December 13, 2005

Finger Me? Finger You!

When perusing the webternet today I found this little gadget [fingergear.com] in a VMWare blog post. I thought to myself, oh cool, something I can carry around with me with a cross-platform platform. But wait, I then asked myself "um, how does it work?" And behold the mighty engdget! They had a whole bunch of comments [engadget.com] on this very product.

It seems that it's nothing more than a USB boot drive. And someone made the astute observation that 1. this could be done for next to nothing but some personal time and 2. the utility of this is limited in that most public hosts cannot be rebooted let alone boot off of a USB drive.

My opinion: Great idea! Poor implementation. :-(

Posted by Guy at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 12, 2005

DIY Batteries

I love DIY stuff. Ever since I started building electrical/electronic circuits in college I've been an avid fan of this stuff. That's why I was so happy when I saw something (relatively) simple that could be of such use in lots of different scenarios. The thing I'm talking about is the SuperCap 9V battery [hackaday.com]. Obviously a light load draining the capacitor in like 3 hours sucks, but the recharge time is great, 20 seconds! I wonder how this setup would fair with different caps?

Posted by Guy at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2005

Burn TiVo, Burn

I was so excited when tivo announced they were providing the TivoToGo service for their devices. For those of you who don't know, this is a service your personal tivo provides that allows you to download recorded programs to your computer. The vision is that these downloads will be transferrable to portable players or can be burned to DVD via a special burner application.

I, however, do not have such a burner application, but I wanted to burn a DVD of the latest House episode for a friend. True, I could have bought the burner application, but I'm a happy user of Nero [nero.com] and what would be the point of having multiple burning applications? So, what makes this special burner (Sonic MyDVD, BTW) so special? I don't know, maybe it's just endorsed by tivo.

So I tried alternatives. First I tried transcoding the .tivo file using the Moonlight demux/mux trick, but the resulting mpeg had some problems. So then I tried NeroVision Express (v3.1.?) and it worked! I just had to add the .tivo file as a video file, was prompted for my password (which is associated with my Media Access Key) and metaphorically pressed the burn button. That's it. NeroVision Express (NVE) took care of the transcoding and burning without any interaction from me. I love Nero!

If you're trying this at home be aware that I have tivo desktop 2.0 and the Moonlight codecs installed. I know you need the tivo desktop software for the codec for .tivo files, but I'm not sure if NVE was using them under the covers.

Posted by Guy at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 23, 2005

The R-Drive

Lately all the rage has been solid state storage systems. This is all well and good, but there are some limitations that people probably won't worry about. That is until it bites them. Most flash-based storage chips/systems/etc are only good for a certain number of writes, actually everything is only good for a certain number of writes, but flash-based are a lot less than hard drives. So, if there are some intesive writers out there then there is the possibility that their flash-based storage systems will eventually crap out.

Don't get me wrong, normal usage of USB thumb drives and their ilk are more than acceptable because there are a limited number of writes. They're usually only used as a personal storage (i.e. 3.5" floppy) replacement, which means that someone will usually write a document to it and then just read or make a few modifications per week. Compare this to a swap device that makes writes as fast as the device allows, especially on high i/o servers. Where is all this leading you ask?

Earlier this week Samsung released a 16GB Flash Laptop hard drive and M-Systems released a 176GB Flash Drive. Cool, great, but will they have shelf lives over 5 years?

I remember in college I had this idea for a hard drive using RAM instead of platters. Of course this has been done in the past through software RAM drives and specialty RAM boards, but my idea was to create a persistent RAM-based device. But how can this be accomplished without Magnetic RAM (MRAM)? By using some sort of backing store. This would make the system, which I dubbed the R-Drive, appear more as a super-cache, but when I designed it I took lots of little things into consideration. Using different techniques it could provide the benefits of fast data access, both read and write, and the long-term storage of data on a backing store. How fast? The theoretical limit of the Southbridge and interface (ATA/SCSI/SATA). This generation of SATA tops at 150Mbs to 300 Mbs.

Maybe one day I'll hit the Lotto and will have time to work for myself and the funding to accomplish such feats. Until then we have Flash-based systems.

Posted by Guy at 07:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)