blog dds: hardware

2009.08.20

HP-200LX Remote Control Hacks

All my friends know that for the past 15 years I've been semi-attached to an HP 100LX palmtop PC (recently updated to a 200LX) for my personal information management and many other tasks. The device is extremely versatile, sturdy, and flexible. Amazingly, after so many years of hard daily use, I still find new applications for it.

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Last modified: Friday, August 21, 2009 0:27 am

2009.05.27

Revisiting the Antikythera Mechanism Emulator

Over the past few weeks I updated the Antikythera mechanism emulator I built in 2007. I was preparing for an invited talk on the subject, which I'll give at the 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, and for this I wanted to include in the emulator the new findings recently published in Nature.

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Last modified: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 12:10 am

2009.02.18

The Information Train

The Information Train is a scientific experiment that I presented at the Wizards of Science 2009 contest over the past weekend. The entry demonstrates how computers communicate with each other by setting up a network in which a model train transfers a picture's pixels from one computer to the other. You can find a video of the experiment on YouTube, and, if you're interested, you can also download the corresponding software and schematics from this web page.

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Last modified: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 4:21 pm

2008.12.22

No Blinkelichten, Please

A computer's flashing lights used to fascinate me. They showed me it was alive and offered me a glimpse on its innards. They also epitomized the hacker culture of the famous "Blinkenlichten" sign.

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Last modified: Monday, December 22, 2008 6:54 pm

2008.04.18

LTO Tape Drive Compression Considered Harmful

I used to think that tape drive compression was a silly marketing trick used by manufacturers to inflate the advertised capacity of their tape drives. Apparently it is worse than that.

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Last modified: Friday, April 18, 2008 0:21 am

2007.01.15

Landscape vs Portrait Monitors

Laptop monitors keep getting wider and wider. What I would really like would be for them to get higher.

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Last modified: Monday, January 15, 2007 5:47 pm

2006.12.25

The Capacitor Plague Hits a Baby Monitor

Good baby monitors are hard to come by. Many tend to be oversensitive, others switch from squelch mode to transmission with a loud hiss that is more irritating than a baby's cry. We were very satisfied with a Tomy Walkabout Digital 1998 baby monitor, until the day it started emitting a squeaking sound.

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Last modified: Monday, December 25, 2006 12:41 am

2006.12.01

(Not) Hacking the Digipass Go 3 OTP Dongle

My bank moved to two factor authentication solution, and thus required me to purchase from them a Digipass Go 3 dongle in order to authenticate my transactions. To register my dongle I keyed-in a five-digit code they gave me, and also the key's serial number appearing on its back. Given that Go 3 utilizes an open authentication framework, and a published algorithm for generating the one time password (OTP), could I utilize the key and the numbers I keyed in, for using the key in my own applications, of for cloning the dongle in my mobile phone or palmtop?

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Last modified: Friday, December 1, 2006 12:19 am

2006.07.11

Boot Lock

I first admired this ingenious method of locking a car in Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean series. A few days ago I saw it in real life.

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Last modified: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11:15 am

2006.01.03

Disappearing Hardware

Let's start the new year with a retrospective look at hardware advances. I've ordered some older and current hard disks that were lying around by date. We're taking for granted the increases in disk size, but also impressive is the reduction in size of the control electronics.

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Last modified: Tuesday, January 3, 2006 5:41 pm

2005.10.14

MIT's $100 Laptop

The MIT Media Lab is working on a research initiative to develop a $100 laptop. This will be distributed through governments to schools to help the education of the world's students. These are my notes from a talk Michail Bletsas, Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab gave on the subject, at an event organized by the Netmode Laboratory .

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Last modified: Friday, October 14, 2005 11:34 pm

2005.10.04

Hard Disk Failure

I tell everybody that the question is not whether your hard drive will fail, but when it will fail. My laptop's drive started emmitting a loud grinding sound last Saturday.

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Last modified: Tuesday, October 4, 2005 11:14 am

2004.12.13

Lack of Progress in Palm Applications

An article in slashdot recently discussed the limitations in the current breed of Palm handhelds. I am glad somebody has pointed out the lack of progress in the palmtop market. My 12-year old HP-100LX is literally falling appart, yet I can not find a worthwhile replacement.

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Last modified: Friday, May 13, 2005 9:59 am