The Telly Terminate is a small keyring gadget to turn TVs off. It appears to have sold well during the recent sports event.
Pro: It turns TVs off.
Contra: It's flimsy and much too wide for use on the keyring. The long, narrow shape of most USB sticks would have been much better. As it is, the Telly Terminate acts like an anchor, and fetching the keys from a tight jeans pocket tends to pulls the chain out of the anchor. I replaced the chain with a carabiner, that's strong enough that hold the gadget to the key ring.
Update: It broke after about a month.
Oxca makes a range of KVM products, including one to provide remote KVM access via TCP/IP. The latter uses a java applet and runs in the browser, and isn't very fine at all. (more…)
I have a Samsung SCX-4828FN printer/fax/copier/scanner, and use it with linux and BSD.
The printer is fine for black and white text, such as I usually print: Fast, crisp text with fine edges, nicely readable. Duplex printing just works. The printer can print quite close to the paper's edge, too. (more…)
I need to reconfigure a device via its serial console; the device emits many ANSI/VT escape sequences and other control codes. These are perhaps helpful if one is typing, but not so helpful when a script is to reset and reconfigure the device.
The following perl s/// magic gets rid of most (but not all) escape codes. (more…)
WD Caviar Green disks (WD15EADS-00S2B0 in my case) like to unload the drive heads to save power. The ReadyNAS likes to load them again. This causes two problems: Frequent eight-second delays as the drives return to duty, and in my case, the drives would reach their stated lifetime (300,000 load cycles) in less than a year.
Several solutions exist. (more…)
Sad to say, but I recently installed ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala) on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S4572. I installed the minimal system followed by xubuntu-desktop and gcompris: xfce is supposed to be better for small boxes and gcompris is the whole point. (more…)
The Popcorn Hour A-110 is a small silent box that can play ISOs and other movies scaled up to 1920×1080 resolution. We have one, diskless, connected to our NAS via gigabit ethernet, (more…)