Digital Distractions

Being able to remotely administer a Linux machine using SSH is something so common and normal that it often gets taken for granted. Mobile broadband is quick enough that with…

Right, so the worse has happened… your shiny Mac has gone wrong – while booting it took forever and showed a mysterious grey/white progress bar. A progress bar you’ve never…

Has this ever happened to you? You’re driving around listening to the radio, switch the car off to go and do something (fill up with petrol in my case) and…

Everyone likes looking at the innards of electronic devices. Modern ones are a bit boring now unless you’ve got a microscope, but there’s plenty of interest in old tech… especially…

I recently upgraded my server to a new machine running Ubuntu 11.10. With the Macs in our house I’ve always used Samba for file sharing – it works, it’s stable…

Hard drives are pretty fascinating things, full of complex and precisely machined pieces of metal that spin at high speeds. And they’re strangely reliable too, considering what’s in them. Well,…

Amy just received this amusing piece of Chinese electronic tat from eBay. It’s a Hello Kitty branded MP3 player that bears a striking resemblance to a popular brand of portable…

After the success of repairing my BBC Micro’s PSU I decided the act of shoving 30 year old floppies into an equally old drive, while amusing and all was a…

30 year old computers often have a few drawbacks, especially when the equally old components inside them start to malfunction. There is a known fault with the BBC Micro’s power…

From the main Fignition website FIGnition is a £20 educational DIY computer which works like an 8-bit home Micro: outputting to composite video and ready to be interactively programmed from…

Notes to remind myself how to configure my Mac so that its swap file is not stored on the SSD.

I just had a rather strange problem with Microsoft Excel 2010. When opening the workbook nothing appeared on the screen: Evidently something had loaded since the formula bar contained data…

I recently bought an SSD for my Mac Mini. Being a late 2009 model with a 2.26GHz Core2Duo, 4Gb of RAM and a 500GB HDD there wasn’t much else I…

A few weeks ago I replaced my malfunctioning Netgear ADSL modem/router/firewall with separate pieces of hardware, the main one being an old PC running the BSD-based firewall ‘OS’ pfSense. After…

Poking a USB device into a Mac causes it to be automounted, with suitable entries appearing in /dev. Ejecting or unmounting the USB device makes all the /dev entries disappear,…