The Insomniac Coder

Well, not really. I was activating a replacement check card and about to go through my usual card destruction routine (file off the magnetic strip , file off the signature strip, cut the card into little bits, melt the whole damn thing) when I got curious as to what I could find with the microscope: The main number at 10x Center of Master Card hologram at 150x.  Signature strip at 150x. Notice the overlap of the signature lines, whenever signing a card I always feel like the strip is too hard and it won't take the ink , but obviously the material handles the ink perfectly, this card was signed at least two years ago and the ink looks pristine. 

It's been a few weeks since the upgrade to SSD , and I was starting to be concerned about my external USB drives . I have two Iomega Prestige USB2 drives (one bought by my robot overlord employer, one bought for personal use). I am scared to death of single-drive data storage on laptops , because wrecking the drive not only kills your OS but also all your data. I like how in desktops and servers pretty much everyone I know tries to use multiple drives, and leaves the OS on its own. Under reasonable conditions (properly filtered power, nobody working the case over with a baseball bat, etc.) it would be extremely rare to lose more than one drive at a time. With the laptop we don't have that luxury. Since we do all of our programming work with a centralized repository, a disk failure is not a catastrophe: whatever was checked into the repository is on a much stronger server that goes through a reasonable backups regime (I pray to God). If the work was not checked in, most of ...

Laptop Design For Disassembly - Slashdot I don't even think it needs to be so extreme, but there is absolutely no excuse for the parts of the laptop that become obsolete faster to take more than a couple of minutes to swap. I swapped a drive on a one-year old Dell and all it took was to remove two screws and a third one that held a plastic fascia in place. It took maybe 5 minutes. As nice as it was, except for the hard drive , DVD and RAM , almost nothing else in the laptop can even be swapped. How come the networking, wireless and GPU are not built into pluggable modules like the ones that fit into the ExpressCard slot? I know GPUs have cooling issues, but I am sure that this should take no more than designating one of these slots only for the GPU and add the proper heatsinks to it. The other things like the networking and wireless cards should have absolutely no trouble fitting and working in this form factor. My laptop is one year old, and after upgrading RAM and switch...

Or, as we call it in the company, "penis envy." A coworker that I am positive reads this blog hit his new machine window a few weeks ago. We are all entitled to a brand new laptop , to our specifications, every 3 years and as a norm Dear Leader buys whatever the hell we ask for. My first to-spec machine was a loaded Mac Book Pro , the second one was a kickass (or so I thought) Dell. I already upgraded the Dell to 8GB through Dear Leader's very generous threshold for bitching about capital expenditures (if you request for something reasonable under a semi-classified dollar figure, he approves it on the spot). My coworker simply followed instructions and asked for the most laptop he could wish for. And he got it. With a fricking quad-core CPU , 8GB of RAM and SSD. He's one of the good guys, so I can't be a player hater, but that didn't protect me from penis envy about the SSD. So we came up with a plan: every X hours or so he would tell anyone that listened...

I just finished installing the last part of my birthday present (at least according to Ivette), a dual monitor stand for my company-issued 23" screen and the 24" screen I scored last week (the first part of the birthday present). The photo is shot too wide, which distorts the position of the right monitor, in reality it is aligned perfectly with the left one. Some annotations: A: I put a round metal plate above the clamp to spread some of the load on the top surface of the desk (F). This was not needed underneath since there is a metal frame available to handle the load. The desk can take the aggregated load with no issue whatsoever, but I felt nervous about clamping 50 or so pounds of load over less than 16 square inches of plastic.  B: Verizon -issued FIOS router.  C: Comcrap PVR, about to get ditched unless Comcrap starts showing me some love. I am not kidding, you assholes are one phone call away from losing my TV account to Verizon FIOS TV.  D: Dell work l...

A few weeks ago I picked up a cheap 4GB thumb drive to have some redundancy for the only "big" drive I had, an 8GB Transcend. I don't think I spent two seconds picking it up, there were a bunch, all from similar brands, all priced the same. Now, after using the new stick a bunch of times I have come to appreciate how sometimes designers manage to lower costs while providing novel solutions to annoying problems. The Transcend stick, and almost every USB stick I have owned, has a mechanism to expose and hide the USB plug. This is to make sure that the USB connector doesn't break by accident. The problem with this is that the latch that keeps it engaged is weak, and after a few dozen times most thumb drives will become harder to connect without accidentally making the connector collapse. The new stick that I bought solves this issue pretty cleverly. Here are the two sticks in the closed position:  Now here are the same two sticks with the USB plug exposed:  Notice t...

Image via Wikipedia I am trying to find something with a 7" or so screen for PJ . It has to play digital video , plain DVD won't cut it. It has to be sturdy and hopefully it should cost less than an iPod Touch, wireless connectivity is optional. The iPod Touch is the perfect device, but PJ is not the perfect candidate for it, it needs to be bigger so it is easier to find when he misplaces it, and it has to be sturdy enough to survive accidental drops. Level of complexity of the UI is a non-issue, PJ has been navigating his Xbox 36 through 2 generations of the dashboard, plus OSX and iOS1-4. A 7" iPad would certainly fit the profile, even if it would cost more than an iPod touch since it would definitely be bigger, and PJ has been using iPhones since they came out, so to him it would be nothing more than a huge iPhone.  Anyone has obvious choices that I haven't figured out yet? Related articles by Zemanta More shots of the next-gen iPod Touch front LCD and bez...

BBC News - Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive : "Meet Kelly Sutton, a spiky-haired 22-year-old software engineer with thick-rimmed glasses and an empty apartment in Brooklyn 's Williamsburg neighbourhood - a hotbed for New York 's young, early adopters of new technology . Mr Sutton is the founder of CultofLess.com, a website which has helped him sell or give away his possessions - apart from his laptop, an iPad , an Amazon Kindle , two external hard drives, a 'few' articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions." This is a fascinating read. I have been slowly creeping towards this trend, something that is not so obvious unless you notice that my laptop backups are not very big. Why? Because I ma...