The best thing I ever did to my Game Boy Advance

I wasn’t a particularly rich kid, so my collection of Game Boy Advance games from childhood was pretty small. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time with an infant sleeping on my chest, and needed something to do with my hands. I decided that now that I can afford games, I’d revisit some of […]

Fake Nintendo silkscreen

Counterfeit Castlevania Aria of Sorrow from Ebay

I recently purchased a copy of Castlevania Aria of Sorrow for the Game Boy Advance from a seller on eBay. Given that copies of this game (with or without the box) tend to sell for $100 or more, I was happy to find a seller with good reviews listing the cartridge for $20. I had […]

Mining Monero: some CPU benchmarks

I recently heard about Monero (it’s a crypto currency like Bitcoin) and read up on it a bit. It’s fairly amenable CPU mining on recent machines, so I figured why not mine some? I’ve been curious to toy with these coins for a while, and I’ve been kicking myself for not buying some Bitcoin a […]

Solved my SSD freezing issue (Intel 330 + MCP55)

I recently bought an SSD to upgrade my aging HP DV6227CL laptop. A few weeks after installing Ubuntu, I started experiencing occasional disk freezes during use that would require a hard reset as well as lock-ups during the boot process. When either of these things happened, the disk activity LED would stay lit indefinitely. When […]

SSD: A worthwhile upgrade for an aging laptop?

I’m still using an HP DV6227CL from 2007 for my school work and otherwise mobile computing, and it goes without saying that there have been considerable improvements in technology since then. With its old 5400 RPM laptop hard drive and unimpressive hardware, some would become rather impatient waiting for programs and files to load. However, […]

Release of Teensy_sPWM Library v0.1

Today I’m making available the first “complete” version of the software-based pulse-width-modulation library I’ve been working on for a few weeks for use in my upcoming Teensy 2.0 projects. Key features include high-frequency PWM, and the ability to apply independent PWM to all output capable pins on the Teensy. It is not thoroughly tested, so […]

Experiments with Ubuntu software RAID0

Ubuntu Linux uses the Mdadm utility to manage software raid devices. This isn’t as fast as having a hardware raid controller, but it’s certainly cheaper (free!) and more convenient. I had a few identical drives laying around, and I’m in the middle of building an HTPC so I figured this would be a good opportunity […]