Category Archives: Hardware

Kindle 3 & C64!

Posted by Haz on 29 March, 2011 None comments

Wow, seems like forever since I last posted something up for some reason. Anyway… I’ve recently bought a Kindle 3, and had it updated to version 3.1 (fun stuffs ;) – watch this space!). So far I must say I’m fully enjoying it! Every so often I keep noticing a few things that I wish it could have had that would make it even better (Memory expansion being one!) but I’m sure I can live without. I don’t intend to put music on it, so ~3GB is going to take a while before I fill it (however like I said I do plan to do some fun stuff with it at some point :D).

One great feature I do really like is the 3g/wifi that’s built-in, along with the browser! Obviously it’ll never have as good an experience as a tablet, or regular PC of some kind… however being able to browse gutenberg.org and freekindlebooks.org for some good old classics to fill this puppy up with and download straight from the web-page is great! Also browsing news sites is awesome too, however I’ve found using Calibre to grab the RSS feeds and save them as an eBook works much better since you don’t need to be within network reach :).

I really like the text-to-speech too (if you use a more native format, mobi; awn; etc;), means I can play the book, and potter around and do a few other tasks – which is fantastic. It also helps that the voices it comes with don’t sound as mechanical as say Microsoft Sam use to on Windows XP (I hated that voice!) – which is an added bonus. I haven’t really used the male voice much, but it is funny to hear the female voice mess up a few words – but considering the number of words she does get right, its forgiveable.

Another recent purchase of mine was a set of C64′s (bought from eBay about a month ago now). I hope to be able to compose some songs with it and maybe make a few demos/games or something later on down the line. I never owned a Commodore 64 as a kid, I had a Sharp MZ-700… so I’m making up for lost time (it is a classic! Plus, it was one of many at the time that brought computers to our homes at a affordable price!).

I shall update this with some pictures at some point :).

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Cool hardware!

Posted by Haz on 5 April, 2009 None comments

Just stumbled upon these: http://us.fixstars.com/products/gigaaccel/

How cool do those babies look? Somehow I don’t see them working properly on a Windows machine (like ever!) but who knows. Yellow Dog Linux, seems to be the only one so far that supports them. Which makes sense, since both are made (or endorsed) by the same company.

After seeing those, I came up with a wacky idea. Why no one has thought of it yet is beyond me (although they might have, but haven’t implemented or don’t ever plan to implement it). Why don’t they make dedicated cards like this, solely for use by an operating system??

Like I said, it’s a wacky idea – but just imagine how fast our computer would seem! What we need are dedicated cards we can slot in that has some form of fast built-in storage for installing an operating system (O/S) onto it (or for anything really!). If you think about it, and a wise tutor (who may be reading) taught me this, the only bottle-neck in a system is the connection between HDD/RAM/CPU. HDD (Hard Disk Drive) being the slowest of them all. A CPU will sit waiting to do more instructions while the HDD and RAM try to catch up.

If we could install the O/S and its applications onto a dedicated card, everything would be super fast. I’m not saying get rid of HDD’s altogether, but they should be used for the purpose they were intended for – storing data. In a Linux system for example, you could have the whole “/” or “root directory” onto the dedicated card, and then have your “/home” directory assigned to a partition on your HDD. So when you store your documents, downloads or music into your “/home” directory it will take the same amount of time to read and write the data as now. But when you turn on your system, it’ll boot in seconds and the applications load times will be cut in half!

If any companies or developers are reading this, don’t forget where you read the idea. ;) I would like to be appraised for it at least, even if it is just my name written in the paper’s for creating the idea and/or £1 per card sold.

P.S. I’m bored of commenting java code, and doing testing >_< (cousework for uni).

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