Bloggers@large

Hostage situation I am surround by idiots. Last night I went to pick up a new batch of contact lenses at my local optician (I have those lenses that I change monthly and I always get a 6 month supply). The store where I get them, has been taken over by some big European optician company and ever since, the service has gone downhill. For instance: they used to automatically re-order my lenses and then either call me or send me a card telling me they were ready for me to pick ‘m up. Well, that changed where I have […]

S.O.S. ! Ok, last night I found out my NAS seemed to have garbled the complete contents of my harddisk. After doing some research I concluded that the data should still be on the disk. However, it seemed that I can not restore the data – even after hooking it up to my Ubuntu Linux box. So I searched for some recovery tool, and I have stumbled upon a tool from Stellar Phoenix hard drive data recovery tools, called Stellar Phoenix Linux. I downloaded the trial, installed it and hooked up the disk. After a scan it shows what I […]

Sinking ship? Is my Network Attached Storage a sinking ship? It sure has proven not to be reliable. About a year ago I bought a Linksys NSLU2 that turns my Maxtor OneTouch 250gb external harddrive into a NAS (network attachted storage). Besides the downsides (it is only USB 1.1 and you have to format the disk since the Linksys uses Ext/3), it now proved a major source for data loss! From time to time it seemed that files I had copied to the disc weeks before had gone or just didn’t exist there anymore. I kind of ignored the problem […]

Civil war Today marks a black page in history: the three year anniversary of the war in Iraq. Even though Bush knows better, he still tries to paint a picture of success. It is rather insulting: the country has been plunged into a civil war but the Bush administration says it is not. However; former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi says recent sectarian violence is a sure sign of a nation at war with itself. The United States claimed that Iraq illegally possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and had to be disarmed by […]

Click me Time for a little round-up from my CeBIT 2006 visit. Even thought the CeBIT 2006 had 6,262 exhibitors, including over 3,300 from abroad and around 450,000 visitors, I did not see anything really ‘new and exiting’. In fact it was a bit of a dissapointment for me. I had expected that there would be more new gadgets and cool new inventions, but as it turned out it was rather dull. Sure, there were enough new and exiting HD-TV LCD screens, but that is just evolution, not revolution.I did see a few kewl things though and I like to […]

About 1 minute after I published my story about XP in the Dual Core iMac, I checked the official website that was hosting the contest, and now it says it has been confirmed: Latest Update Contest has been won – updates to follow shortly. All further donations will go into an account to sustain the open source project that will be launched with the initial solution. So probably Narf2006 did it! Now: I can’t wait to read HOW he did it (and with me probably thousands of others).

iMac Core Duo The minute the new Intel based iMac Core Duo came out the race was on: who would be the first to be able to circumvent the EFI-bios and boot Windows XP on a Mac. There is even a contest with some prize money for this. So now this guy (I’m sure it’s a guy: I haven’t seen any women hackers capable of doing stuff like this) called Narf2006 and his companion Blaka have now posted a movie showing how they boot XP on an iMac. If they are not frauds – and there is no way of […]

Gadget Walhalla Tomorrow will be a day of travel. A day of walking till we drop. In others words: it’s CeBIT time! The US always boasts that it’s Comdex is the biggest electronics fair, but everyone knows that CeBIT is way bigger. Even if you would go every day the event lasts, you would not be able to see everything. It’s just huge. Back in the good old days (before 2001 that is) when I still worked for Netcast (Lost Boys Business Solutions) we would travel in style: we would just grab the private Lost Boys jet or the plane […]

Weekly news It has been a busy week. Both at my work but also when it comes to the news. If I would have had more time, I would have wrote a bit more about it. But for now I will just have to do with some highlights. Starting with the most recent news: yesterday Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Serbia died in his prison in The Hague. He was there waiting for his trial for his warcrimes during the Yugoslav wars. There are some parallels there with the trial against Saddam Hussein. The fact that Hussein is in […]

Asus UM-PC Microsoft has revealed it’s ‘Origami’ project at the CeBIT electronics show this week. After trying to get the same kind of hyped attention that defines Apple, it is now revealed that Origami is just nothing more than the platform that is going to fill the gap between PDA’s and TabletPC’s. Or, as Microsoft calls it: Ultra-Mobile PC’s. Off course the first video’s are popping up so here is one that has been made at the CeBIT (I hope to be able to visit it next Tuesday: so there might be a big CeBIT Bloggers@large editions). As can be […]