Tag: hardware | Atom Feed

new mouse report

Mon 11 March 2024

My RSI prevention strategy involves change: I use three different keyboards, four or five pointing devices, and move around to different places. On my main desktop, I mostly use a thumb trackball, with a mouse in second place and a drawing pad in distant third.

On Friday the trackball died in a peculiar way.

advice on buying firewall hardware

Mon 22 October 2018

Several people have asked me recently what hardware I would buy today for use as a home firewall.

for a total of $176, including shipping. Links were accurate as of October 22, 2018.

This gets you a tiny box, similar in size to random commercial house router/firewall/wifi access points, which can run a standard Linux operating system with a complex firewall running at 1 Gb/s in and out, more RAM than strictly necessary, and an SSD which is both very large (and therefore can last a very long time) and boot the system quickly enough that you can do a reboot without losing TCP sessions.

I would also recommend a medium-sized USB thumb drive to set up as an emergency booting and backup device. Call it another $15 or so.

revisiting a new firewall

Fri 13 January 2017

A few years ago I wrote about my new firewall Let’s look at what I’ve learned since then.

modern cpus

Fri 16 December 2016

The fate of a modern desktop CPU is to sleep for hours on end, up until the point that it is called to leap into action for a few seconds. Later, it will be pushed to the limits of thermal overload for quite a few minutes or hours, along with a GPU valiantly straining to produce triangles that will look like an explosion.

in which I talk about a smartphone

Mon 30 March 2015

I’ve had an LG G2 for about two years now. There are lots of new flagship Android phones coming out now. Is it time to change?

lies, damned lies and benchmarks

Sat 13 December 2014

Rule of thumb: if you have a working computer, you shouldn't replace it with one that's less than twice as fast.

If Moore's Law held true, then that means you can spend the same amount every 24 months and double your speed. Turns out, Moore's Law isn't true. Kinda. Sorta.

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