sniglet999 asks: "I've got a PDA and a Nokia cellphone that can connect to the net. However the IR port on the phone is on the side, and the port on the PDA is on the top. This means I've got to hold the two together, line of site for the connection to work (with increasingly cramping hands, I might add). The idea of mounting velcro to a notepad, so that you could stick the PDA and the phone in the proper position sounds good, but I don't want velcro and it's associated adhesive attached permanently to either expensive device. 3M has some cool hooks that adhere to the wall with a pull strip. Pull the strip and the hook is removed, leaving no residue on the wall. Is there something like this on a velcro backing? Is there another solution? (Short of making and attaching a light pipe. The whole objective behind all of this was to carry less)!" These aren't the "cool hooks" the submittor had in mind, but might these serve as a way of mitigating the problem (since they are self mating, they don't suffer the major problems of velcro). Does anyone else have alternatives to velcro which they use and prefer?

codepawn asks: "I saw an article in the Australian newspaper this morning that was about a handheld originally out of Russia that is apparently becoming BIG with kids in the USA. The article suggests it has potential to become BIG with bigger kids, too. The device, called Cybiko, communicates on its own network using short wave radio. Once enough people in an area have it they can communicate over a larger distance because their signals will make up to 10 hops over other people's cybikos(which in the USA appears to be about 1km radius but in Europe will be up to 10km radius because regulations allow a stronger signal). I've downloaded the free SDK for Linux (there is a Windows SDK also available) which is available from their Web site as an rpm but I haven't looked at it yet. Anyway, it sounds super cool and I was surprised that I hadn't heard about it on here. So what's the story? Does anyone have one? What is it like?" Last I checked, they were selling them for about $199 at the local Wal-Mart and I have seen commercials for these on American TV. I almost broke down and bought one and it looks like I may have to since I never mind playing with new toys (and the Linux SDK may make for some fun hacking...)

alanjstr writes: "IDG News is reporting that Matsushita (aka Panasonic) has developed a floppy drive that will fit 32 MB onto a regular floppy disk. 'To increase the data capacity of a standard floppy, Matsushita's FD32MB system employs zone bit recording -- a system used to encode data onto hard disks and optical disc systems that more efficiently uses the space to record data.' The new drive also supports SuperDisks for 240 MB storage capacity. A Google Search for 'FD32MB' turned up lots of stuff in Japanese. More details and discussion are available here starting back last November." According to the article which starts that PC Market thread, "The new technology increases the number of sectors per track to between 36-53 sectors, compared with its current number of 18 sectors, and its memory capacity per track can be raised from 9.2KB-18.4KB to 27KB." Imagine what the cooler-than-heck Linux Router Project could do with these!

felciano asks: "We have a fairly involved content build process that involves about 20 different jobs that have dependencies between them and are of sometimes radically different running times. Some jobs are parallelizable. We have a suite of machines across which we distribute the load right now, but the actual job-to-machine allocation is done by hand. I'm trying to do capacity and hardware purchase planning, and am getting a headache trying to model this. I've tried doing it in both MS Excel and MS Project, but neither seems suited for this type of model, especially when it comes to asking "what if" questions (e.g. if we bought 3 more machines, how much would that buy us in overall build time?). I realize that scheduling, network flow, etc. problems can get into into hairy (sometimes NP) problem spaces, but given the rise in popularity of Linux compute farms as ways to address scalability problems, I would assume that there are at least some basic tools to help model this. I've looked at distributed job-scheduling software and haven't found much on the automated side -- are there any practical toolkits, apps, libraries, etc. to help do this type of modeling and planning in other ways?"

bandix asks: "There's been quite a buzz going on slashdot lately about various linux based PDAs. What we haven't heard too much about is the software available on the client side. Sure there are plenty of workstation hotsync clients, but what about the web-based stuff? One of the coolest ideas I've seen in a while is the AvantGo.com service that allows PDA users to MAL-sync their data up to an AvantGo server. AvantGo has released the source to an malsync client at mobilelink.org. But where is the web-based calendar software that supports syncing with it? Where do I get the software to setup my own open source AvantGo.com-like service? That application is just as useful, if not moreso, than actually running a flavor of Unix on the PDA. Anyone out there working on a solution or know of one hidden away somewhere?"

ronmon writes: "I was cruising around bp6.com (I still want one) and happened to see a link to some pics of dual Socket A motherboards. It's in Japanese, so I can't read most of it, but this particular board caught my eye. It's a SuperMicro sporting two sockets and five DIMM slots, plus four drive connectors (IDE RAID?). Yummy!" And credulous reader Jim writes: "This one gave me a start when I woke up this morning. 2CPU.com has a screenshot of sisoft sandra scores from a Dual 1.53GHz (11.5x133)T-bird box. Apparently from an anonymous email. The scores are nothing short of amazing. Check it out." Grain of salt, remember.

A Wireless Anonymous Coward asks: "My 900MHz cordless phone needs replacing, but I've since adopted 802.11b wireless networking in the house courtesy of Apple's Airport. What if any problems can I expect with either the new phone or the network if I bring in one of those swank new 2GHz phone systems, e.g. Siemens Gigaset? Compatibility issues aside, what's the best of these next generation phones?" I've been toying with the thought of getting one of these, but I also have a wireless LAN in operation, and hear that these devices do not co-exist. It would be interesting to hear if someone has a work around, but if you have a wireless LAN, you're probably better off sticking with the 900Mhz phones.

An anonymous reader says: "With all the talk of the dreamcast port I figured I'd post a link to This deal - a "developer" model Agenda Linux PDA for $179 -- a bit more expensive than the DC, but it'll fit in ya pocket ;)" Apparently a soon-to-be-released color version of this PDA was being shown at LWCE (I missed it). I finally got my hands on an iPaq, so hopefully I'll have time soon to try PocketLinux (which sadly lacks a calandering app), as well as getting X11 on it. I still want to use an iPaq as a wireless X11 terminal. But first I must complete my MAME cabinet. One project at a time ;)

NP-Hard asks: "My organization has recently come into a Lot of Money for new hardware. We're a Linux shop, we code a lot, and we're drooling over the prospect of dual DVI-driven flatpanels. Believe it or not, Linux-friendly dual DVI solutions are thin on the ground. Anybody know of a good configuration for under $7k?" I'll be able to afford one of these, someday.

Cerlyn asks: "I am the network administrator of three server grade machines purchased from three separate companies. The recent power problems in California reminded me of the fact that none of these servers seem to support power management. The operating systems these systems run (Linux 2.2, 2.4, and FreeBSD 4.2) are compiled to support power management, but do not detect any power management capabilities at all. Granted, no one wants a server sleeping on the job. But the way things seem to be coded, processors can not even sleep while idle without known hardware support. Lightly loaded machines are often idle 75% of the time or more. Sleeping while idle could make them save a significant amount of power. For many companies, the extra ten seconds it would take to spin up a backup server's hard drive(s) likely would be a non-issue. So, why don't server grade computers support advanced power management (APM), APCI and the like?" And in the land of the rolling blackout, one has to wonder if the potential power saved could help the situation, assuming a good percentage of the big iron in Silicon Valley were configured to conserve what power it could (as opposed to adding on to the drain as it is now).

NAcker writes: "LinuxWorld.com.au has an article about a new type of 56K modem that is also a four port ethernet hub. The Netcomm Smart i-Share 56 offers DHCP and firewall services by running embedded Linux! The article has photos of the "network in a box"." This is an interesting piece of kit, not as much of a stretch as those silly radio/flashlight hybrids from places like The Sharper Image. Now if only they would also make it a wireless access point, I would let my credit card heat up a little more. And besides, for those of us who submit to dialup, wouldn't it be nice to have a modem that runs the 2.0.38 kernel?

ilbrec asks: "A friend of mine is a field biologist who studies frog calls. Recently when I was talking with him, he was interested in a MP3 recorder for his research use so that he can record the frog calls and analyze the sound on his computer later on. No, he does not care for DAT at all. He has one himself that he has so much trouble with. He is looking for a small device that takes at least 64 MB or so of solid-state removable memory that is easy to use. Sound recording quality does not have to be great, as frog calls can easily be analyzed at 96 kbps, according to him. No, he does not care for DAT at all. Does anybody know a good one?" Well, we have embedded devices that can playback MP3s...why not ones that can record live audio and use CompactFlash (or Smartmedia) cards, instead of the old cassette?

ronys asks: "I've just bought my son (yeah, sure) a Meade ETX-70AT telescope. It's a pretty cool toy, with an RS-232C port and an optional ($$$) cable and software that connects it to a PC. Since there's nice 3rd party software that supports telescope control, I was wondering if anyone has already hacked the pinout of the serial cable?"

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that Cray has announced that they will be selling their own Linux Beowulf clusters. They're apparently gonna be working with Scyld on the software, and they of course have some crazy hardware (of course the name is SuperCluster, but I guess stupid names are nothing new ;)

Dorian Gray writes "For a long time everyone, including Apple, said it couldn't be done...mainly because NOS linear soup storage is so completely unlike conventional filesystems. But Newton users have refused to let the platform die, no matter how the manufacturer mis-managed (or ultimately killed) it."

Veidit writes: "The Compaq Cambridge Research Laboratory seems to have a cool project named "Mercury". They are integrating an IPAQ running Linux with many diffrent types of wireless alternatives like 802.11b, Bluetooth, GSM, CDMA via PCMCIA. The linux version seems to be the one that Handhelds.org has. " We also had an e-mail from Dan Sparks who writes: " The free Compaq TestDrive Program has added two new features allowing iPAQ handheld development online. In the Test Drive Program, we have four DEC Sharks (DNARD) SA-110 based network computers running Linux allowing development on Linux based StrongArm systems. In addition, Alpha2Arm cross-compiler tool chain has been added to every single one of our Alpha Linux machines, including our Brickwall Beowulf cluster. This means that you can compile programs for your iPAQ handheld on our blazingly fast Alpha computers. The Toolchain includes support for C and C++, and is available on all the Alpha-based Linux distributions we have, including RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, TurboLinux, Kondara Linux, and Debian GNU/Linux."

Belch writes "4 or more years ago DirecTV launched its service. DirecTV was one of the very first large distributors of smart card technology in their product. So much so, that Hughes corp. (the primary owner of DirecTV) decided to create their own smart cards. Each receiver has a smart card located inside that is keyed to the subscriber, and actively participates in the decryption of the digital satellite video stream. However, considering Hughes decided on this technology when it was virtually in its infancy, they made several mistakes. The hacker community caught onto these mistakes, and there has been a war between DirecTV and the hacking community ever since. For the past two or more years, it was apparent the hacking community would win this war, completely opening the DirecTV signal. However, over the last 6 months, DirecTV has fought back with a vengeance, displaying the most extensive technical campaign against the hacking of their product..." Click through for the rest of the story.

Aciel asks: "Does anyone know what happened to Freeboxen? For those who don't remember, Freeboxen was a free site where one could post old hardware and have it taken off your hands. Very cool, especially for building Beowulf clusters. Anyway, I found this Slashdot posting about it, from when it was originally announced, but going to the site turns up a 'Cannot find server.' A Google search for it reveals several cached pages, including one which provides the e-mail addresses of Freeboxen's owner, James Lincoln. But both e-mail addresses -and- a subsequent attempt replacing mindspring.com with earthlink.net returns messages from angry mailer-daemons. I did a 'whois freeboxen.com', and it turned up a phone number and address, but I'm not inclined to harass people in their homes and offices. Anyone know what happened to Freeboxen, then? If not, are there any other good old hardware swap sites out there?"

Knobby was one of the several people to point out a really neat piece of hardware. He writes: "Total Impact just announced (a few days ago) their 'briQ'. It's a PPC G3 or G4 machine measuring 5.74 X 1.625 X 8.9 inches with a single 64bit 66MHz PCI slot, integrated 10/100Mbit networking, a 40GB HDD, and ships with LinuxPPC.. The press release on the page doesn't mention it, but the announcement I received mentioned a starting price of ~$2500.. Note: These are the same folks making the quad G3 and G4 processor PCI cards mentioned in an earlier article." I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.

Komi asks: "I am a senior EE student at Purdue, and in my design class we're making an mp3 player that can read from a hard disk. We're using an 8-bit microcontroller (Rabbit 2000), and I've read documentation on how to interface it with a 16-bit IDE interface (where you latch the upper bits and get those on the next cycle). So actually doing reads and writes shouldn't be a problem. My question is what file system should I use? I want to be able to copy the songs to the hard drive from a PC, then attach the drive to my player and have the player read it. I've read that the FAT system is a horror to use on a small micro, so I was wondering if I should use ext2 ^[?] or ext3 ^[?] . Or should I just stick to reading from CD's?"