Computing – Wisdom And Wonder

HTOP: a cross-platform interactive process viewer

a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.

and it is worth trying.

Its user-experience feels nice and it does at least as much as top.

Keeping Your Computer Safe and Usable by Verifying Downloads

When you install or upgrade software on your computer, try to make it safer.

It only takes a little effort and pays off big rewards in privacy and ease of mind. Although this example is on a Mac, it is general enough to translate to Windows or Linux easily.

Here is now

AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer

Here is a High Performance Computing (HPC) system with sevente Apple II motherboards: one controller and sixteen nodes.

It is probably as great as you imagine.

So You Want To Build Your Own Cray-1A?

How hard can it be?

Here is how.

Imaging your OLPC XO

This page explains how to image your OLPC XO if you have hosed it up somehow.

I’ve followed the steps and it works like a charm.

If you instead only want to upgrade your system to a newer release, you should follow the steps here.

Managing files in the OLPC XO datastore

The only official way to get files in and out of the datastore is to drag and drop a single file at a time, and this only works on USB thumbdrives, not on the filesystem.

There is ticket for a workaround using a Python script; if you use an XO, please offer encouragement to get this functionality integrated with the XO.

Here is the ticket.

OLPC XO Answers about hardware

The OLPC XO Wiki has a questions and answers page. Today I took look at the hardware page and found a few important bits:

JFFS2 compresses your data, performs wear leveling, and manages bad blocks so you don’t need to worry about the fact you are writing to flash.
USB “thumbdrives” should be formatted to FAT32.
Although the CPU supports sleep mode, and the hardware detects the the lid closing, the XO will not automatically enter sleep mode on lid closing until some time next year.
The XO can remain plugged in constantly; the battery will not get overcharged.