User Blogs

For all my life, most of my computers have been hand-me-downs or upgrades. I've built a handful of PCs from scratch, but even most of the ones I built with new processors and motherboards had some hand-me-down parts. But it seems like recently a threshold was crossed where the computers available to just anyone (and not someone who knows "someone") for basically nothing began to be pretty good.

When you're putting together a so-called "Car PC", by which we usually mean a contemporary ATX-derivative computer installed into an automobile, you have a few hurdles to cross. The enclosure, interface, storage devices, and even the power management all become special problems. The power problems can largely be solved through the use of a Wide Input picoPSU, but what about systems outside of a 120W envelope, or systems where you need to switch more than the PC power? The answer is just one typical automotive relay.

Right now, there is a massive flap occurring in the blogosphere which is known as "Mobilegeddon". Google is going to increase the relative ranking of pages which are available in both desktop and mobile themes, as opposed to only one or the other. This has got a lot of incompetent amateurs worried about whether their sites will vanish off the search landscape, but any Drupal (or other adequate CMS) user can solve this problem with a few clicks.

Like many others, I've become somewhat dependent on virtualization to reduce the number of computers and windows installs I have in my home. I recently took another stab at using open source virtualization, and I've had some success with WebVirtMgr, a libvirt-based VM management solution for Linux. This made me want to migrate some XP guests from vmware player to KVM, and I'm happy to say that this is relatively simple today once you figure out the precise sequence of events.

I needed a quick version of lspci for looking at some linux systems without pciutils, so I threw this one together in a couple of minutes.

It's very simple, it doesn't tell you what the devices are, but it does tell you what kind of devices they are and what their PCI ID is. Then you can go look that up online to figure out what they are. It wouldn't be a horrible stretch to add support for the pci.ids file, but it wasn't necessary for my purposes.