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Death of a hard disk
At home, I store data I care about on a network-attached disk array (a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 6). It is populated with 6 hard disks, with of 2 of these providing RAID-based redundancy. Recently, one of the disks in the…
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How magnetic core memory works
Looking back at computing history in interesting. Firstly, the concepts and hardware implementations are usually simpler and easier to understand – I bought my first computer in the early 1980s and I pretty much understood the whole thing down to…
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Building a simple RF-based sensor network
Background I wanted to build a simple wireless sensor network where I could deploy small environment sensors around the house. The sensors needs to be cheap and low-power (so they could run off a small battery for at least a…