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…
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…
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…