Category Archives: hardware

Sep
17
2011

Dumb car radio powered by smartphone

Recently I’ve been interested in purchasing a new car radio, as my current one has no auxiliary input and is basically a rudimentary device. Thinking about different options, and even considering a carputer project, it occurred to me that there should be a car radio that would be powered by your smartphone and allowed seamless integration [...]

By ivan | Also posted in projects | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
Apr
04
2011

Samsung Galaxy S II vs Motorola Atrix 4G

UPDATE 2011-06-15: Well, I recently acquired the Galaxy S II, so this debate is over for me. After reading countless of reviews and comparisons between these two superphones, the SGS2 clearly is the better device (for my needs). The fact that it has no lag whatsoever in pretty much anything you throw at it is [...]

By ivan | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)
Mar
13
2011

HTPC/NAS project

So in my previous post, I mentioned the possibility of building my own mini PC that would serve as an HTPC/NAS and also replace all the current uses of my poor Slug (file server, torrent box, etc.). After some investigation, I think I have narrowed down a few possible candidates: Asus AT5IONT-I. Wonderful board. New [...]

By ivan | Also posted in projects | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
Mar
12
2011

Home NAS or mini PC?

Why are home NAS devices so expensive? The Synology DS710+ is $530 and it has a measly Atom D410 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. In contrast, a Zotac ZBOX has an Atom D525, Nvidia ION GPU, support for DDR3, and is essentially a full-blown PC. All for $260. Granted, the Synology has a very different [...]

By ivan | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
Feb
14
2009

NSLU2: meet 266MHz.

After receiving my NSLU2 recently (yes, I hopped way too late on the bandwagon), I was crushed to notice it was factory underclocked. Even after reading they’ve been shipping them with the XScale’s native clock speed (266MHz) since mid-2006, I still somehow managed to get the crippled one. Dangit. So, after following this cool guide, [...]

By ivan | Tagged , , | Comments (0)