Category: Articles

Posted on

Bookmark Roundup 1

I have this collection of well meaning bookmarks that just expands until I have to dump them somewhere. I’ve tried out some of the social bookmark sites but none of them have the one feature I really need which is to somehow give me the time to go through them.

So I thought I’d post them here with a brief description.

  • I found this pretty good list of Vista tips. My tip would be just don’t install Vista.
  • STADS is a program to easily switch out the default audio device. Unfortunately support for multiple audio devices is lacking. I’ve yet to try out how Vista handles this with it’s improved mixer.
  • A photo gallery of sexy Star Wars recruiter posters. I really should have one of them as my wallpaper. Though my current wallpaper isn’t bad.
  • Here is an interesting interview with John Carmack about the ongoing debate to Ray Trace or not.
  • I’ve always wanted to learn how to Silkscreen so I could make my own witty T-shirts.
  • WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. In other words it’s an online dictionary/thesaurus thing that’s also available for download.
  • The United States Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series seemed like a good place to brush up on my electronics.
  • The css-discuss wiki seems like a real good place to get some design advice.
  • One of these days I’ll memorize a solution to the Rubik’s Mini Cube. For now I have a few general moves and then I stab around in the dark until it magically solves itself.
  • If I ever invent something this Online Machine Shop might be a good place for some prototypes.
  • I’m the proud owner of a partial Lego Mindstorms kit. The Bricx Command Center looked like the best free software out there to control and program it.
  • We really hate how outdated the game Guess Who is. If you ever wanted to design an accurate game the 2000 Census seems like a good place to start.

I think that’s it for this round. I hope you enjoy all the things I’ll never have time for.

Posted on

Gparted, 137 gb, 48 bit LBA and You

It was an interesting situation. Someone called with a hard drive that was always reading 137gb in windows even though it was 250gb. My first thought was that perhaps it wasn’t partitioned completely, I recommended maybe using fdisk on windows or downloading the latest GParted live CD to look at the partition scheme.

After I hung up the phone I did a little surfing and found out this 137gb limit all had to do with Logical Block Addressing or LBA for short. Older computers were not equipped to handle drives with 48 bit LBA and Windows did not support it by default until SP1.

If your still hung up with this problem a BIOS update for your motherboard or upgrades for windows may solve it. However you still might end up with a drive that needs partitioning. The Gparted liveCD is perfect for this. With it you can create, destroy, shrink or grow partitions of all types and sizes. Best of all you can do it all without damaging the data on your hard drive. Though it is highly recommended that you backup your existing data in case anything goes wrong.

This particular problem doesn’t affect Linux by the way. Linux completely ignores the BIOS when it comes to hard drives and uses its own addressing scheme.