It’s been a long time since I last checked the market for WLAN routers. Although I don’t intend buying one right now, I think staying up to date with the latest advancements in the technology used in these devices is a good idea, because I might need to buy one in the near future. And [...]

I just read this very interesting article about the new 4096-byte sector hard disks, like the new Western Digital Caviar Green drives, and the impact a partition misalignment might have on the drive’s write performance.

One of the first things computer users, who are concerned with security, learn is that multiple overwrites with ones and zeros are required in order to wipe data to the extent that it is unrecoverable by any forensic analysis tools. According to this article on Softpedia, on which I stumbled while searching for something else, [...]

About two years ago, I had published some notes about how to use the good old Creative PC-CAM 750 digital camera/webcam combo under Linux using the spca5xx kernel module. Many things have changed since then. The ‘spca5xx‘ driver has been re-released under the name GSPCA, which has lately made its way into the kernel. This [...]

After many years of failure, countless hours of digging into the World Wide Web for information, numerous failed attempts due to lack of knowledge to modify the v0.6 E3 driver for USB scanners (Viceo backend) and add support for libusb, yesterday I was sent a patch, which contained the Viceo backend for SANE with libusb [...]

Hardware either works or does not work. Two pieces of hardware are either compatible or icompatible. This is the rule. However, when the incompatibility-gap between the two pieces of hardware is small, there is almost always a way to make these two pieces work together as if they were fully compatible. This generally involves the [...]

Mobile phones have never been one of my interests, but lately I decided to spend some more time exploring their capabilities. This includes phone maintenance, data management, data synchronization, networking etc. I do not own any expensive cellular phones (this is a matter of principal). Currently, I use an old Siemens S45 and a Sony-Ericsson [...]

I hate hardware failures. I hate them even more when they happen when I am busy with other things and don’t have the time or the mood to deal with such unexpected situations.

LIRC is basically a small server which can decode or transmit infra-red signals. This is a tutorial about how to set up the LIRC server and how to use it in order to control your system or specific LIRC-enabled applications with a remote control. Examples of simple or more complicated setups are also provided.

This post is about a Creative PC-CAM 750, but it will do for all the Creative PC-CAM series web cameras. I had it somewhere in a closet for a long time and finally decided to try it in fedora. As it usually happens with webcams under linux, it did not work out-of-the-box as there was [...]