Mining Monero on Geforce 210: an exercise in futility
I have these old Nvidia graphics cards, namely a Geforce 210 and a GT 240M sitting around doing nothing, and I wondered if I could put them to work mining Monero. The short answer is yes; the long answer is that it’s probably not worthwhile unless you have a much more powerful card like maybe […]
Mining Monero: some CPU benchmarks
I recently heard about Monero (it’s a crypto currency like Bitcoin) and read up on it a bit. It’s fairly amenable CPU mining on recent machines, so I figured why not mine some? I’ve been curious to toy with these coins for a while, and I’ve been kicking myself for not buying some Bitcoin a […]
How to install NetBeans 8.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 with OpenJDK 8
I recently tried to install NetBeans 8.1 on my fresh installation of Ubuntu 16.04, and I ran in to some difficulties. The first of which is that OpenJDK cannot be easily found in the new Ubuntu Software application. To install OpenJDK 8, you will need to open terminal and use the command “sudo apt-get install […]
Making a 12AX7 substitute from two subminiature 6247 triodes
I have a handful of these 6247WA subminiature triode tubes that I bought way back when I was getting interested in tube electronics. They were very cheap, and thus good for experimenting with when I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Now that I’ve graduated to more common and more expensive tubes, I’m […]
Custom 1×8 combo tube amp: build log #3, finished!
I’ve started putting together the electrical parts of the amp. This is where the real fun begins! This log is going to be rather picture-heavy if I can help it, with explanations placed where pictures are worth too few words. First comes the power input section. The power transformer gets mounted in its holes, as […]
Easily root Samsung Galaxy Proclaim with Framaroot
I’ve been searching for an easy way to root my Samsung Galaxy Proclaim for some time now. There used to be a way to do it using ODIN and some custom ROMs, but the links I found through Google using this method have gone dead. Luckily, I came across a one-click-root app today that worked […]
Custom 1×8 combo tube amp: build log #2
The transformers for my amp project arrived a couple weeks ago, enabling me to move forward with construction. The first thing I did was find a suitable location to mount the power transformer. This turned out to be exactly on top of where the old power transformer was mounted. The hole the old transformer lived […]
Custom 1×8 combo tube amp: build log #1
Some weeks ago I decided to build a tube amp. I wanted something simple, with few parts, that sounds good. I decided to work from the AX84 P1-eXtreme amplifier design. I considered buying a metal chassis for the head and then building a wooden head enclosure and wooden speaker cab by hand. I figured it […]
How fast is MD5?
I was having a conversation with some colleagues today on the topic of checksums. Someone was quoted as being able to hash a terabyte of data using MD5 in one minute. This is of course ludicrous for a single hard drive on a home computer, but I’m curious to see what it would take to […]