1/9 1/99 1/999 and so on

I was playing with an alphasmart 3000 and the calculator applet and just punching numbers in.

So 1/9 = .11111111111111111
and 1/99 = .0101010101010101
and 1/999 = .001001001001001
and 1/9999 = .0001000100010001

etc.

This makes sense if you think about it a little bit.

Numbers are cool.

Old system doesn't like the new USB WD 1235 series

I put a new USB western digital WD 1235 (at least that's what the hardware detect calls it) on my old windows 2000 system and it hates it.

I got a WD 3TB and tried it, a WD 4TB as well, and it just doesn't like them at all. hey seem to be detected fine but disk management says "unreadable".

They both work great on linux. *sigh*

The older 4TB WD USB drives work without issue, I wonder why these ones don't.

I thought it might be the partition table, I zeroed the first part of the drive and it still thinks it's unreadable.

The Never Used Kitchen

Apparently, this kitchen was built in 1956 and never used. A real time capsule.

Good thing it is pristine, unlike Tulsarama's Miss Belvedere.

http://betweennapsontheporch.net/never-used-ge-kitchen-a-time-capsule/

Cool spynet video watch

My latest toy is a SpyNet video watch. It's a lot of fun. The camera does 320x240 videos and works best outdoors in sunlight. Under my normal indoor lighting the videos are pretty much black. They fixed this with the more recent version that has night vision. (Mine is the old version, with no night vision)

It even has a couple of games built-in, nothing that will hold your interest for very long. One is like Chromium BSU (if you have knoppix, you know this game) and the other is a "fighting" defense game where you block punches and kicks to win.

It's pretty bulky, holding your arm up and pressing the buttons was like using the ElectraComs.

The bulkiness around your wrist makes it hard to take off or put on your coat.

Since the camera is fixed at the top of the watch, you have to swing your arm around to "point" at what you want to capture, which is pretty awkward. It really limits you to capturing things from 12 to 3 o'clock. The snake attachment looks pretty interesting.

USB flash drives and md5sum

I always thought it was interesting how USB flash drives would read differently if they had sectors that hadn't been written yet.

For instance, here's a flash drive that I was testing:

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ time dd if=/dev/sdc | md5sum
1972744+0 records in
1972744+0 records out
1010044928 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 75.2915 s, 13.4 MB/s
e7ef4e43591086d1f484ac8ae0167ad8 -

real 1m15.670s
user 0m5.747s
sys 0m6.820s
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ time dd if=/dev/sdc | md5sum
1972744+0 records in
1972744+0 records out
4d1ec5b4d17d364db0dc7f1b361271e7 -
1010044928 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 74.0257 s, 13.6 MB/s

real 1m20.292s
user 0m5.860s
sys 0m6.737s
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$

Somehow that just doesn't seem right, to give different results. I suppose I could initialize it by writing zeros to every sector before using it.

so let's make a zero file that fills up all the available space:

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ ls /media/sdc
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/sdc/ZEROFILE
dd: writing to ‘/media/sdc/ZEROFILE’: No space left on device
1972225+0 records in
1972224+0 records out
1009778688 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 10.447 s, 96.7 MB/s

real 0m10.456s
user 0m1.550s
sys 0m7.897s
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ sync
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ umount /dev/sdc


and let's check if that fixes our different md5sums:


knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ time dd if=/dev/sdc | md5sum
1972744+0 records in
1972744+0 records out
1010044928 bytes (1.0 GB) copied2029b6aa4ebbd3c5da36631b1273ef41 -
, 60.7487 s, 16.6 MB/s

real 1m0.780s
user 0m5.677s
sys 0m7.080s
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ time dd if=/dev/sdc | md5sum
1972744+0 records in
1972744+0 records out
2029b6aa4ebbd3c5da36631b1273ef41 -
1010044928 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 65.335 s, 15.5 MB/s

real 1m8.571s
user 0m5.597s
sys 0m6.947s

and yes, now the md5sums match.