One of my hobbies is motorcycling. I have travelled extensively by bike in central and southern europe over many years, but oddly, I have never visited scotland before. I intend rectifying that shortly. When travelling in europe I have always made do with the excellent Michelin range of 1/1000000 (1 cm to 10 km) maps. …
Category Archive: electronics
Mar 14 2012
unplugged
A few days ago my sheevaplug died. Beyond the obvious lack of response either over the network or through the USB serial connection, the symptoms (single green LED rather than blue and green LED lit, ethernet LED light steady rather than flashing) were all consistent with a blown PSU. This problem is well known and …
Nov 30 2011
tp-link respond
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the problems I had with a TP-Link IP camera. Today I received a comment on that post from a guy called Luke in the TP-Link support team. In that response he apologises for the difficulties I had and promises to investigate further. His response deserves as wide …
Nov 16 2011
do not buy one of these
Standalone IP cameras have come down in price quite remarkably over the past few years. It is now perfectly possible to get a camera for between £50.00 and £75.00, and this makes them attractive for anyone wanting to set up simple “home surveillance” systems. I bought one recently just to see what I could …
Jan 26 2011
I guess they do it differently over there
I came across a potential new entry to the “slug replacement” competition today in the shape of a 2GHz Sheeva Marvell based plug computer by Ionics called the Nimbus 2000 (all the company’s products seem to be named after cloud types – wonder why). In addition to that rather fast ARM CPU, this little beast …
Mar 30 2010
unplugged
My earlier problems with the sheevaplug all seem to have stemmed from the fact that I had installed Lenny to SDHC cards. As I mentioned in my post of 7 March, I burned through two cards before eventually giving up and trying a new installation to USB disk. This seems to have fixed the problem …
Mar 07 2010
plug instability
I’m still having a variety of problems with my sheevaplug. Not least of which is the fact that SDHC cards don’t seem to be the best choice of boot medium. I have had failures with two cards now and some searching of the various on-line fora suggests that I am not alone here. In particular, …
Feb 28 2010
from slug to plug
Well this took rather longer than expected. I intended to write about my latest toy much earlier than this, but several things got in the way – more of which later. About three or four weeks ago I bought myself a new sheevaplug. The plug has been on sale in the US for some time, …
Mar 16 2009
a thirteen amp plug just won’t cut it
I normally read the register for its IT tech related reporting – and I enjoy it just because it is a wonderfully scurrilous rag. However, an article about the Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg’s “Quant”, which el Reg chose to call “Mary”, piqued my interest somewhat. I can’t quite make the arithmetic work out. To quote …
Jan 04 2007
vinyl to digital
Recently you may have seen adverts in a wide variety of publications for a USB turntable. This product is aimed at people (like me) who have a collection of old vinyl recordings but no longer have the means to play them as they have moved to CD and/or digital recordings. Most of the turntables I …










