The BBC has made an excellent short video explaining the science behind hangovers for their upcoming program “James May’s Things You Need To Know … About the Human Body.” It’s great stuff, and very much worth watching. Sadly, they did not include an embed option. To watch the clip, you’ll have to jump over to their website.
Via boingboing.
Would you buy something from a company whose entire website looks like this:
KG-Computer entire homepage
I bet you say you won’t.
Well, I did. KG-Computer is one of the topsellers on both Amazon and Ebay. Without noticing, I bought a Seagate Momentus XT hard disk at their shop through the Amazon Marketplace. It wasn’t before the delivery that I noticed the device wasn’t coming from Amazon directly. But who cares, it was there on time so everyone is happy. Up until here I even thought KG-Computer was a nice company.
The hard disk is a hybrid disk, which has a normal hard disk and some SSD storage which is able to increase the startup of often used programs, this should greatly increase the speed of often used program. I opened my Mac, connected the disk and restored my backup to see if it good hold its promise. My first impression of the disk was very positive. The speed improvement is really noticeable.
However after a week or so it started to fail. My laptop froze and I had other funny stuff that I had not seen before. I decided to spend a weekend completely reinstalling my computer. You never know, it could be some old drivers or so. It turned out that a reinstallation of MacOS was completely impossible, so I had to restore the backup again and hope for the best.
Bad luck: the crashes returned. After some googling I found that the disk is just not compatible with the SATA chips that come with the MacBook, so it was never going to work. I contacted KG-Computer and explained the situation. They told me that I could not get my money back because there were more than two weeks between the day the device was delivered and the time I made my complaint. I should talk to Seagate directly and have them send me a new disk.
So I did. Seagate returned me a new Momentus XT within a week after sending out the old one. Needless to say the new disk failed as well. An incompatible drive remains an incompatible drive.
I contacted KG-Computer again and made clear that, according to German law, a customer has a right to get their money back if the product does not work as advertised. Their response was something along the line of: you have to check compatibility before your buy something, they cannot guarantee that a SATA drive will work with a SATA controller in a Mac. I will not get my money back because the two weeks after the delivery had been gone. Please take note: they didn’t comment on the my actual statement!
We played the above discussion a couple of times until finally KG-Computer agreed to take back my drive for testing purposes. By that time I had already asked Amazon to support me on this one. I told KG-Computer the drive was fine, but it just wasn’t usable in my situation. Anyway, I send the drive and they found it was working fine. They also told me they couldn’t give me any guarantee anymore because it was not the original drive they had sent me (it was the one Seagate sent me). And then they sent me back the drive. This is the original text of their reply (in German):
Wie Ihnen bereits schon mitgeteilt ist ein Widerruf leider nur während der ersten 14 Tage nach Erhalt der Ware möglich. Diese Frist haben Sie ungenutzt verstreichen lassen. Deswegen können wir Ihrem Wunsch nach Widerruf nicht entsprechen.
Da wir keinen Defekt feststellen konnten, senden wir Ihnen die Festplatte zu unserer Entlastung zurück.
Zudem erhielten Sie bereits einen Austausch von Seagate direkt.
Daher können wir anhand der vorliegenden Sendungsnummer nicht mehr feststellen ob der Artikel wirklich von uns ist.
Als Käufer sollten Sie sich vor dem Kauf informieren ob die Festplatte mit Ihrem Mac kompatibel ist oder nicht.
I have tried to call the company about 100 times (I am not kidding you): they don’t answer the phone. I mailed them and asked my money back, they basically give me a standard reply all the time. So all that remains for me is to write this piece and hope it gets some pagerank from Google.
A last note about Ebay and Amazon feedback needs to be made as well. If you look at this shop on Amazon and Ebay you will see that it actually gets a 96% rate, which is good with their amount of customers. If you have a look at the negative ratings you might be able to tell, that although you get a good delivery of your order with KG-Computer, you have to be very worried as soon as things break. With KG-Computer you will get no guarantee.
Update: I decided to talk to Seagate directly again and opened a chat on their website. They offered me a new 750Gb “normal” laptop drive in exchange for the 512 Gb Momentus XT (with SSD). I can only say that I am very, very impressed with their service.
This is a verbatim copy of the BoingBoing page, but since this is so significant I don’t care.
Linux running in a javascript window
Fabrice Bellard has written a 32 bit x86 emulator in Javascript — in plain English, he’s created a virtual PC that runs inside your browser, using Javascript. And then (of course), he created a GNU/Linux variant that can run inside it — so you can run a full-featured PC inside your browser. It’s a pretty fabulous hack and has far-reaching implications: for example, you could theoretically run any program or OS inside your browser, even if you’re using a locked-down platform that won’t let you change the OS or install your own programs. And then there’s stuff like installing MAME in a virtual browser machine, so that you can play all/any retrogames.
What’s the use ?
I did it for fun, just because newer Javascript Engines are fast enough to do complicated things. Real use could be:* Benchmarking of Javascript engines (how much time takes your Javascript engine to boot Linux ?). For this particular application, efficient handling of 32 bit signed and unsigned integers and of typed arrays is important.
* Client side processing using an x86 library, for example for cryptographic purposes. For such application, the x86 emulator can be modified to provide an API to load x86 dynamic libraries and to provide a js-ctypes like API to call the C/C++ functions from javascript.
* A more advanced version would allow to use old DOS PC software such as games.
Javascript PC Emulator – Technical Notes
Link (to the boingboing article).
After the upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 I noticed that my HTPC box wouldn’t automatically reboot after a hard reset. I always had to connect a keyboard and press the enter button to resume booting. Kind of an unwanted situation for a box that stands in the living room. So I went through the grub.cfg file to see what needs to be changed. Here is the Ubuntu howto:
First open the /etc/grub.d/header file (you need to use sudo, so you can save it) and look for the following lines:
make_timeout ()
{
cat < < EOF
if [ "\${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then
set timeout=-1
else
set timeout=${2}
fi
EOF
}
Then change the line "set timeout=-1" to some other, positive value, like: "set timeout=10". The result should look like this:
make_timeout ()
{
cat < < EOF
if [ "\${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then
set timeout=10
else
set timeout=${2}
fi
EOF
}
Now the grub.cfg template is updated, the only thing left is to execute an update of the real grub.cfg.
sudo update-grub2
This way the modifications remain in the system, even when new kernels are updated.
I spent this Good Friday in Stockholm. Lovely weather, beautiful city. Makes me feel like this little elk:
Link.