Running Your Own Cloud (Not the Google Drive Kind)

What does one mean when they say "cloud?" This buzzword is used to describe so many things. Google Drive is a cloud where you can store all of your documents and access them from anywhere. AWS is a cloud where you can create VMs and store objects and data for pragmatic retrieval. The difference between these two clouds lies in the audience; the concept remains the same: using resources that are managed remotely and without impact on your local system. That's the point of the cloud, and its been around for ages. We've just never called it the cloud. Today, we're going to be constructing the latter: we're going to make our own personal AWS or Google Cloud.

For Pete Sakes, Erase Your Hard Drives!

I get that some people don't know as much about computers as some other people. But there are things that certainly should be common sense. And if they're not, we need to make it common sense. I don't want this to be a rant, but rather I want to create a brief guide on how to safely erase your Hard Drive. I've bought hard drives that weren't wiped and had all sorts of personal information on them. There was one I bought that had about 18 partitions where each one was somebody's computer. On it were personal pictures, documents, even correspondence with what seemed like Russian wife penpals. I'm sure whoever wrote that didn't want that to get out, and whoever maintained and sold that hard drive was very irresponsible and reckless. That being said, I'm going to go over a vast multitude of methods of wiping your hard drive so that before you sell, throw away, or recycle your computer, you know that your data is not on it.

Hacking Knock Off Smartwatches from China

Is it possible? From the very onset I feel like I'm way over my head here. But we'll try to get our own software to run on one of these bad boys. We'll see just what happens.

I have two cheap smartwatches at my disposal. The one that we'll be focusing on for this post is this one. Now, don't let the picture fool you. This smartwatch isn't nearly as good looking as that. The screen resolution is probably 320x240, but it technically does everything that it says it does. The goal is to take it apart, see what it's running on the inside (chipset and whatnot), and see if we can load something back on that isn't stock software.

Easy Parallel Computing with Old Android Phones

I have some relatively old Android phones lying around (including the Nexus 4 with a broken screen I rooted) and I wanted to cluster them together in some way to see what they were capable of. But the problem was that none of them had the same platform. They all had different Android flavors and different permissions. So I made a few crucial design decisions up front to make this method of clustering as compatible with everything as possible. Here's the outline of how this is going to work.

Graphics Card for Desert

I have some old AGP Graphics cards that have failed and I wanted to try baking them to try and make them work again. I'm either going to get them to work, or take them apart and see what I can save. It probably won't be a lot, but it'll be fun to do. And that's what this is really all about, right?

Rooting a Broken Android Phone

I love the Nexus 4. It was an exceptional phone for its time. I had mine for 3 years before upgrading to the Nexus 6P, but it is still a great phone. Sure it wasn't without its flaws, but what phone is? I got my hands on a Nexus 4 with a broken screen. Like, really broken screen. It was bad. Only the top quarter of the screen was touch sensitive. The crack had gone all the way through. The only way to control it would be to root it so that we could use a mouse with it. But how do you do that with a phone that only has a quarter of its screen usable (so we can't unlock it with the pattern) and USB Debugging Off? I guess the real question here is "is it possible?" We're about to find out.

Building a Basic Render Farm

Parallel computing is really neat. Obviously, it's important in science where you can break computational tasks into smaller parts and distribute the work among many discrete systems. But for rendering, it's incredibly important. Take Pixar, for example. They have a massive rendering farm and yet it sometimes takes them more than a day to render a single frame because of the complexity of the scene (hundreds of lights, shadows, etc.) This project clearly won't reach those levels, it's just to show that it can be done fairly easily to tween images across another using ImageMagick on multiple computers.