Dissecting a laptop hard drive

Posted by on January 24, 2012 No comments

In 2003, I purchased an Apple Aluminum Powerbook G4. The hard drive is what was standard at the time: ATA-100 2.5″ / 1 cm. Planning to recycle the nearly working, but now antiquated, machine, I decided to remove the malfunctioning hard drive and recycle it separately, ensuring that personal data is erased. The iFixit hard drive replacement guide presented a useful set of instructions for opening the computer.

Unfortunately, this is the second hard drive to die since purchasing the machine. I suspect that the machine overheats as Mac OS X keeps the fans running at a very low (and quiet) speed compared with what they are capable of. Replacing the hard drive and battery is 2/3 the cost of buying a new Windows 7 machine, so this laptop will be recycled.

Having never opened a hard drive before, I decided to take a look inside and observe the dual platter layout of this 2004 hard drive model. The capacity of the drive was 80 Gigabytes.

GIT and SSH integration in Eclipse IDE

Posted by on November 25, 2011 No comments

The Eclipse IDE has integrated support for the Secure SHell transport protocol and GIT revision control system. I use rsync.net for remote backup of personal data, and also for hosting personal, private software projects. rsync.net provides manual GIT access over SSH for any account.

While setting up a remote shared GIT repository I noticed that my password-protected 4096 bit RSA OpenSSH key was not compatible with the Eclipse IDE. I generated a 1024 DSA key from within Eclipse, added id_dsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server, and then was able to use a private key from within Eclipse.

Eclipse SSH configuration

Rethinking the web site

Posted by on August 27, 2011 No comments

With the inexpensive services now available on the Internet, I have decided to subscribe to shared hosting for my web site. This site will be my new public presence and http://tstotts.us/ will be the primary domain rather than http://tstotts.net/.