Having trouble getting audio working on your HDMI monitor? Using a DVI converter cable and an audio jack?

Some monitors will not output sound from the RCA or other audio source if the video is coming in with a HDMI/DVI conversion going on. If you are using a HDMI to DVI converter cable, you may have noticed that DVI can not carry audio.

I was playing, in Linux, with the filesystem on my Coby MPC652 and apparently I accidentally overwrote the firmware, which seems to be on the same flash memory as the memory for the mp3s.

Does anyone in the linux world have one of these things? If so, I'll leave an open invitation for you to send me the first megabyte of the raw /dev/sdX file.

This is a Panic Button. I got it for $7.50.

What happens when I push it?

Q: How do I get free internet where I should have none?
A: Use tcp-over-dns tunnelling software.

We'll show you how.

How it works

DNS stands for "Domain Name System". The purpose of DNS is convert a domain name, such as "analogbit.com" to an ip address, such as "208.113.168.166". The interesting thing about DNS queries is that they are usually recursive queries. This means that if a server doesn't know the answer for a domain name, it is allowed to ask other servers for the answer. So while a firewall or restrictive ISP may filter regular internet traffic they probably overlooked DNS traffic.

The good news: nVidia finally released their much awaited 173.14.09 video driver for linux. This officially supports the 2.6.25 kernel and supports the newest line of GeForce graphics cards.

The bad news: When you install the driver your HDMI/DVI digital flatpanel display looks horrible; the text looks jagged or blurred or oversharpened. There are halos and ringing anywhere there is contrast. The colors looked washed out and over bright. However, when you use the D-SUB (VGA) plug, everything works fine.

What is going on?

Problem: 

You are using your audio reciever with alsa, but your reciever takes time to initialize and acquire digital signals. When you play short audio files, no audio can be heard because the reciever is not initialized yet.  

Block diagram close-upJkDefrag (open source defrag for windows) shows the sector map on the left after installing Microsoft Windows Vista 64 and copying a few gigs of files to the drive using ntfs-3g. Is this Vista's fault or ntfs-3g?

If you don't know, ntfs-3g lets you mount a ntfs partition read-write from within linux (via fuse).

Flash devices operating in tandemRecently, we did some speed tests on running USB flash drives in RAID0 (see 6x USB Flash Drive Raid). The results of the tests were promising enough to warrant booting from the raid and using it as a root filesystem.

The problem is that booting from USB is a little hard, booting from raid is harder, but booting from USB raid is harder still. Googling around showed no results for any poor souls dumb enough to have tried, although we know you are out there.

We must work around our flash array's three main flaws:

1. Total disk space is limited (12GB in our raid)
2. Write speeds are not as fast as a typical modern hard drive write. In particular this causes fsync to be slow on most filesystems.
3. The bios ordering and linux device letters of the flash drives change at random (when we physically move them around).

SanDisk Cruzer Titanium x6Can a software raid array of 6 usb flash drives perform well? Is it silly to even try? Well theres one way to find out.

Flash memory as a main storage medium is a relatively new phenomenon. Flash is known for its lack of seek time, so we wanted to see just how much bandwidth we could squeeze out of these devices over the USB bus.

It turns out that even with all of the limitations of the USB bus working against us we were still able to obtain some very good results at a very nice pricepoint.