Open Hardware/Modding: Open-Source 1.8″ SSD, Spark, and Mini-Computing
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ZIF HDDs Dying Out? Here’s An Open-Source 1.8″ SSD
A lot of old technology runs on parts no longer produced – HDDs happen to be one such part, with IDE drives specifically being long out of vogue, and going extinct to natural causes. There’s substitutes, but quite a few of them are either wonky or require expensive storage medium. Now, [dosdude1] has turned his attention to 1.8 ZIF IDE SSDs – FFC-connected hard drives that are particularly rare and therefore expensive to replace, found in laptops like the Macbook Air 1,1 2008 model. Unsatisfied with substitutes, he’s designed an entire SSD from the ground up around an IDE SSD controller and NAND chips. Then, he made the design open-source and filmed an assembly video so that we can build our own. Take a look, we’ve put it below the break!
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If one GUI's not enough for your SPARC workstation, try four
And it turns out that particular computing environment was really the intersection point for a lot of early GUI efforts, which were built and run on Sun workstations and thus will also run on the Solbourne. With some thought, deft juggling of PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and a little bit of shell scripting, it's possible to create a single system that can run a whole bunch of them. That's exactly what reykjavik, this S3000, will be doing.
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Why Bother with a Custom Desktop PC in 2022?
Many people are quite surprised when I tell them that my primary computer is a custom-built desktop PC, that I assembled myself. After all, desktops have been going out of fashion for over a decade and most people these days use laptops or even tablets as their primary (work) devices. The only big users of the desktop PCs today seem to be gamers, but they rarely assemble their rigs from scratch.1 I’m definitely not a (big) gamer. Customs-built PCs require some degree of maintenance (at the very least you have to get them working) and are prone to some subtle issues (e.g. the RAM not playing well with the MB, some drivers being a mess, etc). So, why bother with all of this in 2022?