Okay, so I’ve known about this idea for a while but never had a chance to try it out until now. The basic idea is if your hard drive suddenly fails and your computer can no longer read it, putting it in a freezer for a few hours might fix it so that you can use it long enough to copy your data over to a backup drive before it fails again.

Sound crazy? I thought so too. But consider how the main cause of hard drive failure is usually overheating. This could damage the hard drive in a number of ways, one of which is thermal expansion of certain metal parts. Putting the hard drive in a freezer would cause thermal contraction, which might be just enough to counteract the damage caused by the overheating. Another explanation (and I think this is more probable) is that freezing the hard drive lowers the resistance of the substrates used to store and transmit data. This in turn allows the hard drive to access sectors that previously appeared to be dead.

The most important thing, though, is that I can tell you it actually worked for me. The 40 GB 2.5″ hard drive on one of my old laptops died earlier. I got a blue screen, and after restarting, the system said it couldn’t find the operating system. I then rebooted to a Windows CD, and the installation program couldn’t find any hard drive to install on. That convinced me my hard drive was in fact dead. So, I put it in the freezer (use a zip lock bag to prevent condensation) for a few hours, put it back in my laptop, turned it on, and windows booted up again like nothing had happened. Now, at this point I expected to only get a few minutes of use out of it. But so far, I’ve spend the last 3 hours copying files onto various locations on my network, and the hard drive is still spinning away happily.

So yes, it’s true! Putting dead hard drives in the freezer can indeed bring them back to life! After my files are done copying I’ll put the laptop enclosure back together and see how long this baby can run before it goes out again. (Of course, I won’t be saving any data to this laptop. I’ll just be using it to play movies and anime while I work on my other computers.)

My hard drive on one of my computers died recently, so I ended up reinstalling several OSes (Ubuntu, WinXP MCE, and Win7). I use grub to dual boot, or in this case, triple boot, and in the past it’s always worked fine. Now suddenly the Windows OSes wouldn’t start, and so I dug around and found out that even though my new drive was on hd2 (as evidenced by the fact I was able to mount my Windows partitions on hdC, and you know how fstab starts with “A” and grub starts with “0″), grub still saw the hd2 as hd0. So, after modifying /boot/grub/menu.lst and changing hd2 to hd0 for the Windows configs, everything was spiffy.

Over the past few weeks, Rukia (Sony Vaio SZ480) has been running quite hot (up to 94 degrees C) when at full load with video intensive applications. That’s pretty insane. This week I finally got around to addressing this issue. I bought a Zalman notebook cooler, which brought the temps down to around 86C at full load, and then configured RMClock to undervolt my 13 FID (max) VID to 1.0375 V (from the default 1.1625 V), as well as the subsequent lower FIDs (I was able to run 11 FID at the minimum 0.9500 VCore allowed by the BIOS), and now Rukia never goes above 78C at full load. (She hovers around 50C on idle.)

I’d recommend anyone with a laptop to at least undervolt their CPU. You’ll prolong battery life, decrease energy costs, increase the lifespan of the hardware, and help save the environment– all at no cost to performance! Here’s a nifty guide to follow. It’s written for Vista, but you can extrapolate it to work for XP without any problems.

I finally got around to installing Firefox 3 on my laptop just now, and have spent the last several minutes trying to figure out why my userchrome wasn’t working like it did in 2.x.  I’m used to having all buttons, menus, and the address bar on a single line at the top of the window, so that I have more vertical space to display content.  However, that means I need to cut out unnecessary menu items like the Help, View, Edit, History, and Bookmarks.  (I use the collapsible All-in-One  Sidebar add-on for all that functionality.)  Anyway, after installing FF3, the Bookmarks menu came back.  I checked my userchrome.css file and it was the same as before.  Then I googled for at least 5 minutes before I found a user comment that mentioned FF3 had changed the css name for the Bookmarks menu from #bookmarks-menu to #bookmarksMenu.  Ugh, why?

All the elements of a good story.

[The court] ruled last May that TorrentSpy must begin saving the internet addresses and download activity of its U.S.-based users, and turning over the information to the MPAA in pretrial discovery. In response, TorrentSpy began blocking U.S. users, and made changes on its site to protect user privacy — drawing a fresh burst of outrage in legal filings by MPAA lawyers earlier this month.

I’m particularly curious how the guy was able to intercept emails before they reached user inboxes on the server.

I hacked my PS2 a long, long time ago to play games off the hard drive and use the SNES emulator. Because it’s not often that I install new games, each time I want to do so, I forget what I need to do and end up spending 30 minutes searching for files and instructions. Well, enough of that– I’m going to write down some notes here to help me remember what to do, even if the PS2 is so last-generation and I may never want to do this again. (Read on …)

… is this thing.

*rolls eyes* Get the story here. This lady says she bought a computer with a “Vista capable” sticker on it, and is suing Microsoft because it can only run Vista Home Basic, not Vista Home Premium. She should go out and buy a Mercedes C230, then sue Mercedes because it only has 200 hp and not 600 hp like the Mercedes SLR McLarren. I hope someone slaps her.

Pekkle sent me a link a while ago to an article at AMS about how Google determines the importance of a page, also known as its pagerank. It’s actually a very interesting paper and a pleasure to read, especially the first few pages where the author takes you through some elementary logic to arrive at an elegantly simple representation of the entire world wide web’s pageranks as the eigenvector of a square matrix described simply by the number of links on each page. If you’re like me and derive gratification from seeing real world problems reduced to abstract mathematical constructs, you’ll have a blast with this one. I also found this short review of eigenvalues and eigenvectors helpful, as it’s been a while since I’ve touched any linear algebra.

At the end of last year I decided to splurge on a new laptop. I was biased against anything Sony from the outset, mainly because I wanted something different from my previous laptop, and Sonys are generally overpriced. However, the more I researched, nothing could beat Sony’s SZ series of laptops (which are customizable much like Dell’s) for my specific needs. What I really cared about was getting a decent Core 2 Duo (i.e. T7400) with something other than lackluster on-board video (i.e. nVidia GeForce Go 7400) in a lightweight package (i.e. under 4 lbs). The Dells, Apples, and Lenovos all couldn’t fit this bill, so I went with the Sony SZ480.

Screencap of my desktop		My current wallpaper

Continuing my tradition of naming computers after anime characters, I named my new laptop Rukia after the character from Bleach, because she’s lightweight and packs a big punch. She also has black casing, which resembles Rukia’s black hair, and you know how rare black hair is in anime these days. ;) Besides the essentials, she also has a built in camera, convenient wireless and “stamina/speed” switches, a multi-card reader, a fingerprint scanner, and much awesomeness. :)