hardware
Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster up the
hardware
Over the last twenty years, I've probably built around a hundred computers. It's not very difficult, and in fact, it's gotten a whole lot easier over the years as computers become more highly integrated. Consider what it would take to build something very modern
hardware
I've loved many computers in my life [https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-loving-computers-is-wrong-i-dont-want-to-be-right/], but the HTPC has always had a special place in my heart. It's the only always-on workhorse computer in our house, it is utterly silent, totally reliable, sips power, and it's at
hardware
On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum [http://www.computerhistory.org/] – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right?
hardware
The last time I seriously upgraded my PC was in 2011, because the PC is over. And in some ways, it truly is – they can slap a ton more CPU cores on a die, for sure, but the overall single core performance increase from a 2011 high end Intel CPU
hardware
In 1998 I briefly worked for FiringSquad, a gaming website founded by Doom and Quake champion Thresh aka Dennis Fong and his brother Lyle. I can trace my long-standing interest in chairs and keyboards to some of the early, groundbreaking articles they wrote. Dennis and Lyle were great guys to
routers
About a year and a half ago, I researched the state of routers: about as unsexy as it gets but essential to the stability, reliability, and security of your Internet connection. My conclusion? This is boring old plain vanilla commodity router hardware, but when combined with an open source firmware,
graphics cards
Almost nobody should do what I am about to describe – that is, install and use more than one video card. Nobody really needs that much graphics performance. It's also technically complex and a little expensive. But sometimes you gotta say to hell with rationality and embrace the overkill.
hardware
The last sound card I purchased was in 2006, and that's only because I'm (occasionally) a bleeding edge PC gamer. The very same card was still in my current PC until a few days ago. It's perhaps too generous to describe PC sound hardware
hardware
Are you familiar with this quote? 640K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anybody. — Bill Gates It's amusing, but Bill Gates never actually said that: I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever
hardware
It's been almost a year since I covered The State of Solid State Hard Drives. Not a heck of a lot has changed, but the topic is still worth revisiting, because if you care at all about how your computer performs, solid state hard drives remain a life
programming languages
As far as I'm concerned, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much screen space. By "screen", I mean not just large monitors, but multiple large monitors. I've been evangelizing multiple monitors since the dark days of Windows Millennium Edition: