Dealing With a Stubborn Laptop Battery

I own an older model Panasonic Toughbook CF-28. I picked it up a couple of years ago for around a hundred dollars or so. It has a Pentium III 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM, nothing to phone home about. What it lacks in performance it makes up for in its' rugged design. It is a military specification laptop that is capable of withstanding short drops, extreme temperatures and light water splashes. It also has a touchscreen. In other words, it is a fun toy.

This laptop was missing the battery when I acquired it. I decided to opt for a cheap replacement available on eBay for around fifty dollars. When the battery arrived, I was quite pleased with the quality and performance of the product. I was easily able to get more than 5 hours of battery runtime out of the laptop.

This laptop is far from my daily driver and I left it on the shelf for a few months. When I came back to it the battery was expectedly discharged completely. The interesting part is that it would not accept a charge despite the charge indicator being illuminated.

I decided to disassemble the battery to investigate and was able to bring it back to life!

Fixed Battery

A Graphical Introduction to Hash Functions with SHA-2

Bitcoin Logo

Cryptography is the glue that holds together our modern society of electronic banking, web authentication mechanisms and identity verification. It is also the basis for the radical shifts in the way we think about our money such as Bitcoin.

I have been fascinated by the concepts of cryptography lately and decided to implement a cryptographic hashing function to try and better understand them. I will present the knowledge that I have gained in an easy to understand fashion. I am by no means an expert on this subject but if you have a general interest this should be a good starting point.

I have decided to implement SHA-256 due to the widespread adoption and ubiquity of this particular function. This implementation is designed in LabVIEW which is a graphical programming language. Whether you are a seasoned programmer or just interested in cryptography, this gentle introduction will be beneficial to you.

A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility

I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 and is packed with all sorts of interesting options for connecting peripherals to it. One particular feature that caught my eye was the option to connect to an X Server.

HP 1670A Logic Analyzer

Here is the interface of the logic analyzer running on a remote X connection. I enjoy the colour scheme.

HP 1670A user interface over an X connection :]

I will give you a quick explanation as to how I was able to set this up by modifying a couple of configuration files to enable remote X connections.