Archive for the ‘Weird’ Category

A partition recovery story

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

So my dad tends to have a lot of really dumb computer problems that are either caused by him or some random virus/malware that he somehow manages to get on his system. And of course, I get to be ‘Mr. Helpdesk’ and help him fix them (sometimes), even though I’m 900 miles always from him.

His latest dumb computer trick involved some weird bug where he created a partition while Windows was running, formatted it, *moved* (not copied, but *moved*) a bunch of data to it, and then managed to get a blue screen without rebooting the system. For whatever reason, Windows decided that it didn’t want to write the partition or boot sectors for the hard drive correctly, and so he temporarily lost his data. In the past when I’ve had these kinds of problems with partition layouts, I’ve done things like manually recreating the MBR (a very long time ago) or using something like linux’s fdisk to set the parameters manually. However, the ‘easy’ tricks didn’t work for his problem this time, but I found this marvelous software that seems to do the trick:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

So hopefully it’s useful for you too!

AP Article Cleverly Disguised as OnStar ad

Monday, September 1st, 2008

I generally browse through Google News at least a few times each week, and I came across this article about how people are using OnStar to avoid Hurricane Gustav. After about the first few paragraphs, it quickly turned into an advertisement for OnStar. Great impartial news coverage… but I’ll let you decide:

Drivers rely on OnStar to evade Hurricane Gustav

What can you do with 100 bezels?

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

I’m always on the lookout for creative opportunities, and my latest endeavor has led me to obtain around 100 of these really neat looking plastic bezels from a local business:

Poweredge R200 Bezel (front)Poweredge R200 bezel (back)

Now, it struck me that there’s a really cool use waiting for these things, however I can’t think of anything compelling at the moment. Some ideas that I have:

  • Creating some table or shelf with them
  • Monitor stands
  • Geeky decorations

However, I’m quite sure that theres much more that can be done with these. So the burning question I ask you is… what should I do with them?

Edit: Some other suggestions I’ve received

  • Coffee table
  • Create some kind of katamari out of the dell logos
  • Duct tape based door of some kind