Bacon, Explained

For extra bacon goodness, you may need to run on over to the bacon of the month club. Or if you want to try the bacon without the high shipping fat, order the 13 bacon combo for about 1/2 the price. If you just must have something else, browse around, then send a box of bacon popcorn, or hickory bacon salt, or one of the other delectable bacon bits to your favorite bacon lover.

andLinux

I have tried several VM solutions for running windows and Linux side-by-side, and unfortunately none of them are very seamless. Often I just want X11 & a good shell to my linux box, and while I could just use PuTTY with X11 forwarding, at other times I really want a local terminal. For those times, there's andLinux.

This little gem runs colinux as a service; by default it starts up a shell as root, but with a few tweaks you can run as your own user.

Bacon Boy

For a blog titled "Mmm... Unexplained Bacon" there has been a total lack of bacon related articles, bacon trivia, and bacon poetry.  That ends now!  Check out this article about imaginative bacon treats, it both inspires me and grosses me out.  Even I wouldn't eat bacon wrapped tofo, but chocolate chip bacon cookies might do the trick.

I would like to add my own bacon bits to the list.  How about a slice of chocolate bacon cream pie with pringles for a healthy midnight snack?

Back From the Dead: How I saved my netgear gs108 gigabit switch

Yesterday evening I noticed that our internet was not working. After checking a couple things on the laptop I went to the basement to check the DSL model and switch. All the lights on my Netgear GS108 gigabit switch were blinking about every second or so. I figured that all it needed was a power-cycle. But that didn't fix it.

A quick look at Google showed several other people had this problem, and it appeared to be bad capacitors. The switch is covered with a lifetime warranty, but sending it back would mean at least a week without the internet working. So I decided to follow this example and fix it myself.

The GS108 is a well built switch with a nice metal case, it comes apart easily using only a phillips screw driver. Here is the inside showing the faulty capacitors:

Only one of the capacitors had a bulging top, a teltale sign of failure. But I elected to replace both caps closest to the power supply because they were both the same type and size. The failed capacitors were 1000 micro farad, 6.3 V. I didn't have any that size, but I found some 2200 micro farad 6.3 V caps from an old power supply that I was able to salvage. The new caps are much larger, so they couldn't go directly on the board, so I added some short leads, wrapped them in electrical tape and folded them over.

Here is the finished product.

It is not pretty, but it works.