Recently in hardware Category

... and Sony Playstation 3 Slim. Boy is it ugly or what?

On the bright side, it's got a 120 GB hard drive, it's 32% smaller, 36% lighter and has 34% less power consumption. It's cheaper too. However, apart from all that .. it still looks ugly.

Update: Real-World Power Consumption for Sony Playstation 3 Slim looks as follows: Standby - 0.5W, XMB Menu / Idle 75W, Playing MP3 85W, Playing Video (1080p), Playing F1 2007 (Demo) 80-110W

Since everyone is talking about Green IT and saving power and stuff, I thought I'll have to do some research of my own. Therefore I got myself a Conrad Energy Logger 3500. A nice little tool,  that allows you to keep an eye on your electrical expenses. Besides measuring Power, Current, Voltage, Line Frequency and Power Factor, it also allows you to do some longterm measurements, storing all the data on standard SD cards. Really handy.

Anyway, here are now some early observations. First, the standard desktop gear (mostly old systems with onboard graphics):

	Standby (W)	Idle (W)	Load (W)
Asus M2NPV-VM, A64 X2 3800+ CnQ, 4GB, 2x1TB WD Green	6	55	120
Asus CUV4X-DLS, Dual P3 933, 2GB, 7x160GB	5	99	145
Foxconn 6150K8MD, A64 3000+ w/ CnQ, 2GB, 2x250GB	6	63	85

in contrast to this, some "power-optimized" equipment:

		Idle (W)	Load (W)
Cobalt RaQ4, K6-2/500, 256MB, 2x40GB		24	40
Cobalt RaQ3, K6/350, 128MB, 1x30GB		19	31
PC Engines WRAP-2E, Geode 266, 128MB, Hifn 7955		4.7	5.2
PC Engines ALIX2C2, Geode LX800, 256MB, Winstron CM9		6.9	8.8
Thomson Speedtouch ST 546 v6 (DSL Modem)		8	n/a

Its really amazing how energy efficient those little PC Engines boxes are! Ideally suited for firewalling, VPN connections and WLAN access. However, also rather interesting, the rather low power consumption of those old Cobalt RaQs; no wonder they were once very common in datacenter environments.

Just for the fun of it .. I also did some measurements on my Playstation 3 ...

Playstation 3, 80GB (now w/ 250GB) -> Power Off / Standby			<2W
Showing MainMenu (Idle)			122W
Running Folding@Home (Playstation Life)			125W
Running MP3 Player (Space Thingy)			125W
Running MP3 Player (Color Thingy)			132W
Playing Oblivion - The Elder Scrolls IV			132W

Standby power consumption is fine, but idle power consumption is definately NOT! also 132W might be acceptable for playing games, 125W playing MP3s is NOT! ...  *hmpf* ... bad Sony! ... Guess I should look for a new MP3 player ... ;-(

Open browser, navigate to mainboard manufacturer's hompage, find correct BIOS image and corresponding flash utility, download it! discover that you can only update BIOS via floppy disk. (mild profanity here). find a floppy. checked. floppy drive, huh? we've 2008 man! ok, go find a floppy drive. what about a floppy disk cable? Its not working. its just not working. try to tweak some bios settings in order to get the floppy disk drive going. no good. try another floppy drive. no good. another floppy cable? argl. (some more mild profanity here)

ok, now how do we get a bootable DOS disk? no Windows around here anymore. try google. find www.bootdisk.com, download dr-dos bootdisk. discover that it is a Windows executable. (the profanity thing again) go back to bootdisk.com and search for non-exe image files. checked. write image to floppy. man that thing is slooow! ages later, strange noises appear to be coming from the floppy drive. aaah, bad blocks! try another floppy. bad blocks again. (the profanity thing gets out of hand) some four or five floppy disks later we have a bootdisk. Hmpf!

On we go. boot from floppy. at the dos prompt, run the flash tool. aaah! no keyboard. wtf? obviously a USB-keyboard isn't the way to go here. find PS/2 thingy and retry. did I tell that it takes ages to boot from a floppy. *sigh*. eventually update BIOS, remove floppy drive and swear to never ever touch a floppy disk again. two hours of lifetime lost to some 20 year old piece of technology called floppy disk.

Finally got around and replaced my aging (and btw pretty noisy) DSL gateway box with this (100% silent) tiny little box from PC Engines.

It features a 266Mhz Geode CPU, 128MB RAM, three 100Mbit NICs and a 256MB Flashdisk. And thanks to flashboot from Damien Miller, its running OpenBSD 3.8 3.9 4.0b1 w/ all the goodies one usually needs: pppoe, pf, isakmpd, openssh, openvpn ... and ruby ;)

An interesting article, published anonymously, dissects the Transmeta TMS5xxx architecture, revealing how to access and modify the code-morphing code, how the instruction set works, and tells why you won't be able to run Linux directly on this chip. Neat.