O.k. I admit it, the sheer performance of video calls on current notebook processors made me go for a new instead of a used notebook, as incidentally, a couple of other unforeseen developments required the move anyway. So instead of buying a used Lenovo X270 with a 7th generation Intel processor from 2017 with 2 … Continue reading My New Thinkpad X13 with 16 CPU Threads – First Impressions
Now that I have my ZFS filesystem spanning several drives in place on my Z440, I wanted to get an idea of how this setup is performing together with the underlying LUKS encryption. And while I am at it, the other questions I had in mind were: How does this compare to the ext4/LUKS combination … Continue reading SSD, ZFS and VM performance – Workstation Power At Home – Part 12
I’m quite amazed I am already into part 8 in this series of exploring the limits of using a headless workstation as a ‘power booster’ next to my notebook. The next thing I have taken a closer look at is the connection between the notebook and the workstation, a 1 Gbit/s Ethernet link. That’s good … Continue reading 2.5GbE Network Performance – Workstation Power at Home – Part 8
In addition to running computing intensive applications on my new (refurbished) HP Z440 workstation the other main use case for me is to offload the virtual machines I am running on my notebook today. While I do have 16 GB of RAM in my notebook it becomes more and more difficult to run two virtual … Continue reading Remote Visual Computing with RDP – Workstation Power At Home – Part 5
After a closer look at how to program the 4-Bit Nibbler CPU and how to cope with its intentional limitations it was time to go one step further and have a closer look at how the hardware works one layer further down. To see the signals and how they propagate through the system a logic … Continue reading The 4-Bit Nibbler CPU and Bitscope for Layer 1 Logic Analysis Fun
Time flies but it still seems like yesterday when I discovered "But How Do It Know", the must-read book if you want to understand how a CPU works, the central piece of electronics in any electronic device today be it a SIM card, a smartphone, a notebook or a supercomputer at a large computing facility. … Continue reading Nibbler: The 4-Bit Self-Made CPU
Looking at historical computing educational kits that explain how computers work rather than 'only' how to work with and program computers I started thinking a bit about the different levels of abstraction on which people understand computers. Here's what I came up with: The Working Level Understanding: This is how most people understand computers today. … Continue reading The Computer – Levels of Understanding – And Building My Own CPU
When it comes to computers I always had something of a blind spot: I know how memory works, what Boolean logic is, how a computer adds and subtracts, I know what a bus is, what registers are, how to program in machine language, etc. etc. However, I never really quite figured out how the CPU … Continue reading The ‘Must Read’ Book If You Want To Understand How A Processor Works
So how exactly did we end up with graphical user interfaces, touch screens and shell windows? Apart from improving my understanding of how a CPU really works, understanding the evolution of how users interact with a computer with a keyboard and screen, or a touch sensitive screen on mobile devices, and how this maps into … Continue reading From Teletype to Touchscreen
Let’s continue where I left off in the previous post on the Speedify Internet backhaul bonding and redundancy software I installed on a Raspberry Pi, and have a closer look how throughput looks like in practice.