Anyone Else Blow on Busted Hardware Like It's an NES Cartridge? [Just Me?]

By Andrew Tarantola Oct 14, 2011 4:20 PM 10,725 91

You know the trick. When the game wouldn't load properly, you would take it out, blow in the open end to dislodge dust, grit, peanut butter, or what-have-you from the electrical contacts, then put it back in and hope that it worked (or repeated as necessary).

I personally used the T-shirt variation whereby you stretch the front of your shirt over the open end of the cartridge, then blow through it—the shirt captures the dust and prevents you from spitting into the game as you blow.

Thing is, I still do it. Like, regularly. Any time my gadgets act up—boom, I've got the battery out and am blowing like a Nor'Easter into my electronics. Anybody else still do this too?

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11 Computers from Behind the Iron Curtain [Hardware]

By Oobject Sep 9, 2011 6:00 PM 119,882 9

In the 1950s, the Soviet computer industry's future seemed bright with the MESM. But by the '80s, they were more content to simply clone their Western counterparts. Oobject brings us this collection of 11 incredible Soviet-made number crunchers.

Once you've had your fill of these, check out some Soviet satellites, ten more Soviet ripoffs, and these marvelous mechanical calculators.

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The LaCie Little Big Disk Is Pretty—Pretty Fast (Like Thunderbolt Fast) [Hardware]

It's got a 500GB solid state drive and an exterior designed by Neil Poulton—what more do you want? Thunderbolt? Yes, it does that too.

The LaCie Little Big Disk is available as either a 240GB and 500GB SSD, or as a 1TB traditional 7200RPM hard drive. All three varieties use dual disks as a striped RAID set—wherein data is split evenly between the two disks.

And because the Little Big Disk is built with Apple's new Thunderbolt technology, it's lightning fast—with data transfer rates of up to 10Gb/s (double that of USB 3.0). Plus, Thunderbolt allows the LBD to daisy-chain between your MBA, Mac Mini, and Thunderbolt Display.

The LBD measures 1.6 x 5.5 x 3.3 inches and weighs just 1.4 pounds (630 grams). Its aluminum case's unique heat-sink shape keeps the unit cool without requiring a fan and was designed by award-winning designer Neil Poulton, who has worked with LaCie in the past.

No word yet on price but the Little Big Disk is expected to be released Summer of 2011—which can't come soon enough. [LaCie]

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Paul Allen Wants Your Legacy Hardware [Hardware]

Paul Allen, Microsoft's "Idea Man," is an aficionado of relic computing devices—the older and more obscure, the better. He collects them, along with rare WWII fighter planes, and shares this passion at his Living Computer Museum in Seattle.

The Living Computer Museum showcases machines, peripherals, and software from the era of interactive timesharing systems. Allen credits personal nostalgia as a motivator in his quest for these ancient systems. "They have a certain smell to them and a certain buzz when you hit the keys," Allen, told the Wall Street Journal. "It sure takes me back to those days." Those days being when he and Bill Gates used many of the same machines in their genesis of the Windows OS.

The appointment-only museum currently resides in a nondescript warehouse in downtown Seattle but has already attracted a following. In 2006, Allen launched PDPplanet activated a few old servers in order to host text-based games like Zork.

The museum routinely takes groups of both students and fellow tech enthusiasts. "We're going to try to bring a lot of students through so they'll get the sense of how things have proceeded so rapidly in the last 30 or 40 years from nobody having personal computers to now everybody's got one of those," said Allen.

Always on the search for more machines, the Living Computer Museum has a list of desired computers here.

[WSJ - Top art courtesy Bill Rupp/WSJ]

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