Dan's Data

Atomic I/O letters column #127

Un-drowning a hard drive, killing mystery windows and blackscreened games, "better algorithms" for playing MP3s, and hard-disk shelf-life.

Atomic I/O letters column #126

Mister Handy versus your frame-rate, volume-control sliders that don't work properly, education versus Facebook, and hooking up ancient monitors to modern devices.

Filenames.WTF

File extensions are, in this day and age, ridiculous. But we're stuck with them.

Atomic I/O letters column #125

Letting the smoke out of a wire, crackly cats versus computers, a series of mysteriously dying hard drives, and oiling up a video card.

In Praise of the Fisheye

Wide-view "distortion" in games actually isn't distortion at all, but an ACTUALLY distorted view can work better.

Atomic I/O letters column #124

Hard-drive board transplants, catproofing your keyboard, and the unending confusion of hard-drive capacity numbers.

A modest censorship proposal

Perhaps the energies of governmental busybodies can be less harmfully applied...

Atomic I/O letters column #123

SSD reliability, fun with the hosts file, and a super-fast alternative to Windows Search.

Atomic I/O letters column #122

Lego computer cases, hard-drive reliability by brand, impossible data compression, and high-powered USB.

Stuck in the foothills

The problem with being trapped on a local maximum is that you often don't even know that it's happened.

Atomic I/O letters column #121

Curing the Windows "Not-Responding Problem", and the mysteries of laptop-drive connectors.

The newt hits! You die...

If you call yourself a gamer, but you've never played NetHack, I really must insist that you do.

Have you wasted enough time today?

I cannot speak too highly of mucking around.

Atomic I/O letters column #120

The perils of RAID 0 and the economics of CrossFire, and... memorable... PC practical jokes.

Atomic I/O letters column #119

Cleaning printer nozzles with something other than ink, the mysteries of processor affinity settings, and installing a PC motherboard in a giant old non-PC case.

Big Brother is watching you play

More and more games snoop on how you play. This could be a good thing, a bad thing, or an entirely unimportant thing.

Dan's Data letters #208

Sparklers and thermite, alkaline chargers, more Windows fun, clicky keyboards, car-battery UPSes, Bernoulli disks, homeopathic suicide, Frankenstein switches, and a finger-to-mains adapter.

Dan's Data letters #207

Educational LED frying, mystic battery rejuvenation, modifying headphones, running a US TV in Australia, fixing filthy power, novel dancing-pole installation, fooling your electricity meter, and inhaling deadly gases.

One-note NPCs

Why do so many game characters have so little to say?

Cannibalise the corpses!

"I'm afraid you've got a bad game, Mr Jones." "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!"

Atomic I/O letters column #118

Soldering battery cells, keeping dust out of a large sucking hole, cordless ESD straps, concatenating plugpacks, and laser video projectors.

Atomic I/O letters column #117

The fake-Flash rip-off, diamonds as heat sinks, endless troubleshooting frustration, and deafening beeps.

Atomic I/O letters column #116

HDTV display lag, system-monitor programs that disagree, and the wonders of LSD NiCds.

Five trillion bits flying in loose formation

I have a confession to make: I have never had a PC that worked properly.

Atomic I/O letters column #115

CrossFire versus PCIe x4, upgrading to Windows 7, and why some burned CDs STILL won't play in the car.

Game crazy

PC gamers put up with a lot. But we can also claim a peculiar reward.

Alt-tCRASH

Why is it, you might wonder, that something so often goes horribly wrong when you try to alt-tab out of a game?

Speed kings

The extraordinary, and extraordinarily difficult, activity of game speedrunning.

The daily grind

Grinding, in games, is evil. But its power can be used for good.

The triumph of niceness

The ongoing transition from content-company nonsense to actual civilised behaviour.

A hundred years of EULAs

DRM can actually work. But licensing nonsense that DOESN'T work goes back a long, long way.

Atomic I/O letters column #114

A terrifying error with an easy solution, network adapters of very little brain, and do-it-yourself thermal goop.

Atomic I/O letters column #113

Turning off the swap file, crimping versus soldering, and grafting PSUs together.

Atomic I/O letters column #112

Hunting audio crackles, diagnosing suspicious thumb drives, HDMI hookups, and translating RAIDs.

Atomic I/O letters column #111

Mystifying color-scheme pop-ups, another hopeful drive-board swapper, and lining your computer with rubber and lead!

Next stop: Hardware piracy

Digital fabricators are developing so fast that it's rather difficult to keep up with all of the news.

Atomic I/O letters column #110

Filtering DC power-wire noise, suspiciously inexpensive surge suppressors, fans and resistors, and Windows file associations vanishing up their own fundament.

Steal This Education

I think copyright infringement may save millions of lives. Allow me to explain.

Atomic I/O letters column #109

PC power demands, cracked LCDs, and the mysteries of DMG files.

Atomic I/O letters column #108

Illegal electrics, defragging disks, and long-term backups.

The shifting goalposts of AI

We are surrounded by artificial intelligence, every day of our lives. Or there is no AI at all, and there never will be.

Atomic I/O letters column #107

Upgrading netbook speakers, oiling up your PC, and measuring computer-component current.

No spaceship? No sale.

There's a particular kind of ad that you only see in computer magazines. I hope it never dies.

Atomic I/O letters column #106

Short-lived batteries, cable origami, and what the heck registry cleaners actually do.

500 gig per second, if we don't get a flat

The bandwidth of a station wagon full of memory cards is quite impressive. And it's not as silly as you might think.

Atomic I/O letters column #105

Mains-voltage computer cooling, excessively bright monitors, and what to do with a pile of drives.

Atomic I/O letters column #104

Plugpack selection for oddball devices, USB Cables that Should Not Be, Wi-Fi for desktops, and upgrading an XPS.

Out: Hot rods. In: Robots.

On the hobby-microcontroller revolution. (If you hate it when I put tons and tons of links in an article, you should probably skip this one.)

What'll be free next?

Today, it seems ludicrous that movies could ever be legally given away for free, by people who just make them for the love of it. In 1980, though, you could have said the same thing about music.

Nerd Skill Number One

Command-line interfaces may be older than monitors, but they're not going to go away for quite a while yet.

Noontec V9-T HD media player and dual-tuner PVR

A quite cheap dual-tuner network-connected PVR box for Australian digital TV. But is it any good?

How hot is too hot?

Everybody knows why you should keep your hard drives cool. Almost everybody is wrong.

Atomic I/O letters column #103

System specs for playing HD video, quietening a rack server, and how to imitate an American.

Atomic I/O letters column #102

Optical computers, a new twist on the Stupid Out-Of-Memory Error, and adding galvanometers to your PC!

"In tonight's episode of Fallout 4..."

You know what's wrong with episodic games? They're not episodic enough.

How fast is a hard drive? How long is a piece of string?

Measuring the performance of storage devices is easy. Measuring their performance PROPERLY isn't.

Atomic I/O letters column #101

Deadly PC components, blackout hunting, and data destruction the pyromaniac way!

Atomic I/O letters column #100

Reviving a smoked drive, mouse crud, a mysterious video connector, hex bits, and write-protecting flash drives.

USB 3 drive box and controller card kit

An inexpensive way to upgrade to USB 3. But how much faster is it?

Ask Dan: Drives, drives, drives

Real RAID and "fakeraid", SSD connectors, and that rarest of creatures, a bizarre and insoluble problem with Vista.

Atomic I/O letters column #99

PSU hybridisation, Bluetooth plus KVM equals irritation, clicky keyboard options, and the persistence of outboard power bricks.

Atomic I/O letters column #98

Upgrading the right thing, the Case of the Vanishing Power Management, boot-sector brain surgery, and funny-shaped batteries.