Andys Computer

    I decided to dig out my old Amazon Kindle, a 3rd generation model with keyboard, which I last used, well, probably 3 years ago. Unsurprisingly the battery was flat, which feels weird when you're looking at a screen with writing on it because we're used to screens being dead when they have no power, but that's the beauty of e-ink I guess. But after sitting dead for who knows how long, was the battery toast? I plugged it in to a high power USB charger overnight but in the morning it was still as dead as a dodo... Hoping that I wouldn't need to break it open and swap out the battery, I tried unplugging it and plugging git back in a couple of times. Eventually the orange charging LED on the bottom lit up (I had forgotten it existed) but it would stay on only for a second before flashing quickly and shutting off. I kept unplugging it and plugging it back in and eventually the light stayed on which indicated it was charging so I left it alone. When I came ba

  There are several ways to tell how long someone has been into computers, and one is to watch how they react when they see a box with the Sun Microsystems logo on it. It doesn't matter if it's a server or a desktop, if they stare blankly at it, you know they're new to the business. You see, for those of a certain age, certainly those of us who graduated college before the millennium, the brand carries serious cachet. Back in the nineties, one of the computers on my "wants" list was a Sun workstation. And now, nearly a decade after they stopped making them, I have one. Sort of... Let me start by explaining what a workstation is, as it may be a term you're not familiar with. A workstation was a machine that sat above what we call PC's. They were more expensive, more powerful and more reliable. I'll give you an example: In the spring of 1992 Sun released a machine called a SPARCstation 10, and PC vendors started shipping their 486DX33 models