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The Apogee MiniDAC is a wonderful converter. But how does it work? Well, first of all, you can’t download the schematics from the net. So how it exactly works I don’t know. But looking at the components inside reveals at least some info. Therefor my guess is as follows: 1. Two times CS8416 input digital receiver/PLL chip. Looking at the number of inputs and print layout, I guess the two units are needed because of the number of inputs to be switched. 2. Wavefront AL1402, that’s an ADAT receiver chip which decodes the 8 channel (optical) ADAT stream into 4 stereo pairs. 3. Xilink Spartan XC2S50Read More →

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I hate registry changes in general but this one I like. It shows the various tasks and services that are run during startup and shutdown in the same way as when Windows installs updates. Open the following node in the registry using your favorite registry editor: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and add the following entry of type dword32 with value “1”. “VerboseStatus”=dword:00000001 It’s that simple and it makes your PC look a lot more intelligent.  Read More →

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Playing around with Hyper-V is fun. It’s one of the core components of Microsoft Azure. This Cloud computing thing is (of course) nothing magical. Microsoft has described their cloud in technical detail in one of their free ebooks. The main components are Win Server 2012 R2, System Center, Hyper-V and RDP. Microsofts power lies in the scalability (virtual server, virtual network) and management (System Center 2012). Microsoft provides full featured time limited evaluation versions of Win 8.1 Enterprise and Win Server 2012 R2 for free on their Software Evaluation site. Win 8.1 Enterprise can be used for 90 days and Win Server 2012 R2 forRead More →

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X11 is the mother of many things, one being remote computing. Since X11 is still the graphical engine on most modern Linux distributions these now old-school X11 functionalities are still usable. Just for fun, I set things up on Ubuntu and OS X Mavericks, without using SSH. This is important since SSH has the -X option for tunneling X11, which makes a X11 client server configuration very simple. And thus you can find guides to do this all over the internet. X11 works best on a LAN and SSH tunneling is not needed when connecting over a LAN. Also SSH tunneling kills your performance due to encryptionRead More →