Chrome OS Flex: Google’s New PC OS

Chrome OS Flex is a new version of Chrome OS, the cloud operating system used on Google chromebooks. As this video demonstrates, it can be installed on almost any PC, allowing — for example — new life to be brought to an old laptop.

You can create a bootable USB drive of Chrome OS Flex using the Chromebook Recovery Utility available here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/de…

You could fit the data from 25 million 1TB SSDs on this 5cm diamond wafer

Researchers in Japan say they’ve concocted a new method of creating wafers out of diamonds able to store mammoth amounts of data on them. We’re talking 25 exabytes of storage, which is a 25,000 petabytes. Or 25,000,000 terabytes. Or 25 billion gigabytes. It’s a dizzying amount of data, that’s for sure.

If you assume there’s roughly 50,000 games on Steam and each one is around 80GB, which to be completely honest is probably a gross exaggeration of the average game install size on the platform, you’d be looking at around four petabytes of data required to install the lot. So with a single diamond wafer you could save the entire Steam catalogue 6,250 times. 

Read more…

ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon

Expanding storage in ZFS

In addition to being a filesystem, ZFS is a storage array and volume manager, meaning that you can feed it a whole pile of disk devices, not just one. The heart of a ZFS storage system is the zpool—this is the most fundamental level of ZFS storage. The zpool in turn contains vdevs, and vdevs contain actual disks within them. Writes are split into units called records or blocks, which are then distributed semi-evenly among the vdevs.

Read more…

Hackers found a new way to store viruses in GPU memory

According to Bleeping Computer, cybercriminals have found a new way to hide malware in graphics cards memory. This method of utilizing graphics card memory instead of system memory is undetectable by the antivirus software, the original advertisement on hacking forums claims.

The malware uses graphics memory allocation space, from where the code is executed. The technology uses OpenCL 2.0 API on Windows operating system, no other systems are affected by the malicious code.

The hacker confirmed that the code has been tested on Intel UHD 620/630 graphics as well as Radeon RX 5700 GPU and GeForce GTX 740M and GTX 1650 discrete cards. It is unclear if other graphics cards are affected, but assuming that this method uses OpenCL 2.0, it is very likely to be compatible with other modern GPUs.

Read more…

Western Digital Launches 20 TB Mechanical Hard Drive With OptiNAND Technology

Western Digital Unleashes 20 TB Mechanical Hard Drive With OptiNAND Technology

The 20 TB mechanical drive’s flash memory is integrated “iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD) on the circuit board,” and also performs with a 3D TLC UFS flash memory, the capacity of which has not been released to the public. Western Digital intends to improve reliability and performance with the new drive.

Read more…

Raspberry Pi and ESP32-S2 Team Up for Mutantc_V4

Back in 2019 we first came across the mutantC, an open source 3D printable Raspberry Pi handheld created by [rahmanshaber] that took more than a little inspiration from Sony’s VAIO ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) from the early 2000s. It was an impressive first effort, but it clearly had a long way to go before it could really be a practical mobile device.

Well after two years of development and three iterative versions of this Linux powered QWERTY slider, [rahmanshaber] is ready to show off the new and improved mutantC_v4. Outwardly it looks quite similar to the original version, with the notable addition of a tiny thumbstick and a pair of programmable buttons on the right side that can be used for input in addition to the touch screen. But inside it’s a whole other story, with so many changes and improvements that we hardly even know where to start.

Read more…

This Raspberry Pi Pico-Powered Compact Keyboard PCB Breaks Unused GPIO Out to 3.5mm Jacks

Designed to make the most of the RP2040 microcontroller, this clever compact keyboard includes a rotary encoder and two expansion ports.


Reddit user “stewartd430” has designed a Raspberry Pi Pico-powered compact keyboard, complete with an expansion port for adding extra hardware to the microcontroller’s general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins.

“I designed a keyboard PCB for the Pico,” Stewart explains of his project, which builds on earlier efforts including a simpler 20-key macro keypad driven by the same Raspberry Pi Pico board with RP2040 microcontroller. “65 percent layout, with 15 added macro keys and rotary encoder.”

Read more…