Results tagged “hardware” from Pumanchu

Friday the 13th - part 2

By
Epu
on May 27, 2008 9:39 PM |
I'm going to be on my third Western Digital Raptor 1500 HDD inside the Shuttle XPC. This time it was a S.M.A.R.T. disc failure I checked for in a not-so-routine disc scan, me being desperate to figure out why the puter was so sluggish booting.

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Ethernet to Wall Jacks

By
Epu
on November 5, 2007 9:57 PM |
Ah, the project that never dies.

  • CAT5e wall jacks are run to the living room and kitchen desk areas.
    • Makes it easy to hook up the laser printer and the computers.
    • Good throughput and file sharing.
    • Reliable internet connection.
    • All hubs, routers, modems, and a shit-ton of cables are in the walls and basement, not in my living room and kitchen and so-on.
  • Homerun to attic needs to be completed.
    • Self-augering bit still stuck in the 4x4 between 1st and 2nd floors.
    • Finally bought a 12-inch Irwin quick-release drillbit extension to finish this, when I should have bought a 3 or 4 foot flex bit to begin with.
    • Have huge holes in my bedroom and the basement stairs wall where the wire needs to be pulled to attic.
  • Drops to upstairs rooms need to be completed.
  • 16 port switch needs to be bought and installed.

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Too Hot to Handle

By
Epu
on October 25, 2007 9:37 PM |
It turns out, at sweet home Chicago, things are a little too toasty for the Shuttle XPC, and when playing Team Fortress 2, system becomes unstable. Dang. Thanks to the Killing news list, discovered and ordered a quiet Zalman copper VGA cooler. Should arrive soon.

Drawback is, without the sexy Nvidia 7900 GT installed, TF2 can't run and silently crashes on level load. This turns out to be the onboard video's complete lack of Pixel Shaders v3.0. Unhandled of course.

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Friday the 13th

By
Epu
on April 14, 2007 9:42 PM |
Dang. Cpu arranged to baby-sit for a co-op member's 7-year-old. That went pretty well, except for the part where he knocked my SEGA Dreamcast onto the top of the Shuttle XPC. Guess where the SexyWesternDigitalRaptor lives? Right on top. It stopped working almost instantly, failing to find a bootable disc.

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Backup My Computer

By
Epu
on August 20, 2006 11:13 PM |
I don't. I mean, not really. Not like I could recover from disaster and have all my data intact. Shit, some of the data I 'backed up' onto CD and DVD is already worthless. Discs do get bad with age.

Seriously, who backs up 120gb and 160gb drives?

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Shuttle XPC

By
Epu
on August 20, 2006 10:03 PM |
It's a double-bagel-toaster-sized beauty, best described as sexy. It is a Shuttle 3100 XPC for Intel PentiumD processors, composed of:
Before my cursed OEM copy of win32 arrived, it ran Ubuntu from Breezy Badger dist-upgraded to June 2006 latest.

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Aged Athalon Now Online

By
Epu
on August 20, 2006 8:06 PM |
I Ubuntu'd the aged athalon. This took awhile because the disk image for the installer wasn't completely downloaded. Wasted a bunch of discs figuring that out. I only had a few setbacks.

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USB Print Server Redux

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 9:53 PM |
Back when I bought my USB print server, I was really really really happy with it:
  • Cpu and I could each print without having to turn on any extra computers
  • Came with explicit Unix instructions for using it as lpr/lpd printer
  • Instantly set up when I installed Ubuntu on the aged Athalon.
These days, I'm not feeling the love:
  • non-free software that comes with it doesn't install on win32 after SP2, AFAIKT. This was never a problem before SP2, but I ain't downgrading.
    • Setup runs, but doesn't display
  • The non-free software driver package from the manufacturer was very difficult to find, since the unit doesn't have a name or model number.
That's what you get for 30 smackers!

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Aged Athalon

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 8:04 PM |
I bought Travis' fiance's old computer from them for 35 smackers. It's an old Athalon of some kind, with a Voodoo 5500 video card and two really slow 10 mb NICs. It serves as a file share, name server, and does other crap whenever I need it to. I hasn't been turned on since I moved to my new home, and sits in the basement of sweet home Chicago.

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Universal Wireless Console Controller

By
Epu
on August 18, 2006 10:47 PM |
You know you need one too: I'm not the only gamer I know who has 2 or more consoles stuffed away in his entertainment cabinet.

Has anyone ever made a universal remote controller? How hard could it be? I envision taking it out of its charging cradle, turning it on, powering up the system, and playing. When you're ready to switch to another console, turn that console on and play. No wires. There are no new dreamcast products, so I think I'm still on the right trail. Users with snes and friends will want similar products, I think.

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Hardware MP3 Players

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 9:45 PM |
My biggest disappointment in the whole .MP3 player arms race is that I, the consumer, lost.
  1. I can't auto update my players - maybe the iPod.
  2. I can't easily pull audio off of my players (yes, even if I own it, the vendor risks a huge lawsuit letting me do this).
  3. I can't move files easily between my players
  4. I have an ass load of proprietary chargers and a bucket of rechargable batteries
  5. I can't play books-on-tape that I bought from Audible on all of them
  6. In a year, I probably won't be able to even run them on Vista since proprietary device driver whores tend to drop support for older devices between win32 revisions.
I have 5 hardware .MP3 players. In order of purchase, they are:
  1. Samsung Yepp NDU 64mb walkman (no FM radio)
  2. Audible Otis 64mb walkman .Required to play DRM'd audio books. Stupid DRM. I have 5 players for christ sakes!
  3. Apple iPod Mini. It can also play audible DRM'd books, stupid .aac and other DRM'd files. God. This was like my 3rd player. I hate you Apple.
  4. Car CD player. It has CD text and album skip and everything! Goodbye, CD changer.
  5. Some junky Korean .MP3 walkman with an FM radio I got as a raffle prize.
Of these, only the car stereo component approaches transparent use; they all use different .DRM, they all use different software to update files on them, and none of them use an integrated feature of win32 (like, say, Explorer) to update their contents. None of them have open-source drivers from the manufacturer, AFAIK. I can't just plug them in and have them get recognized. Getting any one of these working in Linux is a pure dork triumph. If you have succeeded, way to go. I pat you on the back. It's not easy hacking USB drivers either.

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