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si vis pacem, para rectum

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Tue, 24 Jun 2008

pix plz kthx

Here, you happy now?


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ome hook wrote


very very cute

Mon, 16 Jun 2008

broken promise of a thousand words

No pictures this time, patient readers. My apologies.

Well! We finally taped out the Thursday before last, so I was off all last week catching up with things around the house. The main event was setting up irrigation for my poor parched yard, which involved lots of soaker hose for all the planters and a few impact sprinklers for the grass. I have things divided into two zones on each of the three spigots placed around my house, and as long as I only run one of the two sprinkler zones at a time the water pressure is sufficient to run soakers on the other two spigots.

This strongly suggests my next project: none of the electronic timers I've found can be programmed for the odd watering schedule around here, viz., Wednesdays and Saturdays, so I'll just have to build my own. Either I'll make individual ones for each sprinkler, or I'll do a little control interface for some solenoid valves and hook it up to positron.

Speaking of positron, that was the other time sink this week: positron Mk. V died a slow lingering death. A couple weeks ago I started getting random lock-ups; figuring it was a heat problem, I reduced the CPU core voltage, and this seemed to work for a while. Unfortunately, it started happening again, and the frequency of occurrences increased to the point where it wouldn't even get through a boot sequence. I swapped video cards, pulled RAM, and even swapped the processor (since I found one for $20ish), to no avail. My last effort was replacing the power supply, since I figured if I had to replace the motherboard I'd need one anyway. Fortunately, Fry's had a sale on the Antec Neopower 500 (for $65, no less!). Unfortunately, the new supply did nothing, but that just meant that I had an excuse to build positron Mk. VI.

Initially I really liked the abit IP35-Pro, but decided that spending that much on a motherboard wasn't worth it unless I was actually planning on running a FSB upwards of 500 MHz. Instead, I ended up getting a DFI LanParty DK P35-T2RS, which is a reasonably priced board that's another favorite for dual and quad core overclocking. Since I'm kind of cheap, I only sprang for an Allendale E4600, which should overclock by 30% with relative ease; I figure by the end of the year quads will be even cheaper and I'll trade up. I also picked up 4 Gb of RAM (a new personal best!) and a reasonably-priced GeForce 8800 GT board (thanks for catching me up on the NVidia chipset line, Wikipedia). For now, Mk. VI will inherit Mk. V's RAID array, and yes, I'm still running Mk. III's 18 Gb IBM Wide Ultra2 SCSI drive as the boot drive. Pretty soon I'll go to a small (30ish Gb) 10k RPM SATA drive for the boot and get four 500 Gb SATAs for a new RAID5 array.

Since I'm talking about positron, I think it's time for a retrospective:

  1. 1994: Pentium 133 MHz, 8 Mb RAM
  2. 1997: Pentium-MMX 233 MHz, 40 Mb RAM
  3. 1999: Dual Pentium II 450 MHz, 512 Mb RAM
  4. 2004: (July) Dual Pentium IIIs at 1 GHz replaced Mk. III's processors
  5. 2004: (October) Athlon64 3200+ (2.2 GHz), 1 Gb RAM
  6. 2008: Core2 Duo E4600 (2.4 GHz), 4 Gb RAM

Just brings a tear to your eye...


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JW Holloway wrote

Such is life...
machines come and go. I still remember many of my machines with fondness. Makes me sad to think of them sitting idle, not humming away.

May wrote


50% off processors. I'm just saying.




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