skip to main |
skip to sidebar
This is my favorite time of year..... when the days get cooler, shorter and the nights get chilly and longer. I can run the systems in my office as much as I want and it only serves to warm up the house! It's that time of year when we spend more time inside and hang around our electronic hearths. There's more time to plan/build systems and 'cus there's less time expended on the yard!
We also start thinking about what we can ask for, for Christmas as well. My Computer Club students are thinking about parts that they can ask for to upgrade their systems or actually build a system. The frantic aspect of the Fall such as the beginning of school and football season is over. Everyone is in a bit of a routine now and know when they can carve out time to work on their hobbies.
For me, it means that there'll be days during Thanksgiving week and Christmas break where I can work on and in my workshop. I have a list of things that need to get built. The unspoken thing down here in Texas is that there is a limited times that these things can happen. Other than time commitments, the main limitation is the extreme heat! If you think that we could get up early or stay up late to avoid that, you've evidently never spent time here in the eastern half of our lovely state where the "H" word have nothing to do with the devil. It's all about the humidity! We actually look forward to the heat of the day to get rid of the oppressive humidity (and I don't even live in Houston)!
On the other hand, our houses don't look like this from December to March either. So, that's when we can do what we want out in the garages. If you've never done it, you should come down to Texas between November and January. The weather is absolutely spectacular, with temps ranging from mid-50s to mid-70s! Plus it tends to be dry, so virtually no snow or ice. If you've never taken your family to NASA in Houston; that would be the time. Want to go to Six Flags Over Texas, River Walk in San Antonio, Big Bend..... come on down!
So, let's take a look at some of things on my docket. One of my Computer Club students wants to do a build on the Mini-ITX form-factor. While all that is pretty straight-forward these days, we still have to deal with costs. I've helped out a number of students in the past by donating various of my old parts to their efforts and this will be no exception. While looking at Mini-ITX cases during a planning session, she decided that she like the Cooler Master Elite 120 in white. I do happen to have the black version which sits in "the closet of doom", so we'll make that into a 2-in-1 project, where we'll paint out the case as well. Some of you might remember a previous student build from a couple of years ago where we transformed an older Alienware case by doing a faux carbon fiber look on it. While that one was just huge, this one will be the opposite!
Another project in progress is the conversion of a Dell PowerEdge SC440 from an old "enterprise" box to a home machine. I have another student who is in that process which will be an excellent "case study" for Linux, FreeNAS use.
Along those same line, we'll also be doing "case studies" on the stack of about 25 ThinkPad R60s that we have down in the "Batcave". These were some of our school district's old teacher computers that we were given. They're of course quite long in the tooth these days, but are also from the Core/Core2 Duo generation so can run relatively modern OS's. These should be fun machines for the kids to take home and play with! I'm certain that, like the others, this will turn into a post of it's own. Are all my projects having to do with the students?
Here's my project! It's kind of a big one. I need to clean out, streamline, update, organize; whatever you want to call it. This is the winter that I need to get myself ready to move forward. Before, I can do that, I have to "un-hook the trailer" from a psychological sense. There'll MUCH more to come on this topic as it progresses.
They say: "Every Dog Has His Day"! I say: every computer problem has a solution.... almost anyway. You guys know that last week was a disaster in all manner of ways. I figured that over the course of the week, things would resolve themselves like they always do:
- On my day off with the sick daughter; I finished repairing the fence by building a new gate.
- Then I resolved my problematic R60 ThinkPad issue.
- I got a cool offer from Lenovo for half-off of a new device.... which I took advantage of!
- Got another of the R60s up and running with a different OS.
I gotta tell ya; I LOVE Windows 7! When given enough RAM and a halfway decent set of hardware, it'll run with the best of 'em. Essentially, it's like a modern Windows XP! That's a high compliment indeed if I do say so myself. When I moved the hardware from the R60 that was freezing up to another one of those machines; it was like magic! All I did was to take the T7200 cpu, the 4Gb of RAM and Intel 40Gb SSD out of the one machine and put it in another one and "BAM" (like Emeril Lagasse would say), it just worked. I took it to show my Principal how fast those machines could be made to work and he was suitably impressed. Now it's in the hands of one of my computer club student/minions for long-term stabilty testing.
I was so excited that the very next evening, I loaded up the previously freezing-up R60 with Zorin OS 9 and showed that to my Principal as the "proof-of-concept" for what I wanted to do with the rest of the 26 R60s (and possibly 100+ X200s) sitting on selves in a closet! I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed with how simple Zorin was to work on coming from Windows. Now for the ultimate test! I'm going to try and put it in the hands of one of my least hardware savy computer club minions for daily trials. Stay tuned!
While all this was going on, I went on a shopping binge.... the Frugal Propellerhead way! You guys know that for the last several months, I've been busy helping a number of people buy computers. You might, or might not have figured out that I mostly make little, if anything on these gigs. It's kind of like playing in a weekend band. However, besides the occasional old computer they throw out, there is a little bit of a silver lining. The majority of these purchases come on eBay, and for the last couple of years, they've had this little incentive program called "eBay Bucks" which returns a tiny percent back to you from the purchases four times a year. A bit like what credit card companies do with their loyalty points. Over the last quarter, I've had a lot of these purchases ranging from the Dell Precision workstation laptop for a former student going to college to the ThinkPad X1 for a co-worker. All this ended up netting me a whopping $57 in eBay Bucks for the quarter that ended on September 30th! Don't scoff: in the Frugal Propellerhead world, $57 and some cents is no laughing matter! Basically, it allows me to rationalize buying things that don't really have a real purpose.
I know what you're thinking: Really; what in the heck is this weird stuff!?! OK. From top to bottom, it goes as follows. A Cooler Master 4-in-3 drive cage. It's purpose is to go into my old Cooler Master Centurion 5 case that I'm turning into a file server. Although it was actually designed for this case, it can be used in any computer tower that has 3, 5.25" external bays and turn it into a, fan-cooled drive cage that can hold 4, 3.5" hard drives. The second device is a portable USB 3.0 Hub/Card Reader that in one device will allow my ThinkPad X1's single 3.0 port to do multiple things. And the last is a rather difficult to find, power supply for one of my Lacie "Porsche" external Firewire hard drive enclosures. That will not allow me to use the other of them "daisy-chained" together as external storage for the "Old ThinkPad Server" project that I'm building out of an A31. It's just $60 worth of stuff; why not just buy it and have done with it? It's all part of my philosophy and the purpose of this blog to start with. Finding ways to do things as cheaply as possible and if possible using old repurposed technology.
