A blog about my rantings, including Games, Game Development, Gaming, Consoles, PC Gaming, Role Playing Games, People, Gaming tips & cheats, Game Programming and a plethora of other stuff.
I've a bit of an eye for oddities in product listings... and this one caught me...
This is for a door latching system and its the weight thng at the top, first of all they can't just say "takes between 1.2 and 1.6 kilos of force to open", instead they go with this very odd metric of 1.5 bottles of 4L water.
So... one and a half bottles of 4 litres of water....
Very distinctly not six litres of water... And the strange thing is I'm pretty sure a litre of water weighs a kilo itself, so one and a half bottles of 4 litres... That'd be 4 + 2 giving us 6 in total, six kilos, which isn't mentioned.
It is just all round odd... That's all I've got for you, move along... move along I say!
Well, I'm midway through an awful lot of little projects, and right now (well about 5 hours ago) I actually just got home from a holiday (vacation to our American cousins)... So, lets just go over what I'm working on, what I'm planning for you guys, and when I plan to do it, saving time slips.
First, the server fan project, the fans have been modded with new resistors, they all still work, and the server boots. And it a LOT LOT quieter, however, the BMC does start to moan after a while and it ramps the fans up to 100% screaming again when they drop below 2250 RPM. So, I'm still working on software patching that...
Second, I have an introduction for you guys for the servers, covering all the little bits of kit I found in them, including memory installation, RAID controller configuration & installation, DRAC set up, and even re-working an Intel Dual Gigabit 8x PCIe. Well I say re-working, I took the heat-sink off and put new shiny thermal paste on it to help it run cooler with the slower fans... Anyway, all that is coming up.
Third, what am I actually going to be doing with the servers? Yes I have two new things to announce, watch this space.
Fourth, again a server item, racking them... I'm planning on building my own mini-coffee table style rack from some ikea items... However, this is a very low priority and depends on Pay-day coming around.
Last Server Item, it the new drives and RAM upgrades I've order, yes a whooping £20 has been spent! However, I'm reaching out to several ebay and Amazon traders looking for partners to bring you new and exciting content as well as giving them reviews for their kit... So, watch this space for more kit being reviewed in my unique style. To those vendors I've sent missives to... Get back to be folks, first come first served... I've got a Server CPU provider already negotiating... I'm missing RAM and cable providers... (hence why I've bought the first round of items for review & use).
Sixth, this is a software project, one of my most popular post series is my old, original, "Write your own CPU" series, which I think is pretty crap, I never finished it, never went beyond the basic add & sum op codes. The later 4004 tutorial is not as popular (despite it being vastly superior), so to help my viewers see more of my blog and sites I'm going to be making a video series about writing your own virtual CPU.
I've got a bunch of real Z80 chips lying around, and some LED's, and a breadboard, so I may very well make a simple Z80 stepping/tester board and then we can write something similar in C++.
Seventh, Java code, the java series I had gets a fair view YouTube views, but I never see those viewers come through to here, so we need to figure out someway to get them java folks to read more than one line of text at a time!
So that whole series needs a tidy up, and the game itself there needs some new loving.
Eighth, I have some more Socket 775 modifications to work on, these are very very low on my list of projects, as I bought them at exactly the same time as the new servers came in. And since the servers work, and are dual socket quad core Xeons, they are far more performance ready.
Very finally, I need to sort out the work-area, I have a new lovely digital controlled soldering iron, I have the Z80 project to solder, and three different arduino powered projects for the father-in-laws DCC train-set hobby to work on, so all those are coming this way, the first will be to mount the arc welding effect lighting into a single board solution. Then I have an RGB effect lighting board to build to emulate a glowing set of fires for him. Then finally a 5v DC motor project to power with PWM and emulate a set of coal-mine head stocks turning.
I've been a busy boy this weekend, I've ordered some new network wire to bring Cat 6 Ethernet directly to the upstairs bedrooms, so I have that to fit out, I've organised all my finances after the house move and everything.
I've retired my two Dell Power Edge servers - just because they were so loud - and I've got a whole bunch of pictures of them for their going on e-bay later this week - they'll be sold as a batch lot, as I basically use one as parts for the other, but they're not shabby, the heavily used on is is ironically one of the cleanest machines I have.
Their replacement is a much more suitable Pentium 4 PC - my old World of Warcraft & Eve-Online machine in fact, it's a massive downgrade in power - we're going from dual 64bit Xeon's on a server chassis to a 32bit 2001 Pentium 4. But it's all about getting away with leaving the PC running in the front room, where it'll be part of my internet provision of services.
I've also been servicing and modding my Saitek X45 joystick, I've got a friend of a friend sorting out a set of new springs for me, I've looked carefully at modding the handle, and also had the thing in pieces to discover what's inside. I maybe putting together a whole post on this alone, as there are not many or much good information about this solid old stick on the interwebs. Mine being 12 years old it's lasted a long time with no intervention. It's played me through MS Combat Flight Simulator, the original IL2, IL2 Forgotten Battles and IL2 1946.
It started to get a little funky in War Thunder last month, I noted I could not keep my 109's from pulling oddly, I thought it was a trimming issue, but it was actually the lack in my spring.
Anyway, as I say, more about all that later.
In Elite-Dangerous, I've been out and about in the universe, I've taken my pilgrimage to Sol, I arrived there last night, and docked at Abraham Lincolm station just as Australia was coming into view below. I'm going to take a better look tonight. However, on the way, though I have a fuel scoop I did decide to stop off and dock at a station, just to update my save at that point. The Commodity reading software worked a treat, even on the system name it had never been trained on before. Going forward I need to improve the capturing sequence, as it's a little clunky even for me; and I created it; but data capture is working out really well now. Capturing and the reading of the commodities, with my myriad of little updates and string swaps is working extremely well.
Aside from changing the capturing to be more, shall we say, slick; I'm also going to be adding threaded operation to the OCR, so as I can leverage some of the multi-core features on machines to speed up the reading process. There is a notable delay at the moment between the images being captured and the OCR kicking in. Yes, part of this is writing the images as bitmaps to disk, but the major delay is the serial nature of it going down the list, I may as well go down two different parts of the lists at the same time!
Apart form selling the Dell servers, I'm also going to be selling a really nice 1024x768 resolution CRT monitor, my last CRT monitor. I'm only selling it because it's being retired along with the servers, it was their heads up display. But it's one of those crystal clear displays perfect for coding with.
I'm also going to be selling the Samsung CLP-320 laser printer, because... well, despite being only 4 years old it's not survived, it still works, but there are fading in and out on the printing, I've replaced the toners (at a hell of a cost) and so I can only conclude it needs some tinkering with or servicing, which I don't want to do. So I'll go out the door for spares & repairs on ebay.
If I get a decent price for all these bits of stuff I'm selling, I may be looking to get myself the £160 X55 Rhino flight stick, but this is perhaps a pipe-dream with the financial situation as it is.
I'm not usually a risk taker, and I don't normally buy second hand kit, much preferring a known starting point the manual and all the cables which come with a new bought item...
So its totally out of character for me to have invested the heady sum of £21 on a PS3 console, which is in the Yellow LED of Death (YLOD) state.
My plan is to strip it open, clean it up and see if the GPU needs reballing, reflowing & reseating, or whether it just needs the old refresh of the thermal compound on the chipset.
It could be anything else, the worst case is the re-balling, which I'd not like to do by hand, but with some time, lots of alcohol and plenty of patience I maybe able to clean it up and resurrect it.
Don't worry, this isn't an advert... just worry, this is a bit of bragging.... I just ordered a brand new Samsung CLP-320 Colour Laser Printer...
And it only cost me £22.19.
How did I do this? Well, I've actually been clearing a load of the shit out of my house and selling it on eBay and building up a little bit of cash in PayPal... And then I've only had to pay the difference of the original price from my PayPal balance.
I actually sold off a lot of my drumming books £30 of them, plus a £10 DVD just today to fund this little jitty... But, I've been wanting to be able to print a decent quality of document for ages...
And when something bugs me, oh boy does it bug me.
I've priced this thing up, read all the reviews, from the honest to the silly to the adoring ones... I event went to visit one in PCWorld today to see what it looks like and feels like and to open all the doors and twist all the knobs and slide all the slide-able bits.
All I need do now is clear up my desk and move my big PC back under the desk (it's been on top since I fitted my new "quieter fans")
As you can see there's a lot going on...
Speaking of those fans, at some point over the next two days I'll get around to putting up my information and review.
