Sometimes when I leave home I don't remember if I left the windows open so I added some contact sensors to my HomeAssistant setup. This way I'll know not to start my AC if I left the windows open. I also added an automatism to turn off the AC if I open the window.

Just another day as break/fix IT.

Reloaded some workstations. Woopee for me.

yesterday while I was in the middle of surfing VOGONS, my harddisk self destructed. Today I'm restoring from backups 🙁

bakemono wrote on 2026-09-05, 22:51:

yesterday while I was in the middle of surfing VOGONS, my harddisk self destructed. Today I'm restoring from backups 🙁

Your drive was in the middle of some interstellar highway. 🙁

On the computer side, I was thinking about some mods to improve airflow in the Corsair 200R case that I put my Ryzen system in. It doesn't overheat (and actually runs cooler with a 120mm single-tower cooler than a lot of people on Reddit with 360mm AIOs), but the restrictive front panel, the location of the side vent, and the tiny gap between the power supply filter and desk seem non-ideal. I knew about the power supply air intake, but I never got around to putting taller feet on it.

I also remembered why I don't like writing software, but it's more microcontroller C code. I got the nRF24L01 working after about 11-12 years, and all it took was lowering the transmit power, switching the bulk cap I soldered onto the module to a low-ESR one, and sending some debug data over the previously unused UART. Also, the BME680 sensor suddenly started measuring temperature more accurately in the process (using it as a source of data to transmit to the receiving system).

I tried building multi-process version of Basilisk on Windows. It didn't work.

Glass Storage
I threw away all my pyrex and now I learn it could have solved my backup issues??? 🤣

Great invention but mainstream not in my life I presume.

Well my old faithful HP Z230 finally gave up the ghost today. In the middle of browsing, which was all it was used for these days, it all of a sudden went blank and started giving 4 beeps, which is power related apparently.
So its been swapped out for an i7-12700T in an HP Elite Mini 800 G9.
Win11 as a daily driver takes some getting used to.

Bought a 2.5gbit ethernet pcie card + switch.
Downloading at 200mb/s is crazy. serves no purpose but using the 2.5gbit internet line I have.

I don't know if this helps anyone, but a while back I swapped out my noctua fans (3 x 140mm) for arctic p14pro. The box is a Fractal Define 7 XL with all 12 front bays and 4 bottom bays loaded. The tiny space between the drives made it hard for air to get through so it wanted something with more pressure. The case is weird because you can either put 4x 120mm fans top to bottom in the front, or 3x 140mm fans that ignore the top 2 drive bays. There's a lot of talk about how 3x 140mm fans push more air than 4x 120mm fans with a lot of people feeling that's settled, but it depends on what's inside and how the components create restrictions and turbulence.

The motherboard is a 10-12 year old supermicro with it's own ideas on fan control, so I'm using software specific to supermicro, not the standard linux fan control tools. It has step settings mapping temperatures to a percent of maximum fan speed. It's just a media server with light duty mostly single drive access--I watch a program that's on a single drive, and only one other needs to be active for the media database, with the OS on an SSD. I was hoping to keep the maximum drive temperature to 40F or below, but that's proving really difficult. And these arctic fans get really loud at 70% or more. But I typically see one drive at 41F, with the rest at 38F or less, even in the two-deep bottom bays. With the noctua fans, multiple drives would get over 40F with the fans runinng constantly at 100%. I found it better to use the closed top panel instead of the open top panel--I guess it forces air to travel through to the back of the case, which in turn increases the pressure through the front drive bays, instead of providing pressure release just behind the drives. Being a server, there's nothing inside save an HBA card with an aftermarket mounted fan--even the video is on the motherboard. I played with a lot of things, like putting something over the front of the top, using 4x 120mm fans, adding a PCI-slot exhaust fan for the HBA, but so far this seems to work best. With the entire front loaded with drive bays, I notice higher temperatures at certain points between the fans, or just in the middle. One setup I've seen separates the three fans, using the top space (meant only for a 120mm fan) with some slight hack. I tried this, filling in the gaps between the bays, and it performed worse overall. Somehow, with the closed top on and no fan in front of the top 2 drive bays, it cools the top 2 drives better. The only other fans are the PSU and an exhaust fan behind the motherboard. It's not how I imagined the best case scenario.

The Define 7 XL case also has a restrictive front panel which I removed. I put a magnetic filter over each fan. They need vacuuming once a week or month. The case is sitting on a dolly to keep it off the floor (it has air intake on the bottom) and so it's easy to move the heavy beast to access the rear panel. Maybe one day I'll document the whole thing and post pics. Or maybe I did that already. yes. Re: What modern activity did you get up to today?

I got enshittification compensation installed. As you might expect from that post, I don't really need fiber Internet speeds for my own use, but software updates need it.

Not quite sure if this is modern or retro, but I've jailbroken my PlayStation 4 Pro today.

This allows for some cool things, like uncapping the frame rate in Bloodborne, instead of running the game at a fixed 30 FPS. When using the default 1080p resolution, the PS4 Pro isn't powerful enough to hold a steady 60 FPS with the cap removed, and hovers around the 40 FPS mark instead. But if you drop the resolution down to 720p, you can get a more stable (but still not perfect) 60 FPS. And there are no physics glitches like with the ShadPS4 emulator, everything works fine on original hardware.

Another that I'm not sure if it's modern or not.
Only because the hardware is getting on a bit now but it's not old enough to be retro, it's just old.
HP 260 G3 with a mobile i5 7200U, 16GB DDR4, 256Gb NVMe + 1Tb HDD.
Added a second 8Gb stick of ram to it to boost it to 16Gb which cost a whopping £25 and a 2.5" SATA caddy too mount the HDD which set me back another tenner.
That was as far as I got with it because a was busy chatting on a forum...
Will be testing it's with Linux, Mint or Zorin not sure which, it don't matter as it is purely to test it and make sure it's stable before it's put into its new life running as a headless Linux server. Network services and a BBS and IRCd

I argue that retro = 16/32bit os, agp/isa, non-uefi
Any one of those = retro

64b,pcie,uefi can be old and slow but it's still contemporary enough.

myne wrote on 2026-09-30, 11:45:

I argue that retro = 16/32bit os, agp/isa, non-uefi
Any one of those = retro

64b,pcie,uefi can be old and slow but it's still contemporary enough.

In general terms, I would agree, with the exception of older 64-bit architectures like that of the DEC Alpha.

Assuming you were referring solely to x86-64 when you wrote 64b, then I absolutely agree.
😀

myne wrote on 2026-09-30, 11:45:

I argue that retro = 16/32bit os, agp/isa, non-uefi
Any one of those = retro

64b,pcie,uefi can be old and slow but it's still contemporary enough.

Im so sure if it fits so clearly...

A for instance.
I have a SuperP3TDE6 motherboard based system right...
Now to me it isnt retro at all, its original because Ive owned it from new, its just an old computer.
But then I also have an Asrock 777i65G motherboard based system and that is retro because its now running as a Win98 system but to me Ive only owned it a couple of years...

wasn't immediately today, but I've been having a weird fan issue with my computer where randomly, after using my PC for sometimes an hour and sometimes several or just sometimes after the CPU ramped up (and once or twice even immediately after booting), the front intake would start spinning at full speed.

It did a good job of cooling the computer I'll admit, but it was annoying and I finally looked into the cause about a week ago.
and of all things, somehow the cable for the front intake fan had come loose- uh for context my case fans are Lian Li fans with cables that go into the fans themselves from a fan hub, it's annoying and has poor Linux support, but that cable came loose and because of that it was running at full speed.

My best guess is that whatever wire was the PWM wire was specifically the one making poor contact, since it was able to draw enough current to actually spin at full speed despite everything.

Still not figured out the issue where that fan sometimes refuses to start up when booting my PC until I prod it slightly (and then it can just start itself after) but I'm assuming that's due to dust or something.

I have been suffering an increasing amount of game crashes or computer freezes in 3D games specifically. I fear that the Palit GTX 1070 Ti JetStream is going south. As a first and easy remedy attempt I underclocked CPU/RAM by 200/400MHz from the stock frequencies (the maximum that the included Palit ThunderMaster utility allows). Let's see if that has a positive effect.

dr_st wrote on 2026-10-04, 06:01:

I have been suffering an increasing amount of game crashes or computer freezes in 3D games specifically. I fear that the Palit GTX 1070 Ti JetStream is going south. As a first and easy remedy attempt I underclocked CPU/RAM by 200/400MHz from the stock frequencies (the maximum that the included Palit ThunderMaster utility allows). Let's see if that has a positive effect.

Have you checked the GPU temperature while in-game, using MSI Afterburner or a similar tool?

Could be that the thermal paste has dried out. By now, those cards are almost a decade old.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-10-04, 06:16:

Have you checked the GPU temperature while in-game, using MSI Afterburner or a similar tool?

Could be that the thermal paste has dried out. By now, those cards are almost a decade old.

Indeed I should. The Google AI suggested exactly the same thing.