Well, I got Plex somewhat working on the Shitsung blah blah blah TV in the livingroom, it works GREAT on the Sharp though, and my 1993 Magnavox with a Roku Stick (yep, I put a Roku stick on the CRT).

Been ripping more movies to Plex for my wife, she picked out a pile this afternoon. I retired the Beigebox again and put the Dell T7010 back to work ripping, this time with the AMD Graphics Card installed, and it's been ripping full DVD's in like 15-30 minutes flat, not bad for a 7 year old i5 4th gen running on 8GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD (with 1TB in back for storage). My media server is a Dell PowerEdge D610 a Colleague gave me - 4TB, RAID, dual XEON, 32GB of RAM, the whole works, running outdated CentOS of course. But really all it does is stores a ton of shit and shares it via Plex or on my home LAN via Samba.

The b**** of the night has been learning how to rip episodic TV show/Cartoon DVD's using Handbrake. Windows 10 and Handbrake have been driving me nuts. Plus that Dell Inspiron 15 that runs it is as old as the 7010 but has a Pentium U430 in it and on-chip graphics so of course it's more anemic than the 12 year old ThinkPad T61....been trying to Rip Captain N: The Game Master DVD all night with it as a guinea pig....quite a pig for handbrake to rip, only gets through the first 5 minutes of the episode then blargh! Doing all this on the Inspiron, right now trying out a different security dll and it's taking 1000 years (sigh).....thing is, I want to try Captain N before I take on some big ones like Mighty Boosh or Twin Peaks.

Speaking of the ThinkPad T61, I just upgraded LInux Mint on it. I'm living more and more in Mint these days just because I prefer the interface, and I keep finding more and more free tools in it that I find more useful than mainstream commercial examples. It seems to me Open Source has truly come of age between FreeDOS and Linux. That things got a NVIDIA Subsystem in it too....it rips on Steam games...might be time to try "The Witcher Deluxe Edition" on it at some point and see how it does. If the weedy Dell Inspiron can do okay enough to be (just barely) tolerable I expect the ThinkPad will probably run nicely. I think I might start using that ThinkPad a lot more again. Also, seems the battery life is longer on it as well.....go figure. Poor thing has been vegging out way too long in the closet with my NEC Versa 40EC that's waiting for it's new screen.

my boss wants a synology ds1019+ setup in his home in an all mac environment.
i have never used a synology before but, i was successful in setting up DSM 6.1 in a vbox.
it took a little while as you have to use a bootloader in vbox in order to install DSM.
seeing this made me happy. now the real fun begins.

I beat my own record for the number of flamin' hot Hawaiian pizza slices wolfed down during a screening of Ready Player One:
Nine and a half. And they were huge.

Still ripping DVD's, and planning spring cleaning.

Figured out HandBrake, seems to only work for me in Linux.

Ripping with VLC on the OptiPlex still, averaging around 10 DVD's a day. I'm already onto Shelf #2.

I did have to reformat my "Data Disk" (2nd 1TB HDD) on the OptiPlex last night because it was NTFS and developed a problem with I/O reading/deleting files due to incompatibilities between the Linux and NTFS filesystem, I decided it'd be easier just to backup what's needed and reformat the whole drive. After all, I'm undergoing a massive data purge anyway this year. After the DVD's are done and the Music Collection is cleaned up and put on Plex, I'll be cleaning up and sorting out my external drive. There's gigabytes of shit on there I've not used in years, some of it a decade or longer. No point in the endless piles of crap from my 20's.

creepingnet wrote on 2021-03-14, 19:05:

No point in the endless piles of crap from my 20's.

Out there Seagate and Western Digital are crying. Why wouldn't you hoard things you'll never actually use?

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-03-13, 21:04:

I beat my own record for the number of flamin' hot Hawaiian pizza slices wolfed down during a screening of Ready Player One:
Nine and a half. And they were huge.

Now thats a record I want and I need to beat. I can only eat 4 so far. 🤣

BetaC wrote on 2021-03-14, 19:10:

creepingnet wrote on 2021-03-14, 19:05:

No point in the endless piles of crap from my 20's.

Out there Seagate and Western Digital are crying. Why wouldn't you hoard things you'll never actually use?

I'm sure they are, I've not bought a new drive from either of them in over a decade, I keep obtaining freebies when people gift me their "old" crap. I've got a few 2.5" SATA drives still kicking around not doing anything ATM as spares. The old Versas have given me an excess of "MB" capacity drives too (120, 250, 320, and 540) - because I pull those old things and throw in 80GB drives in those usually as well.

A lot of the hoarding is photos that I now have on the cloud, old lyrics sheets from my songwriting days that I'll probably never use (been doing that since high School), I downloaded probably a quarter of "Home of the Underdogs" when that was a thing, and probably only played an eighth of the stuff I downloaded more than 10 minutes. Also, a lot of the stuff on that second HDD was already on my external so I had no real need to have two drives with the same stuff on it, especially when that same stuff is also spread out among 9 vintage machines multiple times. Also a lot of video footage I put on YouTube already so it's stored somewhere.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-03-13, 21:04:

I beat my own record for the number of flamin' hot Hawaiian pizza slices wolfed down during a screening of Ready Player One:
Nine and a half. And they were huge.

That's impressive. Last time I did something similar is when I had my first party in the home theater I built -- I ate one large Little Caesar's hot & ready pizza, along with 2 pints of Guinness. I puked it all back up about an hour later, haha. My stomach just said no, you're not going to digest this. 🤣

I think this counts as a modern activity. The past week I helped a friend upgrade his 1967 mustang to modern fuel injection. We used a kit from Fitech and it was very easy to install and the car runs absolutely fantastic and the ECU isn't even done with it's self learning yet. Over the past few years we've done alot of resto modding work to the car. Just this past year alone we've done alot of engine work. We installed a Ford E303 cam and went with a full roller valve train.

Bruninho wrote on 2021-03-14, 22:52:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2021-03-13, 21:04:

I beat my own record for the number of flamin' hot Hawaiian pizza slices wolfed down during a screening of Ready Player One:
Nine and a half. And they were huge.

Now thats a record I want and I need to beat. I can only eat 4 so far. 🤣

wiretap wrote on 2021-03-16, 18:58:

That's impressive. Last time I did something similar is when I had my first party in the home theater I built -- I ate one large Little Caesar's hot & ready pizza, along with 2 pints of Guinness. I puked it all back up about an hour later, haha. My stomach just said no, you're not going to digest this. 🤣

Amateurs.
After a mere 4 slices, my stomach's usually growling still. 😜
The key to maximizing your calorie intake during movie night is to make eating the crust as easy as possible. Because as soon as eating the crust feels like a chore, it's game over--you're not going to want to start another slice. Some people just throw the crust out, but don't do that. Only bad people don't eat the crust.
Here's my method, lovingly rendered in Paint:

For the last few months my sleeper build has been crashing to a black screen with zero BSOD and no event logs in Windows 7 64 (still my favorite Windows OS). I thought it was the PSU, then the GPU, but when I put the system under load both held up like champs. I then did a thorough memory test on the 32GB of memory (4 x 8GB) and still no problems. I was at a loss.

The specs:

ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate AM4 Motherboard
AMD Ryzen 7 2700x 8-Core 3.7GHz CPU
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series DDR4 3200 (4 x 8GB)
EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 FTW3 Ultra
Creative Sound Blaster ZxR
Plextor M9Pe AIC 1TB NVMe (boot drive)

I had the latest recommended BIOS from ASRock which is v3.30 for my CPU. Then I got reading about AMD and the USB issues the X570 was having and I started to wonder if the X470 was suffering from the same problem. So I went ahead and updated to BIOS v4.60 which has what ASRock calls "Update AMD AGESA Combo-AM4 V2 1.1.0.0 patch D" even though it is not recommended by ASRock for my CPU. Guess what? Not one crash to black screen since. The black screen crash would usually happen when the system was idle or doing low CPU/GPU load tasks and I had read of other X470 owners also having my same issue. An odd problem with an odd solution, but hey, if it works...

Note: I am not actually positive if it was the "Update AMD AGESA Combo-AM4 V2 1.1.0.0 patch D" part of v4.60 or another fix they made since v3.30, but the moral of the story here is if I had followed ASRock's advice of not going beyond v3.30 for my CPU class I don't think I would have ever resolved this. I also might add I never use any hibernation or power saving features and that was not the issue either.

So i got a 3d printer the other day, and i'm just having a grand time with it. I printed off the dog & cat that was on the cf card that came with my printer. An Ender 5 pro, btw.

be warned, the 3rd print is "technically" not safe for work. So if your sense of humor is lacking, don't click the 3rd print, link. I was just going to put it up there, but it 2021 and someone will get "offended" and I dont want to make work for the mods. And if you are one of those "people" do us all a favor and put me on your ignore list now.

3rd print: https://imgur.com/fyFwqLI
4th print:

luckybob wrote on 2021-04-01, 23:59:

So i got a 3d printer the other day, and i'm just having a grand time with it. I printed off the dog & cat that was on the cf c […]
Show full quote

So i got a 3d printer the other day, and i'm just having a grand time with it. I printed off the dog & cat that was on the cf card that came with my printer. An Ender 5 pro, btw.

be warned, the 3rd print is "technically" not safe for work. So if your sense of humor is lacking, don't click the 3rd print, link. I was just going to put it up there, but it 2021 and someone will get "offended" and I dont want to make work for the mods. And if you are one of those "people" do us all a favor and put me on your ignore list now.

3rd print: https://imgur.com/fyFwqLI
4th print:

So why is that hand pointing suspiciously at the letter N? Inquiring minds want to know!

honestly? I needed a black background and that was the first thing i found. And it is one of those cheap usb 3.0 pcie cards. its not a secret message.

luckybob wrote on 2021-04-02, 00:42:

honestly? I needed a black background and that was the first thing i found. And it is one of those cheap usb 3.0 pcie cards. its not a secret message.

I wasn’t being serious dude. Are you going to print some drive rails in the future?

i guess it would have been funnier if i had a reaction image like this at the end:

but seriously, yes. drive rails for my 9595 and ALR. I also have some old macs with plastic as fragile as spun glass, so it will help there too.

Maybe if a mod reads this, we can have a section for 3d sil files for retro parts? I already found one for the hinge/faceplace to the Apple II color composite monitors.

luckybob wrote on 2021-04-01, 23:59:

So i got a 3d printer the other day, and i'm just having a grand time with it. I printed off the dog & cat that was on the cf c […]
Show full quote

So i got a 3d printer the other day, and i'm just having a grand time with it. I printed off the dog & cat that was on the cf card that came with my printer. An Ender 5 pro, btw.

be warned, the 3rd print is "technically" not safe for work. So if your sense of humor is lacking, don't click the 3rd print, link. I was just going to put it up there, but it 2021 and someone will get "offended" and I dont want to make work for the mods. And if you are one of those "people" do us all a favor and put me on your ignore list now.

3rd print: https://imgur.com/fyFwqLI
4th print:

🤣, that third one made me think of Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle
Also NSFW, but funny in a very crude kind of way .

I upgraded all 3 nodes of my home Nutanix cluster (little 1U Lenovo RS140 servers) to their max of 32GB each today. Guess it won't be long until this comment would end up in the retro activity thread!

Replaced the Samstunk TV with a TCL over the weekend - MUCH better. No more waiting 5 minutes for it to turn on and waiting 20 minutes for it to connect to WiFi - how in the heck a 2017 UHD 50" Smart TV could have a harder time getting on WiFi than a 1994 NEC Versa with a Cisco Aironet card....I dunno. Still keeping the Samsung, might be good for a Guest Room....or maybe a Bithead1000 style swing from the ceiling sort of thing for games....or backup to my old CRTs.

Brought the Plex media server back online after the wife was asking why it was down. My wife is fairly tech savvy but it is hard sometimes to explain concepts of things like a server (ie, that big loud gray computer tower in my "lab").....to her it was just a big noisy thing that "do you need to have that on all day" - uh yeah, unless you don't want plex......thank god I did not host my retro-PC share on there (at least....not yet 🤣).

liqmat wrote on 2021-04-01, 22:59:

For the last few months my sleeper build has been crashing to a black screen with zero BSOD and no event logs in Windows 7 64 (s […]
Show full quote

For the last few months my sleeper build has been crashing to a black screen with zero BSOD and no event logs in Windows 7 64 (still my favorite Windows OS). I thought it was the PSU, then the GPU, but when I put the system under load both held up like champs. I then did a thorough memory test on the 32GB of memory (4 x 8GB) and still no problems. I was at a loss.

The specs:

ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate AM4 Motherboard
AMD Ryzen 7 2700x 8-Core 3.7GHz CPU
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series DDR4 3200 (4 x 8GB)
EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 FTW3 Ultra
Creative Sound Blaster ZxR
Plextor M9Pe AIC 1TB NVMe (boot drive)

I had the latest recommended BIOS from ASRock which is v3.30 for my CPU. Then I got reading about AMD and the USB issues the X570 was having and I started to wonder if the X470 was suffering from the same problem. So I went ahead and updated to BIOS v4.60 which has what ASRock calls "Update AMD AGESA Combo-AM4 V2 1.1.0.0 patch D" even though it is not recommended by ASRock for my CPU. Guess what? Not one crash to black screen since. The black screen crash would usually happen when the system was idle or doing low CPU/GPU load tasks and I had read of other X470 owners also having my same issue. An odd problem with an odd solution, but hey, if it works...

Note: I am not actually positive if it was the "Update AMD AGESA Combo-AM4 V2 1.1.0.0 patch D" part of v4.60 or another fix they made since v3.30, but the moral of the story here is if I had followed ASRock's advice of not going beyond v3.30 for my CPU class I don't think I would have ever resolved this. I also might add I never use any hibernation or power saving features and that was not the issue either.

Ok, still doing it. Very intermittent. All thermals look very good and I have tested every possible aspect of the system. Then I read in another forum some faulty EVGA factory OC cards can display this issue. Since mine is a factory OC model I learned that NVidia has a nice little feature in their driver where you can disable factory OC settings and revert the card back to NVidia's spec. Pull down menu and select "Debug Mode". Now this doesn't stick at reboot, but it's a quick and dirty way for me to test this theory and if it proves to be true I can make it more permanent by saving a profile in an OC tool like Precision or Afterburner. I am wary about doing an RMA with EVGA right now considering the GPU shortage going on. First things first, though, let's see if this works. If it doesn't crash to a black screen in the next week or so I'll know for sure.