Found out that the "T400 series" thinkpad dock that doesn't fit my T400 also doesn't fit wifey's work issued T460, heh... too old and too new.

Retrieving an i3 all in one from the trash to my wall, framed wooden stand

Bought a pair of laptops for Christmas gifts from a local flooring store going out or business. $50 for a Pentium P6100 Gateway 15.6" with a 320gb HDD, 3gb ddr3 fresh activated Windows 10 install.

$50 for a Toshiba 15.6 i3 3gen, 6gb of ram and a 750gb hdd. Bought a 240gb ssd and got it all setup with Windows 10.

$140 for a pair of fully functional laptops, cant complain.

Did some shuffling around my LInux systems....

- Pulled the NVIDIA Quadro from the dual XEON T5400
- Put the ATI Radeon from my i5 into the T5400
- Considering putting the Quadro in my Core 2 Duo box

Then had to reinstall Linux Mint because Cinnamon was crashing due to the graphics card swap. Was well worth it to reimage though since I was also using up almost all of my 16GB SSD.

Then came the usual STEAM Gambit of getting my login credentials right, and then beginning messing with Proton. In the midst of this I wound up watching Markipliar play FNaF Security Breach and was surprised it even came out considering what was going on with the creator's press the last I heard...so I had to fight the first FNaF throwing up a completley black window on startup....had to install a few things and roll to the oldest version of Proton. Also installed Postal 2 while I was at it. Getting ready for some LPs.....possibly as another character that I repurposed from a horror band I played in.

Not much apart of updating some apps and operating system... I have spent the day on stand by waiting for my work to send some tasks but it's the end of the year, not much work will come in until January.

Time for some gaming then!

dataino.it wrote on 2021-11-05, 19:52:

Retrieving an i3 all in one from the trash to my wall, framed wooden stand

I keep having similar thoughts. Guess I haven't seen the right deal yet though, fast enough for me to be worth the bother, given I've got some fairly fast underemployed systems, so I'd want "blow them into the weeds" fast to justify it.

Bought a second DRAM less? I guess 240 GB "Bestbuy exclusive" WD Easystore. I wonder what it actually is. Massive upgrade over a WD blue 8mb cache sata drive. Im curious how the P6100 will compare to the i3-3120 with less ram in just normal Windows updates and web usage with the same SSD.

Currently upgrading the MacBook Late 2008 to Snow Leopard via a USB flash drive (don't have any Dual-Layer DVD-Rs at the moment) from the Leopard 10.5.8 installation.

In case something goes wrong, I can factory restore it back to the Leopard OS (thankfully, the SuperDrive works).

Just trying (again) my Intel dual core Atom into a micro-atx case with a GT610 PCI video card to test both Win and Linux and see if it can work for most everyday tasks, retrogaming, office and eventually remote job interview that seems quite CPU demanding. With a single video test browser page and a low res retro 480p webcam the CPU takes a 30% usage hit already on both cores, the video card helps but not as much as I thought. I suppose the FullHD monitor is a problem here, I will switch to a lower resolution one but such monitor will consume more power than the computer itself. 😁

bjwil1991 wrote on 2022-01-02, 09:42:

Currently upgrading the MacBook Late 2008 to Snow Leopard via a USB flash drive (don't have any Dual-Layer DVD-Rs at the moment) from the Leopard 10.5.8 installation.

In case something goes wrong, I can factory restore it back to the Leopard OS (thankfully, the SuperDrive works).

I’m just curious, you know that with the OpenCore Legacy Patch method, you can at least get Big Sur (or even Monterey of your feeling ambitious) running on it, right?

But I can understand why you’d prefer Leopard/Snow Leopard, it was one of the best OS X versions to this date. 👍🏼

Building out wallboards for the new hospital. Custom scripting, automation, the whole nine yards. Told it could not be done in 4K graphics with scaling - well...it's done, and it works really good and looks sharp and professional. Can't say much more than that.

As I was sitting at my desk today, drooling on the keyboard while waiting for a 35GB game update to finish downloading, I realized something very cool.

I realized that the average internet connection is now faster than a 486's L1 cache--at least in terms of raw bandwidth. Sure, the connection latency is probably orders of magnitude higher than that of a 486's on-die SRAM, but I'm in some kind of weird flex mode here, so please let me have my moment. 😜

The Internet in 2022:

Cache and memory bandwidth of a 486-66 machine from 1992:

Is that amazing progress or what! If you were to time travel back to 1992 and tell some random nerd that, by 2022, the average home internet connection would be capable of blasting bits to fixed storage faster than his $3500 MegaPC's internal cache can feed a hyper-pipelined, clock-doubled execution core...he'd probably pie you. That is, if his tiny nerd arm could get the pie moving fast enough.

Setup a i7-2600k on a foxconn matx H61 board with 8gb of ram and a r9 fury. Psu is proving to weak, 600watt EVGA white

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-02-04, 04:40:

As I was sitting at my desk today, drooling on the keyboard while waiting for a 35GB game update to finish downloading, I realiz […]
Show full quote

As I was sitting at my desk today, drooling on the keyboard while waiting for a 35GB game update to finish downloading, I realized something very cool.

I realized that the average internet connection is now faster than a 486's L1 cache--at least in terms of raw bandwidth. Sure, the connection latency is probably orders of magnitude higher than that of a 486's on-die SRAM, but I'm in some kind of weird flex mode here, so please let me have my moment. 😜

The Internet in 2022:
Capture.PNG

Cache and memory bandwidth of a 486-66 machine from 1992:
IMG_0398.jpg

Is that amazing progress or what! If you were to time travel back to 1992 and tell some random nerd that, by 2022, the average home internet connection would be capable of blasting bits to fixed storage faster than his $3500 MegaPC's internal cache can feed a hyper-pipelined, clock-doubled execution core...he'd probably pie you. That is, if his tiny nerd arm could get the pie moving fast enough.

Ha! Reminds me of when I would go over to a friends house to watch him play Mechwarrior 2 in 1995. I asked him how long he thinks it will be before games look like the FMVs. He predicted twenty years, I estimated ten. I think somewhere in between is where it landed minus the muddy FMV resolutions. That MW2 intro FMV impressed me so much and then the game started and I found the gfx so disappointing. Now games look like you just walked outside your door and people are like, “Man, no ray tracing on my 8K billion HZ OLED screen? This game is so ugly!” 😎

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-02-04, 04:40:

Is that amazing progress or what! If you were to time travel back to 1992 and tell some random nerd that, by 2022, the average home internet connection would be capable of blasting bits to fixed storage faster than his $3500 MegaPC's internal cache can feed a hyper-pipelined, clock-doubled execution core...he'd probably pie you. That is, if his tiny nerd arm could get the pie moving fast enough.

I see your point, but you're way off on your "average internet connection" calculation. Unless you're considering "average" as top 1% (I'm in the USA). You have nearly a 1 Gbit internet connection there! That's blazing, screaming, ridiculously fast! I'm tremendously jealous, as I have only a 50 mbps connection (barely manages 6 mb/sec). And that's pretty 'average' for my area, in a suburban, heavily populated area with two or three other choices for ISP available.

I'd say the "average internet connection" is about on par with an old MFM hard drive's transfer rate, or maybe a 1992-era IDE harddrive (ie, PIO mode 2 or 3). But, for those rarified few who do have 1 Gbps internet access, it's a dream, I'm sure.

Braining out my OTA TV snarfer build, for general media capturing and hoarding. I want two ATSC tuners in it, and at least one analog for special duties, like "backing up" VCR tapes and getting one or two extra long distance channels on a set top converter box which seems way more sensitive than the tuners or most TVs. Also possibly rigging a dish and receiver for a small handful of still free to air satellite channels. Will have to set those manually until I get around to building a remote gizmo (Serial to IR)

So I need a video card hole, and two PCIe holes for Hauppauge WinTV cards, and a couple of PCI slots, network and a decent amount of storage interfaces. I think I'm going to have to use my P5K3 Deluxe, due to that having best slot arrangements. Into that goes a Q6600, HD6450, and as much DDR3 as I can muster, which looks like only being 6GB right now... might be down to 4GB by the time I've tested. It's known to push quads as high as 4Ghz, which I hope means I can get something rock solid and not too volty in the low 3Ghz-es out of the Q6600 ... because I don't want it taking 10 hours to re-code a movie like the X2-4200 test rig was doing.

Initially, it's gonna get a 60GB SSD, with 30GB of that for "buffer" to dump the recordings to before they get transcoded to something MP4ish and dumped onto 3TB main storage (Got two 3TB drives, gonna see if I wanna JBOD the other one on, or use it for backup and buy bigger drives when I fill the first one)

Think I'm going the MythTV route, might look at Kodi.... Plex got too commercial. It's okay as a frontend still... backend stuff.. nahhhh.

I got hold of a 6TB (2x3TB) Western Digital 2 bay (MyBook Live Duo) NAS for nothing with no drives and managed to get it working with a couple spare old 1TB drives. Bit of a weird one as the OS and software is installed onto the drives, not in any flash on the mainboard. It was a little fussy and took many hours and a Linux PC to get it working but I did in the end 😀 It's not particularly impressive though so not sure I'll bother keeping it.

I have a Netgear Stora too with no drives for nothing but support for that has been dropped as of a couple years ago (Netgear basically seemed to rebrand another company's product and they've gone bust) so the device is completely useless - you can't do anything with it. There is a build of OpenWRT I'm tempted to try but I need to find a serial adapter that'll work on 3.3v and has an easy way to wire up to the pin header on the board.

Stripped a i5-2400 Lenovo Thinkcentre I use for Netflix/media playback to the TV in my room because it quit working. Found nothing wrong except the CMOS battery was slightly under 3V, replaced that and shorted the reset jumper and all is fine again.

SteveC wrote on 2022-03-08, 23:23:

I got hold of a 6TB (2x3TB) Western Digital 2 bay (MyBook Live Duo) NAS for nothing with no drives and managed to get it working with a couple spare old 1TB drives. Bit of a weird one as the OS and software is installed onto the drives, not in any flash on the mainboard. It was a little fussy and took many hours and a Linux PC to get it working but I did in the end 😀 It's not particularly impressive though so not sure I'll bother keeping it.

I have a Netgear Stora too with no drives for nothing but support for that has been dropped as of a couple years ago (Netgear basically seemed to rebrand another company's product and they've gone bust) so the device is completely useless - you can't do anything with it. There is a build of OpenWRT I'm tempted to try but I need to find a serial adapter that'll work on 3.3v and has an easy way to wire up to the pin header on the board.

This should work I would think
https://www.adafruit.com/product/954

But maybe wanna see if there's a UK adafruit distributor to order from.

Dont know if this really classifies as "Modern" but today I retired the 2600k file server/ MC server, replaced it with a 2950x Threadripper that got retired from the job it was doing so now I have a 2600k and motherboard + Ram sitting around ...Guess I could turn it into a WinXP/Win7 beast machine, I do have a GTX 970 that isnt being used that would pair well with it.

Or

I could put the old girl into storage and let her rest for a while, she has been at 4.8ghz for quite a number of years and has well and truly earned a rest.