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DIY Junk

Thinktacular

Linux Funtime ThinkPad Refresh Time! This is an X250 that was getting a little tired-out. It’s got an i5-5300U – i.e. it’s not too hopeless, but it just needed a little love. Particularly since the 1366×768 TN panel is truly and irredeemably horrible.

Get that old screen outta there, in favor of a 1080P IPS panel.
Industry-standard mustache comparison test of new screen.
New SATA and m.2 SSDs.
Clean off the old thermal crap, give it a fresh application.
Tasteful hologram cat sticker to match MacBook Pro.
Done.

Categories
DIY Junk

Making a Raspberry Pi downloader box work with a Synology when you’re dumb and impatient

All I wanted was a little box to whom I could upload torrent files that it’d download to my Synology. I know Synologys can do that internally, but I prefer to have a little more control over the downloader. As a dumb and impatient person, putting up with finicky things is rarely done. However, I really wanted this, so since I’d gone through all the trouble to get this stuff working together I thought I’d write it up. I’m not saying it’s the best way, but it’s the simplest working setup I could come up with.

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DIY Junk

Bunchsnacks’ Dome Imperium

Making my Osborne 1 less tired, via peroxide, mild abrasives, and general tidying.

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Dumb Stuff

Hambalo Spheroid Porks

I’ve wasted my life?

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Dumb Stuff

In Ter Mu Lations

 

Always Stay On Brand.™

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DIY Junk

OS X Server L2TP errors in 10.12.5

I assume this only applies to me, but if you’re running Server on OS X and have been getting non-stop L2TP errors for your VPN since upgrading to 10.12.5, it seems like the fix is just to change the shared secret ?

Categories
Dumb Stuff

Digimals

My 780 Ti was getting a little long in the tooth and I wanted a closed-loop GPU, but was basically too impatient to wait for water-cooled 1070s and 1080s to come out. Fortunately, their release made 980 Tis cheaper, so I picked this thing up for $400. It’s very slightly slower than the 1070, and a 1070 Hybrid will probably be around $450, so that’s alright. I bet I’ll regret not waiting for the 1080, but this thing should be fine at 1440P for a good while.

I actually tried to water-cool my 780 Ti with a Corsair H60i, but its hoses weren’t long enough for installation like this. Which I probably should have thought of.

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DIY Junk

Hoxopleuratical Intermulationz

In this entry from a few years ago, I wrote about putting an SSD in an iBook from 2001. I got another iBook because I like them and they play Starcraft and if I didn’t who would, and I thought that it’d be fun to revisit that and see what a new IDE SSD did against that one from 2011.

Unfortunately, that was a short-lived plan. KingSpec (and others) do still make IDE SSDs, but almost all of them use the SM2236 controller, instead of the older SM2231, which seems to demand a couple more channels than the iBook knows what to do with. It can’t start up from a preformatted SM2236 drive, and it can’t install from a CD onto the drive either. Since clamshell iBooks are one of the trickier computers to do a drive swap on, I found this realization very amusing (although, truth be told, it’s not a terrible job at about 40-50 minutes; it’s just a fuss).

So that was out. But then I figured, in that last article I made reference to my CompactFlash-bedrivulated iBook — what if I revisited that? I made that thing in 2008 or so, surely CF has gotten faster. I also sold it in 2011 without having benchmarked it, lending an air of pointlessness to this whole thing, which was perfect.

So, I got a neat Syba IDE-CF bridge in 2.5″ drive format. Pretty nice; it has two CF slots. I used a Lexar 16 GB 800x card, since I had a spare one; presumably a 64 GB 1066x card would be faster. I also added a 512 MB stick of RAM and a new “CWK” battery to the iBook — which must be made using decade-old NewerTech tooling or something, but it works shockingly well.

Installation was the usual pain in the ass. Installation was the usual pain in the ass.

Hooray!

I also lost my Air’s disc burner and had to resort to, err, backup measures. I didn’t realize this iMac only had 10.1 on it, but it burned the Panther CDs fine, so that’s alright.

Anyway, long story short, it works great. On the left, here is the SM2231 KingSpec SSD in the other iBook. On the right, that iBook’s original Travelstar HDD.

 

Now, here’s the iBook with 800x 16 GB CompactFlash: 

A nice improvement! Slower small random writes than the KingSpec, but everything else is a decent little bit faster. Again, I think you could address that by going with a faster CF card if you were so inclined. The CF and CF-IDE bridge is also slightly cheaper than the 16 GB KingSpec was (in 2011) and the 16 GB KingSpec (with SM2236 controller) is now. The computer is fast for a 2000 laptop, silent, and gets pretty good battery life even by modern standards. The only downside is that the first-generation AirPort cannot use WPA2.

Obviously it’s sort of pointless. When I was little, the three computers I really wanted in 2000 were the Indigo/Key Lime iBook and the Cube, as well as the “Lamp” G4 iMac when it first came out in 2001. I couldn’t afford any of them at the time (although I eventually did have a 1.25 GHz 20″ iMac G4, bought slightly used in 2004, which lasted me until the Intel switch), and made do with a PM7100/80 upgraded to G3. But I guess buying now-useless things you couldn’t afford when you were small is part of being a grown-up or whatever. I have the iMac and a couple iBooks, and I had a Cube upgraded to a 1.33 G4 in 2007-2008, but sold it. That was real dumb since Cubes cost insane monies now. Ah, well. The point is, I don’t really use any of them and it’s pointless. But if you like pointless old nonsense, I guess I recommend shoving CF cards all up ins it. Sometimes you just gots to have a Starcraft 1 LAN party.

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DIY Junk

The Cromp

I wanted to do this for a while — Game Boy shelf. It’s just an Ikea Nornas with a little middle-thing I made out of scrap wood, but it’s nice to have all that stuff in one place. Top row, we’s gots R. Monkeys’ first Game Boy, R. Monkeys’ Color, the Color I modified with an Advance speaker and frontlight, my first Game Boy. Middle row, my modified Advance (AGS101 backlit screen), the Advance SP I put together for R. Monkeys to match her 3DS, and my Anniversary Micro. Bottom row, 3DS XLs. I’ll probably paint the Nornas white to match the rest of our shelves when I have more time.

I did have time to set up the important stuff, though:

Categories
Dumb Stuff

Bloemmaticus

Sometimes DCS be all like ?

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Reviews

Moltustulates: A Porcine-Gelatine Love Story

The XYZ Da Vinci 1 annoys me so much. Technically the XYZ hardware is capable (although it came with a misaligned X-axis), but the catch is that the software is slow and terrible. Converting a 3D object into a printable file is a pretty big job, where good control of nozzle temperature, nozzle speed, infill, print head positioning, and so on needs to be taken into account. And the problem with the Da Vinci software is that it just goes “buddy, that shit sounds complicated”, and skips it.

R. Monkeys was okay with it being right next to the bed for some reason?  R. Monkeys was okay with it being right next to the bed for some reason?

You can use your own software, although to do so you have to screw around. Likewise, you can use your own ABS filament, not the XYZ cartridges, but only if you screw around. It’s not difficult screwing around, but that’s beside the point.

I get that at this point consumer 3D printing is a Sisyphean hobby in which one should expect to screw around, but even for $400 it’d be nice if “You have to screw around!” wasn’t essentially written on the box. I’ll give them the cartridge thing, since I never had a problem with ’em and XYZ has to make money some how, but the software is just the worst, with no profitable reason to be that awful. The printer is a nice unit for a good price, but it couldn’t print a single model downloaded straight from XYZ without messing up a part or the whole, using the included software.

It was a fun thing to try, and practically-speaking it probably requires less screwing around than a lot of other 3D printers, but I just didn’t like the fact that what you’re having to fight is a conscious decision on the part of the manufacturer. It’s like if you’re reading a book, and somebody takes it and throws it on the ground. If that person is a toddler, it’s like, hey, that’s toddler stuff. But if that person is 33, they’re just an asshole. And the software makes the Da Vinci an asshole.

The cartridges are proprietary because XYZ is clearly undercutting other manufacturers on the printer’s price, and wants to make money like HP does on printer ink. But I don’t get why they go to such lengths to prevent you from using other software. You’d think if they got a reputation as a good printer where you can bring your own software, that’d be great for them — they get a good reputation and they don’t have to invest in making their awful software anymore. But they insist on trying to lock you out, so they’re getting a bad reputation and they have to invest at least a token non-zero effort in the software. I don’t get it.

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Reviews

Red Star OS 3.0

I found a copy of Red Star OS, the official OS of the DPRK, online here. Due to the complex way in which the Monkeyses of two generations past partied, my Korean is passable, so I thought it would be funny to try using only Red Star for a week. This proved impossible. But it’s still sort of interesting.

The Kim Family Seal of Quality!