Blergh. And geek.

[azekeil]

I'm still ill. I've not been into work for the last two days. I was starting to feel better over the weekend as well *pout*. Ah well, all is not lost.

Yesterday I ordered some computer bits, and they turned up this morning. I'm happy to say that I have now wireless enabled my laptop with an internal mini-pci card - Toshiba insisted that only their card would work. But that was ~£80 and only 802.11b, rather than the ~£16 card that is 802.11b/g that I now have fitted :) This is something I've been meaning to do for aaages but haven't because of fears of it not fitting/working with my laptop. That is, until kissycat1000 got her laptop (which is now also upgraded by 512MB RAM) and forced me to get a wireless access point for my house, which seemed to make it more worthwhile me finally getting it sorted out. It took quite a bit of fiddling with drivers but it's finally working :)

Other purchases include an 8-port gigabit switch and one gigabit NIC for beast, which I haven't yet managed to get to work. I blame my brain, although I think the linux I'm trying to install on is fairly broken.

Finally I bought a 300GB drive and an external IcyBox with USB and SATA (hotplug don't you know!) interfaces for my growing storage requirements. Beast currently has 8x160GB drives in, and consumes quite a lot of power for the 1TB storage it provides, and they were bought around the time it cost me ~£200 per drive. So, just a vague idea, but if I get people wanting to buy these 8 drives off me for next to nothing (say £30 each?), I could do it and just buy bigger drives for the new beast. Volunteers?

I've also managed to get the Playstation 2 USB EyeToy camera working on the PC as a quite reasonable webcam. This means Jordan will be able to play CamGoo on his PC instead of invading the living room ;)

Comments

[ev1ldonut.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in at least one of those drives, possibly 2.

I have f*ck all storage in my machine...

[goetia.livejournal.com]

Same for me! Definitely one, maybe two :)

[meltie.livejournal.com]

If you're talking about the Thinkpad with new wifi card, i'm frankly surprised - recently they've been putting in card whitelists in the BIOS and protecting it with some TCPM buggery - can't recall the details - basically locking the machine down to only accepting "IBM-approved" cards.

160GB? I've hit a ceiling on data at 80GB at the moment, and I reckon I could stand to drop about half of that on the floor as it's gone stale. Going to have a day this week of just sorting out music. Once i'm back on my feet i've got most of the bits for a proper disk farm.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

No, the thinkpad is work's, and already has a/b/g built in. This is my Toshiba.

[meltie.livejournal.com]

Ahh, good-o.

[poggs.livejournal.com]

How old are the drives?

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

I put the system together in May 2003. Since then, I've replaced most of the drives as they were from the time when Maxtor had big reliability problems. So it's not certain to say, although there was about a year where they saw constant use (constant = in a RAID5 array, cooled by the two 120mm fans so they never really got above 36°C, with sleep set to 30 mins, so they probably were only on for half the day). Since then it's been used fairly infrequently - couple of times a month for 4 hours or so each time?

If you want I can probably get SMART readings from them if you like...

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I might buy spare disks - but it would make more sense for me to buy 300Gb ones instead...

[dylan.livejournal.com]

I'll take the disk with the pr0n on it ;)

Only joking, I know its RAID5. I seem to have enough diskspace at the moment, must get around to downloading more music and films

You still want the DLT drive?

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten you'd got the DLT drive. Yes please :)

When I have it and see that it's working with my stuff, I'll scout out some tapes for archiving :)