nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category acquired things

Desk!

September 29, 2003

This weekend I picked up a new desk for my office. My old one was kinda small, and just didn’t have the writing surface area that I needed. Well, I get the new desk, the O’Sullivan Diplomat from Staples, negotiated down to $109.99. Well, I get it home, get it set up, and while it’s nice and all, there is a decent sized gouge in the top left desk piece. No big deal, but I decide to call O’Sullivan anyway, just to see what they can do.

Well, the end result of everything was O’Sullivan sending me, free of charge, a whole new top piece for the desk. There must be an absolutely massive mark-up on these desks if they can afford to ship a 2′ x 3′ desk piece so that it will arrive “within a couple of days”, to everyone who calls and asks for one.

Weird…

acquired thingsaround the housemoved from livejournal

Pan 0.14.0

September 3, 2003

In case anyone cares, I just installed Pan 0.14.0 from Fink unstable. It’s far improved over 0.13.2 (or whatever) which is the version in stable. I highly recommend to anyone needing a USENET reader that they check out Pan. Install X11, install Fink, make it work with unstable (check the FAQ), and install. It’s very, very close to Forte Agent, except it defaults to viewing images internally. The speed is great even on my G4 Cube.

Oh, I’ll have a G4 Cube for sale in October if anyone is interested.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

…

August 29, 2003

Ahh… New Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers came today. I’ve now replaced my older Altec Lansings from 1995. The ALs were really, really nice, better than most other speakers, but they had a bad 60Hz buzz coming from the subwoofer. I got these speakers as refurbs for $99 for the pair, with sub. They retail for $179 – $199. Not a bad deal… I’ve only had two problems. First, they forgot to ship the speaker cables with them. A phone call later and they are on their way. I’d been wanting to make some custom 16 gauge cables for them anyway, so I got out two 3.5mm mono plugs (yes, the back of the speaker accepts 3.5mm plugs for the amped signal, for some unknown reason…) and the speaker wire, then made up the connectors. I thought about putting six-way binding posts on the back of each speaker, but I can probably leave this work for another day. If it’s even worth it… Anyway, I hook everything up and they sounded like shite. After some troubleshooting it looks like there might be a problem with the input line, some wiggling around in the iMic (USB sound device for the G4 Cube) and everything is good. These speakers sound real, real nice. Definitely worth $99 for the pair. Now I only need to rearrange the office… And find a new place to mount the iSight, as it had sat on top of the old speaker.

acquired thingsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

…

June 25, 2003

I figured I’d post this again since I didn’t have much detail last time…

Here’s the specs on that computer I want to sell:

P4a – 2.26 GHz
512MB PC1066 RAMBUS RAM
Asus P4T-533 Motherboard
Soundblaster Audigy (provides sound and IEEE1394 for iPod)
GeForce 4 Ti4200 256MB RAM (Gainward GeForce 4 Ultra/650 TV/DVI Golden Sample, I believe)
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Card
8x Yamaha SCSI CD-RW
Plextor UltraPlex (32x, I think) CD-ROM Drive
IBM Server-class 10/100 NIC
Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 Fibre Channel Controller w/256MB Cache
30m Fibre Channel HSSDC<->DB9 Cable
Custom external fibre channel enclosure supporting four drives.
Four 9GB 10,000RPM Seagate ST39102FC Drives
Nikao Doggie Case
Ultra Quiet Power Supply

There are pictures of everything available here:
Doggy Case: http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/doggie
Fibre Channel Enclosure: http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/fibrechannel
Fibre Channel Benchmarks: http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/fc_benchmarks

The 9GB drives can be replaced with any size Fibre Channel drives, which are all available cheaply off of eBay. In the machine’s current configuration, it’s benchmarking with disk reads and writes that are over 160MB/sec (http://www.dingleberrypie.com/gallery/fc_benchmarks/aac). Faster disks or a different RAID config could change this both ways.

Also, I’m looking at selling this machine because I want to get a PPC970-based PowerMac G5. It works perfectly fine and is fully functional as my home workstation. I’ll reinstall XP and have everything tweaked before it gets to whoever wants it. I’m thinking $1600 for the main machine, fibre channel array, and connecting hardware.

What do you think?

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

$$$

June 24, 2003

Oh, one other thing. I’m looking at selling my PC. Yes, it works perfectly fine. I’m just thinking I want a PowerMac, and I won’t have a use for a PC if I get that. Here’s what it’s got:

Pentium 4 2.26 Ghz
512MB RAMBUS Memory
Intel i850e Chipset
Gainward nVidia GeForce 4 4200 Video Card
8x SCSI CD Writer
Plextor UltraPlex (32x) CD-ROM Drive
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Card
Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy (w/ Firewire)
IBM 10/100 PCI Server-type NIC
Ultra-cute Doggie Case
Especially quiet power supply.

The only thing missing from making this a complete computer is a hard drive, which I don’t have because I was using an external Fibre Channel array.

Anyone interested? I’m thinking $850 for this…

UPDATE: Make it $1000 and it’ll have a 120GB hard drive in it and XP installed and tweaked for it.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

:)

June 12, 2003

Well, I got some more tubes and another oscilloscope today. If you’d like to see pictures, take a look here. The pictures of things in my basement, which I guess are a new-found collection of tubes, starts here. Yes, there are nixies. Mmm….glow.

acquired thingselectronicsmoved from livejournal

Wow.

June 9, 2003

Reading through these lab notes, it seems that Mr. Jan [CENSORED] once read about a home-made mini-computer called the HAL-4096 and wanted to build one himself. Enclosed in these notes are letters passed back and forth between Mr. [CENSORED] and Mr. Hal Chamberlin. Thanks to Google, I’ve learned that the HAL-4096 was built by Mr. Chamberlin and a Mr. David Cox back in 1966. Mr. Chamberlin was also the first person to demonstrate music synthesis on a computer, the old classic recording of ‘Daisy, Daisy’ that I’m sure everyone remembers hearing at one point or another.

I’m just amazed… Read on for more…

acquired thingselectronicsfound thingsmoved from livejournal

GPS

June 4, 2003

Yay, I finally got a real GPS. I should be getting a Magellian Meridian XL with serial cable and mounting hardware sometime soon. I guess I’ll have to give some geocaching a try, too. Per Geocaching.com there are a number of sites right around Shelby Township. Woo! It might even be fun to add a new cache somewhere random.

acquired thingsmappingmoved from livejournaloutdoors

:D

May 30, 2003


Amazingly styled packaging,
down to the last detail!
(Click image for more…)

Yep, I actually did it… I got one. While the iPod is charging I’m going to tear my dashboard apart so that I can build a shelf for the iPod in place of the OEM cassette deck. We’ll see how that goes… I’m all excited, though.

acquired thingsmaking thingsmoved from livejournalmusic