The spider gets rebuilt

March 11, 2024

In January of 2014, I built a new, proper firewall, because all the previous franken-machines I used before had hard-drive issues, and I really needed a stable development server.

This machine is still going today, 10 years later, and aside from the fact that it’s limited to 16Gb of DDR3 RAM, it’s still a core part of my home lab.

But the time came to change it from it’s home-made angle-iron “spider” platform to something a bit more modern, and dust-proof.

The new living space for “spider”

And what it used to be mounted on, steampunk style.

It was pretty challenging to find a chassis that accomodates a horizontally mounted mini-ITX board, but Lian-Li came through. My big concern was the massive Zalmann heat pipe that I had installed initially, because I wanted the system as quiet as possible, but it fit perfectly into the Lian-Li PC-QR36W I acquired.

I can’t believe this machine has served me so well for 10 years, and it’s still not bad in terms of performance.



 

 Progress

February 18, 2024

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.



 

 A gratuitous plug

January 12, 2024

If you like perfume, and don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for good fragrances, check out my wifes’ Ameru.co.za perfume selection.



 

 Classic Remixes that are better

June 6, 2021

Some remixes are better than the original version. Thanks Ruben ๐Ÿ˜‰

Voyage ยท New Order – Blue Monday (Voyage Edit)



 

 I “invented” dark mode 11 years ago…

June 18, 2020

All the hype about “dark mode” in applications and desktops makes sense to me.

A mild gray background with white text on it is infinitely more environmentally friendly, and also hugely better for the eyeballs.

Observe the documentation I did for my Tribes2 anti-cheat program called “DefenseTurret” about 11 years ago. At the time it was a bit “uncouth”. Now it would appeal to the “youth”.

Also, I’m now running KDE, see the next post…

https://rodent.za.net/defenseturret/index.html




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