I’m in the middle of redesigning my home network (when I really should be in the middle of my uni work). One of the main points was sneaking a rack into the garage for a firewall, some servers and a beefy NAS. My new workstation has got me thinking of ingenious solutions to a big problem. My workstation is LOUD! Dual Xeons need serious cooling. I could just throw on a fan controller and throttle the two 120mm Akasa fans, but I’m getting back into the swing of Folding@Home and 100% across 8-cores is pushing it.
So the obvious answer is to move the workstation itself into the garage too! Wikipedia tells me the specification for DVI should be fine with the distance though the wall.
The maximum length of DVI cables is not included in the specification since it is dependent on bandwidth requirements (the resolution of the image being transmitted). In general, cable lengths from 1-15 feet (4.5m) will work for displays at resolutions of 1920×1200. Cable lengths up to 50 feet (15m) can be used with displays at resolutions up to 1280×1024. For longer distances, to eliminate the video degradation, the use of a DVI booster is recommended. DVI boosters may or may not use an external power supply.
Moving the box to the garage will solve more problems than just noise. Space constraints and heat issues would be solved. The CPUs could be watercooled using a large, passive external radiator.
I’d have to sketch up some designs, but a simple wall box containing two DVI ports, powered USB hub, FireWire and sound would be pretty simple. Imagine just moving all the I/O ports on the back of your PC to a wall jack. It’d solve the plug nightmare that is the corner of the living room too. Currently 10 devices all need a plug-socket with only one available? Oh god!
Of course it would be a great deal of hard work and investment into this project. For starters I’d have to fabricate a new case suitable for wall mounting. Feature check; wall mountable, light, sturdy, thin (2U if possible) and the operating environment would be quite a challenge. The I/O would be the next greatest challenge, I think the distances involved would be borderline for signal boosters on every bus (DVI, FireWire and USB would all need boosters over 4.5-5m cable length). I’d need a new external CD/DVD solution and it could be a pain to troubleshoot if something went tits up.
However ,the pay-off for such a project would be huge. Having a powerful, absolutly silent (but not in the garage!), ‘invisible’, always-on workstation would be fantastic. Time to check google to see if anybody has attempted/acheived this before!
Graduates Asked Not To Toss Hats via BBC News.
A university has asked students to refrain from throwing their mortar board hats in the air to celebrate graduation in case someone gets hurt.
Anglia Ruskin University, with campuses at Cambridge and Chelmsford in Essex, said a corner of a mortar board could hit someone as it falls.
Officials made the request in a statement on the university’s website.
“It is requested that graduands do not throw their hat up into the air,” the statement said.
The site also gives advice on protocol at graduation ceremonies and what to wear but makes a special plea about mortar board hat tossing.
“This not only causes damage to the hats but it can also cause injury if the corner of the hat hits the graduand or others who may be nearby,” the statement added.
A step too far perhaps? I’m sure we’ve all managed quite fine for a while with our normal graduation ceremonies.
Pretty busy for the rest of May then.
Photography
- Professional Practice preparation
- Launch dedicated portfolio website
- Photo 2 coursework
- Exhibition preparation
- Publish book
- 3rd Year Major project planning
Computer Geekery
- Switch over workstations and general PC setup
- Research Cisco Certification courses at my university
- Assemble my Firewall
- Research NAS solutions
- VMWare dedicated development box
- Day of Defeat: Source dedicated server
- Touch-screen Media server for the kitchen
- Local testing of new site theme
House Shenanigans
- Paint front and rear fences
- Tidy garage and conservatory
I hardly ever restart my ancient PowerBook, but when I do I can never remember the correct keystrokes for different startup procedures. Press these during startup:
- X: Force Mac OS X startup
- C: Start up from a bootable CD
- N: Attempt to start up from a compatible network server (NetBoot)
- T: Start up in FireWire Target Disk mode
- Opt-Cmd-Shift-Delete: Seeks a different startup volume (e.g CD or external disk)
- Shift: Start up in Safe Boot mode (temporarily disables login items and non-essential kernel extension files)
- Cmd-V: Start up in Verbose mode
- Cmd-S: Start up in Single-User mode
Well yesterday I took the plunge and upgraded my WordPress version to 2.5. A simple matter of upgrading the wordpress automatic upgrade plug-in to 1.1 and then running it. After a few minutes I was using the nifty-new features of 2.5 to automatically update all of my plug-ins. I did discover one hitch, adsense manager no longer works correctly. But no big loss, I was going to get around to coding an alternative myself. Speaking of alternatives to plug-ins, I’m currently rocking 13 plug-ins with 9 being active so it looks like I’ll have to be rolling my own soon.
First impressions of 2.5? Nice, very nice. A lot of improvements have been made and most of the changes make sense and are very logical. The new dashboard is pretty slick and I took the chance to integrate wordpress.com stats plug-in into it. After never really bothering with it before (managing my wordpress.com account was a nightmare) I’m pretty impressed with the features. Will it replace Google Analytics or Clicky? For me, no. However I feel I can finally relax a little over statistics and not sweat the small stuff.
Overall verdict? A big step in the right direction, just a few more tweaks, but you can never have enough tweaks.
(Edit: Image blatantly snagged from the (mt) mediatemple weblog)
Okay, I’m a big F1 fan and the Melbourne GP was eagerly anticipated. After it came and went my first big impression? Damn the safety car sounds good! There’s something about the deep sound of the 6.3l V8 compared to the F1 cars 2.4l high-revving engines.
Initial thoughts post-race? A lot of errors from the drivers and teams. Not necessarily because of the lack of traction control, but just some random unforced errors. Maybe it was first race of the season type jitters, but some mistakes were pretty unforgivable. Barrichello going into the closed pit-lane for fuel was a good idea (better than letting him run out of fuel on the track) yet sending him out when the pit-lane exit was still closed was a bad error (and let’s not get into the whole ‘driving off with the re-fueling rig still on the car’ thing). In my opinion the rules regarding re-fueling and pitting under safety car conditions need to be revised. Being punished for somebody else’s error is not something that is in spirit with the sport.
All told, it was a pretty exciting race, however due to having so many retirements meant that there wasn’t as much real racing and overtaking attempts as there should have been. Ferrari looked like they would come along and dominate the entire weekend, but after a dismal qualifying the race was full of mistakes from their drivers. Honda surprised most people in qualifying and could have been in-line for some decent points, but their race went downhill from lap one. The only people that had a decent weekend was McLaren, the only team to bring home both drivers.
I think this season is going to be the best ever, once all the nerves have settled down, and new cars are released. All teams are now under pressure to perform in Malaysia, but only time will tell who has the best package. After all, one down, seventeen to go.
After lots of umming and ahhing between an Apple iPhone and a Sony Ericsson P1i, I’ve finally found my next phone; the Xperia X1.
The product homepage lists the specifications, so far it looks like an absolute killer of a phone. As soon as it becomes available on the o2 web store I’ll be putting in an order. 600 minutes, 1000 texts (double that of the basic iPhone tarrif), unlimited data all for £30p/m (£5 less than the iPhone) [edit: Pure speculation at the moment and I'll be using a 24 month tarrif]. Plus I’m not counting the additional £270/£330 upfront for the iPhone. More pictures after the split.
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Contrary to what GeneralStats tells me, crushed-core.com is two years old today! Okay, I realise that in recent times updates and content has been severely lacking, so as a reverse birthday present crushed-core promises to give you lots of high quality content very soon.
Happy Birthday! Thanks for being a part of this site!
Using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-8 you can invert your display. A very pointless exercise, well okay I can think of one use; wardriving. Another use could be to see if the ‘geniuses’ in the Apple store actually know a thing or two about Macs.
I wonder if you can invert the displays on the iPhone or touch?
(Note: Try taking a screenshot when you’ve inverted your display (Cmd-Shift-3 or alternatively), weird huh?)
We got a small preview of the Furai Concept with a teaser photo released by Mazda a few weeks ago, but Inside Line has let the cat out of the bag with a full set of photos and more details about the car. The Furai, which translates to “sound of wind”, is built on a Courage C65 chassis that was campaigned by Mazda in the 2005 ALMS season. It features a fully-running three-rotor Mazda 20B rotary engine that runs on E100 ethanol and produces around 450 horsepower. The flowing shape of the Furai was co-designed by Mazda and Swift Engineering at Mazda’s design studio in Southern California. Expect the full details and tons of photos when we see the car in person at the Detroit Auto Show in just a few weeks.
Source: AutoBlog
What a car! Okay so it is just a fancy body sitting on a race chassis. But Mazda has taken a very simple and easy approach. Using a tried and tested chassis and mating it with the phenomenal 20B engine, Mazda has utilized two common and proven components and shrouded it all in an absolutely beautiful body. Time to start selling everything I own in the slim hope they actually offer it for sale. More photos after the split.
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