The other day, my Cyber Power uninterruptible power supply suffered a horrible death. We lost power for just a moment, but rather than supplying power to Fozzie through the loss, it shut the computer off. Then, when the power came back, the UPS would maintain power to the computer for about 3 seconds, then drop [...]
As mentioned in my previous post, my old Labtec headset, which I’ve had since 2000, broke recently. So I have now replaced it, with a Plantronics MX-505 headset. It’s interesting to note that this new headset is actually designed for mobile phones, which use a 2.5mm headset jack. I’m able to attach it to my [...]
There has been a flurry of small changes with my computers lately. First, I recently decided to take the wireless NIC (a new Linksys WMP54G) from Waldorf and put it in Fozzie. I built Waldorf mostly to try and use the old parts I had hanging around, as well as to have a Linux-only desktop. [...]
Today I upgraded Camilla to Fedora Core 4. The only reason she was running Core 3 was that, as of July, I couldn’t get wireless networking to work under Core 4. But since then I’ve gotten it working — largely because of building Waldorf. This was actually just part of re-building the operating systems on [...]
Today I added one 1GB module of Crucial PC3200 RAM to Fozzie, bringing Fozzie’s total to 1.5GB of RAM. 1.5GB is quite a lot of memory for a desktop system, so you might wonder why I added 1GB rather than, say, 512MB. The reason is, even though the Asus K8V motherboard has three slots for [...]
Yesterday I added a Logitech Precision GamePad 2 to Fozzie. Now, I actually don’t play games very often on my computer, so why would I want a game pad? Because, every now and then I do enjoy playing emulated games. Classic games, like Mario and Sonic, that sort of thing. Every now and then, I’m [...]
Over the weekend I did something I’ve been planning to do for a long time: increased the amount of RAM in Camilla. I swapped out one of the 128MB modules, and replaced it with a Kingston 256MB PC2100 module, bringing the total to 384MB. It may seem odd that Camilla had two 128MB modules rather [...]
I built a new computer! However, this computer, “Waldorf“, is not intended to replace either Fozzie or Camilla. Waldorf is built (almost) entirely from parts that have been cycled out of other computers — mostly from Fozzie. One of my big motivations for building Waldorf was simply that I had enough parts lying around to [...]
Got a new printer today, a Canon Pixma iP6600D. This is to replace my 5-year-old HP DeskJet 932C. The 932C had served me very well over the years (all of college and grad school), but was very obviously starting to die. Whenever I’d print with it, it would emit crazy squealing and grinding noises like [...]
I finally did a long-planned upgrade: I replace my 5+ year-old 20GB hard drive with a new 250GB Seagate SATA drive. The install went flawlessly. I was nervous, I’ve read about people having problems with SATA installs. I probably didn’t have problems because I read so much and knew about the pitfalls and how to [...]