mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Aww, poor thing! You're a good soul, Merc.
Something Random
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
She likes to climb and she's made herself a little nest on top of my fridge. RIP my Flour Jar. She's also claimed my ENTIRE couch. The other three cats are holding the line at keeping her out of my bedroom though.
She doesn't sit still very much, so I've had a hell of a time getting a decent picture of her.
She doesn't sit still very much, so I've had a hell of a time getting a decent picture of her.
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Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
This is EXTREMELY out of left field, but it's fascinating to me, a long form interview with minimalist composer Steve Reich, about his well known (for people who like late 20th century classical music, anyway) piece Different Trains. It's from a podcast called Song Exploder, which most often spends around 40 minutes examining a single three minute song. Song Exploder is something my partner really likes. Y'all might like it as well.
ddrueding
Fixture
Song Exploder is great. It has also been very helpful in getting friends more into music by understanding the production side.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
If you were at all worried if the RAM crisis is a real thing or not, I just traded a G. Skill 2x32GB DDR5-6400 kit that I think I paid about $150 for a year ago for an Asus TUF RTX5070 Ti.
Chewy509
Wotty wot wot.
It's been announced a new Trump Tower will be built in Australia on the Gold Coast, and will be the tallest building in Australia. (well not quite, another building which has also just been approved will be taller, which itself will be located just a few kilometres from this proposed Trump Tower).
Partitions and campaigns have already started to halt/stop the approval process for this property development. The local council and state authorities have both denied that the development applications have been submitted at this stage, so this seems more like a concept of a plan, than something that has actually been approved by the relevant authorities.
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...d-coast-says-developer/106376738?future=true&
Partitions and campaigns have already started to halt/stop the approval process for this property development. The local council and state authorities have both denied that the development applications have been submitted at this stage, so this seems more like a concept of a plan, than something that has actually been approved by the relevant authorities.
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...d-coast-says-developer/106376738?future=true&
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
It's pretty easy to get heavily discounted rate at Trump Tower Chicago. I've been known to use rooms there for affordable (sub-$100) photo shoots . Normally I hate working in hotel rooms but it's a very tall building with great views on every side, so sometimes it works for me.
Eventually, the building will get sold to someone else. It's just a building, and it's not like anyone else who owns skyscrapers is some kind of paragon of virtue.
I found this Youtube video about the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, which happens every year around Mother's Day weekend. Scav is absolute insanity, because the teams are full of extremely talented, driven people who will make things happen to complete the list, up to and including construction of a working breeder reactor.
Eventually, the building will get sold to someone else. It's just a building, and it's not like anyone else who owns skyscrapers is some kind of paragon of virtue.
I found this Youtube video about the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, which happens every year around Mother's Day weekend. Scav is absolute insanity, because the teams are full of extremely talented, driven people who will make things happen to complete the list, up to and including construction of a working breeder reactor.
Gödel
Storage is especially nice if it doesn't rotate
An Ugly Building in a Beautiful City Gets a Much-Debated Makeover.The Tour Montparnasse is one of Paris’s least-loved landmarks. After half a century, it’s finally being remodeled.
It's Paris' only skyscraper, and I loved the joke that the best view in Paris is from the observation deck on the tower’s 56th floor because that’s only place where one can’t see it.
ddrueding
Fixture
I was there a couple years ago, and it did feel very dated. The views from the top are quite good.
sedrosken
Florida Man
I put in a lowball on what was obviously a little SFF barebones PC kit from the turn of the millennium -- the plastic peel for the badge on the front was still present, despite some scratches in the powdercoating on the metal indicating it'd seen a little bit of careless handling -- and apparently I got it.
It's using an MS-6315 motherboard labelled on The Retro Web as being of the LPX form factor. I've seen a handful of LPX machines and this doesn't look precisely like any of them, but maybe this is a lesser-known standard intended for SFF desktops, I don't know. It uses an 815E chipset -- with 4 megs of soldered DisplayCache onboard, luxurious -- and surprisingly nice baked-in Intel LAN. In this class of machine, one expects to see Realtek if there's any LAN at all. It's got typical (for that time) AC'97 audio, nothing special but it'd have gotten the job done for a business machine as this is clearly looking to be.
It comes to me with a Mendocino Celeron at 466MHz and 256MB of RAM. It seems like the seller just left what he used to test it in there. I've got a PIII-866 sitting on a shelf that'd be fine for it, and a kit for 512MB if I really feel like pushing the envelope later on and shoehorning XP onto there for grits and shins. I also have a mislabelled ESS Solo-1 card coming from eBay to make this actually a surprisingly competent DOS rig -- supposedly, we'll see -- and I've hedged my bets with the 815 video with a pair of PCI video cards. This has two full-size PCI slots, and I don't even have to burn one on a NIC. Wonders never cease.
I managed to find a deal on a PCI nVidia card (a rarity in the year of our lord 2026, I assure you) but supposedly it's going to be a 32-bit bus variant of the GPU, a GeForce4 MX4000, so it's barely going to be any better than the 815 video, I'm told. In case that ends up being a bad time, I've also got a Radeon 9250 coming for it from a friend who had a pair, an even trade for my Vortex2 card that's apparently sought after for some reason (I don't like it very much). I'm already very aware of the limitations of PCI video, so my expectations are fairly low -- about the level of Warcraft III is where I'm done pushing it. Anything later that'll run decently, cool -- anything that won't, fair enough. I've seen Vice City and UT2004 run surprisingly well on some surprisingly awful hardware, so I have hopes, but I know this will definitely have some pretty stark limits.
It's using an MS-6315 motherboard labelled on The Retro Web as being of the LPX form factor. I've seen a handful of LPX machines and this doesn't look precisely like any of them, but maybe this is a lesser-known standard intended for SFF desktops, I don't know. It uses an 815E chipset -- with 4 megs of soldered DisplayCache onboard, luxurious -- and surprisingly nice baked-in Intel LAN. In this class of machine, one expects to see Realtek if there's any LAN at all. It's got typical (for that time) AC'97 audio, nothing special but it'd have gotten the job done for a business machine as this is clearly looking to be.
It comes to me with a Mendocino Celeron at 466MHz and 256MB of RAM. It seems like the seller just left what he used to test it in there. I've got a PIII-866 sitting on a shelf that'd be fine for it, and a kit for 512MB if I really feel like pushing the envelope later on and shoehorning XP onto there for grits and shins. I also have a mislabelled ESS Solo-1 card coming from eBay to make this actually a surprisingly competent DOS rig -- supposedly, we'll see -- and I've hedged my bets with the 815 video with a pair of PCI video cards. This has two full-size PCI slots, and I don't even have to burn one on a NIC. Wonders never cease.
I managed to find a deal on a PCI nVidia card (a rarity in the year of our lord 2026, I assure you) but supposedly it's going to be a 32-bit bus variant of the GPU, a GeForce4 MX4000, so it's barely going to be any better than the 815 video, I'm told. In case that ends up being a bad time, I've also got a Radeon 9250 coming for it from a friend who had a pair, an even trade for my Vortex2 card that's apparently sought after for some reason (I don't like it very much). I'm already very aware of the limitations of PCI video, so my expectations are fairly low -- about the level of Warcraft III is where I'm done pushing it. Anything later that'll run decently, cool -- anything that won't, fair enough. I've seen Vice City and UT2004 run surprisingly well on some surprisingly awful hardware, so I have hopes, but I know this will definitely have some pretty stark limits.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
The Consumer Council of Norway posted this on Youtube yesterday and goddammitsofuckingmuch if it doesn't describe our entire world now.
sedrosken
Florida Man
For context, the reason I'm doing this, is because I'm starting to realize having a billion computers all kicking around and taking up space is a not-amazing idea, and I'm starting to try to downsize -- I know it really doesn't look it, yet, but these smaller machines, if they work out and end up being fit-for-purpose, will let me phase out and sell or part out some of the bigger machines. I plan to try to whittle my collection down to a bare handful of desktops over the course of this year, and most of them being SFF or smaller if I can manage.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I remember having scads of desktop systems around a dozen years ago. I realized I needed to stop collecting them about around the time I realized even my low-end systems had 12 threads. I still have more systems sitting around than I use with any regularity, but I'm down to actively using only four systems at home and the rest are shut off unless they're doing something.
sedrosken
Florida Man
The funny thing is you'd think having soldered RAM called "Display Cache" would mean the 815 doesn't have to steal system RAM, but no. From what I understand it uses this faster pool of RAM that only it can access (I think wired over AGP, even) mostly for the Z-buffer in 3D applications, no options to force the framebuffer to live there for Excel drone-type applications. Apparently it can actually improve performance by about 10% overall. It still can't beat the MX4000 even with its crippled 32-bit memory bus and being PCI as-configured, but it's interesting that Intel thought about this, and even more interesting that someone bothered to implement it.
sedrosken
Florida Man
The build is finished and surprisingly ended up with a Sound Blaster Live. I abandoned any hope of running DOS games on it when it refused to put anything in either PCI slot any lower than IRQ9. I then ran Windows 2000 on it for a while before chafing at issues with the Extended Kernel project for it (which usually works, I don't know why it failed here) and did an in-place upgrade to XP, something I don't think I've ever done before. What an odd process that was. A little spooky to see an XP install with a C:\WINNT installation directory. After some updates to make some software work that I wanted to use -- I'm partial to SumatraPDF rather than Foxit as Sumatra can also natively read stuff like ePubs, Mobis, CBZ/R/7 etc. -- I hit it with the inexperience patcher and curtailed system services to within an inch of their lives. It wasn't pretty fitting XP SP3 into 256MB of RAM, but I made it work. And then when I got it home (I'd been house/dogsitting for my aunt and uncle) I found my 512MB kit and maxed it out.
I think I have a better understanding now of precisely why people hate Creative drivers. I have one of the "good" SBLives -- not one of the later ones that call out being 24-bit as a feature, not an OEM card, it's just an SB0060 -- and the process for installing drivers was... heroic. The original CD that was for this model technically doesn't work on XP. And when I installed from it, it somehow... killed my taskbar. The slightest nub of one remained, but I couldn't do anything with it. Windows did warn me there would be compatibility issues with this software, which is a rare pop-up indeed, but I didn't believe it... thankfully, after forcibly updating the drivers (and harvesting the setup files it extracts for later new installations, as the package they come in tries to detect the card and fails without the old drivers installed) my taskbar came back and everything seems to be working fine now.
This is what a "good experience" with an SBLive is, supposedly. If I had an extra couple inches of clearance, I'd have saved the headache and used an Audigy2 that I already had on hand. But I didn't have the space inside, and I wanted actual EAX acceleration, so...
My one and only good interaction with AI so far was over this machine. I'd somehow wrecked my .NET installation so bad that PowerShell wouldn't start. After hours of searching with Google which has now been utterly neutered beyond comprehension, I turned to ChatGPT in desperation and it actually gave good advice -- just use the .NET cleanup tool and reinstall it all from scratch, first 2.0, then 3.5, then 4.0 again, then let LegacyUpdate chew on the update packages for it. Using the cleanup tool wasn't... quite that simple, and I had to go digging to clean up some registry keys, but it competently led me through that process too.
I wouldn't use this in production if you had a gun pointed at my head, but wasting an afternoon chasing that dragon on an "it's either this or reformatting" basis, it actually... somehow seemed to work out well. This time.
I think I have a better understanding now of precisely why people hate Creative drivers. I have one of the "good" SBLives -- not one of the later ones that call out being 24-bit as a feature, not an OEM card, it's just an SB0060 -- and the process for installing drivers was... heroic. The original CD that was for this model technically doesn't work on XP. And when I installed from it, it somehow... killed my taskbar. The slightest nub of one remained, but I couldn't do anything with it. Windows did warn me there would be compatibility issues with this software, which is a rare pop-up indeed, but I didn't believe it... thankfully, after forcibly updating the drivers (and harvesting the setup files it extracts for later new installations, as the package they come in tries to detect the card and fails without the old drivers installed) my taskbar came back and everything seems to be working fine now.
This is what a "good experience" with an SBLive is, supposedly. If I had an extra couple inches of clearance, I'd have saved the headache and used an Audigy2 that I already had on hand. But I didn't have the space inside, and I wanted actual EAX acceleration, so...
My one and only good interaction with AI so far was over this machine. I'd somehow wrecked my .NET installation so bad that PowerShell wouldn't start. After hours of searching with Google which has now been utterly neutered beyond comprehension, I turned to ChatGPT in desperation and it actually gave good advice -- just use the .NET cleanup tool and reinstall it all from scratch, first 2.0, then 3.5, then 4.0 again, then let LegacyUpdate chew on the update packages for it. Using the cleanup tool wasn't... quite that simple, and I had to go digging to clean up some registry keys, but it competently led me through that process too.
I wouldn't use this in production if you had a gun pointed at my head, but wasting an afternoon chasing that dragon on an "it's either this or reformatting" basis, it actually... somehow seemed to work out well. This time.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I have been through the borked .NET runtimes many times. IIRC I had a conversation with long-time member timwhit about it in the early Vista era. Same exact problem. The last time I reloaded Windows on my previous (Threadripper) workstation was because .NET fucked itself. The cleanup tool and reload in order method DOES work if you give it the time, but chances are if that's on production hardware, 10 other things are also broken and some of them, you won't find right away.
One of my in-colo servers has decided to lose its hardware configuration in xClarity (Lenovo BMC) and I've spent my entire day trying to convince it that it DOES indeed have two functional CPUs, two 1100W PSUs and 768GB RAM without hard power cycling the system. Right now, it's running all 96 of its threads at a lovely 700MHz each, just enough that everything kind-of works but slow enough that everyone using that system is going to complain about it the whole time. The problem is that this system has both the best CPUs AND 48TB of u.2 storage on it. It's the one I'm want to migrate VMs to and not from. I am having a lovely Monday.
One of my in-colo servers has decided to lose its hardware configuration in xClarity (Lenovo BMC) and I've spent my entire day trying to convince it that it DOES indeed have two functional CPUs, two 1100W PSUs and 768GB RAM without hard power cycling the system. Right now, it's running all 96 of its threads at a lovely 700MHz each, just enough that everything kind-of works but slow enough that everyone using that system is going to complain about it the whole time. The problem is that this system has both the best CPUs AND 48TB of u.2 storage on it. It's the one I'm want to migrate VMs to and not from. I am having a lovely Monday.
sedrosken
Florida Man
The thing I hate about actual big-iron servers is that it's never enough for you to just buy the hardware you need, you also have to keep licenses for every little thing it can do. Computing has been a subscription service for a long time in that regard, enough so that the switch to cloud computing a la Azure and AWS probably isn't even that big of a leap.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
xClarity Pro isn't THAT expensive, like $100/year/node. Some of my systems are licensed because it was part of the package when I got the machines. This one is a frankensystem that I put together by mating a chassis with a dead motherboard with a working Lenovo replacement and a pair of Xeon 8160s that were on the dead board already. I swapped in a 10x u.2 backplane and it's been an absolute monster system up to now.
The crazy thing to me is that this server is just one machine and it's considered obsolete hardware in spite of the crazy number of cores and amount of I/O it supports.
I did figure out a script I can fire at the BMC to make it recognize the proper CPUs, but it's running them at a modest 2.5GHz instead of the 3.5GHz it supports across all cores. I'm hoping I can get somebody from the DC to do a hard power off tonight (I hate paying for remote hands; but the people who usually do it are only there until 4PM central and I'm going to need one to stay late just to press a goddamned power button or yank some power cords and those assholes WILL charge me for that whole time), just to see if there's something funky hanging around in firmware, or if I need to do a CMOS battery replacement or something equally stupid since it's not recognizing what it has.
On a separate note, I might actually move out of the place I've been living for approximately the last 24 years. My rent had been reasonable until this year. I live right off the shore of Lake Michigan and I love it here, but my apartment complex has been acquired by new management and they want to increase my lease price by 33%, enough that there's no longer any financial incentive for me to stay where I am. I am NOT ready to move out but the new landlord's message to me specifically is that my unit, even at the increased rate, is still significantly less than they ultimately want to charge for it. I'm not happy about this development at all.
The crazy thing to me is that this server is just one machine and it's considered obsolete hardware in spite of the crazy number of cores and amount of I/O it supports.
I did figure out a script I can fire at the BMC to make it recognize the proper CPUs, but it's running them at a modest 2.5GHz instead of the 3.5GHz it supports across all cores. I'm hoping I can get somebody from the DC to do a hard power off tonight (I hate paying for remote hands; but the people who usually do it are only there until 4PM central and I'm going to need one to stay late just to press a goddamned power button or yank some power cords and those assholes WILL charge me for that whole time), just to see if there's something funky hanging around in firmware, or if I need to do a CMOS battery replacement or something equally stupid since it's not recognizing what it has.
On a separate note, I might actually move out of the place I've been living for approximately the last 24 years. My rent had been reasonable until this year. I live right off the shore of Lake Michigan and I love it here, but my apartment complex has been acquired by new management and they want to increase my lease price by 33%, enough that there's no longer any financial incentive for me to stay where I am. I am NOT ready to move out but the new landlord's message to me specifically is that my unit, even at the increased rate, is still significantly less than they ultimately want to charge for it. I'm not happy about this development at all.