T-shirt Folding Machine

[Mercutio]

Seems like a useful tool to me.

 

[Groltz]

http://www.jengajam.com/r/shirt-folding

(This link is not Firefox friendly, as least to me. It required IE.)

 

[Tannin]

Seriously bad link. It crashes Opera. I've never seen that before, at least not since 8.x came out. WTF are you doing linking to stuff like that without warning people?

Could a mod please ADD A WARNING to the top of this thead (or just delete the whole thing - it's a total waste of time anyway).

Thanks for nothing Merc

 

[sechs]

Isn't the problem that you need to be handy enough to make the thing first?

 

[Tannin]

Currection, thanks for nothing Grotlz. I advise people to stay well clear of that link - if it requires IE, then you are seriously vulnerable visiting it.

 

[Mercutio]

It doesn't require IE. I viewed my link and Groltz's link, and the associated videos, in Firefox 1.07 - a proper browser, mind you - without any difficulty at all. I don't even have any media-playing extensions installed on this machine.

Tannin, you can be happy that you got to use Opera's only redeeming feature, its crash recovery.

The rest of us can see something nifty to do with four pieces of cardboard and five minutes of time.

 

[LunarMist]

Thanks for warning about the link. I will avoid it.

I suppose if one frequently wears T-shirts a folder would be of some use. Is it a pro-quality machine or one that will break after a while? I haven't worn a T-shirt in about 30 years (except for one night in 1996) and therefore have no advice to give.

 

[CityK]

I kind of suspected that the video Groltz had linked too was going to be the one of the girl folding the t-shirt....I saw it maybe two years ago (I think honold posted a link to it). Anyways, what she does really works -- only takes a couple of attempts and you get pretty decent at it.....but I hang my t-shirts anyways (no drawer space...lots of hanging space...well, used to have lots of hanging space).

The link, btw, doesn't open in the firefox 1.5 using the mplayer plugin in linux...I used konquerer to save it to hdd...Kaffine couldn't play it back from disk, but mplayer worked.

 

[CougTek]

It doesn't require IE.

Confirmed. Using Firefox 1.5. No pop-up, no crash, no evil occurances.

Your PCs are all f**ked up! Call me for a proper installation. I'll lower my hourly rate for you. 75$/hour instead of 80$ Can't say I'm not generous with my friends. ;-)

 

[MaxBurn]

It doesn't require IE.

Confirmed. Using Firefox 1.5. No pop-up, no crash, no evil occurances.

Your PCs are all f**ked up! Call me for a proper installation. I'll lower my hourly rate for you. 75$/hour instead of 80$ Can't say I'm not generous with my friends. ;-)

Seconded, or thirded, whatever. Relax.

 

[Mercutio]

I used to hang my Tshirts, but the closets in my apartment are kind of small, and I put computers in them, so I don't have as much hanging space as I used to.

My ex- bought me a couple hanging organizers to keep my shirts in. So for the last few months I've been trying to learn to properly fold things and put them away.

I am terrible at folding clothes (can't tie a tie, either). This weekend I shall construct a T-shirt folding machine, which I hope will lead to more optimal folding.

 

[Will Rickards]

You know what are really hard to fold? Sheets.
Not the top sheet that is a nice rectangle. But the bottom sheets with the elastic at the corners and sometimes at both short ends.

 

[Mercutio]

Owning more than one pair of sheets is a sure sign that one is no longer a bachelor.

 

[Tannin]

Fold, fold, fold, nope, unfold, fold, fold, fold, oh bugger it, scrunch, scrunch, scrunch. Works every time.

 

[CougTek]

...the closets in my apartment are kind of small, and I put computers in them,...

You mean that you stack computers in them. Why don't you simply buy shoebox systems and use external storage racks? That would allow you to save quite a lot of space. IIRC, you have around 11TB worth of drives for a useable space of 7TB. That's either 37 300GB drives, 28 400GB drives or 22 500GB drives. I'm sure a Firewire 800 card with an external port isn't all that expensive. Firewire 800 offers around 80% the speed of SATA and lets you plug a lot of drives. There are cards with external SATA connectors if speed is a concern. There's no reason why you should lack space with the needs you have. As for the cost of re-organizing your setup, you're skilled enough with eBay to make up enough cash by selling your curent stuff to compensate for the price of the new components.

Your entire computer park should fit quite comfortably inside the third of a single closet.

 

[Fushigi]

Your entire computer park should fit quite comfortably inside the third of a single closet.

Merc needs a couple of these.

 

[Mercutio]

...the closets in my apartment are kind of small, and I put computers in them,...

You mean that you stack computers in them. Why don't you simply buy shoebox systems and use external storage racks?

Some of my cases are eight or nine years old. I COULD buy shoeboxes, but I kind of like being able to upgrade whenever I feel like it. I might feel differently if I were forced into a BTX upgrade the day after tomorrow or something, but we all know that's not going to happen.

I'm also not too keen on lots of external drives. They probably take up less space, true, but most single-drive enclosures have crappy fans and tend to overheat drives, while the multi-drive units cost as much as a PC anyway. If I already had the enclosures, maybe, but even then, I have a small fortune in internal RAID controllers.

 

[mubs]

Don't your machines suffocate in the closet? How do you get air to flow in there? Unless you have your home furnace's air intake in there...

 

[CougTek]

Merc needs a couple of these.

Look at the very bottom of that page : Prouduct Specifications. That's a gem.

 

[Mercutio]

Don't your machines suffocate in the closet? How do you get air to flow in there? Unless you have your home furnace's air intake in there...

They can get warm, but not dangerously so. I don't keep much else in my closets. Some boxes of comic books and the small amount of stuff that goes on hangers.
My "computer room" is air conditioned year round, but that's more to keep ensure that it gets no hotter than room temperature in there.

 

[CougTek]

If I already had the enclosures, maybe, but even then, I have a small fortune in internal RAID controllers.

I believe you would have a hard time selling all your 3Ware 8506-4LP for more than 120$ each, so that's hardly what I call a small fortune. I'm sure you paid a lot for them, but so does people who bought a Pentium Pro ten years ago...

I've reviewed your various systems and while I'm sure there have been some minor changes since July, I think the heart of your space problem lies with your 4 file servers. I don't think you keep "Pokey", your home theater server and your gaming PC inside your closet, so that's not what's taking space. Your Sempron 3100+ must also still sits under your bed, so no closet space there either.

Selling your 4 file servers would leave you with approximately 4500$, I think. It wouldn't be too difficult to combine them into a single server, or two if you want redundancy. Now I don't know why you built 4 of them as I don't know how your file sharing setup works. But if it's only because there wasn't enough space into one enclosure for 7.84TB worth of drives, it is no longer the case now.

Quick question : how do you back up all this data?


Fushigi, do you have an idea how much the A16F-G-2221-400 (the one with 6.4TB of space) cost? Four digits or five digits?

 

[Mercutio]

Each file server has two arrays, a "live" RAID5 array, and an array that stores the daily backup for one of the others (which is soft-RAID0, which I realize is a risk, but no moreso than making a JBOD, which was my other choice for 2-disk high capacity RAID...). Those machines each have a dedicated Gbit link to their replication partner and a second Gbit link to my switch. Works pretty well, especially since I don't have access to LTO or the like for a proper backup.

Several years ago I cobbled together some perl scripts that comb open file shares for files and folders that match specific naming conventions that I use. These let me automate moving things from individual computers to central storage on the file servers (2 for porn, one for non-porn video clips like downloaded TV shows, one for comics, pictures, ebooks, text files, office-type documents and audio files). I exempt video captures and DVD rips from that process, but everything else ultimately ends up on one of the big boxes. The shares on all the file servers are NSFmounted on one machine and are presented to my computers via Samba as a single namespace.

Why are there four machines? Because at one time, I was trying to achieve reasonable storage density with 80GB drives, and one and then two file servers simply were not adequate. Now I have staggering density, but that's because I've continuously upgraded those machines - 80s begat 160s begat 250s begat 400s.
I'm at about 80% utilization on the (actual) 3TB that are on those machines, and local storage on my desktop machines has therefore been growing quite a bit as well. Just over 2TB on my HTserver (recorded TV stuff), another 2.4TB on my game machine (DVD rips etc), miscellaneous removable drives... I could probably use the storage I have in a more efficient manner, but of course I'm very leery of not having at least a couple copies of anything that winds up on my storage servers.

I'm already using some 400GB drives. Next time I get a decent score from one of my contracting jobs I'll probably buy a bunch more. I don't like the idea of having multiple 2TB arrays in one machine (or, more to the point, all connected to the same power supply), and that's what it would take to get similar storage densities.

Besides, it's not like I have clothes to put in my closets.

 

[Fushigi]

Fushigi, do you have an idea how much the A16F-G-2221-400 (the one with 6.4TB of space) cost? Four digits or five digits?

Not cheap, I'm sure.

That company, I realized, services Europe. So I went to the Processor magazine site. Start here and drill in to End node - Storage - Systems for some direct-attach, NAS, and SAN options. Some have prices; many don't as they may deal with resellers only. I did catch a link to this, which starts under $4K. But I assume that's for the smallest unit & 1 drive.

Serious storage gets seriously priced.

 

[time]

(This link is not Firefox friendly, as least to me. It required IE.)

If you mean it tries to open the media directly rather than saving it, yes, I managed to reproduce that with both an ancient Firebird version of Firefox and Seamonkey 1.0. Isn't that just an association?

Seriously bad link. It crashes Opera. I've never seen that before, at least not since 8.x came out. WTF are you doing linking to stuff like that without warning people?

Could a mod please ADD A WARNING to the top of this thead (or just delete the whole thing - it's a total waste of time anyway).

I have no idea why Brother Tannin's browser crashed, but both links worked just fine in Opera for me - the second defaulted to saving as a file.