- Blog
- Profile
- Homepage
-
Wifi network buying guide for December 2014
Inspired by reading all those Tom’s Hardware reviews, if you need to upgrade your hardware and can’t wait for full 802.11ac Wave 2, then here are your options. Smallnetbuilder.com seems to have the best reviews of these things. Most of the big sites don’t cover this in too much detail, but I find that for…
-
Home Security Systems
The state of the art is in such transition here. The future (e.g. Nest) seems pretty clear. Everything should be IP based, we get out of these incredibly high fee driven systems (although Comcast and AT&T are both trying to monetize). This is a great example of how current systems for burglar, smoke and fire,…
-
Gaming Laptops
If you need a really fast laptop for gaming or for video development, that is probably the most exciting field today. Here are some thoughts. The main one being that we are at the turn for notebooks with both the new nVidia Maxwell (GTX 980/970) class graphics processors and the arrival of NVMe and really…
-
ZFS on Ubuntu
Well, we finally got our file server running and with three SAS drives to practice with, it’s time to learn how to use ZFS. For convenience we are using Ubuntu and there are some handy instructions for installing it on Trusty Tahr (14.04) annotated with notes from arstechnica.com The instructions are pretty easy for installation:…
-
Converting to PCPartpicker
Wow, I can’t believe how convenient this is. I’m in the middle of converting all by recent Haswell buy recommendations into PCPartpicker lists so it is easy to replicate. Thanks so much whoever made this incredible site with: Compatibility checking. You just pick things and you are much more sure everything will fit. I don’t…
-
Shoutout to the Leatherman Squirt PS4
Well this is one of the few gizmos that Alex finds useful. We have all manor of Leatherman multi-tools though out the house but the Leatherman Squirt PS4 ($26 at Amazon depending on the store) is the one that gets the most use just because it is tiny.
-
Haswell Cube and Mini Tower
For the bigger builds, we have two: Haswell Cube. This is based on the mini-ITX and is the fastest setup if you want a high performance double-width graphics card. Haswell Mini-Tower. This is the smallest box that can handle an overclocked dual SLI graphics card setup. This means we are moving up to the micro-ATX…
-
Aquarium PC v2
Well we’ve had our aquarium running reliably for two years now. It’s been awesome. The main issue has been one of the capacitors on the graphics card blowing up. But that was actually better in mineral oil. What would have been a fire merely was the card failing. It is definitely big to have an…
-
Traps building Asus H97i-plus on Antec ISK-300/150
Well, this build went so smoothly last time, I’m just amazed how out of practice I am, but to review we are putting a 4590s into this box (3GHz/3.7Ghz turbo boost, iCore 5, 4 cores, 4 threads) and here are the traps: Because of the way the AC power cable is, you do have 65mm…
-
Building a Supermicro X10SRH with Norco RPC-4220
Well it isn’t like either of these have much documentation. But here are the traps: The disk arrays. There doesn’t seem to be any documentation at all about how the Norco works, but examining the box now that it is finally here, it seems to have four rows of four drives each and there is…