Microcenter Ate My Wallet!
Seriously though, your local Microcenter is worth the extra ‘cost’ in tax or whatever — it’s nice to be able to return stuff. That’s a convenience worth paying for. [Note that their prices are pretty consistently competitive with NewEgg these days anyway.] Anyway, it’s time for a new(er) setup. I wanted to try one of … Read more
Desk 2.0
It’s finally done! I FINALLY got rid of all of that leftover stuff from the old shop days, including the corpse of that monstrous HP 2500CP large-format dinosaur (it was fun while it lasted). I ‘upgraded’ the computer desk and put the displays on a VESA mount / arm setup to get them off the … Read more
Son of FrankeNAS Strikes Again!
Details and hardware of the re-re-constituted OMV Plex-o-tronic box on my network. Case: Fractal Design Node 804 Cube Case Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 CPU: AMD FX-6300 RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800) CL9 PSU: Corsair 500W CXMOD 80+BRZ ATX PSU Boot Drive: 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 (recycled from an old project) Data Drive: 2TB Seagate Barracuda … Read more
Photography 2016
My on-and-off-again photography hobby might see more ‘on’ than ‘off’ this next year… It was long past time to replace the ol’ D70, and I found a spectacular deal on a refurbished D7100 before the holidays. I couldn’t not pull the shutter. I got a nice gift from Santa, too — a Sigma 10-20mm wide-angle … Read more
Quietus Quest (Followup / Aftermath)
It’s been probably a month or so since I undertook this whole project to make my main PC rig quieter. The previous posts are QQ1, QQ2, and QQ3. It was pretty much a success — more than I had expected. The rig isn’t ‘silent,’ but that was not the goal. The goal was ‘quiet’ and … Read more
Eldritch Horror Component Tray
Eldritch Horror (bgg) seems to be the game-du-jour of my gaming crew as of late (even if we can’t finish a playthrough in one evening). EH has lots of fiddly counter bits, which, as of now, I’ve stored in ziplock bags of varying size. There are some better / nicer solutions. Well, it appears that my craft-fu … Read more
Quietus Quest III
I thought I would do some testing and such with the new case and airflow and noise, but when it came down to brass tacks, I just decided to do the swap and make it look as neat as I could. Here’s the rundown of the old hardware vs the new: Old hardware making the … Read more
Quietus Quest II
Last time, we summarized the old setup and some possible causes. Here is a list of the relevant components and their upgrades: Antec 902 vs Corsair Carbide A540 (black) Unknown PSU vs Corsair HX750I Stock AMD Cooler vs Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO Unknown fans vs Corsair AF140 Quiet Ed Fans My plans are to assemble … Read more