Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’

Surprisingly I have had enough time over the past couple of weeks to do more than just change diapers. Here are some quick news blasts!

I did not buy a 61″ TV. Long story short it was a LED DLP instead of a LCD. The budget committee has authorized a 46″ Samsung LN46A630 and it should be arriving “soonish.” Super Bowl party at our house this year? Perhaps!

I sat in the hot tub. Just a couple of days before V’s birth I put the finishing touches on the hot tub project. Sitting in 103 degree water after a long day is glorious. If you haven’t gotten over to try it out yet, you should. If you’re coming to visit us anytime soon, definitely bring your swimming suit.

I putzed around with the blog. I’ve updated the theme, upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (which is glorious!), streamlined the backup procedures, and put everything into a retro 1996 Micron case. Still need to get this thing XHTML compliant.

I read Fables volume 11! My Christmas present finally arrived and it was glorious. Willingham give a solid ending to the big “adversary” story arc. I’m curious where things will go next.

I beat Penny Arcade Adventure: Volume 1. It’s a lot of fun and at $15 is an easy recommendation.

I’ve gotten obsessive about stat monitoring. Been playing with both statcounter.com as well as Google Analytics. It’s lots of fun to see what’s bringing visitors to my corner of the Internet. Some of the traffic patterns have surprised me.

I’ve been playing with Mojo. It’s a distributed iTunes library sharing app that is very cool. If you’re reading this and you use iTunes, you should download it.

And that’s what’s been going on in my “non-Veronica” moments!

Hot tub update: think we can use a trailer to get it directly from Point A to Point B with minimal heaving and hauling. This is a good thing since it weighs roughly 5000 Imperial Tons (it’s 7.5 feet on each side).

Steampunk Star Wars figures. Need I say more?

Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit are ordered and should be arriving in the next days/weeks respectively. I’m a huge Mario Kart nut and can’t wait to give the newest iteration a spin.

Lawn work successfully completed. The whole responsible adult thing is kinda growing on me these days.

Been playing with the latest Ubuntu release a bit over the past few days. Solid release: newbie friendly, polished, and stable. The 10 year old LEGO PC is starting to show its age, so I’m opting for the more lightweight Xubuntu distribution.

The flat-screen high-def TV fund continues to grow. We’re at roughly $330, only a few more months to go. Saving’s fun!

A few weeks back I inherited a dinosaur PC, a relic from the lands before time existed. It was old and slow, but it still runs Ubuntu Linux pretty well so I figured I would put it back into use. But there was a snag: the massive PC case didn’t fit under my desk and was hideously ugly. What do do?

The obvious answer of course is build a new case out of LEGOs! If Google did it all those years ago, so could I. So with a vague idea of what I wanted I set out. A week later, several late nights, and four complete restarts later, it is finished. See below for snapshots taken as the project progressed.

The original hulking monstrosity

As you can see, I started with a case that was 95% empty. It was very space inefficient and extremely ugly.

Bits and pieces everywhere

I’ve torn out all of the important bits and are starting to explore the various possibilities. I got lucky and the motherboard fit perfectly on a standard sized base plate, so that made the foundation simple.

Walls around the motherboard

Here you can see the walls beginning to take shape. My first attempt was to put the motherboard in one castle and power supply in another. This turned out to be a mistake and eventually I settled on a completely different design.

Iteration 2 starting to take shape

Our first attempt was a bust so we scratched it all and started over. The lowest level contains the power supply and hard drive and the motherboard forms the base of level 2. Originally I wasn’t sure I’d have enough pieces to make this work, but AntiMatt lent some engineering expertise and this design choice paid off big-time.

Second level taking shape

Higher and higher we built. I was pretty nervous about the whole thing not being structurally sound, so we spent quite a bit of time making sure everything interlocked well and had good reinforcement at each layer.

Port covers and cables

Here’s a shot of the port covers. I’d seen a number of LEGO cases online that essentially looked like big boxes built out of whatever random bricks happened to be available. For this design, I wanted something aesthetically pleasing and that fit within a theme. The castle theme was the obvious choice: I had a lot of castle pieces, the castle walls allowed us to build lots of well-ventilated walls quickly, and I hadn’t seen any other castle LEGO PC cases.

Second level completed

One of AntiMatt’s key contributions was the massive front doors. Along with providing a means for LEGO minifigs to enter the castle, it also gives me a way to access the lower level bits and improves airflow.

Structure just about done

Things are really taking shape now. We’ve just about wrapped up the second level and are starting to integrate “flare” into our design.

The third level

The third level is purely ornamental. I’m really happy with how it turned out: notice the use of staircases, parapets, cool drawbridges and a castle watch tower.

Another shot looking down at the third level.

At this level we integrated some “grillwork” pieces to ensure sufficient vertical airflow to the processor.

The finished product!

A ninja sneaking across the drawbridge.

Crossbow sniping from the fortress keep.

An Amazon prepares for battle.

This armory is loaded for bear.

No castle is complete without an axe-wielding berserker!

Bulleted list is super effective!

• Went bowling, lost first game horribly but came back strong to win game number two.
• Picked tulips daffodils from garden
• Played Super Smash Brothers Brawl until my fingers burned
• Ate coffee cake, cr?pes, and breakfast burritos until my stomach exploded
• Hit Level 7 in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates
• Played Quake Wars with several of the top 100 players on the planet: and held my own!
• Installed Ubuntu Linux 7.10 on the beefy K6-2 400 tower of power
• Worked (it needed to be done)
• Petted the cat (it needed to be done)
• Played Lincoln Logs with this guy’s adorable litter
• Acquired signed copy of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy Volume 1 *schoolgirl squeal!*

The orangest backup server in the world is now up and going. The final pieces were a Seagate Barracuda 200 GB hard drive and the Ubuntu install. I’ve been very impressed with Seagate’s drives the last several years due to their quietness, warranty and speed. Ubuntu is unique in that it doesn’t supply a firewall at all, so I threw Firestarter on for good measure. At this point, sharing is going via Samba; somewhere down the road I may look at Netatalk again, but for the moment Samba is Good Enough™. On the Mac side, I’m utilizing La Cie’s free SilverKeeper application to schedule the backups themselves.

Without really trying, I’ve accumulated 320 GB—1/3 of a TB—of hard drive capacity on the workstations on my home LAN. From what I’ve seen, this figure doesn’t seem out of line with what my peers are doing. Having lots of space is handy, but it makes backups more tricky. Lately I’ve been putting some thought into my overall home backups strategy; I’ve run across some interesting new options related to Network Attached Storage (NAS) that are quite compelling.

I’ve been noticing that personal NAS appliances are getting ultra cheap; my first thought was to get one of these cheap NAS kits. The Tritton TRINSS001 is running for $60 (minus drive) on dealnews so that seemed like a good place to start researching. After reading a couple of excellent reviews on TomsNetworking about consumer NAS options, I decided that it would be cheaper and easier to build a simple Linux NAS box myself out of various computer bits I had floating around.

To start, I threw in a cheap Via C3 motherboard/processor I picked up a awhile back. The C3 is a perfect chip for this project because it is extremely energy efficient and can be run without active cooling (noisy fans). I’ve got enough ambient noise already, so I try and use systems that minimize noise. Ditto with power consumption.

For a case I picked up the cheapest ATX case that money can buy: a beautiful bright orange beast. More about that later.

The Linux distro that I’m most excited about at the moment is Ubuntu: Linux for Human Beings. It’s based on Debian Linux so it’s highly maintainable—package installation is a dream. Ubuntu stands head and shoulders above Debian in being extremely accessible to real human beings. As I grow older my time is worth more and more so systems like Ubuntu and Apple’s Mac OS X are efficient and usable while still being highly functional.

To be continued…