About

Born and raised in a small Midwest town I grew up reading books and as I got older I got into video games. Early on my parents tried turning me into a programmer but the creating bug never bit me, I’m more of a hack, I modify things to fit my needs rather than create something new. When I was 12 or 13 we had a Commodore 64 that I played games on, eventually my dad and I split the cost of an old 4×86 machine for $200. Over time my dad messed with it and upgraded it in fits and starts. I didn’t take much interest in the hardware since we hadn’t progressed to dialup yet. As time went on we made it up to a Pentium clone Cyrix 166, it was very unstable and so my dad upgraded to an AMD K6-2 at 266Mhz. Before he got rid of the machine it was up to a 500Mhz processor. At some point we had enough dead parts laying around that we threw together a computer and it “got hit by lightning”. This got me a new computer clocked at 466Mhz with a 6Gb hdd. I begged and pleaded and finally got a 12x TDK cd-rw after a few months of waiting. Shortly after that the hdd controller on the motherboard started going out so we ended up getting a new motherboard, a Slot A AMD at 800Mhz that played NWN very nicely and served as my ftp server for quite some time. We went  up to CompUSA and got an “expensive” Antec case with a 300W PSU and before the board died I bought a 120Gb WD hdd with a whole 8 MEGS of cache. For a while I went without a computer, using the various spare parts my dad had laying around to make some temporary systems to play on, but since they were all used scavenged parts the hdds often died or the CPU quit or the RAM went bad. This is when gaming became a luxury and browsing the internet a habit/hobby. By the time I was ready to head off to college my dad FINALLY upgraded to cable internet and I pulled almost all my money out of the CD accounts they were in and built a sweet system. It was an almost top of the line 2800+ with a whole 512k cache (major feature of the Bartons over the older 256k cache cores). I got a gig of RAM and the nVidia Geforce FX5900 Ultra with 256Mb of video memory and a 74 Gb WD Raptor and eventually two 120Gb hdds for data storage. At the time it was a really sweet system, and I saved a bundle since I got all the parts at cost from helping out at the local computer shop. The main reason I got the system was to one-up my roommate, since we’d been talking a bit online since we learned our assignment and I found out that he had a new Intel based Dell machine. Before I retired the system I had picked up a couple 250Gb hdds as well. During my first year at college I threw together a system out of spare parts I had laying around and purchased an old dual processor server from the college that had 4 processor sockets. This wasn’t the beginning of my PC packrat habit, just the start of the exponential expansion of it. I experimented with water cooling and high airflow CPU fans this year as well. By the end of the year I’d overclocked my main machine to the equivalent of a 3200+ and purchased a really nice set of Creative GigaWorks speakers to complement my SoundBlaster Audigy2. I also picked up a 21″ Viewsonic monitor that was a bit older and ended up giving it to my dad for a while since his old monitor was hard on his eyes (eventually I inherited it back when he got an LCD one Christmas). That summer I sold my pride and joy in the hopes of getting a dual Opteron system but I bought a couple extra parts and ended up falling short of my goal. I ended up getting a “tweener” machine to tide me over til I had enough saved to buy a new system. I also purchased a dual processor AMD based motherboard and some RAM. It worked well and I overclocked it a bit to get the best performance out of it but I still wanted something to use as a “main” machine. I ended up getting a ”sidegrade” system that was similar in specs to my old machine, but used a mobile processor so I could overclock it more easily and I received some RAM from a good friend of mine. I still had most of my hdds so I put those into the new machine. I purchased a 9600XT AiW (All in Wonder) video card but found out that I really don’t watch that much TV, even if it is built directly into my computer. I also ended up getting separate TV card at some point for another project but I loaned it to a friend and since I don’t watch much TV I’m going to let him have it and I’ll get a different model if I feel the need to get TV on my PC again. Shortly after starting my 2nd year of college I purchased an Xbox game console, I’d read about the different mods that could be done to them and I met a guy in one of my classes that had modded a lot of them and he was brokering a sale for somebody wanting to get rid of one with a faulty DVD drive so I thought the price was right and bought it. He came over and modded it for me and showed me how it was done so I could do it myself in the future, that ended up coming in very handy when I modded my stepdad’s and stepbrother’s Xboxes as well as one for my stepsister and a guy at a place I worked. Currently I have 3 Xboxes with 1 modded (and it has a modchip but its not functioning correctly) and 1 in the process of being modded (when I get time and find the files again) and 1 that’s been sent in for repair once but managed to come up with an error message after having lost power in the middle of doing something. I picked up a PS2 from my brother in trade for an Xbox since I had a couple and I wanted a PS2 to play some RPGs (and my old PS1 games). I traded my nice speakers to my friend (the one that gave me the RAM) for his old laptop so I could take notes during my classes. My 3rd year of college I didn’t go the full year, I decided a little over 2/3 of the way through that it was getting too expensive at the private school I was attending and I wasn’t learning about the things I wanted to do when I graduated and I wasn’t making much money at my work study job either. After I left I worked for a summer in a general labor job and because the college I was trying to transfer to messed up my paperwork I didn’t get in for the fall semester and ended up going to work for a small company that sells video games. I helped them revamp their network infrastructure and eventually convinced the owner to purchase a tablet PC on my behalf. I’ve been slowly paying him back and now that I’ve left the company I’m making quite a bit more per hour in a field I enjoy. Once I pay off my tablet I’m going to see about stabilizing my storage infrastructure since the drives I’ve owned for 4 years are starting to get grouchy and die on me. That’s probably a lot of TMI of my computer background and doesn’t detail any of the millions of little side projects I messed with over the years, but that’s what this blog is for, to let out the secrets I’ve come across in my wanderings. That said:

This is my random smattering of tech blog. I’ll post random bits of interesting tech that I find here so you don’t hafta troll Digg.com from work like I do. I also find some other very interesting articles in my research on methods of doing things in Linux and Windows. Sometimes I even find or write useful how-tos when I run into trouble with something and find a fix for it.