How To Build a Silent Mini-ITX server.
Posted 22:07 CET Wednesday January 20th, 2010 (51 days ago). 270 views. No comments. Tagged with Gadgets, How To, Technology.
After I moved this site to my own, home grown Mini-ITX server, I realized that I needed a new one. The current server didn’t have the horsepower to cope with the odd request peaks I was seeing and with only half of the 1GB of available RAM being recognized by the motherboard, I had a major problem. Even though the VIA CPU featured passive cooling, the chassis fan made a lot of noise and while disabling the fan didn’t make the server too hot, it just unveiled the fact that the hard drives were quite noisy as well.
So I set off on a quest to find the ultimate Mini-ITX for a home server for my web server and mail server. The server had to be both powerful and silent, meaning no noisy power supply, no CPU fans and no clicking hard drives. The only real way to achieve this is by building a server with no moving parts at all. I also wanted to use a enclosure that looked nice enough to have in the living room. After a lot of research I ended up with the following hardware:
- SilverStone Mini-ITX SST-LC19R black.
- Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC6400 800MHz.
- Samsung DVD±R/RW/RAM slim DL 8X SATA black.
- ZOTAC ION ITX F series motherboard.
- Two Kingston V Drive notebook 64GB SSD SATA/300.
Continue reading "How To Build a Silent Mini-ITX server." →
Going Premium.
Posted 20:08 CET Tuesday October 13th, 2009 (150 days ago). 193 views. 11 comments. Tagged with Android, Music, Technology.
I like music, I have to admit that. Recently I realized that I really don’t listen that much to the lyrics, with some artists it’s virtually impossible to understand what the hell they are rambling on about anyway. I’m more interested in how the voice of the lead singer sounds and for some reason drums and percussion tends to fascinate me. But I guess it’s with music as any other art form, people like it for different reasons.
Even though I listen to a lot of different music, I don’t have that many CDs; it’s been a while since I made the move from CDs from downloads. iTunes and torrents are to blame for that. For a while I downloaded pirated version of the album and then bought the CD online. Yes, I downloaded pirated music, but I also bought the CD. Probably not entirely legal, but I feel I’m in the clear. Because of this I’ve got quite a lot of CDs that I’ve never actually taken out of the cover.
Then I started to buy all my music as digital downloads and now it’s time to take the next step in the digital music evolution: Spotify Premium. Continue reading "Going Premium." →
Lessons Learned the Hard Way.
Posted 17:31 CET Sunday October 11th, 2009 (152 days ago). 130 views. No comments. Tagged with Technology, Work.
I spent Thursday and Friday last week on an internal introductory course covering the ins and outs of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Like all courses some of the lectures were interesting while some were… less interesting. I particularly enjoyed the tours of the TV and radio buildings and the main control room for all the TV channels. With its 3500 employees, NRK is a fairly large company on a Norwegian scale, but if you look at similar international companies it’s a drop in the media ocean: As an organization, NRK likes to compare itself to the BBC, which has so many people employed that the number is not even available anywhere on the internet.
One of the most interesting things I learned, however, was not about NRK per se, but about a project that’s currently in development. I’m not sure if the project details are publicly available information or not and I vaguely remember something about a non disclosure agreement in my contract, so to avoid getting whipped I’m not going to go into any details here. What you need to know that it’s a very complicated computer system handling huge amounts of data – and the data is not being backed up externally.
Say what!? Continue reading "Lessons Learned the Hard Way." →
Now With Even More Mobile Phone!
Posted 20:08 CET Sunday September 20th, 2009 (173 days ago). 150 views. No comments. Tagged with Android, Gadgets, iPhone, Technology.
First of all: My Twitter feed is a bit more active than this site has been lately. What about following me there? A brilliant idea!
And while we’re on the subject of mobile phones; I’m considering ditching my iPhone in favor of an Android handset. The HTC Hero has become rather popular at work and I’ve had the chance to play around with it for a while. So far, so good. According to the reviews I’ve read, the major drawback of the Hero is that it can be a bit laggy at times, but this has been addressed by HTC in a recent patch. Also, my first generation iPhone is getting slower and slower for each update Apple releases, opening the Messages application can take as much as half a minute some times. Continue reading "Now With Even More Mobile Phone!" →
For Me? Really!?
Posted 18:14 CET Monday July 27th, 2009 (228 days ago). 166 views. No comments. Tagged with Computer Games, Technology.
On Friday I had my last day (yet again) with Rubberduck Media Lab and since it’s now Monday and I’m not at work somewhere else, I’m officially on summer vacation. To make sure I have enough to do during my three weeks of pure laziness, I decided to dust off some of the classic computer games I’ve been playing over the years. Of course I ran into the same problems as I had when I tried to install Civilization IV; I was not able to play any of the games using VirtualBox on my Mac and the graphics card of my 2005 work laptop has a lot to be desired – 3 frames per second is not enough for me. My only option was my even older Dell 4150 laptop, bought way back in 2002. Some of the games worked reasonably well, I’ve been able to play Homeworld on it, for instance. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 also worked, sort of, but both the fans are running at full RPM all the time.
In my hunt for no CD cracks for my old games (the DVD-ROM on the Dell is broken), I came across AI War: Fleet Command:
- Cooperative RTS game (1-8 players) with numerous unique ship types.
- Challenging AI in 26 styles, many with unique superweapons.
- Insanely high unit counts: 30,000+ ships in most games.
- Lengthy campaigns featuring 80+ simultaneous planetary battlefields.
- Different Every Time: 16 billion procedural maps, each with specific units.
- A focus on deep strategy that you don’t get in most RTS games.
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