Please wait...
"day of the dead battery"
Boogie board on the fridge for groceries.. dead. ( but impressive, it had the original battery for close to 10 years i think. it was a gen1.. still going strong )
One of the security cams.. dead
My bedroom IP phone.. dead..
One of the cars.. dead..
Living room thermometer.. dead..
Have
still have 8 of the mini ones, and 1 of the project i help start + the expansion bus board.
None of them are populated . just shoved in a bag in the closet. I started to populate the fruit of my project.. but that is when i started losing interest in it all. So after a few caps, it was over. ( and the next month or so later, the retro-purge happened )
Wed Apr 24 2024 22:24:56 EDT from IGnatius T FoobarYou had Z80 boards?
So we are now to be in the basement? How fitting :)
I've got some enterprise SSD's coming this week, so if they work properly then yes, Uncensored will be down here in the garage sometime soon. I've been spending some of my late nights here ever since installing this machine, not using it as a server (yet) but as simply another place to tinker. This room is also my "shop" so there's a bit of a "man cave" feel to it, reminiscent of the basement in my old house where I spent many nights on the computer.
The screen is an old Westinghouse LCD with 1280x1024 display. I'm running my terminal program with the Terminus font in 12 point (one of its native sizes) with font smoothing disabled. It has a lovely look, a bit retro but clean and easy to look at.
Speaking of SSD
Been having an issue over here that i thought was power related. System turning off at random times. Not just a freeze but actual power down.
Turns out its a bad SSD.. never seen that one before.
Here are the specs, which you don't care about, but I'll list for posterity anyway.
Case: a cute little Datto backup appliance, repurposed as a generic Mini-ITX computer.
Power supply: PicoPSU-120, modified to bypass the PicoPSU for the P4 CPU power connector. Currently fed by a 120 watt 12 volt DC power brick. I have plans to add battery backup and maybe even a solar panel to supplement it.
Brains: Intel Core i9-9900 @ 3.10 GHz. 8 cores, 16 threads. Turbo boost is disabled to stay within power budget.
Memory: 32 GB
Boot disk: Intel SSDSC2BA800G3 (800 GB) enterprise grade SSD. This disk only holds /boot/efi and swap.
Data disks: 3 x Intel SSDSC2BX016T4K (1.6 TB) enterprise grade SSD. These are formatted as a btrfs volume and mounted as the root filesystem. RAID1 mirroring is in effect.
For the time being, www.citadel.org and uncensored.citadel.org are running as virtual machines. I just copied them verbatim from their old location.
In the coming weeks or months I will be converting them to LXC containers so they will use the hardware more efficiently. The VPN router, which tunnels the hosting environment to the data center where it is exposed to the public Internet, has already been converted to a container.
Feels good to be home again. And it will continue to feel good until the next power outage.
Batteries. Project Phase 2.
Wed May 08 2024 22:26:33 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar.
Feels good to be home again. And it will continue to feel good until the next power outage.
May not be as fancy, but It would be about the same as i was talking.
Would be easy to test if its smart enough.
Fri May 10 2024 18:43:15 EDT from IGnatius T FoobarBattery system is coming. Dunno when. And I'm wondering whether I was overthinking it. I have an extra car battery charger here. Perhaps I should just wire it to a deep cycle marine battery and then straight out to the load? The charger already knows how to back off when the battery is full, so it would seem that's all the sophistication that's needed?
Boot disk: Intel SSDSC2BA800G3 (800 GB) enterprise grade SSD. This
disk only holds /boot/efi and swap.
800 GB for holding just /boot and swap and meanwhile the workstations at $job running out of space because they have drives worth 40 Gb XD
Well, the 800 GB drive has ~35000 hours on it. That's about three years of continuous operation, and its mirror partner suffered an early demise when they were serving as the main storage in my desktop machine. So I'm not going to give it any hard work to do. I've got a backup of /boot/efi and I can throw any old drive in there if I need to replace it. The other three disks, those are brand new.
I think I may have found my answer to the "little DC UPS" problem, without having to repurpose a consumer "solar generator" (ugh that term).
From [ https://www.powerstream.com/d-sine-dc-ups.htm ]
"Self-contained automotive battery backup system with 5AH battery. 12 volt DC UPS module or battery backup (BBU) keeps 12 volt equipment alive in cars, buses, trucks and taxis using an internal sealed lead acid battery. Useful for vehicles with automatic start-stop features."
12 volts in, 12 volts out, SLA battery inside, 12 amps continuous rating (15 amps surge). And it even has mounting tabs, perfect for my on-wall setup. For USD$200 it's in the same price range as a desktop UPS and it'll take care of my 12 volt setup without wasting any energy on inversion. That's my whole goal, of course, since computers run on low-ish DC it makes sense to avoid stepping up to 120 VAC only to step back down to 12 VDC.
YES.. welcome to my world :) Its not generating any solar power.. its a consumer of and storage of .. ( now, if you want to talk about fusion generators, i might meet someone 1/2 way on that one. While technically its just releasing energy in the H2, its sort of generating in a 'traditional sense', and it is sort of making solar energy as its making light and heat... )
And not disagreeing, it is basically the same and should work fine. But, is it enough wattage? And be sure to check if it cuts out as it switches over from DC in to just battery. That was the one advantage of the solar controller, you could wire it so it did not do that. ( or choosing the right integrated unit, not all do and you do get that short blip on some.. but plenty of them will )
( and too bad about the used drive going belly up.. )
Sun May 19 2024 16:56:18 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar"solar generator" (ugh that term).
"The Backup-Mobile UPS is designed to keep your equipment from losing power or rebooting during engine start-up, ensuring these spikes and sags in power don't shorten the life of your mission critical electronics. We do this by providing uninterrupted, clean, consistent power to your equipment, extending the life of your electronics up to 2 to 3 more years."
"The Backup-Mobile UPS is designed to keep your equipment from losing
power or rebooting during engine start-up, ensuring these spikes and
Sounds like just the thing to put between the battery and ham transciever in the car. I'll keep that in mind, once I get my ticket and save up funds for 2m/440 mobile.
Ah then ya. no blip.
Some of those things a blip dont matter, so they dont plan for that. ( actually, id say most use cases, a blip dont matter. )
Mon May 20 2024 09:19:44 EDT from IGnatius T FoobarFrom the web site:
"The Backup-Mobile UPS is designed to keep your equipment from losing power or rebooting during engine start-up, ensuring these spikes and sags in power don't shorten the life of your mission critical electronics. We do this by providing uninterrupted, clean, consistent power to your equipment, extending the life of your electronics up to 2 to 3 more years."
Grrrr i think my pixelbook is F-ed. Runs on battery. ( its around 60% so its not 'dead' )
Plug it into a "real" power supply, it powers down after a minute or two. Plug it into a 'small' supply, it complains its low power as expected, ( and will slowly discharge ) but runs.
Powerwash, didnt help.
Grrrr
Let it run down. Now its 100% dead.
Sigh. i liked that thing. I'm sure its the charging circuit or dc-dc converter, which is on the main board, not worth the % to bring it back to life. ( plus ist glued together and like 25 screws too, so you end up destroying the back panel + battery pulling it apart. so more $. and the last thing i want to do is buy a battery.. fraud city.
weekly sale flyer from a 'surplus electronic component mail order shop' ( sort of like polypack, for those that remember that far back )
"just in high voltage fly back transformers" Um, i have never heard of a low voltage flyback.. it dont work that way... lol.
I haven't checked the actual prices, but it looks like there is a retrogaming community that is paying well for equipment from the late 90s and early 2000s, since that is around the point in whch it becomes hard to emulate games. Games in that era are too modern to be emulated in consumer hardware but are too old to run natively without hacks. It is called the emulation singularity, or the emulation donut hole.