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Real life debugging with ASRock Z97m OC Formula and ASRock H97i
OK, somehow we are buying mainly ASRock boards these days, some hard won tips, tricks and traps: ASRock H97i This is a nice non-overclockable board for about $100. We are using it for our basic machines. The main things to note are: The m.2 slot is on the back and isn’t well documented. There is…
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Ubuntu 14.04 with ZFS and SMB sharing
Wow the documentation for this is so confusing mainly because most of the google things don’t cover how the latest release of Ubuntu actually works. The good news is that many things are now automatic. So to cover the tricks and traps here; Ubuntu file sharing via SMB This actually as easy as the Mac…
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Unifi UAP-AC Zero handoff
How frustrating, one of the cool things about Unifi and their older product line is how they manager zero handoff. This is needed because most clients are stupid. They hold on to a wifi signal for way too long. What you want in a good environment is for there to be enough coverage (without interference)…
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DIY CNC
Got a great kit from makesmith as part of my Kickstarter addiction. It’s a do it yourself CNC machine. You just need a dremel and it can cut nearly any soft material. But you need to supply your own Dremel. Popular Mechanics has a good review of what is technically called a rotary tool: Dremel…
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ASRock Z97m motherboard confusion
Motherboard vendors have so many identical motherboards and it is so hard to tell what does what. Asrock for instance has four nearly identical Z97M motherboards. Only with a detailed comparison can you see the difference: Z97M OC Formula and the Fatality are both $135. There doesn’t seem to be any difference except for a…
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Best price for MacBook Pro Retina
It sure is complicated figuring out which sites have the best price with complex discount and other structures: Appleinsider is a good place to start with very reputable vendors and it shows that for a MacBook Pro Retina that the prices have tightened up a bit. We got our last one for $2450 or so,…
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Wifi network buying guide for December 2014
Inspired by reading all those Tom’s Hardware reviews, if you need to upgrade your hardware and can’t wait for full 802.11ac Wave 2, then here are your options. Smallnetbuilder.com seems to have the best reviews of these things. Most of the big sites don’t cover this in too much detail, but I find that for…
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Home Security Systems
The state of the art is in such transition here. The future (e.g. Nest) seems pretty clear. Everything should be IP based, we get out of these incredibly high fee driven systems (although Comcast and AT&T are both trying to monetize). This is a great example of how current systems for burglar, smoke and fire,…
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Gaming Laptops
If you need a really fast laptop for gaming or for video development, that is probably the most exciting field today. Here are some thoughts. The main one being that we are at the turn for notebooks with both the new nVidia Maxwell (GTX 980/970) class graphics processors and the arrival of NVMe and really…
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ZFS on Ubuntu
Well, we finally got our file server running and with three SAS drives to practice with, it’s time to learn how to use ZFS. For convenience we are using Ubuntu and there are some handy instructions for installing it on Trusty Tahr (14.04) annotated with notes from arstechnica.com The instructions are pretty easy for installation:…
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Converting to PCPartpicker
Wow, I can’t believe how convenient this is. I’m in the middle of converting all by recent Haswell buy recommendations into PCPartpicker lists so it is easy to replicate. Thanks so much whoever made this incredible site with: Compatibility checking. You just pick things and you are much more sure everything will fit. I don’t…
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Shoutout to the Leatherman Squirt PS4
Well this is one of the few gizmos that Alex finds useful. We have all manor of Leatherman multi-tools though out the house but the Leatherman Squirt PS4 ($26 at Amazon depending on the store) is the one that gets the most use just because it is tiny.
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Haswell Cube and Mini Tower
For the bigger builds, we have two: Haswell Cube. This is based on the mini-ITX and is the fastest setup if you want a high performance double-width graphics card. Haswell Mini-Tower. This is the smallest box that can handle an overclocked dual SLI graphics card setup. This means we are moving up to the micro-ATX…
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Aquarium PC v2
Well we’ve had our aquarium running reliably for two years now. It’s been awesome. The main issue has been one of the capacitors on the graphics card blowing up. But that was actually better in mineral oil. What would have been a fire merely was the card failing. It is definitely big to have an…
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Traps building Asus H97i-plus on Antec ISK-300/150
Well, this build went so smoothly last time, I’m just amazed how out of practice I am, but to review we are putting a 4590s into this box (3GHz/3.7Ghz turbo boost, iCore 5, 4 cores, 4 threads) and here are the traps: Because of the way the AC power cable is, you do have 65mm…
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Building a Supermicro X10SRH with Norco RPC-4220
Well it isn’t like either of these have much documentation. But here are the traps: The disk arrays. There doesn’t seem to be any documentation at all about how the Norco works, but examining the box now that it is finally here, it seems to have four rows of four drives each and there is…
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Cyber Monday
I really wasn’t ready for Black Friday, but gearing up for Cyber Monday, I’m prepared. The main thing is not to buy junk but to get some decent deals on really great hardware. Here are some highlights: Apple MacBook Pro 15” Retina with 2.5GHz, 750M, 512GB SSD. I love the 13” MacBook Pro Retina for…
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4K gaming requires nVidia 980 slip
Well, Cyber Monday is nearly here and while I haven’t finished the post of Haswell processors, given that a Haswell Cube would be all about gaming, its a good question to ask about monitors and displays. Right now the state of the art is: 1080p (aka 1920×1080, aka HD). Not surprisingly the most mature, you…
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AppleTV Activates stink!
Argh. With everything so integrated in Apple, it really is amazing the media companies have managed to make the user experience so awful. Even though we are a Comcast subscriber, every channel on AppleTv requires its own randomly different activation code and it require no less than two logons. First you have to logon to…
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Haswell everywhere…what to build by form factor
I seem to be on a roll here on DIY computer recommendations, so to fill the line out, I’ll add the final two desktop computers to posts and everyone should be ready for Black Friday. One good thing about these comparisons is that Haswell is the same across desktop and mobile lines, so a 1.5…
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File systems ZFS or btrfs
Well I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but using desktop Windows and then the Mac, there really were no choices other than NTFS and HFS. But since we are building our own file server, we can now choose the operating system and the file system. The easiest way to evaluate all this…
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Wow real reliability data and hard disk purchase analysis
I was a little surprised to see this, but Backblaze (hat tip to Anandtech) is publishing detailed information on drive failures. Up to 15% annual failure rate(?!!) on Seagates and they provide model numbers too. Interesting to see a desktop drive do very well (HGST 7K4000, $185 Amazon) at 1.4% in a data center setting…
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Black Friday for Geeks
So what’s a geek to do but drool over the Black Friday discounts and beyond. But as with all things technical, it pays a little to wonder if it is time to buy or whether you should wait for the next product cycle. Here’s a quick low down on popular (for nerds) holiday items: A…
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Cooler Gotchas
We’ve been building lots of machines lately and it seems like we have struck out twice. Both times with cooler issues and once with a lack of an SSD: We got the nice case and it says there is 65mm of clearance, the problem is the (??!!) people who designed it put the Ac power…
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Regin: Top tier espionage
Vlad told me about this and it is indeed scary what Symantec has discovered. A super sophisticated hacking tool with five layers and great ability to hide itself when it detects anti-virus programs: An advanced piece of malware, known as Regin, has been used in systematic spying campaigns against a range of international targets since…
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Grokking Snowmix
This is another amazing tool that complements gstreamer. It lets you mix audio and video feeds quickly and easily and most importantly dynamically without having to write programs. Here are some notes from the wiki, the discussion group there, but mainly by looking at the sample snowmix ini files in the Snowmix/ini directory: This doesn’t…
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Grilled Opah
Well it’s also called Hawaiian moon fish, but it’s apparently more sustainably caught than tuna. We tried this Food & Wine recipe and was really surprised how tasty the fish is. The main thing is not the sauce but a little salt and quite a bit of oil to keep it from sticking to the…
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too cool f15 strike eagle low level
Wow, Jalopnik found a GoPro dream. A low level flight through the mountains of Washington in an F15E Strike Eagle. I can remember spending hours in a simulator of that jet flying around looking for targets.
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Grokking Gstreamer
Well as I’m kind of someone who is knows how to use Play Doh trying to build the Empire State Building, but in a week or so of hacking and understanding Gstreamer. Here are some of the conclusions: Wow, this thing really has no documentation. There is a huge command reference manual, but really the…
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Linux benchmarking
Well now that we are trying new Linux machines from VMware Fusion to Zotac, it’s interesting to see how fast they really are. Phoronix seems like the top hit and their 4.x suite is available as a Debian repository sudo apt-get install phoronix-test-suite How easy is that. If you want their latest tests, then you…