Category: Hardware

CPU fan mounted in my Amiga 1200

I ordered a vented trapdoor from Shapeways and cut it up to fit a 40mm fan to cool my 68060. That was a rather bad fit and I contacted its designer Steve and asked him if he could modify it to hold a fan. After a few hours he had made a new version which I ordered. It didn’t quite fit and I carefully measured everything and Steve corrected the model and uploaded it. I ordered it and got it today and it fits perfectly. You need thicker feet to make room for the fan underneath. If you want one too you can order the A1200 cover here on Shapeways. Thanks a bunch Steve!

Adding powered USB to my car, Day 1

I recently bought a phone mount for my Audi A6. It is two parts. One part adapted for my car, the other part is adapted for my HTC Desire. The power is taken from a cigarette lighter connector. Stupid fucking retarded connector not designed for this! So my solution is to hack my car and the phone mount (it is not a car mount for my phone… would look kinda stupid to walk around with a car on the phone all day).
Step 1 is to add a powered USB to my dashboard. Step 2 is to snip the cigarette lighter plug and put a USB connector there instead.

Today I have soldered wires to the cable harness on the Symphony head unit. By using the “S” lead I get power when the ignition key is inserted AND turned. The power remains on until I remove the ignition key. So I can turn the motor off and still charge the phone. But when leaving the car (and taking ignition key out) there is no power to the USB port. Just the way I like it.

 

Installed some cool servers at work

Got a few new servers at work and man where they massive. HP sure makes great servers. There is a difference in server and desktop hardware. If you’re used to ordinary PC hardware and look at a server it is very much “Russian Space Station *clonk* *clonk*”. Everything is robust and big.

The servers in question are a pair of HP ProLiant DL 585 G5 with 4 QuadCore Opterons and 128GB RAM each. They will do important stuff, I’m sure.

Took some snaps of them too.

First HD test

As some of you have seen om my Twitter lately I have begun my HD convertion. I tried my new TV for the first time today and it is amazing. I have all HDMI going to my AVR and one HDMI to the TV, finally an optical SPDIF from the TV to the AVR for TV sound. All is fine and awesome untill I start my current favourite game, Zen Pinball. There is a lag somewhere. When I press L1 or R1 there is a 1/10 delay until I see and hear them react. Haven’t have time to test any more games.

I will try to see if I can disable all processing of the image to see if that helps, next I’ll try to connect the HDMI directly to the TV and finally I will try to connect it to my parents Sony HDTV.