It's a weekend.

[elfs]

Well, the weekend has come to a Sunday night and I, for one, am ready for bed. I finally figured out what was wrong with my desktop; the fan in the back had completely frozen up. There was no air cirulation at all going on in there. I went out and bought a replacement fan-- the guy at the store gave me some story about how consumer replacement fans can only be found in "modder" variants, so now the inside of my case glows blue with funny LEDs on the fan frame. This afternoon I went out and bought another one for the computer's blowhole to force air over the motherboard-- same price, but no LEDs. Blessed be. If I had to suffer with some kind of glow coming out of the top of my computer like something out of a Tomb Raider movie, I'd've burned the LEDs out myself with a torch.

It was a quiet weekend, really. Omaha and I spent most of it geeking or gardening. Saturday, we took Kouryou-chan on a round-trip to the fabric store, the computer hardware store, the gardening place, the library. She got her hair cut and, while we waited for Omaha, she read to me. That was quite impressive. I scored two tins of Shok-a-cola at the local German deli. I hung up a new yellowjacket trap in a tree across the street from out driveway. We hit Costco. All in all, a good day.

Omaha went out that evening with a friend to go see Spiderman 2 (since I'd already gone with fallenpegasus to go see it) and Kouryou-chan and I went over to j5nn5r's place to see how he was doing after his stint in Iraq. He's... good. Seems to be healthy and all, but he talks slower. There was the suggestion that that's because many of his squadmates were Southern, but I think it's because he spent months as heavily armed smart guy surrounded by heavily armed guys with IQs approximately the same temperature as English beer, all the while trying to survive both the majority of Iraqis who just wanted their lives back, and minority of Iraqis who were crazy and shooting at anything they could.

Sunday, we did more gardening. Omaha put woodchips in all the right places, I pulled more (and more and more and more) weeds, we ran out to get the fan and a replacement feed for the hose reel-- the old one burst. The new yellowjacket trap is already filling up alarmingly well-- fabulous; as many of those soldier suckers as we can get is a good thing. I made tuna fish sandwiches for lunch and hamburgers and coleslaw for dinner. The coleslaw was last-minute, and Omaha and I agreed that I didn't put enough herbs into it. I discovered the 'sensors' program; my CPU is running at 62 and the motherboard probe is reporting 38; my harddrives are reporting between 46 and 48. It's pretty hot in there. I finished Bujold's Memory and have started into Komarr. Yamaraashi-chan is now here and I have to go get them ready for bed.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

62?! Yeoww!! what kind of CPU is it? And those drives are pretty darn warm, too... any way to get a fan in front of them?

I discovered "sensors" the last time I worked at Pogo; I run both the KDE ksensors and Gnome's gkrellm. ksensors docks in the tray on KDE and just reports the temp; gkrellm takes up the upper left-hand corner of my screen and not only gives me CPU temp, but CPU usage, fan speed, MB temp, load average, disk usage, memory and swap meters, uptime, and network usage on both internal and external networks. The external, being ppp0, has a button connected to it that lets me up and down the modem, and a timer that tells me how long I've been on (Eskimo has an 8-hour session timeout, so... )

I'm relieved that j5nn5r is home, and I look forward to the day when everybody who doesn't want to stay gets to go home.

Good on the reading squidget! As I've said before, now all you have to do is keep up. Not that that will be easy.

What's a Shok-a-Cola?

[omahas.livejournal.com]

...gkrellm takes up the upper left-hand corner of my screen and not only gives me CPU temp, but CPU usage, fan speed, MB temp, load average, disk usage, memory and swap meters, uptime, and network usage on both internal and external networks.

Oh, no, don't tell him that. Now I'll not only hear hourly reports of his stupid case temperature, but of his CPU usage, fan speed, disk usage....

Ugh.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I've installed two fans, one in the blowhole bloving down into the box, and one in the back blowing out of the box, and made sure there's enough clearance around the edges of the box for air to move freely. It's been rough; I think I'm right on the edge of power failure. If I plug in a USB anything it seems to become unstable, which has me really worried. I've also discovered that CD-ROM burner can't be pushed too hard, or it fails. That might be the cheap media, but having to reboot over it is frustrating.

It's an Athlon 2400 with an nVidia 4800 in there, so there are a lot of heat sources.

Schok-a-kola (http://www.schokakola.de/index_statisch.html) is basically no-doz mixed with the best damn German chocolate money can buy. A small triangle has two cups of coffee worth of buzz, and it tastes incredible. If you look around, you can still find in antique stores some military-issue WW2 tins, with the swastikas still on them.