Guess what? I’ve been getting more technical devices. Technical things make me happy inside. I recently bought two cheap computers to use as my new download PC (With double the power ), and a file server. They don’t have particularly fancy components, but they’re plenty to do what I need them to. The specs for each of them are:

Download PC

• CPU: AMD Athlon 1500+ 1.4GHz
• M/B: GigabyteGA-7N400 Pro2 (Rev 1.x)
• RAM: 1GB DDR 400MHz
• GFX: nVidia 5500FX
• HDD: 40GB + 120GB
• OS: Windows XP SP3

New Download PC

The download PC is much easier to use now, it’s faster, does more without complaining, and… It actually turns off when I tell it to! The old one used an old motherboard, back in the days when the PSU didn’t switch off when you shutdown the OS. Now I can finally shut it down remotely without having to get up and turn it off. The only problem with this new machine is the noise, it has a large heatsink and fan that is so loud when running at full speed. It has a fan controller, so I can at least reduce the speed/noise a little, but it’s nowhere near quiet.

File Server

• CPU: AMD Athlon 3200+ 2.00 GHz
• M/B: Gigabyte GA-K8N-Pro SLI
• RAM: 2.6GB DDR 400MHz
• GFX: nVidia 6600GT
• HDD: 200GB + 200GB + 500GB + 750GB + 1TB = 2.6TB
• OS: Windows Server 2003 SP2

New File Server

My new server looks good too, it’s using a gaming case. Currently has a front 80mm fan with blue LEDs, one rear 120mm fan with green LEDs, and it had two 80mm fans with blue LEDs on the side below the window, but one of them was completely dead, so I took it out. I decided to go with Win Server 2003 for this server instead of WinXP, as this allows me to manage file sharing a little more, like controlling which users can access certain locations. I was thinking of making it run automatic backups on my computers in the network, but I realised that it can’t turn on the other computers remotely, as my router doesn’t support Wake on LAN. Using my server for just file sharing seems a bit of a waste, so I’m thinking I might run VMware Server on it as well.

You may also be wondering, “Where did you get all the extra hard drives for your server?” I have an awesome explanation for that. What happened was, I ordered two Samsung 1TB drives from an online store for $87 each as part of a group order with three other friends from Tafe. We ordered seven 1TB drives in total and to our surprise, something amazing happened. When one of us was setting up the drive in an external enclosure, we saw the size of the disk as being 1800GB and thought, “That isn’t right…” We checked the others and found that they’d actually sent as four 2TB drives and three 1TB drives. Score! So, we divided our spoils evenly, and I ended up with 3TB instead of 2TB. I’d planned on moving my old drives into the server anyway, including my anime/video drive so that I didn’t need to keep it all on my main PC, and just keep the two new 1TB drives in there. Now I’ve done that and have so much extra space, I’ve got nothing to do with it all. Managing data gets a bit difficult once you get so much, I still need to go through and delete some redundant data on my server, then figure out how I’m going to organise it all.

I’m finally gonna start using my Steam account as well, as I just got Portal for free. I might even buy another game as well, now that I have a bit of money. Maybe Half-Life 2 or Counterstrike: Source, or Garry’s Mod. Or maybe something entirely different, depending on what I find. Any other ideas? Let me know.

That’s all I’ve got for this entry right now actually, I thought I had a bit more to say about techinal things, but I guess not. I’ll have to make another entry if something else comes up.

Ciao!

-Lachy

Woo! I finally found a decent poll system to add to my entries. It’s kinda weird how all of the plugins rated 5-stars were actually mostly useless.

I plan on using polls quite often in the future, so tell me how you feel about polls now, in poll form!

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Well, I actually just bought a new domain on April 18th for my new personal site idea. What I want to do is remodel this blog into a personal site for my own thoughts, as well as a professional project and portfolio site. So, I’m planning to create my own theme for it from scratch, or perhaps just find a decent pre-made one if I can’t develop anything suitable. I have one design nearly completed, but I think I may go for a different approach. Do you think that this project development/portfolio site would do better with a dark or light theme?

Anyway, I’ve just bought the domain www.lachytech.net. I feel it’s fine for what I need it for, it’s original, simple, short enough and personal. Now all I need to is decide on a theme to go with, then plan how I’m going to reorganise this place, in the way of categories and pages. I’m probably going to start adding some blog entries as the project is moving if I get around to it. Hopefully I’ll be able to find enough motivation and inspiration to begin working on it again.

Hopefully I’ll be back soon with some more news on the project.

Ciao.

Well, the HSC is finally over. Now I just need to go back to school to sign out (and purchase a 200GB IDE drive for $23. ). I should be providing some details of what’s been happening, so I’ll start with the exams.

HSC Exams

Well, they’re over. I don’t want to go into much detail, so here’s a brief overview of my thoughts on the exams:

• English Paper 1 – Moderately annoying
• Information Processes & Technology – Easy
• English Advanced paper 2 – Annoying
• Mathematics Advanced – Mostly annoying
• Software Design & Development – Easy, though I know I missed at least one simple mark due to an error.
• Information Technology – Easy

Lennox Head

Well, for schoolies some friends and I went up to Lennox Head, about 30 mins south of Byron Bay. There were six of us going, taking two cars. Our group left soon after my last exam, and we just happened to get stuck in traffic between Korora and Moonee Beach for an hour. Great fun. So, what should have been a 3.5 hour trip ended up being 5 hours. At least we had a good chance to listen to power metal (including some laughing at DragonForce) along the way (my music was supreme =D ), and some of Peter’s misc good-feeling music. Also, we can’t forget Sam’s spectacular iPod, broken in half and held together by sticky tape.

So, to briefly describe what we did up there, it involved drinking; watching Black Books, Cowboy Bebop, Hellsing, Big Trouble Little China and The Goonies (Thanks to Crowley I actually liked it.); playing Xbox/360; going out to Mexican, which was awesome (and included chilli beer); and going to the beach.

Anyway, ’twas great fun.

Nothing

Since then, I’ve been doing pretty much nothing mostly. Watching anime (Gundam 00, Azumanaga Daioh, Cardcaptor Sakura again), watching Cool Runnings, playing some games (Crysis WARHEAD, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed and Plants vs Zombies), swimming a bit, and working on applying for a job. I plan on applying to a few computer repair places, a web design business, as well as K-Mart, Target, Big W, Dick Smith Electronics and Tandy.

That’s basically it for me, I’ve also decided o start using a few more Google apps. I’ve just started using Google Reader, and I’m liking it so far. I needed a decent RSS reader. I’ve also just downloaded a pre-rlease version of ChromeOS, so I’m going to test that out from a USB stick tomorrow.

So, now that I’ve finished school I’ll be able to do a few things, like continue to work on my blog theme, possibly convert to a new database app, although finding a decent RAD app other than Access is hard, and start working on IPTBB again.

That’s it for now, I’m off to drink some Mountain Dew at 2am.

Has anyone else tried the Personas plugin for FireFox yet? It’s basically a light-weight theme switcher in Firefox, that allows you to easily switch between themes and acquire new ones in a second. I really like this, it’s much faster and easier on the eyes than those bulky themes you have to download and install individually.

You can get it here: http://www.getpersonas.com/

The other goo dhting is when you’re browsing through the list of personas in the Tools menu, your browser automatically previews the highlighted persona. The same thing applies while viewing the site’s gallery too.

Anyway, if I’m going to go on raving about how good this plugin is, how could I not show a screenshot of it in use? Here it is: (You can’t go wrong with Hitsugaya. )

Hitsugaya! =D