• Recently I have acquired 18TB in 2.5″ (SAS) HDDs, and have (well, even more recently haha – within the hour), got my hands on 10 4TB (SAS) HDDs for around £103. That’s £2.57 per terrabyte, which in all honesty is a sweet, sweet deal.

    I am letting one of my friends use some of my 42 Unit Rack’s “rack space” for one of their servers, and they mentioned that they would like to purchase a few from me so that a bonus I guess?

    Either way, my Dell Poweredge R230 will have around 16TB worth of space for a media server, etc etc. Either way, the amount of storage I now have available to me has skyrocketed. Yippee!!

  • 42u Server Rack

    by

    I purchased a 42 unit server rack and have started adding my servers, slowly though because I’m lazy lmao 🙂

    I have an Ethernet cable going to a crappy non-rackmounted router which I’ll be changing in the future, I also have a couple more servers on their way, and a lot of storage! Around 100-ish TB in total.

    With a lot of Ethernet cables (50+), and way too much storage (20TB .approx per set of drives), I think I might have an addiction.

    I have two ThinkServer RS140s, a HP DL360p G8, a HP DL380 G7 (yeah yeah don’t judge), a friend’s server (DL120 G7) which is on its way since they cannot house it, etc etc. Funsies!!

  • Aren’t I cool? Jokes aside, I have recently decided to add to my lovely collection of what my mum calls “junk”. Such a joker huh?

    Above is a computer I have just purchased. I already have some XP machines, for example the Dell Optiplex 745, and a lovely old Toshiba laptop which my mum gave to me a few years back. I did have a Samsung A10 years ago, but I have no clue where that went either.

    I have some pretty stupid (as some put it) ideas for this lovely relic:

    • Use it at college and really annoy my teachers!
    • Get Discord working using a somewhat functional web browser (e.g. Supermium)
    • Install stupid software and play around with Windows XP even more.
    • Try and get Minecraft working on this stone-age device

    Not just this laptop, I have also found a lovely (huge) expansion for my collection. This includes:

    • 3 Desktop
    • 3 Laptops

    All Windows XP compatible – and here’s the fun thing: I don’t have any IDE HDDs, so I’m a bit stuck until I find some decent IDE HDDs.

  • vim isn’t hard

    by

    Once you get used to it, you can – if needed – only use the basic commands within vim and still be faster than your average IDE, or text editor whichever you prefer really.

    Above is my installation of vim on my ThinkPad T470p, which is ironically named “thiccpad“. Makes me crack a laugh every time. Now, vim is a wonderful piece of software since it has the option to be expanded more than Windows Notepad (duh), or even just about any version of iOS, MacOS, or Windows – probably.

    Either way, using the pretty simple .vimrc file, you can control every single aspect of your vim installation, but for now let’s focus on the basics shall we?

    Installation

    On an Arch-based distro:

    • pacman -Sy vim

    On a Debian-based distro:

    • apt-get install vim -y

    Then simply run the command vim in your terminal and boom, you’re in. That’s the easy part done.

    Basic Use (CMD/s)

    Congratulations, most people give up and turn off the computer just to leave vim at this point because they can’t figure out that they need to type :q to leave vim, or to quit and save while in a file :wq, or even to quit but not save changes while in a file :q!

    Remember! To execute a command, or to enter NORMAL mode, press the ESC or escape key. To enter insert mode, press the i key.

    To open a file, you’d simply run :o <path_to_file> , alternatively if you have the plugin called NERDTree, you’d run :NERDTree to open the navigation menu (simples!).

    To save to a specific file, use the :sav <path_to_file> command. Fun right?

    Plugins, etc blah blah nerdy mumbo jumbo

    If you want to use plugins with vim, you’ll need to use a plugin manager, or VIM 8+’s built-in package management feature.

    Remember, you’ll need to configure a .vimrc file for any plugins to work, however its really not that hard to configure.

    These are some popular VIM package managers. Personally I use Vundle, but have a look through and pick whichever one sparks your fancy. I’m not going to go into plugin installation within this post (sorry lol)

  • Dell Optiplex 745

    by

    Fun right? When a computer has no apparent errors or issues, but you just cannot figure out what is wrong?

    Well that’s the issue here. I suspect the BIOS has somehow been corrupted, however the Windows XP Home installation seems to be working.

    I suspect it is an error with the graphical output with the device. It turns on fine, power is working as it should at every part of the system. However it does not post, no display output whatsoever. No boot splash, no bios errors, not even my sad little friend, the flashing underscore. I don’t even get a BSOD, which is good and bad at the same time.

    Power to both the FDD and DVD drives, including the only HDD drive included within the computer is working fine too. They all spin up well enough. Using a NVIDIA Quadro K2000, the fans turn on, but still no output. I would’ve expected the BIOS or Windows XP to have either enabled Safe Mode with a generic driver, or just boot with a generic gpu driver which lower colour, resolution, etc so that I could fix it.

    Isn’t life wonderful? I’ll post any updates I have here, if any.