I got a notice today on my secondary Desktop about Windows 10 going out of support later this year. Microsoft really wants people to upgrade to Windows 11.
Like, a lot.
I mean, I get it, and I have no problem with updating. I use Windows 11 at work, I use it on my main desktop. Aside from the annoyance that the Task Bar can’t be docked on the side or top, I don’t really notice.
But I can’t, not on this PC, due to…. Reasons…? Windows 11 is essentially just, Windows 10 under the hood, it seems really weird that I can’t update this machine. Its most likely due to age. But this kind of leads me to another point.
This PC works just fine.
Its just my previous desktop, off to the side. It does everything I need it to do, just fine. It could even do more than I need it to do, just fine. I mostly use it to run Docker Containers and to host files. I occasionally use it to run a second Fortnite instance to play Bot Matches. It has gobs of memory for doing whatever task I throw at it, I have considered getting a better GPU for it to do AI stuff with it (it already has a very nice GPU, just not, AI nice).
Probably, at some point, I will just blow it out and load Ubuntu on it. I will lose my Fortnite ability probably, but I am kind of done with that anyway. I have already been slowly winding down my use needs that are Windows dependant there. I need to figure out the process of transferring my Docker containers over first. I may test things out using my Laptop first, which already runs Linux.
Which is another set of contention here. I went ahead and just replaced Windows 10 on my 10 year old Laptop. It still, ran just fine. I primarily use it for writing and coding, but I do play some games on it too. Thankfully, Steam has made great strides in getting Linux support in the gaming world.
But its not just my laptop. All 3 of my kids and my wife have laptops. My son has a desktop as well. Only one of these laptops is Windows 11 compatible. I have no idea on my son’s desktop. But all of these PCs work plenty fine.
I know I keep pushing this, “It works fine” point, but part of that is because the Windows 11 “requirements” really feel like a weird appeasement to PC makers to try to “encourage people to upgrade hardware.” I feel like these people are greatly overestimating just how often people buy new hardware. I had a neighbor at my old place with a Windows XP machine he would ask me to work on sometimes. The reality is, an XP machine would work just fine for what he needed.
PC power basically just, plateaued in usefulness a decade or so ago. It kind of feels like why there is such a big push for AI crap as well. “Get the new PC with an NPU! Get AI locally somit can make stuff up without the cloud!”
I could put Linux on some of these machines, but I already get grief over having to occasionally fix things on my family’s laptops as it is, I don’t really need that extra layer of grief AND a learning curve. I know its all much easier now, but like the upgrade cycle, its a “regular people” thing. Its a “Why doesn’t this scanner software work” thing, or a “why can’t Install my SIMS game” thing.
Though I will say this, for my case. Linux Mint runs 1000x better than Windows 10 did. I do get occasional weird lock ups though, which is annoying. Seems to be some sort of memory issue with Firefox because it happens if I get too ambitious with tabs, which I very often do. Its fine fine, then suddenly, the shole system is unresponsive.
But it also helps that I know how to use Linux already. I have been using it on some level now for like 25 years. I failed to install it the first time while at college in the early 2000s. But I have used it since. And prefer it.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
My new desktop I mentioned at the end of my last post arrived. I am fairly good about adjusting my workflow when changes or upgrades happen, but this particular change in it’s nature, is incredibly disruptive. My whole process kind of stems out from a source, which for the most part, is either my laptop or my desktop. If I were to get a new laptop, not much would change. Most of that workflow runs off of shared drives or cloud files. On the base level, the desktop works the same way, the real trick I get to deal with is the ripple effect downstream, which I will get more into in a bit.
The machine itself runs fine. It’s much much quieter than I expected it to be, which is nice. The crazy Neon lights aren’t as slightly annoying as I expected, especially once I figured out how to adjust them to be a more toned down, non pulsating, single, cooler color. The day after ordering, I realized that I might need new monitor cables, I checked and sure enough, all of the outputs save one are Display Port. My old set up consisted of a display port adapter, a DVI port and an HDMI out, all three to DVI on the monitor end. I may update the monitors later but it’s not necessary now.
The inside is crazy empty and clean. I’m not quite sure yet where I would even put additional hard drives, though I suspect they mount to the sides.
It certainly handles every game I’ve thrown at it incredibly smoothly even with maxed out graphical settings. My current plan is to keep this machine relegated mostly for gaming (a bit more on this later), so i will keep it fairly clean and free from excess software. So far I’ve tried it out with Forza Horizon 4, Overwatch, Black Desert Online, Minecraft, Control, Quake 2, and Quake 2 RTX.
The RTX is really quite remarkable. The reflections are really neat and the shadows work very well. I look forward to finding more titles that take advantage of the ray tracing capabilities.
The Ripple Effect
Where the real change is happening is down the line. For the sake of maybe alleviating some confusion, I am going to go ahead and use the Network names for my computers. The old workflow consisted of my Windows 10 Desktop, Squall, that I originally put together back in 2012. It still runs everything perfectly fine, since 2012, I’ve bumped up the RAM quite a bit, updated to an SSD, and updated the video card to a 1050ti. Sitting under the desk next to that was Rinoa, am even older box, that I am pretty sure I got second hand somewhere, running Xubuntu Linux. Xubuntu because, it’s only 32bit hardware. It’s primary function was being a web server, for my Dashboard, and a file server. It’s got several old drives in it all shared on the network to dump less important files to, because I’m a digital packrat.
The new machine is Cloud. See a pattern here yet. If it helps my laptop is Selphie, my old laptop was Rikku, my old project server years ago was Quistis and before that Yuna, my family’s laptops are Ivine, Barret,and RedXIII. They are all Final Fantasy characters.
Rinoa running 32bit hardware has been a problem for a while. Several interesting projects I have found needed to run on a 64bit system to get up and running. It’s also woefully under powered for anything robust, like running a Minecraft Server. Rinoa has been desperately in need to replacing for a while. Which is where Squall comes in now. Squall, will become the “new Rinoa”. Squall will become the new project server.
Making this change isn’t easy, it’s still not done, and I’ve been working on it for the last week. Squall is also a much more capable machine, so it changes the workflow a bit. Where Rinoa ran headless, I’ve decided to keep Squall on one of my three monitors for now, and work with it using Synergy. I can offload the load of doing things like, running the web browser off of Cloud to Squall if I want. I also can use Squall for Discord and IRC.
The first thing I decided to do was to move the Web server aspect to a Raspberry Pi. I already had a Pi running a LAMP stack to host my WordPress Archive blob. Moving the basic Dashboard was easy. Copy the files, import/export the database, and it worked, no problem. The harder part was moving the backend processes. I’ve started doing a lot of combination projects, that often consist of some sort of Python or Bash script running that dumps data to a database, and a web based GUI. Like the Network Map, or my rudimentary Twitter Scheduler or the web based Download Queue system for a particular web video downloading software that shall not be named. Getting these to work on the Pi is trickier. Partially because I’d forgotten some steps. For example, I created some environmental variables to open the database with scripts, so I didn’t have to put raw log in credentials in them. I forgot how I had done that, so I converted them back to raw log in credentials for now. I have others that are looking for commands from packages that need to be installed that I’m not sure are available on the Pi.
I’ll get it worked out, I just need a bit more time.
I’m also not real sure I want to move TT-RSS to the same Raspberry Pi, just because it’s constantly polling. I am not sure I want to run that level of read/write on an SD card and risk losing my other files. I will probably just set up a second Pi JUST to run the TT-RSS Server.
The other major thing to move is the files. I started off by consolidating everything, for simplicity’s sake. I converted and consolidated up my video files on my NAS recently, which freed up a lot of space. I’ve been meaning to re-allocate some files off of Rinoa back to the NAS and I used the move as an excuse to do just that. At the same time I consolidated the remaining files onto the largest of the various drives in Rinoa, so I can start off by just moving one drive to Squall, to reshare on the network. Moving the webserver to the Pi also meant giving the Pi an extra USB drive, for more storage. The Video Downloader that Shall Not Be Named, pulls video files, which are larger. I set up a new network share from the Pi for “Working files” and moved all of the “working Files” folders from Rinoa to the Pi.
The process overall isn’t complicated, it’s just time consuming with large data moves and some configuration changes.
Physical Set Up
Another aspect to adjust was the physical set up. Initially I just pulled Rinoa out and stuck Cloud in it’s place on the floor. This was partially done because this was the best solution for cable lengths available until the new Display Port cables arrived. I’ve got some pretty good cable management going on and I am not a fan of cables just hanging all over, a side effect of 15 years of working around equipment racks with impeccable cable management standards. Once the monitor cables arrived, I undid everything and reran all the cables, putting Squall on the floor and Cloud up on the little floor shelf under my desk. The main downside in the end is that the cleaner cable solution puts the large side window on the new PC against the backside, so I don’t get to see inside my PC all the time. Thankfully, I’m not a big fan of this aspect of the machine to start with.
Rinoa is going to just sit behind the monitors on a shelf for a bit until I finish with her, but in the end, the plan is to retire that machine out.
Going Forward
I am actually almost more excited about the prospect of molding Squall into the new Project server than I am the flashy new Gaming Rig. The 64 bit hardware and 24gb of RAM means I can do a whole hell of a lot more than I ever could with Rinoa. I can set up a massive Minecraft server with a whole heap of worlds available. I can run Docker and everything that goes along with that, I can set up a robust and speedy OpenSIM world if I want. I also plan to continue to use Squall as my Video Edit machine, no need to bog down Cloud with all that extra overhead in software and disk space. I also can much more easily start playing around with VMs.
I could have done a lot of this before of course, but I find keeping all of that up and going on a machine you are also using for day to day use and gaming gets distracting, and you start running into resource use issues much more quickly.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
As a bit or a change of pace, I did a bit of work on the two actual PCs I am currently running recently. I’ve gone through a lot of desktops over the years, some getting more use than others, for a while I had like 5 or 6 old ones I had picked up here and there just sort of sitting around collecting dust but I’ve purged a lot of that out. Most of what I used to do with those extra PCs I can now do with Raspberry Pis or on my VPS. Everyone in the family uses a laptop, so no more need for a “Family Desktop”. I am down to two boxes now, ok, techniclly 3 but the third is an old PowerMAC G4 that I mostly keep around because I think the case is cool.
First off, my personal desktop. At the moment it just runs Windows 10, it’s sitting on a handful of drives for a total storage of 4 GB, mostly filled with games. I built this machine almost 7 years ago. It’s nothing particularly special, and I have bumped up the RAM since then considerably. PC computing power really hasn’t gotten much better in the past few years and what it mostly needed was a bump up in graphics power. So I swapped out the Radeon 6950 for an NVidia GTX 1050ti card. It’s not a top of the line super card, but it was within my price range and the performance boost is reasonably noticeable.
The biggest change is that I can run pretty much everything at maxed out graphics settings. So far I’ve tested it on Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto V, and Battlefield 1. Battlefield 1 in particular used to throw out an error about my GPU not being supported and GTA V had some screwy artifacting when it rained in game. Also, maybe it’s a placebo effect, but I have noticed that I do better in Overwatch with heroes like Hanzo and Widowmaker who both require more precise long distance aiming.
That work was pretty easy, though I was sort of worried that the newer card wouldn’t work with my older Chip and Board.
On my other desktop tower, which is primarily used as a file storage server to supplement my Synology, I replaced a couple of dying hard drives. I don’t really remember where this tower came from but it’s at least the same vintage as my main PC. It’s set up running Xubuntu with a collection of drives I’ve collected over time from various places and discarded PCs. It’s been complaining for a while on boot that one of the drives was bad, and another would give read errors occasionally. I copied everything off the read error drive, that one was easy. The other bad drive turned out to be the main drive which finally gave up the ghost and stopped booting on me. I ended up making this problem worse when trying to clone the drive, because I apparently accidentally overwrite the drive as a ZFS pool file system. This is mostly notable because I’m not sure how it even happened. I have used ZFS briefly int he past when I was testing FreeNAS but that system was a way bigger chore to use than just Ubuntu with Samba shares so I scrapped it. So I’m not sure what was even cloned to create a 500GB ZFS partition.
Fortunately there wasn’t any important data actually on the main filesystem drive. I think at worst I may have lost am unused Minecraft server set up and maybe a few webpages I had set up messing around with webdev stuff.
So after a ton of reboots on a live CD to determine which physical drive was witch in the machine, I pulled out the two bad drives and replaced them with two “mostly good” drives. I then reloaded Xubuntu. I then, reloaded Xubuntu again because an encrypted file system seemed like a good idea but I don’t want the hassle of entering a password every time the machine boots.
The real hassle here is getting everything configured. A quick rundown of the steps needed to get things to a basic level of use.
Set up the proprietary drivers for the GPU and motherboard, easy
Set a static IP that puts the machine where it’s supposed to be on the network, mostly easy.
Reinstall Synergy. Mostly easy, though I still need to get it to stat on boot.
Install and set up SSH, easy
Reinstall Samba, easy
Get the system to auto mount the other hard drives on boot, mostly easy
Configure Samba to share those drives, mostly easy
Reinstall the LAMP stack
Fortunately, everything went pretty smoothly, other than I havn’t quite figure out the right method to get Synergy to start on boot. This is actually pretty critical, since unless the machine just boots up to a desktop with Synergy, I have to keep a keyboard and mouse attached. Part of the point here is that this box can just be squired away behind the desk and hooked to a monitor. It may already be set up but I’ll probably set up Python on it as well. I still like to be able to putz around with scripts and web stuff so it’s handy to have.
PS, feel free to judge the dusty ass inside of that tower up there.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
So a while ago, I designed and built my own Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad. I’m not going to go too much into the details behind that, but for a variety of reasons, I’ve actually used it considerably less than I’d hoped. I also found recently that the arrows don’t detect properly anymore since they are connected to the Directional Pad which reads as analogue not digital.
So, I fixed it. While I was fixing it, I finally added the button box I’d been meaning to add.
The button presses of a Playstation Controller are simply the creation of an electrical contact. This can be replicated on any similar button by soldering wires to either side of the PVC board’s pads inside the controller.
Anyway, the first task was to rewire the pad’s “buttons” to the shoulder buttons of the controller board. Simple enough. Now they show up as “buttons” and not analog pulls in the PC.
Step two was to make the box removable from the pad for easy storage. This also allowed me to replace the ball of wire that I’d ended up with when building it the first time.
This mess becomes a network cable and a network jack. The network cable is the one used for the new connections tot he shoulder buttons.
Next is the box, which I wired to the four face buttons of the controller. It really doesn’t matter if I use the “start” and “select” buttons since in the end, the Playstation shell is tossed out and I simply map the buttons to whatever I want in game (I have yet to see how this will affect it if i use it on the Playstation).
The end result is much cleaner and much more reliable all around. I will probably add some stickers or something to the box to make it look prettier.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I am extremely familiar with the insides and mechanics behind build a PC from scratch. I’ve put together several machines for both personal use and at (my old) work. I also have done numerous upgrades to hard drives, RAM, GPUs, etc over the years. I’ve wired up cases for better cooling and upgraded a PC so much that I rebuilt the original PC with all of it’s original parts.
I’ve never ever bought all the parts at once to put them together as a cohesive whole at the same time.
In the recent move, I’ve gained an office space. Part of my desire for this office space is that it’s not going to be where the kids hang out to play on the computer. Unfortunately, I can’t just stick them with one of my extra older PCs, it’ll never work out. So I’m using the opportunity to build myself a new gaming rig. Computer components have gotten so ridiculously confusing these days. The last time I seriously build a PC it was simple. If the processor speed was higher, it was better. A 2 GHZ PC was pretty much always going to be better than a 1.8ghz PC. Unless it’s a Celeron, then it just sucked no matter what.
Now it’s all Cores and i7s, and i3s and Phenom IIs and crazy numbers that are mostly just ePeen related. Fortunately I am aware than GPU means more to a PC than CPU. That’s why I started with GPU. My old machine actually performs much better than I would ever expect considering it’s only Dual core and it’s a stock Dell machine with a new GPU and some RAM. The key was, I picked out a good GPU when I bought it.
So I did some research on benchmarks and performance and came up with a Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850. It’s not a top of the line card but it ranks very highly and costs about half as much as the cards ranking similarly. I’m still being budget conscious with my choices and trying to get the best value I can.
I then did move on to processor. As I said, modern processors confuse me, so I started off looking into the AMD chip recommended by Amazon to go with the GPU. It was a place to start more than anything. I’ve had a lot of AMD CPUs and always liked them. They used to be the top dog but I was pretty sure Intel had come back to the lead.
Some Google searching suggested that it’s not real great unless it’s overclocked and I’m not really interested in trying to overclock anything. It’s not that I don’t think I could do it, it’s more than I don’t want to have to buy another $150 processor when I fuck it up. One thread I found on this chip had several recommendations for the Intel i5 2500 3.3Ghz. It’s a Quad Core chip. I did a bit more research and decided to go for this chip. Mostly my research was into i5 vs i7, but this i5 is supposed to be pretty decent. Besides, CPU is less important and I’m going to better value with a good punch.
On a side note, I also am hazy on the details but I also know that more cores doesn’t always mean better. 4 cores doesn’t make this a 12 Ghz processor, not every application uses multiple cores. However I do a fair amount of Photo editing with Photoshop and I do a fair amount of editing with Adobe Premier, BOTH programs I know benefit from using multiple cores.
At this point I threw on a compatible fan nothing fancy, it was cheap and ranked 1st in fans on Amazon so I bought it. I also threw on a 500W power supply to run it all. I have a 500W power supply but it’s got some bad bearings in the fans and runs loud. I could probably fix it but electricity scares me and I am pretty sure power supplies can be dangerous even when un plugged.
all that was left was to tie it together with a motherboard. I picked up one from the list of recommended ones, it’s listed as Gigabyte Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2133 LGA 1155 Motherboard GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 and is very Blue.
So, because it coordinates, I picked up 8 GB of Blue RAM with flashy cooling fins to go in it.
I didn’t need to get a case, I have a very large and nice case I bought last time I built a machine. it is absolutely boring as hell in it’s designs but that was what I wanted, something that “wasn’t curvy and swoopy and neon and looked like a Riced up Honda PC”.
I’m not showing this thing off for looks.
I also already have some hard drives. I have a 1 TB that I’ll probably stick in it out of my current machine. It keeps disappearing from the OS, but I am 90% sure it’s because that stock Dell Power supply sucks and can’t handle running 3 hard drives and a GPU.
I also don’t need a Monitor. I ordered a decently large LCD a week ago when I thought I was going to be running a different older machine in the office.
Anyway, I’m pretty stoked. I also went in for the Amazon Prime trial so everything should be here by Thursday.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie 
