Welcome one and all to my mad brain, I am 38 and have been modding since I first realized they didn’t make Stretch Armstrong just right when I was 5. I am looking forward to sharing some of my mods with you and have already begun my first mod for your perusal.

I am currently working on a desk mod, and hoping to have a companion water cooling mod to come soon afterwards if it is feesable (and less than my yearly salary to complete) I have children who will help me with some of these mods, so the little people you will see are not a product of your imagination nor the effect of a drunken night of photoshopping midgets into random posts.

I hope you enjoy and as a teaser this is a photo of my test bed for my desk project.

A willing sacrificial object for my Dremel.

Ok so here is the deal. A while back I bought those servers if you recall and now I am going to use one of them! For a few months now I have had this old p4 computer sitting next to my desk running a home webserver along with my pbx phone system for my work line. Well it idles most of the time and really is not that powerful and just uses up power and space and does not get much use. So I am going to start testing a couple different virtualization applications and see what one is the best solution for what I am going to be doing. The ones I intend to test as of right now are XenServer and vmware ESXi.

The Hardware!

Dual Processor AMD Athlon 2GHz

3gb ram

2x80GB Drives

1x250GB Drive

2u Rackmount form factor

The Plan

Run my home webserver phone pbx and a few other applications within multiple operating systems within the single server. This will allow me to run both windows and linux along side each other while still having decent performance for what ever applications I may need to run.

Long story short look for my upcoming venture into the virtual server world as I try and get this server to function on a task that it was not intended to perform

-Tracker

Decription: Run Ubuntu within windows with out using vmware [or any program like it]

Best of all its portable!

Download: http://l4n.us/?dp

Win a xbox 360! : http://l4n.us/?dq

[Sorry about the video time caused me to rush it]

-Tracker

I love building computers. Not only do I love building them, but also taking them apart. Tracker and I [Dark] have striped an entire computer down to nothing in just 1 minute flat. Thats no joke either. When building a new Desktop there are many things to consider. These are just some of the ones on my top priority list.
1. OS
An OS is a very funny thing. If your like me you want a Hack-n-tosh. At the same time you want to run Windows 7 and a Linux distro. OSX is very picky I hear about running on special hardware, atleast if you want it to run well, so maybe you really want to get an Intel processor with an ASUS motherboard because I hear they work best. Now for Windows 7 your also going to need a decent card, not to mention OSX. Linux is happy on almost any system so really if you wanted to you’d be fine getting lower specs.
2. Uses
Different uses of a computer are also important to me. Can I make this computer a Home server? Or will it only be able to surf the web? Will it be an HD movie machine or a gaming PC perhaps? I love all of thee above so my new machine is going to have to be powerful in many areas. But if maybe I wanted to make a simple computer for lets say, Boxee? Then I would be able to not spend so much money.
3. Lifespan
Lifespan is important because even if your computer is outdated before its even shipped (and it is) it still should last you a good 3 to 4 years, hopefully more, but that is very unlikely in these times where everything it obsolete the moment its created.
4. Hardware release dates
If you buy something the day it comes out its extremely expensive, but if you wait to long then its outdated and worthless. So your pretty much playing russian roulette and hoping you don’t shoot yourself later on down the road.

-Dark

Ever go into town with your laptop only to find that you have to pay $10/hour to access it? Well hak5 did a nice episode and one of the segments of the episode was how to get around that. Well rather than re-write the whole how-to becuase it would not come out as good as there instructions I will just send you to view the episode

[Source: Hak5]

-Tracker

In this episode I have some friends joining me! Welcome the newest members Caboose and Care Bear!

We are talking about what to do with your old computer that you have collecting dust in your closet. A rant about ISP service and support and some panoramic photos. This show was recorded using ventrilo and I am not to proud of the quality but I am working on some stuff so hopefully it will get better over time. Any comments or suggestions just post them as a comment I welcome them all

[Links]

• Microsoft ICE
• Linux
• Panoramic Photo Blog Post

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Enjoy

-Tracker

Ok this is a GREAT program. It allows you to turn any iso into a bootable image on a usb stick or sd card. So you can throw your linux iso on it and use that to install it on your eeepc

There are some operating systems that you can select from and it will download it and put it all on your usb drive with a few clicks of your mouse. It is from what I can see flawless. I have used it to test out backtrack3 on my eeepc as well as centos. So if you are curious about testing something like this out what better time than the present?

Best part. Its free!!!

[Unetbootin]

-Tracker

Ok this one is a video done up by one of my favorite iptv shoes hak5. In this episode of it they show how to do cluster computing where you take all the old computers you have laying around throw a copy of linux on it and use all there processors as one. Kinda kool. I have not gotten a chance to try it myself but im sure it would work great for video rendering! Anyway to check out the episode of hak5 click the source link below. There is more to the episode but that is the part I wanted to post about

[Source: Hak5 episode 4x09]

-Tracker

Ok well I have been using Dropbox [BETA] for a while now because I got a invite from a friend of mine. But yesterday it finally came out of beta. Basically what Dropbox is it is a online flashdrive. You can add multiple computers even operating systems [linux osx and windows are all supported] I am not sure about the accounts now but my beta account is 2gigs in size. Some of the great features of it are file recovery. If you delete a file and did not mean to you can go in and restore it. As a matter of fact I deleted a file a month ago and restored it yesterday. Another nice feature is when you put a file into your dropbox folder it syncs automatically to all the computers linked to your dropbox account. And if you update that file from any of the computers it does not transfer the whole file again. Instead it only transfers what has been changed. This is really good in the event that you have a couple hundred MB file or even a 10mb text file [I have a few of those] and you edit it then it only transfers those few bytes that were changed. So if you are looking for something like this I suggest checking it out.

DropBox

-Tracker

Well thanks to Hackaday I found this interesting and in my own opinion quite fun game. Its called Ruckingenur II [2]. The goal of the game is to use the tools provided to reverse engineer the given electronic device. If you sit and think for a second it is quite easy to figure out. I beat it in less than 30min. But it was well worth the download. It has the look of an older game and that I also like. So have fun and dont blow your self up playing it [You will see what I mean ]

HackADay’s post

[Zach Barth] has released Ruckingenur II, the game of reverse engineering. The latest in his Games for Engineers series, it is a full game with multiple levels and live action cut scenes. Set with a military theme, the goal is to reverse engineer enemy items. Pictured above is a lock to a weapons cache.

The pixelized style is consistent throughout. Even the cut scenes have the effect. The reverse engineering is fun enough to keep you interested while you learn. There is an in game help system that keeps you on track as well. Our only suggestion is that he get some better costumes next time!

[Source: Zachtronics via HackADay]