I have written a number of satirical posts on here lately, so I, and a few of my good-humoured (or bad-humored, if you want to get specific) friends are going to start a satirical website. Stay tuned!
Sunday, 16 October 2016
Monday, 26 September 2016
How to Not Get Sad while Watching a Sad Movie (or Reading a Sad Book)
Being the utterly unemotional, apathetic, and heartless person that I am, I am an expert at weathering my way through even the saddest of movies and books without shedding a tear. How is this possible? Let me show you.
Before I show you how to remain unaffected while watching even the worst of tragedies, allow me to make a few remarks about sad movies and books. They are absolutely and utterly useless and worthless - even damaging, to those who indulge in them, for they mess with the viewer's (or reader's) emotions, causing a great degree of unnecessary sadness and grief.
So then, let me show you how to avoid grief.
1. Do not relate to the characters. At all. Remind yourself, at every passing moment, that the characters of the sad story are completely fictional. It helps a lot.
2. Better yet - why bother watching or reading such balderdash?
Before I show you how to remain unaffected while watching even the worst of tragedies, allow me to make a few remarks about sad movies and books. They are absolutely and utterly useless and worthless - even damaging, to those who indulge in them, for they mess with the viewer's (or reader's) emotions, causing a great degree of unnecessary sadness and grief.
So then, let me show you how to avoid grief.
1. Do not relate to the characters. At all. Remind yourself, at every passing moment, that the characters of the sad story are completely fictional. It helps a lot.
2. Better yet - why bother watching or reading such balderdash?
Monday, 29 August 2016
A Computer Ramble: My Storage Server Project
I am going to talk today about something I have never before discussed on this blog: computers. Now that I moved my actual blog over to WordPress, I am free to discuss things of varying subjects on here. Not that I have put God in a 'box' - all I do is to be done in His name, don't get me wrong - but I have a variety of interests and hobbies, which I often feel like rambling about. And here I have a place to do so.
It has been in my mind for a while to set up a Network-Attached-Storage (NAS) Server - essentially, an old junky computer I have no use for re-purposed as a server with a lot of storage where I (and others in my household) can dump all our stuff. Some of us do not have a lot of storage in our respective devices, so this is something that would be very convenient. Even more convenient is the fact that all it requires is connection to the home network - which means no more lugging around an external hard drive from computer to computer.
As it happens, I had an old computer that I had little use for. However, it lacked a decent hard drive, and the power supply unit was ... shall we say, rather iffy. It still worked (and does work) fine, even though I completely short-circuited that system once (another story for another time). However, I have had two experiences with old power supplies literally burning up in the last year, and it is not something I wish to have happen again, especially in a system that has all our family's stuff on it.
So, this past Saturday, I headed to Staples and bought stuff. Amongst my spoil was a RetailPlus 465W Power Supply Unit, bought specifically for the server. Although I have never heard of the RetailPlus brand before, the Power Supply seems to be of good quality. having not one, but two cooling fans. It was touted to be suitable for 24/7 usage, which is definitely what it will be subjected to over the coming years. Time will tell how good it is, I suppose.
As for hard drives, I purchased a 2 Terabyte Seagate mechanical hard drive (I honestly would have preferred a Western Digital drive, but whatever). I had wanted a 3 terabyte model, but they were out of stock. I do intend to add more drives in the future, as this one will undoubtedly get full quite quickly.
I also purchased a gigabyte of DDR RAM, since the motherboard was not liking any of the DDR modules I had laying around.
I should also mention that this is an older ASUS motherboard, lacking PCI Express or AGP slots, but thankfully still including SATA. For a processor, we have a Pentium 4 running at 3.06 GHz.
Putting it together was not hard, save the fact that we had to cut off a small chunk of metal which was hindering the PSU from fitting in all the way.
Then came the hard part ....Installing the software. The operating system I used for it is nas4free, a FreeBSD-based OS designed specifically for the purpose for which I am using it. However, the process of installing it and setting it up was riddled with problems from the beginning.
Firstly, it would not boot completely off the install CD. It would always run into the same error while booting. I tried 2 different versions on two different CD's, thinking the first was defective, but both exhibited the same problem. In the midst of my confusion, the idea occurred to me that perhaps, the ancient CD-ROM drive I was using in that computer was not liking the freshly burned CD's I was giving it. I had little faith that replacing the CD drive would actually make it work, but it did. I then got the software installed.
My next challenge was getting it on the network. While this should be as easy as plugging an ethernet cable into the computer, it was not - the motherboard's onboard ethernet port was dysfunctional for whatever reason, so I had to go find the old PCI ethernet card that used to be in that computer before I tore it down several months ago. It thankfully still worked, although getting the ethernet cable to stay in the port was rather difficult, due to the fact that that my cable was somewhat damaged and would not hold very firmly in the port. Electrical tape easily alleviated this problem.
Once the network was all configured, I could now unhook the display/mouse/keyboard from the server, and do my remaining configuration from my main PC using the server's handy Web interface, which one can access from any computer on the network.
So now all those headaches were over with, ... I had no idea what I was doing. I turned to google for help, and slowly bumbled my way through all the settings I needed to configure, the details of which I will spare my reader.
Anyhow, as of this afternoon, the server is finally functioning as intended. I hope to get many years of usage out of it.
Hope you enjoyed my little ramble. Just letting you all know that I am indeed alive and well, even though I have neglected most of my writing over the summer.
And ... if you have no idea what I am talking about, that is understandable.
It has been in my mind for a while to set up a Network-Attached-Storage (NAS) Server - essentially, an old junky computer I have no use for re-purposed as a server with a lot of storage where I (and others in my household) can dump all our stuff. Some of us do not have a lot of storage in our respective devices, so this is something that would be very convenient. Even more convenient is the fact that all it requires is connection to the home network - which means no more lugging around an external hard drive from computer to computer.
As it happens, I had an old computer that I had little use for. However, it lacked a decent hard drive, and the power supply unit was ... shall we say, rather iffy. It still worked (and does work) fine, even though I completely short-circuited that system once (another story for another time). However, I have had two experiences with old power supplies literally burning up in the last year, and it is not something I wish to have happen again, especially in a system that has all our family's stuff on it.
So, this past Saturday, I headed to Staples and bought stuff. Amongst my spoil was a RetailPlus 465W Power Supply Unit, bought specifically for the server. Although I have never heard of the RetailPlus brand before, the Power Supply seems to be of good quality. having not one, but two cooling fans. It was touted to be suitable for 24/7 usage, which is definitely what it will be subjected to over the coming years. Time will tell how good it is, I suppose.
As for hard drives, I purchased a 2 Terabyte Seagate mechanical hard drive (I honestly would have preferred a Western Digital drive, but whatever). I had wanted a 3 terabyte model, but they were out of stock. I do intend to add more drives in the future, as this one will undoubtedly get full quite quickly.
I also purchased a gigabyte of DDR RAM, since the motherboard was not liking any of the DDR modules I had laying around.
I should also mention that this is an older ASUS motherboard, lacking PCI Express or AGP slots, but thankfully still including SATA. For a processor, we have a Pentium 4 running at 3.06 GHz.
Putting it together was not hard, save the fact that we had to cut off a small chunk of metal which was hindering the PSU from fitting in all the way.
Then came the hard part ....Installing the software. The operating system I used for it is nas4free, a FreeBSD-based OS designed specifically for the purpose for which I am using it. However, the process of installing it and setting it up was riddled with problems from the beginning.
Firstly, it would not boot completely off the install CD. It would always run into the same error while booting. I tried 2 different versions on two different CD's, thinking the first was defective, but both exhibited the same problem. In the midst of my confusion, the idea occurred to me that perhaps, the ancient CD-ROM drive I was using in that computer was not liking the freshly burned CD's I was giving it. I had little faith that replacing the CD drive would actually make it work, but it did. I then got the software installed.
My next challenge was getting it on the network. While this should be as easy as plugging an ethernet cable into the computer, it was not - the motherboard's onboard ethernet port was dysfunctional for whatever reason, so I had to go find the old PCI ethernet card that used to be in that computer before I tore it down several months ago. It thankfully still worked, although getting the ethernet cable to stay in the port was rather difficult, due to the fact that that my cable was somewhat damaged and would not hold very firmly in the port. Electrical tape easily alleviated this problem.
Once the network was all configured, I could now unhook the display/mouse/keyboard from the server, and do my remaining configuration from my main PC using the server's handy Web interface, which one can access from any computer on the network.
So now all those headaches were over with, ... I had no idea what I was doing. I turned to google for help, and slowly bumbled my way through all the settings I needed to configure, the details of which I will spare my reader.
Anyhow, as of this afternoon, the server is finally functioning as intended. I hope to get many years of usage out of it.
Hope you enjoyed my little ramble. Just letting you all know that I am indeed alive and well, even though I have neglected most of my writing over the summer.
And ... if you have no idea what I am talking about, that is understandable.
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