Robert’s Blog

Paula and I decided to have a web cam mounted on the dashboard automatically taking pictures (one every 5 minutes) while we drive across country! I just finished writing a perl script that will monitor a directory on the Eee PC laptop which the web cam will be connected to, that will generate a thumbnail and upload it to roguelogic.com while we are in the car driving! This way, our family and friends can take a look at the same view we are seeing from the car in near-real-time! The laptop will be powered by a DC power adapter I bought for the trip that plugs into the 12VDC plug in the car, and my Verizon Wireless USB card will provide us with internet access right from the car, hopefully all the way across the country! We will really be testing the “can you hear me now” thing! I still have to write another perl script that will sit on the site and dynamically generate the HTML pages of the album, and there will also be a “live” view page showing the most current image captured and will automatically refresh, like those old “live web cam” pages…

Just because apparently, Lockheed doesn’t feel the need to: http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/07/study-finds-that-lockheed-martin-needs-to-stop-disposing-of-hard/

Erasing old drives: http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/15/how-to-erase-old-hard-disks/

I normally use a screw driver to open the drive, remove the platters and take a hammer to the platters, before scratching them up beyond recognition, then I throw the platters out over the course of a few weeks, so make sure they are trashed in relatively separate locations… ;) Basically I would NEVER sell a used drive on eBay… :P

And remember, unlike tigerdirect’s mantra of “dead drives tell no tales…” This is NOT TRUE! Dead drives to speak from the grave!

Today, I started buying components for the new i7 PC build. After talking it over with Paula, we decided that our next Desktop PC for the house will be a custom build by me, instead of a Dell. Today, with the help of my designated “Hardware Advisor” Anthony, I bought the first component. It’s the case, an Antec P180.

After Paula found out that I already bought the case, she did throw a couple of digs, but she was pretty cool about it! ;) Thanks hunny for letting me indulge in my computer obsession!

The new i7 PC will replace our current main desktop in our home office. It will have two TWIN HEAD video cards just like our current setup, so it can replace our current desktop already using triple monitors as seen here:

I came up with a schedule for buying components to spread the purchases and cost over the next few months. The purchase schedule is as follows:

1. Case – Antec P180 (Purchased as of 5/5/2009)
+ Power Supply: Corsair TX 850 watt
+ CPU Heatsink: Cooler Master V8

2. Peripheral Cards
2 Video Cards twin head each for a total of 4 heads.
+ Most likely nVidia based
+ As of 5/18/2009 bought two EVGA GeForce 9800 GT 512MB dual DVI cards.
1 Sound Blaster Sound Card
+ Sound Blaster X Fi (Purchased on 5/6/2009)

3. Drives
1. 1TB WD – WD Caviar Black (Will be going with this as the secondary drive for data only)
+ Purchased on Purchased on 5/8/2009
2. Possibly an SSD (Solid State Drive) or a VelociRaptor WD (primary drive)
+ As of 5/12/2009 decided to go with the VelociRaptor 300GB as the primary drive.
+ Bought the WD VelociRaptor 300GB on 5/18/2009
3. DVD Burner
+ Purchased on Purchased on 5/8/2009
+ LG 22X DVD+/-RW
4. Internal Card Drive
+ Purchased on Purchased on 5/8/2009
+ Rosewill 75-in-1

4. Motherboard
+ Looking at the EVGA X58 SLI
+ As of 5/30/2009 bought this MoBo!

5. Intel i7 CPU
+ Purchased the Intel Core I7 2.66 GHz CPU on 5/30/2009

6. Memory: 12GB of RAM
+ Purchased 12GB of RAM (Cosair Dominator PC12800) on 5/30/2009

7. Operating Systems
+ Primary OS: Windows Vista 64-bit Ultimate Edition (Purchased OEM on 5/20/2009)
+ Linux running in virtualization mode on top of Vista via VirtualBox. (Probably Ubuntu)

8. Extras
+ Keyboard
+ Probably a Microsoft Razer backlit
+ Mouse
+ Probably a Microsoft Optical/Laser

The primary OS will be Vista 64-bit until Windows 7 comes out. I will also be running Virtual Box with a flavor of Linux probably Fedora or Ubuntu. I might also run Virtual Box with FreeDOS as well to mess around with Assembler in a DOS environment. I plan on leaving Linux running in virtualization mode 24/7, since this box will have 12 gigs of ram, I won’t feel it. I might retire our current linux box and use this Virtual Box instance of Linux as our primary linux, my experience so far with Linux within Virtual Box on a dual core machine with 4GB is very promising. Also, our current “main” desktop of the house, the Dell XPS 400 Dual Core/4GB/Windows XP Media Center will be moved to the spare bedroom as a guest PC. The current linux box will either be moved to my mom’s house or given away.

I’ll continue to update this post as I continue the purchases and the actual build…

This computer is a CD-2-Fast Production…

Produced by Robert Ilardi
Hardware Advisor Anthony Favara