What Have You Done Today - (Computer Version)

[doctorrg]

My latest little project... just completed. Unhappy with the range of VESA adapters available I built my own. Simply got a 500x500 sheet of clear acrylic and drilled the according holes. Yes, there's room for two more 100x100 boxes.

Figured it kind of still fits here.

 

[JohnBM01]

Nothing interesting or unique to share here, but after two months of using Windows 8, I've become a bit more comfortable using it. There are a few features I actually sort of like in Win8 than I do from the former WinXP interface. Heck, I still miss playing classic DOS games on Win98! The real annoying thing often times is how I have to do all kinds of other stuff just to properly write files or anything without having to continually use the "Run as Administrator" feature. I AM the Administrator, damn it!

But again- nothing interesting to share for this post except for being more comfortable and confident with Windows 8.

 

[BobK]

I regularly play a few classic DOS games on my Win7 machine with no issues, using Dosbox. Will Dosbox run under Win8?

(if not, another huge reason for me to avoid it )

 

[Davidies]

I regularly play a few classic DOS games on my Win7 machine with no issues, using Dosbox. Will Dosbox run under Win8?

(if not, another huge reason for me to avoid it )

It must do, the original Populous and the the original Dungeon Keeper works for me.

 

[BobK]

It must do, the original Populous and the the original Dungeon Keeper works for me.

I can report from firsthand knowledge that Populous also works fine with Dosbox. Again, this is Win7 not Win8, so YMMV.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

So I went a "vacation" on Wednesday to Sunday. Because my paranoid dad is paranoid, we unplugged almost all the electronics in case of a fire or something.

So when I got back home, I plugged everything back in, and low and behold, my new computer won't turn on. So we tried the paper clip trick again and the PSU still works but when I reconnect everything, it won't turn on. Any advice? I'm starting to think the motherboard is broken.

Edit:
When I said unplug everything, I meant all the electronics in the house, TV, modem, computer, clocks, etc.

 

[Joel]

Got my SSD and hard drive enclosure for my laptop. It came with a 500GB HDD and I put a 250GB Samsung 840 SSD in today, then put the HDD in an enclosure to use as an external drive. Really happy with the SSD, I already have one in my desktop but it's nice to have one in the laptop too.

In all honesty I didn't really need one, the HDD was a hybrid SSHD so it was pretty snappy, but after using an SSD for a year in my desktop I can't go back, they're just too awesome.

 

[BobK]

First post from my new machine. Built it almost a month ago, still "transitioning" stuff over to it.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

I went to one of those PC tech guys today and they said the motherboard's broken.

 

[BobK]

This post is from my old machine. Or my new machine. Or both, or something. I'm physically typing on the keyboard, using the mouse, and looking at the monitor attached to my new machine. But the new machine is passing it all along to the CPU/memory/etc of the old machine.

More succinctly, I'm using the new machine as an X terminal to log onto the old machine. The old machine is just sitting there in the corner, no keyboard or monitor attached, just the line cord and an ethernet cable.

@neema_t, this is what XDMCP is all about. It rocks.

 

[sesselpupser]

@neema_t, this is what XDMCP is all about. It rocks.

Ohhh I've done that, I think? Is that any different to ssh -X? In any case, using that I was able to access LXDE and control my Pi from my Mac even though the Pi was headless; no display, keyboard or anything except power and Ethernet.

Speaking of the Pi, I picked up a USB > RS232 cable so I've been using it with nothing but that one cable... It works nicely, right up until I try to use nano to edit /etc/rc.local to play around with adding a script to get it to tell me the Pi's temperature when I press a button, so it's not really the best solution for accessing a headless Pi as far as I can tell.

 

[BobK]

Ohhh I've done that, I think? Is that any different to ssh -X? In any case, using that I was able to access LXDE and control my Pi from my Mac even though the Pi was headless; no display, keyboard or anything except power and Ethernet.

Well, when I ssh -X to another box I basically get a command line from which I can type in normal commands just like I can from a local console or terminal window. With the -X I can also launch X programs such as firefox or the gimp but I have to set the DISPLAY variable properly beforehand (your setup may do that automatically).

When I connect via XDMCP, on the other hand, I get a complete desktop -- taskbar, icons, all that stuff. And can launch apps by clicking on icons or selecting them from menus, etc. In other words it's identical to if I were using the machine "normally", except I'm using another machine's keyboard/mouse/monitor. The desktop environment is running on the remote machine. It's just displaying it on the local machine.

 

[Submerged]

That sounds like a putty connection. Also sounds like TeamViewer as well.

 

[BobK]

That sounds like a putty connection. Also sounds like TeamViewer as well.

Not like a PuTTY connection at all; PuTTY is basically a (textmode) terminal emulator much like xterm et al. VNC/TeamViewer is quite similar, although it does it in a different way.

 

[sesselpupser]

@BobK oh, ok, yeah. I have to type /etc/X11/Xsession to get the Pi's desktop to show on my Mac, from there I can use it as if I were using the Pi itself (I tested it by playing a bit of Full Throttle that way). I suppose XDMCP would just skip the second part? I should read up on it really, but for now I'm having fun (as sad as that may sound!) just navigating the filesystem with ls, cd and pwd... I'm still struggling to work out what to do when I come across a problem, but so far both of those have been caused by outdated packages due to the age of my install that aren't updated by apt-get update and upgrade.

 

[dice1998]

Fiddling with ME2Explorer so I don't have to run TextMod + Textures before running Mass Effect 2. This should significantly cut down my initial loading times as well as simplify the launch process once again.. in theory, at least..

Hopefully this works.

 

[bluemoon_19]

Sorry if this isn't really the place for this question but I don't think it needs its own thread.

Just turned my PC on now and it failed to POST (no beep and no video output) I hit the reset button and then it booted fine(got the one beep as usual). Its the first time its done it and was wondering is it normal for a PC to ever fail the POST without having a problem?

I may be over reacting but if you remember when I first got the PC I had to send it back then I had to send the GPU back again for a new one. So anything out the ordinary is concerning for me.

 

[sesselpupser]

Sorry if this isn't really the place for this question but I don't think it needs its own thread.

Just turned my PC on now and it failed to POST (no beep and no video output) I hit the reset button and then it booted fine(got the one beep as usual). Its the first time its done it and was wondering is it normal for a PC to ever fail the POST without having a problem?

I may be over reacting but if you remember when I first got the PC I had to send it back then I had to send the GPU back again for a new one. So anything out the ordinary is concerning for me.

I've not had that problem, though I have had many problems with my PC failing to boot after being completely powered off (after power cuts especially, but after I switch off the PSU and unplug it from the wall sometimes too) because it forgets where my system is and goes off searching every other drive except for my SSD. If it does it again I'd be inclined to worry, but if it's a one-off and everything else is fine I'd probably just leave it alone.


Yesterday I spent some time working on my Raspberry Pi again, this time I set up a button to toggle the TFT's backlight and another to start the Adafruit touchscreen camera mode. I have one button left now, I may use it to toggle between the TFT and HDMI port so I don't have to type 'FRAMEBUFFER /dev/fb0 startx' every time I want to use it with a TV, though that doesn't happen very often so I may just write a Python script for that instead.

 

[bluemoon_19]

I've not had that problem, though I have had many problems with my PC failing to boot after being completely powered off (after power cuts especially, but after I switch off the PSU and unplug it from the wall sometimes too) because it forgets where my system is and goes off searching every other drive except for my SSD. If it does it again I'd be inclined to worry, but if it's a one-off and everything else is fine I'd probably just leave it alone.

It just happened again it was completely powered off yesterday when we had some small power cuts if that might make a difference. The thing is once its on its fine for instance yesterday I was playing skyrim with a 2K texture pack and better meshes and all that stuff and it played fine. It did power on fine yesterday after the first fault but I don't understand why its fine once the power is on. I would expect to see something wrong on screen if a component was failing.

I also checked the S.M.A.R.T data from my drives ( 1 SSD and 1 HDD ) both were fine the program I used rated both above 90% on performance and fitness.

 

[BobK]

Spent the last couple hours playing with my new Raspberry Pi. Still not sure what I'm going to do with it, but will be adding a LAMP stack eventually. I'll probably be bugging @neema_t at some point

 

[TB]

I moved an entire department's (7 people) computers, printers and phones from one building to another and got them all up and running. Which considering how slow things move on campus is a damn accomplishment!

 

[BobK]

Just started up the "weekly" backups I haven't done since late June or thereabouts.

Spent pretty much all of yesterday playing around with my Raspberry Pi. Figured out how to run it off a physical hard drive instead of the SD card it normally uses for external storage, but since the HD connects via USB 2.0 there's no major speed advantage over the Class 10 SD card like I was hoping there would be. I'm going to replace the HD with an SSD, not for the speed but because I can then power the SSD from the USB port instead of needing an external power supply.

 

[sesselpupser]

Today I've been trying out vSSH on my phone (pretty cool stuff, if you're a geek I guess) and using it to start working out how I might make a temperature display for my Pi. I've got five of these

lying around and I can't work out what else to use them for and I want to eventually add a fan to the Pi to keep it under 50C, so it seems like something I should do. So far I've worked out how to access the temperature data with Python and split it into separate digits, but that's it so far.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Today I've been trying out vSSH on my phone (pretty cool stuff, if you're a geek I guess) and using it to start working out how I might make a temperature display for my Pi. I've got five of these

lying around and I can't work out what else to use them for and I want to eventually add a fan to the Pi to keep it under 50C, so it seems like something I should do. So far I've worked out how to access the temperature data with Python and split it into separate digits, but that's it so far.

Keep an eye on the Pi temps, you might not need to heat sink it (add the sink before anything else, it's free on power). They run pretty cool unless you're passing a lot of power across places.

 

[BobK]

I want to eventually add a fan to the Pi to keep it under 50C, so it seems like something I should do. So far I've worked out how to access the temperature data with Python and split it into separate digits, but that's it so far.

Wow, is temperature really a concern with a Raspberry Pi? I wouldn't have thought so, but then again I did see an ad for a kit that included some heat sinks.

What have you connected to it that draws any significant power?

The only things I'll be plugging into mine are an SSD, WiFi dongle and wireless keyboard/mouse dongle. That's the one I have now -- who knows what I'll be plugging into my next one.

 

[sesselpupser]

Keep an eye on the Pi temps, you might not need to heat sink it (add the sink before anything else, it's free on power). They run pretty cool unless you're passing a lot of power across places.

I've already got heatsinks on my SoC, ethernet chip and regulator but they've barely made any difference, maybe 3-4C at the lowest average idle temperature and no difference at all to the higher end (i.e. without heatsinks the temperature varied from 46 to 48C, with sinks it's 43 to 48C). I tested the fan before and it dropped the temperature to about 33C, which isn't bad from 5V, 80mA fan that's narrower than my thumb!

Wow, is temperature really a concern with a Raspberry Pi? I wouldn't have thought so, but then again I did see an ad for a kit that included some heat sinks.

What have you connected to it that draws any significant power?

Heatsinks are a common upgrade because they're cheap and as @TenEightyOne says, they're free cooling; people go for them regardless of whether they need them just because 'why not', basically. People do mount fans (I've seen one or two 'plates' that have fan drivers on them) if they're overclocking and pushing the hardware but 80% of the time you don't need them, but because I don't know what I'm doing with mine yet - I may turn it into an emulator, and you can run Descent, Quake 3 and other power-hungry 3D games natively on it - I figured I might as well work out how to monitor the temperature. There's also the fact that I have these tiny 7-seg displays and a really small, relatively low power (0.4W, 5V) fan with nothing else to use them with, so...

In terms of peripherals, I've only got my PiTFT (which kills the airflow between it and the Pi by closing off three sides, gets quite warm independently of the Pi anyway and draws 75mA at all times) and camera module (probably draws a few µA 99% of the time but the datasheet helpfully states every spec as 'TBD'...). Very rarely I'll connect a keyboard and mouse. Eventually I want to have it in an enclosure, though, and if it's already nearly 50C when idling and not enclosed in any way (except by the TFT) I'd like to have a constant readout so I can be sure. Also it's just a nice Python exercise, I guess.

 

[DQuaN]

Installed a Corsair Hydro H55. A birthday present from my Vic.

 

[BobK]

I've already got heatsinks on my SoC, ethernet chip and regulator but they've barely made any difference, maybe 3-4C at the lowest average idle temperature and no difference at all to the higher end (i.e. without heatsinks the temperature varied from 46 to 48C, with sinks it's 43 to 48C). I tested the fan before and it dropped the temperature to about 33C, which isn't bad from 5V, 80mA fan that's narrower than my thumb!



Heatsinks are a common upgrade because they're cheap and as @TenEightyOne says, they're free cooling; people go for them regardless of whether they need them just because 'why not', basically. People do mount fans (I've seen one or two 'plates' that have fan drivers on them) if they're overclocking and pushing the hardware but 80% of the time you don't need them, but because I don't know what I'm doing with mine yet - I may turn it into an emulator, and you can run Descent, Quake 3 and other power-hungry 3D games natively on it - I figured I might as well work out how to monitor the temperature. There's also the fact that I have these tiny 7-seg displays and a really small, relatively low power (0.4W, 5V) fan with nothing else to use them with, so...

In terms of peripherals, I've only got my PiTFT (which kills the airflow between it and the Pi by closing off three sides, gets quite warm independently of the Pi anyway and draws 75mA at all times) and camera module (probably draws a few µA 99% of the time but the datasheet helpfully states every spec as 'TBD'...). Very rarely I'll connect a keyboard and mouse. Eventually I want to have it in an enclosure, though, and if it's already nearly 50C when idling and not enclosed in any way (except by the TFT) I'd like to have a constant readout so I can be sure. Also it's just a nice Python exercise, I guess.

Which variant do you have? Model A, B or B+? I understand the B has the highest current drain at 700ma, and the B+ is "significantly improved" but I haven't seen any numbers for the B+. I have a B+ BTW.

I haven't seen anything on how to add heatsink(s) or where to get them or anything aside from the aforementioned kit. I also haven't really checked out the RPi resources available yet. I did download all the issues of MagPi, halfway through issue 4 right now. I'm not figuring on overclocking my device at all, not enough performance gain to be made; the Pi is slow and overclocking/overvolting it just doesn't change that all that much (the slowness isn't a criticism of the device by any means, just a statement of fact).

Speaking of speed though, I have a project I've been involved with for a while that has something over 125,000 lines of C source code. The linux box I've been using for the last eight years or so (2.8GHz Pentium 4) compiles it in 45 seconds. The Pi took ten minutes to compile it (my new machine does it in ten seconds ).

 

[sesselpupser]

Speaking of speed though, I have a project I've been involved with for a while that has something over 125,000 lines of C source code. The linux box I've been using for the last eight years or so (2.8GHz Pentium 4) compiles it in 45 seconds. The Pi took ten minutes to compile it (my new machine does it in ten seconds ).

Yeah, I've heard it can take up to an hour to compile the code for the Descent source port, seeing as it'd take me about a quarter of that time to download it on my PC I don't think I'll bother...

As for heatsinks, they're typically just tiny self-adhesive things, not much more to say about them; I bought mine from here but I've seen a few places selling more or less the same thing. I've got a model B Rev.2 (with the P5 and 6 headers and GPIO 27 instead of 21, for whatever reason), and it hit 48C today doing absolutely nothing at all. In the shade, too, though it has been kind of warm today. That is if you're out of the wind and rain, anyway.

 

[TB]

I spent most of the day either perched on a wobbly 20 foot tall, one man lift of jumping out of said lift onto a roof to set up a construction camera only to realize that IT was given the incorrect MAC address so nothing works. Looks like I'll be braving the lift/roof again tomorrow!