Another day, another Googlewhack

I think I ought to spin off Googlewhacks into their own blog, or something. Maybe put together a mechanism in my upcoming homebrew content management system for recording them. I'll ponder that whilst wondering if it's all really worth it...

... of course it is!

The latest one - an eight-sided solid is buggered about with by a child of unmarried parents (vulg.) Here it is.

More Bedingfield

Old mucker Dave has scanned the photo of him and Bedingfield back in 1998, but the great big girl is too embaressed by his appearance then and has whited-out his own face. The big girl!

So I went rummaging, found the old photo of him taken in 1997 for the Health and Safety website, and put him back in. Seamless.


Original whited out version (the big girl)

Daniel and Natasha Bedingfield

Turns out my former workmate and stooge from the hospital Dave met the pop siblings at a Christian mission weekend in Porthcawl in 1998. That's ace =)

The Richard Whitely Inn: Beddingfields

Yet a-bleedin-nother

A complex solid shape and the act of throwing things about a bit.

Whack this you mutha.

Whackage de la «Google»

Another one. Child doctor meets, as Dictionary.com puts it, "A jellied loaf or sausage made from chopped and boiled parts of the feet, head, and sometimes the tongue and heart of an animal, usually a hog." Sounds like the sort of shit Gazmond likes to eat as part of a cooked breakfast!

I have commanded armies...

... and conquered worlds.

The Advert Channel has launched on Sky Digital 694. And they play the Playstation advert with the ace spooky kid! (Image from BBC News... bad boy, pinching bandwidth - but I pay my licence fee and it's a public broadcaster, so it's my bandwidth too.)

Further adventures with Ikea PC

Last night I fitted my power switch. And here it is:

As previously noted, it's a proper arcade machine button. A few years back, when I had aspirations of building an arcade machine (or at least some arcade controllers) I picked up a whole load of them on eBay - used buttons with new microswitches; eight red, eight blue and white one and two-player start buttons. Then I didn't actually get around to doing anything with them at all.

From this top view you might be able to make out that it's hooked up rather nicely. I didn't do what Retro Gamer magazine made the mistake of and solder the wires to the microswitch, but got proper spade connectors, soldered them onto my cable, crimped the ends and sealed the joints with heat-shrink tubing. Heat-shrink is the best stuff in the world for hiding all sins against soldering.

You can also see the power and hard drive LEDs flapping around in there. I'll find somewhere for them later.

When I took the second photo the PC was actually on as well! I discovered that the laptop drive I'd dropped into it had Windows 95 on it, and looking at the files lurking on it, was last used in my very old, very dead laptop several years ago. I don't remember where I picked it up from though, because that laptop had a 600Mb drive when I got it!

So what's next? Finding some way to attach all the components securely and fabricating a back panel, I think. I'm also thinking of replacing the fan on the CPU for one that's less loud, though I think minimising the vibration that's being transmitted into the hardboard base might achieve some nice quietness! Eventually I'll see about a paint-job inside and find a nice soft rubber to get rid of my pencil marks outside. Once that's done, installing a new OS I think. I stumbled over 98lite yesterday which lets you strip away all of the stuff Microsoft said couldn't be removed from Windows 98 in their anti-trust lawsuits - big fat liars that they are - so I might have an ultra-compact Windows 98 installation. I'd go for a more recent one - LitePC can strip down a lot of Win2K and WinXP - but when you've only got 1.6Gb to start with you need all the space you can get. The same company can get Windows 98 down to 8Mb, but they don't have a free version of the tools to do that, sadly...

Ikea PC

The lovely, hairy Gazmond got me a Mini-ITX motherboard for my birthday. It's an older model, the Epia-800 - one of the original Mini-ITX form-factor boards. If you compare it to the one in Yoshimi, my PC hooked up to our TV and hi-fi, you can tell it's behind the times.

Yoshimi has two Firewire ports, four USB2.0 ports, a very capable 1GHz processor and connectors for an extra serial port and a floppy (yeah, I know... in this day and age) onboard, with a not-bad hardware accelerated video output and impressive 5.1 surround sound capabilities.

Epia-800 has four USB1.1 ports provided you have the cable for the header, which I don't. So two USB. One serial. Underpowered processor. Fairly good stereo sound. Poor graphics.

But it's not fair to compare them, and I'm not dissing the Epia-800 - there's an identically specced board (but not so small) running Kryten, my Linux box. I don't expect to get blistering performance from either of them.

Anyway. Some time ago I spotted an old external Syquest drive at work which was going to be binned. I saw Mini-ITX written all over it (in my mind, obviously) so I saved it from the trash and stripped it down last week to try and install the Epia-800 into it. I immediately spotted a problem though - metalwork isn't my forté and my tools are, on the whole, not suitable for metal. My little fake Dremel had enough difficulty grinding an opening for the cable in my Elite lightboxes! So I gave up on that plan, and decided to get back to my Ikea-loving ways, and mount everything in something Ikea-y and wooden.

I'm a fan of the Ikea Bås box frames, as anyone who enters my world will know. Not only do I have them turned into lightboxes, I've got them used for displaying Guatemalan worry dolls, collections of cat things and soon for showing the valves removed from the old telly mentioned elsewhere and as a UV box for making Buddy Christ look ace and glowy. I've even got an LCD display hooked up to my work PC built into one! Yes, I love them frames. And you can get a bigger version that's almost A4 sized.

So, I got the frame out from upstairs (it had one of Jayne's dolls in like some kind of mad Leninesque mausoleum) and ordered myself a small PC power supply - the sort used in very narrow servers (a 1U PSU to the initiated). What would you know, they seemed to fit quite nicely:

With a clear mind of what I had to achieve, I went out and bought a saw blade that fits into a Stanley knife. It more or less turns a Stanley knife into a hand-powered jigsaw, and all for 99p. A bit of drilling, sawing and sanding later I had two squarish holes. Squarish, but not square. So yesterday, at the same time as getting a laser-guided circular saw (true!) from B&Q, I picked up some wood rasp files and made the openings a little more regular. It would be bad form not to try putting the components in to test the holes were sufficient, so I hooked up everything I had ready and slid the glass in over the top. Perfect.

What you can see there is the PSU and motherboard with a 2.5" laptop hard drive at the bottom-right. It's not a large capacity drive (I think it's about 1.4Gb, so it's pretty tiny) but it's small and it's quiet, unlike the couple of 3.5" drives I've got knocking around the place.

Currently missing are the power/reset switches and power/drive lights. I figure I can get away without having a reset switch really, and my power switch will be an old arcade machine button (because, like all geeks, I have loads of them hanging around the house). I've ripped LEDs from an ancient PC case and will find somewhere to put them inside - the great thing is there's a huge window to find places within!

Here's a complementary view from the back of the case, so you can see my wavy sawing:

No backplate there because it's gone the same way as the USB cables, so I'll cut up a plastic take-away lid to cover the big gaps, and paint it black. I might paint the whole inside black as well, depending on how it looks with some black card in there.

So there you go - another PC for me to look after. This one will probably have some kind of Windows on it, just so that I can run the stuff that WINE can't cope with on my Linux box, like the stuff for a Cybiko wireless gateway. More on all that as and when...