Search results

  1. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    Yes, exactly what I had in mind. :D
  2. J

    Bush...I can't believe how idotic he is.

    You know this is about oil, I know it's about oil, but sadly the average American couldn't care less. In fact, the average SUV-driving moron probably supports anything that keeps the price of gas low. All I hear now from people are complaints that the price of gas is going up. The minute I...
  3. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    The play dough was a nice idea. :) It seems to have worked well. Steel should work just fine for melting lead. I think most steels melt at well over 2000°F, so you should have nothing to worry about as long as there are no plastic handles. I don't think duct tape and tin foil would work...
  4. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    Did you make sure that it is 100% silicon caulk(generally used in kitchens and bathrooms) and not acrylic or siliconized acrylic? Did it smell like vinegar or more like petroleum distillates? The acrylic caulk or siliconized acrylic caulk will take days to get completely hard, and will not be...
  5. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    The heat's no big deal once it's cured(i.e. once all the water comes out). This takes about 24 to 48 hours. We're only talking ~600°F here. I've used plaster of paris molds multiple times for lead castings. I've even had luck with one-use cardboard molds, although these sometimes ignite if...
  6. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    I think I would make the initial mold of the HDD top with silicon rubber. Home Depot has it in caulking gun sized tubes for about $3 to $4, and one tube should be plenty. Cover the top of the drive and go down along the sides about 1/2" or so(exact amount not critical). Put on about 1/4" at a...
  7. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    Here's the alloy I was talking about: http://www.micromark.com/casting.html Go to the bottom of the page and look at type 160 and type 280. Also a lot of other goodies for making molds here. The two low-temp alloys run $14.95 for 11.4 oz. They also have something that's almost pure...
  8. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    That should work, although you'll might need to get the steel plate fairly hot before hand so the lead has a chance to make good contact with the plate before it solidifies. Before you embark on this project though a couple of precautions: 1)Work in a well-ventilated area(lead fumes are not too...
  9. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    You don't live anywhere close to a range, do you? :lol: I agree getting that much lead would be problematic and costly, but you could make an exact mold of the WD drive's top for a perfect fit. Not easily done with steel or even aluminum, whereas lead can be easily melted and cast on a stove...
  10. J

    hdd mod (in the box)

    Very intriguing. This is definitely something worth trying. If the sound is really damped because of the sheer mass of the plates, probably lead sheets would work best of all. Lead is also fairly soft, so it should be easier to work with than steel or aluminum. In fact, if you needed to make...
  11. J

    Decommissioning old hard drives

    A couple of my own ideas: 1)Buy a few inexpensive removable hard drive racks(Cyberguys has one for only $7.99), put a rack in each of your machines, and use the drive for backup/ file transfer. 2)Use it to upgrade the drive in your Linux/other experimental box. 3)Sell it on eBay. I'm frankly...
  12. J

    Does your computer have a tail pipe? These guys think it...

    Very interesting, although if only PC makers would move to 120mm fans you could move the same volume of air without the need for a muffler. Those little high-speed fans they put on chipsets and video cards are the really annoying ones. They make your PC sound like it's full of mosquitoes. To...
  13. J

    WTB: 4 pieces 64MB 72-pin EDO SIMMs (double-sided, 60ns)

    Look for a -6 or -7 on the chips. This usually denotes 60 or 70 ns. If in doubt post a picture and I can tell you what it is. I have a bunch of 4s myself. Anything less that 16 MB is just about worthless these days. Just check eBay, and the selling prices there are high compared to online...
  14. J

    WTB: 4 pieces 64MB 72-pin EDO SIMMs (double-sided, 60ns)

    I'm interested in buying four(4) of these for my Linux machine(currently 32 MB). Best price so far on Pricewatch is $8 each, but it seems everyone is charging something like $20 S&H. :o One place had them for $10 each with free shipping(USPS-uninsured). If anybody has some in their parts...
  15. J

    Another self test...

    I am Yoda... The wisest master of all... 700 years old and still f*ck you up, I can :lol:
  16. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    Thanks for the links. I program in C, so I gather that the gcc compiler will take care of compiling my code to run on Linux instead of DOS. As I said, there are no DOS specific disk accesses, just reading and writing to the console, which I assume is programmed the same under Linux.
  17. J

    Hardware innovations you'd like to see become mainstream

    One thing I definitely would appreciate is a replacement for the mouse that basically points at whatever I'm looking at, and has buttons activated by some basic thought pattern or minor muscle movement(maybe the small muscles under the ears). Since I have intermittant carpal tunnel syndrome, it...
  18. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    A few more.... 1)Do Linux partitions need to be defragmented? If so, what do you use? I've found no references in the documentation so far. 2)I'm using the ext2 file system. Is there any good reason to change to something else later on? What are the good/bad points of the more common Linux...
  19. J

    Did You Know You Are Rich? About Taxes & Tax Reduction

    That article hit the nail on the head. It could very well have been written about the NYC Teachers Union. There was once an expose in the local paper about the bureaucratic bloat of the Board of Education, caused in large part by union work rules forbidding you from doing anything outside your...
  20. J

    How do you get rid of the stupid Macromedia Flash pop-up?

    Re: How do you get rid of the stupid Macromedia Flash pop-up Excellent! This should be a part of every default Windows install. Thanks for the fix. :mrgrn:
  21. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    I figured out how to boot Windows off my primary slave, In case it's of any use to anybody just add the following lines to the lilo.conf file: other=/dev/hdb1 label=Windows table=/dev/hdb map-drive=0x80 to=0x81 map-drive=0x81 to=0x80 The last four lines fool Windows into thinking it's booting...
  22. J

    Scanning mylar media

    You might try putting a sheet of inkjet paper behind the item being scanned if that's at all possible with your scanner(might not work on a sheet-fed scanner). It usually works for me. You might still have problems with the mylar though because of the shiny surface. The problem here is that...
  23. J

    Blizzard

    I hate that SOB. The expressways he built cut a lot of neighbourhoods in two. Thankfully he was stopped before he built one right through Manhattan. He had planned to raze Chinatown and other parts of lower Manhattan for it. He is evil in a way Bill Gates couldn't evil imagine. :evil: Evil...
  24. J

    How many of these things can you remember?

    We didn't get color until I think 1967 or thereabouts. I think it was the second season of Star Trek because it really was a big deal at the time for me to watch that show in color. Before that we had a huge B&W console with a 21" screen, I think. The thing broke quite a bit, too, and the...
  25. J

    Memory prices stable for the past few months

    I guess it is just me, then. Probably since I don't have any machines that use DDR I just look at the price of PC133, and that seems to have fewer fluctuations than the other types.
  26. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    I just want to thank everyone for their help so far. It's greatly appreciated. I passed what might be some sort of right of passage in Linux yesterday-I compiled my own kernel. As I mentioned above, I needed to load the vfat module on startup, so I figured why not just make a new kernel while...
  27. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    I figured this one out. They're both FAT16 partitions, but the solution should work with FAT32 as well. What I had to do was edit the /etc/fstab file(which I had already changed to get the drives to mount on startup) and change the file system type from msdos to vfat. I also had to make sure...
  28. J

    Memory prices stable for the past few months

    Is it just me, or does it seem like RAM prices have been at their least volatile(at least by my memory-no pun intended) during the last few months? I've been checking RAM prices on Pricewatch on a fairly regular basis. After the price dipped to very low levels(a stick of PC133 256 MB for $10)...
  29. J

    Techie Rants

    Those stories just bought to mind one of my favorite pet peeves-namely people who don't know how to properly handle electronics. Not just customer returns, but I've seen auctions on eBay where they take a picture of a M/B, processor, RAM, or card on a carpet. Once I see that, I completely lose...
  30. J

    Techie Rants

    I can definitely relate to some of those stories having repaired electronics for the last 15 years, and having sometimes dealt with customers whose shoe size is larger than their IQ. Maybe one of these days I'll start my own website with some of my tales, including some really stupid things...
  31. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    Here's couple more for all the Linux gurus around here: The disk I have Linux on has the small DOS partition I mentioned, and the rest is Linux. I configured LILO to give me a choice of booting into DOS or Linux just to see how to do it. I have absolutely nothing in the DOS partition. I just...
  32. J

    Blizzard

    Newer doesn't always mean more fuel efficient. Just look at SUVs. Some of the larger cities like Tokyo also require you to have an off-street place to park before you can get a car. This is something the US would do well to emulate. All those rows of parked cars are an eyesore.
  33. J

    Blizzard

    Well, I agree some of the laws in Singapore are ridiculous, like the ban on chewing gum but I don't see anything wrong with the permit idea. Cars can easily overrun a city and make it unliveable if you let them. In fact, every large city and many smaller ones have chronic traffic and pollution...
  34. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    I finally got around to installing Linux on one of my machines after talking about doing it for a long time. Appropriately enough, given the Linux mascot, I did this last night after the blizzard. The machine is the one that I found, which I talked about here. I put in a 200 MHz MMX processor...
  35. J

    Blizzard

    Tannin and I have both suggested a gas tax as the best way to get people to buy more responsible vehicles. I'm still surprised that more thought isn't given to gas mileage when people buy vehicles just from an economic perspective. A 12 mpg SUV will burn about 22 more gallons of gas than a 100...
  36. J

    Blizzard

    Bush's environmental record is awful, although Clinton's wasn't any better. In fact, it was under Clinton that SUVs were allowed to proliferate. SUVs were/are not required to abide by the same mileage requirements as cars, and Bush's proposal that their mileage be increased by 1.5 mpg in the...
  37. J

    Blizzard

    I have to agree with that. Not just with global warming, but it seems that politicians and world leaders won't do anything about a problem until it comes and bites them in the behind. Maybe when the sea levels start to rise enough that water is at the steps of the Capitol Building or White...
  38. J

    Blizzard

    I'm personally glad when we get hit with snow like this. I went for a nice long walk last night when it started coming down, and another one tonight about two hours ago. With the airports closed and nobody driving everything is so much more peaceful. The air is so much cleaner as well. If...
  39. J

    How many of these things can you remember?

    40 is still very young as far as I'm concerned. I turned 40 this past November 30 and frankly, I still feel the same as I did in high school. I don't look much different either other than that my hair is slightly different now(a bit longer than it used to be and combed differently). My mom's...
  40. J

    Office 97 slow to close documents

    BTW, I like your new avatar, Tea. You didn't accidentally stick your finger in an outlet, did you?
  41. J

    Office 97 slow to close documents

    I'm not sure if it would have anything to do with this particular problem, but did you remove FindFast and a couple of other TSRs that install along with M$Office? The first time I installed M$Office on a machine I noticed that there would inexplicably be drive activity every few minutes, even...
  42. J

    How many of these things can you remember?

    1,2,3,15,16,17,18,19,21,27,28,30,34
  43. J

    DU rounds

    Unfortunately, I looked at that right before dinner. If those images are for real, then they're appalling, although I suspect some of them may have been fakes sent in by someone with an axe to grind. And if they are real, I certainly hope those infants were humanely euthanized. I couldn't...
  44. J

    3DMark03 Released

    :o I guess I won't be getting that on 56K! This is a perfect illustration of how bad software bloat has gotten. Why on earth should a benchmark program require as much space as an OS like Win98? It seems every new generation of faster CPUs is eventually slowed down to the level of their...
  45. J

    10K Western Digital SATA Drive!!!

    It's called the law of conservation of energy. It takes a certain amount of power to spin a disk, which has air resistance, at a certain speed. Since the disks are already microscopically smooth, nothing more can really be done to reduce the aerodynamic drag. Bearing resistance is a much...
  46. J

    1+ TB Hard Drive & Application Proposal

    I had no idea they had gotten that fast. Still, if there's a situation with many random seeks, the drive solution might be better. 30 ms is still 3 orders of magnitude faster than a state-of-the-art tape, although a HDD is obviously not as portable or duarable. I suppose there's enough...
  47. J

    1+ TB Hard Drive & Application Proposal

    The main advantage of this whole idea over tape is the huge decrease in access times. Even if the 1 TB+ drive is a real slug with access times over 30 ms, it will still be orders of magnitude faster than a tape library. Heck, I could probably look in a card catalog, take a book off a shelf...
  48. J

    10K Western Digital SATA Drive!!!

    Looks like they had the good sense to not put a slow actuator on it. 5.2 ms seek + 10K RPM should bring access times down to around 8.2 ms compared to ~13 ms for most 7200 RPM IDE drives. Not too shabby. The only drawbacks I see are price and the need for either a S-ATA card or a P-ATA to...
  49. J

    Lowest pit of hell

    Honestly, I'm amazed that anyone would even try to run XP on such a machine. That must be painful. On the other hand, Win98 or 95 will run quite snappily on such a machine if you don't have anything running in the background. However, 32 MB pretty much limits your choice of software...
  50. J

    A computer-ethical dilemna

    I haven't looked at a tax table in quite some time but I remember when I did my taxes last time I worked for someone else around 1990 that there were huge jumps when your changed tax brackets. For example, there may have been a line that said taxable income $21901 to $22000(tax $3293) followed...
Top