General
The cost of a faulty power supply
When a power supply makes strange noises, it's a sign. It's most definitely a sign you shouldn't ignore, especially if you own a 5 year old Antec. I chose to ignore it and had to live with the consequences.
One morning, I turned on my home theatre PC to watch something, and there was the most disgusting noise coming from the power supply. Seconds later, smoke was billowing from the rear and I knew I was screwed.
Parts salvageable include the optical drive and expansion cards. Everything else appears to be dead and a nasty smell is coming from the motherboard. A good chance to upgrade, I suppose so I went and bought $200 of parts. The shopping list:
- Intel Pentium G620
- ASRock H61DEL motherboard
- 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 memory
- LG 12x Combo BD drive
Hopefully this setup has enough grunt to play the latest Hi10p h.264 content everybody is going on about.
Revamped home page
I've been putting it for years but I have finally replaced the clunky HTML 4.0 page with something a little more 21st century. I've selected a blog engine named Typo.
I've been exploring alternatives to PHP based solutions for a while due to my disdain for the language and managed to settle with something based on Ruby on Rails. Admittedly, the installation of RoR on FreeBSD was a little more than painless. Eventually I ended up using rvm to install Ruby + Rails and everything appears to be perky. Here is a simple but well-working guide: https://gist.github.com/746963
I'll be using this home page to mainly explore Ruby development. I've never been a big blogger so I can't promise frequent updates. An "Old site" link appears in the sidebar to remind everyone of the previous mediocrity :)
