Category: Software

I swapped out the 80mm fan in the router, it had been making weird noises. It’s a Dell box, and the fan was encased in this weird plastic mounting thing. It has cylinders that go through each hole and connect to a grill on the back with “Dell” written on it. I got it off by wedging a small screwdriver in between the fan and the front at the corners – when I did so the front started to click loose. I got the new fan in there easily enough, and slid it into its slots in the case. The green plastic air duct thing snapped on to the CPU heatsink.

My Linksys router is now running DD-WRT. I downloaded my stuff from here, as it’s a WRT54GS Version 6, and followed this handy guide. I haven’t had connection problems since using it, which is nice, although I’m not entirely sure that’s because of the firmware, as I’ve changed other things as well. I wasn’t aiming for a scientific experiment, I just wanted my connections to stop dropping intermittently.

The other thing I did was print out this parabolic antenna. It looks kinda funny stuck onto my wireless antenna, and the downside is then that you have to aim it and sacrifice omnidirectional connectivity, but this might also be helping.

I had installed fresh drivers to see if I could get my D-Link DWL-520+ to support anything better than WEP. No such luck. The applet the driver installed didn’t even recognize my card, although the card still worked. It was strange because even though the icon said it was not connected to a wireless network, I could browse just fine. I uninstalled the D-Link Air Plus stuff, and the card was recognized and configured automatically, at which point things once again became sane.

When Mr. Smith talks about current events, he usually brings up listening to NPR in the morning. It occured to me that I would like very much to listen to NPR in the morning, so I set up mplayer to first play a tapered 440Hz sine wave, in case the connection doesn’t work, then connect to the URL conveniently listed here.

It took me this long, but I finally figured out that Rosetta@Home is far, far more memory-bound than Seti@home. Zombie 1, which has a Celeron @ 432 MHz and 123MB of RAM, had if I recall correctly an load average that was maybe 2 – 3. I suspended Rosetta, and what I had thought was the power light turned off. It was the hard drive light. The thing was eating swap like no other. I have to get more RAM in the poor thing. Zombie 4 was using swap too, although to a much lesser extent. It has a Pentium 3 @ 728 MHz and 124MB of RAM, so the CPU is a factor too.  For now I’m going to detach Zombie 1 from Rosetta and start it back up on Seti@Home, where I don’t remember that happening. In the longer term, I’m probably going shopping for some RAM.

EDIT: Success. Load average is now 1.00.

I added my old 120GB server hard drive to my eMachine. Windows and Ubuntu now have drives to themselves. I spent what was probably literally half an hour staring at the JKDefrag screen, until I realized that because my Firefox profile was on the Linux drive I could browse without locking up too many files. QDB FTW.

When I put the drive in I was hoping they would be cable select, (ATA >.<) but they weren’t. Luckily, I had taken one of my 20GB drives from the school over here, and took a jumper from that to set the drive to secondary. Before installing Intrepid, I tweaked the BIOS. Apparently I had reset it to defaults after messing with the fan speeds, so I once again disabled the onboard sound and video. After some research, I also enabled ROM shadowing and some other stuff in the hopes of extra speed. Intrepid is shiny.

It’s nice to have more space. The extra space allowed for a thorough defrag. I ran JKDefrag twice – once to sort everything alphabetically, another to defragment. Woo.