Artsy Recycling

Even when you actually want to recycle computer parts (especially scrap parts that do not quite work anymore) it’s quite hard to do so. One possible solution is to simply chuck everything in the usual recycling bin and hope for the best. Or you can try to find a metal reseller. Or you can use the parts in a creative way. Kind of.

I disassembled the CFM01 and got quite a lot of spare parts from the 1U Pentium III servers. The casings aren’t all that interesting since they’re fairly cheap (compared to, say, a Dell PowerEdge server) and the CPUs are useless. Nobody wants them. Even recycling the all-copper heat sink proved a problem. So I used them differently.

Get to Know Conky

While Ubuntu/Gnome/Compiz offer various widgets to monitor computer activity, I think they tend too much to offer a strong visual effect rather than actual useful, structured, information about what’s going on in your computer. Sometimes, it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes you want to know more.

One tool that’s not the mega-eye-candy but is very configurable and actually useful is Conky, a “free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.”

Powers of Ten (so to speak)

I am not sure if you are old enough to remember the 1977 IBM movie Powers of Ten (trippy version, without narration) [also at the IMDB and wikipedia], but that’s a movie that sure put things in perspective. Thinking in terms of powers of ten helps me sort things out when I am considering a design problem. Thinking of the scale of a problem in terms of physical scale is a good way to assess its true importance for a project. Sometimes the problem is the one to solve, sometimes, it is not. It’s not because a problem is fun, enticing, or challenging, that it has to be solved optimally right away because, in the correct context, considering its true scale, it may not be as important as first thought.

Maybe comparing problems’ scales to powers of ten in the physical realm helps understanding where to put your efforts. So here are the different scales and what I think they should contain:

More Blinking Lights (and a disgression)

In Blinking Lights I told you about how I feel the modern computer for its exterior, except for its screen, is boring. When I look at my Antec case, I see a large, silent black box, which, by its very definition, is uninteresting at best. Something like a rock that slowly dissipates heat.

However Bill Buzbee built a computer that has an interesting exterior, and a much more interesting interior: the Magic-1. The Magic-1 is a computer running at 4.something MHz, and is in the same computational power range as the original 8086 4.77 Mhz IBM PC, except with a more advanced instruction set.

The Magic-1 Computer