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12 Feb 2021

2021-02-12 11:53 PST

now listening: A Fuller Wine - Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet - Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet

So, I bought an Alienware desktop:

32GB Dual Channel HyperX(FM) FURY DDR4 XMP at 3200MHz
1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD (Boot) + 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage)
10th Gen Intel Core i5 10400F (6-Core, 12MB Cache, 2.9Ghz to 4.3GHz w/Turbo)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER 4GB GDDR6

By contrast, my Thinkpad T480 (purchased in 2018) has

32 GB (16 + 16) DDR4 2400MHz
1 TB Solid State Drive, PCIe-NVMe OPAL2.0 M.2
8th Gen Intel Core i5-8350U (4-Core, 6MB Cache, 1.70GHz to 3.60GHz w/Turbo)
Intel UHD Graphics 620 (rev 07)

The next thing I'm going to need to get is a DAS disk array. I have one in mind, but it'll be expensive, so I have to wait on that. I've kind of wanted a proper desktop to work from, and the Raspi is just a little on the sluggish side for some of the stuff I want to do. The benefit of the desktop is the graphis card, which is basically non-existant on my laptop. Following that, I'll stick another 32GB of RAM in.

I've been wanting a local heavy-duty computing node for a while, in addition to my lightweight pi desktop. I've been looking into options for a while and knew I didn't really have time to spend trying to put together a PC build. I saw the Aurora somewhere, maybe Best Buy while getting a laptop for school, and did some research. The price was right and it's got some decent reviews; every complaint was that the maxed out version ran hot and was a little noisy, which I suspect won't be a huge issue for me.

The dual SIO/2 card showed up in 7 days. I've bought a lot of RC2014 stuff from Spencer, and for a while it would take about 7 days to get from the UK to my house. The stuff I ordered late last year took on the order of three weeks, so it's nice to see the times coming back down.

Going to try to dig into some ARC stuff today, and maybe noodle more on the artifact repository idea.

Update 19:45

Got the ESP8266 WiFi module physically working, the dual SIO/2 card built and installed (including swapping out the 68B50, ROM, and CF card), and now I'm trying to get the module working as a WiFi modem so I can BBS. A friend of mine (hi jeremy) pointed me to the Particles BBS. I kind of want to find a smaller, more tightly knit one - like the tyrfingr IRC server, but a BBS.