Bought any computing stuff today?

[Feanor]

You can generally stick 48V up something that speaks 802.3af and it'll just get on with it.

Just like this, it's my home-brew PoE injector from before I had a PoE switch:


20160401_145411 by Ron Lowe, on Flickr

Only this one is wired with Ass-Backwards Cisco pre-standard polarity.

[Kim]

Heh.  Is the blue cable the old two-100M-ports-on-one-cable bodge?  I think I've mostly eradicated those.

I've got a proper Cisco PoE injector somewhere.  And possibly a bulletproof 802.11b WEP-era access point to go with it.

[Feanor]

No, no such bodgery!

The 3 patch cables you see all go to the switch.
Of the 3 cables inside the wall, 2 went to WAPs with added hard-patched 48v.
The 3rd access point was never needed, and that cable was re-purposed for the weather station server, and no longer carries the 48v.  That's the blue wire.

My phones all have proper Cisco PoE in-line injectors.
There's a bank of them, they all clip together nice and pretty.
They are fed from a single open-frame 48v PSU, rather than a pile of wall-warts.

[Morat]

Nice Labelling

Top tip for PoE - get a second hand HP Procurve switch. They last pretty much forever and come up on ebay all the time. You can get a 24 port 10/100 switch (with gigabit uplinks) for £50. All Gigabit ones are more expensive, but they're all excellent.

[David Martin]

A Piface LCD interface board to see if it can work with my 'hack the lab' project. And a cheap HDMI -> VGA adapter.

[tiermat]

Ordered last week, but has just arrived, a Oneplus Three. Just, now, need to wait for BT to send me a nano sim before I can use it.

[David Martin]

Should soon have a decent pile of Pi zero for my class next semester.

[Vince]

An ATX power supplier.

The one in the server had dies and the only spare one in the house only had a 20 pin plug.

[Dibdib]

Apparently dispatched from Nozama today: a shiny new graphics card (ATI Radeon R9 380 4gb) and a shiny 240gb SSD (Crucial BX200) to replace a somewhat aging graphics card which can't keep up with modern gamez and a spinny-disc drive which seems to be close to crapping out.

My wish list also included a new CPU, motherboard and RAM but that'll have to wait a while until pennies from the mountain bike project recover.

[Maverick]

A new domain - twoberries.scot to go with the current twoberries.com for when independence comes 

[Morat]

A couple more of these little Linx windows tablets. We've now got 8 in use and they've been really good (so far!).

linkeh

[Afasoas]

So, with the RasPi recording Garage Temps, I find the idea of running a fully fledged weather station tempting.

A few mouse clicks later, I learn Maplin sell one for sixty BRITTISH pounds and with the addition of a RFM01 transceiver, the Pi can be made to read the data that the Maplin weather station collects. This expenditure could of course be justified as it will mean my planned smart central heating controller will be able to take account of weather conditions. My theory is detecting a drop in temperature and turning the Central Heating on sooner rather than later could save some energy.

And with all the heavy rain we've had lately, it'd be nice to see some data on a graph!

[Jaded]

A USB 3.1 SATA cable. I bought it and didn't pay for delivery. It arrived within 24 hours. Go figure!

It's rather useful.

[Kim]

So, with the RasPi recording Garage Temps, I find the idea of running a fully fledged weather station tempting.

A few mouse clicks later, I learn Maplin sell one for sixty BRITTISH pounds and with the addition of a RFM01 transceiver, the Pi can be made to read the data that the Maplin weather station collects. This expenditure could of course be justified as it will mean my planned smart central heating controller will be able to take account of weather conditions. My theory is detecting a drop in temperature and turning the Central Heating on sooner rather than later could save some energy.

And with all the heavy rain we've had lately, it'd be nice to see some data on a graph!

I've got a Maplin weather station.  The device described as a rain gauge is in fact a means of monitoring the spider population.

[Afasoas]

So, with the RasPi recording Garage Temps, I find the idea of running a fully fledged weather station tempting.

A few mouse clicks later, I learn Maplin sell one for sixty BRITTISH pounds and with the addition of a RFM01 transceiver, the Pi can be made to read the data that the Maplin weather station collects. This expenditure could of course be justified as it will mean my planned smart central heating controller will be able to take account of weather conditions. My theory is detecting a drop in temperature and turning the Central Heating on sooner rather than later could save some energy.

And with all the heavy rain we've had lately, it'd be nice to see some data on a graph!

I've got a Maplin weather station.  The device described as a rain gauge is in fact a means of monitoring the spider population.

I already know how big the spider population is. There's approximately 10 for every corner in the house and twenty for every cupboard. Add to that 5 per square metre of Garage and 7 per cubic meter of roof.

[Mr Larrington]

Been waiting ten days but finally someone in the UK has got some examples of the latest Nvidia GPU graphics cards in stock, which should make the 4k monitor sing and dance.

[Kim]

One of these just arrived: http://www.portablepowersupplies.co.uk/portapow-dual-usb-power-monitor-v3/

I'd pre-ordered it, as for 9 quid including shipping it seemed worth a punt.

Initial impressions are that it does what it says on the tin.  Build quality and accuracy is substantially better than the incredibly useful but cheese-quality USB volt/amp meters you get on eBay for a couple of USD.  That it keeps a non-volatile running total of amp-hours is a major bonus.

My only complaints are that a single button UI makes for a lot of clicking (but keeps costs down, so fair enough), that the display is almost unreadable without the backlight, and that the current accumulated registers are numbered 1-9 rather than 0-9 or even 1-0 (surely everyone who has use for such a device can cope with 0 as an index).

[Greenbank]

BT finally upgraded my cabinet to FTTC (only 4 years after they originally said it was just 3 months away).

BT Infinity ordered. BT TV ordered (currently using an old Sky box as a freeview box). Just need to speak to upstairs and downstairs neighbours to see if they need their aerial sorted (ours isn't working) when I get someone in to do that.

Gigabit powerline adapters ordered (I have some computers that don't do wifi in another room).

Gigabit switch and new Cat-6 patch cables ordered. I know my old random cat5 cables will probably work, but I've been hoarding random cables for years so it's finally time I got rid of the old lot and started again.

And my Raspberry Pi stuff arrived so I've got another project to build...

[Afasoas]

A few bits an pieces sorted out.

TalkTalk finally fixed the aDSL line.
So I complained bitterly, obtained some refundage and then switched out to Post Office broadband - it looks like the best value contract and given that it's for failover, should be sufficient. I honestly don't think it will be any better than TalkTalk should things go pear-shaped, but I can quite justify the spendiness of AAISP etc.

Ordered a bridgeable aDSL modem as I don't need the extra trickery/power consumption of a "super-duper-voodoo-hub". And whilst I was there, ordered some 4 gang extension leads with IEC 14 connectors so that I can run the modem/switch (along with the servers) off the UPS backup outlets and the nuc/brix/pi from UPS surge protected outlets.

Some ASUS iKVM modules for both servers so that I can has out-of-band management also made the list. Mainly because the server boards were EOL ~2 years ago and the modules are getting rarer/more expensive. With the firewall virtualised on one of the servers, I'd still be limited on what I can do away from home unless I switch to a highly available pfSense arrangement.

So that leaves me contemplating some more spendy stuff, which will inevitably have to wait a while. The main server has an 'idle' power consumption of 21W* with the quad port NIC - I'd have to change the PSU, boot disk, CPU, fans in the backup server as well as adding RAM/quad port NIC to get it's power consumption down to something reasonable, whilst making it suitable for running another virtualised firewall. I'd also have to obtain a new switch as I'd need 6 ports just for the firewall->WAN connections. Maybe it's overkill, but the server's gone down unexpectedly twice the last two years and that represents a major inconvenience when I'm on-call.

*Could be less with a modern NIC

[Vince]

A 'new' rack mounted server (SGI Supermicro Twin Server) from ebay. The intention is to use one node for home storage and media purposes and the other for database and html development.

[Vince]

A 'new' rack mounted server (SGI Supermicro Twin Server) from ebay. The intention is to use one node for home storage and media purposes and the other for database and html development.

I think we'll call that a failure.
The server contains 12, yes twelve, fans and consequently is slightly quieter than a 737 engine spooling up vacuum cleaner. I tried disconnecting one of the pairs of fans, but the BIOS just drove the remaining fans faster. There is nowhere in the house it can't be heard.

[Wombat]

Been waiting ten days but finally someone in the UK has got some examples of the latest Nvidia GPU graphics cards in stock, which should make the 4k monitor sing and dance.

Which one's that, Mr L?

I'm about to "go 4K", and allegedly my onboard graphics does 4K, but I'm suspicious it might do better with a real graphics card.  However, I have a pathological hatred of noisy PC's, and wanted a silent fanless card.  My early investigations (considering I lost touch with graphics card developments about 10 years or more, ago) suggest that getting anything that will drive 4K and has a displayport output is quite big, noisy and expensive.  I'm not into gaming, but I do want good video, and obviously a quality output for photo editing.  I may also decide I want a dual monitor setup, with the existing 1080p monitor as the other one.  That uses a DVI-D input, but I can't recall if it also has displayport (I don't think so, but I'll check later).

Any polite suggestions as to "not too extreme" graphics cards that tick my particular boxes?

[Mr Larrington]

Mine is an MSI GEFORCE 1080 Gaming X which, far from being fanless, has a pair of them.  They'e a lot quieter than the Nvidia no-name job that was in the machine to start with but combine that with the two fans in the PC and it's not silent by any means.  The music and lorry noises drown them out though

[ian]

I'm not sure why any semi-decent graphics card won't drive 4k, it's not really speed, it's bandwidth. A fairly middle-of-road Radeon in my iMac drives my 5k and a second 1920x1200 panel.

In silence. I think there's a fan. I've never actually heard it.

[Kim]

A 'new' rack mounted server (SGI Supermicro Twin Server) from ebay. The intention is to use one node for home storage and media purposes and the other for database and html development.

I think we'll call that a failure.
The server contains 12, yes twelve, fans and consequently is slightly quieter than a 737 engine spooling up vacuum cleaner. I tried disconnecting one of the pairs of fans, but the BIOS just drove the remaining fans faster. There is nowhere in the house it can't be heard.

My rule of thumb is that if you want a quiet server, you've got to mantle it from parts that don't have 'server' written on them and sacrifice the space efficiency.

(Current home server is in a 4U case designed for disk arrays:  High-end desktop motherboard that doesn't have rigid ideas about fans.  About a dozen empty hot-swap 3.5" drive bays on the front (and a few with disks), 4 slow-revving 80mm fans in the middle controlled by a gamer d00d 5.25" bay fan controller, and low-end CPU and high-efficiency ATX PSU with 120mm fans on tickover.  Main compromise is lack of filtration on the dust intakes, but you wouldn't get that on server hardware either.)