Tag: 🖥 Computer

I’ve been using my Antec P182 case for around fifteen years now with no problems at all. I’m on the second computer that’s been in it now. I noticed a fan grinding and upon further inspection noticed another wasn’t spinning.

I’ve had computers for a long time now. Many things have changed. I used to hear all sorts of sounds from my computers that aren’t there any more.

We came across an old unlabeled CD-r in the attic. II had to see what is on it, if anything. I was hoping for some forgotten pictures or something, but sadly, it was just a backup of the Windows 98 CD.

I am uploading all of my ripped CDs to an online backup. It’s really making me notice the difference between our upload and download speeds with our Comcast connection being asymmetric.

I’ve always been fascinated with computers and how they can work, even as a small child. Now that I am reading Racing the Beam, it really helps me understand more how the Atari 2600 worked.

My old trusty hard drive is finally giving me smart errors. I’ve been using it for fourteen years, and it’s been through to computer builds.

I got a new monitor. I didn’t need it, but I wanted on with an actual power button and I thought the touch screen would be nice. It’s been a few months now that I have had my Dell P2418HT for a few months now. Here’s my quick review.

In this day and age where everything is basically designed to die the day after the 1 year warranty expires it’s nice to have a pleasant surprise where things just keep working. Printers in the past for us had been notoriously horrible with dying. The ink jet ones were shit. If you didn’t print often the full ink cartridge would be “empty” or it would dry out and print poorly. No matter the brand or the price they all seemed to be terrible.

I’ve had windows 10 on old Seagate hard drive that I bought in 2007. I really can’t complain about that one. it still works fine. Windows 10 is just anything but efficient with drive use. I hated to buy an SSD for windows which I only boot into once a month if that but I got tired of the click, wait, wait, wait, window shows up with spinning cursor, wait, wait, wait.

After the last experience I had of wasting hours to use a specific program that required windows but required I do certain painfully slow update that took hours of my time I have started to boot into the steaming pile of turds known as windows 10 more than every few months when I need it just to run windows update. I could upgrade to an SSD for windows but I don’t use it enough to justify the cost of another windows tax.

I’ve had the keyboard for 4 years or so I guess. I don’t remember exactly when I had bought it but I have definitely been happy with it since I’ve had it. It has a nice click feeling to the keys and the back lit keys were definitely nice to have for those rare occasions when I have to look for a symbol I don’t use often for it to be muscle memory.

I don’t use Windows often at all but once in a while I need boot into it to use a specific program that I haven’t found an alternative to or stuff like update bios and that sort of thing. It seems that they decided to download the annoyingly slow auto updates exactly the times I need to do something quick and reboot back into FreeBSD which is set up how I want it to be.

Last year I bent my thumb back and it’s had a lump at the joint since then that sometimes irritates me and sometimes it just plain hurts. It happens to hit the edge of the desk when I’m using a mouse at times and my mouse wheel was wearing out and working inconsistently. I tried cleaning it but that didn’t seem to help all that permanently. It lost its clickiness over time too which led me to believe something was worn out inside.

We had an Atari 2600 when we were growing up that my aunt who moved to California bought for us for Christmas (I think) one year. I would guess 1983 or so but I can’t remember exactly when. That is certainly one of the earliest things that got me into trying to understand how computers worked. Before that computers were just something I saw on TV. I wanted to know how that little box does these things.

I was up in the attic the other day digging through boxes looking for something the other day. I was trying to dig up an HDMI cable for something. I keep all my unused cables because you never know when you might need one. Naturally I didn’t have and never actually do seem to have the one I need at the moment. I did stumble on a box with my old zip disks in it.

About 3 years ago I once again found my self needing a new keyboard because my old one had some keys that stopped working. That’s how they always seemed to fail on me other than the one brand new one I dumped orange juice on. Zero out of 5 stars, not recommended. When we were near a few local electronics stores I tried out the ones they had but hey all had the smaller keys like laptop with no movement and no “feel”.

FreeBSD is my main operation system and I do 95 percent of what I need or want to do in that. FreeBSD for 10+ years has been solid as a rock for me. About 2 years ago I built a new computer. The q6600 system I’d built a 10 years prior was showing its age. I was starting to have random glitches that may or may not have been related to the motherboard but Ryzen looked good and for a good price so I figured it’s time to rebuild.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the beta versions and have been really pleased with it. It seems to be much much faster than Firefox 2 was with sites loading pretty much instantly. It seems to be a little easier on memory and a lot easier on the CPU for me on FreeBSD. I really haven’t experienced Firefox slowing down to a crawl after opening a bunch of tabs like I did in previous versions.

Recently I have been seeing Adblock plus brought up pretty often. Adblock plus is an extension for Firefox that blocks web ads. I have the right to block ads and I do that but I think the site owner has the right to block me from using their site. I’d just go somewhere else. I find it interesting that they would want to limit their exposure just because someone is blocking ads.

I’m still using DesktopBSD and still pretty happy with it. Actually it makes using the computer a lot of fun again. It’s fun learning something new and fun remembering and relearning all the different things I remember reading about UNIX. The way things are done are just more interesting to me. The things I had read are coming back to me and making a bit more sense now. I wish I had done this 10 years ago.

I’ve always wanted to switch to Linux but in the past it just hasn’t worked for me. I’d installed Linux twice before but it just didn’t stick for me. Last time I had installed it my hard drive started giving smart errors and then started loosing windows files randomly. We sent that drive back to get it replaced but in the mean time we bought a smaller cheaper drive to put in my computer until the 180 gig one came back.

Alt-Text for Links - Displays the URL of the link in a popup. I find this handy because I know ahead of time where the link is taking me. Download Status bar - This extension keeps track of downloads and shows the information in the status bar. Enhanced History Manager - This basically is an advanced history manager for Firefox. Forcastfox - Shows weather information in the status bar of your browser.