See also www.polarhome.com which has sadly closed shell accounts and shutdown machines.
Discovering SSH, bash, linux etc in 2004 was magical for me. I always liked the idea of SDF and polarhome and did a similar thing with a few friends for a while, albeit with limited success. Proper internet.
Wow I remember this being covered in Custom PC, a magazine in the UK.
I emailed the author to get the modified bootloader source code that he mentions at the end to allow the dual boot between XP and red-hat via a hardware switch. It was magic to me at the time as a 13 year old! I probably still have the code somewhere.
There was something special about Mini-ITX machines at the time, nothing was that small.
I miss the scene and custom cases. MN PCTech still exists and I love reading their builds. It was more of an art to craft custom cases but the payoff was showing up to a lan party with a custom case no one else has.
Also, it was the last serious push of VIA as a processor vendor.
I genuinely miss that era of computing. Simpler, more fun, and with way more but not as crippling problems (except Linux support and WinModem. I'm glad that we're past that).
That era was great - think PC Engines, Soekris, early Mikrotik RouterBoard, etc. Felt proper elite at the time.
I still have one of those C3 embedded aluminium boxes with a pass-through Ethernet bypass port pair. I ran it as a transparent bridging FW, when power went, it turned into a coupler. This is what got me using pfSense.
Another thing VIA C3 had was the integrated Padlock crypto engine, and this was way before AES-NI, supported on both Linux and BSDs. I remember benchmarking SSL against contemporary Xeons at the time and it wasn't even apples and oranges, it was more like tar and fibre optics. Cisco's AIM module throughput at the time felt laughable in comparison.
Atom was OK, but today Intel's N-series are proving great and we are completely spoilt for choice in terms of good, cheap platforms available.
Padlock hash engine can only hash the whole data, not a block of data (not init + update + update + ... + final), so the OpenSSL developer hacked up the MMU to prevent the CPU from accessing next regions and terminate the processing, emulating update() call :)
PC/104 SBCs were smaller (X-Y dimensions, not so much Z as they stacked expansion cards) with similar CPUs. We built some really tiny customs using them back in those days. They were, however, pretty expensive, being targeted at the embedded/industrial market.
Sadly, they axed my "Inside Linux" column after a year, and David Moss's "Inside Windows" too... but they kept my free contributor's subscription running for the next 13 years or so, which was amazingly generous and gave me a lot of enjoyable reading.
I have a 2u drawer that could accept a face panel. It would actually be super useful to be able to access the equipment behind without taking the rack off the wall.
Yes, manifold has been the way to go. I still get geometric artifacts with fast-csg and it doesn't nearly have the same impact on performance. Took a day-long compilation down to 10m for me just adding the `--enable manifold` flag.
I spend an evening hacking together a stack of boards to create a drone interface for both my transmitter (via https://github.com/mikeneiderhauser/CRSFJoystick) and my goggles with a HDMI to composite to 5.8GHz video link.
Is there a maintained open source server counterpart?
It’s really great to see games that would otherwise die live on through a community. Ultima online is a great example with the likes of ClassicUO (amazing client) and ModernUO (an active attempt at a modernised server)
Yes there were many. This is how I got into programming in 2006. The fact that OSRS even happened is because Jagex was losing a lot of people to private servers.
I've been out of the community for 1.5 decades now but there (used to) be a thriving private server community at https://rune-server.org/index.php which shaped my entire programming career
Whether there are still actively maintained ones I'm not sure though.
Also Runelite isn’t open source client per se, its just open source client wrapper that makes many functions available through stable API and adds plugins.
I switched from years old Arctic silver 5 to Noctua NT-H1. It resulted in a dramatic difference. 64c loaded vs 84c -- I now suspect I had an air bubble which may invalidate the initial motivation for the work in the first place :-)
The first thing I noticed was that your idle temperatures are exceedingly high, especially for an AIO. My air-cooled ryzen 5 idles at around 35c with nearly zero fan speed on a $30 air cooler.
Most AIOs need servicing after a few years- find instructions on how to disassemble yours, clean the water block, flush the radiator, and refill with a deionized-water/glycol mix.
Discovering SSH, bash, linux etc in 2004 was magical for me. I always liked the idea of SDF and polarhome and did a similar thing with a few friends for a while, albeit with limited success. Proper internet.