Did I really need 3 desktops?

It’s been about 3 years since I built a monster of a desktop machine with water cooling, fans, LEDs and all that. Long time readers will remember the disastrous outcome of that adventure as the liquid leaked, drown my electronics, and caused me to essentially abandon the thing. I somewhat recovered from the fiasco by purchasing a new motherboard, and trying to limp along with various of the components from that original build. Recently, I decided to throw in the towel and start from scratch. This time around, I decided to go with an AMD build, because AMD seems to be doing some good stuff with their Ryzen and beyond chippery. So, I put together a rig around a Ryzen 7, 32Gb RAM, same old nVidia 1060 video card. Upgraded the SSD to the latest Samsung 980? or whatever it is.

That system was acting a bit flakey, to the point I thought it was defective, so I built another one, this time with Ryzen 5, and nothing from the old builds. New power supply, SSD, RAM, video card. That one worked, and it turns out the Ryzen 7 based system worked as well. Turns out it only needed a bios update to deal with networking not handling the sleep state of Windows 10.

So, now I have two working desktop machines. But wait, the second motherboard from the previous disastrous PC build probably still works? Maybe it just needs new power supply and other components and I can resurrect it? And hay, how about that Athlon system sitting over there? That was my daily driver since 2010, until I decided to build the intel water cooled disaster. I think that machine will make for a good build for the workshop in the garage. I need something out there to run the CNC machine, or at least play some content when I’m out there.

I did finally decommission one machine. The Shuttle PC I built with my daughter circa 2005 finally gave up the ghost. Tried to start it, and the 2Tb hard drive just clicks… Too bad. That machine was quite a workhorse when it came to archiving DVDs and other disks over the years. May it rest in peace.

There was one bit of surgery I did on an old Laptop. I had a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from work which succumbed to the elements last year some time. I had tech support take the ssd out of it so I could transfer to somewhere else. Given the machine is about 4+ years old, it wasn’t as simple as it being an nvme SSD. Oh no, it was some special sort of thing which required quite a lot of searching about to find an appropriate adapter. I finally found it, and plugged the SSD into it, then plugged that into an external enclosure, then to USB 3.0, and finally got the old stuff off of it! So, now I have this awesome adapter card that I could only use once, awaiting the next old X1 Carbon someone needs to backup.

All ramblings aside, I’ve recently been engaged in writing some code related to parsing. Two bits in particular, gcode parsing, json streaming parser, are bits that I’ll be writing about.

And so it goes.