It’s a little depressing that the WordPress app on iPad has statistics about my posts here stating the obvious. Things like “well, they won’t come to your site unless you tell them it’s your site.” Posting a link to a blog gets lots in the wilds of Facebook and not a lot of people stop between memes and have a look.
I am up because I forgot to take a Benadryl, antacid and a mucinex before bed. I had a really long dream about Doctor Who and time traveling between holidays and still being melancholy (I was pretty convinced it was Christmas when I woke up), then looking at the clock and feeling Olive jump on me at 2-god-damned-early-AM to indicate I wasn’t getting back to bed without feeding animals.
Yesterday, I completed my computer build. I crammed 4 hard drives, a SSD drive, and two (formerly) external Blu Ray Drives into a case designed in 2002 or so and has been sitting up in my closet for longer than the kittens have been alive.
I was bragging about how things only cost me $60-something to do that build using existing parts. Well, okay, the freaking thing is too slow compared to my old Threadripper system (to be honest, life itself is too slow compared to my old Threadripper system), so new ram ($60), a new graphics card ($209), new keyboard/track pad combo ($28) and system fan ($18) later and Monday evening will see build round two.
The system only had 8gb of RAM and the built in video on the motherboard just couldn’t handle stretching 1080p files into 4K files on the big TV. I’m replacing the 8gb with 16gb of slightly faster RAM and adding an AMD 5500 XT with 8gb of built in RAM for the video duties.
The 5500 XT is one of the newer low-end AMD cards designed to eventually replace the old AMD 580 and 590 cards I typically throw in builds for my nieces and nephews. It is a little more powerful than a 580 but draws less power than a 590 for $10 more in price. I guess I’m saving money in the long run with the less power but… yeah, it’s too early for this.
The Plex server is currently sloooooooooooowly downloading all the information about all of the movies I own and I don’t dare stream anything from it until this process is over and the system stops glaring at me for making it do too much (the technology in processor was ancient 4 years ago when I bought it) too fast. It ran in a giant case with 11 drives spinning for a couple of years serving as my Plex server before, but I’m forgetting which switch I made or what computer I built and eventually sent off to a niece or nephew that ended that setup.
Life’s too predictable sometimes.
With that, I’m going back to bed. Goodnight everyone.
Jim