This month’s banner is derived from this photo I took on a walk around Normanhurst recently. The weather was beautiful, if a bit hot.
This is my favourite part of Sydney. Just on the other side of the trees there is the North Shore line, which I use to commute into town. It’s done wonders for my mental health being greeted with such views from train carriages on the way to work. I’ve also started getting out a few stops earlier each time and walking the rest of the way home, because it’s just so damned nice.
It seems to be council clean up season in my area of Sydney, with piles of old furniture, clothing, and the occasional rusty appliance stacked by the side of the road for the council trucks to collect. This also means that, occasionally, you may walk past a forlorn looking computer left behind by someone who doesn’t know what ewaste recycling is, or doesn’t care. Naturally, as a tragic retrocomputer enthusiastand a greenie, I feel as though it’s my duty to pick them up, if only to validate for myself that it was thrown away for a reason, and take them to the appropriate places for disposal. If something works, so much the better.
I’ve featured many such machines on this blog over the years. Back when Clara and I lived in Chatswood, I found a complete Pentium III-era tower that was a complete mess, yet completely worked after I pulled it apart. The same happened more recently with a local collection of surprisingly immaculate parts I was able to extricate from a rusty case.
Well it happened again. Clara and I were walking back from having pancakes (as one does), when we chanced upon a very sad looking boy racer “NZXT” tower, whatever that is. The side panels of the case had been discarded further down the street, and were in such poor shape I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been run over. Or maybe that’s the aesthetic they were going for; given they didn’t even centre their own logo on the power supply shroud.
Getting the tower home proved an adventure itself. Despite the case feeling flimsy and cheap, it was surprisingly heavy. We lifted it up into the train carriage and back home, then carried it back to the apartment for inspection.
It was in far worse shape than I thought. Dust, cobwebs (foreshadowing!) dispersed among dirt and leaves throughout the interior suggested the machine had either been by the side of the road for at least a few days in the rain, or had maybe spent a while basking in a carport or balcony while the owners decided what to do with it. Then some fools like us picked it up to see what it was, and if anything could be salvaged. Curiously, the sheet metal holding up the internal 3.5-inch drive bays looked nearly flawless.
As with all kerbside PCs, I like to tear them down, then test and clean what I’m interested in. I got to work taking the screws out when suddenly a large spider lunged out from under the power supply cover! I forget sometimes I live in Australia where everything is out to kill me, but Clara and I were able to swiftly take care of it before a trip to the local accident and emergency ward would have been required for some anti-venom. Yes, it could have been benign. No, I wasn’t taking chances.
By this point we decided it made more sense to take it apart outside on the balcony the following day, in case there were any more surprises. That’s where it sat overnight.
Earlier this morning, I was able to extricate the motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-H170-HD3. A quick search showed it to be a 6-7th gen Intel board. I don’t keep fans or coolers on found machines (everyone has their grossness threshold: that’s mine), but I decided to leave it affixed for now so I can eventually test the board, then replace it if its worth salvaging.
The motherboard came with two 8 GiB DDR4 DIMMs, a hot(ish) commodity in the era of “AI” induced financial vapourware and shortages. I was initially excited to think these were 16 GiB modules, but the labels on the back indicated it was a 16 GiB kit… oh well.
There was also a utilitarian PWM fan controller breakout board to power all the fans in the case, though how effective those fans would have been given the entire front of the case is a thick block of plastic is anyone’s guess. It also had a second daughter board attached with some LEDs, which might be useful to harvest.
It also also had a 750 W CoolerMaster PSU and requisite cables, which didn’t have any of the dirt and grime the rest of the case had; presumably because it was turned off when it was stored. I still decided to give the cables a clean, which I realise are just out of frame in the photo above.
The last step was to remove the screws, drive trays, and PCI slot covers. These may prove useful for a build I’m doing in a breadbox (it’s a long story), so I cleaned them down as much as I could with IPA and rags, then threw the trays and covers into the dishwasher. We’ll see how they turn out.
The next step will be to clean the parts in some IPA, and give it all a boot test.
I was in a waiting room last week when I saw a highlight reel play on breakfast TV of Chinese American skater Eileen Gu at the Milano Cortina Olympics. Wow, she was spectacular!
She also chose to compete for the PRC, instead of her birth country of the United States. Her mother is Chinese, so it sounds reasonable to me. But it’s also been a point of contention for certain people.
The thing is, her circumstances are hardly unique, and are only becoming more common. Millions of people live outside their birth countries, were born into mixed families, or grew up as third culture kids. Heck, I was all three, and now I’m marrying into a Cantonese family, so that’s strike four! Countries are a bit of an anachronism to us; an arbitrary system of invisible borders to be worked around.
My gymnastics days are long over, but it makes me wonder who I’d have “represented” if I’d kept up with it and gone professional (as remote and unlikely as that would have been)! I’d probably say Singapore. I was born in Australia (to a German father), but I spent most of my formative years, and nearly all my school life, in the Little Red Dot. Same if I were being fitted for an astronaut suit, or garb for a multinational construction project. Heck, I only lived in Malaysia for a couple of years but that country and its people really rubbed off on me too.
Thesedays, I’d want both a Singaporean and Australian patch, either separate ones or integrated somehow. Or maybe a stylised image of that Earthrise. We are one, but we are many, and all that. 🌏
Whenever a beautiful bird is the Featured Picture on the English Wikipedia, I feel compelled to share it. This is the masked trogon, photographed Charles J. Sharp:
The masked trogon (Trogon personatus) is a species of bird in the family Trogonidae, the trogons. Fairly common in humid highland forests in South America, mainly in the Andes and on tepuis, it is resident in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Venezuela.
That’s some of the most intricate and stunning plumage I’ve ever seen. Uh oh, I’m giving away that I’d also be a bird watcher if I didn’t already have a million other hobbies.
Or: promoting what I’ve used for years to be my primary machine.
Computers are tools
Computers are tools for most people. They’re means to an end; a way to Get Things Done. It was true when accountants were listening to Genesis while entering numbers into VisiCalc on their Apple II, and when an author used WordPerfect on their XT clone to write a manuscript. Today, people get much of their lives done on these machines, and occasionally vendors even make this easier for people.
I use computers to Get Things Done. I also happen to have made a career out of doing so. I flip bits on a screen, explain to clients how they can flip bits on a screen, and architect systems that facilitate the flipping of screen bits for others. Turns out we’re in the midst of another bubble where a lot of people think flipping bits in a profoundly less efficient and more destructive way is somehow an improvement or inevitable; but then, that’s why people like me exist to explain otherwise. It’s thankless work, but someone has to do it :).
I also happen to be an enthusiast. Computers aren’t just a means to an end for me; they’re fascinating pieces of engineering in their own right. They’re fun to explore, tinker with, build, program, fix, and learn how they work. They’ve brought me joy since I first walked past that glowing DOS prompt on a CRT in my dad’s study. I dedicate a not insignificant amount of my personal life learning about the history of these machines, and advocate for alternatives that make the world better, not worse. I’m a hopeless optimist, despite how my words may sometimes read here.
Just as a motorhead has their “daily driver” and their weekend special, so too do I have a personal machine that’s decoupled from work obligations. Well, almost, I still use personal machines as a way to Get Things Done. But I can justify experimenting with personal kit in a way I can’t on a “prod” laptop that has to present a Visio diagram to a client at their office at 09:00 on their dodgy HDMI projector, without fail.
My personal machines
My personal machines has been Apple laptops since I entered high school. I started with a PowerPC iBook G3, then a few MacBook Pros and Airs. Mac OS X was a pleasant graphical environment for Getting Things Done, but also had the UNIX underpinnings that made tinkering with an ever-expanding world of open source software easy. It wouldn’t be a stretch to give Mac OS X partial credit for getting me into BSD, and Terminal.app was my primary gateway to remote FreeBSD, NetBSD, illumos, and Linux servers for many years.
But in the words of moral philosopher Eagle-Eye Cherry on his 2000 album Living in the Present Future:
Are you still having fun?
Turns out, no, I’m increasingly not. I’ve had my reservations about Apple software for a few years now (and I’m hardly alone in this regard), but Liquid (Gl)ass was the final straw. If I’m not having fun on my personal machine, I don’t see the point.
Alongside my Macs, I’ve always had a second-hand ThinkPad of some sort for further tinkering. This started with my dad’s old 600E from work, then expanded with a steady march of X and E series kit; whatever I could get for cheap at the time. An X230 was my most recent addition, which I use as a distraction-free writing environment with my beloved NetBSD. They’re the sorts of machines I’m happy to mess with.
People joke ThinkPad fans are part of a cult. I can’t speak to that, but I’ve always been a fan of the hardware. I love the understated design language, even if it has evolved over time. The keyboards have always been such a joy to type on. The TrackPoint is the best pointing device ever devised. Many of them can still be easily opened up, cleaned, tinkered with, and upgraded.
My personal MacBook Air is more than five years old now, and starting to have issues. So I figured now was as good a time as any to promote those “side” machines to centre stage.
The ThinkPad E14 Gen 7
Researching which ThinkPad to get was way more fun than it should have been. Apple hardware is easy: click either an Air or a Pro, and you’re done. Lenovo (ne. IBM) segments their laptops into a complex (and at times overlapping) ranges of devices, from the E and L-series on the low end, the “canonical ThinkPad” T-series in the middle, and the high end P-series workstations and svelte X1 Carbons. Each come with their own pros and cons, which can all be put into a spreadsheet along with the multitude of upgrade options, features, and pricing.
I’d only bought whatever was available second hand before, so to build a matrix for researching a new device made this data nerd unreasonably happy. Perhaps don’t read too much into that.
I originally narrowed down my choices to three machines: the X1 Carbon Gen 13 for its featherweight form factor, the T14s for its expandability and robustness, and the E14 Gen 7 for its features and price. In the end, the E14’s screen won out, and I put the order in for a new ThinkPad for the first time.
Choosing the E14 may come as a surprise, especially for ThinkPad aficionados. Lenovo have offered HiDPI options for a few years now, but almost all have since been replaced with OLEDs with PWM, which render them unusable for people like me. Ironically enough, being the budget option means the E14 still offers HiDPI IPS on their 14-inch models. I’ve seen the company’s HiDPI IPS panels featured in retail stores, and it looked just as good to my eyes as my MacBook Air sat next to it.
I used the money I saved to bump the CPU up to the mid-tier Lunar Lake offering with Arc, and maxed out to 32 GiB of memory and 1 TB of storage for surprisingly little extra. I expect these prices to only climb with the current shortages. I also got their Essential 13-14-inch Slim Topload (Eco) bag in the bundle for less than the price of lunch. I’m a massive nerd and secretly loved these business style bags.
For now the plan is to probably throw Fedora on it, as this machine also needs to be used to Get Things Done. But eventually I’d love to dual-boot it with FreeBSD and/or NetBSD as well, once the hardware support becomes available.
This is the first non-retrocomputer I’ve been excited for in a long time. Feels weird!
My tongue-in-cheek post about not needing a 3D printer got me thinking of other things I definitely don’t need.
An all-flash homelab server. Goodbye seek times, massive inflow current on power up, and large, heavy cases! But I also have those aforementioned hard drives and they work just fine with the appropriate ZFS tuning and an SSD L2ARC.
A jar of flags. Clara and I started collecting those little flags you get from tourist trap shops in places we visit, but it’s currently incomplete.
A flat burr coffee grinder. I love my Baratza ESP, but I’ve heard enough people say that flat burrs offer a “cleaner” taste that I want to try them. The devices equipped with such burrs are sufficiently expensive that I haven’t even bothered to investigate.
A server rack. I definitely don’t need one of these, because none of my homelab servers or prod family machines are rack mountable; especially since SilverStone made me buy these incredible towers. But it’d still be nice, especially for network kit.
An LTO drive of some sort. We’d barely have enough data to fill a few tapes, even at LTO7.
An IKEA lamp in the shape of a doughnut. It’s delightful, and I’d have absolutely no use for it.
A large café picture for our balcony nook. My late mum painted a mural for one of the places we lived in Malaysia for a local family balcony “café”, where we’d hang out. That picture is long gone (sadly), but another massive one for our new little balcony would be fun.
An external ThinkPad keyboard. I like my linear switches and thocky Topré boards, but sometimes I long for that ThinkPad experience on the desktop.
A Panasonic bread maker. Not least because I’m trying to eat fewer carb-heavy foods, and because I bake with my hands anyway. But still.
It’s a good thing I’m definitely not interested in any of this stuff.
Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don’t work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree.
And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it’s not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It’s a mess all around.
I’ll bet you’ve had a similar experience, if you’re the kind of person who reads blogs like ours. There’s a reason why holiday periods each yeah become de facto tech support workshops for our families.
At the risk of sounding cynical, it does feel increasingly like tech companies are taking advantage of that knowledge gap. You shouldn’t have to spend your life working in IT, or have a hobby tinkering with such tools, to have a private and secure experience with a new device. Everyone deserves this.
Fresh from having my latest tetanus shot (cough), I walked past a pile of stuff by the side of the road for a designated council bulk rubbish pick up. I didn’t think much of it, but then I noticed a black PC tower between a pile of books and an old chair, which naturally I had to bring back.
I didn’t think to take a picture of the tower before I removed all the components and took it downstairs to the ewaste pile, but inside I was able to extract a near immaculate 550 W power supply, an Asus DVD writer, some screws, and a few ports, switches, and LEDs.
I haven’t had a chance to test yet, but they’re on the Retro Corner :).
We deform the world according to our expectations. When this happens, we call it a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. The world is more deeply filled with self-fulfilling prophecies than we recognize, so we should be very careful about our ‘prophecies’, lest they crowd out visions of the future we want.
The future is less certain than we realize, and a wise course of action involves acknowledging both our uncertainty but also the way that narrative power can shape outcomes. Be wary the oracle bearing the message that their technology is inevitable.
Today was a hard day for $reasons, so it was a tremendous joy to receive a notification from the local Australia Post parcel locker that my latest shipment from Ukraine arrived! I braved the midday Sydney summer sun, walked down to the post office, and scanned the QR code to pop open the appropriate locker.
I reached inside, and retrieved a well packaged cardboard box covered in a printed invoice with a mixture of Ukrainian and English. The shipping label said it was from Lviv, from where I’ve never received items before. Not having a Ukrainian croissant handy, I opted for a celebratory espresso, then took the parcel home to unwrap.
Does this count as an “unboxing” post?
Taking off the bubble wrap and anti-static bag, and we’re left with the board itself:
And here it is with all the other amassed parts so far.
Normally I have no trouble filling a post with meandering silliness, but I’ll admit to being at a loss for words here. I almost can’t believe this is real.
In one sense I’ve been waiting two weeks for this board to arrive. In another, I’ve been waiting almost a year since my search began for this board in earnest. And in a final way, I’ve been waiting since I was a kid in 1998, when the family ewasted the family PC, and I never saw the first computer I ever used ever again.
The board is missing many components, which are also in transit. It also has a bit of that telltale battery damage, though hopefully it’s just superficial. There’s no guarantee this will even start. But at least I now have a base from which I can work.
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