What Did You Do Today???

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
Nice. I need to get on the ball and order up my system... Going to be way overkill, but it should last for quite a few years lol.

Really double check the specs of the motherboard you pick. Asus and Gigabyte have recently been using "fake" 8 phase VRM's on their low/mid end boards that are really 4 phase with double mosfet/choke sets on them ( they have almost what's needed minus the actual controllers that the extra mosfet/chokes need to actually make them 8 phase ) that just appear as if they are 8 phase. Since I don't have plans on OC'ing and as such didn't need the cleaner ( and cooler running ) power that an 8 phase VRM provides... I went with the MSI board instead.
 

Tony

Staff member
Interesting. I don't think they could get away with that on the 300 series 1151 boards though. I'm still torn between the i7 8700k and the new i9 9900k. I know, the i9 with 16 cores and 32 threads is overkill, but hey, I will never bottleneck with the CPU lmao. I will definitely read up on this though for those boards.
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
Interesting. I don't think they could get away with that on the 300 series 1151 boards though.

Actually, they can ... they are simply running two circuits in parallel. A high and low mosfet with a choke and cap in each. Many ( perhaps most ) reviewers don't catch it since they also just look for the chokes and count... they aren't also looking for the controllers which are tiny and tougher to recognize unless your an electronics engineer or an advanced user.

Look for reviews and/or comments from Buildzoid on Youtube ( his channel is "Actually Hardcore Overclocking" ) for the boards you are considering. Of course there is nothing wrong with using a 4 phase VRM... the 8 phase just brings cleaner power that runs a lot cooler making it better for anyone planning on extreme OC'ing ... a basic OC will likely be just fine using a 4 phase.

If they did it... it'll likely be on the top end chipsets.
 

Tony

Staff member
The Washing Machine Drama... Continued...

In the last post about the washing machine I had replaced the two bad capacitors on the CCU which I was sure was the issue with the washer. Before it was the APS, but I replaced that again to no avail. In the last post on the subject, I noted that the drain pump was "locking up". I guess locking up was not a good term as it was still spinning freely so it wasn't actually locked up. But, what I did notice is on the second load the motor was getting quite hot. Remember, we purchased these machines (washer and dryer) over 10 years ago and even then, the only reason we were able to afford them back then was because they were a display model. So in all reality, we have gotten our moneys worth out of them.

With all that said though, we just don't have $1500+ to replace this set. Yes, it has to be replaced as a set! I can NOT have a mismatched set in my laundry room. No way! So I have to keep repairing this one.

As stated, I replaced the APS (Analog Pressure Sensor for those that didn't read. TLDR, I know lol) and that little puppy cost me $65!!! This is a little sensor that reads pressure from the water in the drum. To put it into perspective, the CCU, the BRAIN of the machine is only $50 used. Granted the APS was brand new but still...

So the APS is new, the CCU is fixed and I'm still getting the F35 and the suds error. This is when I started thinking pump because it would always push the code when the drain pump kicked in. That is when I put my hand around it and felt just how hot it was getting. IMO, it was pulling too many amps thus causing it to push a code for suds (H.E. machines hate suds) when it should have been pushing something like an F21 error which is a long drain error, but it would do it within 30 seconds and a long drain error only happens after 18 minutes of draining and not seeing any change from the APS.... Anyway, I digress.

I ordered a new drain pump and it came with the little lint trap and everything (thankfully because the new pump will not fit the old housing) and the pump and housing, everything, was only $25. I put it in and did the only load of laundry I had and everything worked pretty well. No codes and it finished the load without issue. But, when the drain pump was cold, it would always finish the first load.

This all was last weekend on my one day off I had before having to leave back out to the road. Yesterday was a horrible day for me (sitting around doing nothing but waiting on a load..) and when the wife called me later last night I was explaining my day (week) which in short was absolutely horrible. Then the words came out of her mouth....

"So I did some washing today"

I was ready for it. I was going to come home, throw the washer out of the back door and beat the ever loving crap out of it with the front bucket on my tractor.

"I washed multiple loads of laundry back to back and the washer never tossed out a single code"

So yea, that made my day a little better knowing I didn't have to come home and abuse a malfunctioning appliance lmao.

For now at least, the Washing Machine Saga has come to an end. Hopefully for a while.
 

Tony

Staff member
Scanning all of my files for duplicates to see if I can free up some space... This is going to take days to complete...
 

Tony

Staff member
So last night I had my entire network setup and I was trying to setup port forwarding to use WOL on my server (thanks again for that @rdsok). Pretty simple stuff, right? I thought so too.

This was on one of the higher end Netgear routers with dual 5g blah blah, you know... Well, right before I was going to bed, the router rebooted out of nowhere. I tried and tried and absolutely could not get it to connect back to the internet. after messing with it for a while, I found out it reset itself to factory defaults!!! What the hell. So I set it all up again, thankfully I remembered everything, and it did it again about 30 minutes later... Okay, this is getting annoying. Screw it, I'm tired, I'm going to sleep.

I wake up today hoping everything is fine, I get on my desktop (I was on the lappy last night) and I go in and assign one port for WOL to get everything going again and boom, it power cycles and no more internet. I do this about 4 more times trying different things including not messing with NAT (had to so something with that, can't remember what though), I tried not doing the port forwarding, I tried setting custom forwarding, noting worked, it kept reverting to default. Screw it, I'm getting my Asus router back. The good ole AC3100!!!

The wife got off work early, we jumped in the car and headed to Best Buy. I was about half way there when I realized what day it was.... I'm going to Best Buy on FRIGGIN BLACK FRIDAY!!!! Oh yea, this was a fantastic idea.

We pulled in the parking lot and I have never seen it so busy there in my life. We had to park way out in the back 9 somewhere and walk quite a ways to get in there. I get in there and hold the box up to the dude at the door and he looks at me like I'm an idiot. I tell him it's an exchange and he looks confused. I finally get my little sticker (so dumb) and I head to the CS desk where I'm met by someone that is, to put it lightly, extremely flamboyant. I'm not homophobic or anything like that, but this dude was OVER THE TOP!!! Quite the excitement for the day lol.

So when we got to the counter I had the wife wait in line while I went to the back and checked if they had my Asus router. Thankfully, those were not on sale (I have a warranty lol) so there was 2 on the shelf. I picked up one of them and went back to the counter where we did the exchange. I'm telling you, his lisp was so thick I could not hardly understand him. It was bad. Finally I get it exchanged and I tell him I want a bag and he says yes (and yes, I'm assuming his gender. The beard gives that away!!!). He takes the box, removes the spiderman twine that is wrapped around the box and hands the box back to me and says "THANKS! HAVE A FABULOUS DAY!!"... Um dude, I said I wanted a bag.... Yea...

So I get everything done there and I decide to head to the back and look at some laptops since mine is on its last leg and of course the only thing that is on sale is absolutely craptastic. I guess you could run an emulator on it or something, but for what I need it for, um NO. So I start walking around and I end up in the keyboard isle and I see they have a metric crap ton of the "Wave" keyboards and they are marked 50% off. I actually need a keyboard, I have needed one for quite a few years now, I just never could find one that I liked. I figured for this price, I would give it a try. so I had to the register in the back (no way I'm going to the front, screw that mile long line lol) and I check out. I tell him that I need a larger bag than what flamboyant boy gave me and he says that's the largest they have. LIAR!!!!!! Whatever, take my money and I'm out.

I get home and I start setting the new router up and guess what, it powercycles and internet goes away... F-ME!!! I kept refreshing for a while (this was after the initial setup of course) and internet came back so I started working. First, I had to get my grandmas house back online which I did. Not sure what was happening, but changing the ssid seemed to resolve the issue. Speaking of that, I just remembered I never removed the guest network that I had to setup just to have access to that bridge... oops. It was the only ssid and password I had that was of the old versions lol. So that is gone just in case someone is messing with me.

So internet is good here and next door, lets try that good ole port forwarding. Let me tell you, it is so much easier in Asus' dashboard than it is in Netgears. I set the name, the internal IP, the incoming and local port, and clicked add. Done. I pulled up my little "Magic Packet" program and sent out a wake up call over the internet and one second later I hear the fans on that server kick on. Oh hell yea!!!

The whole reason I wanted this (on the Netgear mind you) is because that router would NOT allow me to connect my 8TB drive to the USB3 port to act like a NAS. So I was going to use the server to put the drive into and when I was out on the road and need a file or something, I could just send a wake up call and turn it on and I could get what I need. Well, now that I have the Asus router back, I can just hook it up to the USB3 port and set my ddns url which should still be good from the last router and call it good. But I still would like to have access to the files on that server if I need then.

This is also allowing me to clean up some of the files on that 8TB drive. I ran (actually, I'm still running it) a program called Duplicate File Deleter from the windows store to clean up a lot of the files. You see, the files on that drive are files I have collected ever since I had my first computer. There are a TON of them. But, when I would change computers, I would put files into a folder called something like "old_lappy_celeron.old" or something like that and I would only take out files that I actually needed. But back then, I would just copy the files rather than move them. So there were a lot of duplicate files. But I had no idea how many.

This is the second time I'm running this program on this drive. I ran it yesterday and it took about 15 hours to complete, but I screwed up. Not only did I check the box to delete folders that became empty after deleting duplicate files, but I also checked the "send deleted files to recycle bin". Um, I have a 1TB SSD in my computer and I'm deleting files from an 8TB HDD... Guess what, my computer didn't like that. In fact, it filled up the drive, confused the computer, the computer signed out of windows and took me back to the login screen and when I signed in again, all was for nothing. Well, my recycle bin was full lol. But the weirdest thing is before it logged out, it turned off the signal to my right and left monitors but kept the center monitor on... Weird...

So yea that pissed me off a little bit lol. But when it was all said and done, I had over 220,000 duplicate files!!! Holy Hell!!! I didn't think it was that bad lol.

So today when I woke up I started the process over again, but this time I'm ONLY checking the box to delete empty file folders. I know I'm going to lose some stuff that I would really like to keep, but going through over 220k files to make sure every single one of them is worth deleting is just a waste of time IMO. That would take me days to do. And I would probably never miss what is on that drive to be quite honest, it would just suck to lose it all at once.

So yea, that has been my day. Not a fun one if you ask me.
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
I had ( or currently have since I'm not done double checking ) file copy issues myself after my system upgrade. As I typically do when performing a complete system reload... I did a full disk backup to one of my backup drives. This time, after having reinstalled almost all of my programs... instead of just blind copying my documents, picture and other folders back... I chose to re-organize everything since things had gotten pretty out of hand over the years. First were my two main pic folders, one for the two Olympus cameras I had and one for the Nikon. Then last night I started to look of my turkey pics and couldn't find them in the new folders... Turns out that somehow I didn't get all of the Nikon folders copied back over somehow. I ended up finding out I was missing 3555 pictures ( actually it was over 11,000+ files if you include the LightRoom and On1 Photo Raw sidecar files also ). So now I get to double check every folder I did move just to make certain that everything else did copy over.

I'm still glad I did the re-organizing as it's made a world of difference already in being able to find stuff.
 

Tony

Staff member
Yea, it's a royal PITA to do, but once everything is said and done, it sure makes it a lot nicer to search through the files to find what you need.
 

Tony

Staff member
Oh yea, I also had to completely tear apart my laptop today. Again. For about the 15th time. Had to replace the cooling fan again. This time the old one still worked but it was rubbing and driving me crazy. I had already ordered a complete fan and heatsink setup for my computer so I already had the parts. I also was looking for thermal transfer pads at Best Buy when I went, but of course, Best Buy sucks and didn't have them. So guess what I did for the VRM's? Yup, I put non conductive thermal paste on them lmao. Only thing I could do, I have to have this computer (I'm on it if you didn't get that lol). But now I have a silent computer that hopefully cools better (the VRM's didn't have any thermal pads on them for some reason. Just the small chips next to them...). and stop with the video studdering.

I can already tell it is at least a little better. I used to be in the 50's (Cº) while doing stuff like I'm doing now. Now the computer is running mid to high 30's. I like it!
 

Tony

Staff member
Yea, but you need to look deeper grasshopper!!

So just put a full packer brisket on the smoker. I did separate the flat from the point before we froze it a few months ago. I know, been a while lol. Never thought it would be that long before I could smoke this sucker. But, the smoker is sitting at 276ºF right now, it's been on about 30 minutes and with the point and flat separate it should smoke in about 4 hours to my desired tenderness. Then I get to take that point, cut it up into cubes and make some burnt ends. Going to be awesome!!!

I also had the wife pick up 3 turkeys after the holidays. I think the most expensive one was about $6.00 and they are about 17lb's. Not too shabby. Going to smoke those suckers too lol. In due time.
 

Tony

Staff member
So I just went to pick up the aluminum foil container so that I could wrap the meat and my hand slipped. Yup, sliced my finger... ugh... Just a flesh wound.

But the plus side, the brisket looks amazing!
 

murankar

Staff member
Finished framing an enclosure for a lizard. We have a chinese water dragon that needs a new home. He is out growing his old one. So I decided building an enclosure would be idela for all. Pulled the measurements and started building without thinking much of it. At this point I have the framing done. Right now I am at a stand still till i get the plywood for the 2 ends and back. The front will be acrylic doors framed in wood.

Almost done I think.
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
Since yesterday was a day of waiting ( for shipments and such )...

After the computer upgrade for my home system, I took the old parts that I had removed added a hard drive and power supply and then played around with a couple of the newer distro's of Linux to see what has changed since I played with it several years back. They've made a lot of advances that now make Linux probably easier to setup and use than Windows if you are using one of the GUI interfaces ( as apposed to the command line stuff ). I didn't have to hunt down any hardware drivers, installing programs also automatically took care of any dependencies which is a real blessing... uninstalling programs is as easy as a right click on the menu item itself. The primary distro that I did most of the playing with is called Linux Mint ( v19.1 using the Cinnamon GUI ) which is a very Windows-esk release...

Then I performed a bit of Linux heresy and made it look even more Windows-esk... :D

LinuxHeresy.JPG
 
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