The Plushroom Patch

I like music. My main computer is my mp3 player, assuming I’m within eight feet of it. Which is not often enough probably too often.

My speakers are, of course, always near my computer. But they don’t like music as much as I do. Being an ordinary inexpensive 2.1 setup (two weedy satellites and a “subwoofer”), they shares many common issues with the rest of their class - namely satellites that can’t manage any midrange whatsoever, and therefore outsource that job to the subwoofer - which is fine, as it gives the sub something to do other than failing miserably at playing true low bass. That is, once I forced midrange upon it by making a mountain out of NVMixer’s equalizer. This misplaced midrange has the slightly unfortunate side effect of making the subwoofer clearly locatable by ear, but isn’t a huge deal in itself.

In short, with both quality and quantity notably absent, and the subwoofer waving a Here I Am Playing You Some Nice Fuzzy Midrange flag, listening to music (aside from punk rock, of course) is hardly an inspiring experience.

So I had an opportunity open to me to spend a lot of money. Naturally, I didn’t.

Instead, I dragged two speakers from my basement. Aside from having several species of small furry dust animals gathered together on them, and a pretty good scratch on one, they were in good shape, and had standard RCA jacks on the back.

Unfortunately, as of yet, I’ve been unable to properly utilize these speakers. The closest I’ve come has been hooking them up through the headphone jack of a cheap 2.0 set of Yamaha PC speakers; this got sound out of one speaker at a time, possibly, but not necessarily, because of the mono cable I was using. However, I’ve only got one stereo cable, and the bloody Yamaha refuses to shut up when it’s used. It’s also entirely possible that my 3.5mm (1/8″) TRS to RCA cable is borked somehow.

If I have any luck, I’ll update this. Hopefully I’ll get somewhere tomorrow… err today.

So A-Man got to talking about firewalls again tonight. I got one of my Rather Questionable Ideas. Then I got to work.

The computer in question? 333 MHz of RAW POWAR. Old-school AMD ‘powar’, to be precise.

Well, OK, that’s not completely fair. It started as a 200, with a pitiful little heatsink and fan to match. (Well, sort of - see below.)

This simply Would Not Do, if only because a larger heatsink would make me feel more manly.

So I went looking for something appropriate for the occasion. I spotted a Mendocino Celeron, with its stock (well, stock for eMachines built in early 2000, at least) heatsink still attached.

Yeah, that would do nicely.

So I transplanted the cute little fan from the original 200’s heatsink onto this considerably beefier unit. Which looked rather like the smaller sink, except, y’know, larger. About twice the height, for what that’s worth.

Then I went to put in the 333. Looking over the board, I realized something.

This board was too old.

It didn’t support the lower voltage (2.2v) or higher multiplier (5x) that the 333 needed. Neither did the equally old MSI board on my wall.

(Oughta teach me to do my research in the first place.)

At this point, the Biostar M5ATD the CPU came from in the first place was looking pretty good.

Except for one thing.

Unlike their newer ATX (and microATX, and FlexATX, and upside-down-case BTX, and whatever-the-flavor-of-the-month-is-ATX) brethren, list of onboard devices on AT motherboards was generally summed up as:

1. One 5-pin DIN connector for an AT keyboard.

However, Biostar (in conjunction with whoever built the case that the Biostar board in question came out of) decided to break with tradition a bit. They added a PS/2 port for a mouse right next to the keyboard port. The case I was moving it into, naturally, did not have this cutout.

However, in true Ghetto Modding spirit, the problem was quickly solved with a few basic tools, more specifically vicegrips, an unusually short hacksaw with a standard 10″ blade jutting out past the end (so I can more easily stick it where it doesn’t belong), and profanity. Once it had been established that I knew the case’s undistinguished parentage in detail, a slightly crude hole was fashioned in both the chassis and the pop-out surround for the keyboard port.

I then managed to connect the, um, connectors for the buttons, knobs, lights, and what-have-you on the front panel properly, plugged in the RAM (two spare 64 MB modules, one of PC133, one of PC100, or perhaps PC66, I didn’t bother to find out) and AT PSU plug, stuck in the video card, and fired ‘er up. We had liftoff.

Then, the next hurdle: the CD-ROM drive. It was an old “18x” Acer unit that was remarkably proficient at reproducing a strangled cat’s death cry every time its tray was opened. Unfortunately, at first glance, it wasn’t good for much else - its name came up as a nice row of apostrophes on the boot screen. Or maybe they were backticks. This, of course, screamed “DEAD DRIVE, YOU MORON“. Or maybe it was “DEAD CABLE”. Either one.

So I swapped in a Samsung SCR-3232.

Or rather, a “WAOSWNG WCW-7272″. Backticks omitted.

Evidently the drive hadn’t been the problem.

So I reseated the cable.

Aha! All better. I stuck in Puppy Linux. It worked. There was much rejoicing. (Yaaaaaaaay.)

I haven’t gotten any further with it, since I’m debating on how to best save my settings, I was in New York this past weekend, and the Shuttle board’s got me otherwise occupied. Eventually, I’ll do some more work on this, and you’ll see some updates. Really.