Category Archives: Techno Geek

The new PC build

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After the death of my gaming rig in December, I pulled together parts and built a new machine. I kept the old case, power supply, and optical drive. Everything else I bought new. I used two new resources to help this time round, after years of using the techreport system builders guides. I still referenced them, but this time I relied more on a wonderfully maintained thread and associated resources from neogaf – the “I need a New PC!” 2013 Part 1″ thread. There’s a google spreadsheet linked from there with parts lists for a number of different cost, performance and form factor builds, which is embedded in the first post of the thread. There’s also a link to pcpartpicker.com, which has this great tool that lets you build a shopping list which is sharable and which can be configured to find the lowest price for each component in your build from whichever vendors you want to select from. It’s great. Here’s my build list, by way of example. For the record, since who knows how long that link will work, below is also my partlist:

Intel Core i5-3570K
Asus P8Z77-V LK ATX LGA1155 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Samsung 840 Pro Series 128GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk (this is the Operating System drive)
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (this is the apps drive)
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB 3.5″ 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (this is the drive backups are written to)
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2GB Video Card
Asus Xonar DGX 24-bit 96 KHz Sound Card

This is the first time I’ve added a soundcard in years, maybe a decade even. I did it because I became frustrated with the driver situation for my previous build, where the mobo manufacture (Gigabyte) and the audio chipset manufacturer were not in sync on their drivers, and I had a number of compatibility problems with games. The Xonar stuff has been on my radar for a while – it was cheap enough so I figured I would give it a shot. So far it’s great, and having two independent audio devices is actually handy (voice comms on one, game audio on the other).

The build itself was uneventful – about as easy as they come, and so unremarkable that I have nothing to say about it beyond that. The machine’s been running well for a couple of weeks now, I definitely got a performance improvement in a number of games, which is great, even if truth be told I wasn’t feeling like I needed it before the old machine died. Plus, so far all my game saves have been successfully migrated to the new build, which was the thing I was most worried about. Now I can just cross my fingers I get 2+ years out of this build. Insofar as I can tell, the videocard will be the only likely weak link.

It is worth noting that it’s possible this will be the last time I do this. Intel is signalling that eventually you won’t be able to buy processors anymore – you’ll have to buy a motherboard/cpu combo or manufactured machines, and even the machine vendors like Dell and HP are signalling that they want to get out of the PC business (!!! – they can’t make money). I think what they’re trying to do is get PC’s to the point where they are consumer devices – no one picks which audio chip goes into their stereo, and Intel figures no one should think about PC’s, you just go to best buy and buy model a, b, or c. We’ll see if they succeed. In theory by the time I need another new machine, they’ll be close to or at that point, and Dell may be out of the consumer PC business.

The death of suckegg 7

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Last weekend I finished building a new computer. I was forced into this by the death of Suckegg 7, which had been my main gaming PC for 2.5 years*. I’ll do a brief writeup of the new machine build shortly, but to start, I thought I’d share the befuddling tale of its predecessor’s death.

The first clue I had that something was wrong was about a year ago. Randomly when it booted it would forget what its boot drive was, and I would have to go into the bios and reset it to the correct boot drive. I tried a number of things to fix this (resetting the bios, replacing the bios battery, patching the bios), but nothing worked, and at a certain point it stopped letting me patch the bios alltogether. At this point I concluded I had corrupt bios and started thinking maybe I needed a new machine, or at least a new motherboard, after looking into what it would take to fix corrupt bios and deciding it was a no go. There were two problems with buying a new machine though. First, for about the last 15 years I’ve replaced my machine roughly every two years, but when we knew my son Brady was on the way I spent a bit more than I normally would and figured on the machine lasting me 3+ years. This meant I didn’t want to go and build a new machine, I had sunk money into the one I had and wanted to keep it. Second, they no longer manufacture the motherboard I had, and ‘new’ boards on the aftermarket were $300+ – at least $100 over what I paid, so I didn’t want to pay that much to try and swap out the motherboard in the hopes that would fix it. I actually bought a different model of the motherboard with the same chipset, figuring I could swap everything out and manage to get the right device drivers running on the thing, but chickened out at the amount of work it would take to do it.

Bottom line is I sat on my hands for about a year, dealing with the annoyance of sometimes not booting and having to muck about in the bios to get the machine booted. That was more or less working until December, when the newest and lightest used drive in the system died, causing one of those ‘the system is recovering from a serious error’ blue screens and a dead drive. When that happened I did a chkdsk on all the drives (there were 4 – an SSD boot drive, a 1TB game drive, a 2TB media drive, and a 2TB backup drive), and every one of them had serious problems. At that point I freaked and concluded I needed to write images of every volume as a precaution, despite having recent backups of everything, my theory being I would buy new drives and use those images to get me completely back up and running. I have Acronis, one of the best reviewed backup and disk utility packages on Windows, and thought that this would be easy, but then things got freaky. Imaging my 80GB SSD took 3 days. 3 DAYS!!!. The 1TB drive took over a week. Writing that image back out to a newly purchased drive then took another week. A freaking week!!! I tried all kinds of things to get around this – replacing all the SATA cables, pulling everything but the essentials out of the machine (boot drive, ram, cpu, gpu), booting to cd, to usb drive – nothing worked. Speed was abysmal. Meanwhile, during all this flailing about, the machine stopped booting – it would come up bluescreen of death, and could not even boot to safe mode.

At that point I became so frustrated I stopped touching the thing for a couple of weeks. Eventually I brought it into a local pc repair shop, figuring my time was worth more than the $50 they would charge me to tell me what the hell was wrong with the thing. That was only partly true as it turned out. They came back with a diagnosis of bad sectors on the SSD where a critical windows file was located (which I had already kind of sussed out), and offered to do a data migration for $100-200 depending on how complex that turned out to be. Worst case $200+150 for a new SSD, with me thinking the motherboard was the root of the problem and this money would not fix the issues caused me to bail on the machine. I bought new parts and built a new box. I’ll write that up shortly as per custom, but the spoiler is it was easy this go around, cost me about $850, and I’ll be selling off the remaining working parts from the old machine on ebay to subsidize the purchase shortly. I figure I can get around $300 for those, meaning my out of pocket is not much worse than the repair costs quoted by the repair shop ($350 vs. $550), for a repair I didn’t have confidence in. My one remaining question is, what the hell went wrong with the old one? My best guess is bios corruption introduced data corruption problems on the sata devices, but it’s really just a guess. Anyone else want to weigh in?

*(the name Suckegg 7 derives from when I first moved from Macs to PC’s oh so many years ago. That was in the Windows 95 era, and I joked with friends at the time that Windows sucked eggs in compared to Macs, which I then used as its network name (suckegg). Suckegg 7 isn’t the 7th machine in the sequence, but it was the first running Windows 7, so….)

Stories write themselves

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Who needs writers? Here’s a glimpse of our near-term future, wherein software takes responsibility for writing the stories we read. Now imagine not too far into the future* wherein a complex, macabre circle jerk editorial process consists of computer-written stories being ingested by other software, assessed, cataloged, re-written, and re-published back into the news stream.

Maybe we don’t need readers either, now that I think on it. The computers can just talk amongst themselves. I’d love to see a simulation of how that would play out, where we pour in today’s news and take a glimpse 5 years later at what they’ve been spewing out. There’s the seeds of a novel there for someone like Gibson or Stephenson.

*(by which, of course, I mean now)

Site features removed

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My ISP is complaining about database performance issues and threatening to kick me off their hosting service. I’m going to dump them as a result, but I need to spend some time sorting out next steps, so for now, I’ve turned off most of the bells and whistles on this site in the hopes that one of them is causing the issue.

Why a company would sell me a service (fairly straightforward wordpress hosting is all I use them for) that their server infrastructure won’t support I do not know. My site gets like 3 hits a day. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, more later. For now, no more social media streams.

In order to comment, you now have to answer the captcha

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I moved my site to a shared hosting provider some months ago. So much comment spam is making its way to my site that I’m exceeding their hosting plan terms due to excessive sql traffic. I had to add a captcha to the site to keep from losing my hosting account. When you comment, you’ll notice that you now need to do a simple match calculation and enter the answer before you can comment. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Why the site was down for a month, or: why I’m abandoning Ubuntu

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metamusing was down for a month due to a catastrophic update experience with Ubuntu. I had been running an LTS release for the last year or so. In December a patch came out which somehow broke apache on that release – it was running, but not responding to requests. I gave that a few days to resolve itself via subsequent patches, and when it didn’t, decided to update to a newer release. Turns out moving from that LTS release was a convoluted process which involved updates to specific versions in the right order.

The first update went fine. Everything was back up and running, including the previously broken apache, but having looked over what it took to get to a current version from where I had been, I figured I may as well take the time to get current now because the issue was only going to get worse as time passed. I proceeded to the next update.

The second upgrade also went fine, leaving me only 2 updates away from current, so on I went to the next one, which did not go smoothly. I ended up at the command line on reboot with a broken xwindows and no networking stack running, for reasons I never determined. Xwindows failing on update has happened periodically with linux distros and while I understand the whys of this, it’s still one of the most frustrating aspects of working with the OS for me. Anyway, after screwing around for an hour trying to repair things with no success I gave up and decided to do the last update to the current release, 11.10, using a CD rather than from the network. This turns out to have been my fatal mistake.

Everything appeared to go smoothly – I booted to CD, it correctly recognized the version of ubuntu currently installed on the machine and asked me if I wanted to update it, which I did, so off we went. During the install process there was a single error message which I had not seen before which was worrying, to the effect of ‘some packages cannot be upgraded and will need to be reinstalled.’ It did not enumerate them nor offer me any options, it just reported the problem. Everything else finished and I rebooted…to discover that the update had gone disastrously awry. A random sampling of the oddness:

  • Apache was no longer installed, and there was no longer a /var/www directory where I had gigs of binary data (most of it pictures).
  • Mysql was no longer installed and none of my table data was present any longer (!!!!)
  • A huge swath of my previous software stack was gone, including the data that accompanied it.
  • The usr directories of my wife and I were still present, but her account was not.
  • the stuff I had installed into opt was still there, along with the data.

As you might imagine, I was furious. I still am. On the one hand, no doubt this is somehow my fault. I was rushing through this. I do not keep good backups beyond the wordpress tables that have my blog. I’m hardly the most clever linux user and my job has removed me from daily use and the good practices that helps enforce. On the other hand, I’ve been running linux at home since ~’97. I’ve had head crashes, disastrous red hat upgrades which pushed me to Ubuntu, a cpu cooler retaining clip breakage which caused one of my machines to bake itself to death, including its drive, yet despite all of that, never a loss of a whit of data. I’ve always managed to recover everything. But not this time. I won’t descend into details, but I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out how to recover data from that drive, and as far as I can tell, short of paying through the nose those mysql tables are gone, and they’re really the critical missing piece. Everything else I can either recover from the drive, or I have partial or complete backups of, but the sql tables with all the structure to 12 years worth of images in my image gallery? They’re gone.

So…to hell with Ubuntu. I get this is my fault, but at the same time, I won’t run that distro again, and I might be done with linux at home. I should have had backups, but it never should have destroyed my data – that upgrade script to 11.10 was somehow disastrously broken.

Where does that leave things? I moved my hosting over to site5 for the time being, and my media server stuff over to a windows machine. I think I’m going to pick up a mac mini and move to that for some of this stuff, but maybe keep the web on a hosting provider and not in my house. I’m evaluating image gallery approaches now. I’m not going back to menalto’s gallery – they’re not keeping up with the times. I’m not sure what it will be, though Piwigo is looking promising so far. I want video support, mobile support, social networking sharing support, and effective, well-maintained wordpress integration. Suggestions welcome. As far as the old linux drive, I may still pay someone to try and get those sql tables off of there – they have the first year of my son’s life in pictures, with all the family comments on them. I have all the pictures, but that structure and the comments are the absolute worst loss out of this, and I want them back if I can get them without breaking the bank.