August 28, 2004- In honor of Rainwalk.net being up for a year now at its new site, Plague got a hardware upgrade, details here.

May 24, 2004- I've updates some of the PC Mods pages and included some hardware upgrades and case mods to Headcrash. Check it out here.

December 10, 2003- I'm thinking about starting a new project. Something watercooled, something wood, something sleek and silent.

Here's some rough sketches and thoughts:

Sorry about the size of the pics, but any smaller and the details started getting muddy.

The case will be made from 7/8" Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) for its sound and vibration dampening traits. It will be two sections: one for the main body of the case, the other for a smaller watercooling area up top.

I'm planning on having two 120mm fans bringing in air. One will be down low running through a 5v-off-12v switch to keep the three SCSIs in a slight breeze to keep them cool and get some air circulation in the main body of the case and over the motherboard.

The other will be running through a 7v-off-12v switch and will be pulling air through the radiator of the cooling circuit that will flow like:

Pump - Rad - CPU - GPU - Res - Pump

The cooling section of the case will be completely separate from the main body of the case. My intent here is to create a wind-tunnel effect that will pull air through the radiator and then blow over the rest of the components for added cooling and then exhaust out the back.

I'm debating on having a third 120mm fan in back to pull air out, but I'm not sure if it's necessary of if it will just add noise.

On the bezel will be a switch for the CCFL, two momentary switches for power and reset, two (maybe three) on-off-on switches for fan control. There will also be five LEDs; one for power, one for IDE activity and three SCSI activity.

I want the case to resemble a speaker cabinet, so I'm using parts from PartsExpress.com

September 18, 2003- Earthquake got another hard drive. Details here.

August 1, 2003- Plague has been reborn as a dedicated server in a collocation facility. Details here.

June 17, 2003- I've finished (the current batch of) mods to Locust, re-staining it and neatening up the wires inside, plus adding a cold cathode light. Check out the updated setup here.

June 1, 2003- New hardw4r3z arrived and going into Locust and Earthquake. Locust is replacing Plague as my secondary gaming rig, and Plague is destined to become a dedicated server that will be living in a colo facility in the future, serving up these pages; email- forums- database servers as well as a dedicated Quake 2 Devastation server.

Check out each of the three machines pages for details here, here and here.

May 1, 2003- Now that Headcrash is all up and mostly installed, I managed to take some benchmarks of the storage subsystem to decide how to set up the drives array-wise. I've also decided to take the other "ghetto array" and see if I can stick it and the Adaptec SCSI RAID 2100s card into Plague. Details as they unfold..

April 23, 2003 - I've been really, really, really, really tempted to build myself a new computer, but I won't because I'm a good boy, and computers cost money.

So instead of buying myself more parts to build a rig, I've been buying cheap parts to mod up my current cases. Take a look at the changes to Headcrash and the acrylic case I put together for my mom.

March 24, 2003 - I purchased an ATI Radeon 8500LE card in the 64mb flavor the other day and stuck it into Earthquake, boosting the 1600x1200 resolution FPS score in Quake ]I[ by 200%. Damn... and for less than $75. It makes me wonder what it would be like to have the Radeon 9700 Pro card.

This new card has caused a trickle-down effect, sending Earthquake's ASUS GeForce3 v8200 card to Plague, and Plague's Viper v770 32mb card to Headcrash, and Headcrash's Vanta TNT2 16mb card to Locust, and Locust's S3 2mb card to the parts box.

Obviously, all the boxes now are zipping along just a little bit faster, making my next LAN party that much cooler.

I also have picked up five old LVD 10k 4.6GB SCSI drives and a Compaq 5300 Smart Array controller card. I plan on modding up the Headcrash box to get all nine SCSI drives into the thing and cooled adequately. Headcrash will then have two RAID cards controlling two different RAID-5 arrays. Details as they arrive.

February 7, 2003 - After a long hiatus, my life is sort of working itself out, so I'm back to modding, among other things. Have a look at the new and improved wood case that Earthquake now lives in!

June 11, 2002 - I finally got around to building a wood case for my test PC, Locust. It worked out really well, and I believe I'll be making woodies for all the rest of my machines. Check out the new Locust page here and the details of the woody here.

April 2, 2002 - I got antsy and decided to reconfigure Plague and Locust, making Plague a dual ATA-100 machine and making Locust dual SCSI. I think this configuration will make both machine more responsive and speedy. But for what, exactly, I don't know.

November 28, 2001 - After getting Earthquake all settled in and working nicely (well, Cubase still needs tweaking as it still produces pops now and then) I turned my eye on my other machines and started tearing them apart and reorganizing them for a new network layout and a more optimal hardware configuration.

I've got Plague torn apart and redone in a new LANparty configuration, meaning that it's light and decently fast, and I've basically gutted Headcrash so I could get W2k running on the thing.

An earthquake's a-comin'

I've really gotten into Digital Audio Recording and, because of this, I've outgrown Plague and have decided to build a new workstation called Earthquake. Find out about it's progress here.

A bit of background:

My machines are all named in memory of machines found in the Unix cluster in the basement of Davis hall on the U.C. Berkeley campus while I attended school there. To my knowledge, Lightning, Locust, Headcrash, Earthquake and Plague have all been renamed to boring names like uclink1, uclink2, uclink3, etc, so I "appropriated" the names.

At the moment I have an NT4.0 file server called Headcrash, a FreeBSD box called Locust and a Win98 box called Plague. I'm building a new box that will be my primary workstation. It'll be called Earthquake.

Headcrash case mods and specs:

Headcrash was originally stored in a cheapo mini-tower from CompUSA. It now lives in a modded HX08 that I modded last winter.

I took pictures during that process with a disposable camera, but I haven't developed them yet. When I do, I'll post them with a bit about what I did.