a different look (v5.0)
El Caminito del Rey is Spanish for The King’s pathway. It’s a walkway along steep walls in Spain. If you are interested in some more background information you should take a look at Wikipedia. It is a very dangerous, small and half rotten walkway and since a few years is even illegal to walk the path. However, some people are really trying to get a Darwin Award …
In January this year I was introduced to my new colleague Tunahan who was two days a week working on identifying metabolomics networks by building models on his computer – won’t bother the readers with further details about that. The only colleague till now who wanted to go outside for a walk. And I think that’s because we’re sitting the whole day behind our computerscreen. So we had always a good reason to stretch our legs when it was lunchtime. We then rescued ducks, talked about birds and plants and things which are typical Dutch – which are “strange” for a foreigner – and differences between Turkey and The Netherlands. I learnt some interesting things from Tunahan and I guess the other way around he also did. A nice colleague, very friendly and always in for some nice discussions/talks.
But all good things come to an end. His period as a post-doctoral on his project ended somewhere in August, but on top of that he heard he had to go into military service for a long period, probably a year. It’s a pity that he has to do that. Because the way I know him, he just doesn’t really fit in the army in the sense of being peaceful and having something better to do then wandering around in green outfits and being trained. But because of his high educational background, he might get a more “intelligent” job in the army, so let’s hope that.
Anyway, today was his last day and he gave me two souvenirs. One is a typical Turkish drawing on a magnet, which is now hanging on the whiteboard. And the other is a bookmark – I hope I understood that correctly … – with a so called ebru (Turkish for marbling) painting on it and a golden decoration. Watch this Youtube movie to see how it is made. Very nice. I’m a little bit ashamed I didn’t give him some Dutch souvenirs. Anyway, I am looking forward on updates from Turkey in the future, so I’ll keep an eye on Dutchistan, or perhaps a newly named blog.
That’s the title of a horror movie from 1979. You could say: so what? As some people perhaps know, I can really enjoy B movies and cult movies. In the past I’ve “collected” items like Toxic Avenger, Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Kung fu Zombie – watch this excerpt – and a lot more. Most of these so called B movies have one thing in common: bad acting, bad effects, bad script, bad … actually everything is so bad. And that makes these movies funny. You just sit and watch and laugh about the badness. I hope to add many more bad movies to my existing list.
Anyway, now and then I exchange movie and music suggestions with a friend of mine. This week he came with a movie called Tourist Trap. What is it all about? Living mannequins – those clothing dolls in the stores – who attack people and scare them at every possible manner. I got a copy of the movie and will surely watch it. It looks promising if you take a look at the trailer.
First be warned: this is a technical post. A few weeks ago I was thinking about building a lower power mini-computer to replace my current barebone most of the time – except when 3d is needed. I was aiming at 50 watts maximum power usage. I looked around at myelectronics.nl, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for (either too expensive or even not small enough or missing functionality). My conclusion was then quite simple: why not use my Asus EEE netbook? Maximum power usage is ~22 watts on it. It has SSD (8 GB) and is practically silent, it only makes some little noise when the mini-fan thinks it gets to hot inside the netbook. For the rest it has all that I want/need (WiFi, USB, VGA-out, audio in/out etc). I wanted to combine this device with my barebone, so I had to get a KVM-switch. I bought the Aten KVM Switch CS-62DU, for those who are interested. Works fine, although I use it only for switching the keyboard/mouse. The Asus is analog connected to my TFT-monitor and my barebone is digitally connected to my TFT-monitor. Works great and my TFT+netbook use together at most ~71 watts.
Further, because I am now switching between my barebone and my netbook I needed a central storage facility to access my data more easily. There goes my low power moral. I looked around and it seemed that the Conceptronic – seems to be a Tulip-division? – CH3SNAS is a good device for this, average power usage is ~14 watts and when under heavy load it uses ~27 watts. There are also a lot of hacks for this device, because it is based on Linux it’s quite easy to customize it. The amount of storage is a little bit outrageous with 1 TB (or 2×500 GB in RAID0/1), but so be it.
One final thing to mention is that we’ve also put a time-clock between the router and the modem. Partially to save also energy there, but also another reason: we have to reboot the router almost every day, because it freezes. So that’s now combined with a nightly shutdown and power saving.
Conclusion in the end: total power usage in the worst case is ~99 watts and in the best case it’s ~ 70 watts. It seems to become an obsession, but I like to play/experiment this way.