Tongfamily (Richtong.com Sync)

Well, we finally got our file server running and with three SAS drives to practice with, it’s time to learn how to use ZFS. For convenience we are using Ubuntu and there are some handy instructions for installing it on Trusty Tahr (14.04) annotated with notes from arstechnica.com The instructions…

Wow, I can’t believe how convenient this is. I’m in the middle of converting all by recent Haswell buy recommendations into PCPartpicker lists so it is easy to replicate. Thanks so much whoever made this incredible site with: Compatibility checking. You just pick things and you are much more sure…

Well this is one of the few gizmos that Alex finds useful. We have all manor of Leatherman multi-tools though out the house but the Leatherman Squirt PS4 ($26 at Amazon depending on the store) is the one that gets the most use just because it is tiny.

Well we’ve had our aquarium running reliably for two years now. It’s been awesome. The main issue has been one of the capacitors on the graphics card blowing up. But that was actually better in mineral oil. What would have been a fire merely was the card failing. It is…

Well, this build went so smoothly last time, I’m just amazed how out of practice I am, but to review we are putting a 4590s into this box (3GHz/3.7Ghz turbo boost, iCore 5, 4 cores, 4 threads) and here are the traps: Because of the way the AC power cable…

Well it isn’t like either of these have much documentation. But here are the traps: The disk arrays. There doesn’t seem to be any documentation at all about how the Norco works, but examining the box now that it is finally here, it seems to have four rows of four…

I really wasn’t ready for Black Friday, but gearing up for Cyber Monday, I’m prepared. The main thing is not to buy junk but to get some decent deals on really great hardware. Here are some highlights: Apple MacBook Pro 15” Retina with 2.5GHz, 750M, 512GB SSD. I love the…