So with Christmas and the Steam Winter sale over now, I have A LOT of video games that I haven’t played. Between getting a PS3 bundle with 2 games, 2 Xbox 360 games, 7 games in the last Humble Indie Bundle, and 8 games from the Steam Holiday Sale I’ve built up quite the backlog. Of course this is on top of my existing game backlog which is already pretty long.
Tag Archives: Computer
Setting up a FreeNAS Box Part 1: The Install
FreeNAS is a task specific operating system designed to be used in Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. It’s built using FreeBSD as the underlying OS which lets it have some fairly low power hardware requirements. For example the Dell I used is an old Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and it runs like a charm, granted I don’t put a lot of demand on the box in the way of concurrent transfers or running processes. It’s worth mentioning that the recommended way to install FreeNAS is to install to, and boot from a USB thumb drive. This is the recommended method so it can save as much hard drive space for data storage, but even though it looked like I could boot from the thumb drive like a hard drive in the BIOS I had trouble getting it to boot so I installed the OS to the 160 GB hard drive with partitions for the OS and data. Here’s the parts list with some specifics after the jump.
Parts List:
- Old Dell Dimension 4400 – bought at university surplus sale, $5
- Various old IDE hard drives I had sitting around – two ~20 GB; one 160 GB, probably cost me something at some point…
- USB thumb drive – “borrowed” from family, free
Continue reading Setting up a FreeNAS Box Part 1: The Install
My DD-WRT setup
I upgraded my Linksys WRT54GL with the DD-WRT firmware a while ago and used it as a wireless bridge for internet access in my bedroom where there aren’t any ports (yet). I was using an old D-Link wireless router as the main router, but wanted the upgrade in functionality that DD-WRT provided. So I reset it back to “Factory” default and set it up as my main wireless router. This is mostly for my reference if needed later, but if it helps anyone who happens to stumble upon it later than even better. Continue reading My DD-WRT setup
Easy way to add a second monitor.
There are a ton of good reasons to have your computer as a dual-monitor setup, there’s the added productivity of being able to have applications open in each monitor to work with at the same time. You could also have one monitor dedicated to goofing off, but we won’t tell the boss about that one… There also the fact that they are cool and get plenty of attention, if you’re like me you will have to explain almost daily how just because you have two monitors you don’t have two computers.
How-To use KeePass to Store Password and Other Sensitive Information
KeePass, along with KeePassX and KeePass Portable, is software that safely and securely stores username and password information. One big advantage of KeePass over lots of other methods of storing passwords is the ability to setup groups and subgroups of passwords along with keeping your password database encrypted using AES or Twofish encryption algorithms. So lets get started by going through how to set up and use a database as well as some useful options in the program.
Continue reading How-To use KeePass to Store Password and Other Sensitive Information