Rubicus' blog

So I have a 10 year old computer standing around, that I’ve previously used as a router. Now that I have a TV I thought it would be nice to have a computer connected to it, and since I have several computers, having a central storage ponint for files would be nice addition as well. While the computer is 10 years old, it has an Intel core 2 duo E6600, an ATI Radeon X1950 pro, and 2 GB of RAM, so it should be able to play 1080p material without to much trouble.

So I figured I would like some sort of RAID structure for this in case of a drive failure. The plan was to run a RAID 5 structure with 3 1 TB drives. This way I can get 2 TB of storage with redundancy in case one of the drives should fail. I also use an old 30 GB drive for running the OS off, since it’s so much easier booting linux from a non-RAID partition.

So here’s a followup on my last post (found here)! The chip arrived fairly quickly. Placed the order on tuesday night and I had it the next monday. I decided I needed some practice soldering first (don’t want to have the actual T-con board in my TV be that mess of black horror that my practice boards turned into), and so it took me a while until I had the courage to go for the real chip. Since I had trouble finding PCBs to practice on it took some extra time. Finally got it done yesterday, and well, it’s working! :D It’s actually working! I actually have some trouble believing it myself! Really happy though! Sorry about the crappy picture quality (taken with my phone from the sofa in a dark room).

This post will mostly be about the process of switching the chip!

I finally bought a TV after contemplating it for a long time! Got a used 37’’ LCD screen TV for what I considered to be a really good price. I used it for maybe 2 hours and was very happy with it. Really good picture with clear colors, nice blacks and, most importantly, it accpeted a 1080p input from my computer.

Sadly this didn’t last for very long. Suddenly the pictured turned grey, and became almost completely white, with the remaining picture having weird rainbow-like colors, as can be seen in the picture below. This made me a bit sad. However, I decided to not give up easily, and instead look forward to the opportunity to be able to tear down and repair a TV. That process is what I will be covering in this blog post.

I’m probably putting way to much time into trying to make this blog look exactly like I want it to, but one issue I’ve had was to create the front page of the blog. I do want some of each blog post to be visible to anyone visiting the front page, so that it’s easy to get and idea on what that post is about. At the same time, having each whole post on the front page would be too much, and you’d have to scroll a lot if you’re just trying to get an overview the blog or trying to find something you’re interested in. The answer to this problem is excerpts, and this blog post is going to be about these (and also utilizes them).

What i initially tried to do was use the truncatewords filter in liquid, like so:

{{ post.content | truncatewords: 60 }}

I have long been thinking about starting a technical blog. I often tinker with projects of different kinds, and it’d be nice to share some of those things with the rest of the world. And if noone reads it, it’s still good for me to document for myself what I’m doing. :) Can’t say it’s only going to be technical things though; I’ll cover any subject that intrests me enough to make a blog post about it.

It wasn’t obvious to me what sort of platform that I would choose, but I ended up hosting it on github pages, generating it with the help of Jekyll. I really do enjoy the very simple framework, since everything is basically text files that I keep track of in a git repository. This means all I really need is emacs, and this works very well for me with my newfound emacs love spacemacs. To publish, all I really need to do is just SPC g P u!