Electronics accessories - what to do with them?

[Snattlerake]

. I figure I would light it up, maybe put some little LED’s in with the boards to blink and make it look like it’s doing things. But I also want it to be functional. I have 3 ideas for that:


I did that for Halloween! I used some itty bitty battery powered lights to light up some old electronics testing equipment. One was a really old O Scope. It had ghostseses inside the CRT.

One was a tubed amp. I hot glued the LEDs to the tubes so it looked like they were glowing.

 

[THAT Gurl]

Used to be when the USB peripherals came out, USB ports failed en masse. The computer might boot up but any devices connected to the USB wouldn't work. Booting any computer required going into the boot sector then the BIOS or use an external drive. That drive had to be designated an initial boot drive and had to be configured in the BIOS. If it wasn't a designated first boot drive, the hard drive was usually first then a boot disk.

USB mouse and keyboards didn't work as they were initialized farther along in the boot process.

The old PS2 devices especially keyboards were like gold when you had to boot from the boot sector as they were initialized first before the boot sector and therefore before the USB devices.

Ask me how I know. I carried an old beat up PS2 keyboard for years going cross country to "fix" unbootable computers.

One thing I never understood is why a Windows update would hose up a computer so bad, you had to get into safe mode to uninstall the update then reboot and the damn thing would run.

Most of these updates were for some Uganda computer system anyway and the lack of the update wouldn't affect our system negatively.

Now computers don't have the PS2 jacks and some don't even have a hardwired network port.



Did ya hear the one about the inventor of the USB had died? They lowered him into the ground, brought him back up, turned him around 180 degrees and lowered him back into the ground.

What?!!?!!?!? I have NO IDEA what you just said.

 

[THAT Gurl]

You guys are amazing! I am NOT computer stuff savvy AT ALL ...

 

[HoLeChit]

You guys are amazing! I am NOT computer stuff savvy AT ALL ...

I'm so/so, but I had to get better because of the new career direction, so I don't have a choice now, lol. Anyone can learn it.

 

[THAT Gurl]

I'm so/so, but I had to get better because of the new career direction, so I don't have a choice now, lol. Anyone can learn it.

I've always thought about giving it a whirl. I'm not dumb (most of the time) but my ADHD kicks in and ... Oof ...

 

[HoLeChit]

I've always thought about giving it a whirl. I'm not dumb (most of the time) but my ADHD kicks in and ... Oof ...

Just gotta break it down into small bits. A good place to start just to have an understanding of things is loking up Mike Meyer's A+ course on Udemy. Its 20ish hours of video classes about the basics of computers, broken up into 5-10 minute chunks. I think its $12. I suggest it to anyone who uses a computer.

 

[THAT Gurl]

Just gotta break it down into small bits. A good place to start just to have an understanding of things is loking up Mike Meyer's A+ course on Udemy. Its 20ish hours of video classes about the basics of computers, broken up into 5-10 minute chunks. I suggest it to anyone who uses a computer.

Ohhhh ... Thanks ... I'll be back later. Lol

 

[Snattlerake]

So my long term project goes back and forth in terms of size, scale, and purpose, but the general idea is this: a table, desk, or wall mounted shadow box kinda deal containing lots of circuit boards. Kinda nerdy, kinda artsy fartsy. I figure I would light it up, maybe put some little LED’s in with the boards to blink and make it look like it’s doing things. But I also want it to be functional. I have 3 ideas for that:

1: build a password cracking rig into the fixture. Password cracking rigs are awful big, with heavy cooling and power demands, and typically demand a lot of space too. I’m looking at building a rig that runs 4 graphics cards in parallel for additional computing power. With my last big password cracking job I fried my graphics card on my workstation, and would like to eventually build a cracking rig for high demand stuff, reducing wear and tear on my regular computer.

2: build it into a cluster computing device. I could put several small, moderately powered energy efficient computers in amongst the circuit boards; think like Dell Microform factor computers like seen in offices and stuff. Using software I could use the cumulative computer power of all of those rigs to power through tasks as one unit. This would be the cheaper route of the three, and would be more for fun/proof of concept. Could prove to be useful though, as it could be used as a scalable network security device to manage my VPN, network intrusion monitoring, network storage, ad blocking, and other stuff.

Both of these high horsepower solutions would be useful with digital forensics projects as well. Most of that forensics work is awfully taxing at points.

3: build it as a a computer desk, and build a PC within it, hiding the usable parts amongst the old parts. This would be a fun way to hide the ol desktop.

Maybe something like this, but with modern stuff mixed in:
View attachment 430216View attachment 430217
I saw the bottom coffee table about 14 years ago when some guy built it, and fell in love with the idea.

A fella I delivered laundry to had me open his garage with a code every time I delivered and picked up. He had a great big server rack with fans blowing on it just a whirring away. I swear he was mining Bitcoin.

 

[Snattlerake]

You know what?? It never occurred to me anyone would want this box full of junk but I have an assload of them, too?? I'm gonna piggy-back on your ad in case anyone wants even more ...

I'll get a pic together in the morning. I think I have a bunch of earbuds too ...

I'm a little south of Jason. NW 23rd and Council ...

Post it up and I'll throw it on the first post since my stuff is gone.

 

[O4L]

Give them to @swampratt, he'll take anything.

Except cell phones.