Josh (the blog)

I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.


@joahua

3mm destruction

Yesterday morning on the way to school I happened across a motherboard complete with processor in a computer case dumped on the side of the road, which I then proceeded to pick up (soggy dust and all — it’d been raining torrentially the night before), place in my bag, and lug around until I got home 10 or so hours later.

Gigabyte GA 6VXC-4X-P motherboard, with Pentium 3 processor and HSF attached.

After I’d attacked it at school with tissues for a while, it was finally dry and (relatively) dusted, so I shoved it back in the bag and took it out when I got home, where it sat untouched until this afternoon, when I looked at it again. On second inspection, I found far more dust residue than I’d thought, so I proceeded to take the AGP slot clip off (that’s the black thing around the brown thing perpendicular to the three black strips close to the middle of the board) in order to clean gunk from between it and the green caps (the green circular things next to the black thing around the… you get the idea). Bad idea.

The clip has a fastener at the end nearest the rear of the motherboard (the side with the purple/pink thing next to the two silver things, or the bottom of the picture above), which slides up and out, so detaching that end was fine. It seems, in hindsight, that after that was undone the clip was to be removed by simply pulling upwards, not by sliding out backwards. Because I slid it out backwards next, and that was a disaster.

Macro shot of mount point for missing capacitor C400

You can see in the image above that C399 is present and accounted for, but C400 shows two solder terminals and a whole heap of not-much else. It’s not perfect focus, but that’s one of the first times I’ve seriously used the macro feature on my digital camera, so I reckon it was decent! That shot from a distance of about 0.03m, by the way (You can click on the image above for a higher resolution version of it). Basically, as the clip moved backwards, it forced past the capacitor, detaching it from the motherboard (I figured the stress I felt was just plastic-on-plastic as I tried to remove the clip…), and then flying across the floor. Keep in mind this isn’t exactly the biggest component ever:

Macro shot of missing capacitor C400 next to my finger

Yeah. I crawled around for a while after that.

I’m kind of hoping that it’s just a capacitor for the AGP port, because I can live without that being there, but I’d rather not plug in the motherboard and power up to find out it’s something else… so as soon as I can hunt down an iron which will do SMD soldering adequately (taking into account my pretty average motor skills with such things), I’ll try and bung that one back onto the board and use it all happily again. Alternatively, if anyone feels like volunteering their SMD soldering skills, you’re more than welcome to do it for me!

Ubuntu

Ubuntu Linux logo

Ubuntu Linux rocks my world*.

*Where “my world” actually means “one of my workstations”… it’s still good!

My brother’s birthday (cake) and a light

I don’t usually post about birthdays, simply because that means people will be disappointed if I forget/don’t post for them… but my brother Lachlan had a really cool cake, so I’m posting a picture of that to make you all hungry!

A rather delicious cake.

And I also bought a lamp for my room today which is just awesome (was only $6, too!), so here’s a photo of that…

My funky lamp.

Isn’t it cool?

WordPress 1.5 download counter

I haven’t upgraded, or even grabbed the source yet, but some may be interested in this download counter saying how often the latest WordPress has been grabbed. It was at 11,889 when I last visited…

Bake the Cake screening

Someone putting a ball in.
Nat Moss, female school captain 2005, wearing a Bake the Cake jersey
Ben, pretending he's homeless.
Murchy in an amusing still.
Rohan the Naked Chef, Nat and Andrew next to the “fan-forced oven”
Rohan, in Zoolander pose and Naked Chef dress, standing behind a cake.

It finally happened today — the public screening of the Bake the Cake video released here a few days ago, shot on January 24th, and edited the day after. It was most exciting to finally see an audience’s response to it!

Now, apparently, the entire school has seen it, and SACS students can expect to be subjected to Andrew’s singing in assembly at some point in the not-too-distant future… singing what exactly remains to be determined, although some have proposed the composition of a Bake the Cake song(!) to the tune of some well known-ish piece of music, just so everyone recognises it and can laugh if things go wrong!

A series of still images from the shoot are included on the right side (above this post if you’re not doing the whole CSS thing — and if you aren’t using a visual UA then it doesn’t matter much at all!) for your enjoyment (or something!) — most of the photos were taken by Ben using my digital Pentax Optio S40. Look at them. Be entertained. Especially by the last one. And if you haven’t yet seen the video, hurry up and download it before it goes! (WMV format, 16.5MB)

Note: The original mirror has now gone down. This updated post gives a new download location, from OurMedia.