Rubenerd

What do you do when you have a tiny computer case, and not enough fan headers on your motherboard? You can daisy chain connectors, or you can deploy a fan controller, a device I didn’t know existed until recently.

For some context, I’ve been upgrading my old NCASE M1 build, most recently with a dual-slot Zotac RTX 3070. Unlike my blower GTX 970, the 3070 uses a traditional top-down cooler, meaning it dumps its heat up into the case, rather than expelling it from the PCI slots.

As I soon discovered, the NCASE M1 can more than handle cooling this hot GPU, but the hot air forced up into the case from bottom-mounted fans raises the CPU temperature significantly. This will only get worse when I upgrade the ancient Skylake silicon with hopefully a Ryzen later this year.

Whereas I could rely on convection and negative pressure before, I’ve since invested in a few more Noctua fans as exhaust. But the motherboard only has one system fan header, and I was already using a Noctua-supplied splitter cable to connect both bottom fans. Online guides suggested you could daisy chain more, but I was wary of putting too much load on one header.

I thought my only option was to buy additional fans that connect directly to Molex plugs off the power supply (which I’d done with my Antec 300 homelab server), or wait for a Ryzen board that have far more headers. But then I learned of fan controllers.

Modern motherboards include fan headers with pulse-width modulation (PWM), which lets them adjust connected fan speeds in response to changes in temperature. Fan controllers connect to this same fan header, and relay those PWM signals to multiple other fans. The first fan connector will usually be the one the controller reports the speed of back to the motherboard.

After some basic research I bought a Phanteks Universal Fan Controller and stashed it in the corner of the NCASE M1. Other controllers had RGB light support for which I have no interest, and this box was relatively unassuming and small.

More importantly for my current use case, it came with a tiny remote control that I can have outside the case to control fan speeds. I’ve been concerned how hot the case can get before the mini-ITX board kicks the fans up. Noise is barely an issue when using these Noctua fans, so I’d rather err on the side of cooling. When I get a new Ryzen board with better thermal controls, I’ll attach it there instead.

I was catching up on some old Brain Blaze episodes (#OGBB), and couldn’t let this reaction pass:

I think I have my new Picard Face Palm image for tweets and company chat applications. Am I right, Peter!?

What? The new iPhone SE still has that dated enclosure!? Yay!

I skimmed the product page for the new, third-generation iPhone SE that was just announced, worried about what it could be. It still has Touch ID, and an LCD. I’m unreasonably relieved. Apple may consider those with OLED sensitivity as an afterthought, but at least we still warrant a thought at all.

I’ll still be running my iPhone 8 and 6S for personal and work respectively, but will upgrade once updates aren’t available. The irony is, Android would have forced me to upgrade years ago.

Whoops, missed Music Monday! That’s so unlike me. I think we deserve a toe-tapping classic from one of my all-time favourite bands. That was several hyphens in the same sentence.

I grew up in the tropics, and spent three days in Hong Kong during their monsoon season, and this is the most rain I’ve seen and felt in my life. It feels like the entire eastern seaboard of Australia has been under water for weeks.

This is the latest MetEye image from the Bureau of Meteorology showing rainfall and wind speeds. Last night the wind was so strong it knocked over furniture on our balcony.

View the Bureau’s warning summaries here, and follow the NSW State Emergency Service for evacuation warnings.

I bought a new graphics card recently, so naturally the retailer that sold it to me keeps suggesting new graphics cards for me. Unless you’re a millionaire or using them professionally, nobody is going out and buying another graphics card having just bought one. In the words of Quark from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, that’s some gold-pressed latinum right there.

It reminds me of the time I bought a mattress, and proceeded to be told about mattresses. Because the thing I really want after buying a mattress is… a mattress.

I fear our dystopian, data-mined future. But, if this is all that those brilliant marketing and behavioural scientists can come up with, at least we’re out of the woods for now.

Update: A friend suggested that with all my privacy and security extensions, these retailers don’t have as good or complete a profile of me as they may otherwise do, and so have to rely on fewer metrics. That could be true, but surely even their own data would demonstrate those who buy mattresses don’t immediately buy another one.

I still haven’t got around to my most recent feedback and emails from some of you, for which I apologise! So let’s solicit even more.

My recent FreeBSD workstation/Linux game machine upgrade has meant I’ve been able to move the last of my personal stuff off my nominally “work” MacBook Pro. This formal separation across computers and phones has been great for my anxiety, and given me licence to partake in distro hopping and other silliness.

There’s just one issue: is a phrase with four words. Right now I have to do the USB shuffle each evening between the laptop and the workstation with the one 4K display, keyboard, and mouse. I’m thinking a KVM might help alleviate this first-world problem.

The ATEN 4-port VGA KVM box I have for my Pentium 1, AGP Compaq desktop, docked Toshiba Libretto, and the upscaler for my Commodore 128, Plus/4 and 16 works great, with a button selector to choose which machine I’m using. It’s somewhat redundant for the latter, as the Commodore machines have their own keyboard and mouse, but easily swapping video output on the one 15-inch VGA LCD still makes things easier. There’s no way I’d have space to use this gear in our tiny apartment otherwise.

There are a few ATEN and StarTech boxes that purport to support 4K at 60 Hz, but I’ve held off because of mixed reviews. Enough people say the display cutover is intermittent, regardless of HDMI or DisplayPort. The biggest issue seems to be Macs refusing to wake up from sleep sometimes, perhaps because the KVM isn’t sending the appropriate signal.

Anyone have any real world experience or advice?

I haven’t posted a featured bird photo for a while. Here’s a handsome double-barred finch, taken by JJ Harrison and featured on Wikipedia today.

The site had this to say about the bird:

Best known in the early 1990s, their trademark was electronic rave music with a heavy bass line. Notable Altern 8 tracks included “Activ 8”, “E-vapor 8”, “Frequency”, “Brutal-8-E”, “Armageddon”, “Move My Body”, “Hypnotic St8” and “Infiltrate 202”

That’s clearly the wrong article.

The double-barred finch (Stizoptera bichenovii) is an estrildid finch found in dry savannah, tropical (lowland) dry grassland and shrubland habitats in northern and eastern Australia.

This is a hard post to write, but it has to be said.

My dad’s family emigrated from Germany to Australia in the 1950s. They were part of a wave of immigrants from post-war Europe seeking a better life for themselves and their families that came down under as part of the government’s sponsorship programme. They settled in Sydney, where I’m typing from today.

I have few memories of my paternal grandfather Hans, and the ones I do have are probably a blend of experience and stories from my parents. My mum adored him; she said he was one of the kindest, softest spoken people she’d ever met.

Hans was a field medic during World War II. The family still has a box of his medals and ribbons for his services tending to soldiers on the battle field, complete with the Third Reich’s colours and swastikas. My dad told me it was so we wouldn’t forget.

I remember coming home from primary school after learning about the war, and asking my parents of it. My dad rarely wanted to discuss it, and my mum said Hans would break down in uncontrollable tears at the mere mention of it, even decades later.

So you can understand why some of us are more than a little infuriated at Putin’s idea that Ukraine has to incur a Russian “special operation” to “de-Nazify” their beautiful country, and why we’re so invested in the outcome of this war.

Putin’s justification is a cynical, transparent, ghastly insult to the millions of Jewish people and the mentally ill who were killed, and for the families of those conscripted at gun point into a senseless war to kill their fellow citizens.

Russian parents are being lied to about where their sons are heading, and innocent Ukrainians are being compared to some of the worst atrocities committed by humanity. It looks an awful lot like the opposite to what Putin claims is happening. As they say, judge psychopaths on what they do, not what they claim.

A trial at the Hague would be the most humane outcome I’d wish upon Putin and his sycophantic cabal of advisors and cronies.

After more than a year of sourcing parts for my 1998 Compaq Presario sleeper PC build, I’ve made the decision to refurbish it instead of put modern parts in it again. Yes, my sleeper PC curse struck again!

This time it’s due to my conflicting needs for the case. I want to preserve as much of it as possible, which means no cutting of metal on the sides, or altering the front panel. I see people who take 1990s cases, cut holes into the sides, and add perspex and RGB lights. To each their own, but if you have a particular attachment to a certain hardware design, I don’t feel like this respects it.

Unfortunately, this limited the thermals more than I expected. The Zotac RTX 3070 Twin Edge that I bought to fit the dimensions of the case does work well, but pumps out too much heat for the case to dissipate. This choked even my underpowered old Skylake CPU, and the fans kick into high gear which makes the setup noisy even under what should be less stressful workloads.

I’d have loved to use a blower style GPU like I had with my 970, but the case is too narrow. Water cooling the CPU to compensate was also out of the question, even with the smallest AIO on the market. Even with the smallest radiator possible, there’s simply no space.

The final nail in the coffin was where to fit the SFX power supply. I’d measured the width and height of my little Corsair 750 W unit, but hadn’t accounted for the depth with all the modular cables! Without modifying the case too much, this meant it could only reasonably fit in front of the CPU, which is the biggest space I had to add a fan.

Right now the parts are back in my NCASE M1 while I decide what to do. I’m lucky that this wide Zotac card fits into it with millimetres to spare… a post about that is incoming. It’s also funny that it reminded me how much I love this little case too.

Knowing me, the Presario will probably end up being a Windows 98 and NetBSD tower. I’d got used to playing games like Midtown Madness and SimCity 3000 in VMs, but having a dedicated machine with a period-correct graphics card might be fun too.

I loved the idea of sleeper PCs, but I’m realising now I like old hardware in those cases even more. Go figure.