Replacing wall warts with PC power supplies

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

I wrote a long, long time ago about my adventures trying to find a wall wart for my old 8-port Netgear dual-speed hub. The other day I stumbled across a novel idea for a replacement.
I won’t rehash how you determine whether a unit is a suitable replacement–read the above link if you’re curious–but suffice it to say a $5 universal adapter from Kmart is fine for my answering machine or my cordless phone and can probably provide the 5 volts my Netgear needs, but my Netgear also needs 3 amps and the universal adapter I keep around can only deliver 20% of that. The beefiest 5v unit I could find at Radio Shack could only deliver 1.5 amps.

A PC power supply delivers 5V and 12V on its hard drive connectors. And PC power supplies deliver plenty of amperage: one of mine will deliver 25 amps on its 5V line, and 10 amps on its 12V line.

In a pinch, I could just obtain a suitable plug barrel that fits my Netgear from Radio Shack, clip the power connector off a dead CPU fan, and solder the plug to the red wire (5 volts) and a black wire (ground), put it in a PC, and use that to run my Netgear hub. The increased power draw would be equivalent to putting three typical PCI cards in the system. Just be sure to wire things right–reverse polarity can kill some devices.

Rather than using one of the PCs I actually use, it would be better to obtain a cheap microATX case, short the green and one of the black wires on the 20-pin motherboard connector with a paper clip, insulate the paper clip with electrical tape, and then wire things up to the drive connectors. Or, for that matter, you could use some of the other leads available on the 20-pin connector if you have a device that needs 3.3 volts (pinout here.) You could also just use a bare ATX power supply with a paper clip connecting the green wire and one of the black wires on the 20-pin motherboard connector, if you’re into the ghetto look.

An AT power supply would also work and it offers the advantage of being really cheap and common (here’s a nice writeup about an AT power supply’s capabilities), but most AT boxes require you to hook up enough 5-volt devices to chew up about 20% of its rating on that power rail before they’ll power up. I have a 200-watt AT power supply that delivers 20 amps on its 5-volt rail, so my 3-watt Netgear hub probably wouldn’t be quite enough on its own. So it might be necessary to either connect an obsolete motherboard to the power supply or connect a 1-ohm resistor between a +5 lead and ground, if you don’t have a plethora of power-hungry 5-volt devices to plug in.

But PC power supplies provide a cheap and commonly available way to replace odd wall warts, or at the very least, to reduce the clutter around the computer room.

The Abit BP6 and modern Linux distributions

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

Mail from Dave T.: I bumped into a place that is selling a used, functional Abit BP6 and a 400MHz Celeron to go with it. I already got another 400 MHz Celeron so it would be perfect. I always wanted to try out SMP but so far I haven't thought it was worth it. Now I can buy this combo and make my dream come true 🙂
I looked for reviews on the board but most of them were from 1999 and early 2000, when Linux was using kernel 2.2 and there also seemed to be problems with bios on the BP6 causing stability issues. None of the reviews were recent.

Being a long time reader I remembered you talking about owning a BP6 and a quick search confirmed that you were running a dual 500MHz BP6. Do you still have it? If I buy the board then I’ll be running Linux of course so I was wondering if you do that as well? How well does it work? Stability? I know that processors in a dual configuration should have identical stepping. If the two are not the same stepping, do you think it will pose a problem? What power supply rating would you recommend for 2x400MHz Celerons?

Thanks,

/Dave T.

The Abit BP6, for those who are unfamiliar with it, was a popular board among enthusiasts back at the turn of the millenium, because it was the first really cheap and easy SMP board. Prior to the BP6, to run dual Celerons you had to resort to some trickery, either soldering on slocket-type adapters or, later, playing with jumpers on them. The BP6 just allowed you to buy a pair of cheap Socket 370 Celerons and drop them on. A lot of people bought Celeron-366s and overclocked them to 550 MHz with this board.

It’s been forever since I’ve mentioned my BP6 because I’ve never found it newsworthy. My main Linux workstation runs on an Abit BP6 with dual Celeron-500s (originally a pair of 366s, which I upgraded a couple of years ago). I bought the board in late 1999 or early 2000 and it’s still my second-fastest PC.

I run Debian Unstable on it, running updates every month or two, so I’m running bleeding-edge everything on it most of the time. The kernel is either at 2.4.19 or 2.4.20. I’ve been running 2.4-series kernels on the BP6 pretty much since the 2.4 series came out, although I’ve changed distributions several times since then. The board has an Intel 440BX chipset, which used to be common as dirt, so I expect even 2.6 kernels and beyond won’t have problems with it.

I haven’t updated the BIOS on my BP6 in years, if ever. I’ve found the system to be stable–the only problems I’ve ever had could easily be attributed to memory leaks. Things would get goofy, I’d run top, and I’d find XFree86 had several hundred megs of memory allocated to it. I’d kill X, and then the system would be fine. So the rare problems I have probably aren’t the board’s fault, but rather the fault of bleeding-edge software. I was confident enough in the system’s stability that this Web site ran on that system for several weeks and I never had problems.

CPUs are supposed to be identical stepping. I’ve seen dual-CPU machines with different steppings work together without having any problems that I could directly attribute to the mismatch. It’s not a great idea and I wouldn’t run my enterprise on a mismatched system–although one of my clients does–but for hobbyist use at home at a bargain price, why not?

As far as power supplies, I ran my BP6 with dual 500s on a 235W box in an emergency. It’s had a 300W box in it for most of its life, so I’d go with a 300W unit, or a 350W unit if you want to overengineer the box a little bit.

Performance wise, I find it adequate but I run IceWM on it, and my primary browser is Galeon. Evolution runs fine on it. Some of the more resource-intensive desktop environments might pose a bit of a problem.

As far as upgradability, if you don’t overclock, the fastest Celerons you can use are Celeron-533s. If you want to do dual processing, you’re limited to the Mendocino-core Celerons. Celerons faster than 366 MHz didn’t overclock well; the limit of the Mendocino core seems to have been around 550 MHz or so.

Adapters to allow newer Celerons to work on the board ought to let you go higher (I haven’t tried it) but the newer Celerons have their SMP capability removed. So theoretically this board tops out at a 1.2 GHz Celeron with an adapter, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of getting a BP6. That’s also probably why they’re cheap when you can find them; the kinds of people who bought these boards in the first place aren’t going to be too happy with two CPUs in the 500 MHz range these days.

But I’m pretty happy with mine. I’ll run it until it dies, and that’ll probably be a while.

Slashdot just located another sleazy spammer

Dave Farquhar Spam ,

The Dayton Daily News ran a story today about another sleazy spammer. Naturally, it took Slashdot mere hours to dig up an address, based on clues from the article.
The guy leads a lifestyle even more over the top than that described by R. Collins Farquhar IV and Jacques Pierre Cousteau Bouillabaise de Raunche de la Stenche: Sleep until 1, work for five hours cluttering your inbox and mine while holding a brandy snifter and wearing a silk kimono and leather slippers, then go out for a night on the town.

If you’d like to, oh, I don’t know, send him a postcard from your hometown voicing your appreciation for what he does, click on the Slashdot link. Do a search for “Dayton.”

Don’t even think about DogDoo.com. That’s harrassment.

Fun with 419 spam

Dave Farquhar Spam ,

If you are a carbon-based, oxygen-breathing mammal with an Internet connection, you’ve undoubtedly received countless 419 scam spams.
In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, I’m talking about messages coming from people from distant countries with vaguely African-sounding names who have had a close relative or business associate, usually with a high-ranking position, killed under tragic or mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a large amount of money that they now want your help in embezzling or laundering through your U.S. bank account, and in return for your services, they’ll give you a percentage.

And you thought you were the only one who had all these connections to powerful people. Sorry to burst your bubble, Sparky.

What do you do when you get one of these? Some people get irritated and delete them. Some people call me. It usually takes me about 4 seconds to figure out it’s a scam and finish their story (and mine’s usually better, if I do say so myself). Some people write back and mess with them. That takes time and creativity. Unfortunately, my oversupply of creativity is matched only, it seems, by my oversupply of humility and my shortage of time.

What you’re supposed to do (if you’re a U.S. citizen, which I know a good number of you are not) is forward the mail to 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov. Include the words NO LOSS. That helps the Feds know who’s doing this. They won’t contact you if you haven’t lost any money. But the key to catching crooks is data. So send ’em data. Typically I’ll paste the full mail headers back into the message as well.

If you’re lazy but want to mess with them, you can use the Business Reply Generator. Plug in the name of the guy who e-mailed you and the details of the letter, and it generates a rambling response. Copy and paste it and send it back to ’em. Some people are afraid of responding because they might get more of this stuff. I doubt it. These aren’t typical spammers who are paid in volume–they only make money if people respond and fall for the scam, which involves advancing money for bribes/expenses/whatever, until they lure the victim into a foreign country where they can kidnap and hold the victim for ransom and get even more money.

So I would think wasting their time is more likely to get you put on a don’t-waste-your-time-with-this-guy list than to get you put on a quick!-fire-up-the-mail-server-we-found-a-working-address list.

If nothing else, the automated reply generator is amusing. Click “more” to read the response it put together for me. I especially like the last sentence, which, the way I read it, means “I’ll post it on my Web site.”

Read more

Can I ever buy a record again?

Dave Farquhar Music , ,

I read something today that tells an awful lot about the record industry, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Usually when I write a Wikipedia entry, it’s because something popped up on my watchlist, I read it, and found a reference to something that hadn’t been written yet. Today, a link to Doug Hopkins showed up, so I wrote it. It would be a nice break from writing journalism history, which I’m more qualified to write about, but pop culture is more fun.

Doug Hopkins isn’t a household name, but if you’ve listened to popular music for the past decade, you’ve heard his songs. He was the songwriting talent behind the Gin Blossoms, an alt-rock band from Arizona that rocketed onto the landscape in 1993 and then faded fast.

There isn’t much information out there about Hopkins now, but it’s a typical garage band story: Hopkins founded a band in 1987, the lineup shuffled a bit, they spent a few years writing songs, recorded a one-off album that they sold themselves that contained early versions of what would become all their major hits, then they got discovered, and in 1990 they signed a big-time record deal. They recorded an EP that went nowhere, then recorded a full-length debut, only there was a problem. Hopkins, for whatever reason, couldn’t handle the pressure. He was a self-destructive type anyway, prone to depression and alcoholism and had first attempted suicide way back in 1983. He’d get nervous so he’d drink, then he’d go into the studio and flub up his guitar parts so he’d drink some more to feel better, and then he’d go in the next day and be even worse. Supposedly most of the guitar work on the songs that made the Gin Blossoms famous was actually Jesse Valenzuela, who was normally the rhythm guitarist, and little of Hopkins’ playing actually appeared on the album.

Eventually it got to a point where the band was wondering if they still had a record deal, and Hopkins became the catch. If Hopkins was in the band, they didn’t. If he was out, they did. So in April 1992 they put Hopkins on a plane back to Arizona and had someone back there tell him he was fired. They hired one of their groupies to play lead guitar, paid him half of the salary due to Hopkins ($760 a month–Hopkins got half and his replacement got half), and went on tour to support their album.

A year later, “Hey Jealousy” was being played on every modern rock station in the country, and by summertime, it would be on MTV and on the mainstream rock stations as well. I remember I couldn’t go anywhere in 1993 and not hear that song. Not that I’m complaining.

The deposed Hopkins wrote a few new songs and formed a new band, then another, but he was bitter. His friends were getting famous off his songs and downplaying his role in their creation, while he played small-time bars in and around Phoenix. He wrote a few pop songs for other people to try to make ends meet. But in late 1993, he started to self-destruct. In November, his girlfriend left. One Friday in early December, he went into a detox center for an evaluation, and on his way home, he stopped at a pawn shop and bought a gun. His sister came over that night and found the phone book open to gun shop ads. When she said goodbye to him for the last time, she knew it was the last time.

You probably can guess the rest. One of his new bandmates found him at 1:15 Sunday morning in his apartment.

The guy was obviously self-destructive, and everyone who knew him knew it and tried to get him help, and, having had my own struggles with depression, I know you can’t be helped until you want help. His band members knew it–when you listen to the lyrics, the the Gin Blossoms songs on New Miserable Experience that weren’t written by Hopkins seem like they were written about him–and his family members knew it.

But on top of that, he had to deal with the question of how you pay your bills. At least when I struggled with depression, I didn’t have anyone hounding me for money I didn’t have. I was pulling in a couple thousand a month before taxes–not huge money, but enough to live on. This guy was making $380 a month, plus whatever he could manage to get from songwriting gigs and playing bars.

After his death, Hopkins’ lawyer guessed that his future songwriting royalties would be worth at least $500,000. Not bad for a two-hit wonder, and who knows how much staying power he was anticipating. (The two hits the Gin Blossoms would have after NME weren’t written by Hopkins.)

So Hopkins had a solid financial future ahead of him and anyone could see it. But he died with $498 in his pocket. He had no money in the bank.

There’s a word for that. Exploitation. Hopkins’ depression made for some good songs and some good money, but not for him.

And I’m supposed to run out and buy a bunch of records? When this is how the people who make them get treated? I don’t think so.

What to do when Windows breaks

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Every once in a while I get a question like this one, which showed up Thursday night on this page:
I did a stupid thing last night. A friend thought I might need to upgrade my Windows 98SE to Windows ME, but didnt get me an upgrade version, but the full version. Through the installation process, I did not copy the unistall files to my hard drive as I didnt think I would need to uninstall, plus I wanted to get rid of all elements of any old system files, as they were the ones causing me problems (errors in cd-rom line 2, 3 4 etc)…
Now, my computer stays in dos mode, and says that windows cannot run on ms dos version 8.00!?
Please help!? I need to wipe my hard drive and start again. How do I do that?

Please help

This question opens up a huge can of worms, like whether Windows ME really was an upgrade over 98SE, but in this case it sounds like it’s too late for that argument. How do you install Windows cleanly?

Here’s what I do. At a DOS prompt, I enter this command:

REN WINDOWS WINBAK

This gets your old Windows directory out of the way, but without deleting it. This is important because you might want to harvest stuff out of there: IE bookmarks and fonts are the two most likely things.

Next, because these files under any 32-bit Windows cause nothing but problems:

DEL C:\CONFIG.SYS
DEL C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT

If you’re really paranoid, rename them instead:

REN C:\CONFIG.SYS C:\CONFIG.BAK
REN C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT C:\AUTOEXEC.BAK

Next, start Windows setup. Run it off a CD–grab a boot floppy from bootdisk.com if you don’t have one–or the CAB files might, if you’re lucky, be on your hard drive. The standard place OEMs put it is C:\Windows\Options\Cabs. We just renamed Windows, so you can try these commands:

CD \WINBAK\OPTIONS\CABS
SETUP

That’ll start up Windows Setup for whatever version came with your computer.

If the directory’s not there, or Setup.exe isn’t there, you’re stuck using the CD. Boot off the CD, or use the bootdisk if the CD isn’t bootable.

Run Windows setup, and setup will say it found an installation in C:\WINBAK and ask if you want to upgrade it. SAY NO!!!!! (I feel so strongly about this that I’m tempted to use the dreaded blink tag, but I’ll spare you.) It’ll ask where you want to install. Say good ol’ C:\WINDOWS, and you’re on your way to a fresh, clean build.

Spam, spam, spam, spam–how I got less of it

Dave Farquhar Spam

Someday we’ll get a spam filter at work, and the day can’t come soon enough. On Wednesday I got fed up with getting 8-12 messages a day from “Fulfillment Center”–I was much more irate than usual today–so I took a desperate measure.
I dug up the abandoned freeware Windows tool Bounce Spam Mail (search for it with your favorite search engine; there’s no official homepage). As spam came in, I pasted its headers into Bounce Spam Mail and sent back a bounce. Sending back bounces hours later has never been effective for me, but in these instances, I only sent bounces when I was sitting right there when the mail came in. And it seems to have helped a little.

Ultimately, it’s better to have SpamAssassin on the mail server, or install POPFile. I’m stuck with Outlook connected to an Exchange server in corporate workgroup mode at work, and the last I’d checked you couldn’t use POPFile that way. But checking last night, now there’s a way you can, by installing POPFile followed by an add-on called Outclass.

My fake bounces aren’t ideal, but at least they seem to be better than nothing. But I’ll be installing POPFile and Outclass really soon.

Recovery fluff

Dave Farquhar Personal

I did not feel good this morning, and it didn’t get much better during the day. By lunch, it felt like someone had crammed a tennis ball down my throat and it didn’t seem to matter how many cough drops I sucked down.
I stumbled home, took an ibuprofen, and slept for an hour. When I woke up I felt a lot better. The swelling had subsided and my throat felt almost normal.

I got up and fixed dinner and bound a book–Democracy in America, Vol. 1 by Alexis de Tocqueville. It looks so good to finally have that book on my shelf. It’ll be even better when the glue has dried on the spine and I’ll be able to read it.

After doing a Japanese punch-bind, I glued a strip of paper with the title onto the spine for extra strength and to make the book look more like a commercial paperback. Normally you want to show off the punch-binding, but this early effort is nothing to look at. It needed to be covered.

How to determine which device drivers to use in Linux

Dave Farquhar Linux

A question came up in the comments of one of my past entries that raised a good question: When you can’t get a device to work, how do you determine which kernel module (Unix-speak that roughly translates to “device driver”) to use to get the hardware working?
Linux has a virtual file at /proc/pci that lists every PCI device it finds in the system. So you can just more /proc/pci to page through a system inventory and find out what video card, NIC, motherboard chipset, IDE and/or SCSI controller, and other devices are in the system.

If you’re in the process of installing when you need this information (highly likely), use ALT-F2 to get to a text console–or CTRL-ALT-F2 to get to a text console from a GUI installer–and issue the commands.

To get back to your installer, hit ALT-F1 to get back to a text-based installer, or CTRL-ALT-F7 to get back to a GUI installer. If CTRL-ALT-F7 doesn’t get you back to the GUI, try the other CTRL-ALT-function combinations.

My what-I-did-tonight piece

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , , , ,

I hate to do a boring this-is-what-I-did-tonight post, but I figure the occasional one of those is better than silence from my direction.
I’m sick again. I think this is some kind of record. This pattern of five-day breaks between illnesses really better not last much longer.

So I went out to stock up on sick supplies. You know the drill: chicken soup, zinc lozenges, vitamins. I went in to get my vitamins, then found myself blocked in, so I continued down the aisle and found the first vacant aisle to cut through. Of course it was the make-up section. I felt especially manly cutting through the make-up section, especially considering my next stop was… the sewing section. I needed a needle and thread, for two reasons. I’ve got two shirts with buttons popped off, and I learned a cool way to bind books, but you need a drill (which I have) and a needle and thread (which I didn’t) in order to do it.

So I picked up a couple different colors of thread, then wandered aimlessly for a while until I stumbled across the needles. I found a 25-pack for 64 cents. Good deal.

I really, really hope I looked as lost as I felt.

So when I got home I bound a short book. The idea is this: You drill holes a quarter inch from the top and the bottom, then drill two more holes spaced two inches apart. Cut a length of thread about four times as long as the book is high. You can get the sewing technique from this PDF file. Traditionally, you use Japanese stab binding for short books of drawings, poetry, or journals. But I found it works just fine for everyday stuff. I recently printed a few public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and this provides me with an easy and extremely cheap way to bind them.

I was trying unsuccessfully to sew on a button when my phone rang. It was my girlfriend. She asked what I was doing. I told her I was making a fool of myself trying to remember how to sew on a button. She described a technique to me, and when I got off the phone with her, I gave it another try. I think I ended up using a combination of her technique and my mom’s, but it worked. The button’s not going anywhere.

Something she said gave me my masculinity back. She asked how I was at threading needles. I said I had some trouble doing it. She said part of the reason sewing is traditionally a women’s thing is because women have smaller hands, which are more adept to the fine movements that sewing requires. My hands aren’t huge, but they’re bigger than most women’s. She said threading a needle requires good vision, concentration, and a steady hand. I’ve got good vision and concentration. But every time I tried to do something that required a steady hand, my dad just shook his head and said, “You’ll never be a surgeon.” And they’ve only gotten worse with age.

And before all this, I spent some time writing up a piece talking about all the lovely things Microsoft did to DR DOS in the late 1980s. This is in response to some mudslinging that happened over at my recent anti-Microsoft piece. Normally I’d just ignore a troll who doesn’t even have enough guts to put his name on his taunts–all I know about him is his IP address is 12.209.152.69, which tells me he’s using a cable modem attached to AT&T’s network, he lives in or around Salt Lake City, Utah, and at this moment he’s not online–but I think this story needs to be told anyway. Depth is good. Sources are good. And there’s a wealth of information in the legal filings from Caldera. And those filings prove that my memory of these events–I remember reading about the dirty tricks in the early 1990s on local St. Louis BBSs–was pretty accurate.

I’m not surprised. I have a knack for remembering this stuff, and I had occasion to meet an awful lot of really knowledgeable people back then.

If I can still remember that Commodore’s single-sided 170K 5.25″ drive was the 1541, its double-sided 340K drive was the 1571, and its 800K 3.5″ drive was the 1581 and I remember the command to make the 1571 emulate the 1541, and why you would want to emulate a 1541, I can probably just as easily remember what you had to do to get Windows 3.1 running under DR DOS and what the reasons were for jumping through those hoops. That history is more recent, and at this stage in my life, I’m a lot more likely to have occasion to use it.

Not that I’m trying to brag. I can remember the names of the DR DOS system files, and I can remember George Brett’s batting average in 1983, but at the end of a five-minute conversation with someone I just met, I’ll probably struggle to remember a name. Or if you send me to the store, you’d better give me a list, because I’m good at forgetting that kind of stuff.

I suspect the DR DOS piece is half done. I might just get it posted this week.