mending things

 If you follow my recent posts, I've been deploying some older computers on citizen science projects, namely Fold@home and BOINC. I now have 3 Mac Mini computers, one of which is the desktop machine I use for all my online activity. The other two were running Fold@home client software in a headless configuration (no connected monitor, keyboard or mouse) I redistributed the various servers around the house and decided that all three Mini's should  help heat my office space, but how to arrange them ?  The Mini is a very neat design, with air drawn through the edge circular base and vented out through the rear slots. The solid aluminium casework also ats as a heatsink . Mostly it's completely silent and you could be forgiven for thinking the Mini does not use a fan (it does). While stacking them vertically is aesthetically appealing, this would probably cause heating issues as the heat from the chassis below would increase the temperature of cooler air flowing in the base o...

I volunteer at a couple of Repair cafes in the UK, and we have had a couple of these popular Thane H2O X5 Steam mops in with similar symptoms and fixes. These devices generate steam from water held in a chamber and direct this to the head, to which a mop cloth can be attached. This steam is hot enough to break down dirt, grease while killing off any bacteria. The owners loved them and were very happy to get them working again. The failed units no longer pumped water through the boiler chamber , and hence generated no steam despite the power light coming on. The units will suffer with lime scale , as any electrical appliance that boils water will. However the "Catch 22" is that in order to pump a descaler through the pump to descale it, you need a working pump to extract water from the main reservoir via its umbilical hose. I did a bit of googling and found this video from the always excellent bigclivedotcom Clives video is the key to fixing these units. First you need to disc...

Back in 2008, I started this blog with a post about how my son and I attempted to tweak a humble Dell Dimension 2350 computer for PC gaming. See  How to build a gaming PC from a Dell Dimension 2350 . By 2012 the PC was running very slow and was retired to the attic, being replaced with a mac mini for my son to use for schoolwork. I lamented the demise of this lovable old PC, and back then signed off with : Who knows, perhaps one day to return , in its current guise or perhaps running a flavour of Linux, which might be another way to give it a new lease of life While recently reanimating  another retired PC as a dedicated Folding server  - see  Building a Fold@Home dedicated PC server which is also a space heater , I spotted the old Dell and wondered if it too could be recycled doing something useful. I fetched it down, and acquainted myself with this old friend. My thinking was initially , that I'd redeploy it as another Fold@home server , running linux. It would be ...

This post is about a project I've recently worked on which was not as successful as I'd hoped, but worth documenting all the same. I wanted to make a PC server, using old parts I had and headless (no monitor), that just runs medical research workloads  ( fold@home aka FAH) and warms up my office in the process. Background : Computers, waste heat and the data furnace  I worked in IT for 35 years, and have always been interested in how computer systems deal with waste heat. Most server rooms or data centres need to be kept cool or the computers will fail. Computers turn 90%+ of the electricity they consume into heat, probably now closer to 99% with SSD technology, and in this regard they are no different to an electric heater. We've all probably felt the warm air coming from a games console fan, or had a laptop feel uncomfortably warm. Computers are great electric heaters. Waste heat is treated as an inconvenient by-product, it's not quite usefully hot enough, typically ...