Beautiful blue anodized aluminum heat sink in an old dell computer.

We need to bring back anodized aluminum heat sinks.

A BIOS POST error saying that this memory configuration requires memory fans, and that those fans are not detected.

This is the nastygram you get if the shroud isn't in place. You can bypass it, but that makes unattended reboots a challenge.

Very wide composite image of two images side by side. The inside of the same computer is in both images, and one of them has a plastic shroud with fans over the RAM slots.

I like this z440 - it was cheap and it's reasonably powerful after a few modest upgrades. I don't like that if you want to fully populate all of the RAM slots, you have to add a big plastic dingus that adds a fan over each set of slots.

Now it looks like the engine bay of a 2012 Camry.

That’s a quality cat right there!

It’s Marco the cat.

Three PCIe cards: two are flash storage, one is a network card with an SMA connector added.

Quiet morning today, so I figured I’d take the time to pull apart my stack and install some gear in my main server. Two ioScale2 SSDs that have been idle for a while, (thanks to RemixVSL who reverse engineered the drivers) and an i210 with a hookup I added for timepulses. More on that maybe?

This is a lot smaller than I thought it would be. I can see it working well as a media center PC, but I'd probably want to replace that blue LED with something more pleasant.

marco the cat in front of a computer monitor

Looking forward to giving bluesky a try, thanks @coryw.bsky.social for the invite! I'm about 15 years behind on this, I had only used the bird app to attempt to get better customer service from billion dollar companies.

Anyway, it's Marco.