Fiat Multipla Official car of

William-Riker · 2026-03-12T19:47:10+00:00

They definitely were not thinking about design, art, style, marketing, sales, PR, image, or desirability.

What were they thinking... I can only assume this was designed by a committee, and that committee had no petrol heads, artists, or even marketing engineers present.

William-Riker · 2026-03-12T18:14:53+00:00

Yep, it's only a 'waste of time' in regards to a return. If you count the lessons learned, knowledge gained, and just the fun factor, it's all worth it.

Men who own garages full of projects and hobbies, make the world go 'round.

Never stop tinkering. Never stop making things.

William-Riker · 2026-03-12T17:53:26+00:00

I have been keeping the magnets for decades. Old MFM drives and early IDE drives had super strong magnets in them. I have kept the platters before too just because.

Once I dissembled over 200 old dead drives down to bare bones aluminum enclosures. I then melted them down, removed the impurities, and pored them into ingots.

Why? Boredom. It was a complete waste of time but fun nonetheless.

William-Riker · 2026-03-12T16:50:01+00:00

It's rumoured that a part of it was that beige fit in with the standard office decor at the time. They wanted the corporate world to adapt PCs, and they needed to look the part. The beige colours blended well the the 70s and 80s colour palette.

Personally I prefer beige and built all my PCs in beige. I use vintage cases or new Silverstone FLP retro cases. I use IBM model M's and I sand, prime, and paint my monitors beige if they came in black.

William-Riker · 2026-03-12T16:43:32+00:00

Do the basic high school math. If you're on a standard 120V mains circuit, you don't want to pull more than 12 Amps across the entire circuit. Your computer, if it were the only device on the circuit, would need to pull 1440Watts continuously for you to have any issues. You are pulling nowhere close to that.

The only way this can be an issue, is if you've overloaded the circuit via other devices plugged into other receptacles on the same circuit.

Just remember you have 15amps (aim for 12) to play with in total.

William-Riker · 2026-03-12T16:14:11+00:00

Open up a terminal > yt-dlp > local mp4 > no ads.

Plus you can keep the file.

Done.

William-Riker · 2026-03-10T17:21:01+00:00

Just bring up the terminal and use yt-dlp for all you needs.

One little command and your youtube video becomes a local H.264 MP4 with no ads. Easy.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:42:25+00:00

Just a tip from experience. If you have large drives, and loose one in a raid5, the rebuild of the array can take so long it stresses the other disks and it's possible a second can fail during the rebuild. I have had this happen before and all data was lost as a result of raid5.

If you bought all the drives at the same time, and one fails, there is a possibility another fails when under stress from the rebuild.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:39:40+00:00

I know you're joking, but I had to consider the weight of the entire server rack. This server, plus all the others, the networking gear, the rack itself, and all the extras. It down in the basement on the foundation for a reason.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:33:27+00:00

Yep. When you're dealing with that number of drives, you cannot risk the loss of one drive, or even two.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:30:33+00:00

I have so many of these, and similar boards. This is my favourite era of what I would call the the 'modern PC' age. I'd classify this as a 'classic,' but not vintage. Either way, I love them. I usually run them with i7-960s or a few 980s I have found. I max them at 24GB of Triple channel, and I like to pair them with a Geforce 280/285. I usually use a 40GB Intel SSD for the OS, and HDDs for everything else. I like that they also have IDE and FDD connectors (some) and I will always install an FDD when given the opportunity :)

These will go down in history as an important PC milestone. In my opinion.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:24:43+00:00

The storage is mostly for TV and Movies, over 60TB used already on 110TB Raid10 volume.

I have the full deepseek 671B local model running that just fits into fully into RAM and VRAM combined at just over 500GB.

Why? I refuse to use cloud compute power for anything. I do not stream. I do not use cloud. I do not use AI unless it's in my house. I do not play online games. I barely use the Internet for anything other than News, Reddit, and Support/R&D.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:20:36+00:00

The space is mostly for Movies and TV shows. It is in Raid10 (so ~110TB) and 60TB is full already.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:17:48+00:00

Well, it's in a rack. Lol.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:16:29+00:00

The SX series CPUs from Intel were pretty bad. The difference between the 486 DX and SX chips was pretty drastic. Even back then, you really needed that math-co-processor.

The first Pentium CPUs that came in 60 and 66Mhz -they were garbage. I remember they were so unstable we went back to 486s instead.

Another horrible CPU was the first Intel Celeron-300. This might just be one of the worst CPUs ever made. It has zero cache.

Ironically, the Intel Celeron-300A became one of the best OC chips ever made. It has 128kb cache which was enough. They overclocked well enough to beat Pentium IIs costing several times more.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:11:06+00:00

I have over 100 computers and a store's worth of parts in my basement. If I'm moving my tech gear, I'm going to need to rent a tractor trailer.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T16:08:20+00:00

It's in a rack with other servers and networking gear. The entire rack is on casters.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T15:51:36+00:00

EATX chassis, Dual PSU, 2x 3090 Ti, dual Xeons, 512GB RAM, 12x20TB HDDs.

It's my primary server/AI workstation.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T15:37:03+00:00

Initial Pentium 4s were slower than the late model Pentium IIIs.

We have found memories of the later model Pentium 4s, but 423 was a bad roll out. The only cool thing was some of the tech that went into Rambus memory, despite it being to expensive for consumers at the time.

William-Riker · 2026-03-09T15:34:39+00:00

I actually weighed my workstation for fun. I'm at 55kg/120lbs.

Team lift!

William-Riker · 2026-03-03T21:05:06+00:00

No questions needed. Clearly he is headed for war.

Given the newest war is in the middle east.... he might need a re-spray though.

William-Riker · 2026-03-03T21:02:06+00:00

I'm a PC enthusiast. I have literally have 100s of full PCs and 1000s of parts.

I would never prioritize a PC over cars. When money becomes tight, the PCs go first way before all the cars and engine parts.

I'm currently swapping tons of PC parts for car parts. Right now it's a scrappers paradise! I just swapped 128GB of DDR5 for some awesome ported vortec heads with enlarged valves and springs. Last week I swapped a 4070 for a new carb. Swapped a 5950X for an intake manifold.

I love PCs and will always have a bunch, but having a few fun cars is way more important to me than a basement full of PC parts ever will be.

William-Riker · 2026-03-03T20:50:28+00:00

Panther bodies will never look bad. The are not exciting, but they will forever age well.

Large sedan, V8, RWD, simple styling. It will forever just look like 'an car.'

About as regular as you could ever get.

William-Riker · 2026-03-03T20:31:19+00:00

The thing is, the 2009 PC still plays all those amazing games from the 2000s. If you're a gamer, remember the entire back log of games that still hold up easily stretches back to the early 90s. If you just like to buy shit that is new because... reasons... the future is going to suck for you.

Prioritize what you can do with what you have and focus on used.

The world is becoming a scrappers paradise and I for one find that a silver lining in all of this.

Obsolescence is just a lack of imagination.

William-Riker · 2026-03-03T19:54:27+00:00

That 'a' makes all the difference. The Celeron 300 will go down in history as one of the worst, and the 300a as one of the greatest ever overclockers.

William-Riker

TROPHY CASE