Important Notice To My Subscribers

Going To Be Offline For a Little While...

This morning the rooms above mine had a fire break out. The sprinkler system put it out, but in the process I woke up to find water pouring into my rooms through the ceiling. The carpet in the main room was soaked and some minor leaks elsewhere.

Unfortunately, my main computer got a smattering of water on it. Almost none got in it, fortunately except a drop on a non-electronic part and a bit on one of the exhaust fans and on top of the case.

But I went downstairs to find out what was going on, and the fire department came by my room and yanked out the power cords from the surge protectors to the wall socket, apparently as a precaution against starting another fire

That apparently has fried either my video card or the motherboard. I had another video card in my older system, so I put that in the current system. It almost worked - the system tried to boot up to the login screen, but then went back to saying “no signal”. So I suspect the motherboard is flaky. It may recover, it may not.

I would prefer not to use my older system as it’s merely intended as a backup and runs Windows 10 which I hate. I run openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux on my main system.

As it happens< I was intending to upgrade the CPU in my current system from a 6-core, 12-threead AMD Ryzen 2600X to a 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 5950X, the hottest CPU one can put on the motherboard in the machine. I was intending to wait until Black Friday or Black Monday to see if there was going to be a discount on the $475-500 price. but now I have to pull the trigger on it now.

I also have to replace the motherboard. The one I have is hard to find new these days and the new ones cost over $300.00, so I’ve decided to get a cheaper one with most of the features the current one has. I just really need 4 RAM slots and a fair number of USB ports. I have an extra USB port adapter in the current machine I can reuse anyway.

So it will be Thursday before J receive the new parts and can start rebuilding the machine. Hopefully I’ll be able to reuse the 64GB of RAM I have. Everything else - the hard drives, etc. - will hopefully work fine. The only iffy part will be the video card and I may need to replace that as well.

So I’ll be mostly offline for the next couple days. I typing this on my Chromebook but I may go ahead and boot the old machine with Windows 10 if I have to. I don’t like the Chromebook keyboard, but I don’t like Windows either.

I was gathering materials for an article on the Iaraeli-Palestine situation, but that will be on hold until the new machine is up. I also need to finish my series on movies and TV shows that have influenced me. I’ve been learning to use the Obsidian note-taking app - which does far more than just let you take notes - but that’s taken up quite a bit of time to grasp the full power of that app.

So I may be out of action until the end of the week at least, possibly longer if I have to replace the video card. Hope to get back with you all then.