Upgrading memory and skill
News, Technical, Guns ·Saturday January 16, 2010 @ 03:17 EST (link)
Doubled the RAM of minas-tirith today (1G → 2G). It's fairly old; it takes DDR2 667MHz memory ("PC-5300"); cirith-ungol also needs an upgrade; it's is even older (takes DDR 333MHz "PC-2700"). I was worried it required all the chips to be the same, but it eventually booted with the existing 2 x 512M in slots B1 and B2 and a new 1G chip in slot A1 (earlier they weren't seated properly, resulting in angry beeps from the motherboard's POST, Power-On Self Test). I also ran into some trouble with the second network connection (the on-board network connects to the internal switch; the other, a Realtek 8139 card, connects to the cable modem, insulating vulnerable Windows machines from the big bad Internet). It was mounting huge numbers of receive errors, but taking out the card and blowing the dust of fixed it.
Cirith-ungol (the MythTV/XBMC box) also needs more disk; the root partition is only 10G (with the rest dedicated to an LVM partition for recorded video files). Unfortunately the video partition is JFS, which can't be shrunk, so I'm going to have to copy the entire video partition somewhere, delete the old one, and then increase the size of the root partition. I plan to get a 2Tb Western Digital "MyBook Essential" for that, probably from newegg.com.
I've been going to the new WCA range (we have a silver annual membership) on Tuesdays and a few weekends, and my targets are looking better each time—better accuracy and better precision. We may go later this weekend, perhaps taking the Ruger 10/22 instead of the Glock 34. I also plan to go to the WAC show to pick up some brass-cased .223 ammo, since WCA does not allow shooting steel-cased, which is what I have now. I re-upped my membership at SVRC too, since there's nowhere else close to shoot steel (the Sultan pit is about twice as far away and SVRC is only $75 annual). WCA also doesn't allow anything higher than 7.62x39 (typical AK-47 round), so the Mosin Nagant is out (even though at the walkthrough I was told it was fine) and I needed somewhere else to shoot it too.
Books finished: End the Fed, Practical Anarchy, Devil On My Back.
