2018: Day 35 the one where I built a new Corsair 740 based computer
Word count 94,140 + 3,328 or 97,468 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

That title is misleading. Building a brand new computer would require buying all new parts. The parts being assembled today are not all new. Sure the Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX Cube Case is 100% brand new fresh out of the box. Somebody from Fedex just delivered it to the house yesterday. All the other parts in the case are from a computer I acquired some time ago. It had some type of HP micro-ATX motherboard. At the moment I think it might be an MS-7613 or maybe some variant of that motherboard design. Going out an building an all computer would be cost prohibitive at the moment the price of the parts is greater than their value assembled.

Earlier this morning I grabbed the Corsair Air 740 case and a towel. It was pretty easy to set the towel on the dining room table and place the case on top of the towel. That is how the entire build process started today. Unscrewing two thumb screws was all it took to remove the power supply side panel. The motherboard side of the case has a door handle with an easy open latch that really was pretty easy to open. Getting the motherboard setup was pretty easy the case had slots for a micro-ATX motherboard. I was able to put 5 screws into the case to attach the motherboard. 3 up top and 2 on the middle row. That was enough to get the motherboard firmly attached. I keep all of my motherboard parts in the hand tray under the front of the Storm Stryker case. Cooler Master had some really good design choices on that case. The Corsair 740 does not have as many features. It is however my new case and it does have a lot more slots for fans on the motherboard side of things.

Getting the graphics card installed was pretty easy. I detached two thumb screws and took out 2 slot cover brackets out of the case. The graphics card installed pretty well and was secured with 2 thumb screws. I dropped in one SSD drive using the screwless drive bay. Adding the SATA cable was easy enough. The only real problem came during the process of trying to plug in the front panel switches to the motherboard. They are just not labeled on that old HP motherboard. I found some diagrams and plugged the cables in to the best of my abilities. They are either upside down or exactly in the correct alignment. It could go either way i guess. We will find out at some point. The entire system has no power supply and is not going to be booting up any time soon. My future power supply is on backorder.

The other problem that was diagnosed during assembly is the number of fans in the case. The tiny micro-ATX motherboard can support two extra fans. That means that I need to devise a method to connect 5 other fans that are or will be hanging out within the case. They won’t really be hanging they are screwed to the walls of the case and cannot really move. Fan vibration against the case would create noise pollution within my office and that is not acceptable. I have never really run into this problem before and I’m going to have to do some research on exactly how to connect in these extra fans. Oddly enough it does seem like Google gets lots of search variants related to, “how to connect extra case fans.” I picked a link from the venerable and mostly trustworthy Tom’s Hardware. Based on the guide that I read it appears that I will need to buy a cable that connects to my power supply unit or motherboard that splits off into several fan connectors. It does look like Newegg has some options for this type of cabling.

I’m going to have to learn about the different options and order one of them post haste. They are not very expensive so ordering one will not break the bank, but it is very interesting. My current motherboard in my Storm Stryker has about 5 fans plugged into it and that is something that I took for granted. I know some folks might cringe at the idea of the case having 5 fans plugged into it. One of them is a Noctua NF-A20 PWM premium-quality quiet 200mm fan that is pulling hot air off the graphics cards the other two are Corsair Air Series AF120 LED Quiet Edition High Airflow fans that are pulling air into the case from the bottom and front respectively. Those three fans were added to deal with the heat from two constantly running graphics cards.

Topic 1: The OSU vs. KU basketball game

The Oklahoma State University basketball team is playing pretty well today. At halftime the University of Kansas Jayhawks are struggling. The team has been down pretty much the entire half. Things are not looking very well. Ouch —- that game did not end up going very well. Coach Bill Self is going to have to make some adjustments or the Kansas streak of winning the Big 12 basketball championship is going to be over. I do not have anything else to say about this topic. It just makes me sad. This paragraph will be short.

Topic 2: No more cable television

I made the trip to the cable store. It is about 25 minutes from the house. Getting in the car with the X1 box was pretty easy. We had the cable box plugged into the Xbox One S via HDMI. Our entertainment hub has been the Xbox One S. For some reason the fan on our new Xbox One S is horrible. It makes an awful clicking noise. It really is just terrible. Quality control for Xbox production should be ashamed they let these sneak out into the wild. It is really bad the clicking is loud enough that I can hear it from about 50 feet away. Ok back the problem that was addressed today the cable box. Crawling behind the entertainment center to unplug the X1 power supply was easy enough. I grabbed our push to talk voice remote for the X1 and all of that ended up in the car.

After getting to the store the technical/salesperson who greeted us was able to take our cable bill and reduce it by 2/3 in one decisive action. We went to internet only services. It was frightening and exciting. It was exhilarating and unnerving. We can now only watch streaming services or the over the air antenna. An option exists to move to a 1 gigabyte down internet service, but it would require a technician to come out and verify our lines check out and are up to standards. You can imagine that getting rid of cable was really as easy as dropping off the box and moving on. We were not under any contract or anything like that. At some point next week a brand new TiVo box will show up.

Tonight we have the Xbox and a sweet TERK Indoor plate antenna that found 41 channels when plugged directly into our Sony Bravia television. We plugged in the antenna to the television and it took me a minute to figure out how enable the auto scanning feature. It warned that the scanning might take a total of 30 minutes. Fortunately that was not the case it took about 5 minutes. It found a lot more channels than I expected it to find. It does appear that broadcast television is still alive and well. 41 channels worth of it

Topic 3: NiceHash sent me a payment

Mining cryptocurrency has not been as fun this week. Bitcoin values cratered. They bounced back a little bit. Things are wild in the world of mining. My NiceHash Miner software is still running. It actually just paid out my 8th wallet payment. That was pretty exciting. I was able to make a transfer from the NiceHash wallet over to my Coinbase wallet. My BTC fortune has not reached 0.0096 of a bitcoin. You read that correctly I have almost mined 1% of a bitcoin using the NiceHash mining software. That was a lot more awesome when a bitcoin was approaching $20,000 in value. Based on data from the Coinbase dashboard it looks like in the last month bitcoin has dropped 40.42% in value. A higher value without that reduction would have made my fraction of a bitcoin a little bit more shiny. Alas that is not the case.

NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

8. 2018-02-03 05:50:10 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
7. 2018-01-30 04:28:59 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
6. 2018-01-27 04:51:21 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 04:25:25 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 05:32:06 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 04:27:55 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 04:30:34 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 04:51:00 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

My 100 day journey into the world of cryptocurrency mining is well under way. I have mined a variety of things with NiceHash and I have a couple thousand TurtleCoins. At some point in the next two weeks my new backup computer will be up and running. That assumes a power supply finally shows up after being on backorder. That backup mining machine will build up some reserves of fringe or alternative cryptocurrencies. That has a better shot at profitability than just watching the NiceHash miner grind away selling hashing power. Don’t get me wrong. I have enjoyed using NiceHash, but selling hashing power does not have the same potential upside that mining alternative coins has.

Topic 4: Google gave me a free audiobook

Apparently for owning a Google Home Mini device I received a store credit for one free audiobook. The email said, “Audiobooks are here, and your first one is on us.” That was pretty epic. I scrolled through the listing and really pondered what audiobook would bring me the most joy. You may be surprised to find out that book is Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). When I bought my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone it came with a free Google Home Mini which in turn apparently came with a free audiobook. I’m going to have to plug my Google Home Mini back in to listen to the audiobook. It is one of those devices that I received and setup, but have never really used. I actually unplugged it the other day when my office cleaning binge started.

Topic 5: Getting ready to watch the Super Bowl

We have been without cable television for most of the day. Things seem to be going fine. Sure i will probably miss the Curse of Oak Island and Top Chef. Beyond those two shows I not really have any vested interest in television. We have a subscription to watch the new Star Trek Discovery. I would have just bought on Blu-ray if they had started selling it instead of stringing it out via some CBS streaming scheme. We also have a subscription to something called Stargate Command that proporates to have new episodes of Stargate at some point. You may be starting to see a pattern around our buying habits. They are pretty much driven by science fiction tent pole franchises. Overall that does not really concern me at all. My Blu-ray collection might take up space, but it does not really hurt anything.

It has been about 8 hours since we gave up cable and I can report that nobody seems sad or worried about the decision. Tomorrow however is the day that Super Bowl LII (52) will be occurring on the NBC. That should be easy enough to pick up using our new TERK over the air antenna that is directly plugged into the old Sony Bravia television. It also appears that a ton of streaming options exist for the game. The NFL must be trying to combat piracy by just making it very easy to watch the game online. I’m curious to see if the game tomorrow will have a high viewership number. Apparently, Super Bowl XLIX (49) between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks was viewed by over 114 million people. The game tomorrow will probably not pull in that large of a an audience, but it could pull in a very large amount of people. Based on the economic drama that has occurred throughout the last week and the horrible flu season I think people may just stay in and watch the game driving that number way up. If they manage to calculate all the streaming figures correctly, then it could make a for a record setting number.

We will be watching the game. Being fans of the Kansas City Chiefs the outcome of the game is interesting, but I have no real emotional attachment to it. My rooting interest would be for a good competitive game that is fun to watch. That is probably the best way to sum up my interest in the game. I am wondering if we will see any interesting advertisements. Don’t forget that Apple launched the Macintosh with an iconic Super Bowl commercial. Some very iconic commercials have occurred during the Super Bowl. More people are going to be tuned in and engaged during the Super Bowl broadcast than at any other time throughout the year. If you want to capture the attention of the people, then the Super Bowl is your best bet.

Topic 6: Rounding out the night

Really digging into meaningful topics still appears to be a little bit illusive during this writing journey. That is wholesale my fault. The buck pretty much stops right here. I should be picking better topics and spending more time writing about them. Yesterday I had decided to sit down and sketch out my blog post before starting the writing process. That did not happen. This morning I got up and started closing out the blog post from yesterday. It was not until later in the day that this blog post started to come together. It was not sketched out. I started writing without a plan. The only real thought that was on my mind was related to how hard it was going to be to return the cable box. At the time I thought it would be emotionally draining and somewhat harrowing of a journey to get the box returned to the cable company. That was not the case the process of returning the X1 box was pretty much seamless.

The one thing that I should have done was factory reset it before returning it. Somebody could plug that device in and watch all my Curse of Oak Island episodes stored in the DVR. I guess that device also knows my Netflix password. Maybe they are storing that in a secure way. Either way that concern is just an afterthought. The device is gone. It was scanned in and officially returned. The one thing I have noticed about using the TERK over the air antenna hooked into the television directly is that the guide function is highly limited. Getting the TiVo box will help fix that problem and make it easier to find the right content at the right time without a whole lot of effort.

My goal for the day is to continue writing and try to break the 100,000 word mark for the year. That will probably depend on the level of passion that the topics I pick inspire. It is entirely possible that in about an hour I will want to lay down and just go to sleep. That is what happened last night. That type of effort just keeps me behind my writing goal. Playing catch up is always hard enough to begin with. It would be easier to just stay on schedule and keep on moving forward based on the daily writing plan. That plan calls for a minimum of 3,000 words to be written and ultimately posted within a blog post. Sure that sounds like a routine thing to read as a statement. It is a much harder thing to accomplish.

I started wondering if it would be possible to play my new Dune audiobook from my Pixel 2 XL phone. It turned out that the answer to that question was yes. However, it did require installing a new Google Play application from the store called Play Books. Right now I’m at 0% with 20 hours and 54 minutes remaining on my new audiobook. This is really more of a table reading than anything else. Each part seems to be read by a different person. It is entertaining, but it will take a long time to listen to all 21 hours of this audiobook. I read at a much faster pace than these folks talk. That is good I guess. It will allow me to keep writing and listen to the audiobook at the same time. It really does seem that they are just reading the book word for word. That is good. Some audiobooks are highly abridged. This one appears to be unabridged.

Today was a rather productive day. Even my never ending battle with my laundry pile found a small degree of success. Most of my clothes are now folded and stored in my dresser. Cleaning up my messes and clutter is one of my goals for the year. It is a goal that can be accomplished. It is something that can be done.

Topic 7: Closing out the next day

Things ended up at a count of about 2,882 words yesterday. I’ll take it and we will close out the writing process this morning in a storm of prose. Today is Super Bowl sunday and plenty of time will be available for writing on the couch during the game. I do need to go over and make sure that we are getting a good strong over the air single for NBC on the old Sony Bravia television. That is one major consideration for the day. We kicked off the day by turning on PBS kids. That was a different twist to things. Normally it would have been some type of streaming or maybe the Disney Junior channel.

I do watch a lot of YouTube compared to anything else. A lot of the YouTube creators that I follow produce clips that are about 10 minutes long. I watch a few of them each day. They are mostly on in the background. Right now however, I’m listening to This Week In Computer Hardware episode 451 recorded February 1, 2018. Leo provides tons of content on TWiT television. Leo says on the about page that TWiT is a netcast network. I would just describe it as collection of podcasts with video. All the shows are pretty much stationary and have really good audio. The video is mostly just people sitting around in a studio or their homes talking. Either way it has been something that I have enjoyed for years.

Strangely enough Patrick Norton is talking about GPU prices and miners today. It was really interesting to watch this show talk about the wild tactics sellers and miners are the value of potential income. It was really interesting. My guess was that they were being rather reserved on the topic and did not share their full unfiltered thoughts. I did really enjoy Allyn and Patrick Norton talking about ways to free the GPUs from miners. That made me laugh/giggle.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

P.S. Today is going to have a rather short postscript. On the brighter side of things the word count for this post is well over 3,000 words before this last little bit of reflection. Today the post for day 35 is coming to a close. You can expect a lot of Super Bowl related content to happen later today. That is sort of what happens this time of year. This will be Captain Pickles first super bowl in the house. In preparation for the game we washed both dogs with some type of coconut and honey smelling shampoo. Peppercorn the dog gets washed very sparingly. That dog is not a fan of baths. Captain Pickles does not appear to care in the least.