The wifi on one of the older laptops in my collection failed quite a while ago. At the time, I figured the wifi card in the laptop had died, and got a USB wifi dongle to get it back online. Didn’t think much else about the problem after that.
This morning while I was looking inside to see what could be upgraded, I decided to pop the wifi card out to have a look. The top didn’t look too unusual, but when I flipped it over, there was a big toasted area on the label. Looks like the wifi chip got a bit hot and burned itself out.
Scorched wifi card
The wifi card bay also showed some evidence of the heat. The area was a bit tacky, so I think it might be adhesive residue from the sticker on the back of the wifi card.
Wifi card area
I popped the RF shield off the card and saw a bit of browning on the board from the overheating chip.
One of my favourite games to play on my Apple IIe back in the day was Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. It’s been a long time since I played it, but thanks to xu4 (on Sourceforge), I can play it again. I’ve known about xu4 for a long time, but never bothered much with it until recently.
Getting it running on Fedora is as simple as installing the package with sudo dnf install xu4.
UltimaIV intro screenOut in the worldShopping for supplies
Plays just like it did on my Apple IIe. Ahh, memories.
Finally getting into some consistently warm and more typical weather for this time of year. It’s not getting really hot yet, but it’s hot enough to tell that the insulation I put in over the garage seems to be helping quite a bit to moderate the garage temperature.
Up in the attic space, I was measuring temperatures in the mid 30s (°C) while in the garage it was in the low 20s. Much more comfortable.
If the temperature difference stays around 10°C during the height of the summer heat, insulating the garage will have been totally worth the investment.
This year I decided to insulate the attic space above the garage. During the summer, the garage stays pretty hot and muggy, and nothing saps the will to work on projects in the garage more than stepping into a 40°C workspace.
The attic gets pretty toasty in the summer, and the drywall doesn’t do much to keep the heat out of the garage. I’m hoping the insulation will keep at least some of the hot humid attic air out of the garage and help maintain the garage at a tolerable temperature.
The insulation is pretty easy to put down, but having to crawl over and around the rafters made for tiring work, so I ended up splitting up the job over two days. Unfortunately I had a bit of a brain fart when ordering the insulation from Lowe’s and got the 16″ wide batts instead of the 24″ wide batts even though I had just measured the rafter spacing. Doh. Fortunately, each bat is 48″ long, so I just had to cut each one in half before laying it down. That added a bit to the installation process, but was easy enough to do.
With 4 of the 8 packs of insulation down, all the far away parts of the garage were insulated.
At the far end of the garage, there’s not a lot of head room and lots of shingle nails poking through the roof sheathing. After laying a few pieces of insulation down, I decided my head needed some protection. I don’t have a hard hat but I do have a bike helmet, which proved to be adequate for the job.
The second day went a lot faster and I was able to get the rest of it done in about an hour. A little less crouching and crawling around because most of the hard to get areas were already done.
The opening to the attic area is the only space left uninsulated now, so I’ll have to think of something to do about that. Maybe glue some insulation to a board that would sit on the opening and could be moved out of the way when needed.
Ended up only using about 6.5 bundles out of the 8 that I bought. Not sure what I’ll do with the leftovers. Maybe I’ll just spread them out over the attic.
Acquired few things over the weekend that the Daughters of St Paul downtown didn’t need anymore and would otherwise have gone to recycling or trash. Among them were a couple of old IBM ThinkCentre computers over the weekend. One is missing a hard drive and the other needs RAM. I think I’ve got enough other bits lying around to make one computer out of them that might be usable for simple tasks.
IBM ThinkCentre A51
IBM ThinkCentre A51 innards
They’re both IBM ThinkCentre A51 computers with Pentium 4 CPUs running at 2.93 GHz.
Intel P4 CPU
They both have 1 GB RAM (one has 4×256 MB DDR2 sticks, the other has 1x1GB DDR2 stick). I think I might have some 512 GB DDR2 sticks in the junk box, so might be able to get one of them up to 2.5 GB. That might be enough for a very lightweight Linux distro. Just need to scavenge a hard drive from somewhere.
