Gamer Setup
My epic gamer setup. I'm always playing the latest titles like Sonic Adventure.
I have a ton of consoles like the old NES, SNES, Genesis, Saturn, and that
brand new Xbox thing Microsoft made, though my favorite by far is
the Dreamcast. All of them go to the TV through RF cables and a switcher with nice clicky
buttons, all ready to go with a single press. Or 2 presses, since each input has a console on channels
3 and 4. It was a rat's nest for a while, but I'm pretty proud of the current cable management! Just don't look at the RF boxes.
This is a table I bought at a thrift store for 10 bucks, so it's fine to slap clips all over it
and cut horrifyingly uneven holes in the back. At the moment I'm at max capacity for consoles
until I make some big changes, the switcher can't support any more and I refuse
to start using multiple of them at once. I was thinking about getting that new Gamecube but there are no
good games, it can't even play DVDs and the discs look like chocolate chip
cookies rofl.
But what is really interesting is not just the video games. Behold. Both the Dreamcast and
Xbox can connect to the internet, just as Al Gore foretold. The Dreamcast
annoyingly still uses phone lines and has pretty limited web browsing. A neat
trick to impress your friends is to host something locally to view on the Dreamcast, like
your own webpage.
But it's really meant for playing games like Phantasy Star Online, which works amazingly.
I bet in the future you will be able to use it alongside some
kind of low-power device running software that converts modem signals through
a modern ethernet signal. I would call it
Dream pie
or something because I love pie X3. But regardless the online on the Dreamcast is sooo
cool, Sega will live forever. Microsoft won't be able to compete once Adventure
2 releases.
PROJECT UPDATE: Mistakes were made
Ok, breaking character now. I was truly not planning on getting a Gamecube
anytime soon. Nothing against it, the library just doesn't interest me
as much as the older consoles, I can already play these "legit" on the
Wii, and the games are way too expensive for my tastes anyways. But when you go looking
for deals, sometimes life drops something on you that you would be a moron
for refusing. I got this thing from a local place for like 60 bucks. 60 bucks!!!
That's nuts! The game I bought was almost as much as the console! I just
couldn't help myself at that point. I don't have an RF modulator so it can't go on my CRT yet.
But now that I do have this I am realizing how much I want to do
with it. Gameboy player, Swiss loader, transfer Pokemon Ruby stuff with Colosseum.
It's gonna be great. Not for my wallet, but it will be great.
Windows Deployment Server
WARNING: Boring actual IT shit ahead. This is stuff I do use in my current
position but I don't really have a great understanding of how it works. I only learn new things
by diving in headfirst and figuring it out as I go, and it's surprisingly not too hard to get started.
With the power of shit that I bought from thrift stores and stole from my office, I have created
a setup that will allow me to build a poor facsimile of an actual enterprise domain controller and deployment
server rolled into one. On a mini-pc with a celeron processor and 6gb of memory.
I'm sure that's exactly how professionals would recommend doing it.
(Also this monitor is apparently the monitor that was modeled and used in
cs_office. I wouldn't think this is nearly as funny normally but I found this out
from a random youtube video literally 2 days after buying it)
Right now I have a basic active directory set up with the WDS server. Once everything is set
up you really just boot anything else on the network through IPv4 and it just works.
Computers can be truly magical. The deployment server itself only installs the OS
and joins the computer to the domain, which is good, but I wanted more. Task sequences and
SCCM stuff seemed a bit out of my reach with the hardware I have on hand (Why didn't I just use
virtual machines? Because I don't want to.) But I did find out the magic of ppkg files. This stuff is crazy.
You use Windows ADK to configure stuff like naming the device, set the desktop image,
removing all the bloatware, and so much else. And all you do is put it on a USB drive and throw it
in during Windows setup. It just reads it and applies everything right then and there! It's not as
seamless as I had hoped, but it's so fast and easy I could see myself making a ppkg for my
personal computers! But Microsoft
cannot make good things, so if something goes wrong there is no log file or error code. You are just
shit out of luck until you figure it out yourself. Right now I can't quite get Firefox to install
itself. Oh well.
This is all cool, although I am slightly worried someone else is going to boot into it randomly
and not realize what the hell is going on. Maybe I can figure out how to put it on a VLan? Is that too far for a homelab?
Am I worried about something that will never happen ever? Do I just want an excuse to buy/steal more shit? I
will leave the answers up to the reader's interpretation of my character.
More projects coming soon
