pc

Update: I was able to get everything to work—but I couldn't get the RX 6700 XT's drivers installed in Ubuntu. There are probably a few reasons for that... but it definitely wasn't as straightforward as I had hoped. I'll post an update soon.

Last year, in my work towards bringing up a graphics card on the Raspberry Pi, I was fortunate enough to acquire an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT at near-retail price (thanks to a viewer who assisted my luck!).

This year, as part of a slightly-zany video building a Raspberry Pi into a standard desktop PC, I was able to gather enough parts to make up a halfway-decent gaming/creative PC centered around the RX 6700 XT, and instead of putting it together myself, I thought I'd share in the potential disaster in a live stream—tune in at 10 a.m. US Central time on March 3 (or watch below):

Recently I built the Seaberry, a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 mini ITX motherboard into a PC case (video coming soon...), and got the case power button, power LED, and activity LED all wired up to the Pi:

I used the GPIO and 14-pin header present on the Seaberry (which conveniently are identical to the headers on the official CM4 IO Board), and wound up with a fully functionality power button, power LED, and activity LED!

Here's how I did it:

Power button

To get the power button working, you need to connect the case's front panel 'power switch' connector to pins 12 and 14 (GLOBAL_EN and GND), as seen in the top middle of the above picture.

I wanted to document this process on my blog, since it's the second time I've had to do it, and it always takes me way longer to figure it out than it should... basically, here's how you can take a laptop with a hard disk that's running an older version of Fedora (in my case, Fedora 23), use the Fedora install media to re-partition the drive, then install a newer version of Fedora (in my case, Fedora 26):

[Update: I have posted an article about all the computers I've owned].

Pictured below (in the final year of its existence) is the first computer I ever called my own. Built out of scrap parts my Dad brought home from his office, I managed to build the computer as a 33 Mhz 386, with 2 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive, eventually upgrading it (in stages) to a 66 Mhz 486 with 8 MB of RAM and a 512 MB hard drive!

mmm... SCSI in a PC!

How, you may ask, could a diehard Mac/Apple fanboy start on a 386? Well, it was all about budget, you see. Free is good, especially when you're a little kid with absolutely zero dollars in the bank.

From MacRumors:

Google is phasing out the use of Windows company-wide due to security concerns. The move comes after news in January that Google was hacked in an attack originating in China. Those attacks used a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer for Windows. News of the report comes from FT.com who cites several Google employees.

"We're not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort," said one Google employee.

The majority of those moving away from Windows PCs are moving to Mac OS according to another Google employee. New hires are given the option to run Mac OS or a Linux-based machine.

Google employs over 10,000 individuals worldwide.

So, what computers, peripherals, and software do I use to manage all the websites I create, fix all your Macs, edit photos, and design graphics? I think this is an important question to answer, for two reasons: 1) You can see what I use, and see that I don't take any project lightly; and 2) You can hopefully learn something from my setup that can increase your own productivity!

(Click on the image above for a larger version, complete with detailed notes). You can see two basic themes from a general overview of the picture: First, there is a major lack of space at my workstation. Second, the space I do have is optimized to its fullest potential.