Take one cheap Japanese plastic fan, snap the front off, trim the blades to fit the duct, zip tie the duct to the fan and walla forced air duct for a small server room.

This idea at first didn’t do much. I had the fan on the floor with the ducting blowing out the bottom of the door. Seemed to just take the cool air from the floor of the server room and blow it around with the cool air of the hallway and let it drift back in. The room hung out at around 103* with that setup (video below).

After that setup I moved the fan to the top shelf of the computer rack, stretched the duct out to match the door, cut a hole, trimmed one of Emily’s food bowls to fit in the door and it all slides together now when you shut the door. The best thing is that it dropped the temp from 103* to 86* in about 30 minutes.

Still debating some more ideas, but for now; this seems to be keeping up with the 12 odd computers running in there (most are just doing SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, Cosmos@Home and MilkyWay@Home). I’m also putting bugs in Emily’s ears to let me purchase some “real” servers and get rid of these old ones. Then again, I really like using old computers so who knows .. what ever ..

Take care and check back again,
Justin

IT WORKS! 100% works now! I Googled some more on how to set up the correct APN settings for SoftBank in Japan and walla! 3G, MMS, Network … the works .. The only concern I have now is will it affect my bill? I’ll know here in a few weeks if the SoftBank Flat Rate Data Plan.

Now I can use Waze, Google Maps, Little Twit, GeoBeagle, Fring and more while away from wifi.

I still haven’t hacked my Nexus One, but that is destine to come. I mean really; if it’s working you haven’t fixed it up yet.

I can’t say enough good stuff about the Nexus One. I owned an iPod Touch for a year and my iPhone for over a year. Jailbroke them several times, and used them bone stock. Either way they just don’t measure up to the Nexus One (Especially since now Android comes with native pinch-zoom). The phone feels grippy in my hands, has the little ball/click thing at the bottom that I honestly haven’ty found a serious need for and with the “built in” keys at the bottom of the phone just below the screen everything is handy dandy. Not to mention the touch-hold tecnique works really well (like the iPhone’s touch hold for moving icons).

I’ll write more on this phone I’m sure. I mean really, it’s working perfect .. time to HACK!

I’ve always wanted to put out what my MythBuntu box looks like, but couldn’t figure out how to get a screenshot w/out snagging a keyboard and using the gnome screenshot tools.

So basically you use “import” to get a screenshot of a screen while you are ssh’ed into that machine. My instance was:

$ import -window root -display :0 test.png && rsync -avz test.png justin@192.168.0.39:/home/justin/Desktop

So it basically snagged a screenshot of what ever was on display :0 then I used rsync to copy that file to my current computer’s desktop.

Here is what that command produced:

MythBuntu Media Menu

This menu is the tip of the iceburg. The icons you see here are all folders with movies or parts of the movies inside. If I were to scroll down, you would see the movies that are singular in nature that did not need to be broken into pieces.

Enjoy,

Justin