Computer tech blog

[Dr. Mario]

If you have an old computer power supply that's not been in use for a while and is still working, you probably may be able to use it. If you do, I may give you a list of wire color and its functions, just in case you don't know about it. Should be a good refresher course, though.:

Green: On (short it to ground to turn it on.)
Black: Ground (In this case it would be "-" Cathode.)
Yellow: +12 Volts DC
Red: +5 Volts DC
Orange: +3.3 Volts DC

[Smokey]

For me those are new PSUs, "old" PSUs are AT PSUs wich have a built in power switch... ^_^ but that is a good idea, although computer PSUs arent as stable as LAB PSUs...

[Dr. Mario]

Apparently, no power supplies are perfect. Except, of course, those having rather fatty capacitors for DC power filtering. However, I have had no problem running tons of shits off a harvested DELL computer power supply, but it did killed a Infrared VCSEL diode. LEDs, on other hand, are very forgiving when it comes to ESD (except for the Gallium Nitride LEDs, green [510 - 490nm] to Near - X-ray [180 - 48nm], they're very sensitive to ESD). Yellow LEDs, paired with the resistors will be fine on this PSU.

[Smokey]

Ah, then it should be fine... or i can always toss in an extra circuit with a couple of filtering capacitors...

Meanwhile i had a braiwave, if a laser rod lases intenser with more photons being pumped in, how would a rod being pumped by a dozen laser-pens behave, since laser-pens already produce a coherent beam of amplified light...  ;006

[Dr. Mario]

Well, it won't work, because the ruby rod absorbs yellow light better than red light.

BUT, if you put two ruby rod, both illuminated by yellow LED array, then one ruby rod would be properly labeled a pump laser "lamp", and other a laser emission intensity amplifier.

[Smokey]

Both rods behind eachother or one aiming at the other?
Also while watching "Build it bigger: rebuilding greensburg" on DiscoChan i thought of using a parabolic trough to pump a laser rod... We have a nice hot sun this time of year, and i was concepting a sort of small scale hydro-thermodynamic generator...

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[Dr. Mario]

Place two laser rods' ends facing each other, so that way the first rod pumps the other rod.

BTW, parabolic mirror will work. The only problem is, how do you cool the steam? Under the right condition, it can hit few hundred degrees, unless you have a heat exchanger of a sort. Pressure is also one of another corcerns.

And, no - it's unsafe to pump the laser rod unless there are freezing cold air blowing across it. Heat will simply stress the laser rod until it either explodes or cracks.

Added after 13 minutes:

But still, you would have another shot at it still. Use the best leaded glass and Yellow borosilicate glass filter, cooled by the rear-projection TV CRT coolant, to reject heat-generating Infrared radiation, leaving you only with blinding bright yellow light for to pump the ruby rod without frying it in the process. Be careful, though, that not all ruby rod are approved for CW function (that is, being a pulsed-mode laser rod.)

[Smokey]

Yeah i have thought of that, and the generator setup would need a similar heat exchanger as an ordinary PC watercooling system, only bigger...; Pumping cool water through a tube housing the condensor and cool that with a radiator... Or use a two-stage cooling system, in wich th primary loop cools the generator loop and the secondary loop cools the primary one resulting in the radiator(s) having to cool less hot water...

And i tend to forget that laser rods have the nasty tendency to bblow when becoming too hot, wich makes building an extremely powerful one a bit difficult since liquid nitrogen cooling systems are a bit hard to come by for average people like me... ^_^

Anyways, if i were to get that generator system working and tweaked nice enough to produce some nice wattage i could cut back on the energy bill a bit... This works a bit better than a (home-brewn) windmill, because catching wind with a mill small enough to avoid building code and pissed neighbors is nearly impossible, and a sun-boiler could produce enough pressure (if the system is built right) to drive multiple (or one whopping big) turbine... ^_^

[Dr. Mario]

That's alright, people do forget. At least I reminded you of laser rod's nasty nature.

And, also back to the computer topic, I bought Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blue (formerly Caviar SE16) to replace a messed-up secondry drive. Now I got enough room for editing Blu-ray Disc files (M2TS) - I usually like to do video authoring. And whoever would like to recommend the best HDD recovery software (Freeware is appreciated too) so I could recover my files off a messed-up HDD. Tried PC Inspector, took so long.

[Smokey]

RIPLinux maybe... i also read at the bottom of this page that there is a guide to HDD recovery with linux here, wich is supposed to be very complete and informative... (looks like it's written for n00bs and the PC ignorants... ^_^

[Dr. Mario]

Well, What I'm having is a hard drive filled with broken FAT32 clusters. And I was wondering about Linux, because SANEFS (EXT3) is their standard, and it's likely to complain about the broken cluster, and I don't have any room for the HDD anymore, so I'm using a USB microcontroller to get it read by the computer. (That and I'm worried about the Linux reading the maligned hard drive via USB.) Will try it anyways.

[Smokey]

Oh a lot of linuses nowadays are pretty easygoing when it comes to reading FAT16/32 or NTFS..

[Dr. Mario]

Almost there! But the TOC is already screwed up. The files are left intact, although are orphaned. I need a way to bypass having to use a TOC, since the boot sector is messed up.

At least I have some rewritable DVDs, that I have thrown in. Don't have a BD-RE burner yet, that coulda saved the HDD's shiny, metallic ass.

[Smokey]

Oh if it's just the FAT-table that's gone missing, you shouldn't have too much trouble recovering your data... Now i don't know wich programs they are, and i don't know if RIPlinux does it too, but there are tools wich brush over the fact that the FAT is missing and read what's physically on the drive, allowing you to copy it all...

[NejinOniwa]

DAMN YOU WORLD
DAMN YOU EVERYTHING
MY DELTA IS BROKEN BEYOND MY SKILLS OF REPARATION

Time to buy myself a HDD cabinet and an UMPC.