Project Osmium: Google Sketchup

Google's default shading model isn't fantastic, but works fine for drafting. Here, the effects of the black acrylic side panels are poorly rendered, but the effect should be like dark glass — semi-transparent, with a bit of a mirror finish.

Aluminium is used for the top, back and bottom; acrylic is used for the front and sides.

Two renderings that are hopefully more pleasing to the eye: hidden-frame and X-ray renderings.

Hidden-frame rendering looks the nicest in my opinion, although it does obscure some details, and shows no information about texturing or colours.

The X-ray renderings are a little cluttered, but the internal components should be easily identifiable.

A quick orientation: The radiator is on top, the PSU is mounted at the bottom, flush with the back.

The motherboard is mounted on a second clear acrylic base (attached to the internal frame), and the CPU socket sits right underneath the PSU (a tight fit for anything, really). Yeah, like an SG03 layout, but more cramped.

Lastly, fan grilles and other orifices have not been modelled yet; Thus far, only the back I/O [plate and PCI slots have been cut. Tubing for watercooling is likewise incomplete, as are the CPU and GPU waterblocks.

Here, you can see the internal frame to which all components are attached.

Some sections are still incomplete; I am pondering how to add a support bar to the rear assembly, which holds the PSU and peripheral cards. Still, it should be easily clear how the components are attached, even if the screws have not been modelled and rendered.

These are the components, displayed without the skin and supporting frame. The video card is not shown. (There were no pre-rendered models available, and I didn't not have one on-hand for reference.)

The pump was placed in front due to the lack of mountable surfaces; the SSD is in front so I can possibly illuminate it for some cheesecake night shots.

The radiator assembly and the bottom intake fan actually serve to support the aluminium skins (which will be directly attached to them) as well.

The skin and frame are shown without the components. The skin is made up of 2 pieces of aluminium and acrylic each; aluminium for the top and bottom (which curve around to the back and fold in interesting ways to form it), and acrylic for the base side panel on the motherboard side, as well as the curved front+side panel.

It might be interesting to note that the base panel is attached to the internal frame only via perspex blocks (rectangular blocks, of which there are currently 4; I will need to add a few more), so as to reduce the drilling requirement and make the mirror finish more perfect.

The aluminium panel skins will be attached to the frame via flat countersunk screws, polished to match the anodised aluminium.

Details of the hinge mechanism, as well as other missing details, will follow in future updates.

Project Osmium: Materials and Hardware

Materials
The materials of choice are black transparent acrylic, and black anodised aluminium (brushed finish). While I am not particularly inclined towards lighting in my computer cases, I felt it would be nice to have some diffuse white lighting in the case, accentuating particular elements. Black acrylic would show this off nicely, while hiding the internal components behind a mirror finish when the case lights are switched off.

Hardware
Small form factor means micro-ATX (socket-1156 mini-ITX boards will be a long time in coming...) In addition, I wanted to minimise cost as far as possible, and since I will not be doing heavy overclocking on this setup, it should prove relatively easy to stay on a small budget. This rig will be mainly used for multimedia playback and heavy multitasking, essentially a do-it-all build (excluding gaming; I am not a PC gamer).

The following key components have been picked out so far.

• Intel Core i7-860
• Gigabyte P55M-UD2
• Corsair XMS3-DHX DDR3
• XFX Radeon HD5750

The watercooling elements are tentative and may be replaced by other picks sometime.

• Swiftech MCP350 pump
• Swiftech MCR220-Rev dual-120mm radiator (built-in reservoir)
• dual Noctua NF-P12 for radiator cooling
• Enermax Enlobal Marathon / Magma for air intake & memory DIMM cooling

Project Osmium: Introduction

–noun Chemistry.
atomic number 76. Osmium is a hard, brittle, blue-gray or blue-black transition metal in the platinum family, and is the densest natural element.

Many months ago, when Lynnfield was announced, my interest in a power-efficient, small-footprint quad-core system was piqued. No northbridge, and individual core control; A quad-core system that stays within the 200W power envelope and yet sits in a case smaller than a mini-tower is unthinkable, then.

My earliest ideas revolved around fitting a Core i7-860 in a Lian-Li MUSE PC-C37 case, cooled by a sealed closed-loop cooler such as the Corsair H50. The optical drive + hard drive cage would be removed and replaced with a segregated cooling tunnel for the 120mm radiator, and a 70mm fan intake would cool the memory DIMMs. This idea bounced around in my head for quite a while, until I started looking up case mods on bit-tech and other sites.

The idea of a scratch-build was very appealing; low-form-factor cases have not gained mass-market appeal yet, so pickings are still slim. The only case I could find that would take a full-sized ATX PSU was the C37, and it was still a little too wide for my taste. I also wanted a case that would stand upright to reduce the desktop footprint, and the C37 didn’t look like it could do that comfortably.

Hence, enter project Osmium. The name was (uncreatively) inspired by the element of the same name; this build aims to maximise performance in as small a volume as possible (highest performance density), and it would be decked out in black, like the rest of the other electronics on my table.

CUDA rig status: Started

I finally got round to starting on the CUDA rig. Build pictures:

Inside view, after some cable management

Parts boxes

Components:

• Case: Coolermaster CM690
  
• Power Supply: Corsair HX1000W
• Motherboard: DFI Lanparty 790FXB-M2RSH
• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 940
• Memory: Kingstom ValueRAM DDR2-800
• System disk: OCZ Core V2 30GB SSD
• Test CUDA Card: XFX Geforce 9800GT

Adblock in SRWare Iron

While Chrome does not (yet) support adblock-like features, this has been implemented in SRWare Iron already. Download adblock.ini from SRWare's news page, and use it to replace adblock.ini in your existing installation.

I haven't tested it extensively to see if it works as well as Firefox's AdblockPlus extension, but so far none of the advertisements on Engadget are showing :)

Porting search engines from Firefox to Chrome/Iron

This is a quick method for those seeking to improve the functionality of Chrome/Iron/other Chromium variants on their system.

If you already have Firefox installed and have been playing around with it, then you probably have quite a list of search engines already added. you can, with some expenditure of effort, bring them over to Chromium/Iron. Here's how.

1. Browse to your Firefox profile folder. On most systems, this should be something like C:/Program Files/Mozilla/Firefox/profile (I'm using a portable build so I can't verify this).
2. You should see a folder labelled searchplugins. If you see a number of files with extensions ending in .xml, then you've hit jackpot :) Those files are search engine configurations, and should be named according to the search engine they are configured for.
3. Right-click the appropriate .xml file, then "Edit" (or just open it in your text editor of choice). Look for a line with the following:
4. From the same line, copy the URL that comes after template=, without the quotation marks.
5. Right-click on the Location bar in Chrome/Iron, and select "Edit search engines...". Click "Add", and a dialog box for adding a ne search engine should appear.
6. Type in a name and keyword of your choice in the first two text entry fields. In the third entry field, paste the URL you copied earlier. Replace "{searchTerms}" in the URL with "%s" (excluding the quotation marks).
7. Click Ok. You should now be able to search using the search engine in Chrome/Iron, simply by typing in the search keyword, then the search terms to use, separated by a space.

Of Sky Crawlers and Change

I finally watched Sky Crawlers (from a source I will not name), and it left me with mixed feelings. For a long time I haven't thought about so many things after watching an anime series/movie, so I'm penning all this down.

First, a warning to readers: No, I did not have an outline of this written on a sheet of paper, nor did I plan an introduction, body (with points + elaboration) and conclusion, so I'm afraid you'll have to suffer some of my brain diarrhoea. Any academic body would tell you this is bad writing style, so do not emulate this. But for a blog... whatever.

Without revealing too much of the story and plot, Sky Crawlers is a story about people living the same life over and over again, in an unchanging landscape. Like with other Mamoru Oshii works, this one's a thinker. What makes this one different is that it's boring, absolutely boring, but intentionally so.

In case that hasn't registered with you, I will emphasise again: this is a boring movie. If you just want a quick sky-fighting flick with hot action and lots of noise, this is not the flick to pick.

To be honest, the film piqued my interest only after I read Justin's review of it (scathing look at the anime industry? Ooooh...) I don't fully agree with him, though. As one of the posts on the ANN forums says, the theme of this movie is so general that it could apply to almost anything. It could be a scathing look at anime... or at engineering, or business, photography, any number of fields and disciplines that have fallen into the rut of wash-rinse-repeat. From a general perspective, Sky Crawlers is the embodiment of pretty-but-boring; lovely textures and lighting, sharp CG, but flat textures on flat characters, and bland voice-acting. I wonder if this is Oshii's way of making a point that constancy is not something to be aimed for.

As a teenager I sometimes thought to myself, "How nice things would be if they could stay the same so I would never have to grow up". Now the irony of that statement comes back to bite me. It's triflingly amusing because at that moment in time, I was looking forward to an eternity of constancy; the preservation of a state that includes my preference for an unchanging state of constancy. If that state could have been perfectly preserved maybe I would have been in frozen, time-preserved bliss. Wouldn't that be a dandy state of things? The classic fairytale "living happily ever after".

But in retrospect, maybe staticity is desirable only in the context of an inevitably changing background. In a world where things are changing slowly but surely, constancy is the flip side of the coin, the greener side of the field. I say as a teen, "It would be nice if we never had to grow up and graduate" because growing up and graduating is the de-facto state of things. I wonder what I would have said in an alternate reality where graduation never existed.

In the first chapter of The Nature of Physical Reality, (part of) a paragraph reads "Professor William Lyon Phelps, in his charming informal lectures to the undergraduates at Yale, insisted that physics had far less to say about truth and reality than did poetry. and to prove his point he asked them: 'Would you now read a physics text that is 100 years old? Of course not. But you still read Shakespeare!'"

So much for truth and reality then, as convenient and useful constructs of the mind. Maybe they're not constant either, changing as our perceptions and collective ideas do. Perhaps, as the cliché goes, the only thing that doesn't change is change itself. And if change is the only thing we can count on, then it's probably time for me to grow up and stop getting too comfortable in my little academic pigeon-hole.

I leave you readers to your own ideas on change, and hope you leave some fragment of your presence in the comments :)

NAS Project Status: Suspended/dropped

As I was working on the design, this cropped up in my RSS feeds:

QNAP TS-809 Turbo Pro NAS

Specifications:
Intel Processor Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
2GB DDRII RAM
8 x 3.5" SATA I/II HDD, hot-swappable, lockable
Mono-LCD display with backlight and buttons for configuration

As much as I love the idea of owning an NAS I built myself, this is just so much more awesome. So I'm dropping the VIA NAS 7800 project, until something better comes up.

Edit: I've picked up this project again, this time re-imagined as a low-power home storage server. Updates to come in another few months or so.

NAS Server: v0.4

120mm fan swapped with a 200mm fan, an obvious solution to the issue (thanks jisa!). I'm currently eyeing the Antec Big Boy 200 (the fan in that image is not the Antec, but since i couldn't find a ready-made model I just resized the 120mm to the same dimensions). Hopefully it does translate to better airflow distribution. Removing the duct also makes the enclosure shorter, a welcome change.

Ventilation grilles have been added to the front of the base plate; I'll be adding more in future. The motherboard mounting plate is currently secured to the base by screws. I'm still figuring out a way to make it easily removable without requiring tools.

I'll try to find time during the upcoming semester to model the backplane PCB & SATA connectors. I also need to find a way to secure the hard drives (most likely idea would be a stiff plate secured by press-down clips). I'm also thinking of adding a graphic LCD to the front, so designing the side walls is going to take awhile.

NAS Server: v0.3

Actually this is v4, but since I didn't make any 2D images or backups of v3 I'll pretend it never existed :P (sloppy, sloppy...)

Anyway, you can see that quite a few things are changed by now. I figured it would be easier to make a wall for the base plate and punch holes in it for the backports, so I did that.

It might be interesting to note that the PSU isn't secured by any screws at all (although the metal bracket supporting it at the back is secured by screws). I don't think it has any screw-threads on the bottom surface and I don't feel safe tapping new screw threads on my own, so that will have to do for now.

The 2X80mm system fans have now been replaced by a 1X120mm fan, which should be quieter. Since the HDD cooling section profile is larger than 120X120mm, I ducted the fan to allow airflow to spread. This is a dumb idea of course, I just put it in because I didn't have any better ideas, until a friend pointed out an obvious fix (I still can't believe I didn't think of it earlier; see next update). The fan plate is supported by protrusions on the base plate (a little hard to see in the image, look near the top edge of the base plate).

Along other changes, the HDD cage was redesigned yet again; It now has bottom support in addition to side support. Both old and new designs are simple folding designs that can be made from a single sheet of metal, with no assembly required. I'm still thinking of ways to reduce drive noise and vibration, this will probably be handled with the use of anti-vibration damping strips but I'm open to other suggestions.

The side walls and top mesh cover have not been modeled yet, I'll get to it eventually.

NAS Server: v0.2

Some tweaks, as you can see; the backplane feature has been added, HDDs are flipped with the connector on top. you'd notice that one column of drives has been rotated in order to cluster the connectors in the middle. I hope the rotational symmetry helps simplify the CFD later on (or maybe not, since the heat source isn't centred).

The white bracket you see at the back was a temporary measure for drive-mounting, since I haven't figured out a way to keep the HDD cage suspended above the motherboard and PSU. you might also notice that the HDD cage design has changed; the design I got from 3D Warehouse just wasn't good enough. Currently system cooling is managed by 2X80mm fans, an arrangement I'm not really pleased with since the outer HDDs get less air.

In any case, I did a major redesign (not noticeable, but I basically deleted most of it and started over) shortly after this point.