Clara and I found this Pentium III motherboard and a collection of parts off the side of the road in Chatswood back in 2024. I put it into an Antec case from my father in law, and it’s gradually become my primary utility PC. I use it to test hard drives and expansion cards before I put them into my other machines, and I use its 5.25 and 3.5 disk drives for imaging and creating boot disks. Weirdly, about a month ago the attached PS/2 started sending errant signals. Or so I thought. I’d be in a utility checking the status of a drive, like a gentleman, when suddenly I’d be scrolled a page further down, or a random menu item would be selected. If an invalid key was “pressed”, the PC speaker would chirp indignantly. One morning I woke up to hear the PC speaker beeping on and off nearly continuously, as though a ghost cat had sat on the keyboard, or Ed Sheeran was giving a concert. Worried that it might somehow be an electrical issue on the port, I connected a USB keyboard instead. Alas, the errant key presses and resulting beeps resumed, as though the ghost cat had been summoned again, or a listener with a masochistic streak had asked Ed Sheeran for an encore. I tore the whole machine down, removed the board, double-checked the mounting nuts, re-installed the board, and only connected the essentials. A week later in this state, and the issue hasn’t resurfaced, even with the original PS/2 keyboard attached again. I’ve been slowly reattaching components, validating they work, then repeating. So far, so good. Sheeran and the ghost cat have been banished, and I’m able to interact with the computer as normal. Huzzah! I’m still at a loss as to what caused the problems though. Maybe the PS/2 port was marginal and I managed to finagle it into working again, though that wouldn’t explain why a USB keyboard exhibited the same issue. Maybe the board wasn’t mounted properly, which caused a short. Or maybe something I had plugged in before was spamming the bus, something people do on public transport when they don’t use headphones. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-23.

It might seem a bit out of character for a powerful general—a fierce warrior—to go everywhere with a book tucked under their arm. But in ancient Rome, that was the figure that the great Scipio Aemilianus cut. He was known for training in philosophy as arduously as he trained at arms. Flash forward to General […] The post No One Is Excused From This appeared first on Daily Stoic.

Thoughts on surrendering to the here and now and doing the best with the information we have in any given moment

A Much Cheaper, Almost-as-Good Alternative

cohort four starts sept 28