|
| Your personal background. |
Electronics hobbyist in Yorkshire, England, UK.
I am an electronics/computer engineer and mainframe IBM Assembler/COBOL programmer, currently "between jobs" and dabbling with several projects of my own around the house, restoring an old car (1969 AMC/Karmann Javelin) and enjoying life.
My computer background started many years ago with a ZX81, which I programmed in machine code of course. I went on to an Atari STe, which I've still got and occasionally fire up (but only for games these days), then a Mac G4 tower. The Mac died so I got another, then a spare, then somebody else gave me an old one they didn't want any more, so I currently have 4 G4 towers around the house, one of which houses my latest home-built Linux box (see below). I hate Microsoft and avoid it as much as possible! |
| Your opinions about Radioactive@Home |
I've been running BOINC for several years now, originally for SETI on a MacBook Pro, then also Einstein@home (I'm determined to find a new pulsar!). As my little old Mac laptop was getting a bit old and struggling to keep up with everything, I gutted an old (dead) G4 tower case and built it up as a Linux box, with an ASRock A75M-ITX motherboard and AMD A8-3270K quad core processor, and several flavours of Linux to play with. I'm currently using Linux Mint 17.1 with a KDE desktop (mainly used Kububtu before, also dabbled with OpenSUSE because I liked the little lizard logo, and have been a dual-booter since the days of Yellow Dog Linux), and have found Mint the easiest to install and use so far.
I liked the idea of having a geiger counter attached to my computer, I've dabbled with stand-alone ones before, so fairly familiar with the innards, but I particularly like this v2.61 sensor kit - nicely designed circuit board and it worked first time when I put it all together and plugged it into a USB socket, which is always a bonus. It needed a few tweaks of Linux before BOINC would talk to it (see forums!), but it's working away nicely now. Have built my kit with a black on greeny-yellow display, which looks great, and Yorkshire is finally on the map! Hooray!
If any UK users (or possibly even further afield) want to join the project and have got hold of a v2.61 kit but aren't familiar with soldering, I am happy to build it for you for a nominal cost to cover buying in the remaining parts required and an hour or two labour. Details on the cafe forum. :-) |
| Your feedback on this profile |
| Recommend this profile for User of the Day: | I like this profile |
| Alert administrators to an offensive profile: | I do not like this profile |
|
|
