Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am setting up my second scanner workstation. Let’s get started!
Prologue
As seems to be my new tradition when getting/assembling a new workstation, I am recording this week’s observations from said machine. It’s been interesting. Especially since I don’t have a budget for new hardware.
The Tower
Once upon a time, I set up a Minecraft server for my family to play on. I named it ButtonMash. I did a lot of maintenance to keep it running, but eventually, we stopped playing on our own family-owned servers. Ever since, ButtonMash has been running in the background, catching dust.
With a renewed effort towards finally starting production on scanning, ButtonMash is the perfect fit for a workstation. It’s presently running on 16 GB of RAM, and while I thought it might benefit from an old graphics card I found lying around, a quick test proved it to be a downgrade from integrated.
The Hard Drive
A long time ago, I talked my laptop into scanning without sudo. So long ago –in fact– it was before I cloned Debian to run internally, so it would still be on the external SSD on USB 3.0.
ButtonMash’s motherboard lacks a USB 3 port, so we ordered up a card special. Unfortunately, it straight up refuses to boot from either of the card’s USB slots. No configuration works. lspci will detect the card once booted, but not even my GRUB disk can find my Debian external drive. I could get lost trying to troubleshoot, but for now, the bootable USB 2 slots must suffice.
The Keyboard and Mouse
There must be about seven wireless keyboards hovering about my house, each of which is orphaned from its dongle and paired mouse. Each of them always seems to have some sort of buffering problem.
On the other hand, I managed to spot a keyboard from when I was little hanging out in our treasure trove of old tech stored in the garage. It’s in relatively good shape — most likely because its from the days before USB became king. Fortunately, ButtonMash is old enough to have not one, but two PS/2 ports: one for keyboard, one for mouse. On the other hand, the integrated tickle pad uses a different standard I don’t have the proper port for.
My greatest gripe is that it’s a little hard to write on because it has the pipe and backslash key to the right of the Right Shift key. My computing habits have evolved since using this keyboard. When selecting text, I move my right hand so my thumb presses Ctrl and Shift, and my other fingers operate the arrow keys. On this model, I have to angle my hand at awkward angles to not hit a key I never use outside the command line.
The mouse was a little harder to find, but I managed to pull up a trackball with three less-than-perfectly-reliable buttons. It too is on a PS/2 connector, and so wasn’t designed for “plug and play.” However, I have tested it, and ButtonMash’s motherboard was able to pick them up after unplugging them without rebooting when I tested it for myself.
The trackball is different to use. I’m a lefty, and while I can normally manipulate the thumb buttons with my ring finger, I don’t have the dexterity to spin a sphere in the same place with my pinkie. I’d also have to contend with more extreme button placement, in addition to said buttons being unreliable. I’m finding I get a more consistent click if I press near the base of the button, though click and drag requires a particularly good streak of luck. Either way, it’s pretty fun to spin the ball super fast and watch the pointer not know what to make of it until things slow down.
The Display
ButtonMash has been running headless, only sharing a monitor with my father’s tower when needed. However, I found another treasure from the garage from when I was little: an old CRT monitor I remember being amazed with because of how flat the surface was. It’s just an extra panel of glass in front of the tube.
The long standing standard of VGA means that ButtonMash has no problem outputting to this old monitor. Honestly, it has no business lasting as long as it did.
I started the monitor for the first time in what must have been around 10 to 15 years, give or take, and cringed, thinking it was burning itself out as it crackled to life. It’s probably just thermal expansion. The picture still looks good, though there is noticeable flickering in large patches of white. I calibrated the screen so I’m using the full usable area, but I noticed it drifting a little after a while. My particular monitor has a degauss option hidden in its menus, and in addition to making everything go funny for a few seconds, it removes latent magnetic interference that builds up over time. It also produces a satisfying TWANG! After a few days of regular use, the picture appears to have mostly stabilized.
One thing I was sure to enable is a screensaver. This art form isn’t as important with the Liquid Crystal Displays permeating the market these days, but on old Cathode Ray Tubes, they would prevent a static image from burning itself into the surface of the vacuum tube if left alone too long. The pickings were a little slim on Debian, so I installed the xscreensaver package and picked one called Galaxy.
Using this older aspect ratio brings to light a few design decisions I’ve called into question on a few older pieces of software, namely XSANE, GIMP, and the default panel settings on GNOME2/MATE. On a wide screen, XSANE feels needlessly skinny and lost. GIMP looks silly with its tools detached from the main program body to the point where it doesn’t look like a cohesive program. And panels in MATE flat out waste space when hogging both the top and bottom.
But with a narrower aspect ratio, I find I’m only paying attention to the middle strip of the screen. XSANE windows can be rearranged with the important one taking up roughly half the screen and the others put where needed on the other. While I’ve yet to try GIMP in fragmented mode, I expect it too makes more sense this way. I even found myself restoring MATE’s upper panel to alleviate the icon traffic jam my one panel at the bottom was suffering from.
The Internet Connection
The Internet Connection was about the one part I had already figured out months ago. I grabbed my Pi 400 router from where it has been serving a more permanent workstation. I already copied the card and assigned it one a different IP address.
I tried going straight from Pi to tower without a switch in-between. I wasn’t expecting it to work because of the way I understand network cables to work, but it would seem one system or the other has figured the arrangement out.
Takeaway
The nineties… I can hear them calling… but no, they can’t have their workstation back because I have enough of an anchor in the twenties that spontaneous, meme-powered time travel will not be happening in the foreseeable future. I’m just excited to finally see the last bits of hardware fitting into place after over a year of planning.
Final Question
Have you ever amused yourself by spinning a trackball faster than the computer knew what to do with it?