Long time readers of my blog (all 2 of you) will recall that in 2009 we bought a Dell Zino small-form-factor computer with blue ray optical drive, max memory (4 GB), most-expensive video card, and the fastest available processor. It was the only device attached to the 1080p projector in our home theater (15-foot screen, amazing surround sound with monster subwoofer). For 8 years, the boyos gamed on it, shaking the house and the family watched / streamed great movies. In 2016, Microsoft bricked the device with a mandatory win10 patch, so it ran Linux with Mint desktop and no one noticed -- VLC still worked; chrome ran fine, DVD's and BlueRay disks still played perfectly. Zino was a survivor!
However technology and planned obsolescence in the technology industrial establishment march forward, and the poor little device could not decode Matroska containers with highly-compressed 1080p H.264 MPEG4 content in real time. So I needed to transcode these files with handbrake before we could watch them and transcoding took 5-8 hours per file; transcoding also heated the house and made a loud fan noise. This practice lasted a few years until last month, when we replaced the home theater device with a new, low-end, inexpensive win10 machine that can drive a 4K monitor. But the little Zino sat in the man cave and I used it there for little linux / chrome tasks such as streaming, browsing, coding, email, & document editing.
Early this morning (0300 Pacific), we woke to the smell of a burning power supply. The magic smoke had finally emerged from Zino's power supply. But he "died with his boots on," churning through a major Ubuntu upgrade process. Farewell friend, you served us well and we shall miss you.
No comments:
Post a Comment