benford | 
01 14th, 2009| 
We’ve got a double-whammy of Benford doing stuff today.
Feel free to take a look at this pdf containg several plans of pretty cool things.
Jan
4
When cleaning my parents house I stumbled upon an old HP Pavilion desktop computer, though clocking in with a 533 Mhz Pentium II with 256 MB of ram, it must have been a screamer back in its day. Most notably, it is mini-tower, not too much bigger than a shuttle case by volume, and only has a 100W power supply, making it both fairly quiet as well as easy on the electricity bill.
Currently, my sister’s computer is a psudeo print server for my parent’s house. The printer itself is in another room, with cables strung to her computer. Unfortunately, since her box is also a regular desktop machine, it will typically be powered down when she is not using it. This means that others in the house might sometimes find themselves without a printer for no apparent reason.
Seeing a computer that really was not working well as a print server juxtaposed with a small, relatively quiet, and low-power drain computer gathering dust, I knew there must be a better way. My new goal was to make the dusty computer into a headless networked print server that could share printers with windows boxes.