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This is a list of current personal projects I'm working on - as someone with ADHD it's hard to stick to one thing in particular, but I've always been interested in technology from the moment I as a toddler went to visit my brother studying upstairs and first saw his IBM Personal System/2 running Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0. This is I believe one of my first memories of my childhood.
Since then, I started getting into video games, being completely dumbfounded by the possibilities held within our current technology to create virtual experiences. Sure, with FS3 I was staring at an old CRT watching a bunch of pixels rearrange themselves to resemble primitive polygons in the shape of an airplane, but I knew then it was an industry which had the potential to realistically portray whatever we wanted in a spatial and temporal form.
Started with the Sega Genesis Model 2, Game Boy Color (Atomic Purple, natch) and an SCPH-5501 PlayStation in the 90s. I saw my brother move on to more modern computers and to Linux (and modern Windows) gaming, and saw titles like Half-Life and HL2, Q3, Doom, Red Faction, City of Heroes and the like dance across his computer screen, and in 2003 I moved to the Nintendo GameCube, starting with Super Smash Bros. Melee and Animal Crossing and The Simpsons: Road Rage/Hit & Run.
Things sped up in the mid-2000s. As I passed from elementary to junior high, we transitioned between Platinum-era Macintosh/Power Mac computers to G3 iMacs to iBook G4s in classrooms. This introduced me to Mac OS 9.2, the Universal Serial Bus and flash drives, and showed me the fun us teenagers could have wasting time on the Internet at the advent of social media and Flash games. Eventually in 2005 (I believe), my brother invested in a discounted iBook G4 (Late 2005) for college courses, which I'd eventually inherit as my first personal computer for any significant length of time.
Eventually, in 2007 he got an internship working for a Microsoft subsidiary and was comped a free Xenon Xbox 360, and alongside that I received an old eMachines T4150 from my grandparents. Scavenging through his old spare PC parts, I assembled a rather modest FrankenPC out of:
- The T4150's motherboard, Pentium 4 Willamette (1.5Ghz) CPU
- Early 2000s generic PC case with a telescoping front 5.25" bay door
- 768MB DDR2 RAM of various speeds across 2 DIMMS (ugh)
- 1x 60GB WD HDD @ 5400RPM, 1x 20GB Seagate HDD @ 7200RPM(?)
- First, an NVIDIA Riva 2 TNT PCI card, and then once found, a third-party Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti-4350
- WinXP Home
This and the iBook made for a really bizarre but fortunate time tinkering with tech while going through my teenage years. Eventually I'd upgrade to a new Dell (and in college) my first all-custom PC build. More on those at a later date.
In 2008 we finally (holy crap, what a wait) got a Slim PlayStation 2 (SCPH-70001) which we started out on with Guitar Hero II and eventually moved to MGS, Gran Turismo 4, Black, Futurama, and so on. I eventually would figure out how to do the disc swap trick with the Greatest Hits version of 007: Agent Under Fire and when combined with a modified burned copy with uLaunchELF added in place of the first driving mission's level file, I managed to get Free McBoot installed on the console, my second console mod (after modding a PSP-3000 I got as a birthday gift from one of my best friends, Aaron, who'd received it as I guess a signing bonus with the Army National Guard - to be continued as well.)
He eventually moved to California in pursuit of full-time work under MS, by which time I was spending a lot of time involved with my Dell and high school.
After graduating high school in 2010 and going to college in 2013-2015, I'd finally caught up with the rat race in terms of performance, with a MSI GTX660Ti Power Edition FTW2, Crucial M4 256GB SSD, Intel i7-3770K, 16GB DDR4, and 2x2TB WD Caviar Green HDDs.
Naturally, things have been weird the last few years with the Navy and the world and everything, but as of right now I've got:
Naturally, things have been weird the last few years with the Navy and the world and everything, but as of right now I've got:
- RPi 3B+
- RPi 4
- RPi 400
- iPad Air 2020 (7th gen)
- Mac Mini (M1, 2020, 8GB)
- Xbox Series S
- (Various Phones)
PC:
- ASUS RTX2070 SUPER
- 32GB (4x8GB) Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR4-3600 (underclocked to 3533MHz due to stability issues with CPU/Motherboard at base clock O_o Unsure if it's related/unrelated to XMP and/or the memory's Ryzen support)
- AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
- 5x Noctua 120mm case fans
- Thermaltake 360 Riing (3x120mm RGB fans, 360mm radiator OEM liquid cooler)
- MSI MEG Unify X570
- Samsung 980 Pro NVMe M.2, 1TB
This isn't intended to be a flex though I feel it reads like one - it's more like an inventory of all the insane crap going on with my hobbies for context when I introduce posts related to individual projects in the future.
It's been a crazy ride so far. So, with some of this context, on to more involved things...? Damn, there's a whole other layer to this collection?
-A
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