Thursday, 22 March 2018

New bits for "old" computers [8]

After a week or two with the new keyboard layout it has bedded in well and is now pretty much the default as I have been using serverpc to do a lot of time consuming and resource intensive Gimp stuff and are freed from a lot of thumb twiddling as I wait for it to complete a task. When the Gimp project is several GB in file size it can work out to a lot more demand on memory and frequently you will be waiting for it to read or write the hard drive. This has resulted in some of these projects taking days to complete and it is a good use of that computer to be doing this while at the same time able to continue map drawing on the mainpc.

So having two keyboards and mice in the arrangement has worked well especially with the two KVMs. The only real glitch has been with the MS mouse used with the second Logitech keyboard. Because the scrolling was too abrupt with the wheel, presumably some Linux issue, I replaced it with another Logitech mouse of a different model (an M171) to the main keyboard's mouse which is a M185. Well it does seem that Logitech with different models of everything makes them work on different frequencies or something because I now have three Logitech keyboards and two mice all working together in close proximity without any hassles at all. The only real issue is with the new mouse and the new shelf it sits on both being quite slippery so it is difficult to hold still. Interestingly I don't recall any real issue with the MS mouse used on mediapc.

The next small tasks are making the Win10pc's screen turned to be in portrait mode, and the same for the second screen of serverpc. The next big task is to get the Borg backup server set up properly on serverpc because it is becoming urgent for me to get backups going again and to have the backup server properly set up to receive and hopefully consolidate them. I will have to do a lot of reading up on Borg because I don't know too much about using it in a server configuration. I have done just one backup to date with it on mainpc and that looked pretty good but I am hoping having a server will let me consolidate all the backups together in some way.

The mapresources VM I had set up on mainpc has so far had little use, possibly it won't achieve a lot, great concept but the inconvenience of a restart or failed resume is possibly not as great as I thought. Mainpc is running Qgis 2.18 again until a major issue with 3.0 can be resolved.  Whereas on serverpc I have to keep an eye on disk usage as the gimp projects eat up a lot of file space. The Sources directory currently has just under 500 GB of stuff. The next major task after getting the backups going is to clean up all these aerial photo resources.

As I keep looking at ergonomics, apart from changing a couple of screens around, I have to figure the best way of heating the room in winter and therefore placing the little 800 watt radiant heater where it is useful for both the main desk and the side desk. At the moment it is only useful for the main desk, being on the right, and therefore really needs to be on the left where the second desk is. Therefore my cup slide on the left could be in the way. Moving that is not easy because there is limited room on the right, and I really don't want to move the cup slide over there. The other option is to put the heater on the table itself. Moving the table slightly closer to the main desk, and moving it into the room more, are optional tweaks that could help this work. Because the main air in the room needs to be at 16 degrees I will probably use the air con to raise the temperature in the room, and then use the little heater for boosting that for my personal comfort. It seems strange that last year I went right through winter heating my bedroom at night to 16 degrees, but in daytime I didn't heat the lounge air.