Author: admin

Overclocking

In my post about the new home of GCW, I had a picture of the Raspberry Pi based version of the server. What probably stood out the most in that picture was the cool (sic!) ICE Tower active cooling system. That Pi has been rock solid since I turned it on, so given the insane cooler, I thought I’d try playing around with a bit o’ the old overclocking.

The stock CPU and graphics clock speeds on a RPi 4 are 1.5 GHz and 400 MHz respectively. In order to get the CPU clock past 1.75 GHz, you need to install firmware that is in advance of what comes with the standard Raspbian distro, so I figured I’d start with 1.75 GHz. For the graphics clock, I tried 600 MHz, which I’ve seen in a couple of how-to videos.

With those speeds, the Pi booted just fine, but after some heavy use (i.e. 3 simultaneous video playbacks) the graphics became unstable. I backed the graphics clock off to 550 MHz and the performance stablized.

With the ICE Tower running, the core temp never went above 40 degrees Celcius even under the heaviest load — compare that to the Pi thermal throttling at 80 degrees showing a single video with no cooling.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the result. The combined boosts in clock speeds have made an immediately noticeable improvement in performance. It’s entirely possible that this has reduced the lifespan of the board, but honestly at the price I paid for it, I can live with that.

Divertimento Fall Concert

November 8 & 9, 2019
That’s this Friday and Saturday!

Program:

  • Jacques Offenbach  — Orpheus in the Underworld Overture
  • Johannes Brahms — Variations on a theme by Haydn
  • Camille Saint-Saëns — Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah
  • Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches, Op. 42 “Iveria”
  • Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches, Op. 10

Venue:

Woodroffe United Church
207 Woodroffe Ave.
Ottawa,
Ontario

Concert starts at 8pm. Tickets available at the door.

Commenting

I have set the blog to require registration before you can comment. Apologies. It’s an experiment to see if this will help me manage the egregious amounts of spam I’m getting (even with akismet’s help). If it doesn’t help I’ll turn it off again, but to give you some context, in 12 hours I received 17 pages of spam!

https

I decided I wanted to be able to log in and post from outside my home network, and using vanilla http to do that while running on unencrypted wifi at the coffee shop was just asking for trouble.

Thankfully, Let’s Encrypt has made setting up https on your site both easy and, more importantly, free!

The “wonders” of how my old install of WP was set up has meant that older posts may still have bogus links in them, but on the front page (and going forward) at least, you now see:


Woot!

GCW gets a new home

After many years of running Great Castle Wilson on some flavour of Mac, I’ve finally decided to give it dedicated hardware of its own. In part, this is because I enjoy proving to myself that I can still set up and configure a webserver and all the other required accoutrements — yes, I’m weird like that — but mostly it’s because I’m fairly confident that macOS Catalina is going to break my current configuration anyway, so it seemed like a good time to make a change.

For those who aren’t aware, Catalina is the first version of macOS that only supports 64-bit applications. There are some fairly significant changes under the covers, and the odds are low that my personal mix of random open source software and existing Mac tech is going to continue to work.

So without further ado, here is the brand new GCW:

Yep, it’s a Pi 🙂

Specifically:

So far the setup process has been relatively painless, but I did learn that WordPress does *not* like it when its API URL points at a different instance of WordPress than the one that’s making the request — that took a couple of hours to debug. 🙂

Anyway, if you can read this, then we’re live. The site seems quite responsive and the only posts that aren’t displaying properly are ones where some of the original content they linked to no longer exists

Welcome!

Some history…

I don’t post to NfGCW very often any more, but I love the fact that there’s years of history from our family here. I’ve blogged about many topics over the years, including the site itself. Here are some previous posts about the hardware GCW ran on.

A theme away, A theme away,…

I upgraded to the latest wordpress and ended up with a completely trashed theme. This is just the standard “2011” theme. It will do until I can find something better. One of these days I’ll get around to doing my own. (note to self: Orion needs a project type for creating wordpress themes.)

I upgraded to the latest wordpress and ended up with a completely trashed theme. This is just the standard “2011” theme. It will do until I can find something better. One of these days I’ll get around to doing my own.

(note to self: Orion needs a project type for creating wordpress themes.)

WP Upgrade Blues

*Whew*. That’s what I get for blithely doing what I usually do when upgrading between wordpress versions. This time I was left with a very messed up page, and more than half of my plugins and themes reporting errors. Ugh. There were even error messages when updating the mysql db. Double ugh. I’ve bashed it … Continue reading “WP Upgrade Blues”

*Whew*. That’s what I get for blithely doing what I usually do when upgrading between wordpress versions. This time I was left with a very messed up page, and more than half of my plugins and themes reporting errors. Ugh. There were even error messages when updating the mysql db. Double ugh.

I’ve bashed it back into an approximation of working for now, using the included “twentyten” theme. Now I have to see if I can figure out whether anything else got wrecked.