PureGin.org

This has got to be one of the simplest little hardware hacks I've done, but perhaps also one of the most effective.

The problem:

I've owned four generations of Mac notebooks, and several other Apple products besides, all featuring variants of the same basic power adaptor design: the squarish, rounded white brick with flip-out wings for wrapping the low-voltage line for storage. Many of these power adaptors have not stood up well to everyday use - though to be fair, I do mean I use them pretty solidly every day. One of the early adaptors for my iBook developed a short on the 120/240v side. The magsafe adaptor on my latest laptop, a Macbook Pro, had the low-voltage line pull out of the rubber strain relief sleeve attached to the brick, exposing the internal wiring.

Something I did about a month ago really opened my eyes. I was riding the wave of complacency, just like everyone... we'd been talking (for years, literally) about getting Canada Post to stop deliving junk mail. I happened to chat with our postal delivery person as he was dropping off mail for the neighbourhood, and he said it would be sufficient to tape a little note inside our mailbox: "Please, no un-addressed bulk mail". I ran home, wrote one up, and taped it inside our mailbox - it took five minutes. Unbelievably, this has reduced the amount of paper in our blue and yellow bags to almost nothing! All of these years I've been lugging these stupid ads home, cursing, chucking them into the recycling, and hauling them out to the curb every two weeks. We had FULL blue bags and half full yellow bags almost every two weeks. This amounts to a stack of paper waste about 10 inches in height, once per two weeks, or about 4 kg. Now, almost nothing. I can't believe I've been such a chump for so many years.

Here in rural Cedar / Yellow Point, we've had weekly curbside pickup of food-waste for something over a year now. Some stats have recently been published which I found quite interesting. In case you don't know, the idea of the curbside food-waste pickup is to separate 'garbage' into multiple 'streams'. Everyone is probably practicing 're-cycling' to some extent - separating materials such as paper, aluminium, ferrous metals such as 'tin cans', and plastics, from 'garbage'.

After the usual amount of sys admin fiddling, I've moved most of my Drupal sites onto a new server: an Apple 1.66 GHz Core Duo Mac Mini. Over the coming weeks I'll be doing some performance tuning and testing to see how it stacks up against the old server, a Dell SC 1425 dual Xeon box.

I wiped the Mac Mini's drive and installed Ubuntu 9.04 server, which took a bit of fussing, but turned out to be pretty easy once I figured it out (more details on that later; basically I had to install 8.04 and do an online upgrade to the newest version)

The box is sitting beside me - tiny, silent, consuming only 23W or so at idle, 110 at full CPU, compared to almost four hundred watts for the old server. Actually, I suspect that these figures are a bit on the high side. I'm planning to actually measure the power consumption, but that's a project for another day. I suspect that the humble Mac Mini has one of the best performance ratings per Watt consumed of any server anywhere. The new (2009) ones are even leaner. I have to say that I'm in awe of this little box.

It's running 'headless' (needs no monitor or keyboard to boot up) thanks to a bit of hardware hackery that I found here. I took photos and documented the (pretty quick and easy to do) assembly of the dongle in this flickr photoset.

Next steps: install a faster, more robust drive (perhaps an SSD?) and get SELinux working. Also web performance benchmarking.

Tonight we ate the last of a bunch of garlic scapes that Pamela bought last Sunday at our local Farmer's Market. We steamed them for just a couple of minutes—they are garli-cky, but not overpoweringly so, crunchy, curly, fun, very fresh and extremely tasty. Next time I will snap some pictures, but in the meantime here's a picture from someone else.