Obligatory Introduction Post!

JohnMLTX · April 18, 2017

Hello! My name is John. I'm 22. Three days a week I'm a corporate IT intern, where I fix broken stuff and upgrade important people's computers from Windows XP to Windows 7. I also get to dig through the scrap heaps and tinker with anything interesting I come across. Two other days a week I'm a digital media journalism student at a university in North Texas. I spend most of my days reading unhealthy amounts of news.

My current setup has been coming together since I got my IT internship last summer. Before last August, I was running on a Core 2 Duo E8300 with 4GB ram and an HD5450, so I went more than slightly nuts.

My main desktop/workstation, Zerua:

i7-6700K, running at 4.4gHz
32gb DDR4 in dual channel
MSI Z170A Krait Gaming 3x
Nvidia GTX1070 Founders
Corsair H100i v2
500GB Samsung 850EVO
2x3TB in RAID0

My more portable computer is a Surface Pro 4 i7 with 16GB ram and 256GB storage, named Azalera. Fantastic for random sketching and note taking.

I also have a laptop-turned-thin client named Zubi, a modified Toshiba from around 2011 that basically just runs Windows 7 and connects to my server.

And my server! I pulled this thing out of a pile of scrap. It's a Dell PowerEdge T320 with a Xeon E5-2407, 16GB of ECC ram, and 6x300GB SAS drives in RAIDZ2. It's running FreeNAS and named Sarea. Just got her online on Saturday! She'll be getting a drive upgrade in the near future; I'd like to replace those 300gb SAS drives with some 2TB WD Reds when I have the cash. Already had 2 of the original 8 die on me.

I'm a bit obsessed with weird, old technology, like MiniDiscs, the TRS-80 Color Computers, and late-90s corporate workstations. My current two side projects are restoring an old Micron P4 machine into a sweet Windows 98 retro gaming pc, and rebuilding my treasured PowerMac G4 Graphite into something functional. I grew up working on random IT scraps my dad would bring home, and never owned a new desktop until I built Zerua less than a year ago.

All of my computers get a specific name in Basque. I've used that naming convention for a little while now, and I like it.

I've actually been watching LTT for quite a long while, I just haven't bothered signing up on here for whatever reason, but I've been poking around here for a few weeks now and figured I'd stop by and say hello.

So, hello!