Archive for February, 2009

The quick and easy way to make Paint Bucket Wine(TM)

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Basic idea: Yeast eat sugar and convert it to alcohol, but you want this to happen without other things also infecting and eating the sugar, mainly because their waste products aren’t as useful or tasty as alcohol.

Materials needed to get started:

  • One brand new, clean 5 gallon plastic pail with lid, any plastic type but 3 or 7 preferred
  • One packet of active dry yeast, red brewer’s yeast preferred
  • 14 cans of juice concentrate, required to have no sulfites or preservatives
  • One standard size bag of granulated baking sugar
  • 5 gallons of water, filtered or distilled water preferred
  • A winemaking hydrometer
  • Bleach & a clean sponge

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Compaq Proliant DL380 Generation 1

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

I was given a Compaq Proliant DL380 (Generation 1 or G1) as part of an exchange for doing some filesystem recovery for a customer. It came with 2x800MHz/256K SECC2 Pentium III CPUs; 512MB PC133 CL3 SDRAM DIMMs; five Compaq 18.2GB Ultra2 SCSI hard disks (two failed); a Compaq “Integrated Smart Array” onboard RAID controller; a floppy drive, slimline CD-ROM, and single 275W hotswap Compaq power supply. Here are HP’s specs for the system. Here is where you can find manuals and documentation for the system. Now, this isn’t a bad machine as-is, but let’s turn it into a beast with some smart buys on the used market.

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