I'm cleaning today. And I added things to Adventurer's Project's fundraising ideas. But I've taken a break from my North Country Trail sub project. There was a high pitched noise at very low volume coming from The Robot today. When I opened the chassis side panel, it went away, so it must be barometric? One of the 11 cooling fans is dead and I think that the high pitched noise came from the drive bay cooler fan? My guess is that the front air intake holes are getting clogged with dust. It's really overdue for a cleaning anyways.
The one thing about owning a chassis with 11 fans is that at some point they all have to be cleaned. I usually wrap one of my fingers in an anti static cloth and soak it in 90% rubbing alcohol. Then in the rest for the rest of the computer I use both a compressed can of air and the vacuum cleaner tube and attachment to get some push and pull action on the dust there.
The chassis is made out of aluminum. And often, I have things sitting on top of it. But that's not good because it's built that way to help keep the system cool. With things on top of it, it's very minor, but it's insulating the system and serving to be counterproductive to it's design purpose.
I've got a display in one of the front 5 - 1/4 inch bays that will one day tell me the CPU's temperature is. Well, I haven't gotten to buying the thermal tape yet to install it's sensor to the CPU. But the display goes in and out. My guess is that it's running off of a Molex power connector that's been Y branched over and over again for the chassis fans. As I've stated one of those fans is dead, but I think it's still trying to draw electricity, but even more now. And that may be causing a sag on those wires, who's power is fixed. I want to try plugging in another power cable into my modular power supply unit. I'm not sure if it has another Molex connection available? If not, the other way of powering hard disk, DVD drives and other equipment is with a SATA power connection. I may have to convert one to Molex, but if any of this is possible, the front display could have it's own dedicated power cable?
Yesterday, putting the dispersed camping GPS I's and O's in on the North Country Trail - Minnesota was taxing my newer computer system pretty hard. Under the circumstances, the hard drive light was on solid most of the time. It must have been punishing my CPU? This kind of work is graphical. It's hard to describe when I when I talk to the employees at my local computer store. I'd say that what I do is not as intensive as gaming, but probably up there with architectural design.
My Garmin eTrex 20 dedicated GPS runs for about $200. If you took Buckeye, or North Country Trail's GIS track data and uploaded it to the devices storage, what you'd get is all of the "baby tracks" that it consists of. And they have to be switched from one to another as frequently as every 29 feet.
In order to make it more manageable, I used Google My Maps to overtake the roads and some of the multi-use right-of-ways. Unlike regular Google Maps, My Maps allows me to create, modify routes, save and export them. They were done in the clockwise/ westbound direction because I have the most success merging tracks that way. Overtaking the original GIS reduced the risk of errors on the merging because one track from My Maps usually eliminated 3 or more GIS tracks.
The merging stripped the written GIS data from both agencies, as a result, it's much easier on my system resources to display them. NCTA's has things in there that might be of use, but for The Robot and laptop computer, I just open the original tracks up when I need that information.
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