New Lawn Mower

You may recall that I talked of getting a new lawn mower about six months ago. Or that I talked about it a year and a half before that, or nine months before that. Yes, I do sometimes agonize over fairly minor decisions.

Well, I finally got a new one! No, it wasn't the 36V cordless from my most recent lawn mower post. I went with this 20" corded Homelite mower instead. I had originally planned to get this 18" Black and Decker model because The Home Depot site said that it was available in store and the Homelite was only available online. It turned out to be the opposite once I got there. I prefer the wider cutting width, so this is probably a good thing.

I've used it once so far, and I like it overall. It was pretty easy to unpack and put together without tools, which was a pleasant surprise. It started right up and was about as loud as a box fan, as people had commented in the reviews of various electric mowers. I briefly considered getting just a 50ft extension cord, but I'm very glad I got the 100 ft. 14 gauge cord instead - I don't think the 50ft range would have been enough.

The mower itself only has two design flaws that I am aware of so far. First, the height adjustment selector only has labels on the lowest (1.5") and highest (4") settings. There are seven settings, which means you can change it in slightly-less-than-half-inch increments, but it's not entirely clear if those increments are exactly equal. Second, the rear flap is really stiff and will sometimes catch on the ground and make turning difficult. That's not a huge issue, and the flap might loosen up in time.

Most of my problems with the first mowing were related to the composition of my yard. My yard is not a nice even layer of grass. Instead, it has clumps of dense grass that I will eventually have to kill (getting the yard entirely green is my first priority!), which the extension cord gets caught on. There's also a former garden area that has an extra inch of soil that creates an annoying ridge.

The cord was a bit of a hassle, but I think I just need to get used to it. I couldn't immediately figure out a good way to consistently and gracefully step over the cord as I turned, and I need to cut the side yards separately because the cord doesn't stay out of the way around corners as easily. Next time, I will try draping the cord over a shoulder, cutting the yard in five sections instead of three, and seeing how things turn out. Even if things don't improve at all, my annoyance level with the cord was pretty low. Switching from a self-propelled mower to a push mower was definitely a more significant change.

New Parts for File Server

I fixed my file server a couple of weeks ago. I now have my 3.5TB of storage space available again! If you'll recall, I've fixed my file server a few times before...

I started trying to fix my file server a couple of months ago by reinstalling Ubuntu. Unfortunately, this would hang at about 5% on the formatting/partitioning step. I suspected a faulty system hard drive, but didn't get around to trying another one until early October. I tried an old (from back in high school, for at least part of the machine) 40GB drive. The installation went through, but the system wouldn't boot from that drive. Since the drive had been in my garage for a number of years, I didn't particularly trust it. So, I went to Micro Center and picked up a 500GB hard drive that was on sale. It, too, allowed the installation to complete but would not boot up. It should be noted that the system hard drive has to be an IDE hard drive because I use all the SATA ports for the RAID array.

I figured it was most likely a faulty motherboard at this point. I went to newegg.com and picked out a cheap motherboard and processor (I always prefer to buy them together to ensure I have the right socket and so I don't have to mess with reapplying thermal grease whenever possible). Along with my new camera, the parts arrived in just a few days. I really do love Newegg.

There's not much else to tell. The installation went well, the raid was recreated without much hassle. I did learn a new command: mdadm --scan --detail /dev/md0 >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf. I don't remember having to run this command or having to mess with mdadm.conf at all, in fact, in the past. I'm not sure what has changed, but in order to get the raid device to persist after rebooting, I had to do this. I'm just happy it all works.

And it does all work! I no longer have that noisy north bridge fan (this motherboard doesn't have a north bridge fan to get noisy)! Everything seems much more stable and efficient. I'm really quite pleased with the new motherboard. I'm also happy with the new camera. I took some pictures of the file server, which I can't believe I haven't done before!

The old, very dusty, motherboard.

My newly installed motherboard. So pretty.

The entire case. This is my first Micro ATX motherboard, and it is surprisingly tiny.