[XCSSA] XCSSA Meeting: High voltage, DIY NAS/RAID, USB Bootable Linux, and other fun stuff (Mon, July 20th, 7pm in the NTC building, old room 140 (not the basement))

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

                Xotic Computer Systems of San Antonio *
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	http://xcssa.org/archives/XCSSA_2009-07-20.html#NEXT

Hey all!

NOTE: This meeting will be held in the NTC building, back in our "old old" 
room 140 on the 1st floor!

Quite a bit going on this month.  First up...

Plasma (High Voltage) Fractals: By Fredrik
In previous meetings Fredrik has lit up light bulbs, globes and what not but 
now he's playing with the burn patterns that can be achieved by dampening 
composite wood boards with water and hitting them with HV plasma arcs. Some 
pretty cool fractal-like patterns can be created very easily and Fredrik is 
planning to show the results, and with building approval maybe do some 
demonstrations of the process.  (see web site for fractal plasma images)


DIY Network Attached Storage (NAS) System: By Tim
Tim has shared some of the details of his home brew NAS system.  Well Monday 
night he'll go over the details of his system built on a special low power, 
ITX mother board (VIA EPIA SN10000EG) that boots and runs off CF boot media.  
The rest of Tim's NAS system runs with Seagate Barracuda LP drives, pico PSU, 
running dedicated SW RAID on Ubuntu.  This has been a presentation that we've 
been waiting for.  Also.. if he's able to get it working.. Tim told me that 
he might bring his midiSID project that he's made quite a bit of progress on.  
Keep your fingers crossed! (see web site for links)


Overview of USB stick distro tools: Tweeks
Tweeks loves the new persistent (change recording) boot USB distro tools that 
are coming out, and will go over a couple of them and will touch on some of 
the pros, cons and feature names to pay attention to when working with USB 
distro tools.


Computer Audio Equipment Hacking: Robert Rusk
Robert has picked up a number of computer audio components that he's having 
problems powering and controlling, so he's going to bring these to the 
meeting in hopes of getting some hardware and software hacking help.


** See the web site for links to the above subjects. **
http://xcssa.org/archives/XCSSA_2009-07-20.html#NEXT


Should be an action packed meeting this month.. 
Hope to see you there!

Tweeks
President of XCSSA.ORG