Garage Intelligence

What I wanted = A program to scan my collection of disk drives and say things along the lines of 'Whoa pal, this disk is so old Noah used it for his laptop on the ark!' What I got: An anime girl reading my disks and telling me the current price of petrol somewhere in the world.  Look, I don't know what's going on here either! Surely it can't be that hard to do a little background check on my disks here can it?

We have power, we have display, now we just need the onboard system to live in direct harmony with all the random bits and pieces I've plugged into it instead of it pretending there's nothing there. 'No Dave, I have no freaking idea what you're talking about here. What graphics cards? What Wifi adapter?'.. Hopefully there's some old school drivers still out there!

I've dug out a monitor from the dawn of computing which will help to no end in seeing what I'm doing here. However while getting it to display was easy enough, giving it something to display seemed to be a bit of a wrestling issue in the end..

It's never at the beginning of a project that you pick up pretty significant issues, it's more deep into things when you suddenly go 'Now why didn't I see this earlier?'. Current case in point, my lack of a case has suddenly made me realize what else I'm missing here.  Namely, an on button. Unless I want to continually jump start this project with a screwdriver, I probably should find a way to get it to start ultimately..

Having got the disks plugged in, it's time to find out which work and which serve nothing more than paperweights now. To do that, I need to install an operating system. And to do that, I'm going to need a USB drive that holds more than 10 low resolution pictures of a cup of coffee..

Sigh. The head of the installation team is on the phone again, taking a very predictable swipe at the design team (my teams never get on, even if you force them to sit together during communal lunches and cupcake Friday's at the staff canteen). 'Do those clowns in design even know how plugs off a power supply work?' he sniggers as I try to keep a cool head as the supposedly level headed head of the project I am. 'Ass clowns, the lot of them!'  Sadly after I get him to stop taking pot shots at the design crew and explain exactly what he feels the problem is, it turns out he's right. The SSD band looks okay but there's a glaring fault the installation team picked up within seconds.

 No case? No problem. Now that I've finally got my 3d printer working after months of frustrating downtime , a quick fix solution is just a few hours away!

I've ventured into the back shed (aka the Boneyard) and unearthed a few more pieces to throw at Project: Garage Intelligence although one part seems complete overkill and now I'm also wondering if this thing really does need Bluetooth on board..

A bunch of old school PC parts, a corner in the workshop, a stripped back operating system, a nearby 3d printer and a mild curiosity at rolling my own A.I. What could possibly go wrong here?