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Athlon 64's strata in the eWaste
Wednesday, May 19 2021
Neville hadn't been allowed to "work" at the bookstore while various measures were in place to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. But now that the restrictions are lifting (and most of the people in the demographic that buys books at non-Christian bookstores is vaccinated), it's been decided that Neville can "work" one day each week. Today was Neville's day, and he was able to move some product that hadn't been moving well lately: bookstore postcards featuring his adorable face. Meanwhile Ramona seemed a little mopey without him.
Most of my workday was spent writing a Python script to sift good records from bad in a CSV version of a semi-corrupted dBase table. I'd take breaks now and then to do other things like freshening up a yellow floor shape that had been under the laboratory ottoman.
I also decomissioned my old Athlon 64-based computer, the one that had been in that big case with its own casters. I'd originally bought the case for something like an Athlon XP 1700+, which I then upgraded to an Athlon 64 in April of 2005. These days, there's no justification to operate any computer based on an Athlon 64 even for reasons of nostalgia. They use more power than a slightly younger computer to do a tiny fraction of the work. By this I mean that the Athlon 64 uses 89 watts to work at slightly more than 5% the rate of a 77 watt Core i7 3770, and that's a nine year old computer. I removed the processor and DDR1 memory from the motherboard and put both the motherboard and memory (along with all my other useless DDR1 memory) in deep storage. As for the CPU itself, I added it to my little ad hoc CPU museum, which also contains a Pentium II, two Pentium 4s, Pentium MMXs, AMD K6s, several Athlons (including a Thunderbird), Celerons of various ages, a Core 2 Duo, and a good number of 6502s and Z80s. It turns out the only things worth salvaging from the Athlon 64's strata in my mountain of eWaste is its beefy cooling system and the 3.5 volt lithium RTC battery (assuming that still has power after sixteen years of contiunous running).
This evening I made spaghetti and fried stuff to chonkify the red sauce. This time I used both tempeh and tofu, as there were two partial tofus in the refrigerator that I didn't want to go bad.
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