I built a nice, powerful multimedia PC a few weeks ago, but once I got past the initial installation stages it’s been giving me some trouble. Most annoying among the ongoing problems is something of a showstopper: Every time someone touches the front of the computer, it resets.

A problem, yes?

On a whim I went a-Googlin’. It turns out that I’m not the only one with this problem. There’s also a relatively simple solution, though it involves hauling the machine off of the shelf yet again so I can monkey around with its innards. As a test I may just tape a piece of conductive material to the side of the chassis, bridging the front panel and the rest of the chassis, to see if this is indeed the final fix.

Add this to the fact that the VFD (supposedly a multi-function display built into the chassis) has never worked as advertised and actually causes more problems than it’s worth (which is why I just unplugged all power to that useless piece of junk).

In short: If you’re looking for a multimedia PC chassis, you might want to steer clear of the Antec Fusion Black… unless you feel like getting your hands dirty doing some internal rewiring.

It shows how often I really look at my journal, the fact that my so-called “blogroll” sported several defunct links and lacked a few sites I read almost daily.

I’ve remedied that problem, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I still have managed to miss one or two important sites. Hmm.

For what it’s worth, the comments portion of this journal now supports Gravatar images. Now that they’re owned by the WordPress folks, I figure performance shouldn’t be too much of an issue going forward.

What can I say? It’s an excuse to use “buddy icons” in my journal. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

This journal is now upgraded to WordPress version 2.3, for good or for ill. This upgrade required a few behind-the-scenes changes so I took advantage of this opportunity to do a little “out with the old, in with the new” action.

The Old: I wasn’t using the Timeline at all, and only rarely did I update my Status page. The plugins which made those pages work aren’t fully compatible with 2.3 so I ditched them. Since I was already on a housekeeping binge, I made the Technorati widget go away (you could count the referrals I received from them on the fingers of one hand) and removed some of the old themes & plugins that I was never going to use again anyway.

The New: Tagging. I don’t think I’m going to go through my back catalog of nearly-1800 posts to add tags, but I can add new tags as I go and as I find the need to touch up an older posting.

The Unchanged: I was going to spring a new theme on you, but I couldn’t find one that didn’t annoy me in one important aspect or another. I think in the long run it’ll have turned out wise to just plug new code revisions into this theme just as I’ve done with the WordPress 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 upgrades. This upgrade was infinitely less annoying than the last one, at least.

The Linkage: If you’re going to retrofit an existing theme, you should absolutely pick up the Advanced Tag Entry plugin and the Configurable Tag Cloud widget plugin. With Advanced Tag Entry, you actually get to manage the tags you’re using on each of the posts. The default WordPress 2.3 installation provides no meaningful control over existing tags whatsoever, and ATE remedies that handily. The Configurable Tag Cloud, meanwhile, gives you the sidebar widget we should have been given with the stock WordPress install in the first place. Get it, use it, love it.

Well, this took a bit longer than I originally expected. I guess I’ll have to work on my long-overdue image manipulation projects later this week, eh? (There’s a gallery to fill with pictures from the coast trip, there are banner images to craft for both of the forums…)