I finally assembled all of the spare parts. Motherboards, processors, RAM, hard drives, power supplies, video cards. Somewhere in all of that silicon and plastic would be the genesis of a new, albeit clunky and kludgy, Linux-based home computer.

Alas, it was not meant to be. After hours of testing, only one combination of CPU, motherboard, power supply and video card would achieve anything more than the barest sign of functioning… and not one combination would even POST. Argh.

I ranted in frustration for a short while, and then I decided to turn my attention to something else geeky, something almost equally worthwhile.

I attached the cassette deck to my new receiver!

And that didn’t work out very well, actually. It turns out that, according to the manual for my Panasonic A/V receiver, one cannot record audio or video from one analog source to another. Helluva “feature” if you ask me, but that’s okay. I worked around it through the simple expedient of attaching the tape deck directly to the computer.

The roomie and I then spent a happy few hours combing through our respective cassette collections and pulling off songs we’d long been yearning to have in digital form. He went for an XTC song and a few tracks from a band I’d never even heard of (the name of which now escapes my recall), and I plucked B-sides off a couple of “cassingles” in addition to a couple of stand-out tracks on otherwise-forgettable albums. (Let’s face it, David Gilmour’s old solo album really only has one good song on it.)

I love that living-room PC, lemme tell ya. Not only does it make a great myHTPC platform (all the better to watch anime with), but thanks to the LiveDrive hardware and CoolEdit 2000 software I was able to pull in audio from those old tapes and clean it up in a jiffy.

The results speak, as it were, for themselves. So, who wants a copy of a B-side track from the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album released back in ‘89?

ABWH – Vultures (8 megs, Ogg)