I could have sworn that I wrote a post about my re-issue Optimus Primal in his original, show-accurate colors. However, going back through the blog, I did not! You will all have to deal with a lack of a reference post, I suppose.

Continuing the series of reviews of toys brought to me in my good friend’s backpack (previous posts here: Beast Machines Thrust, Energon Starscream), this is a recolor of the original Optimus Primal release, right down to the battle mask! It was released in 2003 under the Universe line. The toy is an incredibly accurate reissue of the original mold, right down to the extremely sensitive trigger for the missile launchers. You don’t even have to touch them for them to fire off!

The transformation is exactly the same, and the joints are tight, without feeling like they’re going to break when you turn them. Several are ratcheting, and there are quite a few, so there are plenty of options for posing. However, the toy is top heavy, which can limit the number of poses, if you need him to stand up on his own.

I’m not entirely sure why this toy exists. The color scheme doesn’t match any particular cartoons. Fans and writers created a spot in the multiverse for it, by repurposing it as the Shattered Glass Optimus Primal, which, okay, fine, I guess? Every mirrorverse needs a color swap, and it’s good that the toy found a home in the story arcs, but… why?

The toy is very good quality, and fun to play with. Its lack of place in the greater Transformers story may have dissuaded me from purchasing it, if it had not been a gift.

When your oldest son hands you a tub full of laptops and netbooks and says, “Do you want these?”, you say yes. Every single time. Even when he says, “Okay, but could you fix the purple one, so I can use it?” Especially when he says that.

My laptop, seen here on the left of the table, has the tear-down for this particular model (a Dell Inspiron 15R N5110), and MOST of the rest of the parts are the purple laptop. I took it completely apart, replaced the thermal paste, discovered a broken hinge (it mostly works now), upgraded the hard drive (goodbye spinning drive, hello SSD!), and added more RAM. I didn’t have enough on hand to max it out, but I more than doubled what was there. Oh, and I replaced the battery and ordered a new charging cable.

Once it was reassembled, I tested the RAM and made sure the hard drive was responding as expected. I put a lightweight version of Linux onto it (Linux Mint XFCE, if I’m not mistaken) and I tuned it as well as I could. I added a fairly large full-size SD card into the slot for some extra storage for music, videos, and documents, and then came the final step.

My oldest is a huge Marvel fan, so I named the laptop after a less well-known mutant by the name of Forge. And because I am a professional, I added a Forge wallpaper. As far as I understand, he’s using the laptop daily, and it’s still chugging along! Success!

This toy, like Beast Machines Thrust, is another of the gifts-out-of-the-backpack Transformers from a good friend of mine, who also collects them. This is a Transformers Energon Starscream.

I wasn’t doing a whole lot of collecting, or watching Transformers, when the Unicron trilogy was being released, so this Starscream was new to me. From the link above, this mostly-green coloring was to emphasize his “Energon ghost” status, which definitely sounds like something that would happen to him. He usually ends up as some sort of ghost or eternal spark, no matter the universe or timeline. Figure it out, Starscream!

The toy is quite good. Despite the heavy torso, the legs are stiff and solid enough to support it when it’s in robot mode. There’s plenty of articulation for posing, but not enough to do any detailed mimicking of the character’s in-show antics. The transformation is a good middle-of-the-road between complex and straightforward. While in robot mode, it’s DEFINITELY a Seeker, it’s less obvious in plane mode.

While I don’t think I would have purchased this toy from off the shelf, I’m very happy to have it in my collection.

If you’re new to my blog, you might not know that I absolutely love taking an old or abandoned computer and bringing it back to life. I upgrade the hardware with whatever I have on hand, trying to reduce bottlenecks. I order replacement parts for those I don’t have in my stash, and I test all the things. After that, I try to find the best version of Linux that will give the machine its longest life. Usually, this ends up being Debian-flavored, because that’s what I’m most familiar with. Then, once that’s done, I try to find the machine a good home.

This one is an Acer Aspire 5253 laptop. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and upgraded the hard drive from a very old spinning one to a SATA SSD. I replaced the battery with a new one; I love those old, easily replaceable batteries. Just pull the old one out and slot the new one in. Done! For the operating system, I chose Lubuntu, which is designed to run smoothly on machines with very limited resources, for which this definitely qualifies. Additionally, because so much of the internet experience now happens through the browser, I installed Falkon, which allows YouTube and Twitch viewing to happen, at least at medium resolutions. Falkon is really snappy for as few resources as it uses!

The last piece of this puzzle was something new-ish to me. I wanted this laptop to be more than a repair project. I wanted to get creative with it. I wanted to make it unique. Not H-Mods customized, but, you know, something. A while back, I painted the case of my desktop PC (before handing it off to my son), and I was itching to do something similar. This time, to go with the black color of the laptop, I decided on the purple of Decepticons. On the lid is a graffiti style Decepticon symbol. On the wrist wrest is some Decepticon graffiti text, which spells out “RISE UP”, which felt right. I covered both with a layer of clear coat to make the paint last, and then I scuffed it for a worn look. For the final touches, I updated the wallpaper (pictured here) and the user login icon.

I really, really like mixing my hardware tinkering with art. It felt both thrilling and creatively satisfying. I have the feeling that I’ll want to do this again. For now, the RISE UP laptop is for sale here, if you’d like to bring it into your home.

I have a couple of friends who are also Transformers collectors. Because they are friends, we do favors for each other. Normal stuff, right? Well, when I picked one of these friends up from the airport, and got him to his hotel, he decided to bring a backpack of Transformers to add to my collection. Hilariously, some of these may have been rescued from my collection of old, from the Before Times. This Beast Machines Thrust is one that very well may have been mine before.

The Beast Machines series was a sequel to the Beast Wars series, and both were animated in CGI by Mainframe entertainment, in Canada. The improvement in both the technology and the skill by Mainframe comes through strongly. While the story was again centered around Megatron and Optimus Primal battling it out, the story seemed darker and more focused on characters looking inward. I remember really enjoying that change-up when the episodes were airing live.

Now, to the toy. Less than with Beast Wars, the first round of toys didn’t bother much with show accuracy. I’m not sure if that was a timing issue or a communication issue, but it always irritated me a little bit. Thrust makes an effort, and I’m happy for that. The transformation is predictable in a good way, but the arm joints have always been loose. It was a nice touch that the feet-wheel can split into actual feet for posing, because the wheel will not support the toy standing up.

While I have to be very careful posing and transforming it due to the loose joints, I am quite happy to have Thrust back in my collection.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you might remember my old posts about Project Computron. It’s been quite a long time since that project began, and it’s… evolved… a bit over the years. This project is related to that, but isn’t directly in line. Let me explain.

My good friend Peter had a box full of super small form factor PCs, and he decided that we should all (Myself, him, and our friend Alex) cluster them with Proxmox, both for running virtual machines and to see if we could connect the clusters to each other. Let’s just say that the connected-cluster aspect of the project is still in motion.

What really helped with this project was using an IP KVM device, specifically, the JetKVM. Proxmox was pretty easy to set up on each machine, and linking them into a cluster was also pretty easy. Starting a virtual machine was also pretty easy, and when my long-time RSS reader host decided to stop doing that, I spun up a replacement without much difficulty at all! (FreshRSS for the win!)

The only hurdles I’ve run into so far have been changing the config once the cluster is up and running. Unless the changes come via updates and upgrades, Proxmox will just choke on them. So, when I moved away from Comcast to AT&T fiber, I had to wipe the entire cluster and start over.

How does this relate to Project Computron, you might ask? Well, the hardware on which the project was to sit on has been changed multiple times, and this was also an experiment to see how it would fit in this sort of environment. I decided against it, and for dedicated hardware, and have a 1U server currently waiting in the wings. But more on that later. Probably!

To-Do

• Upgrade Proxmox version across the cluster
• Connect cluster to other clusters via Proxmox data center VM
• Set up automated backups for VMs
• Set up automated updates for Proxmox

What is a Transformers fan to do when he starts working for a company that’s designing autonomous semi trucks? Obviously, they must get their hands on the best autonomous semi truck of all time, Optimus Prime. And that is exactly what I did. I visited Grave Danger in Old Town Lansing (now called Shock Treatment), and picked up the Earthrise Optimus Prime pictured here. Was it worth the $50 price tag?

Usually, I would say that’s too high a price for a toy this size. But for Optimus, and for this particular Optimus, it was absolutely worth it. He’s got the classic look, he’s got elbows, and he’s got knees! He’s got the classic gun, the trailer, and the repair bay!

In robot mode, he looks straight out of the G1 show. In order to get this kind of show accuracy, the bumper and grill couldn’t actually be the same pieces between vehicle and robot modes, so the toy does some very clever hiding and folding away when it transforms in either direction.

With all of his articulation points (down to the fingers!), he can be posed in all kinds of ways befitting of a Prime. And while I don’t have a stand to hold him in that position, you can bet that I’ve done the jump pose!

This toy was one of the few pieces of personality at my desk in a cube farm, bringing me optimism and hope in an otherwise bleary office environment. While it stayed in semi mode for all of that time, the transformation is without hangups, without stubborn or loose pieces, and is honestly a joy. If you’re looking for a fun Optimus Prime that is pretty close to the G1 show, I highly recommend this one. If you can get your hands on it, that is.

In the time between the last post and this one, my Transformers collection has expanded quite a bit. It’s been happening in waves, and they’ll chill for a while on my desk, awaiting their turn to be photographed for the blog. Until, that is, my youngest son starts reminding me that they deserve to be posed and put up on the shelf. He’s right, of course, so I’d take a bunch of photos, do a bunch of happy transformation goodness, consult his superior posing skills, and put them up on the collection shelf. And since I’ve gotten the itch to blog again, I’m diving into the collection photos to kick it all off. So, for your enjoyment, I present Transformers: War for Cybertron Ironhide!

Ironhide is ALWAYS tough. In the TV shows, in the movies, and in the video games, Ironhide is ready to bust deceptichops at a moment’s notice!

My middle son gifted me this for my birthday, and it brightened my trip around the sun. This version is from War For Cybertron, and lives up to the aesthetic of the video game quite well. And I REALLY enjoyed this game.

The transformation was a little finicky, but following the instructions got me through it. I may be getting old, but they’re printing those things smaller and smaller, I swear. Time for bifocals, I guess. Anywho, from robot to off-road vehicle and back to robot was doable without any major irritation or limb separation. Other than the roof of the car on Ironhide’s back, there’s almost no kibble. The wheels add to the robot mode, in my opinion, and the weaponry is appropriately ridiculous for the character.

The most difficult thing I ran into was deciding whether I wanted to keep him in robot mode or vehicle mode when I put him on the shelf. Usually a figure has one mode that is much better than the other, and I tend to prefer the robot mode for posing. But with this Ironhide, it was a close call. I went with robot mode, so he could be posed, but I may yet change my mind.

I’ve always been unsure about whether or not the “Gamer Edition” toys would live up to the hype, but I’m pleased to say that I’m now hoping to add some more to my collection.

At the risk of being a broken record, I have a habit of receiving broken technology. The expectation is that I will either repair it and find it a good home, or recycle it. Both have the benefit of keeping that tech out of the landfill, and I really enjoy tinkering with something until I can get it functional again. It brings me a lot of joy. My daily driver laptop is one of these wonderful devices.

I was given a Lenovo X1 Carbon, 6th generation laptop that wouldn’t charge. It charged via USB-C (new-fangled tomfoolery!), and multiple chargers had been tried at different max voltages. The signature orange “I’m charging” light stubbornly refused to turn on. The battery was practically new, and tested fine, so that wasn’t it. After some research, I discovered that this was a fairly common issue for this laptop, and that it was likely that the power management chip on the motherboard had failed. Given up the ghost. Thrown in the towel.

Replacement motherboards weren’t cheap, but they were available on eBay. So, I took the risk of getting scammed, and ended up receiving a fully functional replacement! So, I swapped it out and voila, the power worked! Charging happened! So, I added a M.2 SSD, Linux Mint, some vitally important stickers, and I had a new daily driver!

And because electronics are going to be electronics, a few months later, the sound died. After quite a bit of troubleshooting (the Linux kernel had updated around the same time, so I went so far as to install Windows on it to be sure), I determined that it was yet another motherboard component that had died. As Cartman once said, “Screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.” A friend handed me a bluetooth speaker that attached to a surface, and used that surface to amplify the sound. I stuck its magnet to the back of the laptop’s monitor, and the WHOLE MONITOR became the speaker. It worked great!

For a while. The speaker was inexpensive, and its bluetooth connectivity wasn’t incredibly reliable. Keeping it charged required some cumbersome cabling from a USB-A port to the speaker, which drained the laptop battery quite a bit more quickly than without. To be fair, I used it that way for around a year. Eventually, though, the annoyances wore me down, and I went back to eBay to look for another motherboard.

Not only had they halved in price since I’d swapped out the last time, the model with the upgraded CPU (i7 rather than i5) was also available. I once again lucked out with a fully functional replacement part! The laptop is much snappier now with its upgraded processor, and the SSD access seems faster as well (though I haven’t verified, it might be bias). The onboard speakers are once again doing their thing, and my daily driver lives on!

Since I was so very impressed with the Kickback re-issue, I decided to collect more of the Legacy Insecticons. It didn’t hurt that I already had named computers after all three of them. I found Bombshell at a Meijer, which surprised me, because their Transformers stock has been very thin for the last year or two. I thanked the collector gods for their die-cast and plastic goodness, and took Bombshell home with me.

Again, this transformation was smooth, straightforward, and not fiddly at all. I had worried about the beetle legs, but I didn’t end up having a reason to. They could have gotten in the way, but they didn’t. This figure didn’t come with the energon accessories like the last had, which I noticed, but wasn’t a deal breaker. Unlike most transformers, I felt that moth modes were equally good, and would be great for displaying the figure. I went with the robot mode for display, because of the greater articulation available. MonkeyLinkMega likes to come up with cool poses for my figures, and that’s something I can’t pass up!

Like Kickback, this Bombshell re-issue is both faithful to the original, and an improvement upon it. The basic modes, transformation, and look are all still there, but the new figure has more articulation, more detail (without having to apply stickers!), and more show accuracy.

Finding Shrapnel is going to be a chore, because it seems sold out everywhere. Fingers crossed for stumbling on one like I did this one!

I honestly can’t remember where I got this laptop. I have been given so many pieces of tech over my lifetime, either to restore or to recycle, that inevitably one or two are going to drop through the cracks. This 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2012 is one of those. Sorry, little guy.

I pulled this out of the spares pile with the Compaq in order to donate it to a fundraiser for my local nerd con. The Compaq gave up the ghost, so I was hoping that this one still had some life left. I procured a charger (First generation MagSafe? Cool!) from a friend of mine who had spares, and checked the battery and tested the RAM. All looked good.

Once again, the goal was to swap out the spinning hard drive for a SSD, upgrade the RAM to the max the motherboard would allow, and run a test installation of Alma Linux. (That’s the distro they’ll be installing at the fund raiser.) This one has a Core 2 Duo processor and uses DDR3 SODIMMs, rather than DDR2. Luckily, I had two 4 GB sticks lying around, and still had the SSD from the previous upgrade attempt.

Not everything went as smoothly as I’d hoped. The RAM was almost too large to physically fit in the slot. I had to do several rounds of re-seating to get it all recognized and usable. The optical drive was dead as a doornail, and I couldn’t get the USB version of the Ultimate Boot CD to boot. So, thorough testing wasn’t something I would be able to do. Also, while attempting to install Alma, it was getting a processor deprecation error – who stops supporting whole swaths of CPUs? C’mon, now! – and it would not install.

Once again, I was foiled. This time, only partially. While Alma wouldn’t install, Linux Mint (XFCE edition) installed perfectly, and ran snappily to boot! YouTube, Twitch, ad-heavy news article web pages, all loaded quickly, in the most recent version of Firefox! The battery holds a charge! It won’t end up in the fundraiser, but it’s a great backup laptop in case my current one dies. I’m definitely keeping it around.

Let’s talk about Insecticon re-issues. Specifically, let’s talk about the Legacy and Legacy Evolution series. Why, you may ask? You may not know this, but I name my computers after Transformers, and have for a long, long time. This used to be A Thing among nerds. For instance, a friend of mine named all of his computers after South Park characters. Anywho, I had a quick round of three computers (a laptop, a Roku replacement, and a streaming machine for while I’m working on servers in the basement), and I named them all after G1 Insecticons. If I like the Transformer enough to name a computer after it, I usually also enjoy collecting a toy of it. In a stroke of luck, this happened during the Legacy and Legacy Evolution releases, so I picked Kickback up during one of Ace of Hearts‘ Target adventures.

While the transformation is more complex than the G1 version of the toy, it’s still pretty straightforward. There’s a hip rotation, and there’s some feet repositioning, and there’s some neck twisting. Nothing surprising, and nothing difficult.

The joints are stiff enough to be able to pose the figure and leave him that way, and there are enough of them that there’s plenty of articulation. Articulation and detail – in both modes – are where this re-issue shine. In those ways, it is absolutely an improvement on the original 1980’s toy. In every other way, it’s faithful to the original, and a worthy update.

On a day much like this one, at a garage sale, MonkeyLinkMega found something that would change his life forever. Or, for a couple of years, at most. He found a used laptop, for only $15. A Compaq Presario CQ62. He jumped at the chance to have his own computer, and brought it home, beaming. It needed some love, but, luckily, this Dad knew what to do. Tech Dad replaced the battery, the charging cable, and the keyboard. He added RAM and upgraded the hard drive. Once it had Linux on it, it could ALMOST run a full-screen YouTube clip without stuttering. You see, it only had a single core processor and no dedicated video. (Cue gasps and sobbing)

Eventually, MonkeyLinkMega traded up for something a bit better, and this laptop was consigned to the spares pile. It languished, sad and alone, for years, until one day, the tech-savvy Dad decided he was going to max everything out for a Linux installfest fundraiser.

The maximum RAM was listed as 4GB DDR2 (which it had) on some sites, and 8GB DDR2 on others. Tech Dad splurged on some eBay RAM, which was only expensive because it had become harder to find over the years. He also swapped the spinning platter hard drive out for a SATA SSD, to make sure that storage wouldn’t bottleneck what little speed the laptop could get.

Initially, things were looking good. The full 8GB of RAM was recognized, and several distros of Linux would install, but none of them booted. After several rounds of this, successful booting became intermittent, even off of the USB drives. In the end, the laptop stopped booting at all, and wouldn’t even POST.

Tech Dad had a sad, but knew that the laptop had lived a long and productive life. (It’s me, I’m Tech Dad.) In the end, the RAM and SSD were put in a drawer and the laptop in electronics recycling. Rest in peace, you glorious garage sale find.

Also, if anyone has a need for DDR2 SODIMMs, let me know. :)

Airrazor came in a two-pack with Inferno, so this post is a follow up to that one.

Airrazor, much like Tigatron, feels her bird mode as keenly as she feels her Maximal nature. Unlike Tigatron, though, she also sees the importance of her community, and regularly tries to convince him to become closer to the Maximals. This dynamic, and the closeness between the two that develops over time, becomes pivotal to the main story arc throughout the seasons of Beast Wars, and culminates in Tigerhawk.

I’m not sure why this toy was paired with Inferno, rather than with Tigatron, but I’m also not a Hasbro/Takara marketing decision-maker. The box and packaging material were beautiful, and definitely created the sense that I wasn’t just opening up a two-pack of toys – I was opening up something special. This may be the first box in a long time that I keep. Then again, it DOES take up a lot of space. So, we’ll see.

The robot mode is clean, and very poseable. There’s virtually no kibble. Everything folds neatly away, and there’s an extremely clever (if hard to discern) use of double hinges above her waist and in each wing that allow this. She’s got two little arm pew-pews, and her robot mode is very show accurate. As with many modern instructions, the pictures do a lot of implying that don’t always convey what needs to be conveyed. But not to worry, there’s… oh, wait, no, these are in Japanese, because they’re imports. Whoops. On the upside, because it’s an import, it’s got a slightly different – and much better! – paint job. The wing tips are frosted, the orange contrasts very nice with the dark brown of the feathers, and she is very much a Maximal.

As for the birb mode, it’s just as clean as the robot mode, and just as accurate to the show. Again, the double hinging allows for the bird to look like a bird, rather than a bird-human-hybrid-monster-thing. Listen, they’ve made some mistakes in the past. Anyway, as with Inferno, I’m flat-out impressed with how close to the show these recently-released Beast Wars toys have been. It warms my geeky, nostalgic heart.

In the 90s, when CGI was first becoming A Real Thing, a couple of animated shows went all-in on the computer animation. Hasbro took a huge risk, and Transformers: Beast Wars was one of these fantastic shows. (I’m not forgetting ReBoot! I hope I never forget ReBoot.)

Much like their Autobot and Decepticon ancestors, the Maximals and Predacons chased each other across the galaxy and ended up crash-landing on an unknown planet in an unexplored solar system. The Maximal ship was a research/colonization vessel, and carried a precious cargo… Maximal protoforms – unborn Transformers. When the Transformers on the surface recovered, they realized the protoforms were orbiting the planet in their pods, and some of those orbits were decaying, destined to land and aid their Maximal compatriots.

The Predacons would prefer to expand their own forces, however, and came up with a plan to reformat the protoforms to that end. And it worked! Mostly. Every once in a while, there were side effects. And Inferno, well, his beast mode overrode his logic circuits, in the parlance of the show. As a fire ant, his only purpose in life was to protect his colony – the stasis pod that he’d ridden down to the surface. Eventually, he was introduced to Megatron, and his understanding shifted to include him as the colony’s Queen. His beast mode – a gigantic fire ant – is creepy and bumpy and just incredibly FIRE ANT.

Inferno is my favorite Predacon in Beast Wars, and I cannot state this strongly enough. His wild glee, his chaotic spreading of fire with his flamethrower, and his complete abandon while flying through the sky with his butt… er… abdomen jetpack, leaving an enormous smoke trail through the sky! Just amazing.

FOR THE COLONY!