For work and sandbox reasons I’m back into node.js reading. I had bought a paper (used) copy ofNode.js in Practice from Amazon. I found it to be more of a cookbook and less the walk-through I currently need. I’ve since started reading Web Development with Node and Express on my Kindle and found it to be much more helpful. I expect that the other book will be more useful once I’m up to speed and looking for more focused solutions.

Node is still looking like a great solution for quick and easy web UI access to systems that support it (QNX seems like one exception…probably because of V8 support).

I’ve been doing my Linux work on either VMs or my RPi-3 lately. The node stuff is pushing me back towards getting an Intel based, free-standing Linux box online again. Last night was rather disappointing as I powered up my spare, stable old core-2 box with the intention of pulling the windows boot drive out (drive trays) and slotting in a spare drive to load Ubuntu on. The system failed to come up and then died so as to crowbar the supply. I tried a spare supply (to make sure I wasn’t having power supply issues) and got the same result.

At the moment that machine is fully torn down to the bare motherboard with CPU in and it still isn’t behaving. I’ll likely give it one more try tonight or tomorrow night (relatively low mileage motherboard so shouldn’t have problems) and see if there’s a screw causing a short or something.

If that fails, I’ll likely take the back basement work bench system (madhatter) as my linux system and plan on bringing up a relatively cheap core-i5 system when that area gets cleaned up enough to be useful. I should have a M3D Pro 3D printer coming soon from the kickstarter I funded and if this happens I’ll likely put that together in the back area with the new system hardware. Looks like motherboard, memory and CPU can be had for $300 to $400 so not too bad. Still hoping that the core-2 system can be recovered though.