2009/01/02
(Update: in retrospect, I have realized that this article is perhaps not so well written. Expect something more useful and coherent soon!)
Linux seems like the perfect solution for the new brand of portable PCs, netbooks. It's efficient, requires few resources, and can run most if not all of the programs one usually runs on such small computers - word processing, email, web browsing, and so on. Large, complex software packages that require Windows to run perform abysmally on low-power computers like netbooks, so effectively the need to run Windows is nullified.
Why, then, do consumers (and reviewers!) choose Windows over Linux for netbooks?
2008/12/29
It doesn't work.
Okay, that's a little bit unfair; it's probably more accurate to say that it doesn't work as expected. The Tuniq Sanctum hard drive enclosure is a 5.25" bay device that holds a 3.5" (or smaller, I suppose) hard drive, and purportedly not only reduces the noise output of the drive but also helps to keep it cool. This device, unfortunately, excels at one aspect of its claimed purpose and fails at the other. While it does indeed keep noise levels down very acceptably, the Tuniq Sanctum enclosure, due to the lack of airflow inside the device, fails to cool the hard drive adequately. In fact, leaving the hard drive inside the enclosure will probably decrease the hard drive's lifetime due to the 60+ degrees Celsius temperatures sometimes experienced inside the device.
2008/10/31
This is a mouse that was once broken but is now healed. (A mechanical switch on the circuit board was broken; upon fixing that, the mouse works almost like-new.) I was actually quite surprised at the extreme simplicity of the actual mouse hardware - a couple of resistors, capacitors, an LED for the sensor, and the sensor chip itself. It seems to me that the costs for building such a mouse must be rather cheap indeed. In fact, I wonder now about the optical trackballs out on the market today - mine (the Kensington Expert Mouse) is to all appearances just an upside-down optical mouse with a ball and a couple of extra buttons; would it be perhaps possible to construct my own perfectly-functioning trackball with only cheap optical mouse parts?
2008/10/02
Here's how to stop Firefox from automatically virus scanning all downloads after they've finished - something that's been annoying me since I've upgraded to Firefox 3 because of the extraneous disk accesses it creates. Open up the about:config (open a new tab, type about:config in the location bar), and find the browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone value. Type in browser in the filter bar for quick searching. Set that value to false by double-clicking. And that's it! What, were you expecting something more?
(originally read [here][ghacks])
2008/09/25
I have been having, to put it lightly, some problems with VMware server and an Ubuntu guest. My guess as to why is this: VMware server is, in my eyes, built for production-level server virtualization. It's not really built for on-the-side home server virtualization, like the kind that I'm doing, and on fairly desktop-oriented hardware to boot. Basically, my Ubuntu install often has trouble with disk access, and sometimes network access as well. (I'm running a Vista Home Premium host with an Ubuntu Server 8.04 guest.)
2008/09/05
I found today that I was having problems launching Call of Duty 2 on Windows Vista. I could not start either the single or multiplayer: both would crash and the Vista "this program has stopped working" dialog box would pop up. A quick search on the Internets told me that this was definitely a common problem, and with the help of some pretty obscure forum posts, I finally figured it out. I'm going to summarize my solution here for future reference:
System environment:
- nVidia graphics card
- Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
- 2 GB RAM
- Integrated "HD" audio
The solution for me:
2008/09/02
So here it is, finally: the legendary Google browser.
2008/09/02
I finally received my new motherboard and installed it into my computer. It runs quite well, quite cool, and very quiet. Here's the final details on the quiet cooling system:
Fans/airflow:
- 2 x quiet 60mm fans behind the CPU cooler
- 1 x SilenX 60mm fan next to video card, doubles as case exhaust
- 1 x 120mm fan in PSU, helps move air through CPU cooler
- 1 x Arctic Cooling 90mm PWM fan on other side of CPU cooler
Heatsinks: