Memories

Found a picture from when I was in a soccer team while going through our stuff today getting ready to move. Hard to believe it was nearly 10 years ago!

8MB/s DSL

Got 8MB/s internet as advertised. Its been running at 6.8MB/s for about a year now daily, but it changed today.

Workshop and Cascade

We cleaned out our gararge Monday and set up a computer workshop in the corner.
We also have the Cascade unit running and have it in the garage as well.
I have been testing out quite a few different CPUs and gpus and getting a motherboard and CPU to work together at -100*C... I have a lot to learn still about subzero computer testing for sure.
Pictures to come soon.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod

BSA Polar Bear Award trip

Posted pictures from this weekend's cold BSA trip. http://picasaweb.google.com/Danielee.linux/BSAPolarBearAwardCampingTripOakMtn#
We camped overnight at Oak Mtn State Park in below-freezing weather and cooked three meals for the BSA polar bear award. We had a great time and learned more about camping in the cold and about our gear. :)

iPod App

Favorite app so far: TuneIn Radio
I can get all of the local radio stations as well as many more all over the world!

Some new toys arrived yesterday... currently testing out all of their features...
Ipod Touch 3G and a Gigabyte X58 UD7 Motherboard. :)

The motherboard supports USB 3.0 and SATA 3, I don't have any USB 3 devices to test unfotunately... :(
I got it up to 227bclk fairly easily, I will have to work on it some more to get 237bclk. (The "bclk wall" for this UD7 board for many other overclockers)

The Ipod supports microphone voice recording, haven't tried that out yet either. I'll have to see if the voice recognition software works as well as my headset with Windows...

I've been pretty busy and neglecting to post lately.
I haven't taken many pictures in the last few months of people and scenery but instead have been getting many shots of my computer builds.
Around this Christmas season I have been up to building 3 or so computers a week. It has been fun to assemble and test them.
I have a Cascade CPU cooler to freeze any CPU to -100*C for extreme overclocking and have been learning a lot about insulating motherboards because of that. :)
I will try to post much more this month, pictures, results, and maybe a few hardware reviews.

I have missed my church family over the last two months and hope to see you all soon!
Daniel

Lian Li PC-P80 GTX 295 H2O build pictures are up!

Uploaded some "showcase" pictures of a build made in a beautiful Lian Li PC-P80 Full Tower Case. The CPU and GPUs are watercooled.
Enjoy!
Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/Danielee.linux/LianLiPCP80GTX295H2OBuild#

Hwbot medals from Q9650 overclocking

I have been working really hard on overclocking my Q9650 CPU lately... and earned 3 medals with it on Hwbot!
I got 2nd place for wPrime 32m, 3rd place in wPrime 1024m, and forth place in CPU-Z running it at over 4.9ghz!
#2 Core 2 Q9650 (3Ghz) in wPrime 32m with 8sec 29ms - 9.7 points
#3 Core 2 Q9650 (3Ghz) in wPrime 1024m with 4min 21sec 380ms - 4.8 points
#4 Core 2 Q9650 (3Ghz) in CPU-Z with 4959.48 mhz - 6.3 points
My hwbot profile is Linuxfan2000
I'm going to be testing out a core i7 system with 3 GTX 280s in SLI next to get points for them on Hwbot next week...

Don't know what hwbot is?

Hwbot is a website dedicated to gathering specifications and benchmarks of computer hardware. You can use hwbot to compare processors or videocards with each other, or to compare your own computer to ten thousands of other people, to see whether it performs well. Hwbot is not limited to one benchmark application, but a whole suite of the most popular benchmark applications available.

Hwbot is unique in several ways. In contrary to other hardware sites, the performance of the hardware is not based on one user experience, but based on a community of thousands of users. This is especially usefull when inspecting the overclockability of a processor or videocard. One reviewer being able to overclock a certain processor 20% over stock speed means very little, but if hundreds of users manage to overclock it by 20% on average, you know a whole lot more.

Using hwbot encourages your forum vistors. You can configure our botservice to scan a specific forum topic to monitor for benchmark results. If a forum visitor posts a benchmark result in the topic, it will automatically be added to the team ranking once scanned by a bot.

Due to the excellent set of features and active crew, hwbot has grown to be the favorite place for overclockers (people who run there system faster than factory settings) to compete. Check out the team, member and result hall of fame.

www.hwbot.org

Judge Rules Microsoft Word Can No Longer Be Sold

Thought this was an interesting piece of news...
From HotHardWare.com article here: http://hothardware.com/News/Judge-Rules-Microsoft-Word-Can-No-Longer-Be-Sold/

Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ruled Tuesday that Microsoft can no longer sell Microsoft Word in the United States due to patent infringement.

One can imagine Bill Gates having to pick himself off the floor after reading that ruling. Indeed, the ubiquitous software that you probably use every day infringes a patent, according to Davis.

To be perfectly honest, Davis' ruling simply upheld a $200M verdict issued in May of this year, when jurors found that Microsoft willfully infringed an i4i patent, (No. 5,787,449) on a method for reading XML.

According to the press release announcing the judgment, the injunction prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML. Microsoft has 60 days to comply.

The injunction reads:

Microsoft Corporation is hereby permanently enjoined from performing the following actions with Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Word 2007, and Microsoft Word products not more than colorably different from Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2007 (collectively “Infringing and Future Word Products”) during the term of U.S. Patent No. 5,787,449:

1. selling, offering to sell, and/or importing in or into the United States any Infringing and Future Word Products that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM file (“an XML file”) containing custom XML;

2. using any Infringing and Future Word Products to open an XML file containing custom XML;

3. instructing or encouraging anyone to use any Infringing and Future Word Products to open an XML file containing custom XML;

4. providing support or assistance to anyone that describes how to use any infringing and Future Word Products to open an XML file containing custom XML;

and

5. testing, demonstrating, or marketing the ability of the Infringing and Future Word Products to open an XML file containing custom XML.

This injunction does not apply to any of the above actions wherein the Infringing and Future Word Products open an XML file as plain text.

This injunction also does not apply to any of the above actions wherein any of the Infringing and Future Word Products, upon opening an XML file, applies a custom tranform that removes all custom XML elements.

This injunction further does not apply to Microsoft providing support or assistance to anyone that describes how to use any of the infringing products to open an XML file containing custom XML if that product was licensed or sold before the date this injunction takes effect.

Naturally, since Microsoft has 60 days to comply, you can expect that during those 60 days, some sort of appeal will be filed to allow Microsoft to continue selling the product. Either that, or Microsoft and i4i will come to some sort of an agreement (or will in the future).

Pictures from BSA trip and PCC Computer Science Camp

Pictures from our troop's recent orienteering trip are now on Picasa Web Albums here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Danielee.linux/BSAOrienteeringMBTripJune2009#
It was a short overnight trip to complete requirements for the Orienteering Merit Badge.

Also on Picasa I have uploaded the pictures from PCC's Computer Science camp, they are here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Danielee.linux/PCCComputerScienceCamp2009#

Unloading the grand piano

Grabbed a few shots when this grand piano was being delivered... :)

Its a 1988 Kawai GS-50 6'8" Grand Piano.

Some more pictures of flowers, played with the lighting and colors, used a handheld tripod for some of the shots too... no flash, evening with medium-low sunlight.

A healthy lunch!

Sparkling car

Just cleaned and shined Toyota Prius!

Wood on a bench... you can see the thin line of focus, I thought it was interesting...

Just a leaf... Everyday objects can make interesting pictures can't they? :)

SpeedTest.Net test

Seems like my ping speed is pretty good today, last time I tested it it was 32ms... :)

Hit 5ghz on an E8400

Finally got 5ghz on a CPU, an E8400 on my watercooling setup... the voltages were really dangerous, but the temperature was pretty safe staying under 30*C on both cores.
CPU-Z hasn't been validating my submissions lately for some reason, too bad...
Here is the validation page: http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=578155

Z-5500 review

This is a great speaker set as everyone else says, it can get fairly loud without any special settings, and looks great. The bass is huge, some people say its as big as an ottoman, you get the idea. :)
The smaller speakers are very heavy for their size, so they are harder to knock over and such, and the bass probably weighs 30-40lbs, which makes it something to move around...
The control pod it also nice and hefty, and is a little taller than the side and rear speakers. The buttons and adjuster is very nice on the control pod, it is pretty well laid out.
Has plenty of connection options, you can hook up your HDTV via the digital connection, thats a nice option.

I was a little disappointed at first at this system, as it didn't seem to be able to get "that much" louder than my previous G51 150w Logitech 5.1 system. I had them both connected to a great Asus Xonar sound card, and boosted everything and fine tuned it in the Xonar control panel in Windows. It just didn't get much louder at max volume than the G51, and I was especially disappointed at the subwoofer, it wasn't too much louder than the G51s, the G51s' sub can really be loud!
I finally figured out that it has some special boost settings built into the control pod!
There are two different boost settings, each go to 11, so put together you get a boost of 22db over the regular maximum volume. Each boost is a sound increase of 1db.
To get the first boost you keep turning the volume control knob, it takes about a half-turn then you see the screen display the boost numbers.
Once you have boosted that, you can further boost the system by holding the mute button and turning the volume knob about a half-turn, then you will see the other 11 boosts being added to the volume you had.
So you can use a little boost with the mute button all the time if you wanted, I find that useful if you are using a laptop or an CD player input where you don't have a control panel to boost the speakers, it keeps them as loud as if they were plugged into a professional PC setup...
There are some more interesting little features that the control pod has that you might not know about, just google it!
I'm really enjoying the speakers now, the little speakers are ear-splittingly impressive, they can get really really high pitched sounds very loud, and the bass is well matched to them.
The bass in my experienced cannot be boosted too far above the center, side, and surround speakers, so to get a lot of volume out of the bass everything has to be turned up a lot, and the little speakers are extremely loud.
Great system, it'll take a lot of beating, and has enough power with the boost for anybody that isn't totally deaf. It will shake your walls and play the tunes clearly while doing so.
The bass's cooling fins get really hot after being used for a while, be careful when turning it up a lot, I would probably put a fan on it to keep the heat off...
Great system, definitely recommend it to anybody that has room, wants clarity and power for about $200-$300.
I understand that the Z-2300s are basically the same system with the same bass(actually an 8" version of this bass, same wattage) so for about $150, that'd be a great system for a lot of power, and the bass would definitely be very powerful with the two little speakers.
The bass really can get nice and loud, you just have to tweak it a bit to get the bass going... :)