The non-geek life and some plans

Looking at myself lately, I come to realise that I have not actually touched my computer for 2 or 3 days in a row. My GPRS bill is rising fast though, but the facts are that I'm becoming a lot more of a mobile user lately.

Considering this, I realised i need to get myself a laptop. The one we have as a family PC to surf the web wirelessly is a pretty old Toshiba M30 (Pentium-M 1.7/512MB RAM/60GB 4200rpm HDD/GF FX5200/15.4" @ 1280x800) which does everything well except it's battery life is 30 minutes at most in energy-saving mode.

And if I'm going to be buying a laptop, I will definitely use it a lot in the uni, so battery life is a very important factor. Last year I was droopling on the Apple MacBook, but its 2kg weight and a mere 2-3 hours battery life is just not what I'm looking for, so I decided to go for the Sony VAIO VGN-SZ5MRN/B that comes in at a pricey 61000 RUR or $2400. But for the money you get pretty much anything you'd ever wish. It only lacks a pair of 8800 Ultras in SLI ;)

Planning on buying something is not buying it, so I'll see.

MSU webcam

Moscow State University has a webcam that runs off the 15th or so floor and lets you see a realtime picture of things happening at Vorob'evy Gory.

It seems that they do some IP filtering and the camera is not accessible 24/7, but the beautiful view is worth trying.

P.S. This was found off Wikimapia

HDD - vertical or horizontal?

The name of this post might seem like a start some perpendicular tech talk, but it is actually a link to an article concerning use of 2.5" HDDs after being taken out of a laptop PC.

It containts a number of useful facts on how HDDs work at all and a good explanation of why harddrives sometimes work slower when placed vertically rather than horizontally.

Link

Vista photo viewer yellow tint

I have faced this strange issue after running a windows update on my Samsung monitor driver.
All the photos in Windows Photo Viewer application had a yellow tint. The whole work area of the application was yellowish, so the photo seemed darker and kind of sepia-style.

The very first google result showed that I am so far not the first one to get these kinds of problems. As a matter of fact, Photoshop CS2 and CS3 say that the color profile that comes with the Samsung driver seems to be corrupt and do not use it at all.

The resolution to the problem is to set the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profile as default and delete the Samsung one (you can leave it there, but it's defective, so why bother keeping it?).

ASUS P5B Deluxe BIOS flash

I'm pretty screwed actually, as I just fucked up my BIOS. ASUS WinFlash is known to be faulty when updating very old bioses to new ones. So It erased my EEPROM, flashed it, but failed to verify. Now it doesn't recognise the BIOS as an ASUS one.

There are loads of posts about this on enthusiast forums with most people RMAing their mobos. So basically, I'm only fine until the next reboot, because my mobo does not have a BIOS atm.

I hope ASUS CrashFree BIOS works fine or else I'll have to disassemble the whole system and go try to get some warranty.

So, \Fenix, don't try WinFlash at home xD

Windows guy tries Ubuntu

I just ran across a very very very interesting article called Windows guy tires Ubuntu. It's written in a real-time chat way, so the guy describes all the different bits and pieces of his thoughts while actually working with his Dell Latitude to install Ubuntu next to his Windows installation.

The review (yes, I'd call it a review of Ubuntu) is not biased at all, even though the guy explicitly notes that he's a windows fan.

So it is definitely an article I would recommend for reading.

Wishlist

I fidured there are lots of tech things and gadgets I wouldn't mind owning. Well, uhm, most them aren't gadgets, really. But I guess it be great for me to earn enough this summer to buy at least a couple of things from the list:

1. Apple MacBook 13" 2Ghz/1GB/120GB - gotta love MacOS X - ~40-47K RUR - ~$1540-$1800 for white and black version respectively... aah, I want the black one :P
   
2. Canon EF-S 17-85mm F4-5.6 lens - no, seriously, I hate the kit lens - ~16K RUR ~$615
3. and then there's a whole load I want to buy for my bike

• Hayes HFX-9 Mag 6" rear hydraulic disc brake - $170-$180
  
• New brake pads for the 6" front Hayes Nine - $20
  
• BMX anchor + BMX sadle - guess around $70-100

That's probably not everything, but pretty much everything I can say from the top of my head.

Universal claims P2P robs farmers

The arguments of the claim are just hilarious. Here's the uber-logical chain:

People download movies of P2P networks >> They don't go to cinemas >> They don't eat popcorn >> Farmers lose a lot of money.

inq notes that you could say the same about P2P robbing car-makers, because people could drive to cinemas on cars that they haven't bought [uhuh, because of P2P]. What is more, The Wall Street Journal's statistics say that corn prices have jumped up 50% during the last year (from $2.08 to $3.83 for 25kg). Even if there is a way to correlate P2P networks and corn makers, the latter should be happy.

Seeing how RIAA is being ruled out helpless against students and other people as ISPs no longer have to disclose customer information, this very news makes it clear that companies like RIAA, MPAA and any other music-labels are pretty much helpless now and any lawsuits against creators/owners of P2P networks or individual users are ridiculous.

Stay tuned and check out how else will they humiliate themselves.

Random Marvell Yukon NIC hangups

I've bought a pair of 1GB OCZ DDR2 modules to add up to my 2GB of Corsair XMS2 RAM. Windows XP is the only OS from the NT family that has trouble dealing with PAE, so I had to move from an installtion of Windows XP Pro SP2 to WinXP Pro x64. Service Pack 2 came out recently, so I thought many problems that I faced a year ago would be gone. Indeed, SP2 for WinXP x64 is a good product that makes the system look like it was supposed to be (just like that joke-theory that Microsoft's Beta = Alpha; RC = Beta; Release = RC; SP1 = Release, making SP2 a product, ready for the market).

Among the problems I faced were HLDS (Half-Life Dedicated Server) that I have to run a CS 1.6 ameserver saw "-15Mb" of memory available (definitely unable to cope with 4Gbs of memory addressing space).

I have an ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard with two Marvell Yukon-based NICs. The drivers that came on the motherboard's CD (V8.56.1.3) and the latest version available at ASUS's support site (V8.56.7.3) had an intersting bug. After a reboot, one of the NICs (the one recognised as Marvell Yukon 88R8001/8003/8010 PCI Gigabit Ethernet Controller) started randomly dropping out of work. It just stopped working after a short period of time, usually 5-15 mins, sometimes 30. There was no event that you could blame the problem on. My 100Mbit connection could be filled 100% or I could just be calmly surfing the web. The other Marvell NIC, recognised as Generic Marvell Yukon 88E8056 based Ethernet Controller, would just continue working as if nothing happened. This issue was discussed at Google Answers, with the last comments saying Seems like shitty drivers to me...

Indeed, the reason of all this trouble was a driver not mature enough to be used on a x64 Windows system. Version 10.14.6.3 of the drivers obtained through Marvell's site works fine.

Unknown device on ASUS P5B Deluxe

After a fresh Windows XP Pro x64 installation and installing all possible device drivers, I still had an Unknown driverless device left.

Pretty much everything I could get from the device manager was

Driver Instance ID: ACPI\ATK0110\1010110

Windows update did not know anything about this mysterious device, so the only thing I had left to do is google for the device instance ID. Of course, I was not the first one to face this problem and the solution came up fast here and here.

The only thing you have to do is insert the bundled MB driver CD and do nothing else. It turned out that ASUS has an ASUSACPI.exe utility set to autorun. I wouldn't call this solution sleek or elegant in any way, but it works. Most of the time ;)

For everything else, there's google. (Reminds me of a pic where Bart Simpson was writing "I will use google before asking stupid questions" all over a blackboard)

DRM vs CD vs piracy

Why do we buy music? Why do we buy CDs? Do we want to support the recording label? Hell no! We want to support the artist that we like (love, adore, etc). I'm for buying digital nonDRM content. After all, if most actually buy music, it's going to be better. And there are always going to be people who do not want to pay, who are going to steal. Uhm... w/e... their choice.


*In russian: $5-5.50: what the label gets; $0.50-2: what the musician gets

Microsoft Office 2007

You know, .docx is a much more effective format. Same document in .doc is 450KB, while being 120KB in .docx.

Changes

I've abandoned this blog, as I've been writing to livejournal and diary.ru a lot, but now I think I'll start writing here. And the style I will be writing in is going to be different. You know, I'm sick of words.

So what I'll do is write down my thoughts. Brief thoughts, just the meat and nothing else.

My PC

I've bought myself a pair of UV-lughts and a pair of blue neon lights. Now my Xaser V Damier looks just gorgeous. Inside I have a DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D mobo and UV-enabled SATA and IDE cables + 2 blue LED fans. And on the back and on the bottom of the case I've attached the blue neons, so my room at night is now quite bright.

As well as the neons, I got myself a Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard. Now that was a really clever thing to do, as it just OWNS!

This is my room, my Xaser case and the gorgeous Logitech G15 ;)

HDD space

I've been working on a DV-video project about my graduation party... Now it has finally went out of the beta stage and has a "release" status. That's 60GB more of free HDD space (i have 2x300GBs Seagate SATA drives, but most of that is dedicated to the stuff I'm hosting on my LAN ftp server), now that I have saved the final DVD iso and 700 and 1400mb versions of the final video.

It turned out a pretty neat video that lasts 80 minutes.
What I used for video editing was Adobe Premiere 2.0 Pro and pretty much nothing else if you don't count VirtualDubMod for encoding a DVSD (standard DV) video stream into DivX.

P.S. Now with all the video encoding tasks I have been doing lately, I'm absolutely sure there's no way I'm not buying an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ or higher after AMD lowers CPU prices on the 24th of July. I'm running an AMD Athlon 64 based system atm, with an Athlon 64 4000+, 2x1024 dualchannel RAM, a DFI NF4 Ultra-D mobo and an ASUS N7800GTX videocard to make my server/work/gaming rig complete.

My First Post

There has to be a first post, right? Well here it is...
Why did I choose Blogspot? Well to start off, its minimalistic design (a la Ikea/Swedish furniture/appartment designs) attracts me way more than the cluttered interface of LJ and such.

I'm running another blog on a russian blogsite, www.diary.ru, but it's mostly personal and (duuh) in russian.

This blog was created to write about tech stuff I find out, so stay tuned :P