The money burning machine!

Guess what folks? I just spent Rs. 8000 on a keyboard! Yes, you read it right. On a DAMN KEYBOARD (Logitech G15 2nd Edition)! Now you must be thinking, this guy should be really rich, or even more, STUPID! I wouldn’t blame you. Seriously, who would spend so much money on a keyboard? If you wanted to spend the money, buy something useful! Something like a video card for example. Yeah, that is one argument.

But don’t you think I made an investment? RIGHT! How could a keyboard be an investment??

Now I own a highend (gaming, but highend != gaming) keyboard, a mouse and a headset, and even a sound card. That’s about Rs. 25000 spent on *luxury* items which hardly give any performance gain. If you had known me for years, you would think I’ve been brainwashed or something. I used to look at these luxury items in pure sarcasm. "If I don’t see any performance gain, it’s not an upgrade. It is a waste of money!”, that used to be pretty much like my motto. Whatever happened to the old Nushy???

Simple. When you grow old, you get mature. Quantity isn’t everything. Quality is important. Besides those days probably I envied people who owned these luxury items. I probably wish I could own them, but because I couldn’t, I ignored them completely thinking they were waste of money and those people were LOSERS! Surely, there are still things that I consider as a waste of money. Example would be upgrading my PC to a Core 2  Quad. I wouldn’t even notice the difference in performance in anything I do. Gains will be only in benchmark numbers.

So anyways…this is getting dragged in a wrong direction now. I just wanted to explain how buying this keyboard (mouse, headset, sound card for that matter) is an investment.

See, what’s the most important feature of PCs? They get outdated faster than anything out there. Nothing even comes close to how fast they outdate. Pretty much none of these 4 items ever get outdated. I can use them over and over in new rigs. Sure, there will be better stuff coming out or have come out already. But the point is, you can’t really improve them dramatically beyond the quality of what I currently have. You will be able to add few more buttons to a keyboard/mouse and better looking. You will be able to increase DPI of mouse to 10k. You might be able to increase SNR of the sound card by 5%. But that’s about it. These are not noticeable gains, but really need a lot of effort to put by the manufacturer, hence will have a premium price. It’s just like the Veyron needs only 50bhp to do 80mph, but needs 1001bhp to do 252mph. 20 fold increase in power requirements for a 3 times the performance gain. Is it worth it? Probably if you really like these stuff and have so much spare money hanging out from the  pockets. (it’s a bit different with the headset though. I can buy a 5.1 or 7.1 headset and that would be it. But if it is stereo, then I would keep these for a long time.)

I know, someone or most of you will think I’m just saying these things to justify spending so much money on fancy stuff. But then again, I can argue, just like Suresh says (he is usually wrong about things, but probably is right about this), if you don’t do these things now, you will never do them. Someday I will be married and have a lot of responsibilities and won’t be able to enjoy these things or spend (waste) money on these things (no offense Saman XD) What’s the point of living, if you can’t live the way you like. I’m not doing anything wrong anyways!!!

Besides, you guys don’t have any idea how careful I have to be buying big stuff. This Japan trip is killing me alive inside me. I can’t buy stuff I want to. I have to really plan buying stuff. You know, if it wasn’t for this, I would have an i7 rig and a Nexus One by now!!! (but probably won’t have these fancy stuff) One thing is for sure, the mouse, the keyboard, the sound card and the headset are going to Japan someday! Oh and the SSD and 1TB drive too

Here’s the new keyboard along with the mouse and the headset.

 

Oh btw, there is so much to learn about this keyboard, especially the LCD.

I can control iTunes with it! That’s a great start.

P.S.

Missed the important part.

This is my birthday present to myself!

Accelerating streaming videos

One reason I upgraded my ADSL connection was to watch streaming videos on youtube without the pain of buffering. Guess what? It still buffer a lot! The bandwidth monitor is showing around 30kBps downstream when that is happening. I should be able to get more than 100kBps with the current connection. So I was heavily under-utilizing. Heck, that’s even below the 512k’s saturation point.

I was dissappointed. I believe youtube videos stream with only one connection to the server. So if I can increase the number of connections to the server, just like how download accelerators work, I should be able to get better speeds.

So what I did was, go into the advanced configuration section of Firefox by typing about:config in the addressbar, and increasing the value of network.http.max-connections, max-connections-per-server, pipelining (true) etc. But it didn’t do anything at all.

I had to google for a solution. I came across this application called Speedbit Video Accelerator. What it does is chop the video into small parts and send them in few pipes.

And guess what? It does work! The same video I was earlier streaming at 30kBps, started to stream at 100kBps+!!! No buffering issues. Yay!

It supports a lot of sites too. Wish it could accelerate live.twit.tv though >_<

Finally upgraded my ADSL connection

From 512k/128k to 1M/256k.

Browsing speed isn’t improved though, but download speeds (direct linsk and  torrents) are improved by almost 100%. And now I can watch youtube while streaming. I can watch TWIT live shows. It’s not very painful to browse when downloading stuff in the background. Unfortunately, Cfosspeed is still now working as it used to

So what’s the first big thing I did with the new connection? Play COD4, get a great score and upload to youtube.

Luckily for me, last night I could get one of the best scores I’ve ever got on NRNS servers.

This is the first one. Scores 37-4.

 

This is the big one. Score 70-6

 

Cleaned up the room …partially at least

I only polished the living room floor this time for the new year. I wanted to polish the rest of the rooms but was too bored to do that. Polishing the floor is hard work, especially with this stupid, stone-aged floor polisher. And I had to do all of it by my own. No one would help me. >_>

Anyways…today I started polishing the floor of my room and even though my room is pretty small, it took a long time. Well, I didn’t just polish the floor. I had to dust it too. I, being allergic to dust, makes things worse. But luckily, I could limit things to couple of sneezes.

I had to polish things with a plan. It’s not like polishing the living room, where you can move everything to some place. You can’t move the bed or the almairah or the huge desk out of the room! I had to move each of them aside, polish that area, move them back. It was a tedious task. Especially under my main working desk! Wow that place is dust ball heaven. All because of the wire clutter of the PC. And polishing there, yet alone cleaning the dust was a pain in the butt. I even made my PC froze one during that time. I hit a power cable, and weird thing was that the monitor lost signal. It didn’t show anything on the screen. The PC was still running. But I lost sound. The screen was dead black. If it didn’t get a signal, it would say that. But nothing this time. The monitor power was full on. Not in standby or anything. Weird. When I reset the PC, it booted up just as it normally would. Weird!

Anyways I managed to polish there and move back the desk. Then it was easy. But after than, I was met with a big problem. There is no answer to that problem. The chair would scratch the newly polished floor! I cleaned the wheels, but it would still scratch. I think I will need a carpet there!

Anyways, I thought over these events and came to some conclusions.

1. I need to get rid of the wire clutter. So some day, my plan is to go all wireless. Wireless keyboard, mouse, internet, headphones, and even speakers and printer if possible. (there are wireless speakers, but not sure there are any for PCs) Basically only the power cables will be there.

2. Less furniture the better. And all of them need to have doors. Open cupboards are bad!

3. Carpet for chair.

4. A shoe rack!

Ideally a big ass closet is what I need. Everything is hidden even from the dust. Can keep all my clothes and shoes there.

5. I need to get these uni and bit notes out of paper and make them electronic documents. How can I do that? I know I will need them less frequently than a super nova, but…where can I stock them up? BIT notes are not really needed, because everything is on the internet. But uni notes are not. *sigh*

I think it is about time every student started using an ebook reader and everything better be electronically available. Only the problems can be done on paper. Maybe they can be transferred to electronic docs through an OCR. Books are bad!!! Books ought to be only kept in libraries. >_<

I need a new phone!

Seeing all these new phones coming into the market is making me ditch the Omnia for something more exciting. Omnia was a hero in the Windows Mobile 6.1 days, but everything has improved by now. New OSes, software support and faster hardware!

There are two big issues I’m having with the Omnia. Lack of RAM and slow CPU. OK, the CPU isn’t slow, but if you don’t want to charge twice a day, you have to use power savings. By default, the phone runs at 200MHz even though it can operate at 624MHz. The phone heats up rapidly as well! Not good!!!

I flashed to the latest WinMo 6.5 ROM with TouchFlo2D by Ryrzy. I have so little RAM left for all I do. When I start browsing, I can’t even listen to music. It’s insane! The phone’s supposed to have 128MB, but only shows up as 96MB (it’s like that with every Omnia) and out of that, less that 50MB is available for!!! Touchflo interface is using a lot of RAM, I know, but still…where is the missing 32MB?

I can’t imagine how it must feel to use a Google Nexus One with 512MB RAM. *drool*

P.S.

I’m absolutely loving WinMo 6.5 over 6.1. Wish the interface could be more responsive, but it could be the power saved CPU. It was much responsive on Mahen’s HTC TouchPro2, which officially supports WinMo 6.5.

P.P.S

Weirdly, I’m not bothered by the touch screen performance at all. It’s doing very well, but the shield has made it a little less responsive.

I’m lost!

My birthday’s coming up in less than a couple of weeks’ time. I don’t expect anyone to give me a present, at least something that is well worth it. But that doesn’t mean I should be disappointed. I can buy myself a present, just as I have been doing all this time. But one big issue! I don’t know what to buy.

Well, it is not that I don’t have anything to buy, just that I can’t decide what to buy. One reason, and just one reason alone is holding me back. The Japan trip. Nobody knows when we will go there, so I don’t really like to spend a lot of money on something that I will have to leave behind in a few months. Something I can take with me, would be ideal.

Let’s just take a quick glance on what my options are.

1. HD5770 graphics card

2. 22” or even larger monitor

3. A comfortable keyboard

4. A new phone, like the Google Nexus One

5. A netbook with HSDPA built in

6. Wifi router + Wifi cards for my PC and dad’s

Now let’s look at them in a little bit more details.

The HD5770 is a great choice. The 9600GT is aging. While the 9600GT is still a very good card and good enough for what I do at the mediocre 1280×1024 resolution, there are few games that make it too slow for a great gaming experience. Besides, the HD5770’s idle power consumption and even the performance/watt is pure sex! But the issue is, it is only 60% faster than the 9600GT. Is that worth it? Maybe not, because almost all the games give close to 60fps in max settings at my current monitor’s native resolution.

Aha! That brings us to the next point. HD5770 alone would give a better gaming experience. But a new larger monitor would give even greater experience. The issue is, I can buy the video card alone and maybe upgrade the monitor later. But I can’t do that the other way round. If I buy the monitor first, then the 9600GT would be put through a hard time. 1680×1050 will give reasonable fps, but 1920×1080 which is what I’m aiming at, would rape it in almost every game! But that’s almost Rs. 50,000 for both toys! Yikes! That’s a lot.

A keyboard is the next option, and hopefully it won’t cost that much. But then again, spending even over Rs. 5000 on a keyboard doesn’t seem worth it. But sometimes I get really mad with my current keyboard, which is an A4Tech G700, that I wouldn’t mind spending even $100 on a great keyboard! But when I think about it, at leisure, I feel it is not worth it.

A new phone would rock! That would be the perfect gift for me, given the state of the current phones. They absolutely rock! The Nexus One leads the pack. But the issue is, what can I do about the Omnia? The Nexus One is $500+, and in LKR it will almost 1lakh! And the pain of going through the TRC!!! I don’t even know I will be able to use it in Japan.

There are times when I need a netbook, but usually, I wouldn’t be needing one because for mobile browsing, I have the phone, which is reasonably OK. But the phone isn’t great for certain things and it is slow to load pages. I can browse from anywhere if I have one with HSDPA built in. But is it worth it? I don’t know! Rs. 45,000 is a steep amount!

Then finally, going wireless. This is great, because then I don’t get as much wire clutter as right now. Also, I can connect the phone as well, and it would be awesome. I want seamless integration with everything! But is it worth it?

Basically, I don’t know what to get. Nothing seems to be worth it. Mumble says, buy stuff when you need it, not because you want it as you would otherwise be wasting a lot of money pointlessly. Maybe I should just put 50% of the SSD for the birthday present >_<

ATI’s Eyefinity review

Wow I didn’t know it looked this awesome. Just need the screens to optimize for this with thinner bezels.

Check out the review: AMD’s ATI Radeon Eyefinity Performance Review

But more importantly, check out the video review! Oh boy!

It’s time to save $$$ on three displays and a HD5000 series card. XD

2nd invisible shield on my omnia

Yesterday the package arrived and today I have been busy whole morning applying it.

They have changed the package. You don’t get that little bottle of fluid anymore. Instead they give container with the fluid and a sponge in it. It’s easier tbh.

I applied the shield without much trouble this time. And it got applied neatly as well.

But one BIG problem now.

Swype is struck! The shield’s got so much traction that now I can’t trace through the letters easily. I’ll have to polish edges of the nails…lmao! Without the shield, it was a walk in the park. Now I have to put so much effort into that, I sometimes feels the keyboard is better. Well, we’ll have to wait and see. I’ll let it dry a few hours and see.

Christmas present arrives

Well, it was supposed to arrive couple of weeks ago, but because DHL thought I won’t be needing it that quickly, they arranged it to arrive for Christmas, and they even screwed up that by a few days! So kind of DHL! Comgateway better find a new courier service!

So finally I got it yesterday. I had to watch Avatar again to get it. Well, I was anyway gonna watch it again, but didn’t think this soon. But that had to be the meeting place. Now you must be wondering, if DHL people were at the cinema yesterday. LOL. No. I ordered the toy through a friend and that was the way I could meet him the quickest.

The present was the long waited SSD. I mean, it had to buy it for me. Nobody was giving me a present. I’ll have to find a girl friend if I ever want to get a present from someone that’s not ME!

Anyways, like you would imagine, yesterday evening was a busy evening. I installed Windows on the SATA. The damn thing boots friggin’. Sure I expected it to be even faster, but that is just me. It’s so hard to satisfy me when it comes to tech.

Windows thinks the drive is damn fast. It is now the fastest thing in my PC. A score of 7.6! Wicked!!! XD

Having an SSD is not an easy task. You have to tweak a lot of things for the well being of the drive. Defragmenting = BAD, Pagefile = BAD, Temp files = BAD, Superfetch = Not good.

I usually keep the user profiles separately, but files in appdata folder is frequently accessed by the system, and keeping it on the slower drive will make the SSD less effective. So with a lot of hesitation, today, I moved the user profile back the C:\Users. But I kept the Public and Documents folder in D: They only have big files that aren’t accessed frequently. It’s ugly, and not so effective when it comes to backing up, but I can’t help it. I have to use the SSD properly.

Unfortunately, the drive is missing something very important. Trim support. Intel have released a working firmware with trim support for their 80GB and 160GB models. This is a rebadged Intel drive with half the number of cells of a 80GB model. But neither Kingston nor Intel have released a firmware with Trim support yet. Eventually they will. It was announced today a lot of players will be releasing firmware for their models with Trim support.

I will be eagerly waiting for that day.

Enjoy this small video of system boot up. (The motherboard is not helping! My dad’s motherboard POSTs way faster than this. >_>

 

What’s the new year present? We’ll wait and see. Hopefully the wait won’t be long

Is your UPS giving you trouble?

Is your UPS giving you trouble? Then maybe this is a good read. All this is from my personal experience.

First of all, you need to identify what exactly is the problem (not the cause) you are having. it could be that the UPS cannot hold the PC when the power goes out as long as it used to be. It could either be that the UPS shuts down as soon as the power goes out. Or it could either be that the UPS shuts down as soon as the power goes out if it is loaded up, but doesn’t happen if it is idle.

Believe it is not, the culprits in each of those three situations are not the UPS.

If the UPS can’t hold the PC as long as it used to be

Stuff tend to not work as good as they used to, as time passes by. This could either be the circuitry or the battery. Unlike normal circuit boards that use little currents, power electronic circuits are tend to degrade faster. The degraded inverter circuit will have a hard time giving out power comparable to mains. A degraded charger circuit will take ages to charge a battery or even not be able to fully charge a battery, even if the battery is new. It might even damage the battery reducing the lifespan of it.

Most of the times, if you are thinking of replacing the battery of a UPS after about 3 years, it is not worth it. You are better off buying a new UPS. You will only get slightly better results than what you are getting now.

If the UPS switches off as soon as it loses power

This could be a problem with switching. See, the power supply unit keeps a little charge for few milliseconds in its capacitors and inductors. I don’t know if this was intentionally done, probably not at first. The switching power supplies exploit this *feature* to function. They switch from offline mode to online mode before the power supply unit loses its charge. It will be seamless to the PC. So if the switching is too slow, then the PC will lose power.

If the UPS used to work properly and not anymore, still you cannot point the finger at the UPS. It could even be that the power supply (PSU) is so crappy that it doesn’t have good enough (quality and size) capacitors inside to hold enough charge for long enough. Or it could be that the switching circuit has degraded and can’t switch as fast as specified. Best thing to do in this situation is to try it out on someone else’s PC which is known to work fine with a UPS.

If the UPS switches off as soon as it loses power only when the PC is loaded

The culprit in this situation most probably is the power supply unit. Like I said before, the charge in the PSU is what makes switching possible. So if the PC is loaded, for example when playing a game, when the power goes out, the PSU will discharge faster than when it is idle. So it is possible that the rate at which the PSU discharges when it is loaded is too fast for the UPS to switch modes, but when it is idle it is slow enough.

To make sure that this is the case, I guess you should try the UPS on a PC that has a very good branded PSU.

In early 2004, when I had my old PC I faced this exact problem. I was using a cheap PSU and whenever I lost power while playing Doom3, the PC would reset. I went out and bought a new server PSU (that’s the only way I could ask for a good quality PSU in SL back then), the problem went away. It was a Fortrex FP-500W, which I used for almost 5 years without a problem. Funny thing was that when I moved it to dad’s PC and bought a new Amacrox AX500S PSU for my PC, the Fortrex died. I guess it couldn’t bear the feeling of separation. LOL

I’m afraid, there is not a definitive answer to the question you are asking, but those are the usual things you have to check. First try to figure out what’s exactly the UPS is doing (or not doing). Then think about it and you will narrow it down to couple of possible causes.

BTW, the last two problems are not there with Online UPS, which are very expensive. It is only there with interactive/switching UPS.