phillhutt

So. I bought another pair of headphones. I now have 3! I got a pair of Koss KSC75. They cost just under $15 USD. I got them to use at the gym, I generally don’t run on the treadmill, so I’m pretty sure they will stay on my head while on the bike or doing whatever exercise.
Comfort: Well, I’ve been wearing them for about 30mins now and they aren’t uncomfortable but I wouldn’t say they fit especially well. Meaning that the pads don’t sit against my ears that well, but it’s not that bad.
Sound: These actually sound humorously good. Like probably about the same as my pair of Sony MDR-V300 which cost ~twice as much. I would say they are a bit bright, so I think if I wear them too long I’ll probably end up getting a bit of a headache. Bass is ok, not terribly detailed but you can tell it’s there which is nice.

All in all I’m pretty happy for the price and the portability. They will also need a bit of time to break in so my opinion of them may change over time.

I just happened to randomly look at the chat settings for gmail chat and I noticed that you can now turn the message notification sound off! I have no idea how long you have been able to do this, maybe forever, but I never knew! Amazing.

Awesome, check out what happened to my NEW tyre 45km into its first ride.

I rode over some piece of metal that I did kinda see, and it made this clanging noise and the whoosh and I was like “Fuck”. Of course neither of us had a pump for some reason so I walked it to the petrol station which wasn’t that far away luckily. Put a patch on the tyre which didn’t seem to help much, so I put some paper I found lying by the pump (apparently a $1 bill is good, but didn’t have one). As you can see it is bulging out but it got me back to the car a few k’s away.

I don’t blame the tyre, but I’m sure if it was tougher it might have been OK, not sure.

Also, I think that little Michelin man on the tyre is laughing at me. Hah.

Also, just went for a MTB ride and one of the 4 pieces  of the egg beater of my right pedal broke off so now I need another set of pedals. Doh.

Expensive weekend.

Stupid bikes.

Well, the other day my parents Dell XPS 710 froze and then stopped working. One moment my Mum was happily facebooking away, the next it just froze up. I had to hold the power button to get it to turn off and now when I turn it on the fans fire up to max speed … and that is all. No beeping or lights to tell me what the problem could be.

So after reading a bunch of stuff on forums and discussion things, I figure it has to be the motherboard. Unfortunately Dell don’t make it easy to replace something like that. Firstly, the computer is out of warranty. Damn. Next they don’t show parts like that on their little store (but I’ve heard it said that it could cost up to $400 to get a new one from them). Next they use BTX form factor motherboards so that makes it almost impossible to find one anywhere except Dell. Also if you try call them for some help they say it is out of warranty (fair enough) and it will be $50 to talk to someone. But I really can’t imagine them saying anything other than “Your MB is busted mate, I can send you one for $4500, thanks for the $50″. If I was a computer noob this would probably be my only course of action. Good thing I’m not a noob… Right?

Anyway, bottom line is I’m going to get a new PSU, case, CPU fan and motherboard for probably about $250-$260. Not exactly cheap, but will be either either the same or much cheaper than trying to get a new BTX motherboard (only one I can find is on ebay for $282). If we’re lucky we can try sell the old case/PSU to try offset the cost a little.

I’ve been enjoying tea to some degree or another for a while now. Occasionally I start reading about it again and then go buy a bunch of tea, but it takes me ages to drink it all so it is usually a long time before I go on another buying spree. I’ve almost finished drinking a bunch of tea I bought from Republic of Tea a while back so it is time to start investigating again!

So far I have the following tea sites to look at:

• http://www.oceanoftea.com/
• http://www.uptontea.com/
• http://www.teatrekker.com/
• http://www.specialteas.com/
• http://samovarlife.com/
• http://www.silkroadteas.com/
• http://www.teavana.com/

There is a type of tea I’ve never tried called “Pu-erh” tea that I really want to try now.

I’ve also been watching some informative videos about tea from Kevin Rose.

This one is at the Samovar tea website, the video talks about the three teas and how to prepare them that come with the “Kevin Rose Tea Starter Kit” at Samovar. I’m going to order one of these because it seems like a pretty good deal and a good way to try some different teas. It comes with an infusing basket too. $25.

There are several videos about tea by Kevin Rose here.

Also, if you want to join up to his facebook page dedicated to tea, it is here! It has a couple more interesting videos.

This is something really simple that I have been wanting for so so long. I can’t say I ever really looked that hard at finding one, but while reading this article, I came across it. It is called Taskbar Shuffle. It “is a simple, small, free utility that lets you drag and drop your Windows taskbar buttons to rearrange them”. Exactly what I’ve always wanted! I generally always like to have my browser over on the left had side, or at work I like to have a few apps that I pretty much always have to have open on the left in a particular order, yes, I’m very specific about things like that. It is always annoying when/if they crash or something and I have to open them up again, now it is in the wrong place, and it takes precious moments to find where it is again in the taskbar! The other cool feature I love about it is you can middle click on that application in the taskbar and it closes it, just like closing tabs in Firefox or what not. Very cool.

Ok, so I don’t know if any of you are using google Picasa already, but since the last time I downloaded an update for it (whenever that was) they have added a new feature called the google photo viewer. You know that default picture viewer they include with windows? Well this is like that, but way better. It is cleaner, faster, does this cool transparency thing, here, I’ll show you see below. It is like picasa but loads up way faster and goes away way faster. I highly recommend checking it out. It comes bundled with Picasa 3 and when you install it it will ask you what file types you want to associate it with, as it says, you can always disable it later! (They make that easy to do my offering an interface to select which file types to associate the photo viewer with). A cool thing I had to dig to find, if you open up a picture with the photo viewer, either press C or click on the little down arrow at the bottom for more options and click Configuration. You can change the behaviour of the mouse scroll wheel from zoom (default) to scrolling through the pictures in that folder. Freakin sweet.

So, I’ve been playing with my “new” Dell I bought a few weeks ago. Trying to start working out some of the virtual machine goodness. So, I have VMWare Player, free from their website. I also downloaded Ubuntu server 8.10 virtual machine, also free from here (via torrent). This was stupidly easy to load up. I just un7zipped it and ran the .vmx config file. It booted up in a matter of seconds and it was able to get on the internet straight away. This was good, but I wanted it to get its own local IP address so it could be accessed by other computers on the network, and so that I could forward incoming port 80 connections to it so I can access it from outside. This required some googling and a little bit more work. Here I found a quick and simple guide on doing just that. It assumes however that you have a helpful GUI to help set up a static IP. So, after failing to remember how to edit that via command line I found this to point me in the right direction. I’m used to using nano to edit stuff with via command line, but for some reason it wouldn’t let me open it using that, so as per the instructions I had to use vi which I find impossible to use without references. So, this helpful page reminded me how fun vi was, and I could edit and save the file without throwing the machine out the window. Next I made sure that the VM was using bridged connection. Lastly I had to load up the vmnetcfg.exe program located in the vmware player install folder and set the VMnet0 adapter to my physical ethernet adapter and everything seemed to work (after restarting the VM). I can reach the website from other machines on the local network.

Next I will have to move it to the Dell I mentioned at the begining. I get to make use of having a gigabit network (between those two computers at least) and move the VM over. Should be pretty easy to load up on the other machine.

Just watched another episode of Hak5, and they talked about cluster computing. More specifically, clustering computers you have lying around at home. The one they talked about specifically was Cluster Knoppix. It is, you guessed it, a linux distro, based on Knoppix (did you really guess that?). You can boot it from CD, so you don’t have to install anything. You can boot it up on a bunch of computers, and just start running some CPU intensive process. It will automatically split itself up among all the machines in the cluster in an effort to finish the job faster. There are obvious bottlenecks here, mainly in the network. If all the computers were running gigabit LAN, then it might not be so bad. You should try this out, it would be something that sounds really fun to set up, but I really have no use for it at all. Other than trying to set up a big FAH farm or something.

Actually, I looked into putting together a cheap computer for fun that I can use for whatever the fook I want, and I could put one together for $307 USD after tax and shipping. It was an AMD 2GHz processor of some description (I don’t really know AMD, but it was literally a $20 processor I think on sale) 2GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM, 500GB HDD (at $70 this was the most expensive part). On board graphics, that would be fine. Pretty rad. Can’t quite afford that right now though, so I’ll probably try and put something together in the new year. Or, try ebay for some cheap desktops!

Below is an article on the new Windows 7. I read most of it, particularly the descriptions of the images they have. I like what they have done. It all seems pretty good. One of the things I’m looking forward to is being able to re-arrange the icons on the taskbar. I always wish I could do that. I like the thing where you can “peek” at a window and everything else turns to “glass” so you can see it.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081028-first-look-at-windows-7.html

Well, after watching episode 404 of Hak5, I went and had a look at some of the tools they used in that episode. They all seem to be free, and they all seem to do what they do very well. The ones I had a look at in particular were process monitor and process explorer. Process explorer in particular seems very handy. It is a very detailed version of task manager basically. It lets you drill down and see exactly what is running and where it is running. For example, many of the processes running are running as services, but a few were running as a process started by explorer. It also gives you decent descriptions of what each of the processes are. If you want to get detailed, you can double click to see the properties. I had a look at my FireFox and found that it has used 30 minutes of kernel time and I could see each of the individual threads it had running and how much CPU time they each used, in real time. This is probably far far too much detail for 99% of users, but if you are trying to debug a program and you are wondering what is eating up CPU or memory or something, it could be pretty handy.

Also, I recommend watching that episode of Hak5, if not all of their episodes. They use those tools to have a look at what a few viruses do to your machine, and how they can be useful to try and stop them (your probably fucked if you get one/some of those viruses).

So, lately (and you can call me a noob) I’ve started using the Windows Run command a lot more. Or just Win + R (not that noob). I’m starting to see how handy it is. Especially when I’m forced to use laptops with that stupid little pad for the mouse, or even that little joystick thing in the middle. They really start to hurt my hand after a while.

So, I had a quick search for adding commands to the run command. You know, you can type things like mspaint, calc, msconfig etc, and it knows where to find the executable. Well, first page I looked at was this. It has a nice little how-to on how it works (pretty brief) and adding new commands. When I had a look in the registry (shown below) for what commands are already there, I was surprised to find just how many programs put stuff in there. I’m not sure if it is used by anything else, but things like quake3, iTunes and avast anti-virus are in there. Random. Cool thing is you can change them to make them shorter (again, not sure if this will impact anything else, apparently not). Have a look at the site and some of the comments as to where it finds other places to look for shortcuts and what not.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  SOFTWARE
    Microsoft
      Windows
       CurrentVersion
        App Paths

Here is some more google action. It’s about google Android, the google phone OS.
Originally “google announced that it would give $10 million worth in prizes to software development companies to develop innovative and useful applications for their open source mobile Android platform”. Some of the ideas are pretty sweet. Almost all of them seem to use either google maps and or the GPS function. Two of them remind me very much of the “Aurora: Concept Video Part 3″. “GoCart” and “Compare Everywhere”. It’s funny because that was one thing that I thought was least likely to happen anytime soon.

Here is quite a cool little site I just found: http://www.socwall.com/.  “is a public effort to classify, rank, and distribute high-resolution images for use as desktop backgrounds.”

I had a quick look through the “widescreen” ones and quickly found a 1680.1050 image that I liked enough to replace my current wallpaper. Nice, thanks socwall.com

Recently I have seen a couple of posts about solid state drives.

The first one, here, is about intel testing a 4-terabyte solid state drive array. 4TB. Pretty cool. I think the main reason why it is a big deal is because they are going to be really really fast and use a lot less power. Another good reason why SSD could be really good for commercial use is that it is fairly predictable. They know that the drives will not last forever (especially if they are being used 24/7/365) but neither do current HDDs. However, you can never really be sure when a HDD will fail. SSD drives have more of a definite life span, they have a certain number of expected read/writes before they start to fail. This could mean a lot more pre-empting disk failures, meaning less downtime? It is always good to be able to predict things. Good for budgets too.

Currently as per this article it seems that Intel is currently offering a 3.8TB SSD rack consisting of 120 drives. Thats a lot of drives. If you compare with a 120 drive rack of HDDs (8.8TB) you use 5 times less power and get 115 times faster (apparently) IOPS (in out operations per second). So, it seems like half the storage space for much more performance and lot less power. As for price, I don’t want to know what 120 ~3GB SSDs would cost. If you were really interested in performance I guess it would be worth it. Have a look at the second article at least, there is a nice graphic with the differences between the HDD rack and the SSD rack.

As for the new 4TB SSD array I’m not sure how many drives that is supposed to consist of.

Ok, I just had a read of the Fusion io website where the SSDs for the speedy 4TB rack come from. I had a look at one of the drives they have. They have an FAQ with more details on my previous statement about limited read/writes to a flash drive.

Doesn’t NAND flash have a write limit? How does that effect the lifetime of the ioDrive™ ?
NAND flash has a limit on the number of writes that can be done to an individual cell. The particular limit
depends on the type of flash used. For Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND, the limit exceeds 100,000 writes to a
cell, whereas for Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND, it is on the order of 10,000 writes. Hence, in order to exceed
the limit of a single 80GB ioDrive™, you would have to write almost 80PB (Petabytes) of data. Streaming data
at 800MB/s to the card, it would take you 3.4 years of writing data non-stop to exceed the SLC limit.

So there you go, not too bad really. With heavy use you should get a few years out of it. I wonder what their unexpected fail rate is. That was actually the next question. Apparently since it doesn’t have any moving parts major types of failure (e.g. total disk failure) are extremely rare. Also, it is possible for individual chips to fail, but it automatically writes to the next adjacent chip with no data loss and only a slight reduction in overall storage capacity.

The other cool thing (maybe) is that it runs from a PCIE 4x slot. It acts just like another hard drive to the OS. So, I imagine if I had some money I could get one of these drives and push it straight into my desktop PC. It looks like they have 80, 160 and 320 GB “configurations” available.

Well thats enough for today.

Ok, I love amazon. Comparable to google. But where google have nice little things that are free, amazon has these great things that you pay a little bit of money for. I just found out about this thing called “Amazon Mechanical Turk“. You can do what the call HITs – “Human Intelligence Tasks – are individual tasks that you work on”. So, instead of having something like a programming job or whatever that you send you a computer, you can make a job that really has to be done by a human being and you pay them a little bit of money for it.

Here are just a few examples of HITs that workers have completed on Mechanical Turk.
Select the correct spelling for these search terms
Is this website suitable for a general audience?
Find the item number for the product in this image
Rate the search results for these keywords
Are these two products the same?
Choose the appropriate category for products
Categorize the tone of this article
Translate a paragraph from English to French
Or, eg “Description:       Play a game in your browser for five minutes, then rate the game’s quality and provide a few sentences of advice for the game’s author.” – Time Allotted: 2 hours – Reward: $0.20
I’m not sure how getting $.20 is worth spending 2 hours, but maybe you get $.20 for each game you play or something.
I just think it is an awesome way of making a whole new type of processing power available to people. There is no way you can give that play a game for 5 minutes task to a computer.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, the few can ruin it for the many. As per this article. It looks like people are putting up requests for people to digg things or to sign up for things or add people as friends on myspace etc.
Still, this is an amazing idea and as with everything I am excited to see where this could lead.

This is very very cool:

“Guy Builds a Massive Folding Farm with 51 nVidia Video Cards”

http://digg.com/hardware/Guy_builds_Massive_folding_farm_with_51_nVidia_Video_Cards

My new setup. Check it out. Don’t have time to put anything else up.

https://publicbucket.s3.amazonaws.com/meanmachine.jpg

So, about a week ago I ordered some speakers and a reciever via the magical internet being. I got a pair of black Wharfedale Diamond 9.2 Loudspeakers and a Harmon/Kardon Stereo Reciever HK 3490. I am stoked with both of them, I’m still breaking them in but they sound great, looks great too. Only problem I really have is I don’t have the ideal place to put them, but I can live with that for now. I have ordered a new and bigger desk that will help a bit. I’ll post up some pics once I get the new desk on Tuesday. For now, here are a couple of pictures of me putting the speakers wires into the banana plugs I bought from monoprice.com. I bought 50ft of 12 gauge wire to go with the speakers.

Just a quick one on a few things I have found lately. I’m sure lots of people are already familar with this stuff but I have never quite needed it so I have never played with it. The main thing being – Google Calander!

Lately I have decided to start using google calander to help me organise stuff. It is handy because I can use it at home and/or at work and I have access to everything regardless of where I am. You can set it up to sent you reminders via either email, pop up or SMS (text message, duh). I haven’t used the txt option yet, but I can imagine that it would be mighty handy. You can also import other peoples calanders. The only one I have put in is the public holidays one since I actually have no idea when the holidays are here in the States. But there are other ones I noticed like movie release dates or TV shows or whatever that I imagine lots of people would find handy. If you really want you can add “Barack Obama – The Illinois senator’s campaign events”. Sounds a bit stalkerish to me!

The second thing that I just noticed about google (gmail to be more precise) is that if you go into the settings you can set it to always use https, which I don’t think they used to have. I am really happy about this, it makes me feel a lot safer and it was to me, the only down side to gmail. But no more!

That’s it. I was happy to find these handy things and actually use them. I know they’ve been round for ages but oh well. Feel free to comment if you have found other cool uses for calander.