phillhutt

First review of the 3rd pair of cans

phill — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:23:13 +0000

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.

When did this arrive?

phill — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:26:56 +0000

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.

Bikes are expensive

phill — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:43:42 +0000

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.

The Dell died dammit.

phill — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:23:39 +0000

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.

Tea, ftw!

phill — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:10:22 +0000

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:

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.

New fav app!

phill — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:43:38 +0000

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.

Googly photo viewer

phill — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:39:13 +0000

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.

Switching the LAMP back on

phill — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:25:28 +0000

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.

Cluster time

phill — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:33:33 +0000

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!

A look into windows 7

phill — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:04:56 +0000

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