Jeff McClain's Home Page

Spring has sprung?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:29:00 +0000

We are trying to decide if it is even reasonable to expect that we would have any additional time for another toy (especially up at the cabin in the summer, it sure would be nice). Buying used helps shave a lot of money, and it is a pretty good buyers market right now for a lot of things. Job situations and economy are always a concern, but I think right now, it is probably not a bad thing to be in a little bit of debt if you can continue to respond to short term emergency cash flow needs. Anyway, we are considering a 2006 19' Bayliner 195 Classic Runabout, just to play on the water with the kids. Not that they/we don't have ENOUGH hobbies and diversions, especially with how much the kids have been enjoying riding the motorbikes.

We actually took the plunge and and went ahead and bought it. Not sure what we are going to do with it now...it won't fit in our garage down here...

Snow Mover

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:52:00 +0000

Picked up a used 2007 Arctic Cat H1 650 4x4 this last weekend for a reasonable price (it is black). Looked at a couple, and sort of really wanted a polaris sportsman with EFI, but for the price, this should be a pretty good unit. I haven't seen Arctic Cat too much in the ATV business, but this thing is HUGE. with 12" of clearance and over 700lbs, dry, it is almost more like a jeep than a 4-wheeler. It even has a standard Class III 2" hitch for pulling trailers and stuff around. I ordered a 3000lb winch for under $100 off ebay for it, and it came with a spay tank and some other bags and stuff. Hope Sarah likes it and can take it with us riding (she can be the cantina...grin). Looking at what it will cost to put a snow blade on it to move snow as well.

Update:Got a Gorilla 3000lb ATV Winch for it as well off ebay, which I'll use to lift the Warn snow plow blade I also got. And, to top it all off, a dual stage 24" 5.5hp Troy Built Snow thrower. I sure hope it snows...grin.

I also ended up picking up a 2005 Mirage 7x12' enclosed trailer for moving stuff.

And an ultimate snow mover, a used 2006 Polaris 700 RMK 159" that had 150 miles on it.

Happiness...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:44:00 +0000

So, I'm sitting here, drinking some of my own 2.5 year old aged hard apple cider (no...I'm not drunk, and I just poured the glass), listening to some soft "5 star" personally ranked music on my PC, my two boys are helping each other play a video game (actually HELPING, not fighting and saying, "Thank you Riley!" and "Do you see any more bad guys? No. Thanks!"), Sarah is humming and packing and getting presents ready for our trip to see her folks and sister and her family in our brand new GMC Yukon (thank you RIMM and AAPL), and I'm just plain happy. And I realize I've had a very happy life...not just the last 10 years, which have been the happiest, all with Sarah and now the boys, but a VERY HAPPY life.

I know money doesn't MAKE happiness, but we have been very fortunate not to want too much for that (everyone can always use more, but we have had everything we ever needed, thank you mom, dad, and Micron). It is funny how "relative" money is. We write checks and transfer money, buy vehicles worth tens of thousands, and pay mortgages on hundreds of thousands, but until you actually HOLD $5000 in your hands in $50 or $100 bills, it is hard to put it into perspective. I can't even imagine what some of the CEO's of companies do with it all...maybe it all desensitizes you and even makes you more unhappy (grin...at least I can pretend that is the case). They throw around a couple million dollars for BONUS. And corporations throw around a BILLION dollar type figures every quarter (Exxon and Intel routinely post $2-10 BILLION dollar quarterly PROFITS...wow).

I know environment doesn't MAKE you happy, but my environment hasn't been fraught with worry about being shot in the streets by roving bands of militants or government hit squads or my children taken from me (thank you to every single man and woman that has given their lives and a PART of their lives to secure that freedom for me and my children). I know success doesn't MAKE happiness, but we've been blessed with more successes than I can count (most of all, our two boys...thank you Sarah). I also realize that many of you with less may beg to differ on that (it is easy for me to say all of this when I have it). To that I won't argue. I don't think I've endured any significant measure of hardship or sacrifice, compared to many. Each of us probably has to answer that for himself and decide if they have a legitimate complaint in their lot in life. I can't answer that for you. I know at least ONE person that was handed a most undeserved suffering and blame without complaint. Volunteered for it, in fact. To stand in all of our places for ALL of our wrongs, including the imputed original sin that each and every one of us bears, regardless of how "perfect" we may be...

Most of all, I think I know that happiness, at least MY happiness, is a mental attitude and a personal and private relationship with God enabled through His son, Jesus Christ. A basis on something unfaltering and unchanging and not flawed by anything of THIS world, because it is not based on ANYTHING of this world or any one or material possessions (granted, I find myself routinely caught up in all of that too, and it takes sanity checks and rebound to stabilize, rationalize and move forward)... Thank You Col. R.B. Thieme for teaching me all of this. And, appropriately enough, at this time of season, thank you Jesus Christ, for your wonderful sacrifice that you made on the Cross so many years ago, to provide a path for EVERY person to experience your exceeding and eternal grace and happiness.

There are few things that touch that deep emotional response in me that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, or causes goose bumps and a tingle to run up and down your spine. Watching Braveheart in my kilt standing on my couch while Mel Gibson yells "Freeeeeeedom" (grin...I'm kidding...mostly). Hearing Celine Dion sing "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" (I know...I'm gay and I listen to Cold Play). Actually HEARING, cognitively, the words in a perfectly produced Shakespeare play with a great red wine (again...gay...I know). Catching the perfect surf wave and riding it in a kayak and then doing a combat roll out. Watching the rain fall from boiling dark clouds in Stanley, ID. Jumping in a 12 foot deep canal filled with drifted snow. Stepping off the plane in Marsh Harbor, Bahamas. Perfectly composed perl script (gay and nerdy). Hitting the perfect set of whoops on my dirt bike and riding as hard and fast as I can, all by myself at Black's Creek until I can't see straight anymore but grinning like a school boy, stopping at the top of the peak and looking at Devil's Hole and the South Fork of the Boise River...wow. Remembering hunting pheasants and ground squirls with my black lab when I was 12, Daffy. My Mom and Dad. Riding Moab Rim on a mountain bike at sunset. Perfectly lighting a computer rendered Lego scene (ultimate nerd, probably not gay...but definatly lucky-to-ever-kiss-a-girl nerdy). Seeing my boys run to me when I come home every day. Knowing that I live in a free country and the sacrifice others have made to guarantee that. Most of all, hearing my beautiful wife tell me she loves me; my best friend. All of these are, responses. Wonderful, but not the BASIS or source.

I hope that all of you can find this happiness and the sanctuary that salvation provides from what is our life in Satan's world. With the Hope that has been granted to every person, unconditionally for them to accept, this world CAN be a most wonderful and beautiful place. I hope to see you all in the eternal after life and compare stories. I'm truly shamed that this is not a bigger part of my daily life.

Cascade Property - Take 2

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:23:00 +0000

We continue to look into building a cabin on our property up in Cascade. We would really like to build a very beautiful log home (that just happens to end up being almost 3000 sq-ft by the time you include the finished basement...crap!!!), but the price to build is insane (like over $175/sq-ft, not including a garage, or the property). Now we are looking at what would we be able to get into already built for similar money (and would it be worth just buying that). We found a place that we put an offer on, but we weren't totally in love with it (well, Sarah is, but I still think building on our site would end up with a much nicer view).

Update: Well, we accepted a counter offer from the seller on that place, and it is including a LOT of the furnishings, a gun safe, two snowmobiles and a storage shed.

Below are some pictures of the place we are buying.

Update: We picked up a new 2008 Yukon 4x4 for Sarah (traded in her Honda Odyssey minivan) and for going up to the cabin in the snow.

Quality Entertainment...Matt Nathanson

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:07:00 +0000

This has truly been a year in coming and vastly overdue. Sarah and I went to a local winery to listen to Toad the Wet Sproket concert last year. This guy was up on the stage tuning a guitar. To be honest, he had old jeans and a dumpy shirt and I thought he was one of the support guys up there just getting sound checks and stuff. Well, he keeps strumming some short chords, and then stopping, playing with stuff and humming to himself while we all talked and drank wine...but I keep listening, because there are a couple catchy parts and he seems like a really good guitar player.

Finally, he actually starts talking to us. "Hi. How you all doin'". Well, he talked to us. I mean, really talked to us and joked. It was great. And at the end of the show, I kept humming this one tune I had heard (car crash...which at the time he first started singing it, I thought he was saying "I want to feel a cat's a$$", LOL). Anyway, we bought his "Live at the Point" and "Beneath these Fireworks" albums. Quite possibly the best entertainment I've ever gotten for my music dollar. That was a year ago. And now I just wish I could find his "Please" album, so I could buy it for "Hold Me". Matt Nathanson has more songs per album on my "favorites" ranking than any album I've ever had. My wife wants to have his baby, or at least go to another one of his concerts. Grin. Listen to his albums. They grow on you and somehow, I never seem to get tired of them like a lot of albums do.

Just demo'ed a couple songs from Cary Brothers too, who is touring with him right now. I really like his new album. "Who You Are" and "Ride" from the Zach Braff show, "The Last Kiss". Drat...wish I could catch them in concert.

Remote Disk

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 21:49:00 +0000

I've been through my fair share of HDD's and have tried a couple different NAS drive bays. I have always ended up being a little disappointed for various reasons (most of which has been trying to find a dual drive enclosure with gigabit ethernet support and RAID for a reasonable price). I came across the Western Digital World Book II Terabyte drive at Costco today for $344. It was a bit steep, but try finding a Terabyte of SATA twin drive's PLUS an enclosure that supports gigabit ethernet anywhere.

I'm still trying to get a good feel for it. It is only getting about 10% efficiency of the gigabit bandwidth on my computer for some weird reason, and it is taking over 5 hours to copy 83GB of DVD rips...which seems slow. Averaging only 5.3MB/sec, which is about half what a 100 Base ethernet would do (check this reference for a base line of SATA drive read/write speeds as well as memory and nand flash speeds), let alone a gigabit ethernet setup. Something is VERY wrong. Reading online reviews, it seems to indicate similar problems.

Figure about 35MB/sec for R/W access on a SATA-150 drive locally (this can range from 20-50MB/sec depending on where you are on the plattern). Also, figure on about 60-65MB/sec for R/W access on a SATA-300 drive locally (again, depends on where you are at on the plattern). Figure a typical USB flash drive is about 5MB/sec, and 100-Base-T is about 12MB/sec. Figure striped SATA-150 is roughly 70MB/sec. Main memory DDR2 pushes 5-6GB/sec and gigabit ethernet pushes 125MB/sec. Firewire is ~48MB/sec. Raid-0 (striped) SATA-300 is roughly 100MB/sec. Puts things in perspective.

So, I returned the World Book and bought a Dlink DNS-323 NAS storage and put a 500GB Sammy SATA-II drive in it. Even this NAS is handicapped by less than stellar write/read speeds, but at least it is one of the higher performers I could find on Tom's Hardware. Seems like the dedicated chip doing the conversion from the network traffic to the SATA interface is the biggest problem. Hopefully they can improve it with improvements on the firmware, which is running GNU public code that they said is woefully brute force and not very optimized. This new unit is averaging 18.3MB/sec on sustained write transfers (and about 31% utilization of the gigabit ethernet port). About 3x more than the world book.

Digital Picture Frame

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 21 May 2007 16:11:00 +0000

I have really been wanting to get a nice digital picture frame for my office to show off all my pictures of my two boys. Seems like the static frames I have grow out of date SO FAST. I got my wife an 8" Pandigital frame with 128MB of internal flash and 800x600 resolution from Costco for Mother's Day. I created a slide show of her and the boys and even played a song in the back ground. She loved it. The frame isn't too bad, but some of the back grounds are very grainy and dithered (you can tell they are NOT doing full 16-bit color). Also, now that we have it, I really would like to power down the display from 10PM to 7AM (not sure why, it just doesn't seem right to have it on all night). I also don't like how far back it tilts when sitting on a desk. I may try to reduce the color depth manually on some of the photos in a better program and then upload them to see if the darker back grounds look less dithered, but initial trials didn't work out too well.

I really want one of the Philips 8" frames. It has a clock feature, auto off setable times, and can even apply sepia effects to the photos (though not randomly, I don't think). When you see it as an 8" frame, it is actually the diagonal. And while Philips calls this an 800x480 display, they say only 640x480 is viewable??? Anyway, this is just a little smaller than a 5x7" photo. I sort of want a 6x8" or 8x10" display for home, but that is getting pretty expensive still.

Now, I also see a Mustek PF-T80R 8" frame that has a piano black finish and features a clock and all sorts of other settings (not sure about the auto-off). It is pretty expensive at $299, though. And it doesn't have WiFi like many other frames up in this price range...

Little Biker

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:34:00 +0000

I decided to finally get my 4-1/2 year old a dirt bike. Even though my almost-3 year old is probably going to be the real rider in the family. I got a used 2005 Yamaha PW50 for $750. It has been used pretty hard. I spent the day making some of the dolly-wheel training wheels and tuning it all up. Headset was very loose and the oil needed changing. Also ordered a youth helmet off EBay. Finally got it all cleaned up and ready, and both boys rode it for all of 25.3 seconds. Then they were done with it. Hum...

Dead XBox...just in time.

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 05 May 2007 15:28:00 +0000

Well, 2 weeks after my 1 year warranty on my premium XBox 360 expired, it has gotten the dreaded 3 Red Rings of Death. Seems awefully "coinicidental" this is just the day before they are planning to roll out the new "Spring Dashboard" Update. This sucks. I wouldn't mind trying to get upgraded to an "Elite", but I'm guessing they won't let me do that. Plus, I'm guessing I will lose all my save games and stuff if I send it all in (and have to pay $169 for service). This really does suck. I guess I could try getting an "elite" system and then transfer the content to it with the XSATA. But I'm not sure that is working yet for the 120GB drive of the elite.

Update (4/5/2007): Well, just got off the phone with Microsoft XBox Support and it turns out that my XBox warranty is good through December 2007!!! Woot! I may still get an xbox elite and try to xfer the content over to it and then use the repaired XBox as a second system in my computer room. We'll see. I'm sure my wife won't like that idea.

Update (4/5/2007): I have downloaded XBLA content with both MY gamer tag and with my wife's. Everyone with a profile/gamer tag on my current XBox 360 can play that FULL content (my sons and wife can all play stuff I downloaded/paid for from my GT). The problem, as I see it, is if I transfer this content (or even recover my tag onto an elite), then ONLY I will be able to play this content anymore. My wife and sons will not be able to. As I research this, it looks like even my repaired XBox 360 will probably be a refurb and not the same serial number, so I'm equally screwed there too. If that is the case, I'm super pissed off.

Update (4/6/2007): Found an Elite at my local Fred Meyer store (and got a free copy of Fusion Frenzy 2). I also picked up an Xport 360, which allows you to pop your 360 HDD into a base stand that connects to your computer via a USB cable. Well, the dang thing doesn't recognize my HDD (the 20GB or the new 120GB one). So, I'm back to just playing on my old 20GB drive or petitioning MS to give me some points. I'm super upset that my Viva Pinata save game won't transfer...sigh.

Update (5/31/2007): Finally got my repaired XBox back, and after 2 hours on the phone with Microsoft support, trying to explain the situation to them on why my wife and kids couldn't play the content I had purchased (worse, some had been bought by Sarah, so she could play but not me or the kids), and after being transferred to three different people, I finally got to someone that wasn't trying to run me down a "clear cache/HDD" trouble shooting sheet and actually understood the DRM problem. Had to go through and give a list of all the games (twice), they looked them up and finally had a total (jeezus, don't these people have the accounts right there?!?) points. They said they would call back in 5-10 days with information. Right at 10 days later, I have a PAGE full of codes to enter. And damn if they said they couldn't even EMAIL them to me, let alone just credit it to my account. Are you serious?!? This is a flipping joke. So, got 2 codes wrong when I went to enter them and had to call them back (yeah...you know how hard it is to 783 letters correct when the support person barely speaks English...). Finally done, so, I guess...sigh.

Lost...

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:38:00 +0000

Lost is, quite simply, the best prime time drama I've seen on network TV in years. The character development is awesome. The writing is great. The suspense and twisted plot development is perfect, and every episode makes me want more. I don't know how they are going to end this, but we are two-thirds of the way through Season 2, and it is awesome. If you haven't been bitten by this bug yet, I would highly encourage you to watch it. I'm still reeling from last night's episode we watched, Season 2 Episode 18 Dave. I picked up most of it WAY before the end, a.l.a. Sixth Sense, but I didn't catch the very end part until about 5 seconds before it happened. Talk about hair standing up on end. I LOVE this show.

Ahhh..Microsoft

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:34:00 +0000

I picked up a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade for $250 yesterday, after laboring over all the various options (5 different versions, OEM full install or retail or upgrade, 32-bit or 64-bit...sheeze). I was extremely disappointed that the only feature I really wanted that wasn't on the Home Premium edition, was a working remote desktop. What a farce. So, I went with the upgrade after finding out that Microsoft was planning to severely limit my ability to migrate an OEM copy to new hardware in the future. But then I had also heard that you had to have the oringal OS (WinXP or 2K) installed to complete the compliance check (rather than being able to just put in the disk). This made it impossible to do a clean install. Oh, and there were also rumors that the upgrade would "consume" your old key for the previous OS (makes sense, but sort of sucks).

So, I wanted to upgrade my main computer, which has WinXP Pro on it (to support a remote desktop). But it didn't make sense to burn up a perfectly good WinXP Pro key to upgrade, when one of my 3 other WinXP Home installations would suffice. But, now, I had to erase my Pro installation, and reinstall Home on my new computer just to upgrade to Vista. Grrr. It gets better. I have long wanted to eliminate the space taking floppy from my system. I never use it...except to install Windows XP, when it asks for the driver disk to boot the RAID drivers to recognize the HDD. With Vista, I was happy that it was first of all a better GUI install (fully 32-bit), and it recognizes more than just 130GB of a drive, plus it FINALLY recognizes most RAID drivers.

So, I didn't bother putting a floppy in my new system...praying it wouldn't be necessary. I mean, there are USB drives, CD, DVD, flash cards, network and USB transfers...SOMETHING else should be useable. Sigh. Yeah, except that NOW, I have to try to put WinXP Home back on my system, just to install Vista. F!$#!K. Don't I OWN four perfectly valid full copies of WinXP already? And didn't I just get done paying $250 for an UPGRADE to Vista? Then why can't I UPGRADE?!?!?

So, I decide to try just install Vista on a clean system (no previous system). Maybe I can call Microsoft and explain and get a way to do it with the disk and key from WinXP Home in hand. Nope. It boots from the DVD just fine, and pops into a very refreshing GUI installation screen, and even better, it recognizes my full array of disks (even running my main twin-250GB array as a RAID1 mirror for data integrity). Cool! I can format and partition everything right there. Sweet. No blue screen with white text for this install! Now comes the bad part. It informs me that the installation key I have provided is not authorized to perform a blank install because the proper certified copy of a previous windows installation can not be found (and Microsoft tech support confirms there is no way around this or to bypass or manually give them my old WinXP key and disk). So, I try again with tech support and inform them that my drive with my old Windows installation crashed and died during the Windows Vista Upgrade installation proceedure (which was true, actually, and one of the reasons I'm trying to ensure that my OS install is always done on a RAID1 mirror install). I have a new drive installed and would like to try to get Vista installed. I'm placed on hold 3 or 4 times, and even disconnected twice. I finally get the response that I will HAVE to reinstall WinXP and they transfer me to them. I calmly explain that I can NOT install WinXP, because I do not have a 3.5" floppy drive to load the necessary drivers to get the WinXP installation disk to recognize my HDD's. I'm again placed on hold...and then promptly disconnected.

Sigh. I can tell where this is going to lead, so I don't waste any more time on this, and just remove the RAID array (with the new drive installed) back to a standard IDE interface and hope that I can convert it after the installation. side note: I must be a real nerd, as I have BRAND NEW spare 250GB drives, just sitting around, because when ever I see a great deal on drives, I buy some. Part of that has to do with me hacking xbox's too, but that is another story. After all, mirroring shouldn't corrupt the data right? LOL...wrong (but that is for later). I get WinXP Home installed without the RAID (sort of...it only detects my drive as 130GB rather than full 250GB, but I trust this will be "ok" later in the full version detect...still makes me nervous formating/partitioning on a drive not fully recognized). Anyway, I don't do anything more than type in the certification key for WinXP Home and select basic options. No internet is working (most of my hardware isn't detected these days with the basic WinXP or even SP2 install). No additional driver disks or even SP2. I don't even get online and "certify/validate" the installation. I want to see if Vista Upgrade will work with this half way installation. Surprise, it does...although it informs me that I have to do a full CLEAN install of Vista for the combination of OS's I'm trying to upgrade. No F!#$!King DUH...that's what I wanted to do to begin with...so, it backs up my old OS into a windows.old directory and begins to install.

So, I spend another 90 minutes installing 64-bit Vista and playing around with basic settings, which goes surprisingly smooth. It recognized and installed drivers for EVERY SINGLE piece of hardware I have. It takes me a little while to find all the normal things I access (like drive manager and settings), but it works! It even connects to the internet with almost no help from me and downloads the most recent drivers for everything. Stuff is looking GREAT! Uh...all except I had a 400GB drive in my system that had a bunch of movies I had pulled off DVD's that I OWN (as well as some not-so-legal copies of Lost that both my wife and I are now hooked on), for playing on my HTPC and XBox stream that got corrupted at some point between booting with it in IDE/RAID/IDE mode and WinXP install. Bummer, but not catastrophic. Oh, I also still have a directory called "windows.old" that has my old install, but it looks like it was true to its word and didn't take ANY settings from my old install...at all, not even the time zone settings. It connected to the internet and validated the installation. I'm not sure if it burned my liscense on the old copy of WinXP that I used to base the upgrade on or not. I'll try to boot that PC (my HTPC) later and see. If it did, fine, I want WinXP on that box anyway.

Now comes the part that you look back on and go...why did I do that. Well, I had always wondered if I could convert a normal disk into a RAID1 mirror array. I knew that when I originally built this system, I just unhooked one of the mirrors from the old PC and threw it in the new system and it worked just fine and dandy (old PC noted that the mirror array was "degraded" because of a missing/failing drive, but even it would still boot just fine too). Well, so, I switch it over to RAID in the motherboard BIOS and go into the RAID config to mirror my two 250GB drives. It says I will lose all data on the drives, but they always say that stuff, right? Hit execute, save and reboot. blank screen during HDD boot. Ok..full power off. Same thing. Ok...back to IDE and delete the RAID. Reboot. Hum...garbage on the screen during boot. Uh-oh. Sigh. At this point it is 12:30AM.

I turn everything off and go to bed, knowing I'm going to HAVE to pull the old floppy drive out of my old computer, pop it in, use the drivers to install an old copy of WinXP Home (yet again) on a RAID1 config and reinstall Vista Upgrade. I hope I don't have to talk to Microsoft UNsupport. Plus, all my movies are now gone and I know my wife is going to be pissed that she can't watch Lost tonight. Hey! See, the new Windows DRM thingy IS working...grin.

Spending another $150 to get the full version doesn't seem so expensive now...sigh.

Update (2/1/2007): After a couple friends read this, one finally pointed out an article that has found a work around for doing a clean install without needing ANY form of previous Windows to be installed. Great, this works and saves me from having to spend 60 minutes formating and installing WinXP, just to destroy it to put vista on, AND allows me to finally boot the floppy out of my system!!! Woot! This sort of sucks, because this same back door allows people to circumvent the legit reason for trying to limit what an "upgrade" copy is meant for. I don't have a problem with Microsoft trying to make sure that someone actually HAS a valid liscense for a previous version. But they should let me type in the old key and compliance check the old disk, if that is how they want to play the game. This work around is now, actually less of a check than they use to have in WinXP. So, just like DRM's and the whole HDCP fiasco, the causual user pays the price in loss of convienence while the true pirates and hackers that do a lot of this suffer very little to get around this. Nice job Micro$oft.

Update (2/2/2007): Well, after the tip in the above paragraph, and 1 hour later, I have a fully installed copy of Vista Ultimate, without having to wait for the WinXP format and tedious install to complete (this took >3 hours last night doing it that way) and without me having to spend another hour pulling the floppy out of another system to get the drivers to even DO a WinXP install on a RAID1 mirror setup. As it was, the Vista DVD recognized the drives with no need for other drivers (though it did have an option to load other drivers...and I think it supports floppy, CD, DVD, and flash media). I'm very happy. Too bad Microsoft couldn't help me get to this resolution.

Update (2/13/2007):OK, I just found possibly the coolest part of Vista I've seen so far. And it is something simple. And most of you are probably going to say "So?", but it is something that has bugged me for a LONG time. I have a bunch of digital pictures that sometimes didn't have the date set right (my old digital camera always reset every time the batteries went dead or you changed them...thank god the new one somehow saves that, even with dead batteries). Well, we like to know when things were taken, and if the date resets to 1999 all the time, it sucks, especially when you are looking at camping pictures or pictures of the boys. Well, good luck figuring out how to change the "Date Modified" or "Date Created" on a file in Windows. You would THINK it would be in the right click->properties or something, but you can't change it. I've downloaded a couple freeware tools that lets you modify file attributes, but they aren't integrated and seemless, and a lot of them don't work all the time (crash, and you can't select MULTIPLE files and change them all at once).

I've also tried to figure out a good way to add "Captions" or comments to my JPG photos. Something easy that even Sarah could do. Some programs allow you to put comments in a .txt file with the same prefix name as the photo, and it will automatically put these in the slide show (like my JAlbum photo show program), but that is brittle and tough to keep synced to the photos. move a picture, but forget to do the .txt file too, and you lost the hard work of all those comments. There ARE provisions in the JPG format to allow comments and titles as well as key/value tags to be added in the header (as well as the camera settings and stuff), but a lot of programs don't always use or look at those, and none are really simple.

Well, last night, I was playing with the "Windows Photo Gallery" that pulls up when you click on the little side bar photo preview gadget. And it is a LOT like the latest Windows Media player, where you can sort pictures by date, year, key tags, as well as file structure. AND you can add title and comments (or caption) to each photo. You can also...drum roll...change the Creation/Modified Date on the picture. You can do this all in a VERY cool thumbnail layout mode, and you can do it in BATCH. Meaning, you can highlight a whole bunch of pictures, change the date or add a sort tag (like "Moab Trip" or "Camping" or "Christmas") or multiple ones, and then it is searchable/sortable by that tag. You can also "rank" photos, just like songs, from 1 to 5 stars, just by clicking on them, and then it will remember this and you can sort by "favorites". Nice for slide shows to only flip through the 5-star ranked photos. I think this ranking is still "separate" from the file, and I've had problems trying to retain this ranking for songs in the past when I back up songs and reinstall windows, but it should be easy enough to figure out how to retain that too for backups.

Sarah has HATED having all the pictures of the boys and our various camping trips separated out into different directories, and has wanted to look at pictures all together (for example, I have sorted out a directory for Riley, and one for Brady, and then a different one for Riley & Brady, which seemed good when I started, but you break up a lot of other "categorizations" when you do that when the attribute you are sorting on is really a "one of many" factor). Now, I think I can block highlight a bunch of pictures, and mark them all with a "Riley" tag. Then do the same for Brady. And if they are BOTH in the picture, they get both tags. And if it is a picture of them camping, then they also get a "camping" tag. Basically, one tag isn't mutually exclusive. And now Sarah can look at pictures sorted a BUNCH of different ways.

This alone is prompting me to upgrade Sarah's computer to Windows Vista Premium too...

New Intel Core 2 Duo system

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 20:58:00 +0000

Finally picked up a 64-bit CPU, Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. Paired it with an ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi motherboard that has DDR2 800MHz (PC6400), PCI-Ex16, SATA 300 support. Planning to upgrade the WinXP OS to Vista at the end of the month. Also got an ATI X1900GT with 256MB of memory PCI-Express x16 graphics card. Popped in 4GB of DDR2 PC6400 modules in it. Also got a fairly nice Broadway Com Corp ATX mid tower case that seems to do the job ok (just wish it came with nicer variable speed fans, a front HDD LED, and a better 500W power supply).

The CPU seems to over clock from the 2.13GHz to 2.4GHz easily enough, even at 1.35v, and runs cool with the smart speed step tech (which drops it from 8x to 6x speed when idle). The memory was a bit flakey at the 1:1 1067MHz FSP timing, but seems rock solid at 900MHz (5-5-5-18 timings) and 1.8v. I was also surprised with several BSoD's when trying to run manual timings for CL6 (not going to waste too much more time on what is failing right now). The X1900GT video card will only overclock reliably from GPU 513MHz to 535MHz and DRAM from 657MHz to 800MHz.

Performance testing it all out, it is turning in well over double the scores I use to get on my older 2.8GHz P4 system. And a quick Auto Gordian Knot encode of Black Hawk Down (85% quality-single pass) went from 145 minutes down to 71 minutes on this new dual core. Also, Never Winter Nights 2 will now work at 1920x1200 at over 30fps with most features turned on (this was a bitter 2-4fps slide show on the older system).

Merry 24" Christmas to me!

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 00:02:00 +0000

Well, I finally replaced my aging 20" CRT monitor that has worked flawlessly for almost 10 years now with a new 24" Flat Panel LCD from Dell. Pulling it out of my computer desk hutch, it never ceases to amaze me how deep, heavy and BIG these old CRT's are. And how amazingly light and thin these new LCD's are. This new display from Dell is breath taking and BIG. So far, I haven't seen any stuck or dead pixels and the 1920x1600 resolution is a L O T of real estate. The blacks are very good and the color contrast is almost too bright.

HD DVD for XBox 360

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 23:53:00 +0000

At a time when everyone is scrambling to get a Playstation 3 or a Nintendo Wii, I was on the hunt for an HD DVD player for the Xbox 360. I finally found one at my local Hastings (there were two on the shelf, actually), and so I immediately picked one up...along with U-571 and Swordfish (really, the only good titles they had in the limited selection). Fortunately, the player came with a copy of King Kong as well. The titles were cheaper than I'd expected/heard (only $19.99) and all came with the dual layer format that offers HD DVD and normal 480i/p SD DVD compatibility (edit: hum...this may be misleading, as the HD DVD isn't recognized in a couple DVD players I've tried it in so far...now I'm trying to figure out what that included 480p content even means.).

Well, I got the player connected. It was pretty simple, and just involved unplugging my vision camera from the back USB port, and plugging the drive into it as well as power, after installing a DVD in the original XBox for drivers. The vision camera then plugs into one of two additional USB ports on the drive. I have a 1080p TV, but not one that can accept it over the component cables (technically, it CAN accept 1080p over component as well as the VGA interface, but only up to 30Hz...360 only outputs 1080p/60Hz.../sigh), and they don't have an HDMI plug for the 360 (yet). Popped in King Kong, and waited. The movie spun up pretty quick and the intro HD DVD logo played. Looked pretty crystal clear (even at only 1080i...grin...only). I wish the VGA connector for the Xbox 360 worked on this TV (it doesn't...again, due to only 1080p/30Hz). It would be very cool if Microsoft had the ability to release a dash update to the 360 that would allow 1080p/30Hz over the component cables (or VGA). To my knowledge, 1080p/60Hz is only supported on my HP MD5880n over HDMI. I don't remember how good this movie looked in 480p, but some of the opening scenes in the old time New York (or wherever they were) were phenomenal. Color was fantastic and brilliantly crisp. Sharp edges defined objects and detail was impressive. Fast skipped to more of the action scenes and King Kong about 1 hour into this massive 3 hour long movie. Even the dark scenes look pretty damn good on this (maybe thanks to my HP display). Forgot how gory this movie is in the bug valley scene. I'll have to see if playing the HD DVD in the standard DVD mode on the 360 looks noticably worse or if I'm just justifying the purchase...grin. Something tells me it probably isn't worth the extra $199 for the player and premium of the HD DVD movie format, but going forward, it will be nice. Maybe...it is pretty damn clear and bright. Great...now I have to start replacing all my DVD's with HD DVD's.

Update 10/21/06: I'm getting 1080i out of my 360 with the HD DVD player. King Kong looks fantastic, however, I'm less impressed with Swordfish and a couple other titles I've watched so far. At this point, my HTPC with DVI output in 1080p (software upscaler), and even my hacked original Xbox running XBMC (upscaling to 1080i) looks pretty damn close to as good. You should see Ice Age (DVD) upsampled in a good software player at 1080p on this TV. It is pretty freaky and makes you question why you would even need HD DVD...

Update 12/3/06: I downloaded drivers for the PC to make it recognize the HD DVD player, after finding this page that talked about using the drive on a PC, and I can browse the file structures and everything on my HTPC. The program that evaluates your computer to see if it can play back HD DVD shows that my video card is not HDCP compliant, so the software players refuse to run on it, and even my 2.8GHz P4 is below requirements for playback (Holy crap!). So far, I haven't found a player that works (at least nothing I can down load and try out). Both WinDVD and PowerDVD seem to say that they have plug-ins that will work, but most seem to agree that you can only get them with bundled Hardware at this point. Sounds like they should have something out by the middle of December. Sure wish I could get a player so I could compare true 1080p output from my HTPC over DVI with my XBox 360 1080i over component.

Update 12/13/06: I have finally decided that HD DVD looks decidedly better than it's DVD compliment (even at only 1080i...dang Microsoft...please hurry and fix the dashboard to work with my 1080p TV over component). I was mostly comparing HD DVD to titles like Star Wars Episode II and III, which are actually quite spectacular for 480p. The color saturations and full digital production from start to finish really shine in that movie. So, I'm convinced that 480p content CAN look good, but for the most part it is grainy. Even HD DVD is only going to be as good as its source material. For example, I own both the DVD and HD DVD version of We Were Soldiers. For the most part, both look pretty poor from a video quality stand point. The film is grainy and not exactly brilliant. Still it is clearly better on HD DVD, scene for scene. I was disappointed by the quality, but I attribute that to the source. I'm interested in seeing how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow looks on HD DVD. I think it will look good. I also got HDScapes Saltwater Aquariums HD. It has a dual sided disk, one for DVD content players and one side for HD DVD. This is nice, because I can compare the exact same source material in 480p DVD vs. 1080i (for now...hurry, Microsoft...new dash code or even better, an HDMI cable). I'm not impressed with the quality of the video in either format, for starters, and I think the disk is going to be returned to Amazon. But I can attest that the HD DVD is far better than the poor quality of the DVD content.

Need new Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 02:28:00 +0000

My main computer system has slowly begun to fall apart. It started about 4 months ago, when the on-board gigabit ethernet died on the motherboard. I popped a spare 100Mb PCI card in, and have been limping it by, but I've had all sorts of strange DNS errors (even a new install of Windows Vista RC1 had problems, so I don't think it is a software issue). Now, recently, I've begun to get some really nasty screen corruption (I assume this is in the ATI Radeon video card), mostly when I'm doing POVRay renders and the CPU really heats up the system. It doesn't help that I've had my computer cranking 100% non-stop for about a week now, doing Lego Renders.

I love the Intel P4 that I have in there, and the simulated dual cores with dual channel DDR400 memory performs better than anything I've ever had, but it is getting a little dated. I'm really in the market for one of the new Intel Core Duo 2 CPU's, espeically, given that they crank out far less heat than this beast I have (it is like a radiator next to my leg...of course I do have 4 250GB HDD in there and 10 fans). But, the cpu's are still pretty expensive, and first gen on the motherboards. Plus, I REALLY want to only install a new Windows once, so I would like to wait for Windows Vista. If that is the case, I'll probably just buy a Dell system with a good PCIE card, gigabit ethernet, Intel Core Duo 2 and get a network attached storage device that can do RAID rather than keep loading up my main system.

ATC-1000 Helmet Cam

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:52:00 +0000

I've always wanted to see how a helmet cam video of my dirt bike rides would look, especially on some of the more brutal races I've run in SIDRA. I've also thought that it would be great to have some downhill footage of mountain biking at Moab. But they have always been very expensive, heavy and cumbersome to really make it worthwhile to take on most of my rides. ...Until now, at least.

Someone pointed me to a product made by Oregon Scientific, that is a sub-$100 bullet cam, fully integrated, solid state, and self contained (no wires or battery pack or mini-DV camera needed), the ATC-1000. While it has 32MB of onboard memory, it also allows you to expand that to 1GB with extra SD memory cards (too bad it doesn't work with anything larger than 1GB). It also supports 640x480 video resolution (as well as 320x240, and 160x120), but all only at 15fps, which is VERY poor for any moving/action shots. It has mono sound pickup and a cable you can plug into it to download to computer or play back on a standard RCA video line (cam-corder or TV).

It is just too bad that they don't support >1GB SD cards and 30fps in 720x480 resolution. Even if it cost 2x that price, I would gladly pay it for something that worked and was small/self contained like this. I looked all over for some other provider that might have something, but nothing is available. There is a good review on this page, along with some sample videos. Most of those look pretty bad, and there is nasty lens flare/compression artifacts, bad sound mic, and god-aweful slow, but I managed to find one on closeout at Best Buy Online for $69.99. So, I decided to take a shot and get one. Hopefully it works well enough for some good still shots and action video of our ride in Moab this November.

Here is a great web page of a guy that just bolts his Sony mini-DV camcorder to the side of his head. There is a great video of Porcupine Rim there (even this higher resolution and 24fps content is a bit disorienting).

Joss Whedon's Firefly Series

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 22:34:00 +0000

Been looking for some new shows to watch. Came across Joss Whedon's Firefly (also the author of Buffy: Vampire Slayer and Dark Angel, as well as the new Wonder Woman movie, niether of which I ever watched) series with a lot of high marks, and so I decided to check out a couple of the shows. Ended up buying the full series and the full motion picture, Serenity, off Amazon, after previewing a couple episodes from Limewire downloads. Each of the nine regular cast members make up a pretty complex character mix and they are not your typical Hollywood personalities (all good or all bad). They all have their own dark histories and are more down to Earth about what motivates them (not some lofty always high ground moral goal). I think my favorite, so far, is Jayne Cobb, played by Adam Baldwin. He is just so stupid and idiotic...

Only about half way through so far, but Objects in Space is one of the best 45 minutes of TV that I've seen for a while. I really like the excentric character that Richard Brooks (Law & Order) plays, Jubal Early.

And now, there is talk of a Second Season in a very unique delivery method (PPV, computer download, or monthly DVD), including HD. Very cool. Of couse, there are all sorts of fan sites.

Hacked PSP

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 04:08:00 +0000

Well, I finally risked running the firmware downgrader (to 1.50) on my Sony PSP tonight (you have to have a 2.50 or 2.60 firmware unit with the proper PCB, and you have to have an older copy of GTA UMD). It was a bit scary, given the early signs of lots of people "bricking" their units, but they have most of that all worked out now. Once you are back to 1.50 firmware, you can run all sorts of kernel access mode homebrew games, emulators, and applications (including a universal remote for home entertainment systems!). Once this is done, you still need to be able to run 2.71 firmware to be able to play newer games, so they have a "DevHook" that you can run under 1.50, to bootstrap 2.71 firmware (which also has internet browser, RSS feeds, and PCTV).

Even though I don't condone piracy of these UMD's, there are ways to copy the UMD, compress it and store it on the memory stick, and then play them under this 1.50 firmware. This would be nicer than dragging around all the disks, and should be faster and use less battery. I need to see how big the compressed programs are.

Vacation Property

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:05:00 +0000

I really would like to try to find about 5 acres of nice mountain property (around Cascade, Lowman or Garden Valley) to build a nice steel shed storage for our RV and to camp on. Plus, the way property is going in Idaho, it would probably be a great investment. Eventually, maybe even have enough money to build a 1500 ft^2 cabin or something. Unfortunately, property values have skyrocketted in the last 5 years as much in the hills as they have around Boise (more even). Plus, my stock investing prowes leaves much to be desired, and I have some Intel options that are way under water right now, as are some Ford options. Email me and I'll tell you what I'm thinking about investing in next so you can be sure to sell all your interests in it (LOL).

We found a nice spot up by Cascade in Whispering Pines Subdivision (5 acres for $158k) with power, phone and septic approved, but damn that is a lot of money. Also found something in Murray Creek, just South East of Smith's Ferry, ID. And we can't build a shed/garage for the RV on either property before building a house. And you can't write off the interest on a land loan as a second home unless it is secured by a home (essentially you have to have a house on the property to deduct the interest). So, I really need to have Intel hit $25 before my January 2007 options run out, then I just buy the land and mortgage a house to be built on it.

Update (10/26): We just made an offer (and it was accepted) on a 1.57 acre piece of property (Lot 19 in Whispering Pines), near the one we had been looking at! We close November 20th.

XBox 360

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 03:37:00 +0000

Finally broke down and picked up an Xbox 360 Premium system for $399 today. Happy birthday to me (my wife said she could get one for my birthday, but I figured I'd just wait...then changed my mind). There were some sales on the wireless controller today for $39 as well, so picked up two more of those. Also, got Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, which is a pretty good/complex tactical shooter, Project Gotham Racing 3, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Topspin 2. Also already bought some Microsoft XBox Live Arcade games (like Zuma) for the wife...uh...yeah...I don't play those sort of games...

What I really want, though, is Burnout Revenge. There is something so visceral about that game. Yes, it isn't a realistic race sim, but the speed seems so real, and there is a really good fealing about crashing into those other racers in the face of oncoming traffic. I never thought I would like this game series, but I have...a lot.

The 360 sure does get hot in my audio cabinet, and I'm going to have to get a temp-sensor fan to put on the back of the cabinet to help out (it has always been a problem, but the 360 really puts it over the top). I also really miss not being able to play all the games from the HDD, like I do on my current XBox with the mod, though it is nice to have the 360 power up from the wireless controllers. The XBox 360 media streaming is extremely limited on the audio formats that are supported, and even WORSE on what is supported for video. My Sony PSP will plug into the 360 and detect through the USB, but you can't share video files...just audio. Not sure how to copy stuff between the two.

For the most part, I do like the 360 dashboard and the Live features. The demo downloads are a pretty good way to push stuff, though I wish they had a way to que the download and just trickle stream it while you played and did other things (or at least an option to "power off when done" option). Some of these downloads are >600MB. I think the Xbox Live! Marketplace is an awesome idea. There are some very reasonably priced games that are pretty fun there, and it is a pretty cool way to showcase some new developer talent, without going for a full blown published game.

Update 12/3/06: Well, I've been playing 360 for almost 9 months now, and while I still have my original XBox hooked up in my living room to watch all sorts of movies and use the great XBMC, I rarely play many games on it anymore (which is a shame, because I LOVE having the games on the HDD, and there are a BUNCH I still need to play: Fable, CoD, Mercenaries, Republic Commando, Strangers Wrath, Xmen Legends I & II, Black Hawk Down, KotOR II, Van Helsing, XIII, Rothers in Arms, Psychonauts, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory, Men of Valor, Mech Assault 2, Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City...wow). Anyway, we have Lego Star Wars II for the 360, but the other day, my son wanted to play Lego Star Wars I. So, I started up the old XBox and got the game rolling for him. I was sort of like "ewww...why is that so jaggie and why isn't it widescreen?" I was pretty sure it had been widescreen, but I guess not, and the picture was very jaggie and not anti-aliased. Well, I remembered that they had finally gotten the Backward Compatibility updated to include Lego Star Wars on the 360. So, I popped it in and took a look, since it is suppose to allow the game to render in full res on the 360 (1080i on my setup). I started both the original and the new 360 up (after updating the 360 with a patch for the game). Took a look in the opening area, and was amazed at how much better it looks in the 360. I tried getting some snap shots on my camera (sorry, the quality isn't very good, and I only am showing a small portion of the screen here, but it should convey the general difference in the games). Note mostly the table edges, the stool in the background, the details on Qui Gon Jinn, and the rear wall edge. The original has obvious jaggies, while the new 360 has significantly better anti-aliasing (as well as higher resolution to begin with). The photo is sort of washed out and blurry, but that is just the light conditions, and is an artifact of me just snapping some quick shots. It looks better than that on both platforms, but I had to turn off the flash to keep it from reflecting in the TV screen. Too bad it still doesn't work with Psychonauts, Black Hawk Down, Van Helsing, XMen Lgends I & II, Brothers in Arms, or a number of other original XBox games.

Original XBox in 480p	XBox 360 in 1080i

Sony PSP

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:47:00 +0000

I picked up a Sony PSP while I was in Singapore this last time. I screwed myself out of S$30 on the deal arguing over price (had it at S$625 at one point for the ceramic white value pack, 1GB Pro Duo, 3 games, hard case, screen protector and car charger). After reviewing the price on some of the games, I probably could have done about that well putting the whole thing together from Ebay (probably a little bit more with S&H and some used games), but then I wouldn't have been able to play it on the plane on the way back, and also I got to take a look at the screen before buying it to check for dead/stuck pixels. Ended up getting it all for about US$405. Mine has 2 little stuck red pixels on the right side that you can only see when the screen is black. I'm going to try to run the stuck pixel burn in flasher movie a couple times and see if it will clear them, but even if it doesn't, it is pretty good.

I'm VERY amazed with how good the screen looks. And while a lot of people seem to complain about the poor battery life, I was very amazed with the 5+ hour life I seemed to get out of it, even with the screen brightness up to max (and especially considering you are powering that beautiful 480x272 screen and the UMD drive, that seems pretty amazing to me out of the 3.6v 1800mah battery). The white ceramic unit I got is very clean and has very nice lines. It feels solid and fits quite nicely in my hands. The screen does seem to pull finger prints out of thin air, no matter how careful you are, but they clean up nice. I also got a screen protector, but that seems like a dumb gimick, since it is very hard to put it on without getting minor bubbles in it and doesn't seem to help the glare too much. Also, you can buy replacement face plates (including the screen) for under US$35, so I'll probably just do that.

The wireless seems to work pretty well (only 802.11b, but supports WEP and WPA and works just fine with my home wireless network on WPA TKIP and worked very well in the airport lounges on autoscan). Web browsing is a little tough with the screen realestate being pretty small, but it is better than my Blackberry mMode. Some extensive sites were rough and fill up the cache fast (default is 512KB, but I kicked that up to 1MB and most seem to load). Some have too many graphic forms that fill the page and give very little readable space, but the more simple pages were VERY easy to read news and follow links and stuff.

Movies and MP3 playback is very good, and I've even encoded a couple DVD's and TV shows to the MPEG4 format and placed it on the PSP (I'm going to be going through Flash memory VERY fast at this rate, and I already ordered a 2GB Pro Duo for $89 to supplement my 1GB). A pretty good encoder for the PSP is PSP Video 9, and works well. In most cases, you can get a very good widescreen encode with very little compression loss and good audio at just under 200MB/hour with the MPEG-4 AVC codec support, though it takes my P4-3GHz about 20 minutes/hour to encode.

I also picked up GTA for it, so I can Hack it, of course. There is a save game exploit that gives you access to a boot loader that allows you to run homebrew software, as well as up clock the PSP dual core CPU from 250MHz to 333MHz (this was the original planned speed, but I guess Sony dropped it down to 250MHz due to power consumption). One of the coolest little hacks is a wireless remote control function to control all sorts of home devices from your PSP. I need to get some of the emulators up and running and see how NES, SNES and GameBoyColor ROMS play on this.

I also am planning to get an additional replacement 2600mah battery or maybe even one of the 8in1 Game Grips that adapts the PSP's memory stick pro duo to SD/MMC/CF/MD/MS flash support and has additional standard 4xAA battery slots. Also, there are some really great looking replacement faceplates that look very nice, and come with replacement screens. For ~$6 each ($30 for a 5 pack from Divineo, I'm not sure why you would even bother with screen protectors...

Forgeed ubout et

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 14:36:00 +0000

Yes, that was my lame attempt to speak New York Italian. Anyway, I'm watching (finally) the acclaimed series, Sopranos from HBO on DVD right now. So far, I love it. I'm not sure why, but I love the characters, and I love how completely two sided all the stories can sell to you (on one hand, Tony is a murdering gangster, and he is trying to reconcile all that with a 21st Century family man...on one hand, he is a murdering gangster, and on the other, he is a man with feelings and seeing a shrink...lol).

Drive and Network Bandwidth

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 07:16:00 +0000

Spent some time bench marking some of my network file transfers and disk speeds. I'm really a little disappointed that Coolmax decided to only include an ATA-33 speed drive controller in that NAS enclosure. It really makes it almost useless for good speed transfers. It is only roughly 1/20th the speed of a local SATA-150 drive (granted, the 100Base TX network would limit it far before it got to that, but still, you could have over tripled the performance with an ATA-100 controller over a 100Base TX network, and the USB 2.0 480Mb/sec is basically wasted on this unit), and only about 1/13th the speed of a typical PATA-133 local drive. When you start talking video, that is getting pretty slow (only marginally faster than typical 54Mb 802.11g WiFi connections).

I may have to think about getting one of the Thecus 2100 Yes NAS with twin gigabit ethernet and dual SATA-150 drive support for some blinding fast network file support. But it costs $350, just for the bare enclosure...

I also took some time to create a RAM Drive and test that bandwidth. I chose a Windows XP compatible driver from SuperSpeed, and it is only a demo version.

Benchmarked Data Bandwidth Comparisons

Device	File System	Size (GB)	Interface	Cache (MB)	Speed (RPM)	Access Time (ms)	Sustained Read (MB/s)	Sustained Write (MB/s)
PC3200 CL3.0-3-3-8 DDR1 DRAM	RAM	2GB	Dual Channel	-	-	-	2584	2584
SuperSpeed RAM Drive Plus	RAM	1.2GB	Dual Channel PC3200	-	-	-	966	975
1000Base T	1000Base T	RAM	TCP/IP	-	-	0.3	54	54
100Base TX	100Base TX	RAM	TCP/IP	-	-	0.3	10	10
802.11g WiFi	54Mb/sec 802.11g	RAM	TCP/IP	-	-	1.7	2.3	2.3
Maxtor 6Y250M0	Local NTFS	250	SATA-150 RAID-0	8	7200	7	116	89
Maxtor 6Y200M0	Local NTFS	200	SATA-150 RAID-1	8	7200	7	90	84
Maxtor 6Y200M0	Local NTFS	200	SATA-150	8	7200	7	57	57
Maxtor 6Y200P0	Local NTFS	200	PATA-133	8	7200	7	41	38
Maxtor 6Y200M0	1000Base T NTFS	200	SATA-150	8	7200	7	37	34
Toshiba 20GB 2.5"	Local NTFS	20	PATA-33	0.5	5400	18	16	6
Maxtor 6Y200M0	100Base TX NTFS	200	SATA-150	8	7200	7	9	6
Coolmax CN-550 Seagate 9Y704G Barracuda	100Base TX FAT32 NAS	250	PATA-33	8	7200	7	3.1	3.0
Coolmax CN-550 IBM DeskStar DTLA-307030	100Base TX FAT32 NAS	30	PATA-33	2	7200	7	3.1	2.9

data above was taken with Sandra SiSoft 2005 SR3, and verified with raw file transfers.

Networking "stuff"

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 18:03:00 +0000

I have always been fascinated by the potential and cool-ness of being able to network basic devices throughout the house. From hacked Tivo units to hacked Xbox consoles. Hacked Linksys wireless routers (versions identified) running embedded Linux, to HTPC units and NAS (Network Attached Storage). All of this, in addition to normal PC's, make it very easy to share/access information and data all through the house.

Well, I am going to try cracking my Linksys WRT54GS version 1.0 wireless router open and putting a hacked bios on it to enable all sorts of cool features (like making it able to be a wireless bridge/access point, boosting the power 300% for better connection, etc.). HyperWRT seems to be about the best open source BIOS right now for what I want (again, only works on Version 1.0-4.0 boxes...if your WRT54GS Serial number starts with CGN7 then you have a version 5.0, and Linksys has moved to the closed VxWorks BIOS rather than Linux and it won't work.

I also just bought a very interesting product, a Coolmax CN-550 NAS case that allows you to put/manage a UATA hard drive on your network and access it from anywhere on your network. It only supports single PATA drives and network speeds are only up to 100Mb, but it is cheap, has true NAS, FTP and TCP/IP web management as well as temp controlled fan and HDD spin down to keep it cool and quiet. A good review with more detailed info is also available.

Fictional Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff) — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 07:13:00 +0000

I have read quite a lot of books, and tend to lean toward the Sci-Fi end of the spectrum (Star Wars, Battle Tech, Issac Asimove, etc.), but also love many modern political thrillers and pretty much anything by Tom Clancy. But I have also tried a couple fantasy books recently, and Terry Brooks "Shannara" tales are ok, along with the much read "Lord of the Rings" and R.A. Salvatore's tales of the drow (Icewindale and such) are pretty good. But on some recommendations, I picked up "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin. Reviews were very positive about how good his books were and how complex and filled with great human motivations and political intrigue. Well, I'm almost done with it (but there are 3 more books in this "Song of Ice and Fire" line), and I have to say, it is a very good read with very good character and plot development as well as detailed and complex motives and political maneuvering. Worth a read, if you are looking for something new.

Ha! There, something that isn't electronic or computer/gadget related!