Archive for General
08.19.06
Posted in General at 2:50 am by jw
It took longer than I expected, but my PC is up and running again with a new water pump and a whole new cooling system to go with it. Was fun putting together a system from parts rather than just using a kit like I did last time.
Yeah, I’m kinda proud of it. It’s got half inch piping through it, a 150gph pump, CPU block, GPU block, external radiator (the black blob attached to the glowing blue fan on the back of the case) and internal reservoir (the green blob in the centre of the case). I got some fun UV reactive coolant and the side panel fan has a fairly strong UV light on the back of it which makes the whole coolant glow. You can even see the coolant in the CPU block glowing away happily in the top left of the case!
Now, the cooling performance is interesting – idle temperature for the CPU is about 30 degrees (C) and it goes up to about 40 degrees under load. This is actually a fraction higher than the air cooled temperatures but the real difference is on the GPU which used to go to 80 or 90 degrees under load but now has the same temperature as the CPU! I’m really not complaining about a fifty degree drop in GPU temperature.
One thing I did find about setting up the water cooling is the value of clamps on all the hose connections. When I first plugged everything together (outside the case, fortunately), the whole thing leaked like a sieve. A few cable ties later (the glowing yellow bands on the hoses) and everything was incredibly watertight – the real advantage of thick silicone hosing. The additional cable ties around the pipes are to prevent kinking, as well as they look pretty good under UV light.
In the end, I’m pretty happy with the outcome. The cooling performance is far better than the old quarter inch kit system I had and with the GPU block I’ve been able to run with far less fan noise in the system. The biggest downside is the fact that there’s really barely any room in the case now because the hoses and reservoir take up pretty much all the available space. I guess that’s the price you pay for a fun water-cooled PC.
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08.04.06
Posted in General at 8:57 am by jw
I finally broke down in my personal dislike for console gaming last weekend and went out to WalMart to get a PS2. The rationale was pretty simple – my wife wanted to play console games like Sonic, which she apparently enjoyed as a kid, and consoles really aren’t that expensive. The decision process on which console to get was a lot more involved, and was hampered by the fact that we both had different things we wanted out of the machines. In the end, our list looked something like this:
PS2
- Excellent library of games (including the FF series for me!)
- Significantly behind the leading edge (XBox and X360)
- Cheap
- Well supported by mod chips for if and when we move back to Australia
- No HDTV (480p doesn’t count, really)
XBox
- Good game library
- Better graphics than PS2, worse than X360
- Relatively cheap, but only available second hand or refurbished
- Extremely well supported by mod chips and third party mods (it’s just a PC after all)
- Some HDTV (720p mostly)
X360
- Limited game library and limited backward compatibility
- Very strong leader in its generation
- Expensive (no way I want a core system)
- No mod chips yet, and I really do need these.
- Excellent HDTV support
Wait for a PS3
- $600??!? You’re kidding… I’d buy a PC for that.
So, weighing all that up we ended up going for a PS2 with the intention of looking closely at the X360 once the PS3 comes out and price adjustments happen. I’m still amazed by how small the PS2 actually is – it really looks like a slightly oversized CD walkman.
As you may have guessed, I’m having fun playing the FF series now and my wife has finished the Ice Age 2 game and is looking to play a Wallace and Grommit game next. She’s promised to look at FF and Kingdom Hearts sometime in the future but I think she’s holding off because she knows I want her to look at them and somehow hates it when I’m right about the games she’ll enjoy (her logic is really weird sometimes, of course I know what she likes after being married seven years).
In any case, the PS2 has reinforced my belief that PC gaming isn’t going away and that it offers a viable platform for the future despite console fans crowing over its death with vapid regularity. You really can’t beat a keyboard/mouse interface for a whole class of games (RTS/MMOG) and the incremental upgrade process you can use in PCs really makes them much more powerful in the long run.
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07.13.06
Posted in General at 4:51 pm by jw
Well, not exactly slacking, but been pretty busy. As you can probably see in my gallery we’ve been travelling up north to visit friends in Portland. Was a fun trip, with a day and a half driving up there via I-5, four days travelling around and seeing the area and then three days returning via Mt Hood, Crater Lake, US-101 and US-1 which was a fantastic tour of the area.
While in Portland I also managed to learn a lot about MythTV while helping Dave install it for his home DVR project. I actually like it so much I think I’ll be converting my HTPC into a MythTV box as soon as I get back to Pittsburgh and perhaps a little more settled.
Working on finishing up SiN:Emergence and HL2:Episode 1 before the next episodes come out. Silly EQ2 raiding is taking up too much of my free time to finish all my other gaming projects!
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06.13.06
Posted in General at 7:31 pm by jw
Finished reading Beyond Fear last night – a very interesting book that anyone with an interest in their own security should read, and probably reread at regular intervals. Bruce is one of the foremost computer security experts in the world, with his canonical work Applied Crytopgraphy as one of the prime texts for any research in the area, and has applied the lessons learned in defending computer systems into the wider world of threat analysis, defense and countermeasures in a very readable and understandable manner.
The most interesting aspect, of course, is the discussion of defense against terrorism and what the best options are. It turns out that under analysis, most of the things we’re doing are wrong and probably reducing the security of our nations while the things we were already doing before 9/11 were the ones that have the most benefit in terms of discouraging terrorism. Now, that’s a huge paraphrase so I advise you to read the book and prove me wrong, but a some good examples are the following:
Consider what terrorism is about – the destruction of the morale of a target nation. We now have people reminding us continuously how much at risk we are of terror attacks and how much privicy and freedoms we need to give up to ensure our future safety. I’d consider that a nation well and truly terrorized, wouldn’t you? Compare this to the British response to decades of terrorism from the IRA – the media praised the even tempered responses from the government and certainly avoided the focus on death and destruction, definitely something the US media has absolutely no clue how to do.
Consider what happened on 9/11. The terrorists took several trial runs to make sure they could get on the planes unhindered. No amount of screening can avoid this sort of penetration testing – they can simply try with a new set of people until they find ways that work. This isn’t to say screening is bad, but it really doesn’t mitigate the risk of a determined terrorist. What it does do however is create large groups of people outside a security checkpoint – a very ripe target indeed for a terrorist wanting to cause a major amount of panic and complete loss of faith in the system. I can only dread the government response to that sort of attack – security checkpoints before the security checkpoints?
Consider that terrorism is rare. Astonishingly rare. You have more chance of dying from a bee sting than a terror attack. This includes the chance of terrorists getting nuclear weapons. Why are we spending $40 billion per year on terrorism prevention (that doesn’t include the Iraq war) and not on beesting prevention? The obvious answer is people don’t understand risks and so politicians are forced to act on something that is ultimately not an appreciable risk.
Consider the root causes of terrorism against a state – overwhelming negative sentiment leading to popular support of would-be attackers. America has successfully made itself less popular than ever before in history. While no one “deserves” a terror attack, you certainly don’t let your daughters walk alone in a dark alley wearing a miniskirt and then wonder why the nastier elements in society take advantage of her, why should international politics be different?
Consider that people would go to schools and drive their children home when the DC snipers were shooting people and yet the chances of dying in a car accident were significantly higher than being shot by a sniper.
Consider that people drive from fear of flying when driving is a much higher risk per passenger mile.
Entertaining isn’t it? And that’s only the start of what’s in the book, because the book goes on and discusses what has actually gone right in the “war on terror”, how we can make things better and how to become more informed on security risks as a whole and what they really mean to us.
Get the book. It’s well worth the $25 if you are remotely interested in your security.
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05.11.06
Posted in General at 4:46 am by jw
The temporary move to San Jose is pretty much complete now. We have our computers all working in the 2nd bedroom and the hotel staff were nice enough to pull all the extra beds out of there so we have a lot of room to spread out, at least in the one room. Back on EQ2 again and should be caught up on all the progress we missed in the 2 weeks we were gone pretty soon now.
My new toy of the week is a mini-pc from AOpen which I managed to get through the purchasing department (ie wife) to replace the old Linux box we left behind in Pittsburgh. It really is a great little machine – 1.5 GHz Celeron, 1G DDR2 memory, 30G HDD with 250G external USB2 drive attached, gigabit ethernet, slot loading DVD/CDRW and all for just under $500. Honestly it’s pretty hard to complain about that sort of value – especially when it comes in a tiny little 6†square, 2†tall case. It’s really the perfect headless Linux box!
As expected, Gentoo went smoothly onto the machine and it compiled and ran in no time compared to my old 650MHz Duron box. I definitely love that distribution. Nothing like being able to compile your entire system from scratch specifically optimized for your CPU with a few simple “emerge†commands. Guess that’s the geek factor for you.
Nothing much else new (thankfully – not much time for anything else new). Still working on a way to get an externally visible IP address for stuff like custom web serving and MUD/MOO hosting – probably going to go with a VPS system from DEHE (who are a subsiduary of Solidhost, my current provider) so I can play around to my heart’s content!
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