The 3870 Radeon is Awesome!

After using the Radeon 3870 for about two weeks now, I am ready to call it stable. Not once have I experienced any hiccups in performance. The card has been running Folding@Home gpu when I am not playing games, and has completed about 8 work units flawlessly. I love getting new hardware, but I love when it actually works right the first time.

Trying something different

Starting with this post, I will try to make adding content to my blog a daily ritual. This will most likely mean smaller tidbits, but hopefully not any less informative. Undoubtedly some days will just be crap, when in my world nothing of any consequence happened that I should report about. None the less I will try to keep the boring junk to a small margin. Thanks for reading my blog.

Vmex Source map decompiler

I have fun using Valve's Hammer map editing tool. But sometimes I am at a loss when it comes to how to make the level more interactive. That's where the vmex map decompiler comes in handy. I can find an example in an already compiled map, decompile it, and copy the parts I need. This is really useful if you want to create Portal maps, but don't want to screw around making super complex doors, ball launcher/catcher systems, or super-colliding-super-buttons. Here's a link to the Valve software wiki page.

Synergy Mod for Source games

Last night I downloaded a mod for Half Life 2 called synergy. Basically what it does is it allows you to play Half Life 2, HL2 episode 1, and HL2 Episode 2 cooperatively online with friends. Why blast zombies by yourself when you can have twice as much firepower with a friend? It is also supposed to be able to play other Half Life 2 mods across the internet as well, but I haven't tried this yet. It runs on Steam and you need to have HL2 or other Source engine games to play it. So, if you have Half Life 2 and this sounds like fun to you, go to http://synergymod.net/ and download right away.

Out with the proprietary, in with the open-source

As you may or may not be aware, many Internet service providers are now imposing monthly bandwidth caps on their customers. Comcast is probably the company responsible for starting this practice on a large scale, and many other ISPs followed suit. You would be hard-pressed to find an ISP that does not do this now. Sadly, my ISP is doing this too. Even worse, my ISP is a small town local business and they have to pay someone else for the utilities, thus their cost of operation is higher, meaning my bandwidth is capped at 15 gigabytes a month. After being billed for approximately 17 gigabytes over the limit last month, I have decided that keeping an eye on my own bandwith would be a great idea.
I headed over to dd-wrt.com to grab myself some a copy of the latest open-source router firmware. Instead of going with the feature-limited proprietary Linksys firmware, which comes with the router, I flashed the dd-wrt firmware onto my Asus WGL-520GU wireless router. Trying to figure out which version I needed was no so easy, but no the less I was able to obtain the correct firmware. Flashing the firmware requires the Asus firmware restore utility, and under Windows 7 or Vista needs to be run as administrator with the firewall disabled.
After flashing the firmware, changing the settings was a simple matter of copy and past from my old router. The dd-wrt firmware has the bandwidth monitoring feature, which was really all that I was after. The feature gives you graphs to show you how much bandwidth you've used in the month and on what days.
If you are like me and you are tired of dealing with limited router firmware, download a version of dd-wrt and try it out because it is free. Before attempting this however, you should read the instructions and be aware that a screw-up can brick your router.

New graphics card... for FREE

One of my first posts on this blog was about upgrades. I stated at that time that I would probably never upgrade my current computer. Well that turned out to be totally not true, as thus far I have added a new hard drive, a USB PCI add-in card, case lights, a new power supply, and now a new graphics card. Or to be more precise an old graphics card, which a friend had swapped out for a newer part. In the summer of 2008 we got together and assembled a nice gaming computer with a Radeon 3870 graphics card and an Intel Q6600 quad core. Unfortunatley for him the machine was plagued with problems from the start. The first suspect that was eliminated was the graphics card, which we suspected to be faulty, due to frequent BSODs, even with updated drivers. He replaced the card with a newer 4850 Radeon. The computer still doesn't work but that will be another blog post.
I requested the card from him, and without hesitation he mailed it to me. In about a week the card appeared on my doorstep, in tact and nicely nestled in packing peanuts. The install went smoothly on both Windows 7 and Windows XP. The hardware install even forced me to clean up some wiring in my case, as it seems somewhat neater now. The pre-release drivers for Windows 7 work great even with my older games. The card has passed several 6 hours GPU Folding at home session without pause. No BSOD, no crashes. As well as Folding at home, the card has also performed smoothly through several run-thoughs of Source SDK stress test. At 1680x1050 resolution with all options maxed, the 3870 gave a result of 51 frames per second average.
I would not have normally purchased a video card upgrade, but when its free, I can't argue with upgrades.

Snackr RSS reader makes a sweet treat

I love to use RSS feeds to keep tabs on the latest posts form my favorite sites. For those who don't know what RSS is, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It's its the little orange symbol that appears in the corner of your address bar. When you subscribe to an RSS feed with a reader, the feeds automatically update when new articles are posted on that website. For example, if I create a new post on this blog, your RSS reader will update and show your a short version of the post and then you click to see the whole thing. The advantage of using RSS is that you can have all the new articles for your favorite websites all in one place.
Anyways, Snackr is a reader that resides on your desktop and acts like a stock market ticker and scrolls little bits of each article across the bar. Unlike Windows Vista's built in RSS gadget, Snackr runs on its own. It is built on the Adobe AIR platform, which you must install to use Snackr. Snackr is best of all simple to use and can be placed on any edge of your screen. It also runs on Macintosh.
Get it for yourself. Its free.

WireShark Portable

I personally love Portable Apps. Portable apps is a program which runs from a USB thumb drive and launches other portable programs such as Firefox or Open Office. But my interest peaked when I saw a portable version of Wireshark. Hacks to go anyone?

Sony Mylo is back from Repair Center

After sending my Sony Mylo back to the repair center a few weeks ago, I have finally received my replacement unit. I am delighted to say that the new unit is free of stuck pixels and seems to perform just as well as the old one.
What is your favorite device to use? Write a comment.

Upgrade for my computer....Finally!

Today I went to the Circuit City GOB (going out of business) sale. As I expected the sales were not all that great. Most of the items were 10% off from Circuit City's 50% higher than normal price. Ooh, Ahh. I saw there a terabyte internal SATA hard drive for ......drum roll please.......$219. Boo-hiss. What a ripoff. That does not mean I did not buy anything from Circuit City. I ended up buying the Half Life 2 Episode pack for $8.99. Not a bad deal considering it costs more than that on Steam.
After going and seeing the lame selection of overpriced items at Circuit City, I needed to go to Best Buy to remind myself how much fun it is to go to big box electronic stores. I spotted a Seagate 1TB hard drive there which I purchased. This is certainly a better price for a 1TB hard drive than the CC price. What will I do with that much space? Maybe I will reinstall my Windows 7 beta to that drive. This is a great upgrade now that I have a better power supply. W00t. I will write later on these two once I get around to installing them.

Windows 7 is great, possibly the best Windows yet

Prior to this year, I have never beta tested any operating systems, nor have I been an early adopter of a Windows operating system. That might all have to change now. I waited months to get this beta, since I began to hear about it in November of 2008. I am not in any way disappointed with the Windows 7 beta, build 7000.
The first thing that strikes me about the new OS, is the taskbar. This new taskbar is like a fusion of the windows Vista taskbar and the Mac OS dock. Instead of having launch icons and buttons for open programs, they are all one. Open a program from the taskbar and the icon lights up. No more tiny quicklaunch icons! The once eye candy window preview is now finally useful. Now that one taskbar icon can represent several windows (a browser window with a download window). Hover over the icon and the preview pops up then pick which window you want. Now you can unclutter your desktop by putting icons for you favorite programs in the taskbar. This does not mean that you should clutter your desktop with junk that you may download! (You should make a folder in My Documents for downloads).
Windows 7 makes it easy to use multiple monitiors, too. Press the Windows logo key and P and a small window pops up with a few options. One click you can change the configuration of your multiple monitor setup. Sure, it says projector but, thats probably what the majority of people operating a secondary display are using. All you have to do is set up your multi-monitor configuration once, then use this key combo when you want to turn enable or disable one of the monitors (for gaming or whatever).
So far I have installed two games under Windows 7. Using Steam, I installed Portal. Portal does not run nearly as smoothly as I like, most likely because of my graphics card and the high detail settings. The second game I installed, was Empire Earth. It seems to play just as well as when I run the game under XP. I have all settings turned to high and the resolution at 1680x1050.
This is about the extent to which I have used Windows 7, so I will report more on it later when I get to use it more extensively.

Traumhaus project (preview)

I've been working on a project for the German class that I am taking... and here is a preview. It is a house built to run in Portal. I have spent over 20 hours in the Hammer editor working on this project. Click the downloads link and try it today. Tell me what you think about it. However this is only a preview and is not nearly as detailed as the final version will be. Installation intructions are included in the .zip package. Portal is required to play this map.

New World Internet Speed Record

I have now just broke the world record for the fastest internet. The new record is 310,765,120 MB/s. Here is some photographic evidence of this happening.
Steam is downloading and update which took approximately 1.8 ms at this speed. Since then I have downloaded over 120 movies in Blu-Ray quality in little over two minutes. My next project will be to make a backup of all the torrents available at thepiratebay.com.

Kaspersky Internet Security follow-up

After deploying the Kaspersky Internet security (KIS) suite across my entire home network, I am now ready to give it a more thorough review. I use it six computers at my house and I have little issue with it. The one feature I like about it is that you can specify and update location other than the official Kaspersky update server. The suite tends to have update every few hours and these update are often a few megabytes in size. I use my home server to download the updates, then all the other computers download the updates from it.
In the initial setup the program presents you with a choice of security level. You can choose permissive or restrictive, the latter of which I chose for my computer. I actually had to switch to permissive recently, because I found the frequent prompts to be more annoying than Windows Vista UAC. During the install process of any piece of software, KIS would prompt anywhere from 1 to 5 times to allow or deny a certain reg key or file. When I tried to run one of my games, KIS detected the game as a keylogger. Huh? What? I had to make each game a trusted application so KIS wouldnot annoy me everytime I try to run a game. Occasionally a virus database will corrupt which is fixed simply with a program update.
All complains aside, the security suite is very good. Ever since KIS has been on my computer, I have now had any security problems whatsoever. The suite's scanner always come up negative for malware, Spybot S&D also shows negative for malware.
I would highly recommend KIS for anyone looking for a security suite, or if you are fed up with your current one.

Sony Mylo Com-2

This year I did in fact receive an electronic present, the Sony Mylo Com-2. The Mylo is what Sony calls a "personal communicator". At first glance most people would assume it is a cell phone. This is not the case, however. In actuality it is a media player with Wi-Fi and messenger functionality. The Mylo features Skype, allowing you to call your friends who use Skype or call ordinary phones. With this version of the Mylo, Skype features file sending, so you can send your friends pictures that you took with the Mylo's built in 1.3 megapixel camera. In addition to Skype, the device features Yahoo messenger, AOL messenger, and Google talk messenger.
One of my favorite features is the built in RSS reader. I use it to subscribe to and download podcasts from the Internet. I no longer need to connect it to a computer to get my podcasts. The Mylo now supports widgets as well. I like the Shoutcast widget for streaming music from the Internet. I also use the Gmail notifier, the Accuweather widget, and the Google search widget. The Sony Mylo website has a number of widgets and games available for download, although the number of widgets is only about 30.
The Mylo communicator has a built in web browser which supports Flash. This is quite an improvement over the com-1 Mylo which rendered most web pages in an unusable format. Browsing the web on the Com-2 is quite doable, but is somewhat slow. Using the Com-2's touch screen, you can scroll the web page by dragging up or down in a similar fassion to the iPhone. Sometimes this motion can yield undesired results, such as highlighting everything on the page, or clicking on random links.
I am quite satisfied with the Sony Mylo Com-2 as an all around internet device and as a media player. Though I do like the Mylo, it is not without fault. I had to rebox the device, and I am in the process of getting a replacement unit from Sony. The unit I received had a pixel stuck in white on the display. This is not a huge deal, but it was annoying when watching video with black scenes.
I will post my unboxing video later along with more details at a later time.