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Picky, Picky…
Alex is incredibly picky about his shoes. We’ve been to lots of stores and he doesn’t like anything. But, a little searching online reveals the shoe that looks the most like the one he has. He’s like Dad. Dad has been wearing the same brand, same style, same shape running shoe for 20 years. Why…
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Far Cry Mods
FarCry Mods. Well I finally got a full copy of Far Cry in anticipation of updating Calvin’s machine to a full Athlon 64 system (just waiting for the CPU right now!). A wonderful game even on a now mid-range, Athlon XP 3200+ with GeForce 5900GT card. Main issue is that it pushed the graphics card…
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Dual Core will save us
AnandTech on Intel Developers Forum Wow, this is a big deal, both AMD and Intel are going dual core. So there will two complete processors on one chip. Vanderpool Technology or VT is an upcoming feature on several processor families (including the dual core families) that allow processor emulation and/or virtualization. As explained by Intel,…
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nVidia Driver Guide
Guru3D.com Forums – Which nVIDIA Drivers Are For Your Video Card?. A great list of what drivers for your nVidia card work and which don’t.
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Great new places to shop
Always good to find some good reliable places to shop on the web. Here is my own poor man’s bizrate.com: * “Newegg.com”:http://newegg.com. Very reliable shippers. All kinds of strange PC parts. Love their invoicing system, all the reciepts include serial number so super convenient for rebates, etc. * “Zipzoomfly”:http://zipzoomfly.com. Just as reliable. Usually Newegg and…
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Mac FTP software
Mac FTP Software Applications at The Mac Orchard. “Michelle”:http://vcmba.com asked me to fix her new website. Arrghh. No mac FTP client I could find, but Cobra worked pretty well as shareware. Check out her site, its just coming up, but will be great. And, she saved me from incredible embarassment too so I owe her…
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Netcam and other wireless
This is a $600 industrial quality web cam. There are folks who are doing in rough order of what I think is interesting: Netcams These are devices that don’t need a PC to show audio/video. Unlike webcams which require a PC: * StarDot Technologies / NetCam. There are so many more cool WiFi devices that…
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Carl's electronics
Voice Changer Electronic Kit This kit is uses a Voice Modulator Chip. Wow, got the digital multimeters from Carl’s Electronics in four days. They are wonderful. Gave one to Adrian. They have lots more toys though. Another great example of a small business making good.
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Updated Guides
Some late breaking changes to the August guides are pretty relevant. For the “high-end”:https://richtong.org/guide_to_pcs/2004/09/01/high_end_system_recommendations.html systems, First, taking into account the Silentpcreview.com information, I changed some of the components in the guide to the high end particularly the power supply and the case. Switched the motherboard recommendation to the DFI Lan Party UT Nv3 250 Gb…
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Feinleib is a god!
VC MBA. Well our buddy Dave is off to business school. Makes me feel old that it is decades since I enjoyed the warm sunny Palo Alto area. Got a great URL too. Hope we can buy him lots of drinks. Good luck, Dave!
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Digital Multimeter
Carl Electronics. A great example of what the web can do, need a digital multimeter to measure things and they are $20 from Radio Shack, but a quick google search reveals this little store has the third ranked site for DMMs. Only Fluke and Agilent (two huge companies) have higher hits. Wow. $10 and I’m…
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Washington Primaries
. It’s time once again to vote. I lost my election guide, but everything is now on the Internet, if a little hard to find. Here’s the Washington State official election guide, they actually have a website called “vote.wa.gov”:http:/vote.wa.gov
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Best Video Drivers
Who would have ever thought there was going to be a bunch of debate about this, but in the world of high performance gaming, everyone tries things. “Guru3D”:http://guru3d.com is the site I use for much of this, but here’s the quick guide: * Guru3D.com Forums – Which nVIDIA Drivers Are For Your Video Card?. This…
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Guide to Silent PCs
OK, here is my first guide to Silent PCs. I’m going to change the way I do the PC guides to have essentially three guides: * High-end guide for very fast full systems that are great price/performance. These are gamer and video editing machines mainly. Basically what I like to do and it will have…
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PC Reference Sources
Ah for the days when you just read PC Magazine and that was it to find the best computer hardware and software, now its all about the web. Since I’ve been buying a bunch of PCs this month, here are the sources I’m using in stackranked order of quality IMHO. Its sad, but I basically…
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Audiotron Reloaded
I’ve had one of these “Audiotron’s”:http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/audiotron/feedback.asp forever but have never really used it much. Spent a little time hacking and realized it doesn’t work because it needs a magic user name and password to access a file share. Aargh. How is anyone supposed to remember this stuff, let alone that there is a web interface…
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IP Scanning
IP-Tools. Need to figure out what’s on my network. I should have written it down but I forgot. Here’s a tool that will scan for me. Here are some utilities: * “SoftPerfect Network Scanner”:http://www.softperfect.com/products/networkscanner/. A high google hit. Freeware and seems fast too for finding systems. * “WinPCap”:http://winpcap.polito.it/. Free network analyzer on Windows. Watch the…
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Videos on the Road
Well it used to be incredibly complicated to backup DVDs to your hard drive for those long trips with the kids. Things have gotten much easier though with: * “AutoGK”:http://autogk.net. Gordian Knot is certainly the most powerful of the utilties out there, but super hard to use. AutoGK is the simplified version. The stable release…
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PC Games Review
Ok, with Call of Duty and Ghost Recon pretty well mastered, I put games down for a couple of months, but with a new Calvin PC coming with a mid range graphics card, time to see what’s around: * “Game Rankings”:http://gamerankings.com/itemrankings/simpleratings.asp. A very neat meta site that gloms together reviews from the top web sites…
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Blackberry 7230 Resets, Won't Load
I’ve been using my 7230 faithfully for the last two years now. We got a pair when they shipped two years ago. Lately though, I’ve been having lots of trouble. The contacts won’t sync and have a strange error and the thing will randomly reinitialize itself. The Blackberry.net site is singularly useless for debugging, but…
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83(b) Elections and other trivia
Been doing a bunch of investments lately and boy am I learning more about tax and other law things. Section 83(b) election. What you have to do when you get all the restricted stock in a startup. Don’t forget to file.
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Mid-Range PC Recommendations
OK, so you don’t want to spend a mint, but get the best price/performance. In many ways, mid-range systems offer the best value. I need one to replace Calvin’s PC, so here is the recommendation. Again based on “Anandtech”:http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2177&p=1: * AMD Athlon “3200+”:http://hometheaterspot.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php?masterid=1247981&blsrt=1. This is the last of the 1MB cache system, runs at 2.0GHz…
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Symbian Handsets
With really cool Symbian apps, I need to get a Symbian phone. Interesting to see which ones you can actually buy in the US: * Symbian OS phones:. Here is the list from the horses mouth. Amazing how few Symbian phones there really are. * “Symbian by Operator”:http://www.symbian.com/operators/phoneoperators.html. A nice little application that tells you…
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High End System Recommendations
So based on the Anandtech guides, here is what I’m getting for a high end system. This is a system I’d design for video, photo and gaming. Right now, the PC I have is just too slow for video editing and rendering (takes 3 hours to render a 15 minute video, its a good machine…
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What Memory to Get?
As usual, Anandtech has done an incredible job with its “guides”:http://http://anandtech.com/guides/ to buying PCs. I agree with most of the recommendations. Right now I’m getting a high-end system for video and photo editing and printing and another mid-range system for Calvin. Calvin’s old computer is dead and that means our backup now goes to my…
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Cooler Athlon XPs
While working on Bill’s Athlon 64, I discovered there are some things you can do for hot Athlon XPs. In the same “SilentPC”:http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?p=64530 piece, but there are some utilities that allow an Athlon XP to actually halt when idle. Apparently Windows XP doesn’t do this, so you need a special little utility to do it…
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Bill's Computer Unstable
Got down to San Diego. _I know, I know, guide to Beijing/Shanghai and San Diego are coming soon._ Anyway, checked out Bill’s Athlon 64 3200+ Shuttle SN85G4 is unstable after about 5 minutes. Here’s how to diagnose. Essentially, after about 5 minutes of running flat out, the machine hard shuts down. No windows error, the…
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Campy Compact Cranks
Campy CT Cranks. These are compact cranks, so you don’t need to get three rings in the front. Great for guys like me that don’t need 53×11 big rings. They are 50/34 rings vs. 53/39, so a little lowe4r range. Also, they are lighter overall apparently too, so that is even better.
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Klein Palomino
www.cyclingnews.com news and analysis . Well, there are sure a lot of great bikes now. The Klein got a glowing review from cyclingnews.com as did the new XT system particularly the cranks.
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Off to China
Well, I’m off the China for a business trip. A quick week. Amazing number of things that you have to do: * Visa. You have to mail away for this. * Destinations: East Asia | CDC Travelers’ Health. Check here to see what shots you need. The big one for China is Hepatitis A. I…