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Shoutout to the Leatherman Squirt PS4
Well this is one of the few gizmos that Alex finds useful. We have all manor of Leatherman multi-tools though out the house but the Leatherman Squirt PS4 ($26 at Amazon depending on the store) is the one that gets the most use just because it is tiny.
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Haswell Cube and Mini Tower
For the bigger builds, we have two: Haswell Cube. This is based on the mini-ITX and is the fastest setup if you want a high performance double-width graphics card. Haswell Mini-Tower. This is the smallest box that can handle an overclocked dual SLI graphics card setup. This means we are moving up to the micro-ATX…
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Aquarium PC v2
Well we’ve had our aquarium running reliably for two years now. It’s been awesome. The main issue has been one of the capacitors on the graphics card blowing up. But that was actually better in mineral oil. What would have been a fire merely was the card failing. It is definitely big to have an…
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Traps building Asus H97i-plus on Antec ISK-300/150
Well, this build went so smoothly last time, I’m just amazed how out of practice I am, but to review we are putting a 4590s into this box (3GHz/3.7Ghz turbo boost, iCore 5, 4 cores, 4 threads) and here are the traps: Because of the way the AC power cable is, you do have 65mm…
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Building a Supermicro X10SRH with Norco RPC-4220
Well it isn’t like either of these have much documentation. But here are the traps: The disk arrays. There doesn’t seem to be any documentation at all about how the Norco works, but examining the box now that it is finally here, it seems to have four rows of four drives each and there is…
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Cyber Monday
I really wasn’t ready for Black Friday, but gearing up for Cyber Monday, I’m prepared. The main thing is not to buy junk but to get some decent deals on really great hardware. Here are some highlights: Apple MacBook Pro 15” Retina with 2.5GHz, 750M, 512GB SSD. I love the 13” MacBook Pro Retina for…
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4K gaming requires nVidia 980 slip
Well, Cyber Monday is nearly here and while I haven’t finished the post of Haswell processors, given that a Haswell Cube would be all about gaming, its a good question to ask about monitors and displays. Right now the state of the art is: 1080p (aka 1920×1080, aka HD). Not surprisingly the most mature, you…
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AppleTV Activates stink!
Argh. With everything so integrated in Apple, it really is amazing the media companies have managed to make the user experience so awful. Even though we are a Comcast subscriber, every channel on AppleTv requires its own randomly different activation code and it require no less than two logons. First you have to logon to…
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Haswell everywhere…what to build by form factor
I seem to be on a roll here on DIY computer recommendations, so to fill the line out, I’ll add the final two desktop computers to posts and everyone should be ready for Black Friday. One good thing about these comparisons is that Haswell is the same across desktop and mobile lines, so a 1.5…
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File systems ZFS or btrfs
Well I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but using desktop Windows and then the Mac, there really were no choices other than NTFS and HFS. But since we are building our own file server, we can now choose the operating system and the file system. The easiest way to evaluate all this…
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Wow real reliability data and hard disk purchase analysis
I was a little surprised to see this, but Backblaze (hat tip to Anandtech) is publishing detailed information on drive failures. Up to 15% annual failure rate(?!!) on Seagates and they provide model numbers too. Interesting to see a desktop drive do very well (HGST 7K4000, $185 Amazon) at 1.4% in a data center setting…
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Black Friday for Geeks
So what’s a geek to do but drool over the Black Friday discounts and beyond. But as with all things technical, it pays a little to wonder if it is time to buy or whether you should wait for the next product cycle. Here’s a quick low down on popular (for nerds) holiday items: A…
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Cooler Gotchas
We’ve been building lots of machines lately and it seems like we have struck out twice. Both times with cooler issues and once with a lack of an SSD: We got the nice case and it says there is 65mm of clearance, the problem is the (??!!) people who designed it put the Ac power…
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Regin: Top tier espionage
Vlad told me about this and it is indeed scary what Symantec has discovered. A super sophisticated hacking tool with five layers and great ability to hide itself when it detects anti-virus programs: An advanced piece of malware, known as Regin, has been used in systematic spying campaigns against a range of international targets since…
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Grokking Snowmix
This is another amazing tool that complements gstreamer. It lets you mix audio and video feeds quickly and easily and most importantly dynamically without having to write programs. Here are some notes from the wiki, the discussion group there, but mainly by looking at the sample snowmix ini files in the Snowmix/ini directory: This doesn’t…
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Grilled Opah
Well it’s also called Hawaiian moon fish, but it’s apparently more sustainably caught than tuna. We tried this Food & Wine recipe and was really surprised how tasty the fish is. The main thing is not the sauce but a little salt and quite a bit of oil to keep it from sticking to the…
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too cool f15 strike eagle low level
Wow, Jalopnik found a GoPro dream. A low level flight through the mountains of Washington in an F15E Strike Eagle. I can remember spending hours in a simulator of that jet flying around looking for targets.
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Grokking Gstreamer
Well as I’m kind of someone who is knows how to use Play Doh trying to build the Empire State Building, but in a week or so of hacking and understanding Gstreamer. Here are some of the conclusions: Wow, this thing really has no documentation. There is a huge command reference manual, but really the…
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Linux benchmarking
Well now that we are trying new Linux machines from VMware Fusion to Zotac, it’s interesting to see how fast they really are. Phoronix seems like the top hit and their 4.x suite is available as a Debian repository sudo apt-get install phoronix-test-suite How easy is that. If you want their latest tests, then you…
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Updates on Zotac CI540 Nano and SSDs for a silent $600 desktop
Well that Zotac box is sure nice at $370. It is only 1.5GHz, but ultra quiet and we paired it with a screamer drive (the SanDisk Extreme Pro for $299) and 8GB of Crucial SO-DIMM memory for $68. The only wish is that it would have 16GB or two slots worth. So a nice simple…
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Sudoers hacking
If you are constantly have to type your password in due to a long installation (like a few hours), then here’s the trick. Add the following line with ““ sudo visudo You should use visudo so that it checks your sudoers file and makes it work, but to exempt a user from ever…
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Free certificate
Paying $200 for an SSL certificate which is really just a set of numbers does seem ridiculous. Now there is a free service for this called Let’s Encrypt (http://letsencrypt.com)
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There is happiness…Full frame A9 early 2015
The mirrorless E-mount A9 will have all the things needed to be “PRO”: Worlds fastest autofocus in normal light conditions Close to 50MP FF sensor weather sealed body Can’t wait to see this!
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Google Hangouts and Skype on Linux
Talk about mysterious, if you actually want to use this particularly on VMWare Fusion, there doesn’t seem to be much documentation: Google Hangout starts and looks to see what active /dev/video[0-9] are open. That is, if you want this to work, your webcam needs to be active or any synthetic source you create with v4l2loopback…
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Mac and iOS forgets mail passwords
This is a really annoying bug that seems to happen very regular on some systems. It looks like this has something to do with mail transport bugs and the wrong error being reported according to Stackexchange I’m running Mac OS 10.8.1 and have a (personal) Gmail and a (work) Google mail account setup inside Mail…
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Useful for DNS hacking
When you are trying to migrate DNS Servers, http://viewdns.info/dnsrecord/ is really useful. Let’s you look at what is up there so you can easily recreate it and then do the cut over. To remind everyone here is what you have to do. It’s a three step process; Figure out who the registrar is for the…
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Windows Schannel and Dark Hotel
Wow more things to worry about, but the net is : Update your Windows system now. There is a 19 year old bug found in their SChannel security layer. IBM folks discovered it and allows software you download to take control Dark Hotel. This is a targeted attack where people in Hotels get what looks…
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Lastpass vs 1Password
I’ve seen quite a few reviews of the two. I’ve been using Lastpass for the last few years and it isn’t expensive ($12) but most reviews seem to prefer 1Password. Last time I tried it it was unusable because it didn’t grok multiple users on the same site (e.g. I have 15 google.com accounts that…
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Xubuntu performance monitoring, tweeks
Well, use task manager for basic performance monitoring Here are some other things: Install chromium which is open source chrome: sudo apt-get install chromium-browser Flash for the last four sites in the world that use it sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree VLC seems way better than the native player sudo apt-get install vlc with all the…
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The registry lives on in…Linux
Well, I remember well the days of regedit horrors, but it was sure better than .ini files anywhere. Linux has followed much the same evolution going from .conf files to XML files to a binary registry. Of course with Unix, you get now one but four major ways to edit settings: dconf-editor. A graphical tool…