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Sailing Simulators
If you love sailing, well then why not play a simulation on your computer. It is not like most folks have $100M to run an Americas’ Cup campaign, so here’s a quick search of what is out there: Sailing Simulator 5. Shipped in 2010 and there is a Windows demo. First hit on google, so…
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Apple owes me $44
Argh. Darn Apple Maps, they think the Washington Athletic Club is down on 5th vs the actual address on 6th. Wandered around looking for it and got a ticket 2 minutes before I got back. Was there for 15. Wow, the ever efficient revenue generation of Seattle! And there is of course no way to…
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Gamers PC Blu Ray Player Samsung SE-506 or use digital downloads only
OK, I thought I could get away without an optical drive, but it is pretty clear that PC games are still delivered this way, so I still need some way to read them. Not everything is on Steam or downloadable yet (when will that be???). You do have to suffer with things like EA’s Origin…
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Gamer PC Drivers, drivers
Well the hard part seemed to be putting the hardware together, but it is really getting the software particularly when everything is flash. Here are the steps: Download the Windows USB Installer Put in your DVD and make it Goto the ASUS site and download all the many new drivers Goto the nVidia site and…
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Cyberpower AVR vs LCD
I got a Cyberpower CP1500PFCLCD which is a pure sinewave version costing $200. It is confusing as there is also a model called CP1500AVR and CP1500AVRLCD. AVR means that it isn’t an actual sine wave, but a triangular. Not so good theoretically for modern power supplies that use PFC. If you can get away with it, the…
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The difference between a .dmg and .cdr and .sio
The difference between a .dmg file…: Apple Support Communities explains a bunch to me. Basically, if you want to get a disk image, the Mac way is called .dmg. The PC way is called .cdr or .iso (they are the same). The Apple Disk Utility has a conversion that lets you swap. Just double click on…
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Ubiquiti Unifi AP-Pro beware get 2.3.x and switch to HT40
Well that was quick, got one of these units. Supposed to be amazing on range and manageability. Has 3×3 MIMO at 2.4GBHz and 2×2 at 5GHz. Also it uses POE, so I should need a power cord. We have an old Netgear GS748TP switch and it is supposed to do power over ethernet automatically. The…
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Pretty amazing
How apple innovates. They are trying to get incremental but important things like thinness or a smart connector done. Really admire them.
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Gamer PC Fans Noiseblocker M12-S1
I’ve used the Nexus 120 SilentX fans for the last five years, but things always get better, so for quite a bit more money, you can get fans that are amazingly quiet and cool. SilentPCReview.com just updated their reviews and liked: Noiseblocker M12-S1. It is expensive at $22 a pop, but unreal quiet spinning at only…
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Yes, it booted! I'm soooo happy!
Ok, so maybe I shook some confidence, but the we got the Aquarium PC to boot for the first time. It’s been five years since I’ve built a computer and this one with its 1000 watt power supply had me a bit worried. Fire extinguisher at the ready and it worked! You can see the…
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Camera Choices post Photokina
The big Photokina show happened and had a chance to look at the Fuji X1-Pro and talk about cameras, here’s the scoop on what looks good: Big dSLR With a Canon 5D Mark II already and a big investment in Canon glass, it is hard to switch systems, but I’d say that right now, it…
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Music Keyboard for Computer
Well if you want to do composing and music, it is great to have a keyboard that plugs into your computer. Here’s what you can think about getting thanks the well named musiconmypc.com: Decide how many keys you need. A smaller 49 key will take you well into intermediate, but if you know how to…
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Samsung Vibrant SGH-959T
I don’t play with Android phones too much, but had a chance to use an older Samsun Vibrant SBH-959T. So how to upgrade it as as usual, it is complicated as heck and hackable which is wonderful. There is no recent Ice Cream Sandwich release for it, but hackers have been busy: Fully rooted T-mobile…
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Aquarium PC for Dummies
Well, we’ve been working hard on getting the kit from Puget Systems to work. It is for true experts so needlesstosay, the instructions for it are pretty unclear as is the parts list and so forth, so here is a guide for dummies who want to build from it as we collect it. This assumes…
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iOS 6 adoption is 15% 24 hours after launch…
Wow that is pretty incredible…
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Photokina
The big camera tradeshow Photokina is happening now, there are some pretty interesting developments and some might call it the most interesting in years. The biggest news to me overall is that Sony is really leveraging their sensor development (24MP) and standard lense (E-mount) to produce a single family that can use lenses from mirrorless…
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iPhone 5 at 8M in a weekend
Wow this is pretty incredible from macrumors.com, shows the shipment rate of the iPhone, basically the original sold 1M units in the first 74 days. Not bad. But with the Iphone 4S, they sold 1M in the first 24 *hours*. The iPhone 5 announcement was they sold 2M in the first 24 hours. Whew!
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Gamer PC Mouse Pads Razor Goliathus Control M
Gaming mouse pads. Wow talk about major specialty items, but if you’ve ever played a FPS then you know how important speed and accuracy is, so the Steelseries QcK and the Razor Vespula look good. On Amazon, the massively big Steelseries QcK Heavy, QcK+ have great reviews as does the the Razer Scarab Expert Hard which is a little more…
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Gamer PC Mice Logitech G9x or G500
Here is a list of the best gaming mice. It took a while to wade through lots of reviews, here are some folks seem to like: Logitech G9x. This has been around for years (well since 2009) and seems to get good reviews from folks who like big fat clunky mice that use a palm grip. We…
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Gamer PC Monitor Apple Cinema Display
With AMD, you can use three smaller 22″ monitors to get a gamers view, but for us, a single bigger 27″ or even 30″ display is easier to look at and it would be nice if they were 3-D capable since heck why not. They are huge at 2560×1440 lines As Tom’s Hardware explains, there…
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Gamer PC Speakers not really needed
Normally we don’t get super fancy speakers as most of our work is actually going to be gaming with headphones and it is hard to crank things, so we will probably stick with a simple 2.1 system like the JBL Creative systems that we already have. If you do want a great system, it’s probably…
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Gamer PC Headphones Corsair Vengeance 1500
Gaming headsets are really important as they help you figure out where people are shooting at you by sound. Tom’s Hardware had a roundup Corsair Vengence 1500. I’m still looking through those, but Tom’s Hardware had a good overview. They like the Corsair Vengence 1500 and say the virtual 7.1 sound is actually pretty good which is…
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Gamer PC Sound Card isn't needed
The main question is, do you really need a dedicated sound card. Depends on the motherboard you’ve selected. With the ASUS P8Z77-V (a PC Magazine Editors Choice), you get onboard full 7 channel sound including an optical SP/DIF output and analog RCA jacks, so no need for this
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Gamer PC Power Supply Kingwin LZP-1000 Platinum
Well power supplies don’t seem to have changed much. People are still using ATX connectors and so forth. In fact I have a relatively quiet 750W ATX power supplly around somewhere from five years ago and it seems like it should work. But Tom’s Hardware and SilentPCReview.com did a overview of the issues there which are…
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Gamer PC Cases NZXT Switch 810
The biggest issue with cases is having something that is small but big enough to work in. And if you are going to liquid cooling, something that can actually handle a huge radiator. Tom’s Hardware did a great review of full sized ATX cases that are actually big enough to put a three fan radiator…
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Speck See Thru for the MacBook Air
I absolutely adore this case. Expensive at $50 but comes with a one year warranty if you buy from an authorized reseller. I didn’t and it cracked and regret it, but it really does protect the finish of your MacBook Air. It is very tight and cracks easily on impact so beware, but it is…
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Gamer PC Cooling with Swiftech Edge H200-320 or even an Puget Systems Aquarium with Noctua NH-D14
I’ve always wanted to build a watercooled case. A few years ago, I wanted to build a silent PC and loved silentpcreview.com, but now with water cooling becoming much more turnkey, it makes some sense to go all water cooled and make your machine silent overclockable. Tom’s Hardware has a pretty good guide, but the…
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Gamer PC Memory with Mushkin Redline 993997 DDR3-2133 or G.Skill F3-2400
Time once again to learn the in’s and out’s of memory which right now is SDRAM DDR3, but the basic facts are that you can overclock memory a little and in most benchmarks, once you go from vanilla DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2133, you have had a huge improvement in performance at a relatively low cost. If…
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USB Flash Keys
These things just keep getting cheaper and smaller. So much so that I keep losing them, I’ve bought of series of fast USB 3.0 drives (even though I don’t have any computer with USB 3.0 :-), but the main thing I’m finding isn’t speed, it is not losing the darn things. The plastic cases are…
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Gamer PC Storage Samsung 830 256GB x 2 soon to be 840
Well this is a huge area encompassing both the system ram and also the disk. Right now it feels like going solid state on everything is the way to go, so we are thinking just get a 500GB SSD or maybe a pair and put the rest of the stuff on a NAS somewhere. I…