I’m such a moron sometimes. I got a new CPU this holiday, and I installed it yesterday. It was one of the last-gen AMD Phenom high-efficiency models. 4 cores and only 65 Watts TDP, and it was massively on sale. Those chips never go on sale. So I grabbed it while in the midst of my holiday shopping.

Once installed though, Windows basically ignored two of the cores. Drivers were put in for all four, but two of them remained 0% used. Things were technically working – it would boot, no problems running anything, but with two dead cores, it hardly seemed a productive upgrade. So I started poking about for answers. After much fidgeting about, I got the bright idea to clear my BIOS settings. It seemed a better choice than reinstalling my OS, which was where all the posts I’d read on the net seemed to be pointing me. Just one more thing to try before that though.

Boy was that a mistake. Doing that reset the BIOS settings on the built-in RAID controller, which caused the system to update the DMI data to one of my two disks, but it recognised it as a conventional IDE drive, independently. *FACEPALM*

As soon as it happened I’d realised my mistake, but it was too late. I hadn’t made a meaningful backup in over two years (this is the part about me being a moron). And now it’s all gone.

I had no choice. I had to rebuild a new stripeset and reinstall windows from scratch anyway, except this way was not by choice and with no backup. Two years of downloads and files and such all wiped. Fortunately, I learned a little bit from the last time this happened, back in 2003. I’ve been keeping most of my written stuff online, or copying it to other computers, but I’ve downloaded gigabytes upon gigabytes of PDF books and mp3 files since then, most of which were not backed up onto other systems.

It’s all due to my own damned laziness too. I have a perfectly good 500gb external backup device sitting right next to my system. It’s even plugged in. I just never turn it on. I also need to clean it up first because there wasn’t enough free space for me to make a backup. I just kept telling myself I wanted a home media server in my LAN closet with a nice safe RAID-1 array instead. I still do want that, and I think most of my issues would be solved if I moved to that kind of a setup, but I kept procrastinating. How many more crashes and accidental deletions must occur before I smarten up, pony up, and set one up?

This may be the worst ID10T error I’ve ever made.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 3:08 PM UTC

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It’s been many moons since I’ve posted here, after what could be generously described as a brief spurt. Being called back to work tends to have that effect, such that with so much less free time, I only post if I’m bored.

Clearly, now is one of those times.

I don’t even have a lot to say that is of any real interest, so as usual, I will fill this space with inane details from my mundane existence.

I’m steadily losing interest in yet another career path. I still like cars, and my co-workers (mostly), but I’m starting to think I don’t have what it takes. Maybe someday I’ll find a career that agrees with me.

I’m going to see Opeth, one of my favourite bands, in about a week. The show is in London, ON, at Centennial Hall on the 21st. I’m pretty pumped about that. It will be my first time back in London since I moved away in December 2006.

Speaking of which, I’m in the process of looking at moving again. Locally this time. We’re considering going in with my Mother-in-law and getting a really giant old house. You know, the kind with all the old trim left. They just don’t make them like they used to. There are a few possibilities, but nothing sure just yet.

I’d like to find a winter beater so I can retire my SVX to summer-only duty. I also want to replace Meghan’s car with something newer and more reliable than a 17-year-old semi-exotic that was temperamental even when new. She’s a little bitter about it. Go figure.

I’m looking at used Mazda Protege5 or Chrysler PT Turbo as options, mostly because I can’t afford another Subaru that isn’t a base model, and Subarus don’t hold my interest unless there’s a turbo involved. Though I also found a used Mazda RX-8 for cheap… but then I’d need TWO winter beaters.

One of my housemates blew up his computer, so after frying my old system with his faulty power supply, we’re replacing it all with the guts from my current system, and I get an upgrade. I’m going from an Athlon X2 BE-2350 (2.1GHz, high efficiency) on a flaky ASUS AMD 690G-based board to an Athlon X2 4850e (2.5GHz, high efficiency) on what is supposed to be a very reliable and versatile Gigabyte AMD 780G-based board. I wanted one of the 790G-based boards, as they have better graphics, but the only micro-ATX board that I could find (DFI Lanparty) costs way too much.

Anyway, what makes even this new Gigabyte board so much better than my old one is that the onboard video is actually good enough to game with, thanks in part to 128MB dedicated GDDR3 onboard memory and a modern, if low-end GPU (ATi HD3200-based). As long as your taste in games is sedate or old (which is the case), the board packs enough punch that you don’t need a power-hungry add-in card. That helps keep temps down, which is key in a low-noise HTPC like mine. An additional upshot is that it will do what they call “Hybrid Crossfire” wherein you can link the onboard GPU to an add-in card and boost performance further. It still won’t be amazing, but then, I don’t play games like Crysis, so I don’t care at all. Basically, it will run everything I play now, or have played, and will continue to play for the forseeable future. As long as I can run Diablo 3 when it comes out, I’ll be happy with it.

I got some higher-end DDR2-1066 memory for this board, which with the CPU I have is overkill (it only supports up to DDR2-800), but if I decide to upgrade in the future to a Phenom-based chip, this setup can handle it. If I had the budget, I would have bought a Phenom 9350e (quad core, 2.0GHz, high efficiency), but by the time I upgrade, perhaps there will be more AM2+ compatible, high efficieny Phenoms to choose from. As of right now, the 9350e is the ONLY one, and at 65W TDP, it’s still more thirsty than either of the chips I have now, and costs twice as much.

I’ve been filling the rest of my time with RPGs, as usual. I’ve been running a Shadowrun campaign for about 9 months now, and I think that’s about to draw to a close before the year is up. I’m getting tired of running it and need a break.

So, after that, one of our group is going to run a 4th Edition game for us. I don’t have high hopes for it. The game might play just fine, and in fact, I’m sure it will, but I will never switch over to it. The terms of the new “GSL” or Game System License are ridiculously draconian, especially compared to the “OGL” or Open Gaming License that 3rd edition was published under. The OGL is like the RPG equivalent of the Open Source software movement, and like any other fiscally responsible, socially retarded company, Wizards of the Coast, under the iron fist of its master, Hasborg, is doing everything they can to close that little Pandora’s Box.

There are no solid plans beyond that. Meghan might run one of her games again. Or I might start a new D&D game. I’m leaning toward using a D&D 3.5-based system called Pathfinder, published under the OGL by Paizo (former publishers of Dungeon, and Dragon magazines). Basically it fixes a bunch of stuff that was wrong with 3.5, and despite the terrible artwork, it has great promise.

Bad art in the books has been an ongoing complaint of mine ever since WotC bought the rights to D&D and re-published the 2nd edition back in 1996. Not that all the chainmail bikini babes and Conan-ish warriors made better subject material than anthropomorphic creatures (whose females all have big tits and silly armour anyway), but the quality of how they were rendered has suffered. It used to be gritty, or glossy, but recognisably fantasy. Now everything looks like either anime or a comic book, and I hate it. Whatever it takes to sell books, I guess.

The only other thing I’ve been up to is expanding my music folder on my computer. I’ve been hunting down material from bands that I meant to catch up on 10 years ago. Some have been like revelations, while others have been an utter waste of bandwidth. That might make an interesting post all on its own…

Posted by Ron as Computers, Fire-in-a-can, Games, Home Sweet Home, Music, Work at 2:04 PM UTC

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When I was young, and first exposed to the marvel of Much Music, I began keeping a list. This list contained the band and sometimes album or song name of things I’d heard that I wanted to check out in greater detail. It grew and grew over the several years I’d kept it, and while I’d never made an exact count, I estimated that it may have contained as many as 2,000 entries.

Sadly, at some point, the battered blue spiral-bound over-sized notepad which contained this list became lost in time and space, possibly as the result of cleaning my room, or perhaps when I moved back upstairs from my windowless room in the basement. I don’t know exactly when it was lost, just that the next time I went to look for it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was pretty distraught over it, as it took me a long time to compile and at the time, could not easily be re-researched and compiled. I wrote the stuff down precisely for that reason.

It was probably just as well. I vividly recall crying myself to sleep one night after having made the realisation that I would probably never have the resources in time and money to follow through with my research. After all, at $20 per CD, just to sample the most acclaimed album from each band would have cost in excess of $40,000. Even if I were hunting through pawn shops, that still represented more money than I could ever commit to such a project. That list didn’t include movies either, and when you factor in that many of the groups on the list probably had more than one release worth buying, the cost grows rather quickly. The list was still growing at that time as well. The conclusion I was left with was that I would be constantly playing catch-up.

Then the internet happened. Napster. It was a dream come true. I downloaded a lot of stuff. I started keeping track again (though mostly just on scraps of paper). It was like a second shot at the dream, until the service was shut down by the lawsuits of a few wealthy artists whining about how they were missing out on revenue desperately needed to fund drug habits, psychiatrists, and whores.

Still, the genie was released from the bottle, and has to date proven impossible to put back. Things aren’t as easy as they were then, but looking this stuff up is still fairly trivial, as is keeping a list on my computer. It doesn’t have 2,000 entries or whatever, but factoring in all the bookmarks and everything, might be getting there. Wikipedia helps a lot too.

And that’s one of the many things I’ve been using to occupy my time whilst I’ve been  away from work. I’ve also taken the time to rip many of my old CDs to MP3. I hadn’t realised how many of them were not on my computer until recently. I think that was a result of being storage-limited before. Now I have more space than I know what to do with.

Posted by Ron as Computers, Music at 6:58 PM UTC

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It’s been a while. Four months. Not as long as some people I know, but hardly regular posting.

The rest of October, and all of November was a pretty busy time, between everyone in Meghan’s family with birthdays (myself included), and sorting out issues with this new computer. December with the manic holiday buying (which, admittedly, I did very little of, so it’s a poor excuse – but that’s what this is about – excuses). At least during the holidays we got together with Luke, Chie, James and Jess. That was quite nice.

January was a little slow at work, so I finally got my car in the shop. I’m still rounding up parts to fix it, but it should be ready for spring. Unfortunately, January being slow has also led me to why I’m blogging at 9:24am on a weekday; I’m laid off. Not that it’s all bad. I get some unemployment enjoyment, and a little vacation, which I haven’t really taken in quite some time. Okay, it hasn’t been that long, but it feels like it has. Maybe I’m a wuss and need more off time than people with a real work ethic.

So I plan to take it easy for a few weeks, and hopefully my boss can score me a temporary position as a parts delivery dude, which would suit me just fine. We’ll see; the success or not, of that will determine if there are more forthcoming updates here, I think.

Still no house pics, Other Luke! :p

And now, in case anyone actually wants to know, the tech section

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Posted by Ron as Computers, Fire-in-a-can, Games, Home Sweet Home, Miscellaneous, Work at 11:21 AM UTC

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Last night we had a lovely thanksgiving at my house. Both my parents and Meghan’s mum and sister were there, and we stuffed ourselves. Yum.

When we got up this morning, on the kitchen counter was an opened beer that nobody remembers drinking, and also, the jug of OJ tasted funny. Coincidence? I think not. It happened to be a very good beer, too, so it’s a shame that it was wasted like that. La Fin du Monde is not cheap, either.

I know, it’s been a while since I last posted. Shame on me. I have not posted camping photos, nor wedding pics, nor even the house pictures I promised in January. What can I say? I’m a lazy bum. Plus, my computer is in the bedroom, and has a very uncomfortable seating arrangement. Well, it was in the bedroom. I recently got a new system to play with. Built HTPC-style, it outputs to my new TV, so comfort and the computer are once again friends.

Unfortunately, this new box, while cool, quiet, ultra-efficient and good-looking, has some issues. I think it started with an issue between the keyboard and chair, around the time I thought it might be a good idea to order a copy of Vista to go on this box. Since then, nothing but problems. Issue by issue, things are slowly getting sorted out, but it has been less than ideal so far.

Once I get more of the bugs worked out, I will post more, both about that and maybe catching up on my backlog.

Posted by Ron as Computers, Food, Home Sweet Home at 12:57 PM UTC

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I haven’t blogged this month, so before it’s too late, here goes.

I haven’t been up to much of note. Still anxiously awaiting the day that my boss lets me know what’s going on with my future. I’d really really like to be signed up for an apprenticeship; the sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.

Once I know how secure my job is, I’m sure there are a few things that will get taken care of. I know I have blogged a little list about it before, but now I may have some things to add to said list.

My computer is beginning to give me some trouble. I don’t know if my hard drives are dying, or if WindowsXP is finally taking a shit after nearly 4 years. I’ve been getting some disk errors lately, and chkdsk has been running at startup a lot recently. My gut feeling tells me it might be one of the hard drives. Either way, it might be time to retire this box to light duty.

I think I’ve found my replacement. I’m tempted to go with an ultra-quiet HTPC from Lix Systems, whose specialty is inexpensive Linux-based set-top systems. To start, I’d likely dual-boot Windows and Linux until I become more familiar with the latter, and am sure it does everything I want it to. This would then be hooked up to the new LCD TV/monitor I’d get for the livingroom. Coupled with a wireless keyboard and mouse, it sounds ideal; kick back on the couch to do all this crap instead of sitting at a desk.

Also on my agenda is replacing Meghan’s SVX. It has a negative association for me, as I bought it from SASS, whom I now hate. Plus, it’s not as nice as Alice, my other one. Meghan spotted a very nice-looking WRX wagon at Sudbury Fine Cars, so perhaps we’ll check it out one of these weekends. However, this is a rather large financial commitment, and I have a mortgage to worry about these days too, so it is by no means a certainty.

Well, that’s more or less all there is at the moment. Naturally, if something interesting occurs, I will be sure to write about it here.

Posted by Ron as Computers, Fire-in-a-can, Home Sweet Home, Media, Miscellaneous, Work at 5:54 PM UTC

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I may have finally found another job here in the Sault. Tomorrow I start on a “trial basis” at Reliable Auto. I got the heads up on this from my dad, and he heard from our longtime mechanic who happens to be good friends with the fellow that owns the garage I will be starting at. Goes to show, it’s all who you know. Especially around this town, it seems, since the two years I was down south I had zero difficulty finding work while knowing exactly nobody.

Now, the term “trial basis” strikes dread into my heart, particularly after my experience at SASS in Stratford. This time, I am trying not to put the cart in front of the horse, but I will say that I am trying to be cautiously optimistic.

If this does work out though, I guess I can get on that list of things I want.

• my TV is old and crappy; time for an upgrade. I’m thinking 30-32 inch wide-LCD.
• I have under a gig left on my computer; I need an internal storage drive.
• Dishwasher. I hate doing dishes, and with 4 people around, a lot of dishes need doing.
• finally, I’d like to replace two of my old cars with one newer one, but I’m not holding my breath on this one.

Posted by Ron as Computers, Fire-in-a-can, Home Sweet Home, TV & Movies, Work at 2:39 PM UTC

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That was a rough two weeks. Up until now, I could hardly remember what life was like before the advent of always-on broadband.

Now I don’t have to think about it again for a long time.

So, yeah, back on, but still no new house pics yet. The place is a mess right now. I need a little while to straighten up a bit, then I’ll post all the pics Luke’s server can handle.

Posted by Ron as Computers, Home Sweet Home at 3:31 PM UTC

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Two years ago when I left home, I needed a new printer and scanner, since the ones I’d had access to were my mum’s. I didn’t really shop around much; all I knew I was looking for was low price, since I didn’t have a lot to spend.

Canadian Tire had a Lexmark x1185 printer-scanner-copier for cheap, and I had enough Canadian Tire money saved up from buying all my gas there that I could buy it with that. So I did. Bad idea.

It turned out to be *surprise* a piece of shit. I laughingly thought that PSC stood for ‘piece of sodding crap’ because, well, it was. The drivers and mandatory bloatware printing/scanning/photosuite software were a tangled nightmare and far too large for my liking when all I really wanted to do was print documents and scan the occasional article or picture.

Another episode in my printer saga occurred when I bought a router with a USB print server in a vain attempt to get the PSC unhooked from my main system so that Meghan would have an easier time accessing it. Turns out though, that the router didn’t allow two-way communication, so one could print (albeit slowly), but not scan. Boo.

Eventually, even though we didn’t use it all that much, the mechanicals of the tired Lexmark began to wear out. Paper feed was iffy most of the time, and the alignment was going out on the print heads, despite our best attempts to realign them with the software. I put up with the piece of garbage for too long.

Fast forward to now; I knew what I was looking for this time (inexpensive, network support, efficient drivers and software), and back-to-school season seemed a good time to look. Network support in inexpensive printers is not a common feature, which narrowed down choices considerably. I would have liked a laser printer, and greyscale ones with the features I desired were becoming affordable, but we (read: Meghan) needed colour capability, so we eventually settled on the Brother MFC420CN.

Turns out to have been a good choice. The software package is optional, the drivers are small, the network support is basically plug-and-play (and supports all features), and the print quality is excellent so far. I give it my full endorsement, for what its worth.

Posted by Ron as Computers at 10:52 AM UTC

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If you have to be a consumer, might as well do your part and make your opinion about products known. Companies actually pay marketing firms for this information. To entice people to participate, they even offer perks every once in a while.

Meghan often participates in these surveys, not out of the hope of a reward, but rather for the first reason I mentioned, however, perks don’t hurt either. She recently participated in one such survey on hotspex.com, one of the usual sites she receives invitiations from. They have a points program which you can redeem for contest entry ballots, savings coupons, or donate to charity. To encourage you to complete the surveys, particularly the longer ones, they feature a Wheel-of-Fortune-style wheel, rendered in flash, in which you can win stuff. Usually, it’s just bonus points, but they also have an iPod up for grabs.

Meghan hit the jackpot last week; she won the iPod. It’s a 1GB iPod nano, with her name engraved on the back, though they misspelled it. Neat to win, but we never would have bought one otherwise, for several reasons. Firstly, they’re overpriced. Secondly, I have precisely zero interest in itunes. Thirdly, they’ve become disgustingly trendy. Almost as bad as big sunglasses.

So in keeping with the ‘iTunes sucks’ mentality, we looked for options with this thing. The first thing I could think of was eBay, but with an engraving on the back, resale would be much less than retail value. That’s when we found out that you can load non-Apple firmware on these puppies, which unlock their true potential. No more DRM bullshit, no more being locked into using iTunes, no more format restrictions.
We found a couple different firmwares to try, the first of which was iPodlinux. As expected, installation was a little kludgey, but we made it through. We had to disable apple’s annoying utility that blocks non-itunes transfers to the device, but once done, you’re free to make a new ext2 partition and install away. So we got that in there, only to discover that mp3 support (via podzilla), while enabled, was rather primitive. You can do lots of other things with it, and has great skinning support out of the box (the Amiga themes are particularly nice), but primarily, I still wanted to use it as a music player for my 1-hour-each-way commute to and from work every day.

By suggestion from somewhere on the ipodlinux.org website, we decided to try Rockbox instead. A quote from the Rockbox website really says it best. While not as easily made pretty as iPodLinux, its music player works far better, and is easier to transfer songs to.

So, now we have 3 different firmwares to choose from on boot, and 768MB left to store music and other files, which is plenty for my immediate purposes. Did I mention that it plays Doom?

Posted by Ron as Computers, Music at 7:48 PM UTC

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