Without saying, this is my copy of Sensei's thread.
Except my life is perhaps less interesting, as I enjoy weird things.
Anyway, today in Brisbane was a weird day in terms of weather. Started off rainy, remained cloudy, but it seems damn hot now (night time right now).
One of the courses I'm doing at Uni is Introduction to Web Design - yeah, it's a required subject for my degree, otherwise I wouldn't waste my time with this crap. As far as I can tell, there's two main components - coding (ie HTML etc) and design. Apparently, there's more focus on the design component, so this looks like it's going to be a boring course (have done the following on to this course, Human Computer Interaction).
Had a lecture, and the guy pretty much seems to be rewording what's said on the slides, just saying it in a long winded fashion, almost as if he's just blabbing on >_>
Had a practical session straight after the lecture, which was to write a basic HTML page. They make you attend tutorials by allocating some of your final grade to your attendance - most courses don't do this, but I guess that so many people just decided not to turn up to these sessions that they enforced this...
My other courses for this semester, with the exception of International Finance, seem really boring too.
Okay, you may have seen my rant about how a new HDD kills a GPU, which spent me hours to diagnose. And me having to wait before being able to get a new one due to random stock issues...
And so here my rant continues (leave now!).
And when I finally got the new GPU, I discovered the Samsung 1.5TB HDD having the "clicking" issue (basically when it powers on, it makes clicking noises for about 10 seconds). Although this is rather disturbing for something you're shoving a huge amount of data onto, I guess I don't mind the noise. The problem is, however, resuming from standby. Basically the HDD only seems to be fully on once it finishes its clicking spazz. The computer obviously resumes long before, finds the HDD isn't there, so assumes that you unplugged it. Am not sure why, but even after the clicking stops, Windows doesn't seem to detect the HDD, the only solution being to open the case, and re-plug in the SATA cable.
Interestingly, have not been able to find anyone with similar issues, although Googling the Samsung HDD clicking issue turns up many results.
Anyway, obviously having to keep pulling out the SATA cable when I want the computer to go into standby is really unacceptable, so I went back to return it.
People at the store were pretty insistent that this was normal behaviour however, and tried a second Samsung HDD of the same model and it had the same issue. Wouldn't give me a refund, their point being that "this clicking is normal [for a HDD]" (yeah, sure, especially so many people over the internet returning drives over this issue). Really sucks, but I did manage to convince them to swap with a WD 1.5TB 64MB Green drive for $5 more. Just sucks that they didn't have any in stock, so I now have to go back again on Friday to pick the thing up.
Just hope that the WD doesn't have any issues.
And I thought getting a 1.5TB drive was as easy as buying it and plugging it in...
Long time no post here.
Anyway decided to buy a new 1.5TB HDD yesterday and plugged it into my PC. Oddly though, it failed to boot afterwards. Taking out the HDD didn't help, in fact, I spent many hours trying to figure out what was wrong. I did manage to eventually narrow it down to the graphics card (seriously didn't expect that) - very odd indeed, but it's definitely the GPU after swapping cards with my old 7800GT.
Dunno if it'll get any warranty, as it was bought in Dec08, but I'm going to have to get a new card regardless. Unfortunately, most of the desirable cards are out of stock around here (What the fudge?). After much thought, I decided to go for a PowerColor Radeon 5670 for AU$105. Not exactly a great card, but should be suffice for my needs, and it looks better than the other options:
Radeon 4670 ~ $80: my current card - really want to get something a little different :P
Radeon 4770 ~ $120: more powerful than 5670, but costs more too, plus no DX11 (even though I don't care about it that much)
Geforce 9600GT ~ $90: cheaper, but less powerful, less energy efficient and no DX11
GT240 ~ $103: still not as powerful as the 5670
Am also hoping the PowerColor isn't as loud as my current MSI Radeon 4670 (there's no fan control, so the fan is always blasting at 100%).
Card will apparently arrive in about two days.
So just a heads up to anyone who cares - I can't really do much until then, so yeah...
Had been weighing up whether to get an old laptop vs a netbook and I decided on the later.
Got an Acer Aspire One D250 for AU$500, with an AU$80 cashback. Registered for the cashback, but the thing couldn't verify my ID thing so I'm going to have to print off some crap and send it in to them >_>
Specs:
Atom N270 CPU
1GB DDR2 RAM
160GB SATA HDD
10.1in screen
WinXP Home
3-cell battery
Bluetooth + WiFi b/g
Card reader
0.3MP camera + microphone
The camera's quality looks really bad, even though 0.3MP is like 640x480 which IMO is enough for basic images. But meh, never got this for the camera.
Can't use Memory Sticks in the card reader without an adapter I think, cause the slot's too big. Don't have any Bluetooth devices, so that doesn't mean much, for now at least.
Have thought about getting a 6-cell, but a 3-cell sounds like it can last around 2-4 hours which should be enough for me in most circumstances (unless I change my usage pattern). Still, the cheapest netbook with a 10in screen and 6-cell I could find was around AU$560.
I actually really wanted a 12in laptop, but cheap ones of this size appear to be very rare >_> (not much between 10in and 14in).
I imagined this would be a pain to use, but to my surprise, it's better than I thought. Keyboard is small, but I could use it. Don't like the lack of a native Home/End key (I use this rather frequently; IMO, make the PrintScrn / Pause buttons non-native - I bet you really don't use those keys that much). Touchpad is a pain though - I'd personally prefer the little mouse nubs. I guess I could get used to using touchpads however. Screen is small but still viewable-ish.
Thing is light at just over 1kg - can easily hold it with one hand. Smaller than an A4 sheet of paper (in it's pouch, it's slightly larger) and only about an inch thick.
The glossy screen is highly reflective and looks like to work a wonder under direct sunlight... or not (screen shades?). Why anyone makes glossy screens for a highly portable laptop, I don't know...
As expected, the default XP install is full of crap, so I would obviously put my own install of Windows on. But this is where my adventures with the netbook began.
Spoiler for retarded long story:
Firstly, there was an Acer recovery image making utility thing, which you can burn a recovery disc. The great minds at Acer made the application only work by actually burning the disc, despite that fact that none of its netbooks actually has an optical drive. The concept of a transferable ISO clearly never came to their minds.
Anyway, I decided to keep an image of these recovery things in case I wanted to restore the thing to factory defaults for some reason (perhaps selling). So installed a virtual CD burner and tried to get the thing to work. It did, but was rather retarded. There are two images - a recovery disc, which is over 5GB and a drivers+apps disc which is over 1GB. So I stuck in a virtual DVD+R DL but Acer's app flatly rejected it. So I tried the standard DVD-R - after burning half, the app would seem to try to verify the first image and end up in a loop of asking for a blank disc (and when presented with one, would eject it and ask the same thing). But did manage to get the drivers disc. Then I managed to find an option in Virtual CD v9 (the virtual burning app I was using) to change the capacity of the DVD-R, so I upped it and managed to get the recovery image.
Okay, with that through, since 160GB (around 149GB usable) is plenty of space, I decided to keep their XP install just in case there was some necessary application on there which I wasn't aware of, and had to use in a short period of time. So my idea was the shrink the main drive to around 10GB and install my other OSes on other partitions. So pulled out the HDD and plugged into my SATA-USB casing. Was doing something on Windows, didn't want to restart, so started VirtualBox with an Ubuntu LiveCD and bridged the USB drive across and used GParted to shrink the volume. Bad decision - not sure if it's the USB connection, or going through a VM, but the process was SLOW, like, 5+ hours to shrink the thing...
Whilst it was doing its thing, I thought I may as well strip a copy of Windows 7 whilst waiting. For some reason, vLite won't run in my XP64, so fired up a second VM. For some reason, the VM decided to freeze, so I killed the instance. Problem was that it decided to stay in memory (the window was gone though) and decided to hog a CPU core, and couldn't be killed (was running as a service - probably why). Didn't want to kill VirtualBox altogether, since the other VM was still shrinking the volume, so left it.
Came back a while later, and it seems the VM doing the shrinking decided to give way too, so I had to kill the whole process and ditch the partition I was trying to save.
Okay, now to Windows 7 stripping. It seems the build7260 x86 image I got was a little dodgy - doing pretty much anything with vLite would stop the installer from working (By the way, that took many tries to realise that). My Win7 RC1 image could be stripped a bit though.
So I tried using GImageX's "Apply" option to install the stripped Win7 without going through the installer, but I kept getting "Disk read error" when booting. Tried installing XP, after rebooting from the textmode portion of the installer, I'd get the same thing.
After a while, I suspected the drive to have something about it, probably the cancelling of the resize operation did something with the partition table. Wanted to keep Acer's "PQSERVICE" partition (some 7GB inaccessible partition - I'm guessing used for backup purposes?; Windows can't do anything with it), but in the end, I got pissed and just nuked the entire partition table from the drive and started afresh.
Tried installing XP again, it failed on reboot, but with a different message. Figured it out pretty quickly - Acer's boot from secondary HDD seems to change the ordering of drives, thus the boot.ini on the netbook's HDD is pointing to "rdisk(1)" where it really should be "rdisk(0)". Unfortunately, XP's recovery console sucks - can't do any text editing, so had to take out the HDD and back in the main computer to edit the INI file. After all that, I did manage to get XP to install.
So then I went to try Win7 again. Applied the image with GImageX and managed to boot into the second stage of the Win7 installer - but it just kept failing. Gave up with the stripping thing and just tried installing a stock Win7. Managed to get it to work, but as expected, ran like a slug. Tried the dism registry hack to see if I could remove any packages, but got access denied errors when trying to remove anything. Couldn't be stuffed to look further, so decided to nuke the install and go back to XP.
Except it seems that Win7 had some fun and destroyed the XP bootloader - putting it back in didn't do much - just got some other missing file error. Weirdly enough, my XP installer on my second USB HDD decided not to work, so I decided to nuke the netbook drive again, and recreate the XP installer on the secondary drive.
And finally, managed to get a working computer... >_>
tldr version: took me ~2 days to get Windows working on this thing...
Anyway, haven't really installed any apps on it yet.
Probably should just go with a Linux distro, but wanted to use something a little more familiar.
So you're writing a message (or submitting something) to the Uni's website. You spend ages typing up a message. What can be more irritating than seeing a "session time out" when you try to post the thing, and in horror, find that the entire message has been wiped?
IE7 is obviously too dumb to remember what you typed, but even though Firefox remembers, their system is so excellent that it wipes it for you anyway.
From now on, I'm always going to write stuff in Notepad instead - at least it doesn't time out >_>
I've been using Winamp for years, since v2, the crappy v3 and the improved v5.
A lot of people seem to like Foobar2000 but when I checked it, it really lacked features that I liked in Winamp. Happened to check it out again recently and I must say, I'm more impressed.
Mainly, Winamp 5.551 (think that's the version) seems to be a little dodgy on me - it sometimes crashes when I put the machine into sleep, and seems to take a little while to load my ~6000 songs playlist.
Foobar2000 doesn't seem to have these issues. Also since it's a simpler interface, it uses less memory :P
Issues about it though:
- doesn't have Winamp's nice plugin interface
- can't really select sound output option (stuck with waveout?)
- interface does take a while to get used to and tweak
- I don't really use it, but it probably doesn't have as good visualisations and internet radio capabilities
One of the things I liked about Winamp was the ability to set the output to waveout and then use its global hotkeys to change the system's volume. Although foobar2000 allows you to set global keys to do stuff like this, it doesn't affect the system volume. For this, I happened to find Sound Control which does this.
So well, for a lightweight song player which you keep minimized most of the time, foobar2000 isn't too bad a choice.
...which is really annoying really. Basically it's all about how to design interfaces and crap. Okay, some things are interesting, and if you're absolutely horrible at designing user interfaces, it may actually be useful, but otherwise, it's a bunch of annoying concepts.
Think of trying to explain how to draw aesthetically pleasing paintings using mathematical equations...
You could be an excellent artist without ever having any form of knowledge of art theory (if such thing exists) or you could be an expert in the latter and still suck in the former... If you're studying this kind of thing, okay, but for the rest of us (or at least me), it's stupid.
I'm complaining cause I've got this assignment to write up which is really annoying me >_< (can't figure out what the hell to write)
Interestingly enough, the course coordinator hasn't thought too much about weighting mark allocation well. The assignment, in total, counts 10% toward your final grade. There's 5 major sections in this assignment, each worth 1.5% - the remaining 2.5% is for summaries and grammar/spelling and correct referencing etc. So basically, if I can't be stuffed writing a section, I really only lose 1.5% for it.
Pretty attractive considering that I'm spending hours trying to figure out how to write these things >_>
On another note, simply attending the weekly workshop and answering a question earns you 1% of your total grade (it's to try to get you to participate) and answering the question only takes like 5 minutes, so I'm wondering whether me spending hours for 1.5% is really worth it...
Oh and a presentation I had to do earlier, counting 20% of your total grade, only about 5% was actually based on content. 5% was based on presentation style (ie clear voice), 5% was based on your ability to get your peers to engage in discussion, and the remaining 5% was awarded if you submitted a "reflections" document on your presentation. Which basically means you could make a presentation with pretty much irrelevant content and still get 15/20 - sweet.
Link 1
Void
Downloads
Find teh crap
List of Pplz
Seriously, don't click me
