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Shared The new PC build.
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Shared Everything Search Engine.
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Shared SharpKeys – Home.
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Shared Sublime Text – Download.
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Shared Media Companion – Home.
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Shared dBpoweramp Music Converter.
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Shared Media Center Master.
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Shared Widescreen Fixer.
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Shared AutoHotkey.
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Shared EventGhost.
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Shared WinMerge.
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Shared SlySoft AnyDVD HD.
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Shared ModelN/sDashboard · GitHub.
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Shared How did Argo win best picture?.
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Shared tlk.io.
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Shared Aloshi/EmulationStation · GitHub.
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Shared hexagonal.js – Homepage.
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Shared pontikis/jui_datagrid · GitHub.
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Shared Have birthday, get meatcake.
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Have birthday, get meatcake
That’s right, Meatcake!!!:
Brady and me admiring the meatcake Susan baked me for my 46th birthday.
That was made by my lovely wife and was the best birthday present ever. Truth be told I’ve been teasing her about this for years – this year she did it 😉
She also got my recumbent bike fixed, which was equally awesome. I just need to find a kid’s bike seat for it now so I can ride into work with Brady. I’m pretty sure he’ll love it.
My Mother-in-Law also got me some delicious chocolate and, more importantly, ‘Booger Card!’ which has a picture of a little tot picking his nose. It’s Brady’s new favorite thing, and we can’t go a half hour without him asking ‘Where’s the booger card, Dad?’
😉
How did Argo win best picture?
That’s a serious question. I’ve been sick for a week but recovered enough to have my wits about me for several days, during which I spent a lot of time laying around on the couch watching tv. One of the things I saw was Argo, which was a decent but unexceptional movie to my eye. I’ve only seen one other movie that was nominated this year, Zero Dark Thirty, so I can’t speak to the field, but Zero Dark Thirty was a superior movie by many orders of magnitude. I don’t get the Argo love. I thought the acting was a mixed (though mostly positive) bag, I found the tense ending contrived, and I found sections of it clumsy and unconvincing – the scene in the bazaar for example, or the scene where a “Hollywood location scout” saves the day by revealing he speaks Farsi and then manages to sell a group of suspicious guards that they really are making a sci fi movie in Iran during the revolution. What a bunch of nonsense.
Also, sorry Canada that 30-something years later we’ve decided to claim most of the credit. Thanks for helping us with this, I promise some of us will remember 😉
The new PC build
After the death of my gaming rig in December, I pulled together parts and built a new machine. I kept the old case, power supply, and optical drive. Everything else I bought new. I used two new resources to help this time round, after years of using the techreport system builders guides. I still referenced them, but this time I relied more on a wonderfully maintained thread and associated resources from neogaf – the “I need a New PC!” 2013 Part 1″ thread. There’s a google spreadsheet linked from there with parts lists for a number of different cost, performance and form factor builds, which is embedded in the first post of the thread. There’s also a link to pcpartpicker.com, which has this great tool that lets you build a shopping list which is sharable and which can be configured to find the lowest price for each component in your build from whichever vendors you want to select from. It’s great. Here’s my build list, by way of example. For the record, since who knows how long that link will work, below is also my partlist:
Intel Core i5-3570K
Asus P8Z77-V LK ATX LGA1155 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Samsung 840 Pro Series 128GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk (this is the Operating System drive)
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (this is the apps drive)
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB 3.5″ 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (this is the drive backups are written to)
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2GB Video Card
Asus Xonar DGX 24-bit 96 KHz Sound Card
This is the first time I’ve added a soundcard in years, maybe a decade even. I did it because I became frustrated with the driver situation for my previous build, where the mobo manufacture (Gigabyte) and the audio chipset manufacturer were not in sync on their drivers, and I had a number of compatibility problems with games. The Xonar stuff has been on my radar for a while – it was cheap enough so I figured I would give it a shot. So far it’s great, and having two independent audio devices is actually handy (voice comms on one, game audio on the other).
The build itself was uneventful – about as easy as they come, and so unremarkable that I have nothing to say about it beyond that. The machine’s been running well for a couple of weeks now, I definitely got a performance improvement in a number of games, which is great, even if truth be told I wasn’t feeling like I needed it before the old machine died. Plus, so far all my game saves have been successfully migrated to the new build, which was the thing I was most worried about. Now I can just cross my fingers I get 2+ years out of this build. Insofar as I can tell, the videocard will be the only likely weak link.
It is worth noting that it’s possible this will be the last time I do this. Intel is signalling that eventually you won’t be able to buy processors anymore – you’ll have to buy a motherboard/cpu combo or manufactured machines, and even the machine vendors like Dell and HP are signalling that they want to get out of the PC business (!!! – they can’t make money). I think what they’re trying to do is get PC’s to the point where they are consumer devices – no one picks which audio chip goes into their stereo, and Intel figures no one should think about PC’s, you just go to best buy and buy model a, b, or c. We’ll see if they succeed. In theory by the time I need another new machine, they’ll be close to or at that point, and Dell may be out of the consumer PC business.
Friday Fun – every issue of Dragon Magazine, for free
Polyhedron too. This is apparently controversial and violating some copyrights, so follow your own conscience, but examiner.com has this piece outlining the issue and linking to the specific archive.org repositories for these. This is a pretty amazing walk down memory lane, and a nice workaround to the impossibility of otherwise acquiring this material. TSR or someone they licensed to do it actually sold a physical media collection of all of this, which I used to fondle in the gamestop at the Maine Mall now and then. It was north of $50, which was a lot of money to me back then so I never ended up with it, though had I known it would end up being worth hundreds because of how hard it is to come by a copy I might have found a way to come up with the money. Anyway, enjoy a little nostalgic tour of pen and paper RPG history if you’re so inclined. If you don’t want to read the piece itself, the Dragon Magazines are here and here’s the Polyhedron repository.
[edit: links removed. No more controversy – they had to remove this material. Evidently it was violating copyright]
Get flu shot; get flu
So I ended up with the flu this year. At least, that’s the best explanation I have for what I have been going through. It started last Thursday, when both Brady and I came down with a bad stomach bug. Susan had been sick earlier in the week, so at first we thought, welp we’re getting what she had. But after a couple of days my stomach got better. Meantime though, by Saturday Brady was running a 101 fever and by Sunday he had a nasty wet cough. Meantime, Sunday I developed a scratchy throat, and by Monday felt poorly but thought I just had a cold. I stayed home and lounged on the couch figuring I would be better by the following day. Instead, I was worse – I went to work but came home miserable at lunch. Wednesday I had an all day function I *had* to be at, and so I went in, but again by lunch I was deadly ill – coughing, stuffed head, bad headache. I begged off the function at lunchtime and again headed home. Thursday was more of the same. Today, I am finally starting to feel better. Most of the congestion has eased, the cough is less painful and frequent, and my eyes aren’t watering constantly. WTH it was, I don’t know. I did get a mild temperature for a couple of days, but it was like 100 tops, very mild. Was it the flu? Just a particularly bad strain of the common cold? I guess I’ll never know.
Test your classic gamer cred
Try the DOS Games Screenshot challenge. Bet you can’t beat my score, I got 38 out of 50, which surprised me. I’ll confess I got lucky with a number of them (was that Wing Commander 1, or 2? I couldn’t have told you for sure, but I got it right), and several were easy because of process of elimination, but still, I recognized most of the games from back in the day. How about you?
Every kid loves winter
And I have the pic to prove it (from the recent blizzard):
The death of suckegg 7
Last weekend I finished building a new computer. I was forced into this by the death of Suckegg 7, which had been my main gaming PC for 2.5 years*. I’ll do a brief writeup of the new machine build shortly, but to start, I thought I’d share the befuddling tale of its predecessor’s death.
The first clue I had that something was wrong was about a year ago. Randomly when it booted it would forget what its boot drive was, and I would have to go into the bios and reset it to the correct boot drive. I tried a number of things to fix this (resetting the bios, replacing the bios battery, patching the bios), but nothing worked, and at a certain point it stopped letting me patch the bios alltogether. At this point I concluded I had corrupt bios and started thinking maybe I needed a new machine, or at least a new motherboard, after looking into what it would take to fix corrupt bios and deciding it was a no go. There were two problems with buying a new machine though. First, for about the last 15 years I’ve replaced my machine roughly every two years, but when we knew my son Brady was on the way I spent a bit more than I normally would and figured on the machine lasting me 3+ years. This meant I didn’t want to go and build a new machine, I had sunk money into the one I had and wanted to keep it. Second, they no longer manufacture the motherboard I had, and ‘new’ boards on the aftermarket were $300+ – at least $100 over what I paid, so I didn’t want to pay that much to try and swap out the motherboard in the hopes that would fix it. I actually bought a different model of the motherboard with the same chipset, figuring I could swap everything out and manage to get the right device drivers running on the thing, but chickened out at the amount of work it would take to do it.
Bottom line is I sat on my hands for about a year, dealing with the annoyance of sometimes not booting and having to muck about in the bios to get the machine booted. That was more or less working until December, when the newest and lightest used drive in the system died, causing one of those ‘the system is recovering from a serious error’ blue screens and a dead drive. When that happened I did a chkdsk on all the drives (there were 4 – an SSD boot drive, a 1TB game drive, a 2TB media drive, and a 2TB backup drive), and every one of them had serious problems. At that point I freaked and concluded I needed to write images of every volume as a precaution, despite having recent backups of everything, my theory being I would buy new drives and use those images to get me completely back up and running. I have Acronis, one of the best reviewed backup and disk utility packages on Windows, and thought that this would be easy, but then things got freaky. Imaging my 80GB SSD took 3 days. 3 DAYS!!!. The 1TB drive took over a week. Writing that image back out to a newly purchased drive then took another week. A freaking week!!! I tried all kinds of things to get around this – replacing all the SATA cables, pulling everything but the essentials out of the machine (boot drive, ram, cpu, gpu), booting to cd, to usb drive – nothing worked. Speed was abysmal. Meanwhile, during all this flailing about, the machine stopped booting – it would come up bluescreen of death, and could not even boot to safe mode.
At that point I became so frustrated I stopped touching the thing for a couple of weeks. Eventually I brought it into a local pc repair shop, figuring my time was worth more than the $50 they would charge me to tell me what the hell was wrong with the thing. That was only partly true as it turned out. They came back with a diagnosis of bad sectors on the SSD where a critical windows file was located (which I had already kind of sussed out), and offered to do a data migration for $100-200 depending on how complex that turned out to be. Worst case $200+150 for a new SSD, with me thinking the motherboard was the root of the problem and this money would not fix the issues caused me to bail on the machine. I bought new parts and built a new box. I’ll write that up shortly as per custom, but the spoiler is it was easy this go around, cost me about $850, and I’ll be selling off the remaining working parts from the old machine on ebay to subsidize the purchase shortly. I figure I can get around $300 for those, meaning my out of pocket is not much worse than the repair costs quoted by the repair shop ($350 vs. $550), for a repair I didn’t have confidence in. My one remaining question is, what the hell went wrong with the old one? My best guess is bios corruption introduced data corruption problems on the sata devices, but it’s really just a guess. Anyone else want to weigh in?
*(the name Suckegg 7 derives from when I first moved from Macs to PC’s oh so many years ago. That was in the Windows 95 era, and I joked with friends at the time that Windows sucked eggs in compared to Macs, which I then used as its network name (suckegg). Suckegg 7 isn’t the 7th machine in the sequence, but it was the first running Windows 7, so….)
Beasties in the night
So last night this came a howling onto my land (30 seconds of audio, requires a browser that can playback quicktime):
Your browser does not support the video tag
I went out with a flashlight and chased it off without ever catching a glimpse of it. Guesses as to what it is? I’d say fox, though the sound seemed ‘larger’ than a little fox ought to be capable of producing.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 