Journals

[edit] Posted on my blog about the upgrade. Info, benchmarks and some pictures:

http://sjackm.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/pc-upgrade/

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I just upgraded my platform today.
I changed the CPU from an Intel Pentium D935(2007) 3,2 ghz to an Intel Pentium E6500(2009) 2,9 ghz. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P965-S3 rev 3.3. I had to upgrade the BIOS to the latest version.

Results?

-from 120w in idle my PC now consumes 83w
-from 42 seconds for 1M in SuperPI to 19,5 seconds
-temperatures are quite the same, but the cooler was greatly reduced in size (and doesn't have a copper base, like the old one used to have): about 35 in idle I think

I also changed the original cooler from my Gigabyte Ati Radeon HD4850 with an Arctic Cooling Accelero.
-from 79C in idle and 89 full load it's now 38C in idle and 61-62 in full load.

There is 1 cat in each of the 4 corners of a room. In front of each cat, are 3 cats. On the tail of each cat, is 1 cat. How many cats are in the room?

I'm a little pissed at ATI, I bought their new Radeon 6870 the other day to move away from Nvidia and upgrade from my 8800 (had to cook it once a month)

The 6870 doesn't detect my second monitor, at all. This is annoying. I spent literally a full day wondering why, both my monitors are exactly the same and have the same adaptors (VGA to DVI) yet only the top port on the card works.

Anyway! After countless hours of googling and stuff, I managed to find out that one port on the card is a DVI-I and the other is a DVI-D, the DVI-D doesn't support VGA. What.

Why the fuck would you do that. Now I have to sell one of my perfectly working monitors and replace it for another which is DVI. The thing which is worrying me though is that I was using a DVI adapter and it still wasn't detecting it, so I might waste my money buying a new monitor, and I can't find the receipt for the card...

So I'm back to using 1 monitor until christmas, or if that fucks up, forever probably.

Sigh. Can't I escape the clutches of bad hardware. I bought Assassin's Creed 2.5 for the PS3 and I get some pretty nasty frame rate issues when walking, running, climbing in the main town area. It's the NPC's. They've increased the number yet again so it's taxing my PS3.

Thing is, not everyone is having bad frame rates and videos on YouTube are showing this. At first I thought it was a bad port to PS3 but now I'm not sure. I've contacted Ubisoft so waiting on their thoughts but I might have a dying PS3 >_>

This generation, for me, seems to be the generation of laggy games and hardware problems. I wonder what the next generation will be.

P.S. Yes, yes, PS3. Sometimes I like to play my games on a big TV and not worry about lag. lul.

Started mapping some random stuff again. I like where this ones going.

edit: quick update

Fans of strategy games!
Windows is selling Age of Empires 3 for only TEN CENTS!

$.10 USD!

It's outrageous!

Check it out

To prove the legit-ness, i just purchased it.DownloadI admit, it takes like 15 minutes to do all the signups, unless you have an x-box live account/card set up already, but IMO it's completely worth it.

I just ordered an Intel Pentium E6500. Although the name might sound familiar, this belongs to a newer family of processors, codenamed "Wolfdale". E6500 appeared in Q3 of 2009. I also ordered a new cooler for my Gigabyte HD4850, Arctic Cooling Accelero Pro. I expect my temperatures to drop by at least 25C(it stays at 80C in idle with the stock cooler).

That's why I actually started that SuperPI benchmarking thread, to observe how it compares with other scores. On some sites I saw it was capable of calculating 1M digits in 18 seconds at the default clock, but maybe that's on a clean windows install. Anyway, it will be a lot better than my current CPU.
Better power consumption and efficiency(E6500: max 65W, Intel PentiumD935: max 95W).
I will make benchmark my pc again after I'll install them.

Valve today announced that Portal 2 - the sequel to the ground-breaking title that won over 30 game of the year awards, despite missing its original ship date - will now be available the week of April 18th, 2011. This two month slip not only marks the shortest delay in Valve's proud tradition of delays, it represents the approaching convergence of Valve Time and Real Time. Though this convergence spells doom for humanity, it will not affect the new Portal 2 release date.

More Journals
^ this link added 19th November 2010 in order to fuck with DiscoStu in 2012. Somehow.

It is done...

http://www.twhl.co.za/vault.php?map=5552

Hope it's as good as it should be. If it needs more, tell me.

In case you didn't notice my sudden recent absence from TWHL, I'll say: Hello boys! I'm back!

A few weeks ago my computer caught some piece of malware. I can only suppose that while attempting to fix it I erased my browser's cookies and I got logged out of TWHL. It turns out that after over a year of autologin, I had forgotten my password, which apparently was different than the other password I use for everything else, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out.

I took it as a sign that I should focus on my last exams, so that's what I did. And now, thanks to Penguinboy's Patented Automatic Password Reset System (TM) I am back around here.

Boy, I got a shitload of posts to read now.

I was just finishing a 49-map mod called Last-life. That's right, it's longer than Blue shift. But what "long" mod isn't longer than blue shift nowadays? People left and right complain that blue shift was too short. Blah Blah no one cares.

This mod is basically the end product of a chemical equation between vanilla, Blue shift, Opposing Force, and something French. It is a French mod that attempts to reimagine parts of the chapters that you went through in the three official games. Unfortunately the results are not always great. I ran into your typical problems, including freezes, areas where you must noclip to proceed, and inconsistent v_ models.

The story is as follows. You are Gordon Freeman, and you don't work in sector C. You work in some other unknown sector with dim lighting. One day you go to work, and you mindlessly press a button on a laser machine, causing it to spiral out of control and cause all systems to go haywire. Xen aliens arrive and start a party at the wrong time. And since no one brought chips, the Xen aliens resort to eating your colleagues because they are quite hungry, having eaten nothing since they expected food at the party. This makes your life more difficult. And I just made this up.

So what sets this mod apart from nameless others? Just look at the image below, a memorable screenshot of this mod.

Naw I'm just kidding. That wasn't the highlight. The real highlight about this mod that is absent in other mods is the ingenuity in map design (when it isn't bugging out). Sometimes, you are dumbfounded at a certain area or stumped by a locked door and need to figure out how to get thru. This will happen often. You must have a good eye and thinking to see the hidden paths that will allow you to proceed. Otherwise, you will spend the rest of your days in the bowels of black mesa among all the other crap down there. Poo.

So this mod has the French flag and clever hidden paths going for it. Try it out if you want, but, bear in mind it can be frustrating sometimes due to a small amount of bugs.

First, he couldn't figure out what's his favorite color (seems to change by the minute). Then, he put on a good show of light saber sound effects.

So new development. Basically one night I wanted to listen to some music through my headphones like I usually do when I noticed sound was only coming out of one headphone.

So I contact Dell and also mention the freezing problem I used to get is still here. I honestly can't find a pattern to the freezing but the PC could be fine a week and the next it could freeze once a day.

Anyway as I said, I contacted Dell who told me to run the usual tests and it found nothing. Next thing I know I get an email today from them telling me they're now sending a new harddrive and a techy to install it. I've asked if it'll have windows 7 because quite honestly I believe Vista is a piece of shit and caused most of my problems.

So there ya go. Either Dell sent me a shoddy PC 3 years ago and it has slowly been dying or they're just generous.

Either way that's a new graphics card, motherboard and now a harddrive. What next? ram? Cause I get a lot of memory errors lul.

So in a very tender moment over the weekend, I got down on one knee and proposed to Lyssa with a ring made of white string, she cried and said yes! We're only telling a few people, but once I procure some funds, I will get a real ring and have a big showy proposal in front of family and stuff. So keep this a bit of a secret from our parents ok guys?

[UPDATE!] Made a review for my camera, Nikon CoolPix P100:
http://historylight.blogspot.com/2010/11/nikon-coolpix-p100.html

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Well I just made a blog about photography. I'm not a photographer, one of my passions is photography.
I just felt the need of opening a blog about this.

http://historylight.blogspot.com/