Journals

I love Mondays.

Even though I started school this monday...
Even though I lost nearly all the ping-pong matches this monday...
Even though I had to go to sleep earlier for the first time after 3 months...

It gives me a new hope for a good weekend.

I hate Sunday evenings. It makes me feel awful when thinking of a whole new school week.

Tomorrow I start my last year of high-school. I kind of feel awful and already fear the final exams.

I hope I will find ways to raise my morale and rectify my knowledge gaps as soon as possible.

Welcome back!
This is your 8888th login.

RepDigit celebration login. Yay!

I passed the final driving school exam: the city driving test. Starting from tomorrow I can drive cars( under 3,5t). Yay!

My newest acquisition? Asus Xonar DS 7.1
The problem? I almost regret buying it, I think I have wasted 60$ for nothing. I am quite desperate with the problems it presents. I am just going to copy paste what I posted on the Asus support forums.

[EDIT]{ I resolved the major problems.

-flashplayer doesn't crash anymore
-I now have FrontPanel access, yay! The front panel has a pre-amp, and the headset sounds a lot better. The best part is that I don't have to plug and unplug anymore, I can just switch between 5.1 and FrontPanel from the Asus panel. That's a massive plus.

Minor problems still left:

-I must activate FlexBass when I switch to 5.1 to be able to get low frequencies, I mean BASS. Without that option activated there is no trace of subwoofer activity...
-I must accomodate myself with the Asus panel, in the windows sound options I'm only controlling a "Master" volume from now on
-I have to do a ton of fine tuning to make the 5.1 system sound how I want. That's not necessarily a problem.
-sometimes windows won't boot the first time, I have to restart and select "Start Windows Normally"....
}

[/EDIT

Let me start by saying that I own Gigabyte GA-P965-S3 motherboard, the only hardware part that has been left without upgrade through the years. The onboard audio broke, and it's not chip-related but mostly connector related. They probably worn out after so much plugging and unplugging.

I decided to buy a PCI audio card, and I thought I should invest a bit more money since I'm doing this anyway, to obtain more sound fidelity.
After some research, I finally stumbled upon the Xonar DS 7.1 and thought this was the choice.

When it arrived, I was prepared for some misc failures, like a boot failuter or something. And indeed the computer failed to boot the first time, don't know what was that all about :).

Anyway, I proceeded to install the audio card. Downloaded the latest driver from the ASUS site for Win7 x64 because it's not provided on the CD. At that moment I was wearing my Plantronics Gamecom headset( modest, but I can't afford expensive things really). I noticed the improvement in sound quality. But I was to be soon disappointed. I wanted to check a song on youtube, and the flashplayer crashes. Firefox, Chrome.. doesn't matter. I tried on Vimeo: the same thing.
Soon I discovered that not even the 5.1 system works. The LF were nonexistent. Even though it was set to 5.1 in the windows playback devices panel, somehow every sound got mixed in the front channel.

Now to ensure that there will be no conflict with the 2 audio cards ( Asus and the onboard Realtek one), I completed these steps:

-I disabled the onboard audio in BIOS
-I uninstalled the Realtek drivers
-I uninstalled the Asus drivers
-I deleted every track of sound drivers with drivers sweeper and then run a registry cleaner(ASC)
-after rebooting, I reinstalled the Asus drivers
-rebooted

The results are the same. Fortunately playing games doesn't provoke a BSOD( well, I only tried a League of Legends match).

Ok here are my main 2 problems, for those of you with TL;DR

1. I can't watch flash videos(Youtube, for ex.) since I installed the Asus Xonar DS. YES I AM SURE it is ITS fault, because right before installing it I watched some videos.

2. Going to "Playback Devices", "Asus Xonar Audio Device" and clicking properties I see no Jack I/O information. Similarly, there are no level controls for each of the channel. The onboard sound card didn't have this problem.

Yes I have the Xonar DS Audio Center, but it is useless if windows doesn't itself recognize the audio features. Because of this there all kinds of problems spawning, like the desired sound functionality is next to impossible to achieve.

I have heard that it might be the driver itself responsible, and there are modded drivers that should work but I'm afraid of doing something wrong.

Can somebody please help me?

Does anybody know a GOOD Free or OpenSource OCR software, or maybe even a commercial one that has a trial period?

I'm mentioning that in the scanning process there are mathematical symbols or equations involved, and it's printed, not handwriting.

I made a new OpenTTD beginner tutorial covering the basics of building a train transportation system.

Link

[EDIT] Also, I made a little fractal animation test, using Chaoscope, Ani4Chaoscope and VirtualDub: link

Ok. I was walking along a path in near a river today when I saw an earth worm crossing it.
"How sweet! Let's take a macro photo of it", I said.

So I took a photo, but then I thought I'd also film the oddly gross movements earth worms have.

But there was something even more gross that I only observed on the monitor home...

Link to video

Filmed a Green Beetle. I'd like to film more videos like these. They are calming and beautiful. This one didn't turn up so good because of the bluriness( I have to set a fixed focal length if I want to film something viewable at all, because the auto-focus just sucks).

I need some advice on buying a new HDD. I'm very careful when buying a new product and I study reviews before throwing the money, because it's little.
Often I read not only reviews, but lots of comments from other users to analyse the situation a little bit better.
However, I almost convince myself numerous times that I should not buy the product after all, just because the fear of low reliability or because the product may be damaged from the start.

And HDDs are really sensitive equipment. Reviews might promote the transfer speeds of some hdds, or different functionalities, but I hardly find reliability feedback, other than miscellaneous comments, left by non-experienced users that do not reflect the real quality of the product.

I have decided to choose from 2 HDDs, because of their priceperformance(notice that I didn't write "quality", because I do not know how reliable they are).

Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

or

Western Digital Caviar Blue(WD10EALX) 1TB

Now here's why it's hard to decide:

-The spinpoint F3 is said to be the fastest hdd from its class, even faster than caviar black. It's also SATA2 (not that it could saturate that bandwidth anyway), perfectly compatible with my motherboard(I have Sata2). Plug n' Play!

-The Caviar Blue is not as fast, but the company has some tradition and, well it "feels" more reliable. The problem is that it's SATA3(useless for HDDs), although it has 2 pins on which to place a jumper to set it to SATA2. It also requires some special formatting with WD software or what. I just fear of compatibility problems.

At first I had only the Caviar Blue as an option, but as soon as I spotted the spin point and reading this review which praises it, I lost my power of decision. I am really more inclined towards the Caviar Blue, but the Spinpoint F3 is such a solid option that I need some advice from someone.

So, what do you say guys?

Hold on to yer helmet!

Wiki info

There's little to no information about the game yet, and it might just be a 'forever' project, although it's set for a 2012 release.
As a child this was one of my favorite games. I played carmageddon 1&2.
Then after I got bored I remember I discovered on my own(didn't have internet at the time)how to cheat by modifying configuration files. Lots of fun.

Hopefully Carmageddon:Reincarnation will mean the same lots of fun, or even more, even though projects like this tend to loose their original fame.

Wazzup guys?

First of all, I got Minecraft! Yeah, some of you already know. What a cool game! You know what's the problem? Unlimited freedom limits creativity. It's just the way it is, let's admit it. Not totally, I still find this game incredibly fun. But by the time I finally get some redstone resources, and find the incredibly rare gold and diamonds on some maps(also lapis lazuli is as rare as particles in space) I get kind of bored to continue doing some circuits(never actually did until know, I should learn... I know the basics).
I also have a 2 favorite texture packs: Misa(64x64) and LB PhotoRealism(128x128). They both successfully replace the retro 16x16 without changing the general atmosphere or adding piercing-your-eyes eye-candy.

These days I was looking out of curiosity for some good ringtones, to replace one of the defaults my Galaxy Mini has. Although I didn't quite find something that was designed as a ringtone(I like ringtones to be Ring Tones, not cut up music tracks), I found a couple of ones that are just epicridiculous:

Ridiculous sheep with one having a grotesque hoarse sound

Breathtaking ringtone

Old Nokia tune that has an EPIC turnaround- with a bit of editing, I would extend a bit the "old" part

In other news, today I was rejected at the driving theory test(20 out of 26, min=22)... after I made so many fucking tests at home and made 2 tests at the school to prove myself I should give it a try. Now I have to stay 15 days until I can do the test again :...

P.S.: I am trying to help a friend get some votes, so please go here and give him a vote. There is not registering required, just a simple click.

Sorry to post another journal this fast, but I remembered something I did not post in my last one.

One of the comments 2 journals ago when I said I was leaving for a couple of days was.
"Withdrawing from a heavy TWHL addiction can be quite difficult. Symptoms include nausea, cold sweat, night fever, and diarrhea.", by 2muchvideogames.

Add to that "dreaming TWHL related stuff".

Yes, I dreamed being together with a TWHL member. I don't clearly remember all the sequence, but I know at some point I entered a train, sat down and had a friendly talk about "interesting things" (probably mapping). Then at some point, I accidentally dropped something from the train. So I said to him "wait, I'm gonna jump, get it and come back!". So I did. Unfortunately, although I was running really fast(I mean, FAST), the train was too far away to catch. And so the dream ended with me being extremely upset I didn't got to know him better, discuss more and become friends.

I am not going to tell you who the member was though. ([EDIT] Perhaps in the next journal)

Actually, to cut some boring moments of your life, try to think of what would have happened next if I could have got up on the train again. Imagine!

P.S. Man, this dream just fuelled my enthusiasm of maybe some day be able to make a TWHL meeting in real life. That would be so rad, bros!
TWHL is and will remain a special community because it has given to me one of the best friends. Although he left the community long ago, I still talk to him everyday.

Hey guys! I'm back!

Also, new reason to reinstall my webcam.

Goodbye, TWHL. I'm leaving you.(for a couple of days, haha!)

I'm going to be absent for a couple of days. Yes that's the main reason I asked for a delay on the TWHL map competition and I really hope I can make it for Sunday evening back. I'm going on a trip... by train. And, if you remember me talking about going on a trip in 2010(July I think), trains are damn slow in my country. Damn tiresome trips...

Not that many of you care so much about this anyway.

Where I'm going there are no interesting landscapes to shoot photos of, but I'm taking the camera just in case.

Well, goodbye. See you soon TWHL.