kureshii

Project Osmium: Google Sketchup

2009-10-18T13:20:00.011+08:00

Google's default shading model isn't fantastic, but works fine for drafting. Here, the effects of the black acrylic side panels are poorly rendered, but the effect should be like dark glass — semi-transparent, with a bit of a mirror finish.

Aluminium is used for the top, back and bottom; acrylic is used for the front and sides.

Two renderings that are hopefully more pleasing to the eye: hidden-frame and X-ray renderings.

Hidden-frame rendering looks the nicest in my opinion, although it does obscure some details, and shows no information about texturing or colours.

The X-ray renderings are a little cluttered, but the internal components should be easily identifiable.

A quick orientation: The radiator is on top, the PSU is mounted at the bottom, flush with the back.

The motherboard is mounted on a second clear acrylic base (attached to the internal frame), and the CPU socket sits right underneath the PSU (a tight fit for anything, really). Yeah, like an SG03 layout, but more cramped.

Lastly, fan grilles and other orifices have not been modelled yet; Thus far, only the back I/O [plate and PCI slots have been cut. Tubing for watercooling is likewise incomplete, as are the CPU and GPU waterblocks.

Here, you can see the internal frame to which all components are attached.

Some sections are still incomplete; I am pondering how to add a support bar to the rear assembly, which holds the PSU and peripheral cards. Still, it should be easily clear how the components are attached, even if the screws have not been modelled and rendered.

These are the components, displayed without the skin and supporting frame. The video card is not shown. (There were no pre-rendered models available, and I didn't not have one on-hand for reference.)

The pump was placed in front due to the lack of mountable surfaces; the SSD is in front so I can possibly illuminate it for some cheesecake night shots.

The radiator assembly and the bottom intake fan actually serve to support the aluminium skins (which will be directly attached to them) as well.

The skin and frame are shown without the components. The skin is made up of 2 pieces of aluminium and acrylic each; aluminium for the top and bottom (which curve around to the back and fold in interesting ways to form it), and acrylic for the base side panel on the motherboard side, as well as the curved front+side panel.

It might be interesting to note that the base panel is attached to the internal frame only via perspex blocks (rectangular blocks, of which there are currently 4; I will need to add a few more), so as to reduce the drilling requirement and make the mirror finish more perfect.

The aluminium panel skins will be attached to the frame via flat countersunk screws, polished to match the anodised aluminium.

Details of the hinge mechanism, as well as other missing details, will follow in future updates.

Project Osmium: Materials and Hardware

2009-10-18T13:14:00.004+08:00

Materials
The materials of choice are black transparent acrylic, and black anodised aluminium (brushed finish). While I am not particularly inclined towards lighting in my computer cases, I felt it would be nice to have some diffuse white lighting in the case, accentuating particular elements. Black acrylic would show this off nicely, while hiding the internal components behind a mirror finish when the case lights are switched off.

Hardware
Small form factor means micro-ATX (socket-1156 mini-ITX boards will be a long time in coming...) In addition, I wanted to minimise cost as far as possible, and since I will not be doing heavy overclocking on this setup, it should prove relatively easy to stay on a small budget. This rig will be mainly used for multimedia playback and heavy multitasking, essentially a do-it-all build (excluding gaming; I am not a PC gamer).

The following key components have been picked out so far.

Intel Core i7-860
Gigabyte P55M-UD2
Corsair XMS3-DHX DDR3
XFX Radeon HD5750

The watercooling elements are tentative and may be replaced by other picks sometime.

Swiftech MCP350 pump
Swiftech MCR220-Rev dual-120mm radiator (built-in reservoir)
dual Noctua NF-P12 for radiator cooling
Enermax Enlobal Marathon / Magma for air intake & memory DIMM cooling

Project Osmium: Introduction

2009-10-18T12:33:00.004+08:00

–noun Chemistry.
atomic number 76. Osmium is a hard, brittle, blue-gray or blue-black transition metal in the platinum family, and is the densest natural element.

Many months ago, when Lynnfield was announced, my interest in a power-efficient, small-footprint quad-core system was piqued. No northbridge, and individual core control; A quad-core system that stays within the 200W power envelope and yet sits in a case smaller than a mini-tower is unthinkable, then.

My earliest ideas revolved around fitting a Core i7-860 in a Lian-Li MUSE PC-C37 case, cooled by a sealed closed-loop cooler such as the Corsair H50. The optical drive + hard drive cage would be removed and replaced with a segregated cooling tunnel for the 120mm radiator, and a 70mm fan intake would cool the memory DIMMs. This idea bounced around in my head for quite a while, until I started looking up case mods on bit-tech and other sites.

The idea of a scratch-build was very appealing; low-form-factor cases have not gained mass-market appeal yet, so pickings are still slim. The only case I could find that would take a full-sized ATX PSU was the C37, and it was still a little too wide for my taste. I also wanted a case that would stand upright to reduce the desktop footprint, and the C37 didn’t look like it could do that comfortably.

Hence, enter project Osmium. The name was (uncreatively) inspired by the element of the same name; this build aims to maximise performance in as small a volume as possible (highest performance density), and it would be decked out in black, like the rest of the other electronics on my table.

CUDA rig status: Started

2009-05-27T22:04:00.003+08:00

I finally got round to starting on the CUDA rig. Build pictures:

Inside view, after some cable management

Parts boxes

Components:

Case: Coolermaster CM690
Power Supply: Corsair HX1000W
Motherboard: DFI Lanparty 790FXB-M2RSH
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 940
Memory: Kingstom ValueRAM DDR2-800
System disk: OCZ Core V2 30GB SSD
Test CUDA Card: XFX Geforce 9800GT

Adblock in SRWare Iron

2009-04-13T17:07:00.004+08:00

While Chrome does not (yet) support adblock-like features, this has been implemented in SRWare Iron already. Download adblock.ini from SRWare's news page, and use it to replace adblock.ini in your existing installation.

I haven't tested it extensively to see if it works as well as Firefox's AdblockPlus extension, but so far none of the advertisements on Engadget are showing :)

Porting search engines from Firefox to Chrome/Iron

2009-04-03T16:26:00.003+08:00

This is a quick method for those seeking to improve the functionality of Chrome/Iron/other Chromium variants on their system.

If you already have Firefox installed and have been playing around with it, then you probably have quite a list of search engines already added. you can, with some expenditure of effort, bring them over to Chromium/Iron. Here's how.

Browse to your Firefox profile folder. On most systems, this should be something like C:/Program Files/Mozilla/Firefox/profile (I'm using a portable build so I can't verify this).
You should see a folder labelled searchplugins. If you see a number of files with extensions ending in .xml, then you've hit jackpot :) Those files are search engine configurations, and should be named according to the search engine they are configured for.
Right-click the appropriate .xml file, then "Edit" (or just open it in your text editor of choice). Look for a line with the following:
From the same line, copy the URL that comes after template=, without the quotation marks.
Right-click on the Location bar in Chrome/Iron, and select "Edit search engines...". Click "Add", and a dialog box for adding a ne search engine should appear.
Type in a name and keyword of your choice in the first two text entry fields. In the third entry field, paste the URL you copied earlier. Replace "{searchTerms}" in the URL with "%s" (excluding the quotation marks).
Click Ok. You should now be able to search using the search engine in Chrome/Iron, simply by typing in the search keyword, then the search terms to use, separated by a space.

Of Sky Crawlers and Change

2009-03-20T15:58:00.006+08:00

I finally watched Sky Crawlers (from a source I will not name), and it left me with mixed feelings. For a long time I haven't thought about so many things after watching an anime series/movie, so I'm penning all this down.

First, a warning to readers: No, I did not have an outline of this written on a sheet of paper, nor did I plan an introduction, body (with points + elaboration) and conclusion, so I'm afraid you'll have to suffer some of my brain diarrhoea. Any academic body would tell you this is bad writing style, so do not emulate this. But for a blog... whatever.

Without revealing too much of the story and plot, Sky Crawlers is a story about people living the same life over and over again, in an unchanging landscape. Like with other Mamoru Oshii works, this one's a thinker. What makes this one different is that it's boring, absolutely boring, but intentionally so.

In case that hasn't registered with you, I will emphasise again: this is a boring movie. If you just want a quick sky-fighting flick with hot action and lots of noise, this is not the flick to pick.

To be honest, the film piqued my interest only after I read Justin's review of it (scathing look at the anime industry? Ooooh...) I don't fully agree with him, though. As one of the posts on the ANN forums says, the theme of this movie is so general that it could apply to almost anything. It could be a scathing look at anime... or at engineering, or business, photography, any number of fields and disciplines that have fallen into the rut of wash-rinse-repeat. From a general perspective, Sky Crawlers is the embodiment of pretty-but-boring; lovely textures and lighting, sharp CG, but flat textures on flat characters, and bland voice-acting. I wonder if this is Oshii's way of making a point that constancy is not something to be aimed for.

As a teenager I sometimes thought to myself, "How nice things would be if they could stay the same so I would never have to grow up". Now the irony of that statement comes back to bite me. It's triflingly amusing because at that moment in time, I was looking forward to an eternity of constancy; the preservation of a state that includes my preference for an unchanging state of constancy. If that state could have been perfectly preserved maybe I would have been in frozen, time-preserved bliss. Wouldn't that be a dandy state of things? The classic fairytale "living happily ever after".

But in retrospect, maybe staticity is desirable only in the context of an inevitably changing background. In a world where things are changing slowly but surely, constancy is the flip side of the coin, the greener side of the field. I say as a teen, "It would be nice if we never had to grow up and graduate" because growing up and graduating is the de-facto state of things. I wonder what I would have said in an alternate reality where graduation never existed.

In the first chapter of The Nature of Physical Reality, (part of) a paragraph reads "Professor William Lyon Phelps, in his charming informal lectures to the undergraduates at Yale, insisted that physics had far less to say about truth and reality than did poetry. and to prove his point he asked them: 'Would you now read a physics text that is 100 years old? Of course not. But you still read Shakespeare!'"

So much for truth and reality then, as convenient and useful constructs of the mind. Maybe they're not constant either, changing as our perceptions and collective ideas do. Perhaps, as the cliché goes, the only thing that doesn't change is change itself. And if change is the only thing we can count on, then it's probably time for me to grow up and stop getting too comfortable in my little academic pigeon-hole.

I leave you readers to your own ideas on change, and hope you leave some fragment of your presence in the comments :)

NAS Project Status: Suspended/dropped

2009-02-15T17:38:00.006+08:00

As I was working on the design, this cropped up in my RSS feeds:

QNAP TS-809 Turbo Pro NAS

Specifications:
Intel Processor Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
2GB DDRII RAM
8 x 3.5" SATA I/II HDD, hot-swappable, lockable
Mono-LCD display with backlight and buttons for configuration

As much as I love the idea of owning an NAS I built myself, this is just so much more awesome. So I'm dropping the VIA NAS 7800 project, until something better comes up.

Edit: I've picked up this project again, this time re-imagined as a low-power home storage server. Updates to come in another few months or so.

NAS Server: v0.4

2009-01-03T01:15:00.006+08:00

120mm fan swapped with a 200mm fan, an obvious solution to the issue (thanks jisa!). I'm currently eyeing the Antec Big Boy 200 (the fan in that image is not the Antec, but since i couldn't find a ready-made model I just resized the 120mm to the same dimensions). Hopefully it does translate to better airflow distribution. Removing the duct also makes the enclosure shorter, a welcome change.

Ventilation grilles have been added to the front of the base plate; I'll be adding more in future. The motherboard mounting plate is currently secured to the base by screws. I'm still figuring out a way to make it easily removable without requiring tools.

I'll try to find time during the upcoming semester to model the backplane PCB & SATA connectors. I also need to find a way to secure the hard drives (most likely idea would be a stiff plate secured by press-down clips). I'm also thinking of adding a graphic LCD to the front, so designing the side walls is going to take awhile.

NAS Server: v0.3

2009-01-03T00:20:00.003+08:00

Actually this is v4, but since I didn't make any 2D images or backups of v3 I'll pretend it never existed :P (sloppy, sloppy...)

Anyway, you can see that quite a few things are changed by now. I figured it would be easier to make a wall for the base plate and punch holes in it for the backports, so I did that.

It might be interesting to note that the PSU isn't secured by any screws at all (although the metal bracket supporting it at the back is secured by screws). I don't think it has any screw-threads on the bottom surface and I don't feel safe tapping new screw threads on my own, so that will have to do for now.

The 2X80mm system fans have now been replaced by a 1X120mm fan, which should be quieter. Since the HDD cooling section profile is larger than 120X120mm, I ducted the fan to allow airflow to spread. This is a dumb idea of course, I just put it in because I didn't have any better ideas, until a friend pointed out an obvious fix (I still can't believe I didn't think of it earlier; see next update). The fan plate is supported by protrusions on the base plate (a little hard to see in the image, look near the top edge of the base plate).

Along other changes, the HDD cage was redesigned yet again; It now has bottom support in addition to side support. Both old and new designs are simple folding designs that can be made from a single sheet of metal, with no assembly required. I'm still thinking of ways to reduce drive noise and vibration, this will probably be handled with the use of anti-vibration damping strips but I'm open to other suggestions.

The side walls and top mesh cover have not been modeled yet, I'll get to it eventually.

NAS Server: v0.2

2009-01-03T00:06:00.003+08:00

Some tweaks, as you can see; the backplane feature has been added, HDDs are flipped with the connector on top. you'd notice that one column of drives has been rotated in order to cluster the connectors in the middle. I hope the rotational symmetry helps simplify the CFD later on (or maybe not, since the heat source isn't centred).

The white bracket you see at the back was a temporary measure for drive-mounting, since I haven't figured out a way to keep the HDD cage suspended above the motherboard and PSU. you might also notice that the HDD cage design has changed; the design I got from 3D Warehouse just wasn't good enough. Currently system cooling is managed by 2X80mm fans, an arrangement I'm not really pleased with since the outer HDDs get less air.

In any case, I did a major redesign (not noticeable, but I basically deleted most of it and started over) shortly after this point.

NAS Server: v0.1

2009-01-02T23:32:00.010+08:00

This is a simplistic initial design, made using standard (slightly modified) parts from Google 3D Warehouse (apart from the outer case, which is self-modeled).

Motherboard: VIA NAS 7800
Power Supply (PSU): Seasonic SS-200SU
Hard Disk Drives (HDDs): Western Digital Caviar Green

You can tell this is definitely an early model; no holes for the motherboard backports and PSU power socket, and lots of features not included yet. But the important design features are in place; small footprint (the initial design has a horizontal cross-section dimension of 250X250mm) and low power consumption. The HDD arrangement was selected for optimal cooling and more even heat spread*.

Drive SATA connectors were initially positioned at the bottom for close proximity to the motherboard, but I later decided to design it for easier access with minimal disassembly by the user. This will be achieved with top-loading drives, via backplane PCB-mounted integrated SATA connectors (see the later posts for more details).

*Some case history: I am currently using a Synology CS-407 4-bay NAS (see photo from earlier post), which has the drives horizontally oriented, vertically stacked. While that is a convenient and compact arrangement, it causes the top drive to be cooled less efficiently. During typical operation the CS-407 reports HDD temperatures (in degrees Celsius, from top to bottom) of 42, 42, 40, 38. For this design I decided to go with only 1 layer of hard drives, with sufficient spacing between them; Despite the small footprint, I believe it's still possible to design an optimal HDD layout that isn't confusing or inconvenient.

NAS Server: Introduction

2009-01-02T22:56:00.005+08:00

This project is a downscaled version of the previously-mentioned Uberserf (which I still haven't gotten round to giving a proper name to), meant as a specialised file server, perhaps with a web management UI.

The main design focus and requirements are small footprint (takes up minimal space), low power consumption (so an ATX/microATX mid-tower, though cheaper, wouldn't do) and high storage density (at least 8 drive bays). Other secondary factors include low cost, low operating temperature and ease of manufacture.

The designs are done in Google Sketchup, due to its simplicity (I don't want a design so complicated it can't even be done in Google Sketchup) and also ease of viewing (via Google's 3D Warehouse). There are also some ready-made parts (fans, hard drive cages, etc) available in Google 3D Warehouse, which simplifies the design process.

Anyway, this post and the next few posts are actually backlogged; I should have started project logging earlier, I know >_>

This post, and the posts that follow, will be tagged "nas", and serve as a project log of sorts. Feel free to add your own comments, or recommend any sources/manufacturing workshops if you know any. I fully intend to create a CAD model of it, carry out some CFD simulations for airflow, and eventually make a prototype of it, and use it for personal storage. Plans for commercialisation and mass production are not in the pipeline yet, though I wouldn't rule it out.

Of Love and Forgiveness

2008-12-17T22:01:00.003+08:00

One week before Christmas, and time again for the penitence that always precedes big celebrations. So it may seem odd that I'm conjuring this blog post in my head while in the middle of penitential service. But this is reflection upon my sins after all; albeit not quite in the proper perspective.

Take a sufficiently Sim-like, macroscopic view of things (and I see no harm in this, for vain as we are, we are not quite significant enough that we cannot take a contextual view of the universe we live in and chuckle a little at our pompous self-importance), and a church looks nothing more like a redemption centre; a place where sins are cleared, hearts cleansed, guilty consciences soothed. Zoom in close enough, and bustling effort is evident; choosing of a priest (one who knows you well, or perhaps not so well), picking a queue that doesn't look lengthy, thinking about the words to say and how to phrase them.

At the end of the day isn't confession of one's sins really just an apology for failing to love God/others enough and promise to love God/them more? And yet that's really all that's needed, since God always forgives unconditionally. I can't help but smirk a little at the irony; we hurt others when we love them, and others hurt us when we love them; after all, the insults of enemies and strangers mean nothing, but the words our friends say mean everything.

And this whole - system (for want of a better word) - of penitence is seemingly intended just to preserve this Love, this thing that is the source of all hurt. From a logical point of view this is so preposterous that one would unwittingly chuckle at the thought. Yet this Love, given by God (a gift slowly evolved though millenia and over many generations of societal living, if you like) still exists today, bolstered no doubt by lots of penitence, whether crafted by religious intent, or otherwise.

I shall leave my musings here, and return you, my dear reader, to the canon definitions of love: religiously, "God is unconditional love"; secularly, "Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired" (Mark Twain); and all the other commonly quoted definitions (or perhaps you might prefer a Wikipedia hyperlink).

Macross Frontier

2008-11-16T20:24:00.003+08:00

A few months after the rest of the world finished this series and moved on to Fall season anime, I finally get on it. And... what a ride.

First, the warnings: no, there's not much of a story. No, the leads aren't very likeable (but they sure are pretty!), and yes, parts of it are downright corny. Should that watch you from watching it? No.

Probably the biggest thing that turns people off Macross is the overriding idea that songs (love-filled, culture-filled songs) have the power to stop wars. Yeah, it's a downright facepalm-corny concept if you think about it post-haste, but when they sing, it's hard to laugh when your jaw's on the floor. The songs are simply awesome (and they make the show a little reminiscent of Bollywood, or maybe musicals). It's not Yoko Kanno's best work, but even if it's JPop, it's damn good JPop. Really really good JPop.

Macross Frontier is full of songs. And war. Also, song-wars and warsongs, and more warsongs. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but oh, what a sweet cup of tea it is!

DigiKey

2008-10-27T18:40:00.003+08:00

If you're an electronics hobbyist, it's hard not to be excited by a website like DigiKey's. Things that you've only heard of in hushed whispers at industrial canteens, or seen deployed when your electronic toy finally died and you deconstructed it out of curiosity. Radioshack is sadly inaccessible here, so most electronic components necessitated a visit to Sim Lim Tower or similar hangouts.

But finally, here is an online catalogue for one's perusal. Admire the almost-2000 pages of capacitors, transistors, crimpers, connectors and other widgets. And go to sleep tonight on sweet dreams of building stuff with parts you never knew existed.

Project: Uberserf

2008-10-24T19:52:00.012+08:00

(This project was inspired by an attempt to get some practice done on Central Force Motion. Don't ask how the two are related.)

Objective
1) Create a general-purpose, low-powered home server/router to serve virtual machines, among other things.

2) Set up thin clients to connect remotely to virtualised machines, for casual use or administration.

Hardware
NOTE: I have not found sources/places to buy the following items yet, most links go to newegg only because I'm using it as a catalogue/speccing site, they don't ship here so buying from them is not an option (and don't even mention VPost).

Section A - Home Server

Parts

Enclosure: Athena Power RM-4U4064X60 4U Rackmount Server Case (Image link)
Accessories: Icy Dock MB455SPF-B Multi-Bay Backplane Module x2 (Image link)
Motherboard: Tyan S2912G2NR Dual 1207(F) NVIDIA nForce 3600 (Image link)
Processor: AMD Opteron 1352 Barcelona 4X2.1GHz, Socket AM2
RAID card: ARC-1231ML PCI-E 12-port SATAII RAID adapters (Image link)
NIC: Small Tree PEG6 PCI-E 6-port GbE card (Image link)

Alternatives:

Antec Mini P180 enclosure
Liantec PC-A59 enclosure
Other Socket 1207 server boards
Clovertown/Harpertown with server board
High-end desktop motherboard with single desktop quad-core

Comments:

For starters I wanted up to 10 hard drives (not all at one go) in the server, preferably swappable. And also the slimmest case possible to go with them. The Athena Power case is no svelte beauty by any measure, but you'll be hard-pressed to find anything smaller (near that price) that fits the bill. The two ICY Docks make hard drive management much easier, and lend some beauty to the setup by virtue of symmetry.

I originally wanted to go with a single-socket board, but most of them had sucky specs, so I decided to go with the dual socket ones instead (dual quad-core sounds pretty spiffy too). Among other Tyan boards I went with this one for the price (always a concern for college students), and for the nice board layout (again, nice symmetry of main components, and optimises airflow coverage from front to back).

Ironic as it sounds, I wanted the setup to use as little power as possible (personal, financial and philosophical reasons; don't ask). In hops Intel's 50W Harpertown to introduce itself. Unfortunately, it's pricey and most (cheap) boards for it are sucky. At almost half the price and with a better selection of boards, Barcelona comes to the rescue.

About those 2 specialist adapter cards... I know they'll cost more than the rest of the system combined (excluding hard drives), but they're what makes a hardcore server a hardcore server. As long as they're obtainable I'm not taking them off the list (unless I get better recommendations).

What's it going to be used for? For starters, virtualisation, fileserving and maybe some benchmarking, mucking around etc. In future I might try setting up a filehost/webhost, get a VPN going, and so on. Plans are not fixed yet, but I like to have room for expansion.

Section B - Thin Client

Parts:

Norhtec MicroClient JrSX (Image link)
Any cheap, working LCD monitor

Alternatives:

Single-board computers
Mini-ITX or smaller form-factor thin clients

Comments:

Why are thin clients so freaking expensive? All they do is let you access the OS on a remote server - how much should it cost to do that? I haven't found any thin client selling for less than USD150-200, some go up to USD500 or 600, maybe even more. No way I'm paying so much for something that ought to be much much cheaper.

In pops Norhtec, a Bangkok-based company that creates embedded solutions. 5W machine that starts from USD88 - sweeet. With power consumption so low I might even try to power it off LAN and save myself an adapter.

Software (Virtualisation)

Software:

VirtualBox

Alternatives:

VMWare
SuSELinux with Novell Virtualisation
One of many Linux distros + VNC

Comments:

One somewhat-simple task, so many implementations. Ideally I'd like to run the MicroClient even without the CF card (i.e. by PXE boot), but what happens after boot is the question. Typically I would just run a microdistro that logs in to an active session on a VM on the server, but I'm sure there're other, more efficient ways to do it. VirtualBox supports RDP protocol which seems like a much better idea. VNC sounds nice but would probably be bandwidth-heavy for typical desktop use. I just threw in SuSE for the heck of it because I like SuSE, but it's probably not one of the ideas I'll go with.

This is not a terribly creative or trying project, in that there's not much DIYing or modding involved (just plenty of assembly) and I won't have to write much code or make my own hardware and stuff, but it's possibly the most expensive one I've dared to type out yet. Feel free to drop comments or suggestions (preferably with links if you're recommending other hardware).

[EOF]

Note to vendors: Images are linked to an imagehost so as to reduce bandwidth usage for your respective webservers. If you don't like me doing that drop me an email and I'll remove them or hotlink them instead.

A Pirate is Free

2008-10-15T15:07:00.001+08:00

Quoted For Truth.

Photo Moment: D-Link DGL-4300 + Synology CS-407

2008-09-07T23:55:00.003+08:00

On the left: DLink DGL-4300,Gigabit LAN + Wireless B/G router

On the right: Synology Cube Station CS-407, 4-bay SATA NAS with 2xUSB and Gigabit LAN, as well as full-featured server OS

Don't they look oh-so-pretty decked out in black?

Netbooks: Weapons of Mass Desolation?

2008-07-22T17:55:00.003+08:00

Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry
Article from NYTimes, courtesy of Engadget.

This is a classic call for a Waambulance. Consumers want cheaper laptops, and manufacturers are unhappy because this eats their profit margins.

There's not much to say here. The way I see it, there's 2 scenarios at work:

1) Consumers want netbooks as a second lightweight machine
Manufacturers still get to keep their share of the first-machine pie.

2) Consumers are using netbooks as their primary machine
If that's the case, then maybe we've reached the point where ultralights provide enough computing power to meet the needs of the large majority of users. Then perhaps it's time manufacturers started to look at their business and at the market, and move accordingly instead of sitting on their asses and whining.

Despite the relatively high price of the Asus EEE 900 series, people are still snapping it up. There's money to be made out there, if you can't figure out how to, that's your problem.

I'm a self-professed Fujitsu fanboy, I like the tablet PCs they make and my siblings don't seem to have any issue with their Fujitsu laptops. But it disappoints me to see them profess worry over netbooks. At the kind of retail prices their machines sell at, the low-budget consumer was never in their target market anyway. They can sell their machines much cheaper, and I think they know it but are not willing to 'fess up. I think they've been lazy long enough, and I hope to either see them do more with their business, or drop prices.

Rose & Camellia

2008-06-15T12:50:00.005+08:00

Bitch fight time! As this blog describes it, this is "Mike Tyson's punchout reimagined by Jane Austen". I don't usually post flash games for youtube videos, but this is just awesome - well-written prose, nice art and creepy BGM. And it is really fun with a tablet too ;)

It seems someone's trying to make a homebrew of this for the DS - more power to you whoever you are.

[edit] Apparently R & C 2 is out already. But it's in Japanese only, and you have to finish R & C 1 first to get to it.

Does the increasing trend of ADHD-ness make us more stupid?

2008-06-11T20:11:00.003+08:00

This post was inspired by an article, found on The Atlantic through Lifehacker.

While I would agree to some degree (heh, it rhymes) that the wide availability of information makes people accept information more readily and with less critical analysis involved, I don't think it astute to blame it on Google or the Internet.

While we have increased our average lifespan approximately twofold in the past few centuries, the things we try to achieve in a single lifetime have increased... what, a hundredfold? two-hundredfold? I think a natural result of this would be less time spent on each item, and consequently less focus per achievement as well.

In the past people had fewer career choices and fewer sources of information, and definitely much less spam. I somehow doubt they even have enough outlets to achieve the kind of ADHD behaviour we exhibit today, be it in front of the television or interacting with the Internet. Today, just sifting out irrelevant information alone already saps enough energy from some of us, let's not even talk about focusing on the myriad things that require our attention.

In other words, I think this is a natural and inevitable result of the greater availability of information, and also in the choices available to us when it comes to spending our time. The tradeoff for having more things to do, and being able to do more things, is less time to spend on each thing.

This monologue is going to end here, because something else is dragging my attention away and I'm not really interested in the topic to go dig up references, statistics and facts to support my points. But if someone has an interesting point of view I would be glad to respond and further develop this.

Multitasking Grey's Anatomy

2008-06-07T17:35:00.003+08:00

I'm more than 2 seasons behind on Grey's Anatomy but catching up quite quickly. It helps that it's an easy show to watch, and by that I mean I don't need to be in front of the screen looking at the details since the content is in the context and dialogue, which means I can play it on Hazel (the P3 laptop) while doing something else like ebook-formatting/editing and still be able to laugh when George finds out who gave him syph since it's not something that needs to be visually watched to be funny.

I originally wanted to generalise this to all sitcoms/dramas but decided against it. And I realise that I'm getting better and better at run-on sentences although it is something I probably shouldn't be improving at, maybe I need to start truncating my thought stream or try to do it more in parallel instead of serial.

Fockkkk

2008-06-07T01:39:00.005+08:00

More than 6 years (nay, probably closer to 7) with XP, and I only just realised that everytime I disconnect a USB device my tablet says "fockkkk". It's in a somewhat computerish accent but quite clearly and distinguishably, "fockkkk".

Yeah, fockkkk you too, you lil' bastard. I think it's kinda cute when it says that ^_^ I love my fockkkking cute tablet PC, LOL.

PDF Spam

2008-06-05T00:40:00.005+08:00

You know there's something not quite right about you...

when 20% of the files on your desktop are technical PDFs, and arranged in nice little OCD-esque groups.