Motorola PEBL U6: Solid, No-Fuss Phone, and it's not a RAZR
January 6th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Razrs are everywhere. My friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, septic tank drainers, pushers and hookers have Razrs. It was quite a revolutionary phone at it’s launch, but today they are some many in the wild that owning one of those will get people to whisper “conformist” to you on the streets. I’m usually more of a right side kind of person, but really, some trends, like the Razr, get to a point where it’s almost an insult to individuality.
When I was looking for my first phone, I wanted something like me: really hot. Just kidding. I wanted something functional, with decent looks and that extra special touch that makes it mine, as well as mobile internet, Java and Bluetooth ready. After looking at the Motoral L series, my choice landed on the PEBL U6, still from Moto, mostly because it had all I wanted, but also because my service provider, Fido, didn’t carry it, and after buying 2 of those phones, I have no regrets.
2007, A Yearly Retrospective
December 28th, 2007 § 2 Comments
2007 was a very big year indeed. For the sake of archiving all the memories and accomplishements of the year that has passed, this article will highlight the main events of the year 2007.
- First big event in my year, my 15th birthday on the 30th of January: one year deeper in adolescence, and getting closer still to adulthood and all it has to offer. On the personal plan, I feel that I have gone through great personal evolution throughout this year: a change in tastes, change in mentality, but most importantly, a feeling that time goes by WAAAY faster. As much as last year my weeks seem to stretch out and last forever, now it seems like my bi-weekly paycheck comes in every day.
- Once again a step closer to adulthood, 2007 was marked with the obtention of my first ever job at McDonalds, in the month of March. Being the first one of my posse to get a real job (the kind you have to do declarations for), I had no friend to give me advice on the thing, so the concept of working was totally new for me. My job helped me on many aspects, notably social interaction, negociation and diplomacy, and it gave me my first real taste of what money was really worth. The only sad thing about it is that it got me used to a certain level of comfort that makes me feel poor whenever I fall under, but hey, something’s gotta give.
- Also a big first in 2007, the construction of my first custom PC, and my introduction to the hardware side that came with it. In fact, if this year were to be named after a geeky sphere of activity, it would be without a doubt be called hardware. It’s pretty regrettable, but in the end DIC has been slightly shunned in the favor of OCN, and the tendancy looks like it’s going to continue. Unless I decide to finally get a grip on my code, which is going just as good as the American economy.
- ’07 was also the year of my first parentless trip out of Quebec. With the help of my school, various fundraisers and the federal tax-funded SEVEC program, I went to Peace River, Alberta, with a short stop to Edmonton. Although on the spot I didn’t really care of what was happening to me, if it wasn’t for the immersion in a totally different culture, I later realized that this trip was a very important part of my year, if not my life, for lots of reasons.
- It may sound weird, but this past year feels like the first one where I really have explored my limits with alcohol, and that it is openly discussed with members of my family. I’ve been drinking for quite a time (I know, teen drinking is bad, bla bla bla), but until Q3 2007, I just drunk whatever I had brought to the social event currently ongoing, or whatever was given to me or “found” in the basement fridge, but now I think I know my limits and feel like I can drink to the brink, while having drunk and still not being sick. Examples? Party of 30 at one of my rich friend’s house, probably the biggest all summer, I was one of the only 3 that weren’t sick. It’s not something big, but it’s an accomplishment that I am proud of, a skill that I think is going to be very useful in the college years up ahead
.
- 2007 also marks my transfer to Chavigny High School from Three River’s Academy. I’ve been at TRA (formerly St. Patrick’s) ever since pre-kindergarten, so over time I’ve been used to my little 200 student high school, so the switch to this full fledged 2000 student institution was quite a shock. Despite my integration was quick and painless, and to this day I have no regrets about my switch.
- Also on the academic plan, 07′ is the first year where I get courses relative to the job that I want to practice later on. One of the main reasons I was switching ot Chavigny this year was the Cisco CCNA course given there, in which I was accepted. At the date of writing of this article, the CCNA 1 module is one chapter short of being finished, and so far I’m doing good.
- I’ve gotten way better at biking in summer 07, and I’ve ridden over 2000 k for sure. Great use of all that McDonalds I was eating back this summer.
- I’ve been introduced, thanks to Mark, to Payperpost, and made a couple of bucks from it. Besides putting a little bit of money in my Paypal account, it also helped with my writing a lot. Plugging something while not sounding like a plug is kind of hard.
With this said, let 2008 kick off and be a good one! That’s what my yearly horoscope promised anyways .
Widescreen Gaming: Not That Simple
December 22nd, 2007 § 3 Comments
With the purchase of my monitor a few weeks ago and new graphics card just a couple days old, I’m still pretty fresh to the way of life that is using a wide screen monitor. Although with most apps using any resolution is no big deal, as 16:10(monitors) and 16:9 (HDTVs) are supported by Windows natively, but it’s really in gaming and web browsing that a wide monitor stands out. Again, on the web the format usually isn’t a problem (at least not for the Firefox rendering engine; hurray FF!), but there are some problems in some games. For those trying to play older/crappier games on new monitors, I have set up a small list of games that I personally have had trouble with. Here they are.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
It’s a great game, with a gameplay that IMO will outlive Counter Stike, but unfortunately it’s already getting pretty old. Just look at the system requirements…
600 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, 32 MB OpenGL graphics card, 56.6k Modem/LAN
–Wikipedia
Hrmm. Yeah. Fortunately, the Quake 3 engine being very flexible, there is support for just about resolution you can possibly dream of. Getting it to work correctly is something else. For those who hate fixing up config files, you’ll have to endure a slight bit of it: there are 3 and possibly 4 cvars to be changed in the config file. Look for etconfig.cfg in the etmain folder of your Enemy Territory install and fire it up in your favorite text editor. Find the following cvars with the search function (Control + F).
seta r_mode 3 //Sets the rendering engine to default mode.
seta r_customwidth “” // Set to nothing
seta r_customheight “” // Set to nothing
And change them to this :
seta r_mode “-1″
seta r_customwidth “1440″
set r_customheight “900″
In this case, the last two variables reflect my resolution: 1440 x 900, change that to yours. Start the game, and the game should be in the resolution that you have specified. If not, the config decided to not stick. Vista preventing the writing of some files, the game uselessly trying to revert to an old mode, whatever. It’s frustrating but there is a way to bypass this. If you used to be a server admin, you might remember creating server start shortcuts and setting some variables on the command line to force the game to load mods from the appropriate folder; well this bypass works the same way. Just add the variables above to your shortcuts in the following form: “et.exe +set r_mode -1 +set r_blablabla..”. It’s a foolproof solution, just remember to add this to ALL your shortcuts: the Xfire and Rocketdock ones included. Now that you have it running widescreen, you may notice some distortion in the far ends of your screen: mess around with the cg_fov cvar to tweak that. Usually, a 16:10 monitor is gonna work with an FOV of 100.
Battlefield 2
I really don’t know what’s up with EA, but they don’t seem to be digging the whole widescreen thing. Despite the fact that it is WAY more recent than ET, it still doesn’t support widescreen without some hacking, minor hacking that is. Still, that doesn’t make it any more acceptable. With the unreal amount of patches that EA release, they could of at least thought into making 16:10 an option. Meh… Well anyways, here is how to force it to take your resolution. It’s kind of like ET, only there is no configuration files to be edited, it only works with command line variables. Just add the following line to your command line arguments on your shortcuts:
+menu 1 +fullscreen 1 +szx 1440 +szy 900
+Menu and +fullscreen are important, but I forget why, while szx and szy values are to be replaced with your desire resolution. No need to tweak FOV, the game looks fine with no additional tweaking.
NFS: Carbon
Despite the fact that this game is still relatively recent, it STILL doesn’t support widescreen. And guess who’s the publisher? That’s right! EA! This time, the process of putting it 16:10 is a tad tougher. First, you’ll need a no CD fixed EXE. Not only will this liberate you from EA’s annoying tendency to keep asking for a CD in hope of saving themselves from piracy, which is totally retarded because nobody uses optical drives anymore, but it is also a mandatory part of the widescreen patching process. Because of possible legal issues, I can’t give you the crack right here right now, but I can point you to Gamecopyworld, which is the best site I know for files of the kind. Look for a working crack, and don’t forget to always backup your old executable and scan all shady files for viruses. Once you got the cracked game working, you can go ahead and download the UniWS patcher from here, and follow these instructions to patch your exe. Once that is done, your game should be working properly. If you’re like me and you use Xfire, you might want to change back the game exe to NFSC.exe after you have patched it, anything else will not be detected by Xfire, hence no game hour logging, no in-game chat, etc, etc. Of course, the same process applies to Need For Speed Underground 2, since the patch was originally created for that game.
Although this isn’t a big list, they are the one’s that I have found up to now. If you’re looking for more wide screen gaming resources, check out WSGF, which looks like THE big resource on the thing. Have fun.
So Many Projects, So Little Getting Done
December 13th, 2007 § Leave a Comment
I don’t know if the cause of this is school, lack of stimulation, change in my temper or some other factor that I can’t control, but it seems that I have tons of things currently in progress, but nothing is getting done.
Take this blog for example. In the part couple of months, I’ve been updating it only very scarcely, to the point where my last article dates from over 2 weeks from now. Not that I don’t have anything to write about: I have about 10 computer component reviews to get started on, my cell phone to review, tutorials, a half finished Instructable, heck I even have a Gimp tutorial and an article on widescreen gaming written up on paper waiting on my desk, just asking to be typed up. Thank god for the school bus arriving early at school and substitute teachers in history class, if it wasn’t for the I wouldn’t be writing at all.
While my blog is supposed to be a list of all the projects I currently have, I have since September started many projects without even mentionning them here. Project Niobium, and acrylic case that I am building for myself, probably my biggest project up to now, is currently in design phase and most likely to get concrete somewhere near the month of January. I’ve been logging all of the design phase down at Overclock.net, which I’ve been pretty active on in the last couple of weeks also. The log is here for those of you interested. That, coupled with the arrival of my new 8800 GT bundled with ET:QW and Farcry which has forced me back into gaming, overclocking and everything that comes with it, and then you’ve got all the regular stuff… Christmas, friends, family, snowboarding, school, exams, the school radio which I have recently been introduced to, the upcoming driver’s license, and trying to make all of the above fit into a burger flipper’s wage. Not that I don’t have any free time, but it’s that whenever I do, I just vedge around my computer and play Trackmania Nations all day long, which besides being entertaining we must admit isn’t exactly very productive.
Meh. Welcome to RL, right?
Ziki: All My Internetz At One Place
December 2nd, 2007 § Leave a Comment
While doing my everyday browsing yesterday, I discovered yet another very interesting web service, one that actually does something to put you on the internet, no matter how what your current web presence. They call it Ziki.
To retake the exact wording that the site uses, Ziki is to be used as a
“self marketing tool to promote his personal brand and be listed on the top of search engines results.”
I like to think of it as a cross between Facebook, ClaimID, and a blog. For me, it’s main purpose is to centralize all my pieces of internetz to simplify the finding of those said pieces for the general public, but it’s so much more. It’s you’re auto-biography on the internet, the wikipedia of people.
What makes it so special is that it extracts every bit of info on everything that you own on the internet, and centralizes it, It can keep track of all the RSS feeds to, say, your blog, so that your posts are automatically associated to your person, and it takes all of your blog tags, plus it generates tags based on your location and then asks you to add more tags, as to create a bigass pile o’ tags describing yourself and what you do. Also, a more traditional list of links on the sidebar to list all your internet possessions (Flickr, Youtube, Digg, ect). You can also post some of your stuff directly onto ziki, which makes for the bloggy part to it.
There even is an “Open to job opportunities” checkbox which may be interesting if a possible employer stumbles on your profile.
Anyways, this is the kind of service which you don’t really fully understand until you use. Check out my profile at Ziki, and create yours.
When Linkage Isn't Enough
December 1st, 2007 Comments Off
Its seems today that all bloggers are really into SEO and web site optimization.. Countless times have I seen blog articles reporting the addition of a new feature to this or that, adding tagging here, metas there. Most time it works, but all that time spent trying to optimize linkage and search engine detection makes most of us forget about one of the most effective way of spreading the word of something around: word of mouth.
One problem remains though. I don’t know about you, but I just feel stupid giving away URLs orally, and it’s specially tricky when people don’t know how to spell my last name. Long story short, the best way of giving out all your contact info, and most importantly your blog’s URL, is a physical medium: like those free business cards offered by OOprint.com. It’s simple: choose from over 30 designs, add your custom text, and even images if you’re willing to pay a minimal fee, and get 100 of your cards delivered to your door. You only pay shipping and any additions you might have taken. No matter your age, and no matter your profession, everybody needs a way to give out their info, and OOprint is doing it for free, so why not?
I’m ordering mine right now, so get your 100 FREE business cards today!
Wishlistr, the Ultimate Online Wishlist
November 27th, 2007 § 2 Comments
Wishlists are a practical things, proof, pretty much every respectable online store offer them. It’s a cool feature, but keeping a list of all the wish lists on all the sites isn’t really practical, in the way that you can’t have the newest 780i motherboard and your pair of fuzzy slippers on the same list.
But then, straight outta Web 2.0 Town, Wishlistr comes out and blows our mind, and gives a new meaning to wish lists. You would think that there isn’t really anything to reinvent in a wishlist, and you’re right there isn’t, but who would have thought of it? The design is elegant, and the whole thing just gets the job done, and the use of Ajax here and there really caught me off guard, and looked pretty slick. The user panel is also dynamic, which allows for easy management of your offering suggestions. From the visitor perspective, the wish list itself is far from impressive, and in fact, I find it pretty plain, although the ability to select through a dozen templates is an interesting feature. Ease of use? Let’s say that it’s going to be easier for your 6 year old nephew to set up one of these than to ask for daddy to email you a copy, and it updates automatically and you can keep track of updates via RSS, so adding some last minute gift ideas isn’t a problem. All you need is a title for the gift, add an optional URL and description, and you’re good to go.
Although I liked it from the first time that I tried it, I think that it does need a bit of refining. Being a category person, I would like seeing categories on there very much, and an optional “Price” field for each gift and some “sort by price” feature to even further facilitate gifting. Otherwise, I declare this without a doubt the web discovery of the week.
EDIT: Woops! Marko posted this before me! I guess we had the same idea, didn’t we? I hope the link compensates for my lack of originality :S .
Waiting is so long…
November 24th, 2007 § 2 Comments
Just recently, I bought my monitor from Futureshop, the sick LG Flatron L196WTQ-BF pictured above. It kicks some serious ass. Sure, it isn’t the biggest, it’s only a 19 incher, but check that out: 3000 to 1 contrast ratio, 2 ms second response time, up to 75 hz vertical refresh, really, it’s a neat monitor, specially for the teeny weeny 230$ taxes included that I put on it. Heck, its no joke, after a bit looking at it for a couple of seconds, the screen on my laptop looks yellow and really, really dim. One of the best purchases of the month.
BUT! There is a but. Fr0stByte recently got dissembled, and I have returned my 8800 GTS, just because it’s way inferior to the newer GT, and I was planning on getting one of those said GTs. Problem is, nobody, from Tiger to Futureshop to PC shops near me can have it on order, and I can’t even dream about finding it in stock somewhere. I’m thinking, well I’ll have to wait for it to be in stock again, and in the meanwhile I’ll buy a crap video card just to run off, that’s at least better than my 12 year old 3dFX Voodoo that I’m currently running off. I find this card on ebay: a 7300 LS, for 30$ shipped, so I buy it right away, but the shipping takes forever, and even now, after a week of waiting, I still haven’t seen a USPS package for me, probably because of the stupid American Thanksgiving. Then, just to piss me off, the 8800 GT comes back in stock at NCIX. BUT I JUST BOUGHT A 30$ CARD, AND I’M 20$ SHORT! And to add to that, my parents won’t lend me the 20$, despite the fact that I can more than easily pay it back at my next paycheck, with the arguement that I have already spent too much money on my computer. Noobs.
All of this resulting in the following: I’m running Vista off a PCI video card with support for nothing, running a superb widescreen monitor at 4:3 resolutions, I bought a lesser video card which is taking forever to ship, and I have to wait another 2 weeks in order to be able to play a decent game.
It’s in those moments that I just wanna get off the internets and mix up a batch of jankem.
ThermalTake V1 CPU Cooler Review
November 16th, 2007 § Leave a Comment
If your looking for a high end air cooler that performs abnormally well, even when compared to some of the lower end liquid cooling systems, look no further. I bought this mostly for the looks, and because I absolutely wanted something from Thermaltake, but I got way more than what I expected. The all copper V shapped heatpipe design, coupled with a stylish yet efficient fan that can push up to 86 CFM is the way to go for Thermaltake: the result is a silent and powerful cooler.
Packaging
Considering the fragility of the heat sink fins which are very thin for greater surface area, Thermaltake did a nice job of packing this cooler. Inside the cardboard box, the plastic clamshell holds the V1 and it’s accessories very well, maybe even a little too well: I had to tug at the base of the cooler to get it out, and seeing the fragility of the fins, I had to be very careful. The contents of the box were the following:
- 1 cooler
- 1 set of LGA775 mount fixtures
- 1 set of socket AM2, 939 and 754 mounts
- 4 ever so tiny mount screws. They should have included more, those things can be lots too easily.
- Bag ‘o’ thermal compound, the crappy kind. Through it to the bin or feed it to your dogs or something.
Product Quality
Although at first glance the V1 looks perfect, a few minor defects, most of them having little to no impact on product performance. The biggest one is the use of something that looks like thermal adhesive to join the heapipes and the fins instead of soldering the two together. This sounds like a horrible ripoff when you first hear it, but just thinking about it a bit more will clarify things: soldering the 4 heatpipes to all 110 + fins would have skyrocketed the production prices, and resulted in a cooler than nobody can afford. In my opinion, we really can’t blame Thermaltake for letting go on something like this. The second little fault is the quality of the base’s contact surface. Us overclockers, when shopping for a cooler, look mainly for a quality base, dense and machine to perfection. Although Thermaltake’s product page says the V1 has a “mirror coating base”, what I got wasn’t exactly that: the surface was a tad unequal, and milling marks were pretty clear. Still, considering that I have not yet to this day seen a cooler with a perfect base out of the box, it isn’t bad. If you want a perfect base, grab a 5$ sanding kit and lap it yourself.
Installation
Installation was quick and painless. The LGA775 push-pin mounts that I have used fit just like the Intel stock cooler on my motherboard, contact between base and CPU is superb. Although I can’t recall the amount of sleepless nights I’ve spent wondering if the V1 would fit my case, I can now confirm that this cooler does fit the EVGA 680i SE SLI in a Thermaltake Armor Jr. with no interference from either the power supply up above of the abnormally high northbridge cooler right below. This cooler is a big one, so don’t be thinking that you could be stuffing this in a Micro-ATX case. I would say that 85 % of mid tower can potentially house this cooler, the other deterministic factor being the position of the CPU on your motherboard, which shouldn’t a problem in most cases, and even less if you have one of those almost center-mounted CPU DFI boards. I’ve seen some people run out of space in smaller cases and mount it so that the air is shot up, but I think that it just defeats the purpose of having a flow-through cooler.
Performance
During all the tests, the conditions were the following: 20 C ambient temperature, in my basement. I define Idle as 0% CPU usage with the only thing running being the OS desktop. Full load is 100% CPU usage, attained with the Gromacs test of Orthos dual core edition. The test rig is my Thermaltake Armor Jr, with EVGA 680i SE SLI, Core 2 Duo e6750 G0 stepping, 2 gigs of Corsair XMS2-PC2-6400C4, and an EVGA 8800 GTS SC 320 mb.
First, the stock Intel cooler. I installed the cooler with it’s stock thermal wax (?), and all temperatures were taken with 100 % fan speed.
Stock clocks, idle: 40 C
Stock clocks, load: 67 C
3.2 ghz @ 1.4 Vcore, idle: 43 C
3.2 ghz @ 1.4 Vcore, load: 69 C
Now, the same rig, but outfitted with the V1 and a super slick application of Arctic Silver 5. All temperatures were recored with the cooler at minimum speed. I would have love to try it out at higher speeds, but unfortunately due to a bad fan configuration (high pressure between V1 and extract fan caused by insufficient extraction fan), I only got higher temperatures from increasing the fan speed. Remember, the V1 pushes some 90 CFM at top speed, so a 50 CFM fan just can’t hold up.
Stock clocks, idle: 28 C
Stock clocks, load: 52 C
3.2 ghz @ 1.4 Vcore, idle: 30 C
3.2 ghz @ 1.4 Vcore, load: 56 C
Considering the less than perfect case fan setup, the 13 degrees drop at full load is something that I think is very good, specially at minimum speed.
My tips
- Check your airflow before buying this. You should have more CFM going out than in, and if you current setup doesn’t, you should be considering the purchase of high speed case fans, with high CFM output. This will avoid creating that same situation that I am in, with the high pressure between V1 and case fan. Good case fans include Thermaltake Smart Case Fan (~100 CFM at full speed), Yate Loons, and Panaflows.
- Always manipulate the cooler by holding the heatpipes or the base. Even a slight pressure from the fingers is enough to ben the fins near the top.
- Always use a high quality thermal compound. The chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and don’t let your TIC be that link. Artic Silver 5 is the most popular choice, at 10$ per tube of 3.5 grams. If you’re feeling rich, you might want to check out Shin-Etsu, the ultra thick, high performance compound, which sells for about 10$ also, but for a 1 gram tube: almost 3 times as expensive. Apparently, from the dudes back OCN, it’s worth it.
- Thespeed controller that comes with the cooler is too small, not mountable in any kind of way, and just generally bad. How do you want to control your cooler speed when you case is closed? It’s just impractical. To be able to control the V1 on a closed case, I paid a visit to a local electronics store and showed the guy the stock speed controller, which can be removed from the cooler without cutting anything up anything. The dude gave me a pot which could do the same thing, and most importantly that could be mounted on my case. 2$ for the pot and a knob, then 5 minutes of drilling, soldering and mounting, and I had a practical way to control the V1′s speed. Pictures here!
What more is there to be said? Sure, if you want to save a couple of additional degrees, you might want to go with the super coolers like the Tuniq Tower, or also from Thermaltake the Big Typhoon, but if you want a nice balance of style and performance, the V1 is for you. At 70$, it isn’t cheap, but compare it to the lower end water cooling systems, both price wise and performance wise and it becomes much appealing.
