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.
Free Web File Sharing like it Should Be
November 14th, 2007 § 1 Comment
Ask most people what they use to send files, and mostly all of them will give you the same answer: e-mail. And e-mail is ok… to a certain extent; downloading, editing and resending is tiresome, specially for many files. Also, any file bigger than 10 mb is usually a no go. For non-critical files, uploading via web remains a viable alternative for bigger files, but then again manipulating several files is long, and the same resending routine applies, just like email. So far, all file hosts have looked the same to me… not a single stood out from the pack.
And along comes Driveway. Spawned by Pro Softnet, the same guys who brought us the excellent iBackup which I have recently reviewed, this totally free service has what it takes to make it’s mark amongst the competition. Of course, it offers what pretty much all the other file hosting sites can brag they have, like a 500 mb size limit, high uprates, but don’t mistake it for it’s generic cousins, there is much more to Driveway than that.
The flagship feature is really what makes your life so much more simple, that is the ability to edit and share Office documents stored online. The days of emailing documents for proof-reading or collaborative writing are over: once you have the link to the file, you can go ahead and open it right up in Word, Excel or Power-Point, edit it, then tell your buddy that you have done your job, so he can fetch the file right back. This feature is excellent for say, sending group homework to your groupmates right across the internet, and bypass the traditional emails which make multiple edits by multiple people very laborious.
Another very handy side of this service for the file sharing regular: the Driveway app which integrates into Windows to let you create Driveway links for files within a couple of clicks. You get to share individual files of course, but you can also send entire folders directly, which are automatically converted to a zip archive.
Finally, for all you web-savvy people, there also is an option of creating flash-powered widgets to display your uploaded files, very practical for posting a set of files on say a forum, a blog, or whatever else. Superb for sharing big files without burning up all your bandwidth.
Personally, I think I just found my favorite online file sharing site: great features, no disturbing ads, very long file conservation times, and best of all, it’s free! Check it out at http://driveway.com.
Folding For the Cure
October 31st, 2007 § 1 Comment
You might already know, specially if a family member of yours is concerned, that many disease, like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and even some types of cancer are caused by misfolding of protein. What you might not know though, is that there is a concrete way that you can help find a cure.
For many years now, scientists have been simulating protein folding and misfolding to better understand diseases with computers, but it was fairly long for even a supercomputer to render a couple of those foldings. When considering the amount of molecular strands to be folded, it could be said without question that folding all proteins within a reasonable delay would be impossible. This is where Folding@Home comes in.
Folding@Home is an organization joint with Stanford University and many specialized companies and organizations on the medical scene that uses distributed computing to fold the said proteins faster and better, using the entire community’s processing power instead of just one very expensive supercomputer. Anybody can participate: a client is available for almost every OS, and you can just download, install and go. The software then takes all the idle system resources, and uses it to calculate folding: meaning that under most circumstances, it won’t render your machine useless while running. Of course, under some extreme conditions, like gaming on the newer games, IE: Crysis, and benchmarking, you wouldn’t want it running, but as a general fact, any machine, whatever it’s load is, can run Folding@Home. The work, calculated in work units, is sent to you via port 8080 (make you sure you unlock that port on your router and machine), you complete the unit, and send it back wherever it goes, and then all the medical researchers can has some fun analyzing it. Quite easy for something considered as collaboration to medical research, ain’t it? You can even turn it into something to brag about: every work unit gives you so many points depending on how big it was, and with the points you can compete in teams and see who can fold the most.
I’ve been introduced to F@H by the team down at OCN, an overclocking forum which even made a giveaway out of folding. Either 20 or 10 dollars up for grabs each month, in some 3 categories, from memory.
It’s so easy… why not? Get downloading and fold today!
Fr0stByte, It's Complete.
October 27th, 2007 § 4 Comments
Take a look at this baby. After countless hours of messing around drawing crappy schematics in class and buying crap off ebay, it’s finally finished…. the aesthetical part at least. All stock fans are replaced by blue LED 120mm, that push about 60 CFM each, with the Thermaltake V1 cooler pushing 86 cfm.
From the front, 3/4 shot. Notice the window fan which extrudes from the panel: a Thermaltake 120mm mounted on a 90 to 120mm adaptor, with the cables cleanly routed inside the adaptor, for maximum sexiness. On the front, I have the stock 120mm, plus an iCage holding another 120mm.
I swore to myself that this was the absolute last time that I was taking my motherboard out, so I put lots of effort to clean up my cable routing, which need some adjustments. The 8 pin 12v motherboard line, the USB and sound pinnings as well as the PCI-E six pin are all routed in back, using holes I drilled myself. Despite the only tools I had were a drill, a file and some wood drill bits, they turned out to be pretty clean. I also chopped off the Firewire pinnings for the top panel, Firewire sucks mah ballz. Turns out pretty clean.
On the back, I drilled and modded some stuff for the whole thing to be a bit more practical. The V1 came with a speed adjustment knob, but couldn’t be mounted on a panel, and the cable on it was really short. I went out and bought a pot, mounted it straight to the back of my case, and now I can control the speed of my cooler from the back. Also since leaving a 1230819023 foot molex cable for the side panel fan is not exactly my definition of clean, I mounted a 3.5 mm jack on the back, which is hook up to 12v. The fan on the side window has the plug, so I just shut my door, then plug in the jack to get some juice, and the fan runs.
With some appropriate cooling, I started overclocking this thing a bit, and the results were the following:
Core: 8 x FSB1650 (412.5 mhz), that’s 3.3 ghz. 35 idle, 65 load. It handled everything fine, including Orthos but then I started iTunes and the shit just crashed. FSB and RAM speed/ timings not getting along? Lameass eXX50 series Core 2 Duos have lower multipliers and higher FSB out of the box, so overclocking is limited. At 3.4, FSB 1700, even my CMOS misbehaved. Voltages wrong? Anyways, Running at 3.2 for everyday use, idle 31, 100% Orthos load at under 60.
Memory: 950 mhz @ 4-3-4-10-16-2T with a pair of XMS2 PC6400C4. Even at a stock 800 mhz, they had some trouble handling 1T, so I figured f it, I’ll just OC then to hell’s gates. Honestly, didn’t think I could hold up so high with tight lats like I did at 2.25 V. Corsair is my new lover.
GPU: EVGA 8800 GTS 320M SC. Core @ 622, Memory @ 917, everything stable. With my card, the max is supposed to be 650 – 950, but I kept crashing at anything past 630-930.
Benchmarks are good too:
3dMark06: 10 868
SuperPI Mod 1.5 (1M): 15.422
FutureMark CPU score: 2994
Not bad for something under 2000$. Running FEAR, Farcry, NFS Carbon, CS:S, every game I own, on full AA and AF, under 1240 x 1024, everything maxxed out, with frames greater than 60 every time. Crysis ready? Nah… I need some SLI to play everything maxxed out.
Evil plans for upgrade? Another 2 gigs of the Corsair jank, which is unusually cheap at Tiger these days, and another 8800. Since everybody is getting the newer 8800 GT models are getting release with more VRAM, and that everybody wants more VRAM, I should be able to either buy one through OCN, or buy one from all those that will eventually get processed through EVGA’s Step-Up program for really cheap…. relatively.
Cable Management Saves the Day!
October 12th, 2007 § Leave a Comment
After lots of hesitation on if I should or not give another shot at what I used to proudly call a “cable optimization job”, I finally got off my chair to crawl under my desk and get the damned thing done. After some 2 hours of messing around my case in a spine-bending posture, it’s done.
BEFORE!
AFTER!
Turns out it was pretty easy too. Thermaltake, being the best cooling product company that they are, design the left side panel on the Armor JR so that there is a good ~10mm of clearance between the motherboard tray, and ideal place for stuffing the overly long power cables that my X-finity has. Appropriately bundled and tied to the mobo tray with electrical tape, it’s a zero cable clutter solution. For the extra long cables, I could even bundle them up and stick them next to the powersupply, which gave me a clearance of something like 30 mm. Not a cable escapes the routing: the SATA power cables and molex are placed beneath the side panel and come out from the bottom slot of the hard drive bay, the top bezel pinning connectors are also routed the same way, and even the bigass 24 pin connector was butted against the MB plate, to then come out from the thin gap between the 5.25 drive bay rack and the motherboard. As for the molex which used to spoil the entire bottom right corner of my window, I have hidden them in the bottom 5.25″ bay below the blue fan, and after carefully having routed all the fan cables, connected all the fan molex under there. It’s a tight fit, but it does the job.
Results? 4C off my idle temperatures, thanks to an almost perfectly cable free path from the front panel to the back fan, which also includes my CPU cooler. That and a presentation grade PC. With the window on, the only cables really visible are the ugly stock, uber long SATA cable, the PCI-e power connection going to my 8800 GTS SC that I am getting next Tuesday, and the USB pinning for the bezel at the top of my case, which I don’t want to pin up because that means looking through the motherboard manual.
Now that the 8800 is purchased, the to-do list on this build is getting shorter and shorter.
- Install the side panel fan assembly, with the removable, clutter free powering system.
- Install another blue 120 mm fan in the 3 available 5.25 slots, with the custom machined bracket
- Change the CPU cooler to a Thermaltake V1, make it machine lapped
- Install aftermarket Tt 8800 series GPU cooler
- Change the back case fan to a blue one
- Install some active RAM cooling with lighting
- Add another 2 gigs of RAM
- (Probably) Add another 8800 GTS.
This thing is gonna be worthy of magazines, I tell ya!
