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!
MaximeRousseau.com, Now with TAGS!
October 6th, 2007 § Leave a Comment
As you probably already know, WP 2.3 was a big release, the biggest addition to this version has to be the built in tags support. Since Marko had written about how he was going to use tags for everything from now on, I have decided that I might as well put a little bit of time on it myself, and hop into the web 2.0 tag bandwagon. Problem was that my WordPress theme, dirtylicious, didn’ tsupport the new tagging system.
Luckily for me, I ran into another blog article on how to add tags to my current theme. Because of the way WordPress is written, in a very modular fashion, and because of how clean the CSS in dirtylicious is, I was able to integrate tags very easily into the single.php page, which handles the display of individual articles. I found that tags were too bulky on the index, so I didn’t put any, but that’s my personal preference.
I think that the tags nicely compliment my site, and hopefully, what SEO dudes keep telling us about tags is true and I’ll get a couple more search engine hits with this practice.
For your leisure, I have included the modded theme files in a zip, so you too can take full advantage of tagging. Have fun.
How I Wish I Were a Handyman
October 4th, 2007 § 1 Comment
I was just in my basement soldering some stuff when I thought about it. Everybody likes crafts, without exception… some people type it up, some people cut it and glue it, some put it together and paint it. I have not, even once in my life, seen somebody who did not like to create something with his or her hands. But when it comes to skill, not everyone is gifted for creating stuff, and looking back, I think that I fit into the latter category.
Remember the time when I had just reveived my laptop? Of course you don’t but I do. It was on the 24th of the August, or something like that, that I came home with the Gateway box containing the machine that I now affectionatly call Wifighter. Within the first week of my ownership, I made a shocking discovery: a laptop flat on a table will heat up lots when running games. What were I to do? Well! Pull out the jigsaw and make myself a cooler of course.
Then things started to go bad… Scrap material (I had no money to put on something like that at the time), ridiculously crooked cuts, symetrical pieces that didn’t match, clearence issues with the fans, everything that could probably go wrong went wrong. That’s the moment when I made a sad realization: I am not a handyman, at least not with wood.
But, I am not hopeless: with some help, maybe I could become the handyman that I want to be. What kind of help you ask? DIY.com! Along with their sister sister site HardwareandTools.com, they offer everything I would need to become better at crafting : rebuild a half decent laptop stand, help fixing various things around the house, hell even build a deck or something! DIY.com is more community orientated, offering a forum with competant authorities that can help out with your projects, as well as several tutorials and readings, from very basic to very advanced, which will help you become a better handyman. For you amateurs of instructional videos, hey even sell how-to DVDs at more than reasonable prices. Having known before, I would have bought one of these, and learned how to cut a damned straight line with a jigsaw!
In every departement, knowledge is power, and DIY is no exception. Check out DIY.com and HardwareandTools.com for the tips to make your home reno or crafting project a success.
This post contains sponsored content. More information can be found on my disclosure policy.
EVGA 680i SE SLI Epinions Review
October 1st, 2007 § Leave a Comment
At first, I was a little skeptical to buy with EVGA at all… I wanted to build a premium gaming rig, and all I could think about was Asus, Asus, Asus, and XFX. Sure, having a reknown brand is great, but they, with their notoriety in the market, make you pay for that. I was just going to buy and XFX 680i LT SLI (LT version is the economy version with less features) for something like 40 more dollars, then I got this board suggested by forum member at Dreamincode.net, which just happened to know a couple of people who had built monster system with this as a base. According to him, this board was beastly… and now having owned it for close to a month, and having built a friends system with the same thing, I can testify that this thing is a monster indeed.
When Reality TV and Web Entrepreneurs Collide…
September 26th, 2007 Comments Off
If you don’t know what reality TV is, you either have just been thawed from a 60 year cyrogenic sleep or you’ve lived the last ten years in a bunker in Antarctica. From the big American reality hits like the many instances of Survivor to the utterly insignificant “The Simple Life” starring equally insignificant participants Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, and all the others, all of them are known by everyone.
Now take the classic reality show template which is roughly composed of:
- A cash prize
- Eating of disgusting things
- Several challenges of totally different nature, many times a day
ComplexElaborate system of rewards, penalities, immunities, benefits, exchange possibilities and situational turnarounds- Way too much cheesy smiling
- A host which dictates many things to the contestant from large screens
- Random drama-llama interviews with contestants
And what you get is pretty much the new show called The Next Internet Millionaire. Although it does sport several similarities with other shows, the thing that really sets this show apart from the rest is it`s background. The host, Joel Comm, is actually a very successful web entrepreneur, who over the years has developed many very profitable websites. In this series, Mr. Comm is looking for a new partner for another of his profitable web endeavors. Now of course, for the purpose of the series, a simple interview isn’t enough… so the series goes through many many exercises under the form of challenges.
The show pretty much covers everything, from designing a landing page to eating worms and answering customer support emails. Although as a general fact, I cannot say that I have been enjoying reality shows a lot, this one is special; challenges like writing a blog in an hour really get my attention, being the internet nerd that I am.
Be sure to check out the new reality tv, I’ll surely be watching it religiously.
The Geeksta Processor Belt Buckle
September 25th, 2007 § 1 Comment
There’s been lots of progress lately relatively to the identity of geeks: more and more, we’re affirming our dedication to the nerdy world in several ways, namely through how we dress, with those Thinkgeek t-shirts that mere mortals cannot understand but also by the way we decorate our rooms and homes, how we talk, and even what music we listen to.
Now I’ve had the idea for this Instructable while browsing around and falling on the e-shop of some kid my age who was selling PCB and electronic component jewelery: CMOS earrings, resistor pendants, and the like. Since then, I’ve been trying to integrate old hardware and electronic junk to my daily dressing, without much success. It wasn’t until I stumbled on a pile of old processors that I finally clicked on what would be cool, and yet not be a total pain wearing: a processor belt buckle.
Although not useful in itself, this thing is nice showoff material for those times when you get together with your geeky homedawgs.
It’s simple really: all we are gonna do is take a proc, brutalize it up a bit, then solder it to your standard issue slider and casing type buckle used with strap type belt.
