majestika

Some time ago, I realised that the hard drive found within my laptop (ThinkPad X40) was… poor, to put it to marketing words. Testing showed me that I got no better than about 10MB/s. For comparison, my desktop (with a relatively ordinary hard drive of 640GB on 2 platters) does 100MB/s easy. So off I go, pondering to order a nice and fash CompactFlash card, and a CF-to-IDE thingy for my laptop. Of course, it’ll have Linux on it, configured and tailor made to be awesome epic to take advantage of it completely.

So anyway, I ordered the following:

- One 16GB 266x CompactFlash (genuine Kingston).
- One CF-to-IDE adapter with full DMA support

Long story short, Debian was installed on it fine, it ran for a month or so, then it just died. I’m blaming the laptop, however, that thing has a lot of issues (one of them being that USB is destroyed somehow).

The CF card went out and is being replaced as I write this.

For the time I had it though… it was awesome. It was very speedy, or at least, very responsive whenever I did anything.

I highly recommend you to try it yourself too! Although with SSDs coming down in price, perhaps that’s a far better and guaranteed way of going about this?

Giving in to my cravings for a new machine to play and tinker with, I decided to drop some dough for a nice 1U rackmount server. $250 on ebay! And assumably works, just lacks a hard drive.

Some time ago, I made a fatal, destructive move upon my cool ThinkPad X40 (which for the uninitiated is a small, awesome laptop). The moved involved spilling a drink over the keyboard. Unfortunately, while the keyboard was relatively fine (oh the new smell it got), the thing lost the trackpoint. As such, no more using the laptop just anywhere, as there’s no mouse. Unless I used it without the mouse, which I did, for many months.

For Christmas this year, my wonderful girlfriend got me an awesome present; a Beyerdynamic DT234Pro! I sort of told her of what few things I wanted in life, and come Christmas, she just goes and plucks it down at headphones.com.au (those guys are great, actually) for purchase.

Basically, this is a headset. Not just any headset; this may just be one of finest headsets you can get around the world, other than truly going into the professional-professional equipment (stuff that only the highest tier of pros have). The sound is wonderful, and the microphone is equally wonderful, if not more. It picks up my vocals quite well, while at it. Anyway, first things first…

You know, thinking about how a GUI is like these days, you have to wonder just how much of it is truly GUI. Is it really?

Because all I’m seeing are text labels on buttons.

Just yesterday, I have completed all my exams for this year. There’s still another year of uni left to go, but yessssss, finally a break \o/

I found myself a lovely girlfriend, whom I love very much. Hmm hmm hmm, it’s going to be one awesome holiday.

Anyway, straight back to doing nanowrimo. I have to do ~5000 words a day if I want to make it proper by the end :3

I’ll keep this short. Lots of stuff happened recently (like getting a girlfriend), and my NaNoWriMo is waaaaaaaaaaay behind.

Currently only at around 750 words. Oh gosh darn dammit.

In case you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it is an event that happens annually where the entire goal of it is to write 50,000 words novel within a timeframe of a month. The idea is that it jump-starts everyone’s laziness or otherwise, into just writing and writing and more writing.

I plan to undertake this event this year, and write an epic novel that would bring smiles to the masses, then make them cry. Dunno, always liked writing depressing stuff that leaves the readers dazed and question their lives.

In any case, watch this space. I’m going all out this month. I think. Maybe even write something that’ll get published. Ha, as if.

Yet another album to recommend. If you haven’t heard of World’s End Girlfriend yet, try to think of it more of… a trip. Each album is like a whole journey on its own, mesmerising, drawing you to keep listening. The music rarely stays the same, yet it alternates around such a familiar tune or something else. Words fail me to describe the wonders that WEG offers. Unfortunately, since it’s more of a trip than anything, it’s very hard to recommend just a single track from any of his albums, so I must give you the first track as a taste into the wonderful world, rather than my favourite track. So here it is, “Yes”, first track of Farewall Kingdom.

World’s End Girlfriend – Yes

(one of these days I’ll find a nice audio player plugin thingy for wordpress, so you can listen to stuff just on the page than opening up your favourite player, or something)

Praise to those who get the reference to awesome band that is Explosions In The Sky from this post’s title. Unfortunately, my desktop computer’s not so awesome today, in that its PSU blew up.

It was a trusty old 500W EzCool PSU. A sort of a no name brand, but it has worked for years, and continued to be awesome until today, when it historically blew up inside my computer. Upon opening to see its innards for autopsy, I notice that it was probably aging slowly, getting hotter and hotter, to the point that it melt off the enamel coating on the inductor of some kind. I think that’s the choke… Look at all those bulging capacitors, about to blow up too! Anyway, the fuse blew up before anything else (I think), so I’m hoping that the rest of the computer is fine from further damage.

No desktop computer today, and possibly never from now on. So sad. And the shop’s closed too, so I can’t just go buy another one to fix it up…

[follow up] I just bought a new PSU; Corsair TX750. Looks like nothing else has been damaged, and everything’s sailing on a breeze. Burnt a nice hole in my wallet, though…