Cell Phone Woes: Battery Life Comparisons

 

     The EVO was just.. buggy.

 

     I was pretty much forced to get a new phone. I was given an EVO 4G LTE from work, which was maintained and serviced by their IT department. They gave me a new battery when i complained, and an Otterbox case when i was worried i would break it. The phone was the best phone I ever had, was quick, and did all the things i needed for work and play. The screen was huge and bright with non of the samsung bluish tint I've been noticing.

 

     As the months wore on, it would occasionally fail me. When browsing the Internet, the phone would turn off. Sometimes when plugging the phone in (weekly) it would only charge half way for some reason, and only on the days i would really need it. I got in the habit of carrying a charger and power inverter in my car, a spare charger at work, and one at my friend's house. No I'm not kidding, but yes I'm a little neurotic about the phone turning off. It would freeze when viewing YouTube videos. The 4G antenna would work when it felt like it, and when it did it was not really much faster than the 3G version. Wireless connections are great, but slow to obtain. I started to loathe other people at work who had the new Galaxy SIII, even though my phone was less than six months old.

 

     I talked to my wife about how much I was letting this phone rule my life, when my old phone was much shittier but almost never failed me when i needed it. Battery life was excellent in the older phones I've had, what's the deal here? Even with an extended battery, i would not make it to the end of a nine hour workday. Why? She researched phones for me, and I did likewise.. and we both agreed on the IPhone. The 4S was only a $49.99 upgrade with my sprint account and discounts through work. Reading up on the IPhone, i saw other people complaining about battery life issues. As a matter of fact, every phone I read about, no a one did not have some kind of issue. I bit the bullet and my wife ordered the IPhone the next day.

 

Getting the Iphone and Battery comparison

 

     So the IPhone comes in the mail within two days in a nice little white box.. all simplistic and as the picture showed. The phone was at 0% battery when i got it, so i left it plugged in for the rest of the day and activated it before i went to bed. Activation took three tries and about a half hour over the phone. I kissed my EVO goodbye and started playing around the IPhone the very next morning. I left the hours early in the morning with 100% battery life. I left all push notifications on, email alerts and location services. I had the IT department at work get exchange sync going so I could get company emails, and I was on my way. I used the phone heavily the first two hours. Answering calls on my Blue tooth in my car, and checking facebook and emails. I never looked at the battery. The next few hours i took a few calls and even took a few pictures. When I got home after a nine hour shift i was still at 65% battery life. I was shocked, i mean really surprised..

 

     With the same usage on the Evo with an extended battery, I would be in last 5% of the battery when i walked in the front door to my house. Not paying attention to it, i would normally not even plug it in till hours later, missing tons of calls. Already I'm seeing a huge difference. I decided not to charge the IPhone that night and see how long it would last the next day. Reading a few articles on the way the batteries work, i suppose it's better to run them down to nothing, then charge them to full. The next day, i used the phone the same way, and when i walked in the door I had a paltry 9% left. That's two days, medium usage all settings turned on, without the phone going dead. This is a first for me since I've had my shitty Nokia in college that did nothing but make calls. That thing would go a week without a charge. I decided I wanted to see how long i could go without charging the phone as an experiment.

 

 

     So read about 200 amazon reviews that night while i let the phone charge. I needed something powerful that was not going to get in the way of the phones ports, look good, protect the phone and also have the 1900 mAh battery power that i read so often as being the best. Cases are plentiful, let me tell you. I saw Juice box cases for over $150 that promised up to 200% life. I wanted that, but not at the price. After watching a really sharp review on YouTube about the Max Power case, i decided to try it. After it, it looked good (as above) and was pretty cheap. I only paid $29.99, because it was on clearance and shipping was free because I'm an amazon prime member.

 

     Ill start off by saying this case is really fucking sharp. Same piano white finished color as the iPhone. Changes the charging port to micro USB so it will work with all those chargers you have laying around. not to mention I'm on my third day without a charge with medium usage. You press a small almost invisible button on the back and four blue leds show through the case telling you how much battery you have left. When you press and hold the button, the phone behaves as if it is plugged in. charging it very rapidly. From 3% i was able to charge the phone to 100% in 15 minutes. The back of the phone heated up pretty good, but otherwise no problems. So I'm on my third day and I have enough juice left to charge it up one more good time before i have to wall charge it. Crazy.

 

     As far as the phone it's self, it has never crashed, the 3G Internet is faster than the EVO 4G with the antenna working as it should. Applications load quickly, the phone takes much, much better pictures. The picture is just ultra crisp. The screen is smaller, but I can see things so much better, so i don't notice it at all. Screen sensitivity is much better as well. Overall just a much better product for around the same price.



MSI A6005 Laptop Drivers

     The drivers for the A6005 are the same as CX600 laptop by MSI. They are the exact same computer in everything but appearance. MSI does not support the A6005 and back even though they still sell them and drivers are not available.

     Again, if you want drivers for your discontinued MSI laptop, download them here. They work, I've tried them.

http://www.msi.com/product/nb/CX600.html#/?div=Driver&os=XP%2032

Book whoring, the old fashion way

I did not want to promote my other blog on this one, but I don't have much of a choice, and damnit, i need the link backs.

Basically what I've always done is look around for books, which 've talked about many times before, posted pictures and so on, well now i have a blog devoted to it.

Just go there and check it out if you are in to that kind of thing. Think the Game Chasers, but less videos and more pictures and much more money involved.

The history of the Internet: Major's Version Part 1

The Internet was fresh and new when i was in 5th grade. I had a friend named Ryan who had a small 286 setup in his room in which he could connect to prodigy with. Prodigy, for those who knew about it, was America Online, but with less features. It had integrated email. They charged by the minute, so was closely monitored by parents. I do remember the email system had a major flaw: you could not pick you're own email. It was assigned to you and was just a mess of letters and numbers.

Ryan did nothing special on Prodigy. Thinking back, it was so limited, it had no choice but to be the biggest most expensive piece of shit out there. A 9800 baud modem can only do so much. Or can it?

We discovered the terminal program after we got to learn about how to use one at school. I should explain, but our school, which is in the very small city in Vermont named Winooski, had a super advanced computer program. I'm not sure why. I was involved with two after school programs to get my "Computer License", which was a made up thing the school system had devised so you could have unfettered access to the computer after school hours in the technology lab. (extension of the library) I learned how to fix computers, say correct terminology, use basic graphic design programs, and manipulate DOS. I was sent home with a book about modem commands that had sample phone numbers of local BBSes in the neighboring cities of Burlington. When i passed a written test, i was the third child in the program in the state of Vermont to receive my license that really meant nothing except one thing: i could enter and just about stay the night in the computer lab at school.

Our computer lab consisted of about 20 Macintosh apple IIe computers that all kids could use in the school. Separate from that were about 12 Macintosh LC computers running an ancient version of The Finder. I remember when the computers were brought in, we had to watch a video on how to use a visual operating system to store data on a hard drive instead of 5 1/4 inch floppies. A crude password system with an image of a knight holding a shield protected the computers from unwanted access so only those with the correct password which was written on the back of you're license, would allow you use the computer. The computer lab was open from 3pm after school, until about sundown. Often times, no one would be there and everything would be unlocked, which was better for us.

Using the LCom program on Ryan's computer, we called BBS systems all over Burlington. Often times it was busy, sometimes we would get in to a random system only to be kicked out. One BBS in particular seemed to have infinite nodes and was called The Dog Dish. I could be wrong about the name, but i googled the BBS list for around that time, and it sounds pretty accurate. After logging in, there were several text games you could play like L.O.R.D., which I've talked about before. You could chat with people, look at text files people have uploaded, and download small files. One of the files we downloaded was another list of BBS servers in the area that were not listed in any directory. One such server was called The Game Channel. It had maybe 2 nodes so you had to call all the time to connect. There was a timer of about one hour from the time you logged in to play games, download things, and get off. It used the Fido server, we found out later.

I would spend the night at my friends house and wait till the same time every night log on to Game Channel and play some shitty multiplayer games that were pretty horrible by today's standards with one exception: you played them against other people, and sometimes on a rare occasion, in real time with the person logged in to the other node. One hour was never enough to play all the games and have time to download something cool. ANSI graphics of playboy centerfolds, new games that we had no idea how to save and load. Too much information was available and we had no idea how to access it. Plans ran though my head, and no sooner did i devise a solid foundation for my lunacy did my technology-computer-owning-friend move away to somewhere in central Vermont. I teased him that he was moving so he could be closer to the new Ben & Jerry's factory in Stowe. (He was over weight at the time)

Plan A: Learn something new

My father was, I'm pretty sure, forced to obtain a degree in computer programming from the local university for his job at Champlain Water District. They were converting everything over to a new computer controlled setup, so they could open and close valves all over the state. I'm guessing they had to move water somewhere previously, they had to make a phone call, someone drove down to the tank, and opened the valve by hand for a certain measured amount of time, and thus the water was moved elsewhere. My father designed a program that visually showed an operator where water was, how much, and with a click, transfer it anywhere in the state. Advanced technology for it's time I'm sure. With him getting so in to computers, it was the perfect opportunity for me to learn something about terminals and communication.

Holiday's and weekends he took me to work with him. He let me transfer water, showed me the programming parts i was interested about, we even created a crude Golf game with Q-Basic that was pretty popular in the office. I enjoyed every day we spent playing with the computers and really learned the fundamentals of computer technology and how information systems work. Armed with my budding knowledge, i asked the computer lab teacher at school for a BBS program of my own. Not owning a computer, thinking i could just install it on a school computer, this seemed like pretty good idea at the time. My new dream was to own and operate a BBS.

I don't remember the computer teacher's name for the life of me, but he had a useless right arm in a sling that he would tuck disks into like another pocket. he typed bast with that right hand let me tell you. I begged for a BBS. He said no. I bothered him day after day. Once, i called him at home from a phone number i got from my neighbor the principal. No again. After a month of asking, he relented, letting me use his multi monitor personal computer in his personal office to log on to a BBS client. In no was was i allowed to install anything, but now i was back online without my friend with the 286. I could be on the computer without supervision for at least 4 hours every weekday. Four hours of downloading games, chatting with people in other cities, and learning how to tame Fido.

Plan B: Hijacking a node, not getting caught

I read a text file on a one-node BBS with some random crappy technology name about Fido commands. Like a modern day help file, but written by someone on just what they had read from a  book, or figured out themselves. It had personal notations about canceling authorities, holding nodes open, and so on. It took me 3 hours to print the whole file at school that day to bring home and study. Within the week i was staying on random BBS servers for unlimited amounts of time, downloading protected files, knocking people offline, and just creating general havoc for system administrators in the 802 area code. Not that all servers were Fido, but most were at the time. It was an easy system to maintain, and could be run from any basic piece of junk computer.

People would often catch me causing a problem on their computer and would kick me off, then proceed to call the schools modem phone number. This is right around the time when *69 was advertised on TV for $1.75 each use, so you can imagine the people were pretty pissed. I could hear the warble of the modem picking up for a call, much like a fax, then someones horribly distorted mad voice coming through the small speaker on the modem under the desk. I had a little following in the computer lab, and my friends found this to be about the most funny thing they had seen in a while, so eventually word got around that i was up to no good. I lied my ass off when confronted by the computer lab teacher. I had a feeling he really did not care what i did. I imagined his house to be a blinking neon shit-house of technology, confusing outsiders like Japanese billboards in Bladerunner, eyes red and watery staring at no less than 200 hundred massive 15" CRT monitors, in their nightmarish, beige, plastic glory, as if to find some closely guarded international secret warehouse... full of Unicorn boners. I looked up to him. I needed him, his computers, and less importantly, his dwindling knowledge.


Part Two Tomorrow..

Skyrim: Dawnguard

Continuing with Bethesda's plan for world domination, we have the recently announced Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim expansion, Dawnguard.  Join in with vampires to steal the Elder Scrolls in an attempt to blot out the sun, or join the Dawnguard to become the coolest vampire hunter since VanHelsing.  We don't have any hard evidence of what the expansion will bring us but some things are made apparent from the video.

• Mounted Combat - One of the most asked for features since Oblivion, it looks as though we can hack and slash from our horses at last.
• New Character Models - Much like werewolves in Skyrim, it looks as though you can gain the power of the Vampire (Demon?) in Dawnguard.  Shouts seem as though they are also possible while in this form and much like werewolves, you will need to feed to maintain this extra power.
• New Weapons and Clothing - Crossbows!  Capes!
• Swimming Dragons? - Yeah, I don't know either, but anything to make dragons more interesting / difficult is OK by me.  

Unfortunately, there's also no word on when to expect this expansion.  Planned for sometime this summer, we have until roughly August to wait.  PC gamers and PS3 owners (all ten of you) will have to wait an additional 30 days from the release of the expansion.  Much like the days of Splinter Cell, Microsoft has exclusive one month rights to this DLC.

Prepare yourselves adventurers.  The tyranny of the sun shall end!

Elder Scrolls MMORPG Teaser!

I've played all the other Elder Scrolls games, including the old mobil phone version on my breaks when i worked at the liquor store. I would lie if i told you i was not excited; like my balls exploding out of my pants excited.

Now to pick a new video card..

Old timey TOGTFO

How to be creepy on the Internet in 5 easy steps

     I've said it before, I'm not a creepy guy, I don't go looking for people. Once upon a time i had someone ask me how to find someone. He felt as if he had some unfinished business with an ex girlfriend who moved away. He did not know where she went so all he had was a name. I promised to help. As to not waste time at home doing something stupid like this, we did all the research at work where i would be paid to do it. In the course of one or so shifts we had uncovered some pretty cool information, and it's really all common sense.

     Before we got online we decided to brainstorm where to find information. Marriage certificates, rental lease, home purchase, tax payments, registration of any kind.. all great things we thought of looking for. Bad news though, most of the above you at least need to know where the person is. So..

Step 1) Google. You will need to find out at least what county they live in. Using myself as an example (a bad one at best) i was able to find out where i live and my phone number in 15 minutes. Getting a card out of my wallet for a salesperson that services the company i worked for, i was able to do the same in about 10 minutes. In one rare case i was able to find out the date of an impending marriage of two people by their public online registration on Bed Bath and Beyond. Here is the link. Google is just plain fucking scary in general. I mean it.

Step 2) Use the clerk of courts. This is almost always a hit. Public information is ready and free to search almost always yielding an address or phone number. People get tickets, get sued, register vehicles, buy or sell a house and so on.

Step 3) Social Networking Sites. Always make a dummy account and search for the user specifically. If you remember who they were friends with, search them as well using their friends as a reference. In the case you feel that you are blocked such as on facebook, friend your dummy account that count your friend's friends. Sounds dumb huh? It's not. Most often the person you are looking for thinks your a hateful asshole and wants you blocked. Counting through your friend's friend list, you may notice a certain someone you did not see before.

Step 4) Background check. Use to get these for free at work. Don't even need a SSN to get started, just some basic information such as either a D.O.B. or place of birth. This normally will give the current address and some times a phone number if they have got a ticket recently. This will also reveal their SSN. Some websites charge as little as $5 for this service. **Note: Don't tell me this does not reveal your social. It does. Depends on the check.**

Step 5) Website registry. Often times people sign up for websites, forums, coupon sites and so on. This information might as well just be handed to you. Here is the results of me just typing in "Major Asselin Profile" on Google. Just on the main page you can see my phone number and address. I'm not logged in to anything, it's just a lack of security all around from many different websites. You may have to be more specific on the name with this one, i just happen to have a unique name. (Use the middle name if possible)

     That's it. Your now officially stalking your ex-girlfriends and getting a stomach ache when you find out they are married with kids that don't look like you. Congratulations. Also, this makes you a creepy asshole.



Book Collecting 101

I collect lots of things, but my real passion is.. you guessed it, books. I've collected games and systems, board games, posters, cards, movies, comics.. and sold them all and not regretted it one bit. The books have found a place in my house every time I moved, and i never put any in boxes.

I started buying and sorting books in my room when i was in 7th grade, and in my first year moving to Florida after my parents divorce. My dad bought me a used bed that had a book case in the headboard that would hold about 50+ books. Compelled, i got my lord of the rings trilogy together and set them up like little soldiers right behind where i layed my pillow. One problem, it looked empty. My dad asked me if i wanted some more books, and i said yes just to fill up the headboard so it did not look stupid. For some reason i felt if my friends were to come over, or a girl, they would wonder why i had just three books in there. I was convinced some day a girl would come over so this was pretty important.

He took me to the Flea Market at the run down drive-in movie theatre several times and i got it filled up. I had only ever read fantasy books and not that many really so had no idea what i was looking for. By coincidence i picked up several Piers Anthony books. One night, laying awake in a small duplex in the ghetto with no TV, phone, or anything to entertain me, i reached behind the headboard and grabbed one of these Anthony books and began to read. I stayed up all that night to read that book, and nearly missed the bus the next morning. I had to have more!

By the time i was 16, I had finished collecting Piers Anthony books and had most editions and at least one legit copy of each title he published, which was around 250 to 300 books. I had others in my collection by different authors but with no serious direction how i bought them, or how i read them. Altogether i had about 500 books total or 2 book cases and that stupid headboard full to overflowing. I have pictures I will upload later if i can find them. Yes, i took pictures of my books.

Limited funds did not allow me to buy books for a few years after high school. If i saw something at a garage sale for 10 cents i would pick it up, otherwise i would just skip it. So between 2000 and 2002 i bought and read maybe 75 books total. My hand written ledger confirms this. So for those who are keeping track, i had about 575 books at this point. That's about 3 Super Target bookcases super-full. Between 2003 and 2004, i became a hunter. I pinned thrift stores and flea markets on paper maps in my bedroom and made weekly road trips. People brought me books they were throwing away. I abused the paperback exchange stores with throw away books from libraries and picked up another 300 books in this time. Money way better, so i spent it. In the long term, my hobby does not really cost anything significant, and my girlfriend at the time was supportive and loved telling people our house was a library.

In 2004 i got married (different woman) and my hording tapered off some. I started to sell some of my first edition rare titles to make some extra money in 2008. I told my wife anything over $100.00 list on ebay is going to be sold which she was really happy about as our house just got destroyed by a tornado. (the books were fine) I sold three books before i almost had some kind of emotional breakdown. I had sold or lost everything else i collected over the years, why should i sell something I've some passionate about? I felt with each ebay sale as if a piece of me was being sucked away.

Once we stabilized and had our son, i dragged myself to every store i could find, plotting my weekends finding, sorting, reading, writing, and just collecting more books. In this period of time between 2009 and 2011, i bought over 1000 books. Yes you read that right. And i only sold one, for the sole purpose of using that money to buy even more books.

I changed jobs in 2011 and all of a sudden, I'm getting paid about double what i use to make. My job allows me to travel Florida and see new things and find all these hidden book store not on google. The 50 mile radius around my house became dry, and the only things i could find were at garage sales. I started to search abroad and discovered gold. Since may 2011, i have brought back over 500 books home with me. Again, i only sold one for some mad money to buy even more books.

I do not have all my books in my database yet as i have been buying them faster than i can get them sorted and put in, but i think I'm well over 2,500 different science fiction and fantasy paper backs. With that i have about 500 or more hard backs. It's enough to fill a room full of bookcases, which is exactly what i will be doing in the coming weeks.. buying lots of bookcases and getting everything organized. I might have to take time off work for this one.



Sorry no posts this week, working too much.

Thinking about pulling a "Ferris" and finding a way out of work, but seems impossible for now. So far I've worked over 90 hours this week, and as I'm writing this i should be out the door already.

Quick updates:

My monitor is turning yellow.
My son threw up on me last night.
I found out that tacos made the "tradtional way" are not really tacos at all.
Sometimes you don't have time to take a dump.

That is all.

The FInal Upgrade: Soundcard Edition

I had good sound before I got the card, 5.1 on-board sound. The 7.1 headset is nice, but not the greatest for movies. Too much bass, not enough tinny little artifacts of sound I love. The speakers I have support 7.1, so i figured i would make the wife mad and get one last upgrade before I call it.

I decided on the Soundblaster Audigy 2 after reading many favorable reviews on some tech websites. THX certified really means nothing to me as I have seen it on some real low end cards so did not play a factor in the end result. I took heed to the warnings about troublesome setup and then promptly ignored them.

I bought the card at CompUSA and put it in that afternoon. First thing i noticed was that the card came with like three books in several different languages, so i threw them in the garbage post haste. Installing the drivers was a snap and they did not work at all. I downloaded new drivers from the website and those did not work either. Using a tried and true program, Audio Sandbox, in combination with the downloaded Windows 7 drivers, i was able to get it to work. Using several splitters i was able to add speakers to the back and my extra sub without a problem. The installed surround application just did not work at all, so once again i used Audio Sandbox to get my speakers in the right place sounding great. Frustration after installing this fucking card could only be quelled by several Sam Adams beers.

If you don't have Audio Sandbox, i can not honestly recommend buying this card or putting any faith in to it. Getting a movie to play with anything better than stereo in Windows Media Player was next to impossible without the aid of A.S. Once properly set up and tuned the way you like it, your Blu Ray's and Skyrim-like-games sound great. Speakers make a huge difference.. I recommend anything that has "Creative" written on it.

**Update: I just realized when i put my hand on the computer earlier that it was hot to the touch. I added a fan and poked a larger hole in the desk for better ventilation. Lets hope that worked. Maybe time for a new desk?**

The Playorc Author Finds Unknown Hole

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The Extreme Team - The New Epic Video Series

Caught the link on Facebook from Muscles Glasses of EpicMealTime fame. One of the very few times i laughed out loud when watching YouTube.

Favorite quote: "It looks like the Philippines."

Legend of Zelda NES Case Mod w/bonus Video

Made by Ryan Fitzpatrick (aka “Platinumfungi,”)

Why do we love Adrianne Curry?

1) She plays World of Warcraft. I'm not saying that's the best game in the world or anything, but I play it, and I'm a strong believer that most hot chicks play it and possibly do so completely nude. In the shower.

2) She shows up at conventions, in Slave Leia gear.

3) I feel as if, if she is a nerd and not faking her inner-geek to exploit those who give her exposure, then she really is some kind of champion of geek vagina. Bloggers, webmasters, choice-makers, and nerds everywhere love the pictures like the ones above because it gives them hope that hot chicks do really like to be nerdy.

4) She is almost always on twitter showing her boobs.

Doom running on a TI enspire CX Calculator.. in color.

Finally, a color version of Doom has been hacked to run on a Ti-nspire CX calculator. One slight caveat: the "controls had to be tweaked a bit and a custom Doom menu was created to make it different from the plain DOS version of the game." Continue reading for a video.

Legend of Zelda Cufflinks - Wait.. Listen!

There was a time where i would do anything to have these. I would sell a child, deal drugs, or have sex with old ladies. Really old ladies. Okay maybe i would not sell a child...

Buy them here. Be quick, time is of the essence!

Piratebay.com S.O.P.A. Header

Microsoft.. Word.

World's Record NES Controller

The massive controller measures approximately 12ft (w) x 5 ft (d) 3 in x 1ft 8 in (h), and weighs in at a whopping 265 pounds. It was built by Ben Allen, along with Stephen van ‘t Hof and Michel Verhulst.
The controller cost over $6,000 (USD) to construct, and yes – it does play games. The thing is so big that it takes at least two people to play a game with it, as the armspan required to use the D-Pad at the same time as the A/B buttons is too wide for even the likes of Yao Ming. Hence, my comment about Co-Op mode in the title above.

Running a Nintendo DS Emulator.. Part 1

I decided i wanted to play Nintendo DS today. I use to own one, actually several. My last one i modded several different ways to take advantage of the amount of games that you can download and never pay for. If anything, I did not want to pay for games. I've installed DS emulators before to take screenshots and so on, but never really played one out-right, or reviewed a particular one.

(Castlevania - Order of Ecclesia)

The above screen shot i took using the in-program screenshot menu option provided by NO$GBA Emulator. I'll break it down quickly: Don't download iDeaS emulator. It sucks, its very hard to get it to work. The options suck. Any combination of settings resulted in either a gray screen, a blue screen, or a black screen. I was never able to get video or sound to work, and i tried everything. I read their forums for help, but it looks as if the eumlator is no longer being supported. NDSEmu emulator was a bit better. I was able to get the rom to open without a problem but the sound was so off.. i mean it was bad. The speed of the game is not set to auto by default, so i had to change that, but it did little to help. The game throttles speed incorrectly with no setting to get it right. This makes most games with timing issues to be unplayable.

The last emulator i used was NO$GBA, which was spot on. No problems from the first time i started it. Options are great, menus are awesome. Picked up my game-pad without any configuartion. (wow) Any DS rom worked from the few i downloaded.

Don't waste your time with the other garbage. Download NO$GBA.

Bacon Tits

People want to see my what? Oh, desk.

I have had several people eMail me and ask for pictures of the things that I buy actually on my desk. It's almost like people do not believe i would waste such money on computer thingys.

After the 32 inch monitor post they started coming in, but i had not posted in a while, being burned out and all, so i did the only thing I'm good at, I ignored them. So, here are some pictures i just took about 5 minutes ago.

There they are, all the shit I have been blogging about getting for the past six months or so. I can't remember if i blogged about the Pen Tablet or not, so there it is, a Genius 10 Pentab with Swipe. Swipe is like an Itampax like touch thing. I don't use it. I used black poster board for the inside of the desk because i was getting terrible glare from the reflection on the glossy wood surface. The speaker system in a Creative 7.1 THX boxed system i got from Best Buy years ago. I replaced the center channel with two other speakers when i upgraded my sound card because it supported that. The subwoofer on the desk goes along with that. The big grey box on the desk to the right is another subwoofer that has a super-duper low bass response that a boxed speaker system could never get down to. It's controlled by a Yamaha amp on the other side of the room. I'll take a picture of that in a moment. Also located on the desk: The Raptor 7.1 gaming headset, an external DVD drive so I burn more than one thing at a time, the Nostromo, the Cyborg, Microsoft gaming keyboard and mouse, remotes for the bullshit laying around, and on top, three multimedia PCs that i made using old DVR boxes designed for those TV's in Walmart. I should do a blog about those sometime as they are pretty unique.

I guess you can call that the power center. It's right behind my desk and consists of two Klipsch floor speakers which have two kevlar 8 inch drivers and one horn tweeter in the front and one 15 inch bass-reflex subwoofer in the back. Above each one is an Altec Lansing double 3 inch loud speaker. I don't normally turn these on unless my wife is not home, or if i want to show off when my friends are over. With those same Klipsch speakers i was able to knock the sliding glass door off the track down stairs while watching Star Wars.

So that's it, ye nay-sayers. I spend way too much time on the computer not to have a good one with the features i like, so.. Keep the emails coming. Sorry I took so long to respond. 



I upgraded my Video Card.

You may be asking yourself, "Why do I care Major?" And the reason is: Because I fucking do, thats why.

Everyone i know had something better than me, i had a Geforce 520 which i overclocked the hell out of for the longest time. Then came Skyrim, and the old 520 just groaned under the stress. So i found an open box GeForce GTX 560 Ti at CompUSA and bought that. No more groaning, noisy fans or crazy overclocking. Well, maybe the overclocking.

The new Geforce App you can get from their website has built in features for overclocking. Super customizable, easy to screw up.. just the way I like it. I kept the old video card and put it in a buddy's computer I'm fixing up. I had an 8400GS laying around so i put that in the other-other buddy's computer I'm also fixing up. Wait, let me a take a picture because this is pretty interesting.

Okay so the computer on the left belongs to Friend #1, and the one on the right belongs to Friend #2.  Left computer is a Core 2 Quad Gateway, the other one is the slightly older Tri-Core Phenom Gateway. Both have blue screens and heat problems with the video card that was supplied with it. I have rebuilt both computers and they are waiting for me to install an operating system.

This model of Gateway, GT56XX series, is the biggest piece of crap on the planet. After two years, the fans begin the quit, the ram starts to die without cause, and are plagued with heat-control issues. Friend #1 supplied a power supply which is a good start until i found that the ram had gone, the video card, the hard drive, and all the cables had to be replaced as well as the video card. An extra fan must be installed in this model so it wont blue-screen every five minutes. Anyways, i did the same to both and they both turn on. Friend #1 could not wait on me to fix the computer any longer and bought a new much better one, so said i could keep the old one. What do i do with it? Friend #2 i think is dead.

If you ever want to buy a used computer, never buy one like the pictures above. If you do, don't ask me to fix them.

**Update** I unlocked the fourth core on the tri-core phenom. It's a Bios thing, anyone can do it, especially if you don't care if the thing dies or not.