poit's blog

Remarkably cheap upgrades

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:07:05 -0600

Well, if I'd thought about it sooner I'd have put this up as a sort of last minute christmas shopping thing but...it's too late. Still worthy of note. It's just remarkable how cheap it is to upgrade a PC now with all the price drops in DRAM, CPUs and GPUs.

For instance, getting a 2.5ghz Intel E5200 CPU (or a cheaper 2.2ghz Intel E2200 CPU to shave off $20 bucks) OR a cheap ASRock intel motherboard or if you're an AMD fan, an Athlon X2 5000+ and a cheap ASRock AMD motherboard

Global warming information

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:15:55 -0600

I found a nice page bringing together much of the information about climate that I've found myself. Anyone that feels it's a certainty that humans have caused (substantial) global warming really needs to read this. Our affects are tiny...and more likely than not...BENEFICIAL (screwed up as that may seem to some)

http://members.shaw.ca/sch25/FOS/Climate_Change_Science.html

HOLY SHIT! HERE COMES THE COLD!

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 23:43:06 -0500

So I've been digging into the whole global "warming" thing (the earth has actually cooled somewhat for the last decade). I was pointing out to someone the recovery of the sea ice (up 9% over the previous year's low in 2008 even though the ice SHOULD have melted since it was thinner) and it suddenly stuck me... HOLY CRAP, the environmental groups were right but in the wrong way. We really did just cross an environmental "tipping point!" All during the last 10 years the old warm mode feedbacks have been counteracting whatever force (probably solar activity) has been pushing world temperatures down.

Global warming's entirely our fault...riiiiight

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:27:08 -0500

You know it just keeps bugging me that "global warming" has been on hold now for a decade. Seriously an entire decade while everyone rambles on endlessly about how terrible the dangers are, how there's no question that CO2 emissions are driving up the temperatures...when the temperatures didn't go up. In fact, they've DROPPED in the past few years. Now of course...the guys that are getting all the media attention are blabbering on about it merely being a natural variation compensating for man's emissions. Well...since the southern hemisphere had the coldest winter in a lifetime and since a lot of northern hemisphere temperatures are also showing signs of further drops, I think that's probably not the case. I think the sun's behavior (dismissed as unimportant by the IPCC) is actually responsible for the bulk of the changes. I think we're at a point when this is going to become obvious...and I think the halt to warming and the drop are probably the reason the fuckers found it necessary to FALSIFY THE DATA. Seriously, look at their old chart (a rather inconvenient chart since temperatures were actually equally warm half a century ago)

Base load alternative energy

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:15:17 -0500

Just something I thought I'd toss out there. Everyone's blabbering on about wave power, wind power, photovoltaic plants and occasionally, solar-thermal power plants. Let me explain the concept of "base load". There's a certain amount of power that we need...and we need it CONSTANTLY. This is (more or less) our "base load". This is an amount of power that we NEED to use, or else people and businesses will start losing power. Now no matter how freaking windy a place is...no matter how many waves there are...no matter how much the sun shines...when that shit STOPS you need to have a normal power plant standing by.

This creates a teeny, weeny little problem. First off...traditional versions of these plants really don't deal very well with cycling up and down. Second, you're talking about paying almost as much to maintain this gigantic power plant (which will sit there doing nothing much of the time) ON TOP OF the more expensive "alternative" energy plant. Oh, of course you could also use storage systems...which also double up on your costs.

Well, NASA was a dud

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:53:50 -0500

NASA seemed to take a cautious approach and not try to draw any conclusions. They just pointed out that the current sunspot activity is withing the sun's normal behavior for the last 200 years...in other words back to the time of the Dalton minimum.BTW, I also just realized (heh, or remembered, depending on how you look at it) last night that part of the reason the arctic wice ouldn't have return to its previous extents as soon as the temperature dropped is that it didn't have enough ice cover to provide the additional cooling (from higher reflectivity)...but since the south pole just had a massive increase in sea ice, I'm guessing the north will see a similar increase. Eventually it'll be so thick that melting a substantial portion would take a prolonged heat wave, again, due to the increased reflectivity...and of course the thermal mass. Glaciers, permafrost areas, etc are probably having similar issues.

NASA press conference tomorrow...end of 'global warming' talk?

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:08:12 -0500

In the last couple months there has been essentially no sunspot activity. Today we FINALLY have an obvious sunspot and it's the reversed polarity type that would signal sunspot cycle 24. The problem is, there has been so little sunspot activity for so long, it's actually difficult to tell if this is the actual ramping up of the next sunspot cycle...or the normal first observed spot that signals the start of cycle 24's activity (the activities of both cycles kind of overlap)...in which case it would take another 12-20 months to ramp up. Either way, there's a rather large amount of evidence that...(A) the next sunspot cycle will be a bit of a dud...like dalton minimum levels and (B) that such a minimum would mean a heck of a cold spell globally.

Chain of death

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:46:45 -0500

I was showing a friend a freeze cam shot from TF2 and he said I really needed to post it so...here we go. Me having just been killed by a heavy, who was then killed by a spy...who was then killed by a pyro. (click to enlarge)

Failing to stop??? WTF???

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:09:38 -0500

For the second time I've been pulled over for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign...when I'm actually about the only person on the campus that DOES come to a complete stop. He SAID he was watching, but I have to wonder, if he was watching, why didn't he go after that guy that was there 30 seconds before me...that went thru the intersection faster than the (absurdly low) speed limit? "Thankfully" I got off with a warning like the first time, but I shouldn't have been stopped at all. If it's because of some criminal activity in the area and they just want to stop me, I'd be FINE with them saying they just needed to stop people. What crazy ass amount of time am I supposed to stop at these stop signs to not be pulled? It's not like I ONLY wait until my car rebounds from breaking. I wait several seconds (yes, I actually count since that last one) and this time I ironically stopped for another moment to ponder how annoying it would be if I got pulled again after that other guy flew through the intersection without stopping. Sadly, I've now experienced how annoying it is. Do I need to get one of those stupid little things to track my car's movements constantly???

The medic I want

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:01:24 -0500

I've had that song from grease "You're the one that I want" stuck in my head the past few days and the lyrics have morphed in my head into a song about a pyro needing a medic (in the game Team Fortress 2). I should probably ask someone about making a video on that (what? I'm lazy). I guess it wouldn't be TOO difficult though, at least you don't need to be able to sing. You only ever hear pyros mumble because of their face mask, so it'd have to use subtitles and mumbling.

I got kills...they're multiplyin' and I'm takin' control...but then I'm hit and I start dying...it's mortifying!I need someone... who can heal me fast, who can heal me on the run. I need someone, I need das ubermensch... heal me with your medigun... give me your uber when it's done.

You're the medic I want, you are the the one I want...ooh ooh ooh, heal me! The medic I want, you are the the one I want...ooh ooh ooh, heal me! The medic I want, you are the the one I want...ooh ooh ooh. The one I need...oh yes indeed.

Uber's filled, your buff protects me. But you're shy of crits from bombs. Just follow me, in this direction. Air blast deflects them.

Uber me up...or we'll never last. We'll take the sentry down this time. Uber me up and we'll cap the point. Or we'll kill their whole team tryin'...then we'll cap if we survive.

200 meter breast stroke

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:38:07 -0500

The 200 meter breast stroke event in the olympics...all I have to say is that it's WAY LESS INTERESTING than the name implies

Nvidia questions...apparently there are rumblings about MASSIVE FAILURE RATES of nvidia's 8000/9000 series product lines. I should probably update the computer parts suggestions to reflect that ...ie, just not recommend nvidia until this is settled. On the other hand, nvidia just enabled physics acceleration on most (all?) of their 8000/9000 series cards...so there's a lot of potential there. On a third hand, once someone fully ports nvidia's CUDA to ATI (and I hear individuals are close to having it done), PhysX acceleration will be available for them as well. Oh well, in the mean time I'm thinking I should pick up a super-cheap (but workable) card to do a cascading downgrade (my older card back to my machine, that card to my wife's machine, etc) just in case my 9600GT fails.

FreeNAS: at least ONE install is easy

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:44:50 -0500

Well, I put a LOT of work into the computers over a 3 day vacation. Nothing like a relaxing day of pulling your hair out.

FreeNAS was the one easy thing to install. It actually takes longer plugging in a card than it does to install FreeNAS and it's just a couple minutes to make the drives accessible to windows. As I've mentioned in the past, FreeNAS is nice enough to take over as the master server if you tell it, so if the network connection is up, any computer on your home network can see it...none of that bullshit windows networking often does. I've modified a crappy case I got for free so instead of holding three 5.25 drives, a floppy and a single 3.5inch drive...it holds up to SEVEN 3.5inch drives. Should make for a nice RAID box (one for boot and up to two, 3 drive RAID arrays). I'm not entirely satisfied with the 120 megabit throughput of the system, I might need to try another motherboard since it seems the VIA chipset (no surprise) kinda holds back the hard drive transfers. No biggie, again...it's quick and easy to install. I'm hoping to get it up to about 200-250 megabits (about enough to burn 12X DVDs straight off the network drive)

I'll take the 9600GT for the win Alex

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 03:44:12 -0500

I should have put this up earlier but...I've been playing games a lot (like Team Fortress 2...see below) and going back to test various things. Anyway, for a slightly early birthday present I picked up a Chaintech 9600GT OC. WOW, I thought it would be nearly twice as fast as my ATI X1950 Pro by some benchmarks that I saw but, it doesn't QUITE work like that. I mean sure, if you don't have on any anti-aliasing and such, it's twice as fast. But this card seems to handle anti-aliasing a HELL of a lot better. Like it went from...Oblivion being playable at 1024x768 and 4xAA with everything on to the same except...at 1600x1200. In Crysis (thing of beauty that it is) it went from being tolerable at 1024x768 at medium settings with maybe 2xAA to playable at the same resolution, high settings and 8X...or 1600x1200 high settings and 2xAA. WOW! I don't know, maybe something's not set right or something but it seems to scale oddly, like the more you throw at it the more efficient it gets.

Team Fortress 2 announcements

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:29:05 -0500

I've been playing Team Fortress 2 a bit lately and thought it would be amusing to do a couple of announcements. These are just "Thank you for calling Team Fortress support" sound clips...as if it was from some help line for the soldiers in the field.

All our operators

Press or scream one now

Newbie engineer

About the heavy and bullets

Paid

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:29:28 -0500

Well, I got most of my back pay. Retirement and tax took a little more than I'd expected but it's still enough to REALLY help get our finances stabilized. Hopefully this will be a good year. Before taxes and retirement it was $1111.80. This next (regular) paycheck is going to be about $100 higher as well...and I think I've still got a minor issue worth another $50.

Due to unrelated factors I might actually splurge a little early and get a new video card now instead of waiting until next month. The card's not TOO expensive at $150ish although most people for some reason think video cards...these days the part with the most powerful processor in a computer...should be cheaper. Should be able to play Crysis with some antialiasing and basically any game at reasonable speeds for the next year :D