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My mom visited Taiwan recently and brought back this cool gadget. It's an electric bug whacker. It runs on a pair of AA batteries and looks like a miniature tennis racket with thin metal rods running horizontally inside the head of the racket. All you have to do is hold the button on the handle down and an LED lights up to let you know it's active. Then all you have to do is touch the bug. It's way way easier than trying to hit a bug with a magazine or book or those fly swatters. Most of the time all you have to do is put the racket over the bug and scare it and it'll fly right into the racket. ZAP! You don't have to hit the bug with a good clean hit like you do with conventional physical methods either...and it makes a little spark too. Fun for the whole family! No, really, it's pretty useful and I think it cost about 10 bucks. 11:15 AM Actually, I thought this was out already, but the page says the file was last updated on 6/16/97, so.... The utility from Windows Magazine lets you benchmark many aspects of your machines performance. It's very quick and easy to setup, but I'm not sure how reliable the results are. The previous version of WinTune 97 I had was reporting incredibly low uncached hard drive scores under NT. The new version still does it. So I'm not sure what they changed, really. It does have a nice database of results included so you can compare your system to others, however. The last vestiges of instability are gone from my computer. I've been using it for a week with no crashes whatsoever, just invisible use. The icon corruption problem I was experiencing was solved by disabling the DRAM Fast Refresh setting in my BIOS. Funny, but it doesn't really seem as if my RAM has any of those good features. No big deal.
Infoworld has a story on a new 2.2 pound competitor for the Libretto from Mitsubishi. Just briefly, it's going to have a P133, 32 MB of RAM, 1.2 GB HD, and a 7.5" active matrix screen. I may have found my new dream laptop! It's supposed to be introduced in Japan next week...I'll eagerly be watching for pricing information. 10:15 PM They are available from: ftp://ftp.diamondmm.com/pub/display/monster/monster3d/m3d_108.exe
With the 1.07 drivers I was consistently getting 50K more in D3D Test with Diamond's drivers
as opposed to Orchid's or the reference drivers.
I have no idea why. The difference was quite apparent in games too. This is a great little benchmark you can use to objectively rate your hard drive's raw performance. It's quite accurate and consistent. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in about 4-5 months. Still, it's very useful.
We all knew that already, didn't we? Anyway, I have a Seagate Medalist 1.0GB drive which I bought a little over a year ago to burn CD's with. Well, turns out that wasn't really necessary, and the drive is not that fast to boot. It gets a CheckHD index of 1.8, compared to my IDE Fireball TM 3.8 GB which gets something around 2.35. However, I have NT 4.0 on my IDE drive, and yesterday based on some advice I got after asking around on microsoft.public.windowsnt.misc I moved my swap file to my SCSI drive. Wow, it really does feel faster! I would point out that despite the fact I have busmastering drivers, the IDE drive still uses 60% CPU time compared to the SCSI drive's 14%. 12:58 AM Before I go to sleep... DESCHALL actually did it...the project cracked the DES encrypted message posted by RSA. They did get lucky and only end up having to search 20% of the keyspace, but it's still a remarkable achievement. Oh well, now that that's over with, throw your spare CPU cycles at the Bovine RC5 Cracking Effort instead. Expect this one to take a little longer! Oh yeah, in case you're wondering, the message was:
The unknown
message is: Strong encryption makes the world a safer place.
If my job lasts longer than expected, I might actually have enough money to buy this. It's quite possibly the most incredible value ever to hit the world of home video capture and editing. The catch is that you must have a Matrox Millenium II (Millenium's won't work) or a Matrox Mystique (yes!) to use it. Features I think are important include:
It's capable of capturing video with MJPEG compresstion at 720 x 576 PAL and 720 x 486 NTSC resolutions! Incredible! You will never find a combination of features like this in an add-on that costs...get this...$230 street!!! Intel's crappy Smart Recorder III that does video capture and nothing else and uses your CPU to compress video costs $170 alone!
Click here for info
about the Rainbow Runner direct from Matrox's site. Gary Bettan at http://www.videoguys.com
has gotten a chance to work with the card and says it really does work well, although
he would prefer other card, say, by Miro, for serious work. He does say that doing
720x486 capture at 30FPS for the Rainbow Runner is pushing it a little. But still! Wow!
I have not heard anything official about NT 4.0 support but Matrox is usually good
about NT 4.0 support, unlike most other companies. This is from the section of Dracula's castle called "Marble Gallery." Go get it!
The bug found last week by an enterprising fellow has been fixed. Download the new version here.
Link to Navigator FTP site
Direct
download for Netscape Navigator 4.01 base install AMD plans to stay competitive with Intel prices by keeping the prices of their equivalent processors 25% below Intel's prices. Personally, I think they need to be even cheaper. The story is here.
You know, I really don't think anything of consequence happened today. Anyhow, I'm adding a new hardware section to my site, which will contain some of my thoughts on what and how to buy stuff, as well as how to tweak it, etc. This is very much under construction, so documents are going to look rough and unorganized...just bear with it, it'll get better!
You've almost certainly noticed by now that the site has undergone a slight redesign. The new design is going to allow me to organize things slightly more logically and make it easier and faster to navigate when content gets added. Yes, this site is called the Game A/V Page, and I haven't posted any music on my site for a while but that's about to change. This stuff is too awesome to miss. This game's music is SO awesome (the game is awesome too). I love it. Click on the Game Music section. The music from the starting area is up now. Music from all different parts of the game will be rotated in eventually. 7:20 PM Do you have a problem with your system where operations like full window drag and scrolling cause playback of audio to stutter and CRC errors to occur on your modem? I found a document about 1 1/2 months ago that finally shed light on why this has been happening this whole time to me (and many others, no doubt). This document explains it in detail. I can't believe video card manufacturers do this and those so-called experts at PC Magazine or Infoworld don't call them on it. Until we manage to get one of those big guys to make it an issue, this problem will probably hamper or annoy a lot of users. I also forgot to mention, another reason I bought the Mystique is because part of their excellent driver support is the ability to disable the so-called "Automatic PCI bus retries" feature. 6:14 PM If you like, you can go to http://206.204.65.109/cgi-bin/ntitar.pl and download the domestic version of Service Pack 3. I am unable to download the product properly using Netscape Communicator...the web site refuses to recognize that you have filled out the form properly. I had to use IE 3.02 to get it instead. 3:00 AM I went ahead and replaced the Stingray that was holding me over with a Matrox Mystique today. I decided on it fairly quickly because:
I'm extremely pleased with the card's 2D performance and especially the drivers. The virtual desktop support and ability to fine-tune refresh rates is great. There's a slot which can be used either for a memory upgrade (which I probably won't be using) or for the Rainbow Runner, a video capture card. If you have the Rainbow Runner, you can get a TV tuner card attachment for it too. Those addons aren't available yet, but should be next quarter. The video playback is unfortunately not as good as the Graphics Blaster 3D. Increasing the size of the video slows performance visibly, although it's certainly evident that the chipset is handling some of the load. Then again, playing videos doesn't crash my computer like the GB3D did! I did pay a little extra by buying it locally instead of mail-order. NECX has the 4MB version for $135, and that's BEFORE the $25 rebate. Good stuff. I wanted and was seriously considering getting the Stingray 128/3D, but the poor RAMDAC (only 135 MHz) and questions about the NT support put me off the card.
I'm a little worried about buying this card right now since I expect some excellent
third-generation 2D/3D cards to be coming out in the next few months. I really got
screwed on buying that GB3D, even though it was cheap. I wonder if CL or Cirrus
even knows about the bug. BTW, I e-mailed Cirrus Logic and their tech support rep
said that Creative Labs customizes their BIOS and drivers and the GB3D is not compatible with
CIrrus Logic's generic drivers. Well, that's possible, but I think it's more possible
that Cirrus Logic is just trying to feed me bullshit or pass the buck, so to speak. I have no idea what this is and I have never heard of it until today. Whatever it is, it's out and it's got something to do with 3Dfx. Grab it at http://www.station.sony.com/battleground/. The K6 PR2-166 is running around $230 and the K6-PR2-200 is going for around $335. This is much more in line with what they should cost, given their performance. I cannot understand the people who were buying the chip for the whole month or two that the prices were so damn outrageous($450-600!). I mean, seriously, you could have gotten a Pentium Pro for that much money. Intel's planning on pulling the rug out from under Pentium prices for their regular July price cut. Expect the Pentium Classic 200, for example. to be around $120 and the MMX Pentium 166 and 200's to be $138 and $240, respectively! Wow! Pentium Pro and Pentium II prices are not expected to change much, but if you want to buy a Pentium, you should hold off until after July if at all possible.
You see, AMD and Cyrix are getting damn close, so Intel is starting to glut the market and
cut prices dramatically. See what a little competition gets us lowly consumers? On
the other hand, it makes you wonder why Intel didn't drop the prices more regularly before.
Smells almost...monopolistic... | |||||||||||||||||||||
