Eden.fm

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Recently one of my websites that was around for more than a year was blocked/removed by dot.tk, I was using a free TK domain to host a little free app I had been developing. Suddenly and out of nowhere.. yesterday I find the site has been blocked and it redirects to a subpage on dot.tk saying it has been removed due to abuse or copyright abuse, and no further info. I didn’t get an email or anything at all about it. The site had nothing but a small wordpress blog similar to this, so I have no clue what triggered such actions.

So I decided to move all the sites I had on .tk domains elsewhere, I don’t have a single bit of trust on the reliability of those domains, bye bye.

myimgur.tk will now reside at http://myimgur.eden.fm/

Seems I’m not the only one: http://labby.co.uk/2011/09/dot-tk-web-address-cancelled-due-to-abuse-and-copyright-infringement-bullshit/

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/cloaking-content-generators/103036-dot-tk-cancelled-my-domain-has-ever-happened-you.html

I’ve finally imported all my posts from techsuki.net into a new category here: https://eden.fm/category/techsuki/

I will be closing the old website soon.

I finally did it, bought a decent UPS.

This is something I was holding up for years, for some reason, and finally decided to get one. The area I live at is quite prone to having micro power cuts whenever it rains, and it’s so extremelly annoying when the PC keeps rebooting from those, you have 930493 things open and bam, all gone; rarely any data loss since I usually save any open docs very often, but having to re-open and prepare all the apps I use etc etc, specially while programming, is really frustrating.

A couple years ago I actually bought a cheap, really cheap, UPS, and omg did it suck. It was around 35 euro; whenever there was a power cut it would last a few seconds.. 4..5 then bam, off, followed by a really loud beeeeeeeeeeeep that never turned itself off even after power came back until you pressed a switch. It’s been buried under my bed since then.

This week I bought this:

it was around 65 euro, not a fortune either, and seems to be working nicely. I tried to manually cut the power and waited a few minutes, seemed to hold up just fine. I had plugged the case, 1 of my 2 24″ lcd screens, and the DSL router to the battery-backed plugs.

The software to manage it seems a bit messy to setup and you need to figure out yourself, the documentation is severely lacking, but after playing around a bit I got it. The display for the remaining time while on battery didn’t seem to work, it never showed anything even when I cut the power; maybe it needs a few minutes to “learn”.. dunno.

A view of the status:

Along with the UPS I ordered also a 2TB disk as I was planning to get one soon, so I fit it along as there no extra shipping charge for another small item. Shipping sucks here btw, was around 20 euro for the box; usually at least ~15 is the minimum for anything from the mainland.

So, I replaced an old 500GB disk with it. I had a 50 GB partition on it that was “using” for OSX (installed, played around with for 10 minutes then never booted back); I wanted to keep it since I’d like to take a look at programming for Cocoa and the iCrap sometime, and if you ever tried to install an OSX backup you’ll know it can be a real PITA to get it working.

So I was looking for a simple app to mirror the drive or at least the osx partition; last time I used anything like that was many years ago, old norton ghost through a bootup cd with a dos-like interface etc.

I looked into a few apps, first Paragon’s Backup & Recovery, but that didn’t work. It has a few options to make backups and restore images etc, but nothing to mirror a drive. You need to first make an image into a file then it has some options to restore it, none of which let me specify my new raw disk. Then tried a few others till I found one that actually worked with no hassles: R-Drive Image

was pretty simple and straightforward. So I did the cloning, booted back into the new drive, OSX ran up just fine.

Techsuki v.2

Galleries and software are being moved to this domain.

This is a follow-up on my previous article

I commented the card was really hot, around 85C on idle and over 100 on load, so decided to open it up and see what was wrong.

Here’s the culprit:

Bunch of dust blocking the air intake and some horrible paste was the cause. After I cleaned it up nicely and re-applied paste, idle went down to ~65-70C, and the fan now automatically goes down to ~45% (1415 RPM). Up to 60% it’s mostly silent. It took me a few hours to take it all appart and re-assemble the card, this is no joke; counted about ~50 screws.

I had been wanting to buy a new case for quite a long time, and finally got around to doing it. My old Thermarltake Armor LCS just couldn’t do the job anymore after I switched to air cooling for the cpu. Also took the chance to get my first SSD and a new video card. This isn’t intended as an extended review or anything, just a small post to show pics to friends etc. Let’s begin:

The chosen case was the Cooler Master HAF 932. Its main features are excellent cable management and nice airflow. The case is slightly bigger than the TT, although half as heavy.

The new case:

They include some wheels (with a brake); I won’t use them though, the case just barely fits under my desk.

Disassembling the old one:

I became to hate this case for quite a few reasons. One being the location for the hard disks: you can either put them in a removable cage (room for 3) which is placed right IN FRONT of the PSU, which is placed vertically thus.. blocking the PSU fan. Retarded. The other option is to put them in the lanes from pics 1 and 4 above which are attached to the radiator, so you gotta pull it out from the front and it’s a huge pita to do so.

So, let’s continue with the new case:

I always wanted a case with the PSU slot at the bottom, removable hard disk trays and the cable plugs either on the front or the back.

I started by installing the motherboard, then doing some cable management, PSU, hard disks, and cards.

Notice the hole in the 3rd picture. This is apparently so you can change heatsinks that require a backplate without having to remove the entire motherboard etc. Obviously either they didn’t consider AMD sockets, or Gigabyte is at fault with the location (doubt it). Also notice in pic #4 how the fan is placed.. it can be either above or down, not on the sides which would be ideal (possible with the Intel brackets only). Utterly retarded from Thermalright.

yep, f@cking huge.

My razer barracuda ac-1 and terratec ht pci (sound card and tv card). The razer used to be quite expensive.. but I don’t think it’s all that great. My older Terratec Aureon Space 7.1 had much better quality. Too bad they don’t care about customer support/drivers etc (it doesn’t work very well with W7, and I had to bother them for more than a year to get a BETA working driver for Vista, so I won’t even bother for w7; they even removed any contact options from their website). They are n.. german btw. The TV card however works really well in W7 and they keep updating its software.

Now something I dislike about this case:

They include an adapter to install a 3 1/2 unit, but they didn’t include any special cover for it, so there’s a hole on each side. Also, the 5 1/4 bays have a system to very easily remove them by pressing on either side, as you can see on pic 2, however, once you install a drive.. yeah, looks ugly :/ They could have included something to cover that with.

The system to easily install 5 1/4 devices without screws works pretty well compared to most others I’ve seen, just press the button and it’s locked. However.. it’s a bit loose on the right side, so I used a few screws there. They should include those push things on each side imo.

Back to the adapter.. there’s only 1 included, so I couldn’t install my fan controller. I’ll buy some adapters from ebay I guess and update the article later.

The hard disk trays are great (sorta delicate though, probably easy to break). You extract each tray and ~place the disk in, no need for screws. They also include some rubber stuff to minimize vibrations. For the SSD I used a converter I bought sepparetely.

I used my <3 eee while installing the case so I’d still have internet and such. Susprisingly.. it worked fine plugged to a 24″ LCD @ 1920×1200

The brackets to install PCI cards are just awesome. Seriously. I’ve assembled dozens of pcs and encountered a multitude of different “easy-install” systems, they all sucked. This one rocks though, it works really well. Thermaltake’s suck and they always made removing any card a nightmare. These however work as they should.

My 8800 GTS (I haven’t received the 9800 gx2 yet). I had never used the stock cooler, purchased the water cooling kit at the same time back then (was quite expensive). (Yes, I won’t be using water cooling on the card anymore, since the entire wc system is part of the TT case). The stock fan works nicely, barely noisy at all. With WC it was always around 55-60C, even under load. With air now.. it ranges 60-75.

And we are done:

Now some benchmarks of the SSD:

* Installed w7 in about 7 minutes, from first install click to a booted desktop.

Yep, amazing. Look at the I/O in the HD Tune results.

To help its lifetime I followed I few recommendations from the OCZ forums, such as a few registry tweaks, disabling prefetch/superfetch, search indexing, auto-defrag, system restore, pagefile (never used it anyway since I had 8GB), and moving firefox cache, windows logs and temp files to a RAM disk (I have 8GB ram so used 2GB for it). I purchased QSoft’s product for it. It seems to have been made by a single individual, no real business etc, but works extremelly well where other products fail. Even works for 64-bit W7 with no problems. I think it was around ~$12, just the right price.

UPDATE: finally received the 9800 GX2. Also the 5 1/2 tray converters and a pci-e card with 2 sata ports.

So, 2-3 weeks after I first wrote this post (saved it as draft only), received the rest of pieces to complete my new system. Let’s see:

* XFX Geforce 9800 GX2 Black Edition. I bought this used from ebay. I was thinking of a 260 or 275 first, but decided for this. The 8800 GTS was still doing ~fine, however sorta lagging with high quality settings etc in 1920×1200. I will probably ebay it now. So, the new card:

The card is extremely heavy and large. I was worried about the power plugs.. read everywhere the card needs 1×6 and 1×8, no conversion from molex and such. Fortunately my PSU is quite high-end and had no trouble powering it up (Corsair HX620).

Took the chance to test an old xfx 7600 GT that died on me years ago. Thought maybe it was the mobo at the time.. so worth giving it a try; no luck though, it’s dead.

Bay converters: they SUCK. Apparently they aren’t standard size, so I had to cut them a little bit on the sides and keep trying till the devices could be placed. Same thing with the screw holes, they didn’t fit. I will leave the appropriate feedback to the ebay seller. Anyway, I bought 2 of them, used them for the cards reader and the fans controller. They don’t look great, but beats a hole on each side.

One thing that bothers me now.. the card runs extremelly hot. ~75-80C on IDLE, ~100 on load. I’ve read on some forums from other people’s experiences, and this seems to be acceptable Oo The fan is also quite noisy at 100%, so I put it down to 60% manually when I’m not gaming (it auto-adjusts itself, but being the idle temp. so high it’s always loud). I also tried lowering the core/memory/shader frec. but it didn’t help much. I guess I need a more powerful case window fan (it’s very low rpm to keep the noise down, about 650 RPM). Maybe I’ll open the videocard and plug the fan to the controller sometime, so I don’t have to use the nvidia control panel for that every time.

As for gaming.. it’s really nice, played some Aion beta and Oblivion, was great and smooth with max settings.

Now the PCI-e sata card. It was cheap. So cheap they didn’t mention you could only use 2 of the 4 ports at a time. It has 2x e-sata on the back, and 2 internal sata ports. You need to switch some jumpers to use either. I bought this card since my motherboard has only 6 sata ports and I needed at least 8 (5 hard disks, 1 dvd drive, 1 e-sata + 1 sata on the front panel). I don’t think I’ll ever have a use for e-sata, but I often use the other normal sata port.

This was quite a screw up. The card is so small.. the sata cables barely reached, I had to place over the video card :/

It didn’t work right away on W7-64, and the included drivers failed. Trying to update the driver online from device manager failed to find anything. The drivers from the Silicon website failed also (the card is a Sil 3132). Oddly though.. windows update did find the driver, installed it, and then it worked great (beats me why trying from device manager failed).

Light catodes.. w/e they are called: I had 4 of these in my older case, 2 blue, 2 violet, connected to a controller (off/on/alternate blue-violet, on by sound). I decided to use the 2 blue ones, without the controller (it’s small and leaves half a 5 1/4 bay empty). The problem was where I’d place the on/off switch. The case has some sorta opening on top below a plastic pad, which is advertised to be used for filling a water tank for wc (no clue how you’d install that there.. seems like bs advertising). The button was too small, but then I saw this bubble plastic stuff I had lying around and had this idea..

This area is normally covered, so it doesn’t matter if it looks ugly, it’ll be always covered (I can still press the button).

The lights:

And we are mostly finished. The backside with a few more cables:

And we are done. Thanks for reading!

So much for google’s “do no evil” motto.. (I guess supporting the censorship of human rights and civilian massacres seems alright to them), they’ve done it again, screwing up its customers. I loaded my Picasa site today, it was empty. No notice, no instructions, no warnings, no nothing.

If you have a paying Picasa account and have a single picture you think might be against what they deem innapropiate in line with their terms of service, you might as well take it down and think it twice before renewal. They removed my entire 35k pictures gallery, which included only art (screenshots) and personal photo albums. It’s all gone.

– You’ll get no warning
– They’ll delete everything, even personal pictures
– You can’t contact them, at all. I mean it, try a search “how to contact google”
– If you paid for storage you are not getting your money back, even if you were on their $500 plan
– You won’t be able to upload to your account again, even if your paid storage plan is still active.

So yeah, they won’t be seeing my few $ upon the next renewal.

I ran a 3DMark 2006 test today to compare Vista and W7 beta1 (both 64-bit):

I had been delaying this for a while and finally got around to it. I’ve had a watercooling setup for 1.5 years, but the past few months had been horrible with leaks in the CPU block and really bad performance. Also my PSU was being more noisy than I’d like. I was thinking of getting a new water cooling block, specifically the G-flow from Innovatek, which looked pretty good, but I was really tired with pita and expensive maintenance of water cooling.

So I decided for a heatsink/fan for the CPU and I’d close the WC circuit to the GPU. I bought a Thermalright Ultra 120-extreme and a Corsair HX620w PSU. I looked at many others before deciding for those 2.

My current setup: look at this horrendous picture, a damaged and patched numerous times CPU wc block which still leaks, and some rags behind it to save the GPU.

Also check these temperatures (load and idle): My CPU is an AMD Phenom 9850 BE (65 nm)

Really bad for a water-cooling setup, isn’t it?

Ok let’s go with the goodies. Let’s check the heatsink first. Thas thing is frigging huge and heavy, it’s scary thinking it will be hanging off my motherboard:

It comes with adapters for AM2 and 775, some anti-vibration rubbers, clips for a fan, thermal paste, and and the ULNA (Ultra Low Noise Adapter): this is simple a cable adapter which reduces the voltage from 12v to 5v.
The fan clips are a pita to insert, although Thermalright has a new fan adapter now for sale, and also a socket 1366  version (for i7)

The ULNA:

Now the PSU:

I had been wanting a modular PSU for ages to remove some unneeded cables from my case. It comes with many sets of SATA and IDE cables, 2x GPU, 4 and 8 pin extra motherboard plug, and some adapters for floppy etc. There is also a manual complete with a bunch of useless Euro languages.

Now the Noctua fan. This is a very famous brand for their awesome performance and low noise:

It took me a while to remove the CPU WC block and re-do the tubes to close the circuit to the GPU. While I was at it, I decided to finally arrange the cables in my case properly, which are currently a mess:

Yeah I know what you are thinking.. but I’m finally fixing it!. Also look at my older PSU, what a mess with those long cables.. most of which I didn’t need.

So I started re-arranging the cables for the motherboard (speaker, power-on, reset etc.. which go all the way to the top of the case), 4 UV tubes, front panel with card readers and e-sata, and my Aerogate II (fan controller and temp. display).

Next I proceeded to insert the new PSU. I had some trouble here because it seems to be larger than standard(?) and the anti-vibrations bar of the case won’t fit properly:

Applying the paste: these cards work great for this

Inserting the heatsink was quite a pita with the AM2 adapter: the back plate always moves back and I have to push really hard for the screws to reach the holes.
I had read some reviews which said the surface wasn’t properly flat, so I took a look but couldn’t figure out if it was like those or not.. what do you think?

Finally inserted:

Now tidying up the rest of the cables etc:
I love these sata plugs with the clip, you need to push slightly to unplug them so they don’t accidentally disconnect (very easy with the normal sata cables). Also the PSU has these nice IDE plugs where you press slightly and it comes off for easy removal.

Almost done:

Re-filling the coolant tank:

And we are finally done.

Both the Noctua fan and the Corsair PSU’s were incredibly silent. The PSU one barely moved at all (it adjusts according to temperature or load).

I plugged the Noctua to the AerogateII to check the RPM:

It’s rated 800-1200 RPM so I guess it’s ok. Hopefully it will work nicely when I enable C’n’Q to adjust the RPM according to load. I also tried with the ULNA, but with that it didn’t report RPM info (showed as 0) somehow..

After that I placed a temperature sensor in the heatsink and tested it in 3 ways: 1) without fan. 2) with the fan. 3) with fan and the ULNA. (Note: this isn’t the CPU temp., it’s the heatsink’s)

1)

2)

3)

Let’s close the case:

And finally the awaited testing..

1) Idle with fan:

2) Load with fan:

3) GPU idle (it should be better now as it has the WC all to itself)

4) Idle without fan (I gave it a couple minutes to warm up)

5) Load without fan It eventually reached 70-72 C

Ok, that’s pretty much it. After completely closing the case etc. the temp raised a little bit but that is to be expected: the fan orientation with the AM2 socket is awful, and my case fans setup is far from perfect. I will eventually get a new case with better air flow and the PSU on the bottom, and I will get a new video-card with passive cooling. (a heatsink without fan)

Price:

– Corsair HX620w PSU: 124 euro ($165)
– Thermalright Ultra 120-Extreme: 59 euro ( $78)
– Noctua 120mm fan: 19 euro ($25)
– 1L coolant: 20 euro ($26)
– Shipping: ~17 euro ($23)

= 239 euro ($315)

The Thermaltake Armor LCS case costed me ~250 euro back then ($330)

Final thoughts: These products rock, it was worth the money! (much more silent now). Also.. ThermalTake products suck, I’m not buying one ever again. (old PSU was also thermaltake)

Alright, thanks for reading!

If you are thinking of upgrading your Picasa Web Albums service to paid storage, be advised that Google offers no support at all even to paying customers.

All support links in their website turn around and lead you to their lousy “forums” which generate a few hundred messages per day from other customers in desperate need of support. Your only chance at getting any help for your paid services, even for billing matters, is to post in that lousy forum and expect some other user to try and answer you.

This situation hasn’t changed at all 1 year after I signed up for their paid storage plans. The auto-renewal of that service is also suposed to send you an email 30 days prior to expiration. I have 10 days left to meet the renewal and there’s no notification yet in my gmail inbox. If you happen to be charged automatically, you are probably out of luck to request a refund as you can’t contact the company you are paying for the service.

This is a huge point down for Google’s services.

So here’s what happened:

Today some water accidentally poured down on my keyboard (first time in my life this has ever happened to me), and some keys stopped working. So I opened it and to my surprise, the plate holding the inner membrane and keys together has no screws, only some plastic bits that have been melted through some holes on the other side. The membrane inside (3 layers) was wet so I needed access to it to properly dry it and had to break those plastics.

Result: keys “work” again, but the plate is a little too far from the keys so you need to push the buttons really hard, which makes it kinda useless. I tried to glue it but it didn’t help much. If it had screws instead, there would have been no problem at all.

Wishful thinking, but I hope the designer reads this post someday (in the extremely rare event that he has any English skills), and commits Seppuku ??, Seppukuout of embarrassment for his stupid design.

Tokyo Expose 0.1 / May 19 2008

Little application to somewhat simulate the Mac/Linux(KDE?) effect that shows live thumbnails of all open applications on screen. The thumbnails update in real time and light up when you hover the mouse over.

Simply run it; when you hover your mouse over the TOP-RIGHT corner of the screen, the expose will activate, and:
left-clicking a window = bring it up
right-clicking a window = close that program
left-clicking the desktop window = minimize all programs
ESC = cancel

To close it, click “exit” from the tray-icon menu

Requirements: Windows Vista 32/64 bits

Download: http://techsuki.net/apps/TokyoExpose/TokyoExpose.exe

This is a very simple and lite application to index and search for files in your hard disks. Tired of the lame and cpu-intensive file search stuff in windows I decided to make my own. It needs to be manually re-indexed when you add new files but it suits my needs.

Download: http://techsuki.net/apps/TokyoFileSearch/TokyoFileSearch.exe (322 KB)

Runs in Windows 95 to Vista, either 32 or 64 bits. Does NOT require .net
Simply download and run it somewhere. It will create a file called “index.db” when you run the indexer, in the same exe folder, don’t delete it.

Consider it a beta since there is a lot to be done, it’s very raw now.. but does its job. Check back later for updates.

Click on the pictures for a bigger screenshot.