Today I have gotten my OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W Modular High-Performance Power Supply. I installed it and it is working great. Also since there is no room inside my case to put a fan where I want it, I added it to the outside of my case and put a SilverStone 120mm Fan Filter on it. The computer is not quite at the dell level of silence but it is much quieter than before.

I am thinking that I could try to remove one of the 3 120mm fans I now have on my computer but then I will lose the great low temperatures that I am experiencing!

And that’s under load! I was blasting orcs away in  Warhammer 40k: Space Marine while I was taking these temperatures. My CPU temp probably would have been 20 degrees higher and my GPU would have been 10 degrees higher before I installed new cpu cooler (Hyper 212 Plus 120mm CPU Cooler) and the passive gpu cooler (Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Plus).

But I must admit that there is a fan blowing air directly onto the GPU cooler, the one I placed outside the case. So that is the reason why the GPU stays pretty cool even under heavy load.

But anyways that’s it for now!

• Dust Build-up
• Aging Fans

With the increasing noise on my mind I decided to make my computer sound like a Dell. It’s an odd thing about Dells, no matter how old they get, as long as the electronics are functioning properly the computers are DEAD silent. I was after this dead silence. The specs on my computer were as follows:

• AMD Phenom II 550 Black Edition (with extra two cores unlocked so it shows up as a B50)
• Stock AMD Heatsink
• GA-MA78LM-S2 Motherboard from Gigabyte (mini-atx)
• Cooler Master Elite 341 m-ATX Mini Tower Case Black – (RC-341C-KKN1-GP)
• Asus ATI Radeon CuCore HD5770 1 GB DDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card EAH5770 CUCORE/2DI/1GD5
• 8 GB DDR2
• Thermaltake W0070RUC TR2 Series 430W Power Supply with 2 Fans
• 2 Terabyte Western Digital Green Drive

Since I unlocked the extra cores on my processors the computer is plenty fast, 8 gigs of DDR2 is fine, and my HD 5770 is more than enough for the games I play. So no need to upgrade. What I did want was a quieter computer! So I bought the following:

• GAMMA Classic Series ATX Mid Tower Interior Steel Chassis (Black)
• Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus Series 500W ATX12V V2.3 Power Supply (RS500-PCARD3-US)
• Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Plus Cooler – Retail (DCACO-V470001-BL)
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler, RR-B10-212P-G1

After setting up these parts my computer is MUCH quieter and cooler. But it is not anywhere near the Dell level of silence. Unfortunately while the Hyper 212 keeps my processor ridiculously cool, even with only one fan, It is not on the Dell Level of silence (But I need to look into controlling its speed). I am thinking of getting a Noctua NF-P12 Fan  fan and installing it on the Hyper 212 cooler instead of Cooler Master’s fan But we shall see.

So anyways here is what it looks like.

I am not one of those guys that loves to neatly organize wires and junk so the jumble of wires is going to stay at the bottom of the case. I am not interested in moving those because the PSU fan is on the top and the wires don’t block the air flow. Oh and also this is a windowless case so nobody will ever see it!

The main reason for including this picture is to draw your attention to my video card. as you can see it has no fan and a huge heat sink on it. This is the aforementioned, Arctic Cooling Accerlero S1 Plus. if you look at the image of the item from Amazon at the bottom you will see that there is a plastic Bezel around the item. Unfortunately the Heatsink is so massive that I had to remove the bezel in order for the video card to fit, and even so it BARELY fit. Here is a close-up.

As you can see from the image there is very little space between the drive cage and the Heatsink. Since I don’t have anything other than one hard drive I don’t care. But some may.

So keep this in mind of you are trying to pair an Accelero S1 with one of these NZXT Gamma cases. These cases are extremely cheap and seem to be of fairly high quality so I think many people will be getting these cases. And if they want to have passive cooling for their video cards they should keep in mind that the heatsink may not fit. But the Accelero S1 with the Asus CuCore 5770 will just BARELY fit.

And there it is, all closed up. Nice looking case, if you ask me. My girlfriend is the one who uses the pink glove, not me! But watch out, she uses that in her kick boxing class.

here are the temps that I am seeing at idle. These are 10 degrees lower than what I experienced before changing these parts. And as you can see from the previous picture I even removed the fan that came with the case.

Temp1 is my CPU and Temp 2 is the System Temperature. I only have two fans in the system and both are on the CPU Cooler Fan pushes air onto the Heatsink and Fan2 pulls air away. I will most likely be getting rid of both of these fans and replacing them with one extremely quiet fan so I can get to the Dell level of silence hehe. Either that or figure out how to use Speedfan to control my fans. Fan 1 should be able to go down to 600 RPM so I will have to research that one.

Once I figure out how to use speedfan I will update this posting accordingly.

UPDATE 11:45PM 1/28/2012

After installing some chipset drivers and using the EasyTune utility available at Gigabyte.com to slow down my CPU fan. I found out that the noise was not coming from the CPU fan, it was coming from the Power Supply! If you look at the reviews for the Cooler Master (CM) 500 Watt PSU you’ll see that the vast majority of users claimed that it was quiet, REALLY quiet! But trust me this thing is NOT quiet at all. In fact I just took out the CM power supply and re-installed my Thermaltake 430 Watt because I couldn’t take the noise. This CM psu is going right back to Amazon.com.

I also ordered the OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W Modular High-Performance Power Supply. The OCZ PSU received the hardware secrets golden award at hardwaresecrets.com. I think from now on I will only order items that receive some sort of award from Hardware Secrets. Trusting user reviews will now make me have to pay a restocking fee or a shipping cost or something. eh….

I’ll try to do another posting once I get this OCZ PSU.

END UPDATE

Anyways, thanks for reading! pictures of the items I bought and some of my old parts are below!

Peace out!

According to Microsoft’s own IE 6 countdown, IE 6 browser usage is down to 7.9% of the world. I haven’t done the math on this but I think the only reason it is even that high is due to it’s 25% share in China. Since I will not be making any sites in Chinese, for my purposes I think I will go with a much lower guestimate of 1-1.5%. And I bet a large portion of that is us web developers constantly using IE 6 to test compatibility on projects that we have made! So I feel relatively secure in ignoring IE6 users.

IE 7 I am more worried about ignoring. According to W3schools Browser Statistics IE 7 is down to 3.5% share. Now this does not have Microsoft’s stamp on the data but I think it is good enough for my purposes. This amount of people I am more worried about, especially since IE 7 just came out in 2007 with Windows Vista. A truly horrible browser for a truly terrible operating system. So I feel a bit less secure ignoring this section, but the costs far outweigh the benefits in this situation.

In order for me to test IE 7 I have to set up ANOTHER VM in VirtualBox. Granted, Seamless mode makes this kind of cool, but VirtualBox’s sheer awesomeness does not make up for the time that I have to spend checking everything in IE 7 and then re-doing code for a million hours.

So what I am slowly getting to is that it is time Microsoft. I know IE 7 is not as old as IE 6 and didn’t have a 5 year lifespan, but it is time to start an IE 7 countdown so we can all at least start the process of killing off this browser that, while terrible, was an ever so slight improvement over IE 6. In case you care, there is an IE 7 countdown, but it is not from Microsoft. I’ll wait for the Microsoft version…

I think that’s all I wanted to say on that crap. Oh and I think IE 8 sucks too but it was released just 2 years ago so I can’t justify ignoring it. And also, according to W3schools, it is still more popular than IE 9!

Which brings me to IE 9. Finally Microsoft has developed a browser that is not just a highly polished turd! Microsoft spent lots of time achieving economies of scale in the turd polishing process with IE 6 7 and 8 but IE 9 changes all of that. IE 9, finally, supports some cool stuff with standard CSS syntax (there is still a lot that it does not support but improvement, in my opinion, should be noted and encouraged). I’m not saying I am going to jump off of Chrome and Firefox for it, but IE 9 is actually a somewhat ok browser in my experience.

So if you are viewing this on IE 6, 7, or 8 PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do me, the rest of the web developer population, and the WORLD a small favor, and UPGRADE to IE 9! or even better do us and the world a big favor and start using Chrome or Firefox. Of course, this assumes that you are using one of those super old browsers at home and not on some hardcore locked down corporate network.

Personally I like Chrome, except for the fact that the adobe plugins keep crashing on me, but I never liked flash and shockwave anyways, so yeah. Hopefully Adobe will end Flash on PC’s as it just did on Mobile devices because sheez Flash is annoying. Anyways, that’s a rant for another day I suppose.

Wow this entry turned out much longer than I intended. Peace out!

Synergy shares your mouse and keyboard across multiple PC’s. Who cares you say? it does this over your network and it can share your Mouse and keyboard from a mac to a PC or linux or vice versa. I am absolutely in love with this software. Anyone with multiple computers to manage should love this idea.

Here is the situation that I am using it for. I have my huge wonderful computer with dual 24″ monitors on my desk. I come home with my X61 and I don’t want to use the tiny keyboard and nub (you know the little red thing in the middle of the keyboard sometimes referred to as a clit mouse). So I just turn on synergy and I set the laptop to the right of my monitors. Just by moving my cursor all the way to the right until it is off of my monitors I can now control my laptop with my big PC’s keyboard and mouse! Genius!

Anyways, I love it. It is great for me because recently I have been doing a lot of browser compatibility testing (Entreeplay is coming along!) and it is nice to have easy access to a PC with older browsers on it.

But anyways you can try out synergey here (http://synergy-foss.org/)

see you next month!

As I was walking back in from a run I saw a little tiny bird on the ground on its side. It seemed as though it had flown into a window and injured its leg or something. In any case it was lying on its side barely moving. I stood their wondering what the hell I should do about it. This was a big question for me because I tried to save a bird once, it was a baby bird (chick?) that had gotten caught in my parents sprinklers. I don’t even know if I was successful. I left it outside the next morning after it had been dried off and the bird’s mother, or father I guess, came back and was bringing it food. I think it was what would be called a fledgling bird. This means that it was on the ground learning to fly when it unfortunately got caught in my sprinklers and got REALLY frightened. So I left it outside that morning and watched it for a while,  when I came back it was gone. My parents’ neighborhood has a lot of cats so I wasn’t sure if it had gotten eaten or not. But I saw no signs of a struggle so I like to think it learned to fly and is off eating worms and what not today. But I am really not sure.

So back to this bird from yesterday. As I looked at it laying on its side I wondered if I wanted to be responsible for this little life. After 30 seconds of contemplating and staring at this tiny bird I decided to try to take care of it. So I gently picked it up and brought it inside. Picking up a bird is much harder than you might think, especially a small one. As soon as you start to put even a little pressure on its sides you feel how fragile it is. One wrong move or a just a little too much pressure and you could crush it. Or at least that’s what it feels like, I really have no idea how fragile these tiny birds are and I have no desire to test it.

But anyways I gently picked it up, and walked into my building holding it in the palm of my hand. It was looking around but not trying to escape. I placed it in a small open box. The picture below is where I put it. I called a veterinary hospital and told them that I would take it in after this meeting that I had. In case you didn’t know, it is ILLEGAL to try and treat an injured wild bird on your own. You must take it a wildlife rehabilitation center to be taken care of. Whatever state you live in (in the US I don’t know about other countries) will have wildlife rehabilitation centers where you can take the bird.

So as you can see the box was left open, I figured the bird could barely move, it can’t fly out. I was wrong. This guy heals FAST! when I got home to take the little guy to the hospital I was greeted by an empty box! After 15 minutes of searching in my tiny apartment I found that the bird had gotten out and was hiding behind my HTPC (Home Theater PC). And when I tried to pick it up and put it back in the box I discovered it could fly! Quite a shock, since when I found it it could barely move. But when it landed I saw that its leg was still injured so we carefully caught it and put it back in the box. I then prepared a larger box for it and partially covered the top. Just a a small hole, a bit smaller than the size of the bird, for ventilation and light.

By the time I had caught the bird again and prepared this larger box it had passed the time where I could take it to the Veterinary Hospital in Renton, I live in Bellevue. So I decided I would take it in this morning (Sept 1st 2011). When I woke up Crystal said the bird is making a lot of noise. So I went to check the box and it was empty again! the bird had somehow gotten through the little hole and was up at the top of the window. I carefully caught it again and put it back in the big box.

At this point I was faced with a decision. Was I helping it or hurting it by holding it captive until the Veterinary Hospital opened at 9am. The birds right leg still seemed to be a little injured but it was now VERY mobile compared to when I had found it. It seemed to have 90% healed overnight. I closed the box and partially covered the hole on the top and contemplated my next action.

I turned to Google for guidance. I looked online and found that when a bird hits a window it can be stunned for a while. I think that is what happened to this bird. It seems as though it is best to leave the bird where you found it covered by a box until it recovers. This was not possible in this situation because the bird was on the ground near the side entrance to my building, leaving it there would probably have been the wrong decision.

Because of this new information, little guy/girl’s unhappiness in the box, and the fact that it seemed to have healed so much overnight, I decided that holding it captive for 3-4 more hours and then driving it 15 miles away to Renton would not be the best thing for it. Who knows? it might have a bunch of friends living right outside of my apartment building I didn’t want to separate it from it’s friends for now reason.

I took it back to where I found it and opened the box. As my hands came close to it to lift it out of the box, it flew out on its own and landed on a small branch of a tree nearby. It seemed much happier there than inside of my box…

So I was all excited to see this movie. because really, it’s Green Lantern, he can imagine anything he wants and instantly make it. How can they screw it up?

Well they screwed it up. This turd of a movie was so boring that by the end there was a guy sitting behind me snoring through the action scenes. It was THAT boring. I think the move spent 80 minutes building up towards maybe 20 minutes of action.

Normally I am all for character development and building up a story. I loved how the first hour of The Matrix was character development and build up. But even though it was slow it was still INTERESTING. The whole first 80 minutes of Green Lantern was basically Hal Jordan getting over his stupid failings in life so he could spend the last 20 minutes fighting a monster. in addition to Hal Jordan hating himself the writers also attempted to create complex character interactions and back stories and failed miserably creating a boring and stupid story. gah..

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the action scene at the end was VERY predictable. As soon as it started I turned to my left and said “Crystal, He is gonna….” Left that out JUST in case you want to see the movie after reading this.

So anyways here is my one sentence review of the movie. While the special effects were cool, the movie was AMAZINGLY boring with a really stupid story line.

This is one time where I agree with the super low Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Gah! The Fantastic Four movies were horrible hot messes but at least they were not BORING! ugh… 

The picture above is the main dish that I ordered at Kisaku yesterday. It was sooooo good! This is actually an off-menu item composed of two orders of Salmon Sashimi on top of Sushi rice. The Sushi Rice is, unfortunately, hidden under sashimi. So this is sort of a Chirashi Bowl comprised 100% of Salmon.

I am a Salmon Sushi Connoisseur of sorts. I am SUPER picky when it comes to my raw Salmon. There are many restaurants with edible Salmon but few that I consider to be actually good. Here is a list of the Sushi Places that I have tried that have very good Salmon in my opinion:

• Toro’s Japanese Fusion Seafood
  Their Sake (Salmon) and Sake Toro nigiri are to AMAZING (Alhambra, CA)
• J Sushi
  Their Salmon is on the Low end of good but still good (Seattle, WA)
• Doraya
  Another place with a killer Salmon Sashimi bowl absolutely Amazing. This place has a nigir called seared Salmon Toro, oh my lord, it is positively orgasmic! (Causeway Bay, Hong Kong)
• Sushi one
  Another Hong Kong place with great Salmon and also seared Salmon Toro. (Causeway Bay, Hong Kong)

The last two have all kinds of good Sushi but it was a salmon list so there you have it. If you are ever in Hong Kong You should really try Doraya and Sushi One. They both have multiple locations but I was living in Causeway bay so there you have it. But I digress, onwards with Kisaku!

This following picture was some other kind of Salmon called Copper River King Salmon. It was good but I think I like the normal salmon better.

The Copper River King Salmon just didn’t have the same great flavor as the salmon in the salmon Chirashi Bowl. But it was still VERY good.

The following picture is from Crystal’s plate of sushi. I suspect those of you that know me can already guess which one I stole from Crystal. I will tell you after the picture so you can guess haha.

I tried the nice and fatty looking one in the second row on the right. It was Otoro, also known as VERY Fatty Tuna. It was exquisite ($10 dollar word) and the order only cost $9!! That would have been like 18 dollars at Toros in Alhambra but what can you do.

Finally it was time for Desert. Normally I don’t eat dessert but as crystal was reading the dessert menu I heard “Fuji Apple Cheesecake.”

She had me at Cheesecake! It is a well known fact among my friends that I have an unhealthy infatuation with cheesecake. But it is a lesser known fact that I LOVE Fuji apples. The Cheesecake was definitely very good. Although the best Cheesecake I have ever had was in Hong Kong at the Intercontinental. But whatever who knows if I will ever be able to afford to go there again haha.

So to sum up. If you have not eaten at Kisaku and you are a Sushi lover in Seattle, you should eat there!

If you are a visiting Sushi lover you should eat at Kisaku!

If you, like me, were told that Shiro’s and Maneki’s are the best sushi in Seattle, and then tried them and felt crushed by their utter lack of magnificence, You should eat at Kisaku!

So really, everyone who eats sushi should eat at Kisaku!

But I must say that I only really eat sashimi and Nigiri so if you are a roll person then I don’t know if these statements will apply.

Peace out.

So as with everyone I have a multitude of annoyances in my life but there are two things, currently, that above everything are really really getting on my nerves. And they both deal with companies not listening to their main customers and income source. Here are they are:

• Netflix User Interface Change
• Syfy Channel cancelling Stargate Universe and Caprica

I can’t understand it. Netflix’s old user interface was beautiful. It allowed me to quickly find a movie that I was looking for, while also allowing me to wander around looking for movies that I wanted. The new layout as I mentioned in a previous entry is just a load of crap that looks like it belongs on a mobile device. But that’s neither here nor there.

The cancellation of SGU and Caprica are the REALLY annoying things. Both of these shows were perfect. Every time I watched either of these shows, at the end I spent a moment in silent reflection absorbing what I saw and thinking about what it meant. The shows were visual, psychological, theatrical, and storytelling masterpieces the likes of which we may never see again. OK I’m lying, we will definitely see masterpieces like them every year and then we will also see them cancelled every year. That seems to be the way of the world.

But you know? at least there is still Eureka. Eureka is probably in no danger of getting cancelled because it doesn’t require people to think on a higher level. Basically you watch the Sheriff’s antics for an hour and have lots of fun doing it. These types of shows with low emotional investment always last for years. But then again this is also a show that is in Syfy’s summer lineup.

I am convinced that, had Stargate Universe been a summer show as it was intended it would be starting its third season right now. Also they way that the Syfy channel airs shows is just horribly stupid. Season 1, season 1.5, season 2, season 2.5, with 6 months in between its just stupid! I am a hardcore Science Fiction geek and I couldn’t keep up with all the breaks and schedule changes that Stargate Universe went through. Friday, Monday, Tuesday and every day competing with some highly rated broadcast show. It was just stupid. It seems as though Syfy was out to destroy SGU from the beginning so that they could create an excuse to trash the entire Stargate Franchise.

Why would they want to end the Stargate Franchise you ask? well this brings me to another amazingly annoying fact about the world we live in. EVERYTHING comes down to money. Stargate and space based science fiction shows are expensive to produce. Reality TV and wrestling shows are cheap to produce. So of course Syfy is taking the lower risk option, and decreasing their capital investment in TV shows. So they are almost guaranteed to make a profit. But this means that for me, and others like me (http://www.facebook.com/SaveSGU), there will, in the near future, be no television channels dedicated to the genre that we love, science fiction.

Oh well, at least I can watch them on Netflix. Oh wait!!! arrg the new Netflix User Interface is making me feel nauseous as the titles scroll by at a snails pace. gah, I just can’t catch a break!

hah! at least for now the old layout works with this chrome extension!

 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ngacmlmclfopgbnmefcffgbcjiafbfpo?hl=en-US#

Thank you Mr. CheeseGoat you are the Man! Now if only someone could make a Chrome extension to save Stargate Universe (http://www.facebook.com/SGUUK). That link is for save SGU UK You should join that one too!

Edit 6/16/2011

May as well turn this thing into three major annoyances. four days ago some hacker hacked the Save Stargate Universe page. so now that’s gone… Now people have started un-liking the page and Facebook has not done anything about it at all. Really makes you wonder, if facebook isn’t quick to fix a group page with 55,000 users then what happens when your single account gets hacked? 

The link at the top goes to a Google Chrome extension that forces Netflix’s old layout. It will work as long as Netflix leaves the old layout accessible. I have used it and it seems to work great for the most part. Once you drill down into sub Genre’s it doesn’t work.  This has been fixed!

Oh and yeah you have to be using Google Chrome to install it.

But whatever it’s better than having to deal with the new Netflix layout. I can’t stand this new layout.

Stupid Netflix, the only reason why I haven’t switched to Hulu Plus is because Flash is much slower than Silverlight (Netflix uses Silverlight for its online streaming). I wonder if Blockbuster uses Silverlight…

Edit 6/12/2011

Last night I left a movie paused and went to sleep. When I came back it said to press refresh to reload the video because my session had timed out. usually I press refresh and pick up where I left off. This plugin stops that feature from working working. upon pressing refresh the page will continually refresh and keep adding “fcld=true” to the end of the URL. Something about the actual movie watching page causes this plugin to enter into an infinite loop of some sort.

But this is a minor annoyance since I shouldn’t be leaving the thing on overnight anyways.

Old Layout:

New Layout:

I seriously HATE the new layout with a passion. And a basic search on the internets has shown that I am not alone. Here are some links with lots of sympathizers.

• http://www.homemediamagazine.com/netflix/netflix-tweaks-streaming-interface-users-howl-24188
• http://blog.netflix.com/2011/06/new-look-and-feel-for-netflix-website.html
• http://www.webpronews.com/netflix-redesign-2011-06
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Change-Netflix-Back/204414212935278
• http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_218498411517909&notif_t=group_r2j
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/09/netflixs-new-look-instant-play_n_874481.html

All of the previous links are full of people expressing their absolute hate for the new layout. On the Netflix blog there are over 2000 comments! most of them proclaiming hate for the new layout. So what do I dislike specifically about the new layout? here is my personal list.

1. it is ugly. I like the nice fixed width page on a red background
2. while it does show more movies the ratings are missing. you are required to mouse over each image and wait for the information to show up.
3. the method of getting to the page where all of the reviews are located is not obvious
4. the way that the scrolling is set up it gives me the feeling that my browser window is not fully expanded and there is not enough room on the page. Look at the last image in the top row of the New layout example image
5. the scrolling is SUPER slow and annoying. My girlfriend says it makes her feel nauseous.
6. I think the design uses an iframe or something so the navigation bar follows you as you scroll down. This means no matter how far I scroll it is still taking up real estate on the screen. (But I guess it also means that you don’t have to scroll up to get to the navigation bar, eh I dunno)
7. When I first saw it, it made me feel like my web browser had failed to load the style sheets for the page. It just feels like a mistake.
8. The new layout is just not intuitive at all.

So those are 8 reasons why I hate this new layout. I don’t know why the Netflix UI/UX guys would let this thing go live. On the huffington post link it seems that almost 40 percent of users hate the layout while the 35% or something are neutral. Any sort of focus group could have told them that the layout was junk. While it does put more emphasis on the movies this layout is not good for the PC version of the Netflix site. When you are on a PC and have more than a stupid PS3 or Wii controller to work with users want to have all of the information on their screen and at their fingertips.

If you agree with me, join the two facebook groups that I linked to previously. here are the links again:

• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Change-Netflix-Back/204414212935278
• http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_218498411517909&notif_t=group_r2j

Thanks and peace out!

Oh! I forgot to mention! for now the old UI still works if you use this link

http://www.netflix.com/WiHome?fcld=true

I don’t know how much longer it will work but at least for now it is something to fall back on.