So I finally got around to building me a new box, the old one was a little dusty and not as fast and spiffy as I wanted so I decided to upgrade. I started my search looking for a new mother board and processor, memory is easy as I know I want at least 2gb.
So I started my search for the processor first and after checking out a few sites I stumbled upon a great resource for Processor reviews not only was there a huge list of todays current processors there was a mountain of reviews for each processor. This was a tremendous help because I could tell from the reviews which processors had more issues than others. So after cruising around for a bit I settled on a AMD ATHLON64 5000+ X2 Box AM2. So Now I began searching for the motherboard and low and behold they have a great section for motherboard reviews too. I am still a little on the fence on which motherboard to buy though, here is what I was thinking:
Well I’m a little late in writing about this, but Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the UN International Panel on Climate Change. And I think this is a wonderful, Al Gore has done a tremendous amount to raise awareness about Global warming. Now don’t get me wrong I wrote a whole post about how we are too focused on global warming itself and how reducing our waste and CO2 outputs and other nonsense is a waste of time and money. While I do agree that we are a increasing the rate at which our planet is warming, I think our current focus on how to fix the problem is all wrong. What we need to do is change our technology, you will not get everyone on their plane to change their life style, but if you can change the technology that runs that life style you will be on a much better road to improving our enviroment.
So anyway back to Al, If there is one one man who has done a lot for this country I think it is Al Gore, he seems to be a true visionary in many fields ands seems to truly care about the future of mankind and our planet. Believe it or not while Al Gore did not personally invent the Internet (A claim he never made), he did push for, fight for the funding for the DARPA project that eventually became the internet, he also pushed for many government acts that brought the Internet to its current form.
My Congratulations to you Mr. Gore, you deserve it. I just wish more of us were like you.
I was (looking for data storage), after looking at a few different options I finally settled on tilana.com, it offers a great feature set that allows me to keep my important file secure and even supports file versions! Once you get started with Tilana you simply download and install their software and specify which folders and files you want to store on their servers, it then handles the rest.
It is true continuous data protection, whenever you edit and save a file Tilana automatically saves that file on its servers, and a neat thing is you can use it on multiple PCs to synchronize folders! I thought about setting this up with my Parents and just synchronizing pictures, files, etc across the country!
File synchronization across the country is awesome, allows me to share pictures without the hassle of zipping, emailing and walking my parents through downloading and expanding. Its a nice service to have as I can access my files any where at any time with the remote access to my files.
I can’t for the life of me remember how to grep the f’ing cmd line history. I use this command about once a month and it pisses me off that I have to keep looking up how to do a simple little command. SO I said I will put it in my damn blog and maybe someone will make fun of me and I will be able to then finally remember how to do it! BTW for those of you looking for the command it is:
UPDATE: With the new 2.3 Firmware this no longer works.
So I have started using my Zune again because I have been traveling more lately and I needed to re-setup my Zune to add a few movies and such so I wanted to copy everything off my Zune. I had set it up to be able to direct connect in windows but for the life of me I could not remember how. So after a few minutes of googleing i came upon Phaleux.com that gave me just the advice I needed.
Make sure your Zune is not plugged in and your Zune software isn’t running
open up regedit by going to the start menu and selecting “run”. Type regedt32 and hit “OK”
Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Enum\USB\
Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace”. This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above …\USB\ The ##’s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune
Change the following values:
EnableLegacySupport to 1
PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
ShowInShell to 1
Plug in your Zune, and make sure the Zune Software starts up.
Hopefully at this point you can open up “My Computer” and browse your device, though it does NOT show up as a drive letter.
I’ve been meaning to type this up for awhile, it originally stemmed from an commment I made on another blog so I figured I would blog it and expand on my views so here it goes:
There is a time and a place for everything, do I think excessive force was used on Andrew Meyer, yes I do. Do I think he acted in a manor deserving of some force yes I do. When you go to an event like that, there are rules, just like there are in everyday life, you bend or break those rules and you have consequences. I’m not saying you shouldn’t break or bend rules when you deem its necessary to get your point across. What I am saying is you have consequences and you have to accept them, good or bad.
Andrew Meyer got his consequences and now the police have to accept there consequences, and if you think there are none for them, your wrong. But I think we will see more of this type of pushing of the limits as more and more people wake up to teh reality that the latest American regime has put us in. Its not one of protector and liberator. We are now being oppressed ourselves, we are being spyied on by our own government, illegally, and we do nothing. And when someone finally stands up and says hey! Thats illegal! What does our government do, it changes the laws to make it legal? how does this make sense?
If Americans do not do like Andrew Meyer and stand up for what they believe, how will we change? We are all afraid of consequences, and if you do stand up like Mr. Meyer you will most certainly have consequencs. but when you get older don’t you want to be able to say, I stood up…I did something when I saw injustice.
Saw this on CNN today, “Taser this: Fuck Bush.” This was written by an 20 year old student editor of the Colorado State University’s newspaper. It really amazes me that this is an issue worth national news attention and worth a student losing a job over. I mean seriously? First amendment people, editorial equals opinion, and last time I checked the patriot act doesn’t limit us from telling our opinion (Disclaimer: As long as that opinion does not threaten, interject harm or contain outright slander.) about someone.
This student felt the need to share his opinion of the American president, sentiments shared by a good many people. Does this mean he should get off scot-free for using offensive language in a newspaper? I think that depends on the newspaper ethical rules. I think the kid got what he deserved and I’m sure he will put more thought into his next editorial.
Microsoft has released a few new patches for Vista, supposedly they are performance and compatibility enhancements ahead of Vista Sp1. From my standpoint, Vista is just a flashy version of XP. have not really seen any advantages of it over XP as of yet. I use Vista on my laptop as it came preinstalled and I wanted to give it a chance to grow on me and I also wanted to hit the bumps in the road so i could speak about them intellectuality when they came up.
That being said, vista does have issues. For one it randomly blue screens on me and when it comes back up it doesn’t tell you why. Of course it gives you its there has been a problem would you like to check for a solution….You know how many solutions I have found…. 0, thats right 0. I have stopped looking now, seems microsoft better do something with that or it will be a useless feature people will ignore. Anyway back to the Patch releases, You can find all the x64 patch releases linked in this Ars Technica article, it was useless for me as my laptop run the x86 Version.
10/02/2007 — Well Microsoft has unveiled the Zune 2 and I have to say it is impressive, I orignally bought the first gen Zune because I liked the screen size and all the features, that and I did not want to get on the apple band wagon.
Don’t get me wrong, I am NOT a microsoft fanboi, but I like some of there products, I Use windows xp for my desktop gaming rig because its the most logical choice for out of the box gaming. Linux and wine just is too much of a hassle. Apple is great for video editing and multimedia projects and I guess they make a good mp3 player, my wife and daughter like it. Linux is my choice for Server software, I run my Web Server, DB server and just about every other server i have on the web offering content off of Linux distros (Debian, Ubuntu).
Anyway enough of my preferences, back to the Zune 2. So it has an awesome new feature, wi-fi syncing, whenever you get in range of your computer you can sync or have it sync automatically. Now that is NICE, they also introduce they ability to share other media other than mp3 and removed the mp3 expiration on shared music. HOWEVER the 3 play limit is still there. They have changed the hardware and now have a Zune Pad which is a clickable touch pad for navigation. the interface has been reworked and looks snazzy.
I think the smartest and most awesome move Microsoft made in this whole ordeal is they are offering ALL of the software upgrades to the first gen Zunes. This has to be an awesome move on Microsoft’s part as its great PR and raises their standing in first gen Zune owners eyes (like me.)
So if your thinking of buying a new MP3 player, I suggest looking at the new Zune, so far it looks awesome.
It’s called the Zune 80 and, shockingly enough, it has 80GB of storage.
Uses the new Zune Pad — four way touch-sensitive d-pad (with up, down, left, and right buttons).
It will sell for $250 (with “premium” headphones).
Available only in black (to start).
Screen size has increased to 3.2-inches (from 3-inches). As far as we know the resolution is still QVGA.
Dimensions are 61.1 x 108.2 x 12.9mm (2.4 x 4.25 x 0.5-inches), some 1/3rd smaller than the classic Zune.
The classic Zune will now be known as the Zune 30 — it’s not going anywhere. More on that in a sec.
New flash Zunes
Zune 8 and Zune 4 are the names for the 8 and 4GB flash based models.
Also uses the Zune Pad.
These will sell for $200 and $150 respectively.
Both will be available in pink, green, black, and red.
It will feature a 1.8-inch screen (compare to the nano’s 2-inch screen).
Dimensions are 41.4 x 91.5 x 8.5mm (1.6 x 3.6 x 0.33-inches) — compare to the new iPod nano, at 69.8 x 52.3 x 6.5mm (2.75 x 2.0 x 0.26-inches).
Everything else
New Zunes ship in November, date not yet announced.
All Zunes (including the Zune 30) will have a new, redesigned interface and feature parity. In other words, early Zune 30 adopters will have all the same software features as new Zune 80, 8, and 4 users.
Additional native video codecs for h.264 and MPEG-4 — users no longer need transcode those file types to WMV.
Zune can FINALLY sync video from your Media Center PC! Jeez, took you friggin long enough, guys!
WiFi sync to host computer! Includes moving over music, movies, photos, podcasts, etc.
Podcast support! (Sorry, no over the air downloads — sync only.) Podcasts can also be shared via WiFi.
The 3×3 song sharing DRM has had its three day restriction removed, but users can still only play files three times.
There is still NO wireless music store.
The Zune software is all new and rewritten, and is supposed to actually be more than a rebadge of WMP10 now. Friggin finally.
The Zune music store is going DRM-free, with over 1m MP3 tracks being made available for download. Other details (like which labels, whether there is a DRM-free upgrade path is for users who’ve bought music with DRM, price differences, etc.) are not yet revealed.
I have no problem admitting I am a Democrat, not out of loyalty to a particular political party or any overt interest in politics, I vote Democrat mainly because their views more closely match my own rather than the Republicans.
There is only one republican I would consider voting for and that is Ron Paul. Ron aligns closely with traditional American values, small government, reigned in by the Constitution of the United States. And he votes that way, he is not one of todays modern politician who talks the talk but rarely walks the walk. Ron votes his stance, he believes the constitution is not a hinderer to legislate around. He is also in favor of talking first, not blustering and threatening.
America has lost much of its shine in world opinion, is this a big factor to me, no, not really…but it used to be a source of pride, and with our latest America Regime, we destroyed our reputation on the hope that MAYBE they, the regime, could maybe keep us safe. How are we supposed to keep our country safe when we can’t even talk to our enemies, this makes no sense to me. We are trying to keep ourself safe from Iran and the possible radical fundementalist it harbors, yet we won’t even talk to them at a decent diplomatic level? in my eyes all that can do is increase the tension, the mistrust and the likelyhood we will send more of our American youth to die in a war that could be adverted by talking.
Anyway, back to the subject, if by some miracle Ron makes the Republican ticket, The Democrats will be hard pressed to get me to vote for someone else, the Democrats would have to do a better job than they are now to keep me out of Ron’s camp come presidential elections.
