Monthly Archives: November 2009

Kindle for PC beta

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Ever wondered about the Amazon Kindle experience?  You’ve likely seen the commercials or see some of the buzz about it online.  It’s the industry leading e-book reader that Amazon debuted about eighteen months ago.  Amazon has just done something really cool to help head off the launch of the Barnes & Noble nook – it is the Kindle for PC beta.

Once you have downloaded and installed the beta, you can shop from the Kindle store and see how that might work if you had a Kindle.  I have to say that I am very impressed – and the amount of free literature is pretty astounding.  There are even newer titles for free, the top 100 seems to be full of them.  I just spent about 10 minutes looking through them and saw some by Patterson and Salvatore that I would like to read – for free.

If the Kindle beta for PC only gets folks to look at the Kindle library, the beta will likely be succesful.  It is hard to spend the time looking unless you have a reason to shop, and going to the Kindle store previously seemed pretty pointless.

Kudos to Amazon for continuing to innovate.

–Nat

Mass Effect = Awesome

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Mass Effect was received with critical acclaim some three years ago or so.  My sister, Liz, gave it to me for Christmas last year.  Knowing that it was an epic title that would take some time to complete I waited until Kristin was gone to start it.  Well, I started the game and played it twice.  The save system that shows that in the two times that I have played it, I have dedicated 16 hours of time.  Most games would already be done, I am maybe a third of the way done.

If you played and enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic, this is your game.  Same game mechanics, huge universe and a great story so far.

It also happens to be $10 on Steam this weekend.  You should pick it up, that way we can commiserate over the time we spent on it 😉

–Nat

Sometimes, bigger is better

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Craigslist hunting can be a pretty rewarding sport.  Since Kristin is gone and the work situation being what it is, I’ve had a little more stress and a little bit more bored time on my hands.  Those who know me well know how I react to this type of situation: I shop.  Craiglist and the Anandtech forums are both likely places to buy things as deals can be had and there are many different items to peruse and then devise rational for having them.

I’ve never liked the passive subwoofer that the Onkyo home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) system we have upstairs uses.  Bass should be felt and heard to be experienced and this lil’ guy is woefully inadequate.  Hence, I decided to find a good deal on a used powered subwoofer.  I found a 12″ Mitsubishi sub for $50.  I wasn’t able to find a lot of info on it online because it came out in 1997 or so, other than the fact it was part of a reasonably high end component system.  I was surprised when the lady tried to get it out of the back of her Accord, it was huge!

12" Mitsubishi vs 12" Parts Express Subwoofer

12" Mitsubishi vs 12" Parts Express Subwoofer

The sound is huge too.  While the parts express sub seemed to find the resonant frequency of everything pretty well, the Mitsu shakes the seats.  In order to test the sub I watched the Matrix lobby scene.  Then I ended up watching the rest of the movie.  Great sub.

I’d forgotten how awesome the first Matrix movie was…

–Nat

I love you, man

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IMDB

Redbox redeemed itself with this gem of a movie after allowing me to rent Transformers 2.  The pretext is simple, a guy needs a best man for his wedding and realizes that he doesn’t have any close friends.  Awkwardness and comedy ensue as the protagonist, Peter Klaven, tries to find a BFF in time for the wedding.  What really made this movie shine was the low key actors sharing the screen well, the comedy and the pacing of the movie.

Paul Rudd (Peter) and (Zooey) Rashida Jones (known to me as Karen Filippelli, Jim’s GF from the second season of The Office) are getting married and I think play the part of a couple preparing to get married really well.  I suppose that I liked Jones from The Office and was predisposed to like her in this part.  Jason Segel (from How I Met Your Mother) plays Sydney, the man crush for Peter.  Scenes are played out in a relaxed, believable manner that makes the jokes and rocking out to Rush all that more engaging.

The humor found in  I love you man might make some prudish people uncomfortable but otherwise has very wide appeal.  There is  subtle humor that some will appreciate, along with some “in your face” projectile vomiting that almost had me rolling on the floor.  The sometimes explicit comedy keeps the movie from becoming too sweet which would diminish its value and essence of creativity.

Contemporary comedies like Superbad or Napoleon Dynamite completely like any sort of pacing.  I love you man does a great job of giving us the background, starting the conflict, running the conflict up to a crescendo and then resolving the conflict.  Very little time is given to pure comedic indulgences and this does an excellent job of keeping the burner on and keeping the audience interested.

I liked the movie a lot, but it won’t be joining my list of favorite movies ever.

A-

–Nat

Quiet down your PC

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This is a topic of conversation that Sean and I have been discussing lately.   What makes this so frustrating is that even if you buy really nice components, when you assemble them the PC tends to be noisy when compared to some $400 Dell or HP PC.  I’d even go so far to say that some of my cheaper builds have been quieter than my more expensive ones.  That and all the PCs I build for Jeff Lemaire seem to be whisper quiet, frustratingly so compared to the rigs I build for Kristin and myself.

To that end, I have set out to quiet the PCs in the Juchems home (thanks to Sean for bringing this up in his own quest to cut down on PC noise pollution.)  Some things to keep in mind when building your own quiet PCs:

  • Buy a video card with a three or four pin fan.  Two pin fans are not speed controlled and therefore will spin at one (typically annoyingly loud) speed.  This prevents control of fan speed via software as well.
  • Enable automated fan speed management in the BIOS, sometimes referred to as “Smart Fan.”  This will spin down your CPU fan and possibly any other fans plugged into the motherboard headers for power when system temps are cool.
  • Pay attention to the Db (decibel) rating of the fans you are buying.  Try to stick to fans that are ~28Db or lower.
  • Spin your fans slower.  This is a example of how to do this from Silent PC, a site dedicated to making your PC run as quietly as possible.  As for myself, I just modify a three pin to four pin adapter buying switching the yellow and red cables in the female end.

I recently purchased an inexpensive video card from the online forums as part of package of inexpensive computer parts.  I didn’t pay close enough attention – the fan on the little x1650 card was two pin and spun incredibly fast and loud.  As this card is likely to go into my moms computer (hey, I might want to fire up a game on it for some easy LAN action back at the farm) it needs to be much quieter – this little $20 card was filling a room with sound and that made it pretty worthless.  This card doesn’t consume much power so only a little airflow is really needed and the fan was really pushing at 12v.  So I performed the mod linked to above.

See how the yellow matches up the red and vice versa? By default, they would match up.

See how the yellow matches up with the red and vice versa? Prior to the mod, it was red to red and yellow to yellow.

The tools I used to complete this modification were a paper clip and a box cutter.  I used the paper clip to push in the “fingers” that held in the pins on the female end and then used the box cutter blade to push those fingers back out before reinserting the pins.  If you are attempting this, you’ll get what I mean by looking at it 🙂  I was able to carefully push the two pin female connector from the video card onto the three pin adapter without any other modification.

Since I performed the mod, the fan can no longer be heard.  It should be spinning with 5v rather than 12v now, meaning just under half as fast.  Now it will serve its purpose perfectly.

One word of warning – using this adapter as a pass through now will likely roast something like a hard drive.  Make sure there are only fans downstream of your connector.  You can daisy chain these four pin fan adapters to accommodate all of your case fans and you should only need to modify the first connector.

–Nat