Caviar in the mail...

Just received a SMS informing me that my 2TB WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR GREEN (SATA/300 64MB CACHE) has arrived in the mail!

My 1TB drives are getting too small to fit all my photos, time to start with two terrabyte discs, some day I will get a NAS...

Sweet!

Forsa geforce!

Update!

Finally! Took it's time, hope it was worth waiting for!

Ordered last Monday but Kjell&CO didn't deliver until Friday and I had to waste a whole weekend on riding my bike and not play Starcraft2! ;)

Can't wait to fire up the GeForce GTS250 and see how well it preforms, hopefully I can use the Ultra-setting!

Well, way better than my old gfx card anyway, and it was quite inexpensive. Not a big gamer...

Update!

Ultra-setting on everything, Reflections is on, Models is High, not sure if it's the highest setting?

I'm more than pleased, totaly OK for a graphics card I payed 650:- SEK for! =)

The gameplay in Starcraft 2 looked sweet now by the way...

"Lost Viking"

Sorry, can't keep from posting this. There is a "Easter Egg" in Startcraft 2, when getting access to the cantina on Jim Raynor's ship, the Hyperion, one can play a arcade game called the "Lost Viking"!

Only played a few levels but it's actually a decent old school kind of "shoot 'em up" game, thank you Blizzard! :)

"Hell, it's about time!"

It's finally here!



Starcraft 2 has landed! And if the Swedish postal service gets it's thumbs out of it's a** I might have it in the mailbox today...

If they ever make a full length movie in the same class as the game trailer I would stand in line at the cinema! =)

More toys!

Placed a order on a XEROX PHASER 6110N color laser printer yesterday at elevenish, today about the same time I got at text message on the phone that the printer was delivered! That speed I like!

The price for the color laser printer including delivery ended up at 1300:- Sek fron Dustin.se, very fair price if you ask me, however when I got to the post office I realized how big and heavy it was! =)
Everything needed to get going except a USB-cable, wonder why they don't ship printers with a cable when almost every other USB connected item you buy ships with one?! I will probably connect it via the Ethernet network anyway. =)
Toner cartridges mounted.
Ready for start up, read on the reviews that the printer had a tendency to make some smoke when the fuser is heated up for the very first time. Disappointed that no smoke was shoving but a burned smell spread in the room...
First color photo printed! Had some trouble with the printer stopping because of malfunction in the paper tray, switched it off but that was a mistake since it started over with the calibration process all over again, took ages!
I hope it will serve me well for at least a few years to come, I seldom print anything but when I want to I never have a printer at hand. I refuse to buy a inkjet printer since all inkjets I have come across tend to stop working after a short while due to the fact that the ink dryes up and clogs up the intricate jet nozzles...

Defence Grid

Just bought a game from Steam, Defence Grid - The Awakening. Purchasing online is way too easy, the price is low enough to make you think it's worth it and after giving them your credit card information you just download the game to your PC, there is even a function to make a backup of the game install-files for later.

I admit I downloaded a illegal copy on Internet earlier but I think the game was good enough to pay for, so who says that pirating games don't generate money?! ;)

Now I noticed there is a demo version available to download from Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/18510/

Stem powered games is the wave of the future! Won't write anything more now, have to play some more...

Defense Grid: The Awakening (PC) - video 1 (HD) from Hidden Path Entertainment on Vimeo.

Coming early December 2008 for the PC, Defense Grid: The Awakening is a unique spin on tower defense gameplay that will appeal to players of all skill levels. A horde of enemies is invading, and it's up to the player to stop them by strategically building fortification towers around their base. Beautiful environments, spectacular effects, and a dynamic, engaging soundtrack bring the world to life. The controls are intuitive and the gameplay is deep - the special attacks and properties of each tower work together to provide many ways to succeed.

Winter planets...

Just fooling around with a few recent photos in Photoshop using this guide: http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/create-your-own-panorama-planets/

Maybe I'll wait for the next version?

Will be interesting too see what price tag there will be on the iPad in Sweden, the photo app seems really sweet and is almost a reason by it self to get one, not to mention how well Bejeweled 2(3?) might run on it! That poor glass will be grinded useless in a few months! :)

Fast forward to the end, that speed impresses me most.


This will for sure be the most misunderstood device since MacBook Air...

Electric Sheep goes HD

One of the coolest screen savers (who still use them?) has been updated!

By installing it on your computer you contribute to calculate the amazing visuals it displays on the screen when activated.



Their web page seems a bit over loaded right now though... ;)

Droid droool...

Looks like Motorola managed to do something right for once and that in a very impressive way!

Can't wait to get my hands on one to try it out.





Stealthy commercial... :)

New stuff for old gear...

Installed latest Ubuntu v. 9.10 on my HP ZD7000 draggable "Lap Top". Not sure if it was the switch to ext4 filesystem or other software bundled in the distro but Ubuntu started to warn about the state of the hard drive, it was loosing a lot of clusters.

Decided to look around for some replacement drive, found a 160GB, 2.5", Samsung Spinpoint for roughly 500Sek, hopefully it will work without problems. If the computer had been a few years newer I would gone for a 7200rpm drive but I think this 5400rpm drive with 8MB cache will be a speed booster anyway compared to the old 80GB drive...

Just hit me that the ZD7000 probably is the most expensive computer I have owned, did no upgrades during the two years it took to pay it off but shortly after that I started to get mysterious shutdown and they came more and more frequently until I managed to isolate the problem to the SODIMM memory modules. Bought a single 1GB SODIMM and after that I got rid of the problems, until now with the flaky HD. Must remind my self not to pour money into obsolete computer gear anymore! ;)


New drive, old drive, the old Hitachi (bless you!) drive was a mere 4200rpm drive!

Seems to work fine!

Pan & Zoom

Have seen some nice slide shows where the images are sliding and panned and as many times turned out they had been made on a Mac. Unfortunately I don't own a Mac so I have been trying to find something similar to windows.

Seems like Microsoft has something like that in vistas movie maker but that can't be run in XP, surprise!

Decided to download latest version of Picasa and see if it could solve the problem and it sure did! Exactly what I was looking for! Very simple but I suppose that's what they have aimed for.

First test:

Getting calibrated!

Finally got my hands on a monitor calibrator (colorimeter)!

Wrote about buying one some time ago but there has been other holes to put money in so it had been on hold for a while but this week I put in an order at Cyberfoto.se after I figured out how to get free shipping. :)

I got the ColorVision Spyder2express.

Don't know if it did a huge impact on the color setting but sure there was a difference before and after. The main thing is that it gives a peace of mind knowing that I have done what I can to get proper color setting on the monitor.

Uploaded two amazing, award winning grade movies of the unpacking and the calibration procedure!
Unpacking:

Calibration:

Space for rent!

Ordered a second 1TB hard drive last Friday and today I got a text message that I could come and get I at the post office, while I was shopping for the drive I somehow managed to buy a pair of speakers for the computer that I've been oogling a while but have not been able to justify.

When I got the box it looked a tad too tiny to contain both the speakers and a drive and that suspicion turned out to be correct when I opened the box, in it was only the drive!

Called the company where I ordered the stuff from and after 15 minutes waiting in queue I got to speak to a human and it turned out that they have sent two separate packages! How about writing that in the order status on-line?! Well, the speakers will probably land in the post office tomorrow..

Old drive and new drive. Total of 2TB of diskspace, a dream just a few years ago! =)

Been formatting the new one to NTFS the last two hours now, should be ready soon so I can start the copying process and give Tobbe back "his" drive...

Cosmic Motors

As a Sci-fi nerd, motor buff and design freak I found the Cosmic Motors web page highly fascinating!It's a made up company that competes in various motor sports in the future with cool machines.

Complete with a company history.
They have compiled a book with illustration with all the vehicles and such.

Even a video, I could watch a whole movie! :)


Daniel Simon has more nice stuff on his web page: http://www.danielsimon.net

Scared for real!

Not so long ago I bought a 1TB LaCie external hard rive to store the wast amount of photos that have piled up on different hard drives during the last years.

This weekend I started to do some more serious cleaning at home. I had some music playing in the living room while I was scrubbing the cupboard shelves clean. After a while I went to the living room and there was a strange clicking sound that was clearly notable in the music. Turned the music off and the clicking sound was even more notable, started to try locate the sound...

Argh!! The metallic sound came from my new hard drive! Managed to shut down my computer, it got a bit confused not being able to communicate with the drive no more but eventually the computer shut down and the drive that's USB connected also winded down, pulled out all the cords fron the drive and I let it cool down.

Didn't dare to connect the drive until the next morning and to my big relief it spun up just like normally and I could access the files without problem and getting strange noises from the drive. Puh! I quickly copied all the new files that I didn't have any copies of on other drives.

Definitely an eyeopener on the importance of making regular 'back-up's'! Luckily it was only about 30GB that wasn't backed up. Started looking for a new 1TB while the drive was cooling noticed that the prices have been standing still since I bought my drive. The idea of a RAID:ed NAS once again came to mind. Perhaps start looking for how much one has to pay for internet based storage...

Ye olde tune

Having a bad cold right now and not being able to do anything physical I found my self googling on old Atari ST games and remembered a game with a jester that had a tune that I liked, this was perhaps 1988 or 1989, only 20 years ago. =)

After some hardcore powergoogling I managed to find out that the game was called Black Lamp and the character you played was called Jack the Jester. Never finished the game, which was pretty difficult if I remember correctly but the tune got stuck in my mind.

After I found out the games name I could find the title tune on YouTube but still couldn't find the tune I remembered.

This is the title song:

After yet some more googling I located the Atari ST YM2149 archive After downloading the whole archive and unpacking it I had to find a player and there was a link to WinJAM (Just Another Music player). Works great, small and nimble!

Lo and behold, the second track was the tune I was looking for! Wanted to put the tune on the net but didn't know how to 'rip' the music so I started to look for a audio ripper that could rip music directly from the sound card.

Found s software that I think I have used some time before OpD2d. After installing it I noticed that there was a red dot in the JAM-player, after pressing it I could make a WAV-file directly from JAM!! Doh! :)


Choose HD for best sound quality

While looking for the tune on YouTube it turned out that the tune was based on "Greensleeves" also called "What child is this". When thinking about it I suppose I have heard it sometime.

Found several versions on YouTube:











And yes, I'm getting bored being sick... ;)

Work, work, work...

Been on a course all day, not much time for blog:ing! :(

Still two days to go!

Electro plague?

Once again my electric stuff seems to be hit by some kind of electronic plague, two of my devices has stopped working. On my lunch I went home and I had lost my Internet connection, called the help desk since I thought there was something wrong with the modem but finally we concluded that it was the network socket in my PC that was the problem... *Gaharg!*

Wonder what will go next? My new flat screen monitor? My camera? My phone?

Strange that these breakdown occur at the same time, a few years ago I went through the same scenario, think it was my microwave oven that gave in first, not long after that my TV broke down and if i remember correctly there was something more that broke down during that same period!

Perhaps it's a flu and the virus is spread by electrons? Or perhaps there is a outbreak of fat electrons on the electrical grid? ;)

Like a bridge...

Hohoo! Found a Brige Builder 'look-a-like' flash game:




Can't write more, have to play! =)