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Cyber Monday
I really wasn’t ready for Black Friday, but gearing up for Cyber Monday, I’m prepared. The main thing is not to buy junk but to get some decent deals on really great hardware. Here are some highlights: Apple MacBook Pro 15” Retina with 2.5GHz, 750M, 512GB SSD. I love the 13” MacBook Pro Retina for…
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4K gaming requires nVidia 980 slip
Well, Cyber Monday is nearly here and while I haven’t finished the post of Haswell processors, given that a Haswell Cube would be all about gaming, its a good question to ask about monitors and displays. Right now the state of the art is: 1080p (aka 1920×1080, aka HD). Not surprisingly the most mature, you…
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AppleTV Activates stink!
Argh. With everything so integrated in Apple, it really is amazing the media companies have managed to make the user experience so awful. Even though we are a Comcast subscriber, every channel on AppleTv requires its own randomly different activation code and it require no less than two logons. First you have to logon to…
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Haswell everywhere…what to build by form factor
I seem to be on a roll here on DIY computer recommendations, so to fill the line out, I’ll add the final two desktop computers to posts and everyone should be ready for Black Friday. One good thing about these comparisons is that Haswell is the same across desktop and mobile lines, so a 1.5…
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File systems ZFS or btrfs
Well I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but using desktop Windows and then the Mac, there really were no choices other than NTFS and HFS. But since we are building our own file server, we can now choose the operating system and the file system. The easiest way to evaluate all this…
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Wow real reliability data and hard disk purchase analysis
I was a little surprised to see this, but Backblaze (hat tip to Anandtech) is publishing detailed information on drive failures. Up to 15% annual failure rate(?!!) on Seagates and they provide model numbers too. Interesting to see a desktop drive do very well (HGST 7K4000, $185 Amazon) at 1.4% in a data center setting…
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Black Friday for Geeks
So what’s a geek to do but drool over the Black Friday discounts and beyond. But as with all things technical, it pays a little to wonder if it is time to buy or whether you should wait for the next product cycle. Here’s a quick low down on popular (for nerds) holiday items: A…
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Cooler Gotchas
We’ve been building lots of machines lately and it seems like we have struck out twice. Both times with cooler issues and once with a lack of an SSD: We got the nice case and it says there is 65mm of clearance, the problem is the (??!!) people who designed it put the Ac power…
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Regin: Top tier espionage
Vlad told me about this and it is indeed scary what Symantec has discovered. A super sophisticated hacking tool with five layers and great ability to hide itself when it detects anti-virus programs: An advanced piece of malware, known as Regin, has been used in systematic spying campaigns against a range of international targets since…
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Grokking Snowmix
This is another amazing tool that complements gstreamer. It lets you mix audio and video feeds quickly and easily and most importantly dynamically without having to write programs. Here are some notes from the wiki, the discussion group there, but mainly by looking at the sample snowmix ini files in the Snowmix/ini directory: This doesn’t…
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