3d graphic speed

Strange. The card in my home machine is actually do better on 3D.

ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro
Desktop Graphic Performance 4.0
Gaming Graphics 4.1

NVIDIA GeForce 8300GS
Desktop Graphic Performance 3.4
Game Graphics 4.2

And yet I am still not happy with the performance. Time to get another graphic card.

Swapped disc ... still slow to load ...

I swapped the boot partition harddisk from a slow one to a faster one. OS loading seems to be faster, but it still takes a lot of time to load models in Daz Studio 2.x. So I guess it's the problem of the Daz application itself. In fact I don't see much harddisk light blinking at all while it stuck. So may it's time to try out a faster graphic card?

On the other hand, after reboot, certain activies (like move fingers on models) seems much smoother. So maybe next time when I see slow slow reponse, I should reboot the system.

Acronis Disk Director Suite 9 .... what the hell

I spent hours yesterday trying to use Acronis Disk Director Suite 9 to copy 2 partitions (OS partition and a app partition). The application didn't complain, but after reboots the parition was not being copied. Yet Acronis Disk Director didn't complain anything at all, as if nothing was happened.

After being futrated for a few times, I found out a much better way to copy partition:

• Back up the partition(s) using Acronis True Image 10
• Restore the partition(s) using Acronis True Image 10

The best part is that I can do it LIVE while the system is still running. No reboot was required. A 40Gb parition took 8 to 10 minutes to backup, and slightly less time to restore. This is way better than wasting hours seeing reboot and reboot.

Justify Buying new harddisk

I use disk bench to check and see how fast/slow the hard disk I am using daily in order to determine if getting a faster harddisk can make me work faster. Here's the result:

-- Old Office desktop with Windows XP
Size: 2774401024
Time: 136048 ms
Transfer Rate: 19.448 MB/s

-- New Office desktop with Vista
Size: 4614848512
Time: 164237 ms
Transfer Rate: 26.797 MB/s

-- Lenovo X60T laptop
Size: 1355111798
Time: 132047 ms
Transfer Rate: 9.787 MB/s

-- C Driver in home desktop
Size: 1343384636
Time: 125562 ms
Transfer Rate: 10.203 MB/s

-- X Drive in home desktop
Size: 4697620480
Time: 150641 ms
Transfer Rate: 29.740 MB/s

So I swapped my harddisk, and hopefully I get some performance gain.

Vista... man ....

Under Vista, in order to run DiskBench I need to give the software administrator access.

Damn damn.

NetSetMan does not work, but Disk Bench seems to do OK

Sigh fustrated. NetSetMan doesn't resolve my problem of constantly switching between Workgroup at home and Domain at work. Also, I have to keep reminding myself to put my office IP set into trusted area under ZoneAlarm or otherwise I can't even get into the domain.

On the positive side, I found little app that allows me to test real work performance of the harddisks. It's called Disk Bench and I am going to try that sucker at home tonight.

Found a reason to ditch Vista yet again

It seems like for some stupid reason VM under Vista took SO MUCH TIME to start up. One reason why I should give up on Vista and go back to XP.

Convert ape to split wave file

I just found out that the best way to split a .ape file (with .cue file) into a bunch of wav files is by using CUE Splitter, based on what is mentioned in this post. I tried and it worked darn well.

Dealing with file format .ape

I found the albums that I was looking for years, and they are in .ape format. Confused, I search the Net and found that there's an app called Monkey's Audio that handles the .ape format, also convert .ape into wave. Here's the detail instruction. There also plug in to allow you to play .ape file in any Direct Show supported audio player.

Researching for scanner

I always have a passion to turing all my physical magazines into digital files so that can search, store and organize in the way I like. Recently I came across this Canon DR-1210C and find it pretty attractive.

And then I found this site that list out all the SheetFed Scanners, which is great cause I can use it as a springboard to find product first and then find a better deal at NewEgg.

I also looked into HP Scanjet 5590 L1910AB1H, and skipped it because of tons of negative review. XEROX DocuMate 510 is another candidate. Microtek ScanMaker 5950 looks cheap but it has shit tons of negative review.

So it seems like XEROX DocuMate 510 is by far the cheapest sub-$300 solution and has some respectable reviews.

Finding a good eBook reader for PDF files

I find that navigating PDF eBook with Adobe Acrobat 8 is kind of a dizzy experience, so I looked around and found that FoxIt Reader 2.3 does a slightly better job as a viewer for PDF files. In fact it's even better than the Adobe Digital Edition as it provides more functionality. Then I found out that I can make Foxit Reader portable by grabbing this and apply it on the top of the zip version of Fox it.

Indiana Jones Lego game

Indiana Jones Lego game for NDS is awesome, but it has one huge problem on my old screen NDS: the screen is just too damn dark. Sure most people are using NDSL these days but can't they just be more considerate by providing a contrast option so that the game can be more playable on my NDS?

Gigabyte M912 opening box video

I am watching Gigabyte M912 opening box video and very much enjoying it. It's very prefessionally made, and gave me a very good idea about what the machine is.

One thing for sure (that I won't like): the screen is not a Wacom tablet.

And more video fun here.

Crappy viewable angle with monitor in the office

I have DELL 1907FPc and 2208WPF monitor in the office. But, when viewing at portirat mode look TERRIBLE. 1907 FPc only got 160 degree of viewable angle. Same 160 degree for the 2208WPF. Hopefully my new 2408WFP will do a much better job. Otherwise I will be very very pissed.

iPhone app

iPhone apps were from ground up designed for use in a mobile device. You interface with the device by finger instead of by a stylus. That's partly why Pocket PC app sucks cause they expect you to use stylus.

speed

Event though EeePC is such a nice laptop, but there's something that works better on Windows mobile that works better than NetBook: instant on. Sure the Linux bootup time on Eee PC is fast, but there's no way that it can be as fast as with Pocket PC's instant on speed.

Day of learning to love my old gear

I spent most of my time today to try to make the gear I currently have more useful so that I don't get tempted to buy new gear, like Asus Eee PC 901. After all, my current gear seems to do the job OK as long as I keep pushing. Here's what I accomplished today:

• I installed Windows Mobile 6.1 on my Dell Pocket PC (x50v) and then installed the most critical software so that the system won't slow down by having too many software installed. Specifically, installed Monster Chinese 5.3, Resco Media Suite, and ... that's about it.
• I get Outlook Syncing working with both my mobile phone Nokia 5300 and iPod Classic. I also took the oppotunity to clean up the mobile phone contact list, and now it's much cleaner than it used to be.
• I restored the messed up Mac OSX 10.5.1 , and now I am working on restoring the XP OS to the previous cleaner state so that the Touch screen can work again.

Eee PC .... errr .. maybe not now

I found a nice money back rebate deal with Asus Eee PC 901, so I was planning of getting the device, but THEN I did more resource and found that there are some stuffs that I don't like about Eee PC:

• The vertical viewable angle is NOT good. So it suffers the same problem as my x50v.
• No tablet feature.
• Can't flip around like a Tablet PC. Somehow this is such an important feature to me. The open angle of lid is OK but can't do all the way 180 degree flat.
• People keep complaining about how small the keyboard is.
  

On the bright side:

• There's reasonably less heat problem with 901

What? No search in iPhone and iPod Touch?

I just found out one thing that dramatically decrease my willingness to get an iPhone or iPod Touch: iPhone does not have song search feature. That means I can't enter the prase "fast" and let iPhone find out all the songs that has the word "fast" in the song title. What a BUMMER! Well, maybe I am a bit over-reacted. But I always hope that there's a way to find songs easily. Sometimes I even have problem finding the song that I want to hear within iPod Classics 80Gb because I have thousands of songs in it and navigate to the one I want takes time.

Hopefully someone can write an iPhone app that does the search.

Installing Vista in Office machine

Now that I have a much faster machine than I used to, I gave Vista Ultimate another try on my development box, and it seems to running OK now. There was a serious glitch while I installed it the first time and it corrupted the system big time! So next time after I finished the installation, I have to run Vista SP1 right away, and after then everything goes very smooth.

Multiple Instance of KM Player

Others seems to like single instance of KM PLayer, but I like multiple (again, my symptom of having ADD). To turn on multiple instance of KMPlayer, select [Perference], Under the [General] tab, UNCHECK the check box "Disallow multiple Instances".

Finally found an app that remembers audio playback position

I was very happy with KMPlayer's ability of automatically remember the position of video file playback. But in the version 2.9.3.1214 that I was using, it still doesn't support remember audio file position. So I started looking around and see if there's any mp3 playback application that remembers the position of audio files when I stopped playing the file.

At first I was pretty glad to know that the Winamp 5 plug in Time Restore & Autoplay v2.1.1 seem to be able to do the job, but after playing it a while I realized that it only remembers the last played file and its position. That doesn't work for me since I always jump between multiple audio book and podcast (yes, I have serious ADD problem).

And finally I found my solution, and not surprisingly, it's KM PLayer doing the magic again. The current stable version of KMPLayer 2.9.3.1428 supports saving audio playback position automatically. All you need to do is go to Perference, under General, check both [Remember the played position of video files] and [Remember for audio files too].

Wasted time

Darn it. I wasted time online quite some stuff this morning that yield no fruit at all.

• I tried leaving my Dreamcast on for a whole night hoping that the recharagble battery in the motherboard can start keeping track of time. It didn't. So I either need to learn how to replace internal parts (hard to find and need some technique to install), or have to torelerant the time setup screen. I ... lean for the second one.
• I tried to use some of the harddisk enclosure I brought from Hong Kong. They all seemed to have problem with the transformer, not providing enough power to drive the harddisk, making the harddisk spin up a bit but not enough to make them work. Even the EIDE to USB cable failed even when enough energy drawn by my another working harddisk. All these junk are in my trash can now.... Rest in peace.

Learned a few things today

I learned a few things that I didn't know before:

• For the DELL in my office (probably also the one at home), the bootup sequence of SATA drive is dictated by the SATA Bus ID. ID1 is the boot up drive. If I swap another drive to ID1, that new drive becomes the boot drive.
  
• My crosslink cable sucks. Either that or I need to set up static ID address to make it work. Either way I am NOT doing it, and instead go to an SATA drive to do the transfer.

R4 broken, and then fixed

I sensed that my R4 had spring problem, and finally it was broken earlier today. After seraching the web, I found some discussion about the issue. Ultimately, I watched some YouTube video and eventaully got some plastic taken out, caused the spring to stop working, and now the R4 is working again. This site also have some nice photo as reference, in case you also have the same problem.

Reset my iPod to recover all disappearing Traditional Chinese song titles

All the Traditional Chinese song titles suddenly disappered from my iPod Classic this morning, so I have to reset it, and now everything is back to normal.

Earbud

Strange, I suddenly had an urge to do a sound comparison between the earbud that came with my iPod Classic 80Gb, the headphone that came with my iRiver 140 (which I brought 5 years ago) and a cheesy US$9 inner ear headphone. I wanted to see which headphone sounded the best when using with my iPod Classic 80Gb.

The result: the earbud that came with my iPod. I was a bit surprise that the sound difference was previous obivous.

I also found out that turning on software EQ on my iPod (I set it to Bass Booster) really mess things up. Turning the EQ off gives me the best result.