Friday, January 31, 2014

OLD | Thermaltake Commander MS-I

Last week, I decided to change(upgrade) my desktop case after roughly a year. When I bought it at first, I was simply looking for the best bang for buck case and settled with it. It had the features I needed, it was cheap and it looked decent to say the least. (mini tour of old desktop)

I've always had my eye on the Fractal Design Define R4 and I simply had to get my hands on one of it. Hence I made the trip down to Sim Lim Square last Saturday. One mistake I made was not taking the cab. This case is heavy as fuck I swear, at least it shows that it's well constructed.

It looks quite messy as you can tell

 So I started removing all the internals to prepare transferring to the new case, starting with my precious graphic card.

MSI Nvidia GTX 760 Hawk Edition

4 X 4GB of cheap value RAM

Dust is the bane of all computers

After un-wiring everything from my old case, removing all the components, I was ready to unpack my beast of a case. I love how clean it looks. Clean geometrical lines and a full black coating makes it really sexy.

Fractale Design Define R4

First look at the internals

Box with all the bolts and nuts

Seating in my motherboard

 For the next hour or so I was busy wiring up everything neatly and making sure that nothing goes wrong, referring to the manual diligently and hoping that I won't screw up anything. Much effort later...

Everything is installed! Still a little messy though

Cable management holes to keep everything nice and neat

Wiring up everything at the back and tying them up. (before it's actually done)

No dangling wires

no dangling wires

I made a mistake of not taking glamour shots of the case. This actually has a rather large window pane to showcase the internal components, maybe some other time when I'm making a substantial upgrade. (shouldn't be too long from now*) I recently added a Corsair AF140 Quiet Edition fan to the front panel. Increasing it from 1 to 2x140mm front intake fans.
*planned upgrade to the CPU cooler

I was so excited typing this out that I forgot to mention why I did this and what's so good about this.

This is one of one of the few rare cases that I totally gave in to what I want and there isn't much of a need nor solid reasoning. I suppose I could say that this is my hobby, seeing how much time and effort I've put into it. I want it to run as cool and quiet as possible, thus extending the life of the machine itself.

So, what's so good about this case compared to the other one?
Firstly, it's extremely quiet; to the point where I wouldn't know it's on if not for the LED indicator, and I sit about half a meter from it. I put my ear to it and the only thing I can hear is the air being sucked in and pushed out.
Secondly, awesome cable management. As you have seen from the pictures above, there are holes and space for me to route my cables properly and give unrestricted air flow.
Thirdly, expansion-ability. As it's quite a bit larger than my previous case, there are simply more space to put more substantial upgrades. Like I could water-cool my system should I wish to; it would be hard with my old case.
Last but not least, have you seen how sexy it looks?!

Moving on, I've been hard at work researching like mad; preparing to build a new computer. I'm not kidding, I am preparing to build a storage server, something that can scale out and suit my needs for the next couple of years. My main motivator is my depleting storage that is forcing me to shuffle things around, to make matters worse, I don't have any backups.

I'll be writing up a post pretty soon detailing what I've been doing all of today. Sometimes I wonder myself, what am I trying so hard for...

Oh by the way, happy chinese new year.

Labels: awesome, define r4, desktop, featured, fractal design, lordofgeeks, show off

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Saturday, April 13, 2013

Running Windows 8

It has been a really long time (years maybe) since I've bothered customizing my desktop, because I want it to perform as quickly as it can and didn't want to waste valuable resources beautifying it. However, I noticed that I have a surplus of computing power so I decided to make use of it.

But I still didn't want to tweak the system files for maximum stability, so all I did was change the icons on the taskbar and used Rainmeter for the clock and system monitor (bottom right).

The desktop icons are hidden using Stardock's Fences. Double click to show or hide the icons, which eliminates unnecessary clutter.

Anyway you see that little arrow on the bottom left?

Start menu FTW

Yeah, it's a friggin' start menu on Win8. I'm using a program called StartisBack. And I actually paid for it. I got a bundle so I could give 3 licenses out for free if any of my friends asks. Though I don't usually like to pay for little programs like these, I think it's worth it for the low price and the functionality that it brings.

Alternatively, you could use Classic Shell to emulate the experience but it's just not as clean speaking from my own experience.

I don't know if it's because I'm a power user or anything, but I really can't stand the "Modern UI", especially when I'm actually trying to get some work done.

Example of Win8 default start screen

That UI makes no sense on a desktop environment. If not for the slew of improvements under the hood, I would've stuck with Windows 7. As many have said, Windows 7 is the new Windows XP. It just works, and it works the way you expect it to.

Oh well, I have tweaked my Win8 to work like Win7 as much as possible, and so far everything is awesome. The minimalist approach towards my desktop simply satisfies the my OCD. Speaking of which, I really cannot stand it when people have cluttered desktop or unorganized folders.

I need new hard drives. And on that bombshell it's time to end.

Labels: desktop, geek, random, show off

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

With 100mbps downstream and 50up, I feel like a more integral part of the internet. Of course, these results can only be gotten when connecting within the country, and through wire. When you make the switch to wireless, the speeds drop dramatically, even more so when you're not within the same room.

After a lot of tinkering, I finally managed to get my wireless connection speed to something decent in my room. (as the wireless router is outside in the hall). Achieving a connection speed of between 40~58mbps. Of course, due to all the overhead and extra bullshit too long to be explained, the actual internet speed is only about 12~18mbps.

Now, Mb/s stands for megabits per second, the speeds you see when downloading files is MB/s which stands for megabytes per second. The upper or lower case is very important, as 8 Megabits = 1 Megabyte.

Now, you might be wondering, why the hell do people use megabits since most of the things around us are written as megabytes. Well, that's partly due to the evolution of operating systems and how they count the data, and some marketing bull-shittery.

Okay let me explain a little about bits.

You know that a computer works using binary coding right? Which means that it operates based on 0s and 1s. For example, 1010 = 10, 1100 = 12, 110001100 = 198. Each digit is a single bit that is either a 1 or 0. There is a lot of fascinating things about it so read up on it if you're' interested.

1 Megabit, refers to 1 million bits. Which means that if you have a 10mbps connection, your network is actually capable of transferring 10MILLION ZEROs OR ONEs PER SECOND. Per second, can you even imagine how blistering fast that is?

Technology is amazing and that's why I love it.

Now for some ranting and relatively geeky section.
I can't believe how anal Starhub is with their routers. I wasn't able to connect my own and access the internet easily. Which was no problem if the wireless router they provided wasn't so unnecessarily lousy. I'm just a room away and the connection was basically shit.

My own routers for some reason couldn't take a private IP address as it's WAN address without fucking up it's wireless radios and giving me errors the entire time.

I didn't feel like using an old router with such a new network (even though it's running DD-WRT), after some research I finally decided to flash my new TP-LINK WDR4300 with OpenWRT. Which worked pretty flawlessly. That router is now running a custom version of Linux, which says a lot about how much customizability is given to it. The wireless is now running smoothly and internet is functioning well as well.

Unfortunately not all is well as most of the things are manual, using CLI more often that I would prefer. Even so, the amount of freedom with a good software is limitless. I shall be experimenting like crazy as much as I could.

Exams are starting next week. Oh well. 

Labels: amazing, awesome, fiber networks, geek, historical, internet, life, like a boss, lordofgeeks, show off, speedtest

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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

My battle station!

I've mentioned the other time that I "made" a laptop dock for myself? This is it. I just realized I should've taken out the laptop and show the dock itself, but I was using the com and it's a pain to remove everything just for taking a picture.

As you can see, I have a messy table.

Read more »

Labels: daily photo, DIY, dock, featured, geek, interesting, laptop, life, show off

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Saturday, January 21, 2012

I took a random speed test this morning as I was reading about networks and stuffs.

Unbelievably, I scored a 622.7KB/s for my download. Of course, it's rather early and there probably isn't a lot of people using the network so it'll be fast (yes, it works that way). Still, I'm really amazed by it. The highest I've ever gotten is roughly 500KB/s.

Ah, technology. Making me feel happier and happier each and everyday.

edit: yes this is my phone.

Labels: awesome, geek, hspda, like a boss, lordofgeeks, samsung galaxy s2, show off, speedtest, wtf

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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Well, after some tweaking and testing and uninstalling/installing all the crap, here's the video of the awesome boot up.

Sorry for the shitty quality since I used my phone and no tripod and Youtube compressed it.
But yeah, I'm really impressed by it so far.

One question remains though, is it really that useful?

Well... in my case, yes. However, for daily use.. not particularly. I mean, at least not at this price at capacity yet. (unless you're just using this as a boot disk, but then you'll probably need a desktop for that configuration)

Here's why, I save roughly 2 seconds from each application that I open (daily). So if you add it up for the entire day of computing use you'll probably shave a couple of minutes off your day. Is it worth the couple of minutes? That's up for you to decide.

However! If you're like me, who needs to use heavy applications like photoshop, lightroom, VMware, etc. It's great, it saves you 10seconds or more on each of these applications. Those could add up very quickly, it saves a lot of frustration waiting for the applications to load, and worse, the sluggish performance due to the bottleneck of your hard drive.

In conclusion, if you have spare cash, buy it. If you use content heavy applications, save and buy it. If you simply do your daily stuffs (youtube, emails, songs, games) well, it's probably a luxury and you can't afford it anyway.

p.s. It does help with the loading time of games, but once you're inside, unless you're playing MMORPG or games with really huge maps that needs to be loaded, you won't see much of a difference.

Tell me if your experience if you get an SSD! And as usual,
Farewell my minions!

Labels: awesome, boot up, geek, happy, ocz, show off, ssd, vertex 3, video

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Tuesday, November 01, 2011

As you can all clearly see.

"I AM THE GOD OF TETRIS."

Oh yeah, this has taken me quite some time. Especially the sprint. It was so hard to get my level in sprint. But I finally did. And I did it for good!

So.. I guess I won't be playing tetris that often anymore. Gotta focus on... my studies? Or BlackShot. (I'm raking in quite a few kills in there as well). Okay, today is one hell of a tiring day. Tomorrow's gonna be worst. I didn't forget my daily photo. But it was a lousy one. Either way, let's move on to the next post.

Labels: awesome, epic, facebook, fuck yeah, god, like a boss, show off, tetris

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Saturday, October 29, 2011

To be honest, there are a lot of funny things that happened over the week.

But the thing is, I can't remember shit. I'm just too damn tired everyday after school. Be it early or late release, I just want to plop onto my bed and just, forget about everything (though  I can't do that cause I'll be screwed)

Seriously though, I'm pretty lifeless this week. I know I went out, did I? Okay, I did go out yesterday, that's all I can remember. I know I played pool. I know I finally bought my jeans. Uh...

Okay seriously, I think I'm having a really lifeless period right now. I don't even have the mood to watch anime anymore. The good part is that my math seems to be on track for the first time. Seems like, I will be able to keep this attitude up. No, not the lifeless one, the studying part. Also, it's like 1 week to A's. So my friends are all pretty busy and all.

Something that I do remember is that, I've gotten my screen protector. (thx fat)



I only got the front side. Because, honestly I don't give a damn about the back. I've got 2 back covers plus I sometimes use the silicon casing. So well.

It's great so far, I applied it without too much trouble. THOUGH, the interesting thing about this protector that it requires you to apply some sort of solution before putting it on. It will make you device wet in the process but I think there's nothing to worry about as it evaporates pretty quickly. As long as you don't turn on your device before it dries you'll be fine.

It cost $20 including shipping. Got it from eBay. Uh, it is rather fingerprint resilient. It's not anti-fingerprint, but at least it does a pretty darn good job at keeping my fingerprints off the screen. So I think if you're looking for a clear screen protector that does that, this is a pretty good one.

Note: It's not like TOTALLY smooth. A picture does a better job at telling the story.


If you look at the part with light you could see that it is kind of "wrinkled". Because this protector has a slight rubbery feel to it. And don't worry it doesn't make sliding your finger across the screen hard. Also, this helps a little under direct sunlight.

And as you can see it's not really visible once you turn on the display.


If you think my phone is beautiful, all I can say is

I KNOW RIGHT?!!

Okay, it's been a long time since I wrote such a nonsensical post. Better got some writing juices flowing in me soon.

Labels: i9000, insivibleshield, life, random, samsung galaxy s, show off

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