indiboi.com

I’m not quite sure how my mother can stand it… the noise of her computer. That thing, built by my brother David, sounds like it’s about to launch into orbit. Now, my file server is a bit noisy, one of the reasons I’m thinking about moving it out of the office… but it has four hard drives in it… while they’re all fairly quiet, the noise is cumulative. Her computer is a hand me down, just like her monitor is… I think it’s time to change all of that.

I mentioned, vaguely, the idea of getting her a tiny computer to go with the LCD panel I’d probably be getting her for Christmas. She wasn’t totally enthusiastic, but… I guess she just doesn’t understand that computers don’t need to be huge and loud. My workstation is virtually silent, unless under heavy strain, then the fan speed increases. It is a bit warm, with only one fan… but I really think the six or so fans in her computer is overkill.

I took inventory of her system just a bit ago, it’s not terribly behind in technology, but it isn’t exactly cutting edge either. She has 512MB of memory, all the usual stuff basically, with an 80GB PATA drive.

Essentially, for $155 I could get her an AOpen EZ18, in either white or black without having to buy anything else — her cpu, ram, drive, etc, all fit in there without issue.

I think she’d like it… I’m sure it’d be considerably more quiet, smaller is always better, plus it would be much more visually appealing too. I think I might just get that for her birthday next month… and then the LCD for Christmas.

Oh, and it looks like Shuttle has released their SN26P barebones… I have little to no interest in SLI, but I really like the violet front panel, it looks so hot, haha.

Along with the whole wireless debacle, I want to upgrade my network to gigabit speeds. This in and of itself isn’t difficult… drop gig-E cards in the existing computers, swap out my switch for a new one, there… done.

Unfortunately it isn’t quite that simple. I’m trying to also upgrade the wireless… the most reasonable way is to get a wireless router.

The thing is, I have a router already… it has an eight port switch built into it. I can’t seem to find any wireless routers with eight port switches… only four. I can only find one that has gigabit ports.

Right now I’m using five ports of my eight port switch here in the office. I have my workstation, file server, laser printer, wireless access point (the cute Airport), and the link to the router downstairs.

If I’d go with a wireless router the port used for the Airport would open up, leaving me with four ports absolutely needed. The problem is… here, my office is the better place of the two locations for the wireless access point. I really doubt that putting a wireless router on the floor in a room surrounded by concrete blocks… basically a basement, is a very good place.

If I’d move the router up into the office I’d need to drop a new ethernet line from the modem up here, and then use the existing cable to go back to the ‘old’ router, to use it as simply a switch so that everything downstairs still has a connection. That’s less than desirable, period.

I could get the nice wireless router and just not use the router bits, but that seems like a waste.

I don’t like having most of the network equipment in my bedroom. Of course, the network equipment was there long before it was actually my bedroom. The annoying thing is that every cable that was snaked through the floors and walls, well, they were made just the exactly right size to get to the ‘nexus’ for the house. The cables aren’t long enough to even put them up on a shelf… it’s the floor or rewiring.

I’ve pretty much decided that the best location for everything would be in what we call the laundry room. It’s mostly just a junk room, there’s a big closet with the water heater and all the other water pipe related stuff, then another closet next to it for the washer and dryer. The rest of the room is basically all junk; we had it cleaned out, but then my brother Matt moved and it sort of piled up with crap, mostly his crap.

Relocating the network equipment to that room would be both difficult, expensive, but also… ideal. The chosen location is centrally located, very good for wireless, also very good for not having to use excessively long ethernet cables. I would need to drop another longer cable from my office to get there, but the others should be sufficient.

I’m not sure if the thick RG6 coax for the cable modem is actually long enough though… It might be, but it’d be one of those “just long enough” things if it is, actually, long enough. I’d probably need to add a longer coax to the list.

The option of leaving the modem in place, just using a longer ethernet cable, isn’t exactly an option; I need the modem to be on the battery backup. While the cable company has improved service greatly, I still remember vividly the problems of losing sync and not being able to reconnect after a power outage. I don’t want to go through that again. I live in a semi-rural area… my town is small, but it isn’t a village, but regardless, power usually cuts out for a couple minutes generally once a month… probably the result of some idiot driving their car into a pole, or whatever, but it’s something that needs to be taken into consideration.

We also might be moving to VOIP and dropping the regular phone service… This could be where I’m showing my bomb shelter mentality a little. I want the phone to work in the event of a power outage, heh, like it would usually; that would mean supplying battery power to the cable modem, router, and voip adapter. It might seem ridiculous, but I’ve long considered purchasing a generator and having it wired into the house… so it’d switch automatically in the event of a power outage.

I also want to move the file server into this network ‘room’ of sorts. It’s always been in my office as a matter of convenience, easier to connect it to the network; one of my UPS units quit working on battery, so I’ve had it connected in with my other one… which made it a convenience from a power standpoint. Now with the RAID on the fileserver I feel the need to prevent unmanaged shutdown even more… that resyncing process is a bit frightening.

If I were to move the fileserver I’d then need to get a new UPS… I doubt the 280 VA one used for the networking equipment could provide enough juice for the fileserver and the network equipment… plus, of course, if we’d move to VOIP, I’d have four boxes to power… there are only three battery powered plugs… a problem. I could solve that problem by either getting a second UPS or by buying one with four plugs.

I suppose, really, I know what I should do, I just feel a bit too lazy to actually go through the process. It’s also looking like it’ll cost a bit more than I’d really want it to, heh… new router, new switch, new UPS, new cables… I’d also probably want to buy a nice extra long drill bit to make the new holes in the floor and wall… I know it was a horrible process the first time around, trying to get holes to match up. It took me four hours to get that one network cable down through the floor. Ultimately it was worth it, since I didn’t need a cable stretching down the steps anymore.

The other thing, does anybody know if there’s some kind of standard for the colour of network cables? I mean… certain colours of cables for certain things? Like… red cables for printers, blue cables for connecting between switches, etc?

I’ve been tossing around the idea of upgrading my iBook, who can resist G4 goodness and wireless G (versus B)?

Years ago when I first bought my iBook I also tossed in the Airport card and a Netgear WAP, so I could actually be wireless with it. Wireless hadn’t really caught on yet, so choices were limited and prices… well, you know how it goes.

I chose the Netgear access point because I had a pretty good history with their equipment and the price was right. Well, that access point was utterly terrible. I had it for about a day and returned it, it was either defective, or all of them were horrible, either way.. I wasn’t going to try it again.

I quickly spent twice as much, $300, on Apple’s Airport Base station, the totally cute translucent UFO looking thing. It has locked up maybe three times in the last few years, usually as a result of a Windows XP computer having difficulties with it… and then there was the whole debacle of when my brother David setup a wireless router as a bridge… they just didn’t cooperate.

I love how it looks, that UFO shape defies indication of what it really does… it has cute little white lights that blink in sequence whenever it’s starting up too. Alas, it’s only wireless B, painfully slow, thus whenever I do any sort of file transfer I usually plug in directly via ethernet. The new iBook would have wireless G, significantly faster, might even be tolerable for file transfers intra-network. I find myself on the market for a wireless G access point, thus my first stop was Apple. It turns out they still sell the cute little UFO base stations, but only the one with the modem… which at the time they came out was $100 more than the one without. Well, the non-modem version no longer exists, it has been supplanted by the Airport Express. The base station with the modem is now only $200.

The big problem is that I can get a wireless router with four gigabit ethernet ports for $125. It doesn’t have the sound or usb ports like the Airport Express, but for my purposes those are not exactly important. Still, I want the cute little UFO… I don’t think I can justify spending so much money for it though, considering I’d still need to buy a gigabit switch.

The thing is, I guess, is I have this aesthetic nostalgia of sorts. I don’t ever really see the Airport base station… it sits on a shelf, hidden by other little bits of crap. Why do I care what something looks like even if I don’t see it?

I could just keep it, I suppose, but if I’d be able to sell my iBook to Matthew I would also want to throw in the base station, since it has a modem… that way he’d be wireless on his dialup, heh… I think it would be nice for him.

I think I just need to get over this little aesthetic hang up. I always need to find something that has great form and great function. I think I could justify spending all that extra on the Airport if it also had four gigabit ethernet ports, heh.. It’d be kind of neat looking… all these wires coming out of that little squished orb shape; like tentacles.

I tried to extend the game play as long as possible, basically three or so full days, perhaps four, spaced out… but I have now finished playing Half Life 2.

I have to say that I absolutely hated driving the buggy and the whole antlion thing was very annoying… overall though I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game.

I did encounter the horrible stuttering problem toward the end. In the final chapter it was totally unplayable, then I defragmented the drive and it that mostly solved it.

My cheapass Geforce 6200 was able to play the game on its highest settings (with the exception of no anti-aliasing) using the full native resolution of my LCD, 1280×1024. I don’t have framerate data, but I can say that apart from the stuttering, which has nothing to do with the graphics processor, the game was completely playable… unlike when I tried to play Doom 3 on my Geforce 420MX — which was a slideshow.

It’s interesting, I suppose, that even though I was getting such lovely visuals with an admittedly low end graphics card, how I wrote down on my specificiation sheet that I wanted a Geforce 7800 GT for my new little Shuttle box. Those cards come in around $400… almost as much as the AMD 64 X2 I have my eye on. I say almost, as when you’re getting into the higher figures the difference of a hundred dollars seems insignificant, lol.

I think I found myself wrapped up in overkill mode, why not get the best.. even though there is a GTX version of the 7800, it won’t fit in the Shuttle, heh. Then again, I just don’t know… it’s about spending once and then not having to worry about it for a couple of years, thankfully and horribly, it’ll be a long time before I can muster the cash to actually buy any of that, heh.

I’ve been casually looking around at new computer stuff ever since the setup of the new RAID, and of course the pondering of the new video card. This is always a bad thing, of course. I’ve pretty much written out the specs of my new computer, one that’d I’d probably not be able to afford until maybe this time next year. Things will have changed so much between now and then that the whole idea of planning that far ahead is ridiculous.

Anyway, I’m absolutely lusting after this Shuttle SN25P ‘small form factor’ barebones. I’ve simply not been able to find an attractive computer case, they all have some horrible flaw, except this one, plus I’ve always had a thing for those little Shuttle boxes, sort of like the Mac Mini, but… not. As much as I think my current computer is perfectly fast enough, I’m feeling very interested in going with a little Shuttle, I just love the idea of having that thing sit on the corner of my desk. I’d also love the idea of a Mac Mini, if it weren’t so damned wimpy. As weird as it seems, I really prefer Linux over any other OS, and can’t imagine converting full-time to OS X, plus, of course, it’d be pointless from a game standpoint.

So far I’m thinking I’d want to stick an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ in it, at a whopping $530, ouch. I can’t resist the dual core 64bit computing… I mean, how could I? It seems the Windows 64bit OS is a bit wonky, from the reviews, so I’d not be wasting my money on that… though, I’d still be compelled to get an XP Pro SP2, since I don’t have installation media thanks to HP. It still sickens me to think about buying Windows, since I use Linux 99% of the time, but… gotta have it for the games, heh.

I’ve thought about it, and I really think that maximum number of computers I need is three; one laptop, one workstation, one file server. A new computer would completely replace my existing workstation, because I’d want to play both games and do work (games in Windows, and work in Linux) on the fastest computer I would happen to own. I’d not want to have a fancy dual core computer go to waste. Ideally, I’d have two super fast computers, one for Linux and one for Windows, but I don’t have that kind of cash, heh. So, who knows… I haven’t a clue what I’d do with my existing one… perhaps I could actually use it for its intended purpose, a media center, HA!

Still, first on the agenda is to get either a 17″ LCD for my mom, or get a new 19″ LCD for me and then give her my 18″ Sony. I’d prefer a new one for myself, particularly this LG beauty, the 1981Q. This isn’t so much cheaping out on my mother, because while I love her to no end, I’m not exactly going to drop the kind of cash needed to get her a 19″ monitor, lol. The 17″ ones have the same native resolution, but I think giving her my 18″ (again with the same native resolution” would be better, because otherwise I think the loss of size could make text a bit too small; the 19″ CRT with 18″ viewable would be identical to my 18″ LCD. I do plan on contacting Sony’s support to see about fixing my LCD, because it has this very strange darkened band at the bottom of the screen. I doubt they’d be able to get it repaired or replaced in any sort of timely manner, thus I’d need to get myself a monitor for the interim. In the best case scenario, she’d get a brand new Sony LCD… heh.

Second on the agenda, as I mentioned before, I really, really need a new laptop. I’ll probably stick with an Apple iBook, because I don’t see much benefit to getting the Powerbook (still). I’d then be free to ‘give’ my iBook to Matthew, in exchange for a little bit of cash, lol… to avoid going through the hoopla of ebay and the like. It’s still perfectly good, I just want something with more oomph.

Somewhere along the line I’d like to get a new case for my fileserver, one that works a bit better on the inside for holding drives, but also for cooling those drives. It’s a relatively minor expense compared to all those other things, but it’s also one of those ‘not completely necessary’ sort of things. The same goes for the idea of upgrading to 5.1 speakers, I’d kind of like it, for games, but don’t really see a lot of point… It would be nice for noises coming from behind in a game to actually be heard behind me. I think though, instead of getting computer speakers, it might be better to just upgrade my surround system downstairs and move the old on up here, heh. That’s a pretty far off idea too, it’s just not necessary.

Last week I bought a Gigabyte GV-N62128DE, the Nvidia Geforce 6200 video card, with 128MB of RAM. Even though I know better, usually, to avoid buying a card with 64bit memory, and would have ordinarily bought the one with 128bit memory, this time it was a matter of power consumption.

All of the Geforce 6200 cards that I could find that used 128bit memory required a power supply connector. While that in itself isn’t a big deal, the fact that my HP 873n has a mere 200 Watt power supply gave me great concern. Most cards also indicate a minimum PSU rating… all above the 200 watts mine can provide.

Then there’s also the whole overkill aspect. I’m not a gamer, in the same way that I’m not an audiophile, or videophile. I don’t see the point in spending excessive amounts of money in order to eek out just a tiny bit more performance. There is a certain factor with “good enough” that works for me.

I paid roughly $60 for this card, the 128bit memory versions cost twice that. I’d also feel compelled to upgrade the PSU… making the upgrade cost considerably more at roughly $160. I figured that if this card did not perform to my expectations/requirements I’d return it and then get something with more oomph.

Keep in mind, of course, that I was previously running a Geforce 4 MX-420, one of the biggest hunks of graphics shit Nvidia ever produced. Playing Doom3, even on the lowest settings, was a slideshow.

While not a benchmark, my glxgears frames per second doubled with the swap in of this new video card. I loaded up URU: Ages Beyond Myst and WOW, I was able to play at full native resolution (1280×1024) and have the graphics at their highest settings… while I don’t know what the FPS actually was, I know that the game experience was definitely more than just playable.

I then downloaded the demo of Half Life 2, the game automatically set the graphics to ‘High’ and I loaded it up. Full native resolution, again, highest settings, and the game was perfectly playable and my goodness, the first time I could actually use the phrase “life-like” when it comes to any game.

I decided, based on the demo, to go ahead and spend the $30 to buy the game… and consequently spent most of yesterday playing it. If I turn on anti-aliasing on the card I get a slideshow, but otherwise it’s perfect. I have trilinear filtering turned on, the default based on graphics performance as detected by the game, though I have to admit I don’t know really what that does.

I don’t mind the lack of anti-aliasing, as I’ve never been able to use it anyway… for the first time though, I can almost see why so-called gamers have the zeal they do for getting the latest and greatest hardware. If I was so impressed with HL2 using this ‘crippled’ Geforce 6200, if I had enough oomph on my graphics card to do the anti-aliasing, it’d be considerably more of a wow factor.

Now that I’ve taken a little moment to actually look up what anisotropic filtering is, I can see the benefit again of having more oomph; but, again one gets to the point of… good enough for $$ or extra good for $$$ or $$$$. I could never imagine spending the kind of money that some do, but then, I suppose that’s because I have so many interests, with playing the occasional computer game a pretty low priority compared to so many other things.

All in all, I think I made a great choice with this particular card… it fits my needs. I can play the games I want to play in full native resolution and at their highest quality settings. I’m not going into overkill, thus now ‘wasting’ money for something that doesn’t really get used much. The 2D aspect of video cards is pretty much a standstill of technology, you’re paying for the 3D rendering. Linux and Windows (With possible exception of Windows Vista, still in development, but the jury is still out on if that is ‘fake’ or real) do not use 3D rendering for anything on the desktop. The xcompmgr app I was playing with the other day enables the use of the 3D hardware to draw the desktop, which also allows for all sorts of cool transparency and shadowing, but it’s horribly buggy. Mac OSX, on the other hand does use 3D rendering to create all the eyecandy, which is why those of us, such as me with my pre-G4 iBook, get a bit screwed in the eyecandy area.. our onboard graphics cards were not included in the list of cards, thus doesn’t support the hardware rendering.

With all that said, I still find myself wanting a dual core 64bit AMD CPU, my P4 is still fast, but… it’s now at the lower end of fast, and while Windows apps don’t really yet take advantage of all that extra processing oomph thanks to the 64bit processing or dual cores, at least with Linux I can recompile the apps myself. Sadly, I’d probably find myself actually shelling out for a license of the 64bit Windows XP… it’s kind of sickening to even consider such a thing. I’m going to put all of that onto my ‘maybe late next year’ list… a new iBook, or Powerbook has to come first, it’s really starting to drag at a measly 600Ghz, G3 at that. Historically I’ve taken to only buying a new CPU when I could double the processing speed. I started out with a 200Mhz Pentium, then moved to a 400Mhz Pentium II. I then bought an 800Mhz AMD Duron, but when that motherboard failed prompting a new computer immediately (I later bought a new board and reused the CPU) I skipped over that doubling of speed philosophy by getting a P4 2.53Ghz. Honestly, it really wasn’t that specatular of a difference for everyday computer usage, going from .8Ghz to 2.53Ghz. This time around, I’d probably have to go for slightly less than double, to avoid spending mega-bucks. That’s assuming AMD has 5000+ processors at the time of upgrade, of course. They do have a 4800+ 64 X2 right now, so it’s a safe assumption… I guess it isn’t bad if you’re willing to pay $900 for just the CPU, heh… I’m not.

Oh, and it sort of bugged me at first that I ‘had’ to buy HL2. Now, this isn’t one of those pro-piracy rants or anything like. I simply believe in household sharing when it comes to media. Would you buy a DVD that you could only play on a single TV? That once you’ve played it, you’ve locked it in, and you couldn’t then take it to another room and watch it? That’s basically what Valve and their Steam engine does. You’re not so much purchasing the game, but licensing it for use by one person. When you install the game, you need to register with Steam, your CD key then decrypts the game after their server has authenticated your key. I suppose that you could play the game anywhere that has a legal/valid install, simply by using your own Steam login that has a legal/valid key associated with it. I just don’t know, because I have no reason or way to try.

You see, my brother David had bought HL2 last year when it first came out. I wanted to play it, only to discover that I couldn’t install it on my computer because he’d installed it already. I’d need another CD key, for use with my own account. This may not be entirely accurate as to how the system works, but regardless, I’d basically need to login as him if it’d even let me use it.

While I may be pretty open about downloading music, I actually tend toward legal use of my OS and Games. The games thing is questionable I guess, because I see absolutely nothing wrong with you or your brother buying it, and then both of you being able to play it on separate computers. That’s just like the little DVD metaphor, or like a CD… we’d not tolerate a music CD being locked to play on only one device and not being able to take it with us or loan it to a friend.

I bought the Sims, shared it with my brother, we both bought expansion packs and shared them between us, then when Sims2 came out, he bought that and shared it with me. With HL2 this intra-family sharing was impossible. One might argue that this is a totally different thing, but to me it isn’t. There is a legal copy of the software, we ought to be able to share it between us. Just like, again, why would a family purchase 2 copies of the same audio CD? They could just share it, right?

Perhaps they need to setup something like Apple does, with having a ‘family license’ for the OS. Of course, since the OS runs only on Apple hardware (not counting the latest Intel builds that people are pirating), and Apple is a hardware company, the OS isn’t as important as a revenue stream.

These annoyances are just what we have to live with, so that companies can continue to create new software, I can live with it, I just don’t have to like it. The same thing that is stopping me from borrowing HL2 from my brother is the same thing that stops thousands of unlicensed copies from being played out there too.

The thing though, that I actually have come to like about the whole Valve/Steam HL2 insanity, is that one is no longer required to have the CD or DVD in the drive. One can safely put away their CDs and not have to worry about them becoming scratched or otherwise damaged. I know when I buy an audio CD (and, I actually do, from time to time) the first step is to rip to MP3, I never touch the CD from then on out. Previously to play a game without the CD there’d have to be a no-cd crack and you’d need to keep the disc image on your hard drive all the time… which is exactly the same thing you have to do when you’re pirating the game, ironically.

There’s also this little thing about pricing. It’s amazing what chopping $20 off a software title will do. The price of HL2 was originally $50. I just couldn’t justify spending that much for a game. Yesterday when I went to buy it, or at least to look and think about buying it, I was pleasantly surprised to see it now cost $30 (at Walmart anyway). I have no problems at all buying a game for $30. So, this is a little note to game software publishing companies… cut the price, you’ll make it up in volume. You’ll have fewer people pirating the software because it’s easier to just drop the $30 and get it all legal and nice, everyone benefits. As it stands, I’ll just wait until the game is ‘old’ and thus no longer demands that price premium. Doom3 is going for a mere $20 at Walmart now, I almost picked that up too; even though I’d played it already.