Orange Planet

I’m notorious for downloading series and never getting around to finishing them. It was Sketchbook for the longest time, and now it is Kurenai, and Spiritsnare reminded me that I have yet to finish Clannad too. What the hell! On top of that there’s the stuff that’s airing this season -  like Tytania, One Outs… the list goes on and on. I haven’t seen anything besides Baccano/Someday’s Dreamers and School Rumble for the past two weeks, and I’m dying to go on an anime marathon. Now which series shall I pick? On the list are:

• Dennou Coil
• RD Sennou Chousashitsu

I’m thinking Dennou Coil, because it’s older and it doesn’t seem like many people watch the show. Derek asked me when I’m gonna do it, and my answer is:

One Day™

Yes, happy thanksgiving folks.

MaYesterday I was telling Amol about my external HDD enclosure: it’s a Cooler Master X Craft 250 Lite in black. It’s pretty standard fair for the most part: it’s got a metal shell with a tray and activity LED that holds a single 2.5″ hard drive. You can then drop in the 2.5″ hard drive of your choice - I’ve got a Fujitsu MHV-something-something.

But anyways, the great thing about this thing - besides the fact that it’s cheap and brand-name, is that you can run it off a single USB jack, given that your HDD isn’t a power-hungry, 320GB, 7200RPM behemoth. For those kind of drives, there’s an extra USB plug - on the SAME CABLE - that lets your drive pull more juice from a second USB port. 

Why is this important at all? It’s because I’m totally fed up with the amount of periphery that our electronic devices tend to drag along with them. It seems like every little gadget has it’s own little cable - and even worse, it’s own proprietary power brick - that you have to drag along if you want to use the damn thing. Why can’t we all just use the same blasted cables?

I’ve been trying to consolidate here: my camera, PSP, external HDD, and phone can all do data transfer over the USB. The phone and HDD can even take power. My printer still needs a different USB cable. The problem is that the cameria, PSP, and printer still need their own power bricks. I mean, I can understand the brick for the printer, but the hell can’t I charge my camera or PSP from USB?

Well, ok, maybe it’s because of USB’s relatively low power spec, but I don’t mind waiting longer for my devices to charge if it means dropping the effin power brick. I guess the problem is that the USB is just a serial bus. Where the hell is my Universal Power Bus?

Because everyone knows that the latest Windows OS will run great with a Q6600 and a GTX 280, I’m usually more interested in testing these things on somewhat older hardware.

My usual test machine, a not so out of the ordinary Dell Latitude D600, is out of commission for want of a hard drive. The other test machine, a less ordinary P4 desktop, is not out of commission for want of a hard drive, but for want of everything else besides a hard drive.

So I dusted off ye old Dell Dimension XPS R450, and popped in the disk, only to be presented with a cheerful message from the Windows Boot Manager:

Well okay. Someone’s gotta have seen that one coming from a mile away. If, you can’t read the top parts, that’s fine, as the main message is pretty clear. Status: 0xc0000017. Info: Ramdisk device creation failed due to insufficient memory.

So there, you have it folks. Just maybe I’m confirming what everyone else in the world already knows, but for those who don’t, Windows 7 Pre-Beta Build 6801 fails on 128MB of memory.

I’m at home right now. In my room. Downstairs. You know how hot air kinda rises and cold air kinda falls? Well, it’s effin cold down here and those pesky thermodynamics might be part of the problem. Since my sister and I are in college, it’s just my cousin living down here and the heating is pretty much never active.

Really, I meant to blog about bike drifting as my, uh, partner-in-blog suggested, but there’s not much to say anymore now that I’ve stopped. For a couple weeks I was trying this out, but I shredded my old bike tire and shaved like a few millimeters off my new one. The bike tires are pretty cheap. but if you go through like one every few weeks, they start to add.

The space heater is a reference to two desktops, one laptop, two lights, and a monitor outputting about 350 watts of heat. Your standard space heater is probably rated at something like 1000 to 2000 watts, so you can see how 350 isn’t really putting a dent in anything. My main desktop is running at 20C at the moment. That’s like… less than room temperature.

I could actually turn on the central heater, but I think I’m just going to get into bed in a bit, so there probably isn’t much point. It’s also annoying to leave it on overnight, as it blows dust in my nose at night. Furthermore, the temperature control is straight from the seventies and not terribly accurate, usually erring on the hot side and turning the area into a furnace by daybreak.

Yes. I think I’m moving to my bed now. 350 watts just isn’t as good as a blanket and a laptop buring a hole in my lap.

I went to sleep at just past three this morning for reasons that are no longer known to me or anyone else. Well, maybe God, but we’re not even sure we know whether he exists - not to mention whether he knows why I went to sleep at three last night.

Somehow I still managed to wake up in time for class at nine. That’s becoming a more common occurance these days: since I failed the midterm, I feel obligated to go to class, even if it doesn’t help me at all for the final. So this is supposed to be about naps. I took one in my eleven o’clock class - a short one, approximately ten minutes.

I made it through lunch without catching anymore sleep and listened to my friend try to play the first couple stanza of One More Time, One More Chance with mild success. I didn’t actually think I’d fall asleep in my one o’clock class, but before I knew it, fifteen minutes had passed and my back was kinda sore. Still, I made it through the rest of my classes - well, one and a half classes - without incident.

And dinner, too. And wham. I slept from six to seven too.

They make 32GB SDHC cards these days. They also make 1500GB 3.5″ hard drives these days. 1500GB is roughly 47 32GB SDHC cards which is somewhat of a large number of SDHC cards. My point, though, is that 47 SDHC cards actually take up less volume than a 3.5″ hard drive, which means that flash memory is actually physically denser than traditional spinners now.

Yes, this is a bad comparison. I should probably be comparing the size of the individual flash chips to the size of the platters in a standard hard drive. But I’m just trying to make a point here.

Earlier I went on at some more length about a Compact Flash card, an Ultra IDE adapter, and an HP TC4200. Now, in are the votes and closed are the polls: Compact Flash kinda raped my old drive:

Ok, ok, it’s a bad comparison again. I should technically be testing important things like IOPS, but HDTune free version is kinda limited in what it can bench. Even HDTune less than free version can only test like sequential writes, though I don’t imagine that to be too much slower. At the very least we can conclude that a 4GB, 300x CF card kills a 40GB, 5400RPM HDD when it comes to reads. Any kind of’em.

But ok, reads and random reads aren’t the only thing we care about. My main concern is actually battery life. So throughout the past two days, I used my computer in class and took down the durations for which the laptop was used and the corresponding drop in battery life.

67, 20

19. 07

40, 15

06, 03

55, 21

55, 18

21, 09

You tally up those numbers, minutes in the left column and percents in the right column, and you get 307 and 107, that’s 2.86 minutes per percent of battery which is 286 minutes which is 4.76 hours which is… well, absolutely ridiculous and probably wrong. I couldn’t touch that when the battery was “new”, despite having a traditional disk.

Nonetheless, ignoring the ridiculousness of this figure, I think it’s safe to say that there IS a decrease in power consumption, even if the overall battery life isn’t 286 minutes which is 4.76 hours. I haven’t done any recent tests with my old drive, but my occasional mental calculations were putting battery life in the three hour range, so…

Ok, that’s it for today; I’m going to watch some effin Animu.

A couple of days ago (and hence my reason for not posting - well that’s not the only reason, but whatever) I ran into a weird problem, which I believe is caused by µTorrent. I had set µTorrent running overnight, but after I woke up from a deep sleep, my internet was completely broken! TokyoTosho refused to load, Google loaded after like a minute, etc etc. The same thing happened two days ago and I powercycled my router and all was fine. At first I thought it was Comcast doing the shit that the do, but apparently every one else in the house was a-okay with it.

What happens is this: µTorrent torrents like usual, but I think it eats my bandwidth too. Upon quitting, it doesn’t seem to release it, but Windows isn’t mentioning anything about this either. So all I can do is IM, since browsing the internet is broked. Come to think of it, it has happened before too. It’s just a long time ago, and I think I switched to Vuze/Azureus. I’ve downloaded Vuze/Azureus and will probably be using that for a while, and see if it’s causing any more trouble. I sure hope not!

You know, I might as well put an (NT) or (EoM) at the end of the title and be done with it, because the title does a very good job of summing up the contents of this post.

It actually started raining a bit early than the meteorologists on KGO predicted; I felt a good number of drops on Thursday, and it really picked up that night. Friday mostly pretty tame, but it started picking up in the evening. Since then we’ve had a pretty steady flow of water (though not necessarily a huge volume) with only a few breaks here and there.

So at about 3:30 today (after not getting any work done at all), I climbed into my bed with my E6400 and opened the window. Then I proceeded to watch Ef, A Tale of Melodies 4, Clannad After 5, Akane-Iro 1, Akane-Iro 2 - well at that point, I was feeling kinda drowsy. And I kinda paused the episode. And I kinda fell asleep.

By the time I woke up it was about five something. So I climbed out of bed with my computer and left the window open.

Yeah, that’s the end of the story. I’m srs.

So I like to do some art on the side and about nine months ago I bought myself an HP TC4200 for a scant $450 on eBay. I had previously been using a 9 x 12 Wacom Intuos3, but I was looking for something more portable and a small tablet PC even gives you a free PC with your tablet.

The TC4200 is a really nice machine, but it was already getting old by the time I picked mine up. Unfortunately, anything newer, faster, thinner, lighter, better was way out of my price range, including the new (at that time) Dell Latitude XT which sat a price point of nearly $3000. Now maybe I’m just a Dell fanboy, but I really wanted an XT and I had really hoped that Dell would come out with something affordable, but that just wasn’t the case…

So fast forward nine months and suddenly I get an XT at the Dell outlet for a mere $650 (after discount, before shipping and taxes) and I’m considering replacing my trusty TC4200. Because the XT is newer, faster, thinner, lighter, better. Because the XT uses a Dell power supply. Because all my other laptops are Dells. Because the XT is a Dell. Something like that.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but there’s a big problem with the XT and it’s the same problem that convinced me not to buy an IBM ThinkPad X41T instead of my TC4200. The XT and the X41T both come standard with 1.8″, 4200RPM hard drives. The hard drive is already the biggest bottleneck on most computers and these dinky things are among the slowest of the slow hard drives. So I’ve gotta fix that.

An XT option is for a 32GB SSD which is generally quite fast, but costs something in the range of hundreds of dollars and none of the outlet machines ship with that 32GB SSD. So I decided to test out a relatively common  SSD improvisation on my TC4200. I bought a Transcend 4GB Compact Flash card and paired it with a SYBA Ultra IDE to Compact Flash adapter for ultimate Compact Flash win.

Windows XP Tablet Edition installed in a relatively quick 20 to 25 minutes and I had all my drivers installed within another half hour or so. I moved some utilities onto the drive and at this point, I was down to just under one of my original four GB, even without a page file. Windows bothered me about my disk space so I pulled out my secret weapon, an A-DATA 16GB SDHC Flash card, plugged it into the card reader and BAM!

Nothing happened. I thought there might be something wrong with the card (though I have never tested the reader, as I don’t own any SD or SDHC cards) so I plugged it into my main comp, a Dell Latitude E6400, and it showed up just fine. I thought about it for maybe half a minute before I thought of something bad, and Wikipedia confirmed it.

According to Wikipedia, SDHC cards were introduced in June of 2006. The TC4200 was introduced in mid-2005. Devices that do not specifically support SDHC do not recognize SDHC memory cards. That’s ghey.

Obviously the TC4200 wouldn’t specifically support SDHC since SDHC didn’t exist when HP released the TC4200. So that’s the end of my ultimate CF win for now, as I don’t really want to full up the 4GB CF card and I don’t like Windows’ annoying little space complaints. I might get a standard SD card, but I don’t really want to shell out any more, especially if I’ll use just end up using the 16GB when/if I buy an XT.

I guess it could be worse. The CF card could have been incompatible too…

I was up decently late last night, checking out the bands over at TADA Music, and after that I decided to watch an episode of Bounen no Xamdou. Sadly, I found myself constantly falling asleep while watching (it was 3am, and I was stupid). In the end, I gave up trying to finish the episode and went to sleep. I woke up at 8:45, cursing myself. But then I figured that there’s no use rushing to school now, since by the time I get there around 9:45, the class will already be coming close to an end. So I decided to sleep a bit more, and I woke up at 10:15. That was when I realized that my class started at 10, and not 9. I have no idea why I thought my class was at 9. No friggin’ clue. This is depressing stuff…

So here in California we aren’t really known for our load and loads of rain. This is quite unfortunate since I really do like a solid number of rain; this hot and dry crap that we know so well just doesn’t cut it for me.

I was in my car this morning listening to KGO and they were like, “yeah, it’s gonna pour this weekend” (not an exact quote, but that’s the idea). Whoo! As far as I know, the last time it rained around here was sometime in September - I had hoped it would pick up, but hope doesn’t seem to do much these days - and that was quite a while ago.

The best thing to do on a nice day - for me that could a really nice sunny day or a really nice rainy one - is to open a window, get in bed, and watch my anime. And that’s exactly what I intend to do this weekend. Not the whole weekend, of course, but a few hours at the very least. I’ve been waiting for this since the last rainy season (”rainy” is honestly an overstatement) season ended.

Try it out sometime.