Orange Planet

I had this dream about having this nice little room, with my Core i7 and insane amounts of RAM, connected with 18Mbps internet and a wifi network with the SSID of “Cosmonaut”. You know, the typical dream of a typical me (people who know me personally will get what I’m hinting at). The new semester at a new university starts in about a month, and I need to move out of my current home. I was waiting for my financial aid to come in so that I could pay for the deposit, but I found out a week ago or so that I won’t get it until sometime next year. I tried applying again but it said “Duplicate Student ID” entered. After calling in, I realized that I will have to submit a paper application.

Not so bad, I said to myself. I went about taking care of my academics, which should be over by Monday. After a study session today, I sat down and started looking for studios. The first one I came across looked fine to me, until I read the pdf application that required me to have my 3 most recent paystubs. Now I haven’t been living in the US for that long, and no one told me that pay stubs were this important. Yes, I didn’t really care for them and I threw them away. Now I realized the gravity of my mistake. I kept looking, and came across another one, except that they wanted me to be earning 3x the rent. Now I work on-campus atm and it barely pays 0.75x of the rent, so that won’t work out either. It is then I realized that what a pickle I was in.

But this is where my “character type” kicks in. I’ll say that so far, I’ve been very happy-go-lucky. Maybe I used up all of it, and will have to chance upon (doesn’t that require luck in and of itself?) something that will refill my “luck bar.” I figure that right now, there’s no point in swearing and brooding over my situation. I have 30 days to make something happen. I may or may not be able to make something happen within the span of 30 days, but I dug my own grave. Hence, I’ll start going to San Jose as often as I can possibly go to start looking for housing.

Here, under “Fallacies of Irresponsibility,” I shall enumerate my experiences in trying to find a place that will take me in as a tenant. If no one does take me in, I’ll have to commute 2 hours to and back from school. My chances of getting a place to live is low(er than before), but it’s not 0%. With this philosophy in mind, I shall tackle the issue at hand. Look forward to the accounts!

Once upon a time I used to archive the anime I’d seen on DVDs. When the Internet was a bit slower and hard drives a bit smaller, this made plenty of sense. DVDs were a cheap and reliable way to keep your data for relatively long periods of time. The density of a DVD is also such that a 24-26 episode series of anime at roughly 170MB per episode will fit on a single DVD. Excellent, no?

Well once the collection starts getting a bit bigger you wind up with a helluva a lot of DVDs and DVDs start taking up quite a bit of space after 10-20. I had a binder that could hold 8 DVDs per page and it just got heavier and heavier and heavier. At some point I decided that it just wasn’t practical to keep adding to this pile so I decided to move my collection to what had once been too expensive an alternative: HDD.

The price of a not-so-big-anymore 500GB desktop hard drive has exactly halved in the past year. About this time in 2007, I picked up a Western Digital WD5000AAJS for just over $100. Anticipating the space that all my DVD anime would take up, this year I picked up a Seagate ST3500320A for just over $50. That’s basically 10GB to the dollar, which is honestly pretty crazy.

Turns out it was completely unnecessary. My entire stock of anime - more than three years’ worth - came out to be just around 400GB. This means I either don’t watch that much anime, do a good job choosing subs with small filesizes… or both. Honestly I think it makes sense - for the back half of high school I usually only watched about 1-2 eps a day. In college I probably upped that number to 2-3. Even now I’d say I’m still watching at a rate of 2-3 eps per day.

At three 170MB episodes a day it will take approximately 2.7 years to fill up a 500GB hard drive. That’s a long time, especially in terms of technology. At the rate things are going that 1TB drive will be $50 next year (or a 2TB drive will be $100). Two terabytes for $100. I read somewhere that you could store a human life on 10TB (whatever that means).

Also, pic not related.

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?

So I got myself a P3 seedbox from Vectoral. Estimated timeframe is 24-72 hours. It’s the Starter Dosky series, with 500GB of bandwidth. Can’t wait!

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.

Wewt, the PV for Tsubasa is finally done. Actually, it’s been like 2 days since it’s been done, but I got lazy to post. So as usual, you can find it in the kara folder!

I hope you enjoy it. I know there are some minor problems with the timing (I thought it was “funny” at times, but I can’t seem to pinpoint anything, so *shrug*).

And my JLPT kyuu-yon registration card has arrived. Only so many days until December 7!

燃えるぜ！

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.

Remember how I mentioned my µTorrent issues? Now as an alernative, I figured that I could give myself an opportunity to try out a seedbox. My main seedbox provider will most likely be Seedbox Hosting. The only drawback though, is that it only allows private trackers, so the majority of my usage will be hindered (since I use Isohunt and/or Mininova). Although, I think that that’s okay because if I don’t like how this idea fares, then I’m not losing much. Maybe like $50 a month (yikes!) =P.

Another service that I want to try out is Usenet. I hear that it has damn good speeds too, so I’ll try that out and see how it goes. Here’s a good comparison between BT and UN. The only drawback is that I won’t get the latest stuff, but that’s okay.

Man I want to try out a remote usenet server. I’m going to go look around for one. Too bad my-partner-in-blog hates the idea of “software as a service” (or something along those lines).

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.