Archive for the 'General' Category

Gigabyte Celeron N2807 BRIX

Bought it to replace my years old Sony VAIO notebook running Ubuntu Server (which its fan has become noisy these days).

Normal state CPU temperature under 60 degree Celsius, not bad.

BRIX

My favourite albums/composer/artists so far

Haven’t been writing anything on my own blog than facebook these years, I’ll list my favourites so far, they hadn’t changed much in the past 10 years

ICO from 大島ミチル

ワンダと巨像 大地の咆哮 from 大谷幸

灰羽連盟 ハネノネ from 大谷幸

Silent Hill (series) from 山岡晃

BTW, my favourite piece of music was still “Promise” by 山岡晃.

Data corruption on my OCZ Vector

I haven’t had much luck with SSD, my Intel 510 died (first data corruption, then no data can be read), at least SYNNEX gave me a brand new 520.

I then went with an OCZ Vector, starting to have data corruption these weeks, and I think it is going to die very soon, too.

Now back on the replacement Intel SSD 520.

Intel SSD 510 120G, stopped working

It died right before my planned upgrade, and had turned into a paper weight that needs to be sent back to Intel.

Goodbye, Nokia E6-00

Replaced (and sold) my Nokia E6-00 with a Galaxy Nexus.

It works fine before the update (Symbian Anna), everything went downhill after the update (Symbian Belle).

There is no way to downgrade, as a last resort, I use the abandoned Sony’s Xperia X8 (of my wife) and installed some modded ROM to see whether Android is a platform that I can use everyday. And I think it still lacks quite a bit from an old time Nokia phone user, but there are a lot of apps to complement the base facilities.

The price of the Galaxy Nexus unexpectedly dropped 30% today,  took the plunge, bought one and traded in my Nokia E6-00.

I really miss the keyboard, though.

PC upgraded, finally

Core 2 Quad Q6600 -> Core i5 2500, 4G DDR -> 8G DDR3, WD RAID edition HDD -> Intel Series 510 SSD, Lian Li 8 years old chassis -> Cooler Master Silencio 550 chassis.

Cost quite a bit, but the boot time is simply excellent.

EDIT:

Added 2 Zalman ZM-SF3 120mm fans to the chassis to increase ventilation.

The CPU cooler hasn’t been upgraded yet, but the noise level is well below the ambient noise (from the surroundings).

Still researching on quiet and relatively small coolers, targets include Notua NH-C12P SE14 and Coolermaster GeminII S524 (much cheaper).

Tomato USB Victek’s RAF mod

Works great on my brand new E3000, flashed directly from the stock firmware and working great !

Thank you Victek and Teddy Bear.

http://victek.is-a-geek.com/tomato.html

The HDD of my TZ31XN/B has died

A few days to the end of its 2nd year, the 1.8″ HDD died.

Bought a KingSpec 64G SSD, but it is so damn slow (0.5-0.6MB/s for 4K random writes). I would not recommend anyone to go with it. There are be better alternatives at similar price.

ICO/SOTC HD versions on PS3

As many of you long time fans of Fumito Ueda’s works might have known, the collection is going to be released in 2011. I expect it is a bit more than the GOW/GOW2 collection and I’ll definitely buy it in a heart beat.

Looking forward to “The Last Guardian” next year.

My other favourites are still not quite there, e.g. the Silent Hill series. The Shadow Hearts series is dead since the team was dissolved and the company is not going to do anything about the series.

USB 3.0 Experiment

Had tried a couple of USB 3.0 cards and devices recently, tested with Kingston Value SSD 128GB

Subjects:

1. SYBA USB 3.0 PCI-E 1x adaptor

2. Transcend USB 3.0 PCI-E 1x adaptor

3. UNITEK ExpressCard/34 USB 3.0 adaptor

4. UNITEK 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 case

5. SNT 2.5″ SATA to USB 3.0 case

6. Seagate GoFlex SATA USB 3.0 adaptor

Results:

#1 – Power supply to the devices are weak in the first try, exchanged and still suffer from the same weak supply problem (supplier claimed that they have fixed the problem by adjusting the components)

#2 – Works normally, and it is the one inside my PC

#3 – Must use external power supply if the device is not self-powered, similar cases for the other brands, prepare to use power adaptor cables to supply extra juice to the card for ExpressCard/34 USB 3.0 adaptors

#4 – Supplied cable is a bit too long, have to be plugged to the card directly (not working when there was an USB 3.0 extension cable), the craftsmanship of the PCB is not in high quality, it uses USB 3.0 B to A  type USB 3.0 adaptor cable, even with enough power, there are intermittent disconnects and reconnects once in a while

#5 – Similar situation as #4, but it uses A type USB 3.0 port and A to A type USB 3.0 adaptor cable (NOTE: do not plug a USB 2.0 cable to the rear port of the HDD case)

#6 – Works normally with or without an USB 3.0 extension cable, perfectly stable

Transcend USB 3.0 PCI-E 1x adaptor & Seagate GoFlex SATA USB 3.0 adaptor are the only ones working perfectly so far.