XBOX 360 Torn Apart

My nephew’s XBOX 360 had the dreaded Red-Ring-of-Death.  This is a common problem on the XBOX 360 that Microsoft claims only they can fix.  I just cracked open the box, removed the heatsinks and reseated them after cleaning the terrible heatsink compound that MS uses from the factory.  I used Arctic Silver heatsink compound which I always use on anything I build because it does a fantastic job.  That’s all there is to it!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Battlefield Bad Company 2

I bit the bullet and purchased a GameFly account.  The first game I rented was Battlefield Bad Company 2 because the multiplayer looked awesome.  I was all set to have some people over for the local split screen multiplayer like Halo and Call of Duty because they are so much fun to do a system link and get 6-8 people killing eachother.  But NOooo!  Battlefield Bad Company 2 does not have local splitscreen.  The only way you can multiplayer is online with Microsoft XBOX Live and even then every game I tried to play couldn’t find a host game (most likely since it’s fairly new and it was a Thursday night).

Of course nobody I know has this game so multiplayer is out of the question!  Plus who can afford to have 8 friends (or more) buy a $60 game just so you can multiplayer?!?  The campaign is awesome and the game play is superb with fantastic weapon choice and great vehicles but it’s not worth buying in my mind.  I’m glad I rented because this is one I would have bought and been very disappointed in feeling like it was not worth the money.  But for those of you who like the campaigns better than multiplayer or if all you want to do is online live multiplayer then this game will rock your world!  I’m just not that type.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’ve been looking for an alternative to Microsoft Publisher since the dawn of time…  Ok not quite but I’ve often thought that if an alternative existed the school could drop the $7000 per year cost of maintaining Microsoft Office.  The Macs could run Neo Office and the PCs could run OpenOffice.  Or both could run OpenOffice.

The two main advantages are cost and familiarity.  The cost is, of course, free.  Being that OpenOffice is cross platform is a big advantage because the interface is identical no matter if it’s Windows or Linux or Mac.  Currently we have Microsoft Office 2007 on the Windows computers and Microsoft Office 2008 on the Macs.  While MS claims them to be the same, they are not.  The interface is very different and MS doesn’t offer Publisher on the Mac side.

Scribus- alternative to MS Publisher?

The biggest holdup has been publisher because so many teachers use it to create newsletters to send home.  I’ve been waiting for a good alternative to present itself and while OpenOffice doesn’t yet have a clear cut choice it appears that another open source package, Scribus, might do the trick.  At least during my five minute trial and test of features it appears to work very much the same.  It doesn’t have some of the polish and word wrap appears to be funky but it does do many of the things the teachers want and think they need.

This discovery will weigh heavy on my mind as I try to investigate the possibility of eliminating MS Office from the school’s standard software and by doing so save over $6000 per year!

Popularity: 8% [?]

I upgraded my Dell XPS M1210 laptop from Linux Mint 7 Gloria to Linux Mint 8 Helena last night. This was all done from the terminal while running version 7 and it amazes me how well the upgrade does. Even though Mint recommends downloading the 8 install CD and doing a complete wipe and fresh install I decided to try the upgrade solution. I figured if anything went wrong I would then do the full wipe.

This was the proceedure:
Open a terminal and type the following commands:

• gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list (Change all occurrences of “gloria” to “helena”, and all occurences of “jaunty” to “karmic”, remove the lines for the Community section of the Linux Mint repository, then save the file and close the editor)
• apt update
• apt install mint-info-main (choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)
• apt install mint-meta-main(choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)

In the terminal, repeat the following commands until both upgrade commands show no upgrades available:

• apt upgrade
• apt dist-upgrade
• apt install mint-meta-main

I had to reinstall Firefox for some reason.  Perhaps something went wrong with the upgrade from 3.0 to 3.5.  I had Google Chrome open at the time of the upgrade because I was surfing while the downloads and upgrading was going on.

Not a lot of major changes.  Clearly a nice new theme and wallpaper with a new icon set and some of the dialog boxes have added features like the popup screens telling you about your wireless network status have a timer wheel letting you see visually how log they will remain visible before automatically vanishing as well as an option to always hide the message in the future.

I’ve been running Mint since version 6 and for over 4 years on this particular laptop with stellar results.  It hasn’t crashed and I can perform any and all tasks I need to do.  I’m very pleased!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Today Shantelle played her last peewee basketball game. This could potentially be her last peewee game ever unless the school district decides to get rid of 6th grade sports next year. Unfortunately they lost to Granby but the coaches said they had a great season and everybody loved practice and the games. I’ll post some pics later.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Shortly after we had a nice snow storm dropping 6-8 inches of snow the following two days were colder than -20 degrees F. I love it when it snows because it’s not nearly as cold. I’m tired of the bitter cold winters. Maybe it’s time to look into moving somewhere warmer- like Alaska.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I was fixing pizza for supper tonight and since we have a large family I had to fix two, as I always do. Reading the back of the boxes I couldn’t find the directions for cooking two pizzas at once. Upon closer inspection I read, “for instructions on cooking two pizzas at once visit our website at digorno.com.”

Give me a break! Put the directions on the fricken box!

Popularity: 44% [?]

Experts Agree Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat.

Popularity: 58% [?]

Yes, upgrade your MacBook Pro… DO IT NOW!

Of course I’m talking about the older MacBook Pro, not the new aluminum block ones.

I was always very suprised that Apple didn’t put 7200 RPM hard drives in their MacBooks.  It wasn’t a matter of them not being available and must have had more to do with their internal purchasing.  BUT after upgrading my MacBook Pro I can tell from experience that not putting the 7200 RPM drives in from the factory was a mistake.  The performance gains were phenominal!!

So I fould lots of instructions on the web about how to do it and even YouTube videos which were great.  The main trouble I had was in moving the OS and data.  After some trial and error I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner and moving the entire old drive contents to the new drive which I had already formatted.  Anyway I’m rambling…

I ordered a 320 GB 7200 RPM HDD and a 4 GB memory kit from New Egg for under $140 with shipping.  I took extra care to benchmark prior to the upgrade using XBench (http://www.xbench.com/) and got an overall score of 108.  After the upgrades I re-ran XBench and got a score of 127!!  Nearly a 20 point gain!!  If you haven’t used XBench before you won’t realize how huge of a gain that is, but believe me- it’s HUGE.  Now my old MacBook Pro that I’ve had for over 2 years out performs the newest iMacs coming out!  My XBench results on the new iMacs can be found in another post called “Are the newest iMacs any faster?”  Oddly enough the new iMacs actually score lower than my MacBook Pro did before the upgrade.  Figure that one out…

The laptop is like a new machine!  I strongly urge you to upgrade your old MacBook Pro.  You will be so happy and giggle with delight so much that a little pee will come out.

Check back soon as I will post the XBench results from the new aluminum MacBooks.

Popularity: 66% [?]

Exactly how much faster are the new iMacs that were just released a few weeks ago?  The answer: They’re Not…

I was so excited to get the newest iMac and evidently was one of the first because my order needed to be modified from what I had ordered and upgraded to a comporable nextgen.  After moving everything over to the new iMac using Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html and awesome software BTW) I ran XBench (http://www.xbench.com/).  Now it’s important to note that I had already installed XBench on my old iMac and there were absolutely no changes prior to re-running XBench on the new iMac.

To my great disappointment the XBench score was lower on the new iMac!

As you can see the only place the new iMac scored higher than the old one was under the Thread test!

The NVidia GeForce 9400 is only PCI where the ATI Radeon HD2400 is PCI Express at full x16 so even though the ATI is an older chipset and has 128 MB less VRAM it still out perfoms the NVidia.  I should also point out that the VRAM on this NVidia chip is shared with system ram where the ATI on the previous generation isn’t.  This explains exactly why the new system was using more RAM right out of the box!

So, don’t go rushing out ready to trade in your iMac for the new ones because the bottom line is that they just don’t perform as well as expected!  The exception to this would be in the new 24″ iMacs.  At least get the new iMac with the GeForce 120 or 130.  These have dedicated GDDR3 memory and are much better chipsets.

If you have one of the new 24″ iMacs please post your XBench results here!  I would love to see how much better they perform than the 20″ iMacs.

Popularity: 71% [?]

We just got home from watching the outstanding Harlem Ambassadors!  This is a basketball team that puts on a great show with a positive message.  They can be contacted for fund raisers.

Our team which consisted of about 20 locals ranging from pretty darn good basketball players to the oldest player, a semi-retired high school principal and coach at the young age of 68.  While the Ambassadors may not be quite good enough to make it in the NBA, they were certainly better than our Kremmling team and still beat us even after putting us ahead by 20 points at the half!

One thing nice is that they promote clean, good fun with a message of “stay in school and off of drugs.”  The center of the team is a powerful woman demonstrating racial and gender equality.  One thing these players have that not all NBA players do is a college degree.

Lots of fun and the kids enjoyed it.  We purchased some penants and they had them autographed by the players.

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Yesterday while at a local bookstore I found it refreshing to find 5 different magazines about Linux.  My excitement was quickly reduced to frustration in the crucible of my brain heated by anger when I noticed all but one were at least $15.00!  This is because they all contained CDs or DVDs with Linux installs on them.

Don’t get me wrong.  There was one that only cost $6.00 which is a price I would pay but the others had better articles for me.  The $6 mag was geared toward long time Li/Unix users.  They were talking about modifying scripts and developing applications and some other stuff way over my head.  It would be nice if these other magazine publishers would put out two versions- one with the media and one without.  Most people have a fast enough internet connection to not need the media.  Beside, the media isn’t worth $10 IMHO (in my humble opinion).  I would buy the media online before I would buy it in a magazine.

I would love to install and test the new OpenSUSE 11, Fedora 10 (after all Fedora 11 Alpha is out), the new KDE 4.2.1 XFCE and other stuff but since time is so limited I do occasionally rely on the opinions of others who have done what I could not.

So what happened was that I stood and read the magazines at the news stand and they missed out on a sale because the publication was too expensive.

Do you know of good publications?  If so drop us a line!

Popularity: 53% [?]

In a previous post I attempted to predict the future about the future release of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and also offered some insight into what the new iMacs were going to look like.  Well last week Apple released the new hardware level iMacs and it was done prior to the release of Snow Leopard which in my guestimation is right around the corner and certainly this year that the latest.  It’s almost certainly going to be at the same time as Windows 7.

Both Microsoft and Apple have been releasing more and more info about what the new OSs are going to hold in store for us and as more and more details are released I (for one) get more and more excited about both of them!

Lets take a look at what I predicted on the new iMacs and what I got right and what was wrong.

The first thing I talked about was the FSB.  The old iMacs were 800 and I predicted the new ones were going to be 1333 but unfortunately the iMac was released with a 1066 FSB.  Still, this is a major improvement and perhaps Apple felt that dependability was more important than the cutting edge hardware and the 1066 chipset combinations from Intel have certainly been time tested.  The RAM has been upgraded to DDR3, as I predicted.

The new processors start at 2.66GHz, 2.93GHz, or 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duos.  The also have 6mb of shared L2 cache.  I built a new PC for my father-in-law with this exact hardware about a year ago and it is VERY speedy.  Although I am impressed with the speed of this setup, as I said it’s about a year old and it would have been nice to have the current hardware in new new iMac.

Let’s see what I predicted for the graphics chips.  I said that we should expect something like the NVidia GeForce 9400 on the low end and to not count out ATI with something like the high performance 4380.  Well, I wasn’t perfect in my prediction.  They actually have the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 memory or optionally the GeForce GT 130 graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory.  Remember ATI?  Well you can also get the Radeon HD 4850 graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory.  This is a pleasant suprise because it’s actually better than what I predicted.

All this being said, mine will arrive next week and I will certainly be one of the first to have one so I will be sure to let you know how it compares.

Here are a few things that Apple has said WILL be included in the new Snow Leopard release.  First ZFS file system.  This is exciting!  ZFS is an awesome and robust 128 bit file system with self healing technology and HUGE storage capability.  This is already a time tested and utilized file system use by the creator, Sun Microsystems, used in Solaris 10 since 2006.  The DROBO storage device also uses a modified veriosion of the ZFS file system on their handy and easy raid storage device.

It will have better Exchange support and will be 64 bit.  Quicktime X will be included giving better modern codec support.  Apple tells us that performance gains will be massive.  One of the things besides 64 bit technology and the upgraded filesystem is something called OpenCL.  OpenCL will allow processor intensive tasks to be off-loaded to the GPU.  Apple also promises that Snow Leopard will have a smaller footprint which will give back valuable hard drive space.

There you go.  Look for my next post about the new iMac after I get it next week.

Popularity: 57% [?]

Instead of judging others, try to help.  This is a great message about opening your eyes to what is really important and watching for signs.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Here’s an awesome song.  I think I want this played at my funeral.  It’s a superb message about the fact that death isn’t a sad thing but rather a celebration!  God only cries for the living because they’re left to carry on…

Popularity: 50% [?]