Den News

UpGraded MOBO/CPU/RAM Combo

Unhappy with the Gigabyte motherboard, I decided to do an upgrade.

For the first time in years (since the PenIII's) I'm back to Intel. Prices were down, that Gigabyte was flaky, and I was sick and tired of trying to work around the unavailability of 939 socket parts.

So a nice Intel mobo, and CPU, and some SuperTalent RAm. Man this thing has some serious punch. Assuming my new 8800GT was doing most of the work, I didn't expect much in performance boost. But I have a feeling the 939 was holding the new Vcard back a bit. Plus the jump from a 2.4 to a 3.0 and with Intel's new 6mb L2 Cache, the boost was substantial.

Details on the: TechPage

»June 25th – »2008

Big time Trouble shoot puts me down for 3 weeks.

After my computer wouldn't boot to XP, I assumed it was a case intrustion sensor that had been giving me problems. So I replaced a motherboard. First one was dead on arrival (Albatron) . Second one did the same thing (Gigabyte). Figuring it may be a Vcard issue I replaced that. Same results.

So it was a bad Windows installation was my next thought. I tried reformated but crashed several times. So replaced the HD. Same results.

Turns out the motherboard I replaced the old one with had an SATA controller issued that required 3rd Party driver installation. I probably could have reformated with the original mobo. I'll use the GigaByte replacement for now, and RMA the Asus, since finding a decent 939 socket board is a nightmare.

Pics of the whole fiasco on the: TechPage

»April 23rd – »2008

Forgotten Hope 2 released After a long time of rumors, updates, and leaked content, FH for BF2 has been released. Details on the BF2 Page.

»Dec 15th – »2007

Happy Thanksgiving- Have a safe holidays everyone. My new job is going good and they gave me the day off (paid) this friday so that was an awesome gesture on their part. 4 days off in a row to get some chores done around the house and off course get in some good gaming.

»Nov22nd – »2007

Made 2nd Lieutenant.

60,000 pts. -Not that I've ever been big on stats or awards but they are good for following one's personal progress. While the mile stones are simply numbers picked out of a hat they are mile stones never the less. Personally a mile stone for me is something that comes with drugery since I don't do a lot of the things in BF2 that accumulate many points per round. I don't gun in choppers, fly jets or command. 3 of the biggest things that rack up big point totals if you do them well. I've mostly been squad leading which is if done correctly is a a tedious endeavor of staying alive and actually avoiding the enemy. disfigured @ BF2S . This milestone puts me out of the NCO ranks and into the officers. It's the largest point leap I've ever had. So instead of chevrons of some type next to my name I have officers bars. So it does effect me in game in the fact that I'm seen as something different by others who place an importance on that. I even took a screen shot to commerate it.

» July 31st – »2007

iTunes and LimeWire.

» June 12th – »2007

Battefield 2 Test Video

Fun with a DuneBuggy. -A short Test video, of my C4'ing a pesky mounted .50 cal machine gun in a Hummer. It's not hard to do if you don't care about surviving, living on the other hand can be sort of tricky. It's fun and since it makes for a good fun subject matter I decided to try out my hand in making a BF2 video. I captured the BFR file with BattleDirector and did the editing on Windows MovieMaker.

A first very short Test video:

FunBuggy

»June 2nd– »2007

Third in the video series.

What will Houdini Eat? -Just what will this cat eat? Well like many cats lots of things. Shrimp, tuna, a nice piece of meat are not special for many cats. So it's needs to be something most cat's don't or won't eat.

So here's the third Video in the series:

What will Houdini Eat ? Video No.3

»May 6th– »2007

As promised another Houdini Video.

What will Houdini Eat? -I do want to make a disclaimer that the title of the video series "What will Houdini Eat?" is sort of misleading. I'm not attempting to see just how many things he will eat when prompted. He likes these things on his own and hounds me for them. These things are actually what he does like.

So here's the second Video in the series:

What will Houdini Eat ? Video No.2

»March26th– »2007

Video Series

What will Houdini Eat? -Since Nitro's RC Truck Videos were so successful and fun to make, I decided to delve into the process of making web content videos myself. Might as well do something with all this PCpower besides gamin.

In a series I am call "What will Houdini Eat? I'm going to produce videos of my 16 year old cat eating some of his favorite snacks. Here's the first installment of what I hope to be quite a few videos:

What will Houdini Eat ? Video No.1

»March23rd – »2007

Bashin your Truck.

RC Truck Video -NitroAddict (aka Lord Our God), made a .WMV from an excerpt of when we were video taping his new RC Truck.

Bashin In Tyngsboro

I grabbed it and put Beethoven behind the audio track, but there's another version on Nirto Addict with some Def Leopard for the background music.

»March8th – »2007

BF 2142 announces Xpack release.

»Feb23rd – »2007

Armoured Assault Demo released.

»Dec22th – »2006

Nitro Addict website Launch!!!!

Nitro Addict - After some prodding from LOG (Lord Our God) aka, Nitro Addict, aka Noodles, I took a deep breath and started him on webpage building. To my suprise he took to it like a fish to water. With only the basics , a good template, and a few of the questions that always pop up, he's been off and running ever since.

Without Further ado -I give you Nitro Addict. Of which of course he will be recieving a reciprocating permenent link, as soon as I decide where to put it. Vist there, or check on my Tech page for occasional updates and media.

»Dec22nd – »2006

Some refinement to website

Webcam - Getting used to the stylesheet and it's properties too a litte bit but I've got the webcam images clearer. Turns out my upload resolution didn't jive with the stylesheet "popup" resolution. Matching the two, and making the thumbnail a scaled version of that cleared things up a lot. I also resolved the issue of the captions being hard to see when the colors in the room changed. The overlays provided by ConquerCam were only in 320x240, so I wasn't able to line up the caption with the overlay. The overlays provide a "masked" area that does not change as the view of the webcame changes. I simply put the overlay image in Gimp, and scaled it up to the resolution I am using (355x288).

There was also an issue with the location of the new webcame pictures since the stylesheet extracts them from a seperate folder. An adjustment to the upload location in the webcam's FTP software fixed that.

Christmas Grapic -Not a big deal, but added a Santa Graphic on just the Home page.

»Dec2nd – »2006

Yet another change to the Den.

After hemming and hawing over the previous design of the den I looking for another design at www.OSWD.org

Radical Change - After being obsessed with keeping my design to fill a 1280x1024 desktop resolution, I came to find I was limiting myself in my choice of templates. I found this one and liked it a lot. It's got some cool features and a slick look. I would have rejected it because of it's narrow design before, but decided to put that prejudgidice behind me. I was actually easier to manipulate then the previous design and came out looking better.

»Nov15th – »2006