Entry #0012

As you all may know, there has been a lot going on here lately. I am moving, which is both good and bad. Good for the location (not in a high crime area) but bad in the aspect that I will be further away from some of my friends. The place we’re moving into is great, and we’ll have a get-together once we get all settled in.

Now, onto the nerdy stuff. I recently downloaded the demo to Battlefield 2142.. and might I say that I was very impressed. The people at EA have really stepped it up a notch. The netcode is much much better, and the playability is fantastic.

Above: Screens from BattleField 2142

As you may notice, there has been a lot improvements in the lighting and shading. Take a look at the last screenshot.. (which was taken on my XPS m1210 notebook). There is also a new combat mode called Titan. It is a lot of fun, your main goal is to destroy the shields, board the enemy titan, and destroy it. This adds a lot to the gameplay, and is just plain fun.

I can already tell you that I will be getting this game. It’s just a great new addition to EA’s arsenal of great games.

Entry #0011

Ok, so it has come to my attention that I have a lot of websites that weren’t really linked together very well.

Poof! http://www.djsavage.net – Go here to take a gander at my other creations. Hopefully I’ll be updating the others soon to be a little more pleasing to the eye, as well as up-to-date.

Here’s a screenshot…the first one is a cube I made in SketchUp, and the next is the circle. The circle joining them I created in Photoshop, along with the text and other effects. The gnarled tree (I must confess) was yoinked from a Google Image search, all credit for the tree must go to artist Patrick McEvoy.

Let me know what you guys think….anybody know any good flash animators, lol.

Entry #0010

Ok, so I had a nerdy but cool idea that I’m sure other people have had (at least some variation to it anyway). My idea is to take a standard RC car that you’d get from the toy store and modify it to have a camera on it (built in) so you could see and record where you are driving.

This may sound simple, but upon doing more research.. it does look like a daunting task. There are lots of things to consider, a few of which I have listed below.

• FM Frequency
• Operating Distance of RC Transmitter and Receiver
• Operating Distance of A/V Transmitter and Receiver
• Interference
• Weight
• How to View Camera
• Type of RC Car to Use
• Type of Camera to Use

The list could go on and one, and let’s not forget the biggest one of all… HOW TO MAKE IT ALL WORK! Well, I’ve taken the first step…Tricia and I picked out an RC Car from Wal-Mart that was to my liking. Below are some pictures of the car out of the box.

As you can tell, this is not a super fancy Pro-RC model, but I figured that I’d start cheap and work up from there.

Below are the specs:

• 24 MHz Radio Frequency
• 9.6v Ni-Cad Batter or 8 AA batteries (works 30% faster with Ni-Cad)
• 15 Mph Top Speed (250 Mph Scale Speed)
• 150-300ft Range
• Realistic Front and Rear Suspension

I do have some work cut out for me, but I think it’ll be fun. There will be more updates soon (I hope).

Entry #0009

Have you ever wondered if somebody might be watching you? Do you ever get that feeling that you’re being watched or that someone is spying on you? Well, now there are measures you can take that will help you find out if that is true.

There have been many cases (especially in the south) lately where shop owners or private citizens have set up hidden cameras in order to spy/peek in on people. From restrooms, tanning booths, dressing rooms, to apartments… more and more people are finding out that they have been or are being watched without their knowledge.

The Wireless Camera Hunter and Viewer will fix all of that, and the beauty of this piece is that it’s an all in one unit. You don’t have to be a spy to use it. It has the screen, the scanner, and viewer all in one unit. The price might be a little more than most are willing to spend.. but for $499.99 it’s not out of reach.

(below is the product’s description on BrickHouseSecurity.Com’s website.)

This fearless Wireless Camera Hunter scans commonly used Video Frequencies in less than 5 seconds and detects any video transmissions in the area. Then the Wireless Camera Hunter locks in sources from up to 500 Feet away (depending on power of source transmitter).

Thousands of wireless cameras are hidden in public and private places – Find the ones in your area

The device allows the user to see what the Hidden Camera is seeing, making it easier to detect hidden video. The monitor display is a high resolution 2.5 ColorTFT Screen that displays the Video Image and the exact frequency of the transmission. This Wireless Camera Hunter is lightweight, portable, compact and perfect for counter surveillance applications.

You would not believe how many cameras you will find! See what they are viewing.

Entry #0008

OK, so where did I leave off? Last I mentioned, we had replaced the old floppy and CD drives with new ones and installed the OS. So of course, I wasn’t done with the build… on the front of the tower there was enough room to put two 80mm fans for better air-flow through the case. I couldn’t pass that up, so I hopped on Newegg and ordered two ultra-low noise 80mm Coolermaster fans to mount on the front of the case. (as seen below) Install was a snap, and the fans are so quite you can barely hear them at all. I had to shine a light on them and put my hand up to them to make sure they had come on. As can be expected, to have this low level of noise from a fan you sacrifice air flow. The main idea when building a case (in my opinion) is to find the right balance of noise/air flow for your setup. Since the CPU and hdd temps were already at a good level, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add these on just for a little extra boost.

Above: Front fan mounts, fans not yet attached. Pulls air in from the front of the case.

Above: NIB Cooler Master low noise 80mm fans.

Above: Dual 80mm Cooler Master low noise fans installed on the inside front of the tower to pull air from the front of the case. This greatly improved the airflow in the case and dropped the temp by about 3 degrees.

As you might have noticed, I did have to bore out the screw holes a bit to fit my screw-driver through the slot. I don’t have a tiny screwdriver or anything, so I just used a normal one that I had on hand. I love adding fans, and other mods like this.. I’m not quite sure why, but it a lot of fun.

The next step was arranging the cords and things to improve the way the air circulated through the case.

Above: Cables semi-routed. I didn’t get a good picture of the final cable routing, for some reason the pictures turned out fuzzy, but a lot better than when I first put everything in.

Final Thoughts: So that’s it for this computer build. I closed up the case and loaded all of the software on that my parents needed. I would say, however, that I could have picked a smaller case to work with and still been OK. I wanted to go with something easy to work on, and something that I could add to later on if need be. This case is HUGE! I would have liked to use a higher end case, parts, and even sleeve the cables…but I had to make due on a 5-600 dollar budget. I came in under my goal, and ended up right at 500 dollars for everything, there were a few parts that I know I could have gotten cheaper, but I didn’t want to go any lower in quality. Any thoughts or comments you might have would be great.

Entry #0007

So I have become yet a bigger nerd and created another website to add to my already ‘impossible to manage’ collection. I just resently started http://www.zidanegifs.com.

As you can see, there’s a lot of fun to be had. I think I have under-estimated the popularity of these funny images, as I will soon approach my bandwidth limit for my hosting package. This may have something to do with the fact that I have over 100 different images hosted, and gifs are not exactly small in file size. I may have to increase the hosting bandwidth limit, or remotely host the files just in case. That’ll be a lot of trouble to manage, but I want it to be up all the time. I think what I might do is have 2 versions of the site, one were all the images are hosted with my host, and another that is hosted by photobucket, and just switch to the photobucket page when i get too close to my limit.

But, don’t let that stop you.. drop on by. :)

Entry #0006

When doing the build we had first planned to save the floppy, and CD drives from the old tower, however this didn’t work out so well. The front bezels on the old CD drives were quite hideous and looked way off in the new tower, and the floppy drive didn’t have a bezel at all. So, I ordered new CD drives and a floppy.

Above: mounting the floppy, as you can see, not too pretty.

Above: Old floppy drive installed, the lack of a bezel and the black color of the drive itself didn’t’ quite match up with the rest of the tower. Much of building a computer is trial and error. Don’t be afraid to send something back, or try something different until you get the desired result.

Once we got the old CD drives and floppy installed, we loaded up the operating system (Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition). Later that night I decided to load on all the software, and after I had installed and configured the entire system to spec, I decided to load on some backup software. HUGE MISTAKE! The backup software, which I had never installed before created a corrupt partition and wouldn’t allow the system to boot at all. So we were back to square one.

After much frustration, I went on-line and found a crack for Windows XP Media Center that works like a charm. Just loaded the OS and when you first get into windows load up the crack, even Microsoft doesn’t pick up on it (at least not yet).

Above: With the OS now properly installed, here’s a screen of the bios temps. Not too shabby!

I will expand on this build further in another post, there’s lots more to cover.

Entry #0005

Ok, so I got my new laptop.. this post is being written on it actually! This thing is amazing, but we’ll get to that in time.

The main thing I want to focus on in this post is the build of my father’s computer. I have completed it, and it’s up and running great now. We ran into a few errors with the first round, but after a few trials it all worked out in the end.

I would like to thank James for all his help on the machine, he really helped alot in putting the machine together. He helped in the assembly as well as the software side of things.. so hat’s off to you James, I couldn’t have done it without ya.

Ok, so where to begin. As I have mentioned before, my father’s old machine was a snail. Upon opening up the case, I found mounds of dust, and the only fan in the machine was the cpu fan. It didn’t need much being a celeron. So as you can tell, this is a significant upgrade for my mom and dad. They’re getting out of the pre-fab boxes and into a new world of reliable custom built pc’s.

First, I had to dismantle the old system and take out the hard drive (which James is now using). Some of the pictures of the older system got lost, as well as the mobo insertion pictures. Here’s a few views of the inside of the tower.

Above: As you can see, this is the inside of the new case straight out of the box. I did remove the side CPU vent.

Above: The bottom two hd plates were also removed to increase air flow from the front 2 fans that were later installed.

Above: Front view from inside the cd drive bays, as you can see it was a mess.

Above: Bottom 2 HD mounts removed, as well as the huge CPU side funnel.

Above: The new MSI MOBO installed with Processor, Memory, and new WD SE 250gb HD installed (out of picture, it’s a hard drive.. you’ll live).

Above: A bunch of crap that came out of the old case, that I tried to fit in the new one.. but I really didn’t like the look of the bezels. Seriously, it was gross.

That’s all for you right now, I’m off to McDonald’s for some grub, there are quite a few more pictures and words to write about this build.

Entry #0004

Movie: The Lake House
Leading Actor: Keanu Reeves
Leading Actress: Sandra Bullock

Acting: 3.5 (out of 5)

As can be expected, Sandra Bullock out-played and out-performed Keanu Reeves, as she has done before. But this time, Reeves actually did not do to bad of a job. There is even a scene where he is crying over the death of one of the characters, and not once did I have the Bill and Ted movies flash into my mind. Bullock's character, Kate, does evolve and grow throughout the movie quite a bit more than Reeves's character. The supporting actors were well chosen, and did not seem out of place; however, Alex's (Reeves) brother, Henry (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) did make me feel slightly uncomfortable with his obvious anxiety and emotional issues.

Plot: 3.5 (out of 5)

I am not going to say too much about this, as I don't want to give it away too much, but the plot actually wasn't that bad. The only thing that was left out of the movie was an explanation as to how the two were able to communicate via a mailbox that seemingly knew no time or space boundaries.

Cinematography: 4 (out of 5)

Actually, this was one of the better parts of this movie. Had the cinematography been something else, or been bad, then I think the story wouldn't have been quite so moving. The images of the lake house, leaves, buildings, and overall color of the film were quite beautiful. There wasn't any amazing special effects in this 'Reeves/Bullock' film, and is in no way reminiscent of the duo's prior movies. Although, ironically there is a bus scene.

Overall: 3.75 (out of 5)

I found this movie to be entertaining, captivating, and pleasant. There are a few things I would have changed, but all in all, not to bad of a film. I would suggest this movie to any couple wanting a date movie, or to any romantic type. This movie would not be well suited for children, or movie patrons that crave action/adventure.

Please let me know of your thoughts on this movie, and let me know if I left anything important out.

Entry #0003

So.. I did it. I ordered the Dell XPS 1210 yesterday. I’m so excited! This will be the first new notebook I’ve ever owned, and boy howdy is it loaded!

The shipping date says July 10th, but as you can see.. it’s way ahead of time! I should have it by wed of next week (does happy dance).

I went all out with this one, and trust me.. there will be a detailed review and tons of pictures! The Dell XPS 1210 is what I’ve been looking for in a notebook, and now it’s mine…mwwaahahahahah!

But seriously tho, this notebook is loaded… just check out the specs:

As you may notice on the total line, it shows $2,561.00, but did I pay that? No sir Bob! My final total was $1750.00 after discounts, etc. Ahh, the glory of working for Dell *evil grin*