I have downloaded the .iso image, but given the recent problems with my desktop PC, I am not prepared to risk it on there, and not too sure if it will work properly on the laptop – Vista fails to load working drivers for the wireless!
May have to wait till I get new PC and I can try it on the newly designated “old PC” ;-)
I thought the external temperature gauge in the car was broken this morning… the – sign was missing from the front of the number!
In fact I will be turning the central heating back to ‘timed’, it has been on 24x7 for well over a week now. I have found from previous winters, that it is actually cheaper to have it on continuous but with the thermostat turned really low, than on timed with the stat turned up.
But sods law looks to be in force again, I was hoping to go golfing tomorrow, but the forecast is for heavy rain and 20 mph winds!
If you have a Canon compact digital camera.
Ever waned to be able to save in RAW format from your compact, or have a live histogram? What about exposures up to 64 seconds, flash sync at 1/60000th or exposure bracketing ! Then you need “Canon Hack Development Kit” You can even script your camera to fire on motion detection!!
Check http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK for full details, of features and supported models.
Unfortunately, my “IXUS 85 is” isn’t supported yet, but development is proceeding apace, and there should be a functional port within a week or two.
As the week progressed, call volumes have gently increased, and the boredom level has dropped and the temperatures, whilst still low are now at least higher than zero.
The one thing that has not got better is the traffic. The road works on the Hagley Road have re-opened after their xmas break, and it is complete chaos again. Even on the bike, the ride home is terrible, and a good 5 minutes longer than ‘Normal’, I just hope they finish soon.
Today is my first ‘Long Weekend’ of the year, and due to the remaining frost, the golf course is mostly closed, and it is forecast heavy rain for Monday!
Amy’s new handset arrived on Tuesday evening, and I requested the old number be ported, that is due for completion today, but the 3 PAYG SIMS that were supposed to be sent, were in fact SIM only Monthly contracts. I had to call Orange and cancel those, and an now awaiting delivery of the re-ordered PAYG SIMS.
I had hopes that Monday would mark the return to ‘Normality’ – traffic, meal, work etc. No Such Luck!!
Monday morning was –4C with almost an inch of snow, and whilst the mains roads would not be a problem, as usual the estate was not a good place to try riding a powerful motorbike. So with great reluctance I used the bus.
It took 40 minutes to travel the 5.5 miles to work, and then we had no work!!! Only 5 calls between 7 people all day. I watched Rambo (2008) and Hancock to pass the time!
The journey home was equally great, 55 minutes for the 5.5 miles, stood up for the first 20 minutes.
No wonder there is a reluctance to leave the car at home, and use public transport – 105 minutes for an 11 mile round trip (6.3MPH!!!) and to add insult to injury, the prices have just been increased by 12%. £3.40 return!!!!
This morning is still frozen over, but I am going to risk the bike for the 200 yards to the main road.
Yesterday (Saturday) afternoon we went to the Hippodrome in Birmingham to see Robin Hood starring John Barrowman (Capt Jack from Torchwood / Dr Who)…
Verdict – Excellent. Apart from JB, the only other well known (to me at least) face was Don Maclean (Friar Tuck), but everyone was pretty darn good, and Titan the Amazing Giant Robot was fantastic!
It seems that the exact same show will be running in Cardiff this Christmas, so if you are in the are, check it out ;-)
Well the year has started off rather chilly, and I have not done much today, apart from top up the bird feeder in the garden, I hope it is a little warmer in the morning, negative temperatures on the bike are not fun, even with heated grips!
After a rather late night out at Jackie & Pete’s, I had a rare ‘lie in’ this morning – 10:30!! and even so, am still rather tired, so it will be an early(ish) night tonight… back at work in the morning. Meals have been a bit random again today – a combined lunch and breakfast at 11:30, a piece of cake at 13:00 and finally tea at 19:00… Not much chance of things improving tomorrow either – We have a 40th birthday party at 19:30!
On Saturday, we have a couple of missions to accomplish in the morning – Latin dance shoes and a bus pass for Amy – before heading off to the Hippodrome in Birmingham for the Panto.
I am almost looking forwards to next Monday, with normal traffic, a reasonable workload to pass the time, and proper meals at my normal times! And yes, you did read that right, I am at work on a Monday!!! I have gone more for the Friday to Monday 4 day weekends every other week for the start of the year.
The next thing I have to get sorted out is the mobile phones, Amy has been nagging me for a while to replace the Samsung D600 with a Samsung U900 ‘Soul’ in pink, and as my BT Mobile contract has now expired, I can do something about it. Looks like we will be going to Orange, where I can get a Soul in pink for free on sub £20 per month contract (200 minutes, unlimited texts) and two PAYG SIM’s with a bonus 300 text messages for free. Even if I take out the ‘insurance’ on the phone (£6 per month – covering damage, loss, theft etc) it is still a saving of £20 to £25 per month on what I am paying now!
Still been sorting out little bits of PC config etc., and have made sure that I have backed up again after every single change!! Nothing like bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted eh?
I have decide on an ASUS P5Q Deluxe Mobo, 4 GB of DDR 800 RAM, a 500 GB HDD and an ATI 4850 Video Card.
The GPU was based on a a desire for a PC that can play occasional games, so a ‘decent’ frame rate in “Flight Sim 10” (26 fps @ 1680 x 1050 with AA4x) and “Test Drive Unlimited” (66 fps @ 1680 x 1050 with AA4x) were required, and the fact that it can manage Crysis at 37fps @ 1680 x 1050 albeit without AA is a bonus.
At about £120 it’s a little pricey, but it will easily last the life of the PC without the need to upgrade.
The HDD conclusion came from the fact that with almost everything installed, and some ‘zipping’ up of older, less used documents etc/, I now have almost 50 GB free on a 250 GB HDD! I may be tempted to install 2 of these drives and use the second unit purely as a backup device.
After several weeks of really wet Monday’s and another couple of weeks of ‘Man Flu’, I finally manager to get down the golf course today.
Given the 7 week break since I last played, I was quite pleased with how well I hit the ball, and the poor scores were mainly down to very tricky greens! They are not very flat and the speed of the green seems to vary from one end to the other!
I only played 6 holes, as part of a four ball with three lads I met on the first tee, but by the time we had played that many (another two 4 balls in front!) I was starting to flag a little, and my back has started to tighten up already!
Following on from my recent investigations, I realised that there was in fact a 3.33 GHz Dual Core CPU, the E8600. I checked the benchmarking details of this item against the E8500 (winner according to the previous post), and found that it gave an average of 40% improvement over my current CPU compared to the 35% for the E8500. So am I going for the E8600? Probably not!
I added some cost data to my little spreadsheet, and came to the following conclusions for cost per % of improvement:
E8500 - £4.54
E8600 - £5.25
Q9550- £10.05
i7-920 - £16.15
So at £220 rather than £164 (CCL Computers today's date) it is not a cost effective option, and the extra 5% would equate to a 4 second saving on a 1’40 task!!
Still struggling over the spec for new PC, Current dilemma:
First question AMD or Intel? I am happy with Intel, and it seems that Photoshop CS4 is written to take advantage of the Intel instruction set, so… Intel it is>
Next Question:
Do I Spend £180 and get a 3.1GHz dual core (E8500) or for an extra £100 get a 2.8 GHz quad core (Q9550)?
Moving up the quad core speed list the 3.0 GHz Q9650 is about £460 – way too expensive.
The Core i7 CPU’s are the last option, with the 2.66 GHz version (i7-920) being available for about £240 (faster versions jump to £490/£880 for 2.9/3.2 GHz)
The article on Tom’s Hardware (CPU Charts Q3 2008)confirms that the dual core at a 3.1 GHz would be on average 35% faster than my current processor across a range of real world applications*, moving to a 2.8GH Quad core would, in most cases only give me a 20% improvement, and the 2.6 GHz i7 would be even worse at a mere 11%.
This is a only true, however, for those apps which currently are not written to take advantage of multiple cores (i.e. almost everything!) For the select few that are (WinRAR 3.8, AVG antivirus) the improvement for the Quad Core averages 90%, and for the i7 130%!!
If software writers continue to be slow on the uptake of this multi-core technology, I think the 3.1 GH Dual core is the way to go.
* The benchmarks considered here were:
Applying multiple filters to a large image in Photoshop CS3
Zipping up a large number of files with Winzip 11
Ripping a DVD in iTunes
Converting a large document in Acrobat Pro 9
Running a demo in Unreal Tournament 3.0
Scanning a collection of files with Grisoft AVG 8
Zipping a large number of files with WinRAR 3.8
Only the last two apps are ‘Multi-Core Optimised’
to where I was before the hard disc failure.
I have, after many hours of downloading, and updating, patching, installing etc. managed to restore my PC back to a fully working condition, with no significant loss of data.
All I know that is missing is three weeks worth of e-mails, and none of them were of great significance.
The biggest pain, was that just before losing the drive, I had spent about 10 hours tidying up the “My Documents” and “My Pictures” folders. After restoration, everything was a mess again, and it just seems much more like hard work when you have to do the same job for the second time!
The upshot of the last rationalisation, is that the free space on the 250 GB drive is now near 50GB, so it will last till I change the PC now. Additional benefit of ‘zip’ or ‘rar’ ing several large but not well used folders is that the number of files on the drive has decreased by several 10’s of thousands, which makes backups (yes I am backing up every day at present) and defraging much quicker.
My hard drive failed over the weekend, it is not even seen by the BIOS reliably, so not much chance of recovery.
I have now switched back to the smaller (250GB) drive that I recently installed Vista 64bit on, and after several hours of updating AV programs, Windows, utilities etc (who would have though there were so many updates in just 3 months?) I now have a vaguely working machine. Fortunately, I did refresh my backup on the external HDD just three weeks ago, so not too much data loss, but it is still a pain!
OK, now to see if I have configured 'Live Writer' correctly...
I was quite surprised by how well some of the pictures from my little canon iXUS 85 turned out.
Set to 'Night Snap' mode, and flash turned off. Only a little re-touching (levels, vibrancy and cropping) in Photoshop and they are now available for all to see here:
Not long got back home from the NIA in Birmingham - Public transport really is shocking for a major city on a Friday night - it took over 1 hour to get a bus 5 miles home! - Anyway...
Really enjoyed the show, not as much as previous shows, not Katherine's fault, I just don't think the NIA is anywhere near as good a venue as Symphony Hall.
Blake were as good as I expected them to be - but a bit louder!! (One of the joys of a front row seat in front of a speaker)
Faryl Smith was an unexpected, and very welcome surprise - she really is a VERY good singer - but needs some work on 'chatting to the audience' - she forgot the name of the 'Big London Show' she attended last night (It was the Royal Variety apparently)
Finally, William Joseph was a pleasant surprise that should well find at least some of his work on my iPod before too long
Finally special thanks to the nice gent in Block A Row B Seat 2 for the sweets he handed round during the interval ;-)
Will have a look at my photo's in the morning and see is any of them are worth posting.
It’s been a good November for New CD’s this year:
Dido : Safe Trip Home ***
Katherine Jenkins : Sacred Arias ****
Hayley Westenra : River Of Dreams ****
Alesha Dixon : The Alesha Show ****
Enya : And Winter Came ***
Anastacia : Heavy Rotation **
Jewel : Perfectly Clear ***
Seal : Soul ****
Plus, Three new Audio Books from http://www.wholestoryaudio.co.uk/
Dune by Frank Herbert (21 Hours)
Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs (9.2 Hours)
Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs (9.5 Hours)
I had forgotten just how good Dune was, pity they don’t have ‘Children of Dune’ or ‘Dune Emperor’ on there too…
Unfortunately, the concert with Hayley Westenra was cancelled at short notice due to illness, so we will have to wait till early 2009 to see her again, but should still be OK for Katherine Jenkins at the NIA in a couple of weeks time.
With my CCS based website redesign.
Not too much of the new design working yet, just http://startfromhere.redbreva.co.uk/ and My Page (via the ‘My Family’ link).
The rest of the pages are there, either looking really rubbish, or just as place-holders.
Not sure yet though’ why Firefox shows a dark space under the pictures in the Family menu table, it look OK in IE 7. Hmm bit more digging required into the CSS attributes there I think!
Coldest morning of the winter so far – frost on the ground, changing to sleet, and the central heating boiler decides to have a lie in!
The nice man from British Gas came at about 10:00 and found that a fan assembly was seized. he lubricated it with WD40 and managed to get it running again – sort of, but it’s a bit noisy and needs changing.
He will be back on Tuesday at about 09:00 to replace the faulty part, just hope it keeps running till then.
In the meantime the advice is to leave the heating on as much as possible, because if it stops, it may seize up again!
Fitted the new video card this evening, and re ran the windows performance benchmark test.
The 2D figure increased from 4.3 to 5.9
The 3D figure increased from 4.4 to 5.5
But best of all, Photoshop CS4 now uses the GPU on zoom, panning, colour translations etc. to run faster and better.
I recently installed the new CS4 edition of Photoshop, which supports hardware acceleration from supported video cards.
Seems my Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT is not one of those supported cards! Mind you it is a pretty old card now – almost 3 years old and it was only £65 new…
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 2.2 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth - 6.5 GB/s
Memory Size - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version - 9.0c
HDR Lighting - 64 bit
According to Nvidia’s web site, this is a card in the “Business User, Casual Gamer, Home PC User” category, and the best card in that group is a 9500GT DDR3 (£38 +VAT)!
NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT (GDDR3)
Texture Fill Rate (Per Second) - 8.8 billion
Maximum Memory Bandwidth - 25.6 GB/s
Memory Size - 256 MB
Supported DirectX Version - 10
HDR Lighting - 128 bit
So, it should be about 4 times quicker, not bad for less than £50, may even manage to run “Microsoft Flight Sim X” at a reasonable frame rate now ;-)
