More Rocks

I know I am very behind on this, but here is the last round of rocks.  We’ve had a few instances where when we were all done, they just weren’t polished enough so we but them back in, or started a new round and added as we went along.  We’ve got one more batch in right now, but haven’t had the time to start the polish stage.  Below is a picture of the last batch that actually completed and looked good.  We’ve already been back to the rock shop to pick up more ‘grit’.  Camden and Shelby both enjoy going out to look for rocks that might be good to tumble, our church parking lot is nothing BUT rocks.  Hopefully as the weather warms up we can get more.  While the ones you buy for the rock shop end up looking the coolest, they do get expensive.

First Round of Rocks

So we’ve finally completed our first round of rock tumbling.  Here is a before picture…this is what we started with.

And this is what we ended up with…

If I had planned ahead at all I could have arranged the rocks in the same order they were in to begin with so it is easier to compare….but you get the idea.  Also you may notice that there are a few more in the finished picture than what we started with.  Some of the rocks broke into two pieces and I did add a few as we went along.  Now I have to figure out what to do with them.  Tara suggested I put them in a display container of some sort.  This is what we had on hand….of course the obvious place to display them is on the china hutch next to all the fine china that has been passed through the generations.

So now, on to the next phase…..more rocks!!  The next batch will be all rocks that we found in our yard….however I did add a couple that came with the tumbler of similar size and texture.  Here is the starting point.

Stay tuned to see if we get any rare gems!  This round should be all ready the second week of January.

Rock Tumbling....the new hobby

Camden and I have recently started a new hobby...Rock Tumbling.  We started last week with some very rough rocks and let them tumble for one week.  Here we are about to open the container and see what the rocks look like after stage one (there are four stages total)

Here is what the water and course grit turned into after tumbling 24 hours a day for seven full days.  It all turned into a very gray liquidy sludge.  Camden didn’t think it looked very good.

I didn’t get a picture of the rocks before we started the first stage so this picture won’t really mean anything, but this is what some of the rocks looked like after the end of the first stage.

This is what the next round of rocks looks like before starting stage one.  After this we will do stage two which smoothes the rocks a bit more before we do two stages of polishing.

As you can see above, there are lots of sharp rough edges that will be rounded off in stage one.  Next week we’ll post pictures of this batch after stage one and start stage two.  Below is a picture of how it all fits together inside the tumbler with water, rocks, and the very course grit.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Single Player Campaign

I’m only about an hour and a half into the game so I certainly don’t have a full spectrum report….but so far it is both amazing and terrifying!  I loved the first installment of Modern Warfare, but this latest one is even more intense.  Most of the time I feel like I am just running for my life trying to get to the next objective, keep in mind I am playing on the lowest, easiest setting called “Rookie”.

Level 1 has you defending a bridge builder immediately after finishing the brief training.  After the bridge is set, you man a Humvee mounted machine gun as you patrol the seemingly quiet streets……until you get ambushed.  The rest of the level has you running behind your squad leader as you clear out buildings of enemies while trying to not harm any innocent bystanders.  It’s very close-quarters fighting and really gets your heart pumping.

Like the first Modern Warfare, there are frequent (and automatic) game save points so if you do happen to die, which I do frequently, you only have to go back a little ways to re-play.

Level 2 begins with a frustrating-if-you’re-not-coordinated climb up a sheer ice wall.  Sounds easy enough; left click swings the left ice axe, right click swings the right….I got confused about 3/4 of the way up (twice) and fell to my death.  After getting to the top it’s a long jump to the next ice wall.  This level is more of a ‘stealthy’ level where you try to avoid contact as much as possible.  But, since you are outside in a blizzard you have to use a heartbeat sensor to see your enemies and avoid them.  It’s difficult to see, and the longer you stay outside, the harder it is to see as your vision slowly ices over.  Taking cover in buildings is hard because they are occupied.  Eventually you get to blow stuff up, drive a snowmobile and jump it across a large crevasse!

When you start the game it warns you of disturbing content and gives you the option to skip it without penalty.  Level 3 is that content.  Even is you decide initially to play the level, it asks two more time before you start the level if you want to play the disturbing scenario.  Again if you start playing you can skip it via the pause menu...I recommend skipping this level.  I won’t explain it here, it is disturbing.

Level 4 had me running confused and lost through a small hilltown village where I had absolutely no clue how to get to my objective all the while being being shot at from all directions……all directions.

I am currently at Level 5 (if I’ve counted correctly) and the war is now on American soil.  Lots of running, and shooting, and currently I am defending a fast food hamburger joint.  You get to control unmanned drones to fire weapons from the air.  Very fun, but very intense!

All this is just in the single player mode.  I’ve played multiplayer a bit already as well, and am very impressed with the new features.  More on that later.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

I was curious how they were going to handle the technical aspects of this game regarding copy protection.  In Modern Warfare 1 there was the ability to buy one game and load it onto multiple computers to play over a local network.  This time you are required to sign up with an online gaming forum called “Steam”.  The serial number that comes with your game is assigned to your account.  My understanding is that you can load the game on multiple computers and play it without the need of the physical DVD disc once loaded.  You can also play your game both online and as a single player campaign from any computer that has the game loaded, since you are required to log into your Steam account before the game launches.  The great thing about that is you always have access to your character and don’t have to worry about making sure you have your latest profile with you if for instance you play at home and when there is nothing going on at work.

Which means, you can’t load the game on multiple computers and play your friends if you only have one copy of the game.  Each Steam account requires a serial number and validation code for the media you purchased.  This certainly prevents people from buying one copy and handing it out to their friends for online play.  It is seamless and a very well executed integration between the game and online service.  The online lounge seems a lot like the Playstation3 multiplayer lounge for the first Modern Warfare….I like it.  It seems to match you automatically with the best server for your connection and player ranking.  You also have the option of inviting friends to your game or creating your own ‘server’.

I’ll write more about this game as I progress…..so far I really really like it, only wish it had a ‘take cover’ option like in the Rainbow Six Vegas games.  I like to hide behind walls and stuff.

Something a little different

Typically this blog is about tech/computer stuff, today is a little different, it's about parenting. My wife had a brilliant idea the other day of having a little bucket containing plastic spoons. On each spoon is written a 'privilege'. When our son disobeys he has to go to the bucket and choose a spoon. Whatever is on the spoon is the privilege he loses for the day. Things like losing dessert, no TV, no Computer, lose one toy, his favorite place to play at the mall. The power of suggestion is amazing! Even if he has not thought of going in weeks to the destination that he pulls out of the bucket.....he suddenly becomes devastated that he no longer has the opportunity.

We've also started reading a book we got from the library called "Aaron's Way". For anyone who deals with (or even has) a strong willed child.....this book is a must read. It's a book written by the mother of a now grown strong willed child named Aaron. Throughout the book there are comments from Aaron giving his perspective. It's full of encouragement and tips on what worked for them. If nothing more, it gives a sense that you are not the only one with a strong willed child.

*this blog was written and posted using Windows Live Writer…..first time using it.  Seems way easier than doing it online on blogger.

Windows Vista Update

I have not booted into XP on my home system for several months. I have not yet run into anything that I can't do in Vista Ultimate 32bit OS. I don't have any crash problems or driver issues either. My computer looks great, runs great and even edits video from our new HD video camera decently (Canon HF20). My next big step is to move to Windows 7 when it is released. For some reason I still don't want to completely wipe out my XP system drive...paranoia I suppose. Everything is backed up and since I haven't even booted into XP in months, there probably is no reason to keep XP on my system.

I still run XP on my work computer and on our slow 'primary' home computer downstairs in the living room. Work computer we keep the same for cost and compatibility reasons, our slower home computer just isn't powerful enough to run Vista.

Thought you might be interested in an update.

Geocaching

I have recently begun to enjoy Geocaching with my son. It is a fun little 'treasure hunting' game that uses GPS coordinates to locate the 'cache'. You create a free account at www.geocaching.com and search for caches near you. You read a description of the cache, read logs from previous finders and can then get an aerial map view of the location if you so desire. The description and hints usually give you the details of what to look for once you are near the GPS coordinates.

I find the satellite view from Google Maps to be the best way to pinpoint the location of the cache. Up until the most recent update to the Google Map website (as well as the Maps app on the iPhone) has been spot on every time. The new update however seems to snap the location to a street instead of the actual coordinates. The easiest way around this is to just add "loc: " to the beginning of the coordinates when you use them in Google Maps.
Incorrect coordinates will look like this:
N 47° 24.034 W 122° 14.599
Correct coordinates will look like this:
loc: N 47° 24.034 W 122° 14.599
Hopefully this will be fixed in future releases of either the Geocaching app or in the Maps app for iPhone. Until then be sure to add "loc: " to get the right placement on the map!!

I've recently purchased the Geocaching app for my iPhone. While the app is a little too expensive for my taste, it is so fast and easy to use I highly recommend it for anyone using their iPhone for Geocaching. The iPhone GPSr is not the most accurate (about 55feet at its best) but the ability to see recent logs, descriptions, hints, maps, nearby caches etc....makes it a very useful device while out and about.

My son (who is four right now) really enjoys going to "look for treasure". He's been able to trade things when we find caches large enough for toys and such. He's traded hot wheels cars and small McDonalds toys. It's a fun adventure and a way to get out and explore! This summer we are going on a trip to Yellowstone and hope to find some caches along the way.

We've purchased a few 'Travel Bugs' to drop along the way. Travel Bugs are special dog tags that have a unique serial number printed on them. When someone finds one in a cache, they are supposed to log in to the website and report that it has been picked up. They are then able to drop it off in another cache and report where it has been dropped. This will be a fun way to track your items and see where they travel. Most Travel Bugs have a goal listed, so when you pick one up you are supposed to help it go to it's goal location.

Here are a couple of ours so far:

( not yet dropped off in a cache )


http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=39caccfb-f327-4840-b423-6f432b9af647
I hope people add items to the key chain as it travels. It will be fun to see what kinds of hitch hikers it can pick up.

Canon HF20

After our very old Sony camcorder died on the day of our sons last-day-of-Pre-School program I have been on the search for a replacement video camera. Our Sony MiniDV camera (TRV-17) lasted us many years and I was quite sure it wouldn't be worth having it repaired. There are so many different kinds of cameras, formats, models, brands....it was a bit overwhelming. After doing a quick look online at BestBuy to get an idea of price ranges I decided to research only Canon cameras. They seemed to be more in my price range and had more of the features I wanted.

We ended up getting the Canon HF20 High Definition camcorder. It records to 32GB of internal flash memory and is expandable via an SD card slot. It records to a very good looking but very compressed HD format called AVCHD. For anyone looking to buy a camera that records this format, BE SURE to download sample clips and make sure your computer can play them. It is a very processor intensive format and requires a lot of power just to play the files. Our Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz running Vista Ultimate 32bit has no trouble playing and editing, but our AMD TurionX2 @ 1.8GHz laptop running Vista Home 32bit and our Intel Celeron @ 2.6GHz desktop running XP can't play the files well at all.

I had wrestled for a long time trying to decide whether we should get a file based recording system versus a tape based recording system like HDV. HDV records to a MiniDV tape and all video capture is therefore realtime via FireWire 400. AVCHD is just a file transfer over USB2.0 for video capture. So if you record 30 minutes of video on a HDV tape and want to edit it, you need to capture all 30 minutes in real time before you can start editing. With AVCHD, you transfer the files and can start editing within about 5 minutes.....HUGE time saver. This was a big selling point for me bacause the reason I hardly ever edited the video I shot previously was because it took so long to put in on the computer to begin with.

While you save a lot of time getting the video on your computer using AVCHD, you do sacrifice some time at the end of the edit when you export a file. Again it is a very processor intensive format so the computer must decode, then re-encode the video to make a new file to save on your computer. On my Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz, it is about a 5:1 ratio for export. For every 1 minute of edited video, it takes aobut 5 minutes to export. Luckily it is something you can set and forget, let it run overnight or while you're eating dinner.

Very happy with the camera so far. Here are some things I really like about the Canon HF20:
File based video transfer
Expandable memory
Takes HD still photos while shooting video
Built in video light and flash
Small, small small small!! Can fit into a big jacket pocket easily.
At the middle recording mode (of 5 settings) can hold about 6 hours of video on internal memory
Plenty of manual settings (Aperture, Exposure, Focus etc...)

Here are some not so cool things:
90 minute battery life with stock battery (seems short to me)
You must plug camera into the wall power to transfer files from internal memory
Need a pretty beefy computer to play back files
Long export time for edited videos

Obviously if the bad things I listed were deal breakers I would return the camera....but realistically all the pros heavily outweight the cons in my mind. Quality of the video is quite good. Low light could be better I suppose, but to get the low light quality you'd need to spend a LOT more money on a camera with 3 chips....way out of my price range. The HF20 got really good reviews on cnet.com and also on Amazon.com (my two favorite places to get info on electronics). Besides, CNET says it is on par with other cameras in its class.

I edit video on Adobe Premiere CS4 and have had very good results. The camera did come with some editing software that says it's able to put your edited video back on the camera....I have not yet tried it. Since the camera has HDMI out, HD/SD Component out, and composite out, there are plenty of ways to watch your video from the camera without the need to edit it. We don't have and HD TV in our house, so putting video back on the camera doesn't make sense for us. So really at this point we have no way of even watching our HD home videos, but I figure one day we will and it will be nice to have some HD footage of the kids growing up. I've posted a few videos already on Facebook, they look quite good I'd say.

THe price of hard drives is coming down so quickly, that finding a reasonably priced hard drive to store all this priceless footage will be easy. Almost every week I get some sort of email advertising name brand 1TB hard drives for less than $100. Copy the footage to one of these in an external enclosure, pop it in the fire safe for worry free long term storage.

iPhone Apps Part 2

Here are some more apps that I have found fun, useful or interesting.

If you have a Facebook account, you can download the Facebook app that will allow you to quickly update your status, check mail, send pictures, chat etc from your iPhone. It is different than the iphone.facebook.com web page. I have both on the phone but mainly use the Facebook app. The webpage is more thorough but for quick updates I like the app.

Air Sharing is a program that allows you to access your iPhone as a portable wireless hard drive. Works pretty slick but I think it only works over Wireless networks (not 3G or Edge). It gives your phone an IP address which you can access from a Mac or PC on the current network and transfer files to and from your phone using a sevure username and password. It sets up a partition for file sharing, so you don't have access to all of your music, photos and videos on the phone this way....only the files you've transferred with Air Sharing. Pretty cool.

I've been looking for a fre or inexpensive IM program that will work with Windows Live. So far the only one that is free that gets any decent reviews is one called Palringo. I installed it and set it up this morning so I haven't had a lot of time to mess around with it but so far it works....and it works fast. I sat at my computer logged in as one user and on my iPhone as another cnd chatted with myself to see how quickly it would respond. It was intantaneous. I have read reviews of peolpe having trouble adding Google Chat accounts, but I have only tried MSN and it works fine.

Cannon Game is a great game app. It is from Discovery Channel and and gives you access to a Non-Line-Of-Sight cannon and you must use elevation and velocity to catapult your projectile over mountains to destroy your targets. I haven't found a way to mute the sound yet, so it's not good for secret playing while in a boring meeting.

Not actually an app, but I did find a third party A/V cable that allows you to connect your iPhone to a TV or stereo so you can play your music or videos/photos on the TV. Haven't had any problems with it until yesterday when I plugged it in it indicated that it was not an Apple approved product and may not work properly. I did get a little bit of noise through the speakers while playing Pandora Radio but quickly went away. The cable also has USB on it so you can charge your phone too. $30....not bad at all.

More to come later!!

iPhone Apps

This is a list of the Apps I've downloaded and think are very cool and useful. Everything is this is free.

-Jott is a great little app for voice recording and transcription. It allows you to record up to 10 seconds (I think) then transmits the recording to the Jott server. The server trascribes the recording and keeps it on the website which then sends it to your phone as a note. Great way to make a to-do list while on the go without needing to stop and type. (It does require free registration on Jott.com)

-Pandora is a free custom radio station (much like Yahoo! Launchcast) which allows you to create stations based on you favorite artists. It will then play music similar to your favorites and let you rate it with a thumbs up or thumbs down.

-Simplify Media lets you stream music from your iTunes library on your home computer directly to your iPhone. This gives you access to your entire iTunes library (or music folder) which may be 50GB in size without taking up space on your phone. ( I have the 8GB version of the phone and have to be selective of what I put on it) I was driving down the freeway today listening to music that wasn't even on my phone. This program also requires you register for free and also makes you install a small 'server' program on your computer. Only issue is you always need to have your computer on to make this work....iTunes does not have to be running. I should also note that for best results, your host computer should be on an ethernet cable instead of a crappy Lynksys USB Wi-Fi adaptor. Mine keeps falling off the network.

-Bible Reader by Olive Tree puts the entire bible at your fingertips in nine translations! This program installs everything on the phone so you don't even need a data connection to make it work. This means you can put your phone in 'Airplane mode' and use it in church without the worry of receiving phone calls or text messages.

-GPS Tracker is a program that will track your phone and post the data on a website that you can share with friends and family. They can track your progess while you're on a trip giving them your location, altitude and speed at any track point. The only problems with this program is that is has to be in the front to work, you can't start it and then listen to iTunes. It's also a huge battery hog. You can however launch the program to get a reading, then close it after a few minutes just to give the website random points if you want beople to know where you are at a certain time. (other programs I've read about use SMS which is a problem if you don't have unlimited texting)

There are TONS of other apps available that I'm sure are gems, but these are the ones I've come accros so far and find useful.

Apple iPhone

Ive been one of those Anti-Apple guys for quite some time. I don't like the endless proprietary cables, plugs, and power supplies that Apple incorporates into everything they do, making you spend even more money on things you need and can only get through Apple. However, as I began researching the options of getting a new cel phone (with data connectivity) and possibly replacing my tried and true every day usable Palm TX, I began looking into the iPhone. Most of the people at my work have them and absolutely love them.


I made a list of all the things I use my Palm TX for and compared it with what is available for the Apple iPhone as included programs or free 'apps' to install. What I found was that I could do everything I do now plus a ton more by using the iPhone. It wasn't anything to enter into lightly as the monthly cost was pretty high as well as the initial cost of purchasing the phone and activating it and such. Since the monthly cost of what we are already paying for cel service for a family shared plan was the same as a single plan for the iPhone, I thought it wouldn't be too big of a strecth. Granted we will now be butting T*** on a pay-as-you-go type of plan that will hopefully not cost very much at all to maintain for the amount of time she actually will use it.


Needless to say, I bought one less than a week ago and really like it. One of the things I was really excited about was the GPS functionality. It's not what I'm used to and not quite as good as what I had with the EMTAC Navigator and Palm TX. The iPhone currently doesn't have real time turn by turn directions, but it does give directions as you would find on Google Maps and print out, has constantly updated maps, and current traffic conditions. To make it most useful, you'd want to have someone with you reading off the directions to you...but the ability to have current maps, Points of Interest via Google, and current traffic conditions make it worth while (until someone makes better software for it). Downside to this system is that it always needs a data connection to work. So when I went to Mt Rainier last weekend, as soon as I was out of the AT&T data service, my map went away. The Palm TX was my copilot for that trip and worked like a charm.

I also really like having my email always with me. There are times when I will be wiating for an email and constantly tethered to the computer waiting for a response...this way I can get email anytime all the time. Our mail server at work will also 'push' the email to my phone so as soon as the server gets the mail it alerts me....I don't have to wait for it. Standard POP3 email uses a 'fetch' schedule that will check for mail every 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Push and frequent fetching drains the battery faster than if you didn't have it on...but when you need your mail, it's there.


I have had to charge the phone everyday as opposed to my once a week charge on my old phone. I assume the battery wil last longer once the novelty of this device goes away and I stop playing with it so much, but even then it's not a huge deal since it will charge from any computer or as long as I keep the AC 'cube' with me.

I'll write more another time about all the cool things you can do with the iPhone and free apps. For now I'll say that I really really like my new phone and do think it's the future of mobile connectivity. I am impressed that my standard headphones work and the power charger is basically the USB cable that plugs either into your computer or the proprietary AC 'cube' that comes with it. The bummer is you can't use your standard car adaptor with the USB plug in the same scenario. I've purchased a car charger from Meritline.com that will be arriving this week ($5)...hopefully that will work.

More to come.

Picasa 2

I have always been one to use Photoshop any time I had to do anything picture related. Even simple straightening and cropping of photos. Recently I've been scanning in several pictures to put to a video slideshow for a memorial service and was NOT looking forward to taking every image into Photoshop to crop and straighten. In my quest to find a free simple program that would do such things I remembered about Google's free photo program called Picasa. I already had it installed on my computer but never really used it. So I updated to the latest version and opened it up to see what I could do. I love it!!! For simple tasks it is the fastest and easiest ever! SO much easier than Photoshop because there are both 'straighten' and 'crop' tools. You straighten (and adjust) a bunch of photos, then when you're done, you can save your changes. Picasa will save your original unaltered file in a hidden folder and replace your adjusted picture in place of the original. That made it super easy to straighten, crop, and color correct pictures without the hassle of opening them all in Photoshop and doing them manually one by one.

The final slideshow turned out really nice. I did it in Adobe ENcore DVD which has a nice 'automatic' slideshow feature. Although I did have revert back to CS2 to make it work. The program kept crashing when I would try to build the final project and burn a DVD using Encore DVD CS3. I almost had to revert to using Microsoft Photo Story 3 or Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder. Each are nice and easy, but quality is not nearly as good as Encore DVD.

Windows Vista

A while ago I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my new fast computer. I installed Vista on a separate internal SATA hard drive separate from my XP drive (IDE). In order to swap between operating systems I do have to go into the system BIOS and tell it to use the SATA (Vista) or IDE (XP) drive to boot from instead of putting both on the same drive and using the startup manager to switch. I don't know what is safer....but so far this seems to be working. I'm a little paranoid about putting both operating systems on the same drive but I suppose eventually that would keep the computer cooler having fewer drives inside.

There are things I really like about Vista and things I really don't like. The graphics are great. My games play very smoothly on the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz processor in conjunction with the nVidia 8500GT running DirectX 10. I think it looks better than the same hardware on Windows XP using DirectX 9.0c. I've been playing Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X. All look really good. Might look better on a better graphics card, but not worth the extra $150 to me for as little as I get to play.

Other things I like about Vista are pretty minor but cool. A search within the start menu is nice. If you're looking to launch a program that isn't in the 'START' menu, instead of doing the old Start:All Programs then hunting around for it, you can actually type in the name of the program you're looking for and it'll show up. Nice! Also when you want to rename a file in the finder, you can click on it and instead of it highlighting the entire name including the file extension, it only highlights the name....not the extension. Makes renaming files a lot faster and easier...and safer!

Vista has a much faster install time than Windows XP, and a much faster repair time as well. In my attempts to resurrect my XP system drive, I corrupted something on my Vista drive and it wouldn't boot. I was able to 'repair' by booting off the Vista install CD and the repair went very quickly unlike a repair in XP which basically reinstalls the OS.

Things that are really annoying are the lame administrator security alerts. "You need administrator rights to do this, click here to continue". So you click there and it does what it was supposed to. The problem is that I only have one user account on the computer....and it's an administrator. So I already HAVE administrator privileges. Annoying. I haven't done much research into this but maybe there is a way to disable these alerts...probably not but it would be nice!

I'm using the Windows Vista Aero 'theme' since my system is beefy enough to handle it. It looks great and all the windows have these zoom.fade effects which look nice when windows open or close. The Alt+Tab interface is cool, instead of having tiny thumbnails of the open windows to switch between, the sample windows are pretty big so you can actually see what you are choosing. Also when you mouse over the open windows down in the task bar, a decent sized thumbnail shows up down there too. Makes it a little easier to see what window you are about to open.

I haven't explored all the features in Vista and probably should go through the "what's new" or even the "welcome to Vista" stuff.....eventually I will. But for now, these are the things I noticed right off the bat.

NEW issues

My system drive for Windows XP on my new computer (old hard drive) died earlier this week. I've been working on it here and there as I get time trying to resurrect the drive so I didn't have to reinstall everything from scratch. I had a feeling it was a partition table issue from past problems with this drive so I bought a program from a company called Easeus that was supposed to repair Master Boot Records, Partition Tables, and Boot Sectors. After several attempts, I could not get it to come back to life. I did a 'surface test' and discovered it did indeed have some bad sectors so I counted it a loss and started over from scratch.

I didn't lose any of my important data since I use a program called GoodSync to backup all my important stuff on other drives. I'm getting pretty good and fast at installing Windows XP and all my programs in the right order...I've done it a lot the past several months. I am now down to the last batch of programs to install and activate (Adobe CS3 Production Studio) then I'll use a utility that came with my motherboard to backup my entire system drive. It's supped to back up the entire drive in a way that will make it easily recoverable in the event of catastrophic system failure....except if your drive physically goes bad.

One of the things I've been looking into is setting up a RAID1 (mirrored volume) for all my data (not programs or operating system). However, I've learned that you can't do that on Windows XP. So I'm again using GoodSync to back up one of my data drives to another identical drive so in the event of one drive failing, I'll have a backup immediately available. It takes a little more work to do it this way, but since I can't do a RAID1, this will have to do.

That's all for now. The computer has been running very well until this recent drive failure and I am very happy with my purchase and computer building success. I've been seeing some increased performance with games when plying using the Windows Vista operating system...I'll talk about that next time.

Computer building pitfalls to avoid

While I saved about $150 building this computer myself (I saved even more by using my old computer parts like case, DVD drives, hard drives and PCI cards) I have found myself wasting a lot of time troubleshooting things that I probably wouldn't have if someone else built the computer. Looking back though, I would still build it myself just for the experience and fun of putting it all together. One thing I have learned is if you don't know what it's for....you shouldn't enable it!! I ended up turning on something called Boot Manager that came with 7Tools Partition Manager. Don't enable it unless you know what you're doing. It caused me to reinstall my operating system because I didn't know what I was doing.

So here is a list of problems I ran into in this whole process:
1) My motherboard only suppors two IDE devices through the built in IDE controller. My first set of problems came when I tried to install Windows XP to the hard drive connected to the Motherboard through tehDVD-ROM drive connected to my PCI IDE controller. For some reason when the drivers were being loaded form the Windows XP CD, it could no longer read from the drive. So I ended up connecting one DVD-ROM drive and one Hard Drive to the Motherboard IDE controller to install Windows XP....everything was fine. Once installed, I connected the main hard drive and slave hard drvie to the motherboard IDE controller and all other devices to the PCI IDE controller. (by the way this was an XP repair install not a fresh clean install on a new partition)

2) I installed a couple games to the system drive but for some rerason they would not launch. Games that ran off the hard drive (like the Call of Duty 4 Demo) worked fine. The full version of Call of Duty 4 did not work. I knew my system was powerful enough to run the game since the dome worked, so I ended up installing Windows XP fresh over my old system. Same problem. The solution was to connect the DVD drives to the motherboard IDE controller instead of the PCI IDE controller. Problem solved....everything works fine now. I don't know why that makes a difference but it does. Had I known these issues, I may have researched a bit more into a motherboard with TWO IDE controllers built in.

3) 7Tools Partition Manager and Restorer 2000 are great programs worth every penny I paid for each. They have saved me on numerous occasions when I needed ot recover information off a hard drive or had to repartition a drive without blasting over it. However, in 7Tools Partition Manager there is an option for enabling a boot manager. I do not know what this does, but for some reason I enabled it anyway. BIG mistake. It caused my system to go into a never ending reboot loop where I could not get into the operating system. So I had to re-install Windows XP again. In this process I also lost my largest 250GB hard drive and all its contents. I was able to use Restorer 200 to recover most of it, but some files were corrupted and some were just too big, I had no place to put them. I also lost about 120GB of space on my drive. I'm still trying to figure that one out, but lesson learned....if you don't know what it does, don't mess with it!!

All in all it was a very enlightening learning experience to put this fancy little computer together. I don't at all regret buying the pieces from NewEgg and building it myself, I just wish I had known about the whole IDE thing earlier and ESPECIALLY I wish I had not enabled Boot Manager! Lesson learned. At this point all of my games work, my encoding software is lightning fast and both of my LCD screens look great!

Super Fast Computer!

I just completed a few benchmark testing cycles with the new computer and I am very impressed....even before overclocking! I've been using these programs for testing purposes:
CPUMark 2.1
ViMark Video Encoding Benchmark
Heavyload (for testing the overclock stability)
Nero Recode (for compressing DVD-9 into DVD-5 size)
Handbrake (for converting DVDs to AVI for my PalmTX...gives a frames per second encode speed)

The programs I've been using for monitoring temperature and clock speed:
CPUTrueSpeed
CPU-z
RightMark CPU Clock Utility

RightMark CPU Utility is great for monitoring (CPU Clock speed, temerature, performance monitor, etc). It looks like it does everything. When running, it sits in the little clock bar and just lets you know what's going on....without getting in the way! I love it.....and it's free! I've tried the provided EasyTune5 for overclocking the processor and it seems to to a great job. It's super easy and the best thing about it, is it resets your settings back to default every time you restart your computer (unless you tell it to do otherwise). I like that in case I mess something up, I can reboot and all is well again.

Even though I haven't done a LOT of speed testing due to some unforseen issues which wasted a lot of my time, I'm very impressed with the dual 2.66GHz processor. I'll see if I can post some screen shots of my testing results for comparison, but it's fast!

I've installed some new games and they look awesome! Call of Duty 4 and Rainbow Six Vegas run very smoothly and look great!

New Computer Progress

The new computer is now up and running after a few different trouble shooting sessions. After putting all the components together and powering up, the motherboard would POST (Power On Self Test) and I could get into the system BIOS, but it would not boot the operating system off the hard drive. Granted I was using my old hard drive and had my doubts it would actually boot, I was disappointed to find I couldn't even boot off the WindowsXP CD-ROM. I got as far as the "Starting Windows" blue screen after it loaded the drives, then would freeze.

My configuration at the time was the System hard drive and one slave hard drive were attached directly to the only IDE controller on the Motherboard. The two DVD-R drives were connected to a Promise PCI IDE controller card. Turns out that I needed to connect the DVD-R and the system drive to the same IDE controller on the motherboard in order to launch WindowsXP off the CD and repair my Windows XP installation on the system hard drive. Once the repair was complete, I was able to load all the new drivers for the new components and now everything is up and running smoothly. I don't think I lost any data!! I'll need to go in and reconfigure the drive letter back to the original settings but that's no big deal (especially compared to losing all my data)

The bottom line....everything works, so far it seems to be running faster than before and I didn't even have to reinstall the operating system from scratch.

Things to try with this new system:
-Compare video encoding speeds with old benchmarks
-Play old games and see if they run faster
-Try overclocking
-Eventually install Windows Vista

I'm a bit nervous to do overclocking but this Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard came with the software for overclocking. I like this idea better then going into the system BIOS and doing it from there since I don't really understand all the different settings and options.

So far so good, I'm doing a DVD encode right now using Handbrake and it seems to be only using half the processing power, I'll need to figure out how to fix that. I think on the laptop it uses 100% processors...but that runs on Vista. I shouldn't complain though, this is a juge jump in speed than my old Pentium 4 2.4GHz computer. I think it encoded at about 75fps, this is currently at 154fps.

YouTube videos on your PALM

vconvert.net allows you to enter the URL of a Youtube video and convert it to a WMV, QuickTime or Flash video and download it to your computer. The video is actually converted online using the server, then you just download the converted video, you don't need a super fast computer to get this done. I have not had any success with the WMV option, nor have I tried the Flash option. I've been able to use the QuickTimes and watch them on my computer right away.

To get them onto the PalmTX, I've used a program called PocketDivxEncoder to convert the QuickTime to an AVI file using the Divx codec. That AVI file plays very well on the PalmTX through TCPMP. PocketDivxEncoder is a pretty fast program for encoding files, but it is processor taxing so the faster your processor, the faster it will encode. This program does not work with Windows Vista.

Once you have the AVI file saved on your computer you can put it on your PalmTX SD card using a card reader. Don't try to 'sync' it through the Palm desktop software or the file will get converted again automatically to an ASF files (reducing its size and quality...again).

The videos you get from Youtube through this method aren't high quality by any means...it's Youtube for crying out loud. But if you're looking for a way to get some music videos on your Palm, it's the only way I know how.

New Computer

I'm putting together a new computer. I'll be using most of my old computer parts and upgrading to a new motherboard, processor, video card, and RAM. Hopefully it all works, but I'm a bit nervous putting it all together since I've never really done that before. I've taken pre-built bare bones systems and added to it, but never started from the motherboard and processor.

Here is my new parts list (all purchased from newegg.com for less than $500):
Motherboard- GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX
Processor- Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775
Video Card- ASUS EN8500GT TOP/HTP/256M GeForce 8500GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
RAM- G.SKILL 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory
CPU Cooler- ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler (in case I decide to vernture into overclocking)

The only thing I'm not 100% sure about it working is the RAM. I went to Gigabyte's website (manufacturer of the motherboard) and found the 'approved memory' section and G.SKILL was not on the list. I figured DDR2 800 RAM is all the same so I found the best deal and went with it....hopefully it wasn't a mistake. If it doesn't work, I suppose I'll return it to Newegg.com and see if I can get a different kind. I wanted to get one stick of 2GB RAM instead of two sticks of 1GB RAM, it makes for easier upgrades in the future if I ever decide to switch over to Windows Vista which supports over 2GB RAM.

I'll take the parts from my current computer and put them together with the new. Case with 400watt power supply, three internal IDE hard drives (7200rpm), a firewire PCI card, SONY DVD-ROM drive, Pioneer DVD+-RW drive, and a PCI IDE controller. The new motherboard only supports one IDE channel so I'll need to use the IDE controller card to run the DVD Drives and the other two hard drives. Eventually I'll switch over to SATA drives, but not yet. I'm doing only what I can afford at the moment.

All the parts should arrive on Friday. I'll let you know how it all went!