Since this weekend I’ve assembled my new PC after it being in boxes for a few days. I simply didn’t have the space to do it.

I bought a new one because the old one started crashing a lot … in the end Windows wouldn’t even boot and I worked on my laptop for over a week. It’s amazing how much more you do around/in the house when you don’t have a working computer 😉

Specs of the new one:

• Intel Core2 Duo E8400 (3GHz), Zalman cooler
• 2x 2GB DDR2
• Asus P5Q-WS mainboard
• 2x 250GB WD SATA HD on 3Ware 9500S
• Geforce 9600GT 512MB Zilent
• Lian-Li PC60 Silver case
• Plextor 16x DVD-ROM
• NEC 16x DVD-RW with Lightscribe
• Hauppauge WinTV PCI (Almost 10 years old!)
• 2x Samsung Syncmaster 920N 19" TFT

Should be OK for the upcoming years, and the upcoming GTA IV, I hope 😀 

(And the first game I’m going to play on it is… OpenTTD, yay for such power hungry apps :D) 

Anyone in Belgium in want/need of some USB/serial/Ethernet temperature sensors?

I would like to order 2 for personal use but the shipping cost is quite steep, sharing it would be useful for all…

Here’s the info page 🙂 If you’re interested, please let me know. 

Last sunday Bertem lost power for about 2 hours. The fact that it went down at 20:00 -precisely- was a bit odd I thought, called Electrabel and heard an ITR of 2 hours…which was about right.

At those times you realise a) how nice it is to have a UPS b) how little you can do without power.

Watch a movie, nope. Read, nope, too dark. Clean up, hardly, too dark. Watch TV, nope. Computers, nope. All my computers, servers, routers, modem, etc had power, but Telenet was down, too. Sigh 😉 

Caught the following spam in my mailbox: 

I write to bring to your notice that I am the Nigerian new foreign affairs minister and an official delegate from the United Nations To Central Bank Of Nigeria to pay 150 Nigerian 419 scam victims $1000,000.00 USD (One Million Dollars) each. You are listed and approved for this payment as one of the beneficiaries to be paid this amount as compensation.

Hmm. 😉 

Dell’s Printer Driver CD is "special". If you put it in your windows box, you get Windows and Linux drivers. If you mount it under Linux, you only get the Linux drivers. I guess this is a "you don’t need it anyway" scenario, and as such classified as ‘good intentions’. However, it’s pretty annoying if you want to copy the Windows drivers to a fileshare for the other Windows boxes to access… sigh.

Last weekend I got Guitar Hero: Aerosmith from my wife, as a present for our first anniversary. Cool game, and I’m having lots of fun with it although a lot of cool Aerosmith songs seem to be missing (e.g. Crying) – one minor niggle in the star power mode: most people in your audience should be lucky they’re not living in the middle ages, as they would be burned as witches. No other person can clap so much out of sync with the music, you should try it! It really is impossible, and especially it completely gets you out of rhythm 🙁 I’m avoiding star power as much as possible because of it 🙁 (no clapping in the original GH3, as far as I know). The Guitar Hero series rocks 😉

I forgot to mail my original GH3 DVD to Nintendo, so I’ll do that on monday; why, you ask?  Because the original Wii release has a bug in that it only produces mono sound. You can recognize the fixed version by the guitar on the disc print (in Europe, or a star on the US version). Disc swaps are free until August 31, so hurry up if you didn’t do it yet!

Like before :

A convicted spammer fatally shot his wife and young daughter in an apparent murder-suicide Thursday while being sought after escaping prison last weekend, authorities said.

Heh. 

 (link to article )

2 more kittens coming up! 😉

If you’re a system administrator and haven’t heard from Areca RAID controllers, you’ve probably been living under a rock somewhere. Throw out your 3wares, throw out your Adaptecs (if you’re happy with software RAID, keep it), insert Areca for instant fun. 🙂

I’ve been using them for quite a while now and I’m quite happy, mostly in RAID6 configurations, with great performance.

Some things can do with some improvement though…

– Web interface looks a bit dated, but hey, it works

– Expansion of volume set through the CLI didn’t work on my box. Areca says update the BIOS, but it’s at the latest, Areca says update your Linux driver, but hm. Maybe later 😉

– More on expansion: I expanded a volume set, and the status changed to "Initializing(15%)". INITIALIZING. Sounds terribly wrong and datalossy for an online expansion… luckily it was indeed expanding it, as it works fine now 😉 But still. It got very hot all of a sudden…

Luckily it all works grreat now, so as long as they keep this up they’ll always have my Euro’s 😉