In the couple of months since the last folding@home performance post, my priorities have shifted somewhat. I am now after maximum stability, lifespan and minimum power usage. I’m still using the Q9300 with the linux SMP folding client, but I have now dropped its speed back to stock and even undervolted the chip a little. As a result, as I am typing this, the power draw of the system, monitor, modem and router fluctuates between 73 and 80 Watts, even with folding using all cores. That’s pretty impressive. Power bills were just getting a bit too high for my liking, especially since I am paying a bit extra for wind power. The other power usage drop has been the switch from electric to gas hot water - that made for a big difference in off-peak usage, which has now dropped to zero.

The RAM in both PCs is now 4GB as well, mainly because it is so damn cheap. I dropped the other PC back to stock speed as well, and stopped the notfred linux folding client that was running in a VM. I tried experimenting with having the machine sleep after a certain period, but with no success. I couldn’t wake the machine back up without holding the power switch in to shut it right off, then switching it on again. It took a while to come back up, too, especially if it was reading 4GB of RAM contents back off the drive. So I gave up - it’s set to spin down the disk, and that’s about it. It’ll do. Even with just my Quad core PC running at stock, it still gets ~4400 points per day in F@H, not too shabby.

While on the subject of the second machine, the Windows 7 RC is looking unlikely to stay on there very long. I had two choices for when the Release Candidate expires: buy a full version of Windows 7, or put XP back on. Well, there is the third choice of Ubuntu, but I can’t seem to get approval from the Mrs on that one. Might have to dual boot…

With the price of Win 7 looking to be a couple of hundred dollars, I thought I’d rather spend that money on a hardware upgrade that will actually make a difference in performance. So I’ll probably pick up a Solid State Disk drive in the next month or two, with possibly a dual boot, XP/Ubuntu setup. It should fly. And it means I’m not giving any of my money to Microsoft.

To follow up from my previous post, as predicted, after 10 weeks I have only made 15 posts to Twitter. Some stuff from people I follow is kind of interesting, but it’s mostly filler. At least the spam followers have dried up a bit now.

I guess I’ll keep going with the account, but it’s hard to come up with something worthwhile. Plus, 140 characters is so damn limiting - most posts there look like gibberish with all the abbreviations and shortened links. Is that really the future of the internet?

I’ve just changed the photo for the masthead of this blog, to a picture I took at the Otway Fly treetop walk. At least I know what this picture is, rather than the mystifying old one, which I think was a balcony or something.

OK, I’ve decided to join twitter and see if I’m one of the 60-odd percent of users who forget about it after a month. I mainly joined to follow other users, rather than post my own content. Anyway, I’ll see what comes of it.

Check it out here.

OK, it’s time for a change in direction. This is just a personal blog now. The grand plan was to turn it into some sort of tech site, something like a poor man’s How to Spot a Psychopath, but without the technical knowledge - and to get enough readers to support a few google ads on the site. I was aiming to make a bit of extra cash, maybe enough to pay for the internet bill each month. I had a trial of that, as mentioned in an earlier post, and earned a grand total of $0.00. From zero clicks on the ads. Fair enough too, because I rarely click on ads either. But in order to get visitors, I was trying to write for a large audience on topics I thought would get views.

All that achieved was to get on to google for a few search terms, and a ludicrous proportion of those were for a photo I took of a rather pointless Sony billboard. I could start pimping the blog around different sites, but I have figured that it would then pressure me to keep making updates. And frankly, I don’t have enough to say to make a daily post.

So now, I am going to write for a readership of one - myself. Sure, there’ll be the odd bit of blogspam with a youtube link every now and then, but I have yet to sort out a purpose for this site. All I can think of at the moment is to keep my writing skills up. English ended up being my best subject at high school, though not my favourite. My forte was spelling. In the early years though, I just somehow knew how to spell correctly. Putting those correctly-spelled words into paragraphs that people wanted to read took a lot longer. And now, over the years, I have noticed my skills dropping off. My job rarely requires any lengthy blocks of prose, and so my abilities have atrophied somewhat. Adding to that is nearly a decade of reading crap in web forums from people who consider spelling and grammar a luxury, and I feel that I have become almost dyslexic. I sometimes see spelling errors where there are none.

So I shall continue to tap away here, honing my skills, writing about whatever pops into my head. And greetings to those of you who have found this blog through google, although you have probably not read this far and have, in fact, hit the back button by now. Never mind. I’ll live.

This blog will now be known as Steve’s Journal, rather than its previous title, Bort’s Load of Bollocks. I felt it was time for a name change, along with a change in the focus of what I write about. I have previously tried to make it a tech blog, or one about cars, or something that shows funny videos. But still, with my readership consisting entirely of accidental google hits, with people spending about 1 second here before clicking the back button, that strategy has not worked. Time for something else.

More will come later. So will pics of the new car!

Recently at the train station near my work, the following billboard has gone up:



What the hell? OK, it’s for a Sony Vaio laptop. Quite what it promotes about said laptop, is a mystery to me. It is used by women with too much makeup? When you open it, three pictures of women fly out? I can coordinate my top with my computer, finally?

Ad departments. Gotta love them. Somebody probably got a bonus for coming up with that campaign, too.

Just a reminder that September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so be sure to inform the rest of the landlubbers. Yarr.

Below is a video of a 1/5th scale radio controlled B-29 bomber, the ‘Dina Might’ which in real life was shot down by a Japanese fighter on June 26, 1945. According to Gizmodo, it has four, 160cc engines, a wingspan of nearly 30 feet and weighs 463 pounds. That’s 210kg!

Found this on Youtube - somone mounted a camera on a 1:6 scale rock crawling radio controlled jeep - here is the footage. A nice touch, filming throught the windscreen like a 1:6 scale driver would see. It’s something I always wished I could do with my R/C cars as a kid - but back then video cameras were so big the car would have barely moved.