Author: wyred

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Silly CPUs

So the Intel i7-860 CPU I bought 3 months ago performed very poorly with FFXI. It’s good on other games but just not FFXI. It performed worse than my E6600 at stock speeds. I had to disable HT and then overclock it to around 3.2GHz just to get it to perform the same as my E6600.

The main reason for buying this i7 is just so I can enjoy smooth gameplay on a game that I play the most often. Frustrated, I sold it away. It’s just silly that I paid so much for a CPU and didn’t get any performance boost at all.  The motherboard, CPU and ram all sold at a loss of around SGD$180.

With the money I got from selling those, I wanted to buy a Q9650 but it seems that the i3/i5/i7 CPUs are replacing the previous generation CPUs which makes it near impossible to find one anymore here in Singapore.

So I went and got myself an AMD Phenom 2 x4 965 (3.4GHz). And now I finally enjoy smooth framerates in crowded areas.

However, there were 2 minor problems.

Firstly, the stock heat sink fan (HSF) that came with the CPU ran at 6000 RPMs making it very very noisy. I had Cool n Quiet (CnQ) enabled. The fan plugged into the CPU Fan plug on the motherboard. The processor speed clocked down when idle. But still the fan ran at full speed.

So I went down to Sim Lim Square again on the next day to buy a 3rd party HSF. Got those huge ones, a Coolermaster Hyper 212 plus. A little troublesome to install. But once I got everything set up, it’s working good. I think the CPU got 5 degrees cooler with this new one.

Next problem is, the CnQ is pretty buggy. The CnQ clocks down the CPU in areas where there’s less load and when I move into an area with a lot of characters around, the CnQ then powers up the CPU back to full power. During this powering up/down transition, I get a noticeable lag in-game.

I did a bit of googling and found that I wasn’t the only one who noticed this.

Fixing this is as simple as disabling CnQ which I will do so tonight. Besides these 2 minor problems, I’m finally very happy to be able to get good framerate out of my favourite mmorpg.

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Danny Choo’s autograph

After AFA09, K-on seiyuus, May’N and Danny Choo, each had their autographs up for auction.

I’m not sure if you can call it an auction because you can only bid once, and you cannot find out what’s the current highest bid.

But just for fun, I bid SGD$50 for K-on seiyuus’ autographs and SGD$20 (USD$14.20, JPY1308) for Danny Choo’s. I already have May’N’s.

I bet if the organizers announced the current highest bid for those autographs, they could fetch higher prices for the autographs.

Because I actually won the bid for Danny Choo’s autograph, lol. But I’m going to assume there was a higher bid for it but that person didn’t show up to claim his prize.

Danny Choo's autograph
"Identify and live your passion. The rest will always follow"

My colleague says the costs for framing this autograph is definitely more than SG$20, lol

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My iPhone stories ep1

As I spend more time with my iPhone, I love it more and more. So once in a while when I have enough real life stories to tell about my phone, I will share it on my blog. Stories of how it has made my life convenient.

Firstly, my iPhone is not jailbroken. I do know that only by jailbreaking this phone can I unlock it’s full potential. But due to warranty reasons, I shall hold back on the thought. Yes, you can still restore the phone to a non-jailbroken state and Apple will not be able to detect it. But what if the data cable port is damaged, or if some hardware on the phone fails and prevents me from restoring it? That’s one of my concerns.

But anyway, on with the story!

The other day I was at Liang Court. A friend was on his way to meet me from Funan mall. Although Liang Court is quite close to Funan, he forgot where it was. He too had an iPhone.

Instinctively, I started the Maps application on the phone. Dropped a pin on Liang Court on the map and proceeded to see if I could send this location someway, somehow, to him. And sure enough, I had the option of emailing him or sending him an MMS. I chose the email option and sent it to his gmail.

Map app features
I've set my phone's language to Japanese for practice. The small button in the middle, right at the bottom is the one that allows you to send this location via email/MMS.

I then sent him an SMS to tell him to check his gmail. He did and the pin that I dropped on my phone showed up on his.

I did not know that this could be done. I just felt that it should be possible knowing how Apple can make good software.

And here’s another tip for those who regularly buy manga and have a lot of series to keep track. This can be done on any phone with acceptable camera performance.

Oftentimes I forget what’s the last book of a series I’m following. So I started keeping a list of manga of all the series I’m following and the next book I should be buying.

Which creates another problem, I forget to update that list sometimes.

So to remedy this, each time I buy from Kinokuniya, I arrange my books and take a photo of their sides with my phone. Then in future when I need to confirm if I’ve already purchased a certain book, I can refer back to these photos. It’s easy to take a photo, and it’s not that often that I will need to check back on my purchase history.

Jan 10

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2010

On the last day of 2009, I lazed around the whole day. Lay down on my bed and read manga, played FF13. During the last few hours, I watched all 3 “Back to the Future” movies. Loved them back when I was a little boy.

On the first day of 2010, I lazed around too. Just didn’t felt like doing anything.

I’ve been looking forward to 2010. It has a cool futuristic feel to it. :D

Gah, just realized that back when I had a bad harddisk crash, my January 2009 entries went poof as well. Can’t recall what new year resolutions I’ve made and whether I’ve fulfilled them or not.

Since I’ve got my iPhone now, I’ve been contemplating getting a Mac mini just to learn how to write software for this phone. However, I am totally clueless on what software I should code out because there’s probably a software for everything, anything, out there on the app store already. It has to be something interesting enough to keep me going.

For career, all I can think of is finish up this CMS system I’m working on for my company. This should look good on my resume.

Acquiring a few more new skills are good too. Knowing lots of things broadens one’s opportunities. And by skills, I mean ones that can potentially help me in earning my bread and butter. Not like having the top driving skill at Initial D at the arcades.

Photography is an ongoing thing. I find that I’m bad at framing for portrait shots. That’s one area I need to brush up.

Japanese too, I’m still far from being able to have a proper normal conversation in Japanese. Although my previous Japanese teacher says there will be a lot of speaking in Pre-advance level, because my class has about 10~15 people, I only speak 1 or 2 lines each lesson. That’s fine. I can always do image training myself. :d

Ah yes, I’m going to try and get back into jogging now… Must make it a weekly thing!