danny’s space

i’ve recently (well, over the last month or so) been on a backup spree - i swear it’s so fun, backing up important data and whatnot..

a reminder about the importance of backups came when the hard disk in the computer in the lab i work in crashed.. luckily most of us kept second copies of our work on other computers, but one guy in the lab lost most of his recent work because he had forgotten to back up.. so we had to ship the computer to a data recovery service, and the price was pretty steep - ~$1500 to recover only 6 DVDs worth of data from the dodged hard disk..

so the moral of the story? keep regular backups.. invest in a DVD burner (i recommend the pioneer range) and buy a couple of DVD+RWs and back up those files! photos and stuff i like backing up onto DVD+Rs because it’s not like they’re going to change.. also Rs keep for longer anyway.. it’s also useful (i read somewhere, smh i think..) to make 2 backups and give a copy to a friend who doesn’t live in the same house as you - call this paranoid, but better safe than sorry..

so, go forth and back up!

i woke up today to find out that the thermaltake cpu cooler i had ordered from mittoni a few days ago had arrived by courier.. it was the ‘silenttower‘, and it lives up to its name - it was a tower indeed! (see picture - the big blue thing is the silenttower) i was afraid it wouldn’t fit into the computer case because it projected so far from the motherboard - i think a gap of only a few centimeters exists now between the case and the top of the cpu cooler..

anyway, installation was pretty straightforward although quite involved.. had to pull the motherboard out of the computer, remove the stock intel fan, clean up the mess that the intel thermal compound left behind, and then install the new fan using nice new micronised silver thermal compound from arctic silver..

and then obviously i had to take it for a test run.. the computer switched on without too much of a hiccup, apart from windows not liking usb devices plugged into different sockets coming out of hibernation.. apart from that, this thermaltake cpu cooler lived up to the other part of its name - silent! it’s a far cry compared to the dodgy intel stock cooler..

anyway, on stress tests with video encoding and also, of course, playing half-life 2, the cooler performed fantastically.. on a warm day like today, the temperature stayed under 50 degrees with only a whisper of sound coming from the cooler - compared to the blaring motorbike noise that the intel cooler used to make.. supposedly cooling performance will improve once the silver thermal compound properly melts in or something - it’ll be even cooler then! (in more ways than one)

okay anyway, i have a headache now from playing half-life 2 to ‘test’ out the new cooler.. so there goes my productivity for the day.. maybe i should have installed it at night.. oh well..

all up the cooler plus thermal compound plus delivery was only $61 - a small price to pay for great cooling performance and the ability to actually hear yourself think when using the computer.. i know next time i build a computer i’ll be looking to put one of these after market coolers in instead of the crappy intel one..

hooray, after 9 long and kind of boring weeks, the midsemester break is finally here!

a bit of nc and billy got together this morning to play a bit of cricket at north rocks oval - too bad chap had work, moo had 21sts and alex was in canberra.. it was interesting getting into it after a few months of cricket void.. nash is still the sri-lankan champ and billy ain’t that bad either..

two trips to the airport this morning (although i was only awake for one, so actually only 1 trip for me) to see people off.. no matter how many times you see someone off at the airport, it never really loses its punch..

also had a haircut, i think i left it much too long this time, the hairdresser mowed it back like usual but it was still pretty long and bushy so we had to keep going.. it looks okay now i think, although some people would say otherwise.. it’s low maintenance!

took jaz for a walk again today.. scary thing happened a few days ago when i took her walking alone (normally my sister and i walk jaz together).. this dark taxi rumbles down the road in the opposite direction, sees us (jaz and i), and then pulls to the side of the road, does a U-ie and then drives slowly behind us for a bit.. i keep looking backwards with a concerned look on my face while jaz also looks backwards excitedly, thinking about any new friends that may be sitting inside the taxi.. i rather not have found out, so i pull my phone out and gave sara a call so that at least someone could be witness to my abduction.. thankfully the taxi left us alone.. phew, got out of that one

so yes, sitting in front of the computer all smelly now.. backing up photos and the like.. i swear dvd burners are cool, everyone should get one if only to back up important stuff like photos and documents and whatnot..

and.. went to buy dvd+rs today at bigw.. saw a spindle of 50 tdks for $42 and a spindle of 25 hps for $43.. i had previously bought the hp ones and they worked pretty well so i was going to go for them again, but then did a price check (how cool are those scanning things) on the tdk and found out that it was a buck cheaper for double the amount of dvds.. so i got that instead just to try it out.. go home, check up the disc info, turns out that they both come from the exact same manufacturer, and the tdk discs are actually a few models up from the hp one.. score!

yes anyway the afl is on, i normally don’t watch it but hey its the grand final, 70-odd years since sydney last won, so i’ll make an exception.. doesn’t look good though, 8 minutes to go and eagles are up, but only by a bit..

ok, publish!

how much would a 10 metre network cable cost? $10 maybe? what if it was black? maybe $15 because black’s a cool colour.. and maybe $2 more than that because it’s category 6 (what on earth does this mean anyway, i thought they were cat5 normally… since when did another cat join the ranks?) and perhaps an extra $20 because it was sold at dick smith.. making the total a whopping $37, which means i probably got it for cheap considering it was *only* $28.94 - bargain!

not

wasted the pretty much all of today setting up an old pentium III for file serving… which reminded me that i should really make backups of my data and clear up some room on my main computer…

so i looked around for official-looking information on the lifespan of recordable media, and it turns out that dvds last longer than cds… dvds supposedly last from 100-200 years (although ‘accelerated aging’ tests show around 30 years), while cds last up to 30 years…

plus what was interesting was the suggestion that the best storage position for discs is vertical! man, no wonder my backup cd-rs screw up all the time and have such a short lifespan!

more information, go here

now to look around for gold-looking dvd-rs

my gosh…

don’t use permalinks with wordpress if you want your pages to display properly - at least don’t use the permalink template that wordpress suggests! it doesn’t work… took me an hour to work it out…

i thought having permalinks would be cool but noooo…