Pork + Apples

Today I tried an amazing recipe (which was franken adjusted to my tastes)

 

Take pork chop steaks boneless butterfly it, then take dill apple and onion chopped with a little butter for good measure and stuff the steaks in it. Finally finish with a dash of pepper.

 

When cooking the steaks in the oven be sure to add 1/2 cup of apple juice to the bottom of the cooking sheet to keep everything moist.

 

It's delicious!

Dell Laptop Owner's Beware

If you have an Inspirion 9400/e1605 chances are you video has went on you. It's not new news anyone with an nVidia card either be Go 7800 or 7900 GS will fail. The 7900GS has a far higher failure rate with most of these cards dying from artifacts that look like lines going up and down the screen.

If Dell offers to extend your warranty DO IT! I'm already on my 4th card.

My first card was a Go 7800 by far this card lasted the longest as it worked fine in my system for the first 2 years.

Upon failing the Dell service depot did not have any of the parts in stock, so they substituted it with a Go 7900GS video card. I was happy that I got a free upgrade to a slightly faster card but unfortunately after 2 months this card failed.

The third replacement was again a 7900GS this by far was the shortest lifespan as within 1 month and 1 week it also died (you can confirm this by searching the archives).

Now I'm on my 4th card, I'm a bit disappointed that Dell replaced my last fancy Go 7900GS with the older Go 7800 which generates a lot more heat and performs weaker. That said after contacting Dell several times to get this remedied I just decided it was too much hassle and most likely this Go 7800 judging from how much heat it generates will just go up in smoke before the 1 year warranty is up anyways.

Video cards for the dell Inspiron 9400/e1705 are becoming ridiculously expensive on ebay now with prices now well into the $400 CDN range. If you were to upgrade to a 7900 GTX or a 2500M be prepared to shell out at least $500 now. That said I've heard that the 7900 GTX has much better cooling and will not go up in smoke like the Go 7800 and 7900GS.

For those that are interested I'll be sure to update the blog the next time this video card goes up in smoke, I'd also like to hear any horror stories you might have had as this is very a very common design flaw. Maybe if anyone has a solution to this it would be nice as well.

Right now I just needed to get this down for those of you wondering if you just got a lemon of a laptop. Let's just say all Inspiron 9400/e1705 are like this and you should expect to have to have your video card swapped out regularly.

Long Weekend

Back in Toronto for the long weekend. Not much to do, had a chance to give the car a quick clean and wax for today while the weather was slightly nice. Still very chilly though.

1. Clean (with mitt)
2. Initial wax layer applied with orbital buffer <-- step just applied today
3. Inspection (will be done tomorrow not enough light today)
4. Post-inspection touch up (re-wax missed areas and non glossy areas)
5. Interior recoat (F303 aerospace protectant)
6. Glass recoat (Rain-X)
7. Glass final spotless clean (with Stoner's Invisible glass)

(obsessive much?)

Kipling 09 @ McMaster

Washroom Humor

One problem with symbolic information is how it can be interpreted in different ways take this for example.



On first inspection it's just a normal hand dryer, but if you look closer...

Laptop Revived

Well the laptop arrived back 2 days ago after some more through tests I can confirm that the new video card is working fine.

Unfortunately I do feel like I can't endorse Dell anymore 2 times failure is now a pattern. I've ordered some thermal gap fillers from the other side of the world these are the same ones that go over some laptop IC components in order to dissipate heat. I'm hoping I can replace my current pads with these ones which are suppose to perform better.

When these pads arrive I will also put a new layer of OCZ freeze on which is generally 5 degrees better than my current Xigmatek brand thermal compound.

I also have another GPU I'm bidding on with a dual slot cooler provided the bidding doesn't get out of hand this will become my primary while the current card becomes the spare.

Laptop Video Dead

It would appear that after my recent laptop video replaced under warrenty this new one also died.

I'm starting to suspect nVidia QA issues with my GeForce Go 7900 GS as well. What's strange is both GPU cards died from a vram related issue. I suspect that the cooling pads for the vram are not sufficient to cool down the chips. Unfortunately I don't really see a way of correcting this issue.

Perhaps with my next unit I will put better thermal compound between the GPU core and the heat shield but I doubt that will fix the issue because the ram chips are the ones that are dying no doubt due to thermal expansion and contraction of the solder joints.

if you have a Dell Inspiron 9400/e1705 with an nVidia or ATI graphics card and suddenly get a BSOD with a NMI: Memory Parity/Check error, you can be pretty sure your video card is starting to go bad and the memory in question is vram.

For my next mod once the video card is back I will try and replace the thermal pads with a solid aluminum block along with buffing the surface to hopefully improve the thermals just enough to prevent another premature failure. Failing that my only solution is to continue buying new video cards off ebay as they are a "hot" item (excuse the pun) for this model of laptop.

SpeedStream 4200 Cooling MOD

After having the SpeedStream4200 around for about 2 weeks I decided that the tiny diminutive DSL modem has serious cooling issues. Under normal conditions when it's allowed to lie flat on the table the bottom will get too hot to touch.

 

The problem became more serious when the modem was taken apart, the main processor on the board was hot enough to give you a burn.

 

Although I have no doubt the modem is operating within operating ranges it's still inexcusable how sometimes a simple heatsink that would've cost less than a dollar would've remedied the situation and greatly reduced the number of these modems that have been known to fail.

An easy fix for those of you DIY'ers is to take some aluminum thermal duct tape and to fold your own semi-pro looking heat sink.

 

 

Remember the trick when trying to create your own is to start with an accordion fold. The higher you can get the cooling fins the better your cooling will be. The denser you can pack them together likewise will help as well. Passive cooling is a function of surface area so when designing your heat sink try and maximize that. Although I haven't done it another good idea is to mount a cooling fan nearby to encourage airflow over the chip.

I hope in the future manufacturers won't take shortcuts after an hour of testing temperatures appear to be dramatically reduced.

Source Dedicated Server On Linux

Here's a quick guide to how to get any server up and running on linux from scratch.

1. Go to the steam website and download the "hldsupdatetool.bin"


2. Make a new directory for your steam install mkdir steam


3. hldsupdatetool.bin is actually a self extracting executable it extracts the executable steam into your new directory


4. Now you need to execute steam auto-update to grab the binary files
   ./steam -command update -game [gamename] -dir [installdir]
   
   The [gamename] can be:
   
   
   
   • tf: Team Fortress 2
   
   
   • l4d_full: Left4Dead
   
   
   • esmod: Eternal Silence
   
   
   
   The [installdir] is where you want it to put the game for modular installs you should place sub directory so each game will live in it's own directory.
   
   Example:
   ./steam -command update -game l4d_full -dir .
   
   


5. To run your server you navigate to your server directory and execute the following command
   ./srcds_run -autoupdate -game left4dead +maxplayers 4

Have fun!

Overtime

This seems to be the week that everyone works overtime. Me I'm starting my T.A. stint for the year and everyone else I know is in hyper busy mode. I hope that this rough spot subsides.

Back For The Holidays

Well back with the family for the holidays. Toronto is pretty snowed in right now although most of the snow is oddly less slippery than the snow in Hamilton. I do hope at some time they clean up my street in Hamilton so the return trip would be safer.