Thursday, June 03, 2004
StonGard
I ordered a StonGard (pronounced Stone Guard) light kit for my WRX a few weeks back from RockBlocker. It's pretty amazing that after a year and a half and 31k miles of driving the car, how many small rock chips are in the fog and head lights as well as the front bumper. The StonGard is thick, flexible 3M plastic material which you apply over the area you are protecting. I figure if it keeps my head and fog lights from getting chipped they will pay for themself. I installed one fog light this morning. Some people recommend using a liquid solution when installing, but I found that it just made it tough to get the material to stick. I had to get the heatgun out to help evaporate the liquid which sped up the process. I will try the other fog light without any liquid as the guys at RockBlocker recommend. Now I have to decide whether or not to get some paint protection as well, my bumper is getting pretty dinged up and I wouldn't want it to get too much worse.
Hi Megan!
Megan came down and visited Wendy and me last weekend while down here for her sister's bachelorette/bachelor party. She mentioned that she was interested in setting up a Blog of her own, so now she's got one!
PS - She turns 27 tomorrow!
PS - She turns 27 tomorrow!
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Seasonic Super Tornado
I picked up a Seasonic Super Tornado PSU after reading this review over at Silent PC Review. Seasonic claims that is is one of the most efficient PSUs on the market which Silent PC Review confirmed. It is also very quiet.
To confirm the efficiency claims, I used my handy Kill-A-Watt meter to measure the current draw of my main desktop PC PC at idle and full load using mprime. My old PSU was an Antec True 430 which sells for $65 over at NewEgg. The Kill-A-Watt reported a power factor of 0.65 at idle and load, and 107W at idle and 124W under load. After swapping out the True 430 for the Super Tornado 300, the power factor measured 0.99 and now only pulled 91W at idle and 107W under load for a power draw reduction of 15%. Having a near perfect power factor will also reduce the current draw through the house wires as well, in this case the current draw will be cut in half. As Silent PC Review also noted, I found the Super Tornado to be very quiet, I can't hear it over the CPU fan or hard drives in my machine.
I've now ordered two more Super Tornado 300s from Computer Gate at $65/ea to replace the PSUs in my Linux firewall/fileserver PC and my MythTV PC. Computer Gate has free shipping on those PSUs right now. I'll take before and after measurements of both when they get here.
I highly recommend this PSU as it's price is comparable to all other high quality PSUs on the market and has the advantage of being the most efficient and also being extremely quiet.
To confirm the efficiency claims, I used my handy Kill-A-Watt meter to measure the current draw of my main desktop PC PC at idle and full load using mprime. My old PSU was an Antec True 430 which sells for $65 over at NewEgg. The Kill-A-Watt reported a power factor of 0.65 at idle and load, and 107W at idle and 124W under load. After swapping out the True 430 for the Super Tornado 300, the power factor measured 0.99 and now only pulled 91W at idle and 107W under load for a power draw reduction of 15%. Having a near perfect power factor will also reduce the current draw through the house wires as well, in this case the current draw will be cut in half. As Silent PC Review also noted, I found the Super Tornado to be very quiet, I can't hear it over the CPU fan or hard drives in my machine.
I've now ordered two more Super Tornado 300s from Computer Gate at $65/ea to replace the PSUs in my Linux firewall/fileserver PC and my MythTV PC. Computer Gate has free shipping on those PSUs right now. I'll take before and after measurements of both when they get here.
I highly recommend this PSU as it's price is comparable to all other high quality PSUs on the market and has the advantage of being the most efficient and also being extremely quiet.
Sunday, May 09, 2004
Monday, April 26, 2004
PETCO Park
I visited PETCO Park for my first time since it's grand opening a few weeks ago. It's a great facility located in the heart of San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter and right across the street from the San Diego Convention Center.
What made the trip even better, was that the Padre's beat the Expos 3-2 in the bottom of the 9th!
If you're in the area and have the chance to watch a game, I highly recommend going. If you can, get seats on the bottom floor of left field, they have a great view of the entire field. While you're there, treat yourself to one of the many restaurants within walking distance a few blocks away!
What made the trip even better, was that the Padre's beat the Expos 3-2 in the bottom of the 9th!
If you're in the area and have the chance to watch a game, I highly recommend going. If you can, get seats on the bottom floor of left field, they have a great view of the entire field. While you're there, treat yourself to one of the many restaurants within walking distance a few blocks away!
Saturday, April 24, 2004
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
MSIE Broken Again
Well, Microsoft has managed to break MSIE again.
It turns out that KB832894 breaks the behavior of KeepAlive when under SSL. If you let your KeepAlive session then attempt to submit a form, the browser will not actually post any request parameters to your action.
One fix is to disable KeepAlive for MSIE clients. Unfortunately, this makes websites with multiple resources on their site quite sluggish because of the additional overhead of establishing a new connection for each resource. There was a similar issue ages ago (back in the MSIE 5.0 era) where a very similar bug would surface if KeepAlive was on.
A better fix is to install Mozilla or Firefox and use that as your browser instead.
It turns out that KB832894 breaks the behavior of KeepAlive when under SSL. If you let your KeepAlive session then attempt to submit a form, the browser will not actually post any request parameters to your action.
One fix is to disable KeepAlive for MSIE clients. Unfortunately, this makes websites with multiple resources on their site quite sluggish because of the additional overhead of establishing a new connection for each resource. There was a similar issue ages ago (back in the MSIE 5.0 era) where a very similar bug would surface if KeepAlive was on.
A better fix is to install Mozilla or Firefox and use that as your browser instead.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)