Siggy’s Rants

A few years back, I bought a version of the IBM Model M manufactured by the company that bought the rights from Lexmark. Unfortunately, the keyboard itself was black while it had these aweful shiny silver keycaps. The plastic itself is imbued with some sort of sparkle that simply doesn’t lend itself to a professional grade keyboard designed to last for decades. Here’s a sample picture from their website to illustrate.

I had purchased mine before the addition of the Windows and menu keys, so I’m blessed with a full sized spacebar. Regardless, you can easily see that the black and grey thing just isn’t kosher with me. So, in the spirit of the modder inside of me, I decided to change that!

Using a simple can of Dupli-Color Vinyl and Carpet spraypaint in flat black, I transformed my two-tone keyboard into a beautiful black monolith. Vinyl dye paint is designed to soften the plastic on whatever it’s sprayed so the paint can seep into the surface, thus dying the plastic whatever color you choose. Just as other sites state, it’s extremely difficult to mess up a vinyl dye job. Since I don’t have the capacity to photograph large objects just yet, here’s a small sample of just how professional vinyl dye looks.

As you can see, the paint is very uniform and has the exact same texture as the plastic it was sprayed on. I had gotten the results I was looking for! I finally have myself the equivelant of a Das Keyboard only with the loud feedback of genuine buckle spring actuators. Because the keycaps are dyed, I’ll never have to reapply paint unless I wear the keys down past the point of dye. Once I get a larger setup for pictures, more photos will be uploaded.

Recently, I decided to get rid of the hassles of wireless and bought a corded mouse. Not just any corded mouse, however. I purchased a shiney new Razer Copperhead!

Before I add any nice pictures of the product, let’s see what the company says about its technical specifications.

• 2000dpi Razer Precision™ laser sensor
• 32KB Razer Synapse™ onboard memory
• 1000Hz Ultrapolling™ / 1ms response time
• Seven independently programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons
• On-The-Fly Sensitivity™ adjustment
• Always-On™ mode
• Zero-acoustic Ultraslick™ Teflon feet
• 16-bit ultra-wide data path
• Up to 45 inches per second and 20g of acceleration
• 7080 frames per second
• GlowPipe™ non-slip side rails
• Ergonomic ambidextrous design
• Ultra-large non-slip buttons
• Gold-plated USB connector
• Seven-foot, lightweight, non-tangle cord
• Approximate size: 130mm (length) x 66mm (width) x 41mm (height)

Impressive for a simple periphreal, eh? The one I purchased happens to be in Chaos Green, though it also comes in Tempest Blue and Anarchy Red. And now, time for the pretty pictures.

The two sides of the Razer Copperhead are completely symmetrical down to the buttons, 7 in all. At first glance, the side buttons didn’t seem as if they’d be very comfortable at first. Luckily I was wrong as every button except the ones on the far side are perfectly accessable and fall directly under fingers or a thumb.

The DPI on the fly buttons are, by default, on the right side of the mouse. The instructions state that the official drivers and software must be loaded for this feature, but Microsoft Vista happens to have an updated driver that allows the on the fly changing without installed software. I installed the software anyway, however, and was surprised to find out just how powerful it is.

As you can see, the software offers a variety of options such as the ability to set a small macro of up to 5 keystrokes to any button as shown by the right flyout. On the left, we have options for sensitivity, the DPI on the fly changing as well as double click speed and the option to completely turn off Windows’ mouse acceleration feature.

Under normal Windows use, the 2000 DPI setting is far too sensitive, though that’s not where this feature shines. At 800 DPI, you have a well balanced mouse for browsing the Internet, photo editing, et cetera. At 1600 DPI, the mouse begins to become an extension of the hand, allowing you to very precisely aim and fire off a round in FPS games.

At 2000 DPI, however, I found it to be a tad too sensitive. The simple beating of my heart was enough motion transferred through my arm to activate the sensor and almost defeated the purpose of insane accuracy. In games, I found the 1600 DPI setting to be most comfortable, no matter the genera.

Contrary to other reviews online that have stated that the laser sensor is inadequate for extremely fast gameplay, such as where a flicks of the wrist are common, I’ve found that I cannot get the sensor to go into a malfunction state. Try as I might, no matter how fast I flicked my wrist, the cursor always went to exactly where I had wanted it to.

Something I find questionable is the ability to change the polling rate. It’s stated that a 125Hz polling rate is the equivelant of an 8ms “lag”. Unfortunately, even updating at 125 times per second, if a game isn’t displaying faster than that, there’s no true benefit to having an increased reporting rate much less 500 or an absurd 1000 times per second. In short, a game running at 60 FPS won’t benefit from a cursor reporting in at even 125Hz as far as I can see.

In all, I give this mouse a 9/10. The mouse itself is extremely responsive and the utility program is very tweakable. I question the usefulness of a polling rate of higher than 125Hz, however, and I question why it should be a major feature. Apart from the minor squabble, this mouse comes highly recommended from me.

Since the last photo of my layout, a few things have changed. My new Lian Li PC-7B Plus II has quite a few addons the stock case doesn’t have. Among them are the stealth bays for two optical drives as well as the 3 HD cage taking up 2 optical bays. It not only frees up space in the bottom front for watercooling, but it also adds an 80mm fan into the mix to help keep things cool. Every fan, save the HD cage fan, is a Panaflo medium speed running at either 6 or 8 volts.

Update: Since I wasn’t using the keyboard try to my desk, I decided to make it into a sort of stand for my monitor. Raises it up to the perfect level and it gives me more functional desk space in order to store things.

When I said “tomorrow” in the previous post, I actually meant “next month sometime when I can be hassled with it”. Anyway, here’s the moneyshot of my new cellphone.

I’ve been using Microsoft Windows Vista for a few days now, and I have to say that I rather like it, compatibility aside. A few things don’t work too well with it such as my printer, which HP has decided to drag their asses on making drivers for. Luckily, their “solution” is to load up a driver for a different printer in a makeshift way to avoid developing stuff for users. Way to go for cutting a few bucks, HP.

The part about Vista that I absolutely adore is the Games browser. Any installed games are placed here and it gives you a single place to run any game you have from. Luckily, Vista Business, the version I have, doesn’t come preinstalled with any of those games such as Solitaire, Hearts, Minesweeper, and the like. Just to give you an idea of what the browser looks like, here’s a shot of it in action.

It gives you all sorts of useless information that adds a cool factor to it. As a test, I even installed some older games such as Tribes 2 and Starcraft and it detected them flawlessly. As you can see, some newer games are listed as well, so the list Microsoft has is quite extensive.

One of my close friends bought me a cellphone when he heard about all the trouble I went through with the cellphone company recently. Alltel can suck on my white wang, those pretentious cocksucking assholes. Fuck them and fuck their service.

Anyway, here’s some screenshots of the modded software. Pictures of the phone will ensue tomorrow, likely.

So, I got an iPod Shuffle G2 today. It’s an extremely tiny little device!

Here are some comparisons to it to a quarter.

The audio quality is excellent and iTunes and Winamp both detect it without hassle. Talk about an excellent stocking stuffer!

Alrighty. Here are some pictures of the hard drive as well as the computer it’s in and its specifications.

First, we start off with a top view of the drive.

And then the bottom.

Here’s the computer and desk layout that will be used for most, if not all, of the components I may review.

The machine itself is as follows:

Kingwin SK-523BK

Antec TruePower 430

Lite-On SOHR-5238S 52x CD-RW
Sony DW-Q30A 16x DVD-RW

Abit AN8-Ultra

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

eVGA GeForce 7800GT

The performance results are in the previous post.

I’ve been pretty busy as of late with both classes and work, but I’ve had a chance to remote into my machine to get a couple of nice benchmarks for everyone to see. May as well pony up the goods!

As you can see, the performance is pretty nice, in all regards. CPU utilization is fairly low and raw read speeds are exceptional. Had these been even larger drives, I wouldn’t be surprised to see even higher speeds. In terms of read speed, these two drives are about on par with a 150GB Western Digital Raptor. Access times will always be higher, of course, but unless you’re running a computer in a server environment the gains will be minimal.

I should have some pictures of the drives themselves up pretty soon, so stay tuned! Unfortunately, they’re fairly plain. If you’ve seen one SATA drive, you’ve seen them all more or less. Raptor X excluded.

Today I ordered two Western Digital Caviar 250GB hard drives. Their features include a 16MB cache and 7200RPM spindle speed. Once I get them, I’ll post a comparison of those two drives in a RAID-0 array against my current 3 disk array. Hopefully I’ll get some nice performance out of the drives. My current configuration includes three 80GB Western Digital Caviar drives with 8MB caches and 7200RPM spindle speed. The areal density of the larger drives combined with the large cache should put performance at greater than my current configuration, despite there being three drives instead of two. We’ll see how things go!