KriLL3’s blog

Finally managed to nail down the issue that was making my PC reboot without displaying an error at random while gaming or doing something else performance intensive, like using Photoshop and watching HD movies, the problem has gradually grown worse since the day I built this machine a couple months ago, at first it was really infrequent and not that bothersome, but lately it crashed 5-15mins after starting a game and that’s not acceptable.

I went over the RAM settings on the official Corsair forums and got a thumbs up, I also removed all but one stick and switched between the 4 sticks when that didn’t help, I under clocked the GPU and CPU, I tried putting a hulking big fan next to the case and re-seated all heat sinks with new paste despite all temperatures being reported as sub 50C.

I was about to give up when I finally turned to what I should have checked at the start, the power supply. It’s a good one “Hiper HPU-4S730 Type-R Omnigrid II 730W” so I disregarded it as the cause from the start, something I shouldn’t have done, I checked the reported voltages in the bios and with AsusProbe in windows, both agreed that my voltages were dipping from time to time way too low for comfort.

I don’t know if my PC simply has outgrown it’s power supply or if it’s is weak on one or more rails, I thought my load balance between the rails was quite good and I tried switching it around a bit including putting the SLI power connector in the other port available on the PSU, didn’t help.

My old PC (P4 Prescott, 9800pro) used a 400W Zalman power supply which I kept, sadly it was in the junker rig running XP I was using as a server and IE6 testing environment via VNC (a form of remote desktop) for my designs (all my other machines run Vista, which can’t run IE6), I got another even older PSU that’s sufficient to run it but it’s the wrong shape, none of the screw holes match a regular ATX power supply (comes out of a desktop IBM machine), so I’ll have to put it in the bottom of the case, that’s fine as long as you don’t need to carry it around.

I cut one of the black leads and the green lead on the thick motherboard cable bundle coming out of the 400W and soldered them together to make it start when it gets power without the need for a motherboard to trigger a power up, I put the Graphics card and all drives on the 400w power supply and left the motherboard, fan controller etc on the 730w and sure enough, my system is 100% stable even during heavy load, I’ve gradually gone from downclock to raging overclock and it’s still stable and cool. :)

My full current specs can be seen here.

I’ve been clean for months, but my brother lent his 70 hunter to a friend who wanted to try PvE servers, so he switched to one, and yes you can only switch too PvE servers, not back again.

I’m a much faster power leveler than my brother so I offered to level up a hunter to 70 again for him.

The first hurdle was the that the majority of the addons I relied on have died during the time I’ve managed to remain away from the game, I tracked down an addon dev channel full of helpful people to get substitutes and track down some fan continued versions or renamed versions of my old favorites.

The second is that my experience with hunters is superficial at best, I had to rethink my mindset (I’m a feral druid mainly, rogue and warrior secondaries) the key parts to remember for us melee guys is to let the pet get and retain aggro, and keep your distance from the enemy, I still want to rush in there and pummel stuff but I manage to restrain myself.

I’ve managed to limit the amount of hours I put into it each day, but man, it’s one addictive game and there is always something to do, most games fall flat on that aspect, there is no progress to be made or if there is it feels like work, WoW has a lot of grind, but somehow it doesn’t feel like grinding

I’ve been using multi protocol IM clients for a long time, and I’ve used a bunch of them, Trillian in various flavors, Miranda, Meebo etc and they all had one major flaw or another.

Trillian: Payware, and very constrained in it’s modification possibilities, skins is the only way to really change it and they’re not easy to make.

Miranda: Very customizable but at a cost, the UI and addons system just dumps their confugration windows at your feet, as if they don’t really care. It’s up to you do make of it what you wish, a bit like getting a huge lego kit without any instructions, you can make it look really nice but you’ll have to fight it every step of the way. very unstable and buggy at times.

Meebo: Online based, thus has limited functionality, otherwise nice, it’s a good option for people using a public computer since it’s encrypted.

Digsby: Is my new all time favorite, it has the customization of miranda, the stability of trillian and it also checks your email, twitter, facebook and myspace, I use it for MSN, Gmail and Facebook. If it had some skype integration it would the the only IM app a man would ever need.

Here are some screenshots: Coversations Buddy list

You’ve most likely already heard this sentiment but here goes: awesome cities and awesome parkour, but horribly generic and repetitive missions, it feels like they made the world and movement system first but near the release they quickly slapped on some gameplay to make use of it, a shame really since it could have been one of the very best games ever. When you’ve done all missions in a town however it’s great fun to simply rush around the rooftops and cause general havoc, though it’s a bit odd that you can hit most guards twice or more with a sword but a single throwing knife kills just about everyone, and your assassination targets (aka bosses) require a billion hits to kill.

I faced a dilemma earlier, I already set up my dreamhost email to redirect to my gmail account, only problem with that though is if I want to send email from @krill3.com I would have to use dreamhost’s own web mail, not an exciting proposition, so I set up Google Apps for Domain which was easy but time consuming, once I got all that settled I realized I had a whole new google account for all their services, thus all my calendar, mail, docs etc has to either migrate from my old account or I have to use 2 accounts… *twitches*

About me and Freelance both have some preliminary content, both need some more proof reading and polish but it’s a start, the next step is for me to assemble a portfolio from my multitude of files across several folders and partitions gathered up over the course of several years… ugh…

If you find an error on either page please contact me.

The design of this site spans nearly 3 months, from early December 2007 to late February 2008, only a few elements have remained and none of them without modifications. It spans 2 domains and 2 hosts, krill3.no-ip.org on my home server, and later krill3.com on dreamhost. The site has come far in a short amount of time, I wounder where it will be in another 3 months.

Each text is related to the picture under it, click said picture to enlarge it.

2007-12-09: The very first design was like the one below but had no rounded header corners and the tab navigation was hanging of the left side of the header, can’t find a picture of that theme. It provided the baseline of the design, to be honest it was rather bloated with it’s multitude of images, image based semi mystery meat navigation and big randomized header image.

2008-01-15: I decided the navigation should be part of the main body instead of on the side, both to better fit the expectations of visitors and to make better use of the horizontal space.

2008-01-24: I dropped the random background image in the header in the name of style and faster load times and removed the seperate sidebar after I realized it was superfluous and quite frankly, ugly. I also dropped the semi mystery meat navigation in favor of a text based one. This is the first point in the design I felt comfortable using it as a proper site to represent me and my designs, I was well aware of the design shortcomings of the earlier versions.

2008-01-29: I experimented with the idea of having each post be it’s own “bubble” but I realized that would be hard on your eyes and be an inefficient use of space. I also made the theme a bit lighter, the background especially was very dark previously.

2008-01-31: I also experimented with the idea of a free floating navigation bar.

2008-02-01: Some inspiration came about and I started a new theme from scratch, I made a quick mock up of the general outline of it, it’s a very raw rendering and the final colors would most likely have been a lot closer to the old design, great expanses of black isn’t something I fancy.

2008-02-11: I tried to pick one of the themes, but realized I could merge them, retaining the tiled background “wallpaper” from the previous style, it’s general color scheme and layout but incooperating the outline around the main body of content and the highlighted part of that outline displaying the active page along with the square corners, which felt like something fresh and exiting after making designs based on rounded corners for so long.

2008-02-24: That hybrid theme named “Fusion” further progressed and it’s what the site uses currently, I added a dark gradient to the bottom, also balanced some colors and replaced the header’s outer glow with a drop shadow, all in all making it a bit more refined, the footer and navigation bars seem to be the same color, but in fact they are 2 very different shades, the dark gradient in the bottom and the white gradient on top makes the fields seem to have very different colors if they’re exactly the same, an optical illusion.

Just finished watching 2010: The Year We Make Contact the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey both based on novels by Arthur C. Clarke, both movies are good examples of Sci-fi done right, yes they’re both old (1984 and 1968 respectively) and the effects while stellar at the time look very dated now, the fact that all displays are CRTs and the cold war seems to have outstayed it’s welcome doesn’t help either but they’re both really nice to watch, yes they are a bit meta at times but they both got what Sunshine for example misses, a detailed and realistic view of space exploration.

In Sunshine everything was simple to accomplish and they lived a life of luxury, a ship built as humanity’s last hope as quickly as possible wouldn’t be squeaky clean nor have every creature comfort known to man, in 2010 and 2001 the parts of the crew that aren’t tasked with keeping the ship operational and on target is in hibernation during the round trip to save resources.

This is a mistake most current Sci-fi makes, everything has that vacuum sealed feeling, everything is sparkling clean and 100% reliable, and if it does break down you tap a button and everything is fine. The Firefly universe is a good example of the mentality I like, their ship feels like something tangible, if the engine hiccups the crew is shacked about, there is rust and grit on the floor and the walls are full of stuff that look like they have an actual function, I’m tired of Star Wars and Star Trek:esc ships that hide away all the important parts of the ship and the only interaction the crew has with the blood and guts of what makes the ship tick is to tap buttons.

If someone got other examples of Sci-fi that is a bit more realistic please tell me.

I think it’s all done, let me know if you spot something out of place.

I’ve switched the site from lightbox to thickbox, it’s almost the same but looks a whole lot better, simply click any thumbnail with a colored outline to see a larger version.

The font-size is defined with a font-size: 85% in the body and em’s in the divs which adapts very well to different DPI settings, the old style which used px didn’t scale as much, it looked fine on a multitude of screens/devices but when I tried it on my dad’s 17” 1920×1600 laptop (horribly high dpi, wrecks most sites) the text was too small to read, now it expands accordingly, all text margins are em based also making them expand with the content.

The result is a fluid size of the content, but a fixed sized header and navigation which to my mind is the best compromise, the header and navigation could be made to scale with the rest of the content but that would require them to be text, and I want to use the font the navigation uses currently “mirconN55″ which wouldn’t be possible in non image form short of making every visitor download the font, which wouldn’t be very practical…

The site now uses some custom PHP and JavaScript to make the header image and navigation update when you browse the site, a trivial thing if each page was it’s own (x)html file but I’m using Wordpress as a content manager and it lacks that feature without some modification. I’ve experimented with the thought of making the navigation links inactive if you’re on that page but I figured it would be better keep their functionality to bring you back to the main page of that section of the site, also I considered for a while to make the text of the the navigation bar change color the same way the border above does but decided not to, it’s clear enough already and you need to know when to stop adding features and effects, less is more.

I’m quite pleased with the new theme, it’s a bit brighter than the old one and looks a whole lot more refined.

I’ll add a mobile and a print style in the coming days, the site already looks and works really nicely in opera mini and on the iPhone/iTouch but I doubt an ordinary cellphone browser appreciates the design currently.

Updated the permalink structure, thanks addis0n.

Expect odd behavior and looks while I’m implementing the new theme I’ve been working on.