New PC

I treated myself to a new PC as my Atom based desktop was just lacking behind what I needed for it. It’s primarily been built for my work as I use LaTeX for my writing and while this can easily be edited on any PC with a text editor, when you come to compile the code, it requires CPU and the Atom just wasn’t coping. it’ll also mean I can go back to a dual screen setup, making it easier to work as I can view a PDF on one screen and Word or Texmaker on the other.

Therefore I purchased the following:-

• Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H
• ATI HD3850 Radeon GFX
• Intel  E5300 @ 2.60GHz
• 320Gb Samsung HD
• Kingston 2Gb
• OCZ StealthXStream 400W SilentPSU
• Cooler Master Elite 335
• Coolermaster Hyper TX3 Cooler
• Windows 7 Professional

The aim is to over clock this when the TX3 arrives (it’s currently running on the stock Intel cooler) and apparently it should easily reach 3.9GHz but we’ll see what happens. This all came from Aria (except the TX3, which is coming from Play).

Of course, with the power, it can play some games which I intend to use it for at times. I’m eagerly awaiting the new Dawn of War 2 addon, Chaos Rising, that arrives in March. I’m currently going back and playing through the campaign and the new downloadable content, Last Stand, where you have to face multiple waves of enemies until you die.

I also bought Titanquest and it’s add on from Steam a while ago but was unable to play it so I’ll be having a go at that as well – it’s the closest game I’ve seen to Diablo 2 which is a personal favourite so that’ll be played. I also have Blazing Angels but this doesn’t appear to work on Windows 7 with Steam which is a royal pain and I cant get a refund on this without getting Titanquest refunded as well so I’ll stick with it and hope it gets updated.

Anyhow, it’s nice to be back!

Prism – Web Pages but Applications… Not useful? I disagree.

Prism has been out and about for a while – it allows you to use web pages as a standalone application on your desktop. However I’ve not seen much notes on it.

Why would you want to put a website as an application you might ask? Well my first and main reason is distractions – with a web browser open, the distractions are enormous. Ok, so Chrome minimises these to a degree which is applaudable but it still has the URL, bookmarks visible and can visit any site just by putting in the URL.

What you if you can clear everything out so you had just what you needed to work? Wouldn’t that be great? One application I can think of that would benefit is a Tiddlywiki – this fantastic file lets you create your own one page wiki (you can see one in action on the tiddlywiki website or on my Linux help page on here).

This is exactly what I’ve done with my PhD research wiki as I use Tiddlywiki. Prism runs from Firefox so is easily able to save and browse the JavaScript powered wiki. And as you can see in the picture, it is clean and has no distractions and means I cant browse websites whilst working.

Prism can use a URL bar etc but this in my mind distracts from the point of it. which is to be clean and concise. The ability for it to appear as a standalone “program” is also good – like Chrome, if a one crashes, it shouldn’t take the lot with it. Also it means you can create a shortcut to the website anywhere because it’s a standalone app now!

I’ll be setting this up at home as well for use with various programs. – should work great with router config pages and bittorrent web GUI’s as well. The ideas are limitless!

It’s no use for normal  web browsing as it has a lack of tabs but for staying on focus, you should be happy with it.

Published Again – Micro Mart

I’ve had another article published. Check it out in this weeks Micro Mart (Issue 1091) if you want to find out how to build a Clarkconnect home Linux server.

Intel Release New Atom

The Intel Atom D510 to be precise. And I’m somewhat annoyed as it outperforms my current Atom 230 quite significantly according to an Andatech article!
I must admit recently I’ve been thinking at times my Atom is a bit slow (when it comes to compiling a LaTeX document, especially the first time in a session, for example) so it might be worth upgrading to. Having found £57 in my change drawer, this is about 85% of the cost so it might be a worthwhile upgrade, especially if I can sell the old motherboard on through eBay. However I cant help but have a feeling that I might be throwing good money at a problem and that this will not help my speed issues. Mind I know that the machine I use at work can struggle at times with the LaTeX compiling as well (that’s a Toshiba Satellite Pro with Core 2 Duo @ about 2Ghz) so it may not be worth upgrading to a much greater power machine.

The trouble is, I’ve fallen in love with the mini-itx form factor. I have done since I saw the first one. I love Shuttles but they are far to expensive, especially as I have the case already ( a Morex Cuboid 3677) which is small and suits it all fine.  But the 3677 is a major pain for getting anything to fit! Even the Intel Atom 230 motherboard wouldn’t fit, I had to get the Gigabyte version (which even that is a bit of a tight fit!). Apparently the D510 should fit according to mini-itx.com but I thought I best check. Depending on the answer, I’ll have to make a choice whether to upgrade or not. And if I do, I’ll have to see if I reckon my case will allow the machine to keep cool. It might mean turning the fan around so it’s blowing air into the case and not sucking air out. However I’m not sure what would be best so some research on that might be good.

Anyhow, nothing to do until they say yes it will or no it wont. And if it wont, I feel that it may not be worth my while bothering, as a new case  may make it better to purchase a better machine completely, even though I really like the low power consumption aspect of the Atoms. In fact this D510 board is supposed to be lower power consumption the 230 Atom board I currently have so it would be a bonus – more performance, lower power, a winning situation!

German Goverment Warns Against Using IE

Well it’s about time a Government issued advice on the matter!

BBC News

Hardly ground breaking stuff but as it provides a weak link in user security, I’m surprised there’s not more governments issuing warnings. It seems that an easy press release like this could improve the opinion the peoples view on the Government (almost as if they cared about the voters). However I guess it might anger Microsoft and if there were any special discounts for Government purchases, that might be removed…

Maybe that’s me being cynical…

Regardless, nice to see a step in the right direction.

I want to like Google Chrome, I really do…

But I just cant.

It’s a very good browser. Fast, minimalist and lightweight but  glaring in various omissions. Namely history. In this day and age, why is it not possible to not delete browser history by default? Opera does it, Firefox does it, even Internet Explorer does it! I don’t want to save a history of sites I visit. I don’t visit anything I shouldn’t, just why do I want my browsing to be tracked, even if it is on my PC? I don’t!

Now the Incognito mode is very nice. But some websites I visit require cookies to be saved after each visit so that  I can easily browse the forums (namely the Micro Mart forums) therefore rendering this useless. I have used a walk around on Windows to make the history file read only (walkthrough) but because I cant find the save files on Linux, I cant do the same trick (it appears Chrome doesn’t save it’s settings in a users home folder).

Also the privacy issues aren’t hugely encouraging either. Google records what you search for in the omnibar and send that data back every now and then. However this can be prevented by using a different search engine (such as Bing!) If I used it, I’d drop Google from search duty and stick with Chrome and Bing. I mean after all, I’m using Google Reader, Goolgemail and I search with it so the amount of data Google could have on me is quite a large amount. As such I’ve cut back on the services I use.

So in the mean time, I’m trying to like Chrome – it’s got loads of good things going for it. It’s just a shame it’s lacking in a few key areas!

Is back and different themes….

In Silico back and slightly different. No longer is it purely low power focussed computing but general. However it will feature low power, high performance computing when possible or of interest!