Category: General

ITs christmas eve here in Kuala Lumpur and its getting quite. I’m the only left in the office and its just 4pm. Ok, it was suddenly announced that its half day off today so most of the guys in the office have already left, but I’m here for the aircon!
Happy xmas & merry new year! (no typo!)

Bought the new PC in parts and surveying the prices in Low Yat to put together the following system:
– ASUS P5P800 Mother board for Socket 775 Intel Processors
– Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz Socket 775
– 512Mb Kingston Value RAM PC3200 400MHz (good enough!)
– HIS Excalibur ATi RADEON 9550 128Mb
– Netgear 802.11b/g PCI card
– Antec LANBOY aluminium casing with built in 350W power supply
– BENQ CDRW/DVDROM (not DVD writer)
– BENQ 531 LCD 15″ (Cheap and good enough)

The casing comes with transparent side panels (not that large, but enough for the light to be quite obvious) and I’ve installed some cooler master blue LED fans in it.

The whole system is not meant to be super powerful but powerful enough and packed with enough quality components to last… well… 3-5 years? All in all, had a nice time putting it all together…. too bad it wont look that nice as a PVR. That I will need to use the Shuttle SB83G5 for it!

Part of the mission I had this week to was to look for the most cost effective video card that’s fast enough to run most games out there. Ok, not DOOM 3 but at least 99% of the other games. Finally settled on a ATi RADEON 9550 based card. Its based on the fact that a 9550 card can be had for USD65+ while at the next level a RADEON 9600 will cost in excess of USD100. I’m not even looking at the SE versions of the two card because they’re too much crippled. 9600SE has just 64 bit memory bandwidth while the stock 9600 has the usual 128bit. Apparently according to the benchmarks on the internet, that makes a big difference in the performance. Continue reading “Video Card: The RADEON 9550”

Just a few weeks after getting my new Shuttle PC, I’m in the market for a new one, but not for me this time. The configuration will be the same as the P4 3GHz Shuttle but for the time being it looks like its going to be a full system (not barebones) with an external video card, not as fast as the RADEON X800 but faster than the built-in card on most motherboard.
I’ve got all the price lists from Low Yat Plaza in Kuala Lumpur already and doing the comparisons.

When I tried to log into my WinXP today I noticed my ASDJKL keys are not working… which was a little strange. I managed to log into a passwordless account, and when I tried with a text editor it still didn’t work. About 5 minutes later its all working fine, just before I was going to swap the keyboard with a spare one… still can’t figure out what happened….

Was in Shanghai last week and had my first taste of the new Magnetic Levitation train that linked Pudong Airport with the city (well, not really the city, you still need to take a taxi to get to the Puxi part of the city). The stop in Shanghai is at Long Yang Rd, which is about the 4th or 5th metro station in Pudong after crossing the river. Continue reading “Maglev train from Pudong Airport”

Bought a Shuttle barebones system today to replace my old Pentium II 266MHz. The Shuttle system essentially comes with just the casing, motherboard, sound and video built in, all the networking you need (ok just gigabit ethernet) and a nice sexy casing.
So I compared a few shops over here in Kuala Lumpur’s Low Yat, and finally bought a Shuttle SB83G5 which is an Intel system with the 915G chipset (supports PCI Express, onboard video and the new (at the time of writing anyway) Socket 775 Pentium 4.
Continue reading “Shuttle PC”

Another few more days before the start of my 2004 holidays. spent some time today trying to charge all my batteries to make sure that they all work well. I’ve got batteries for 2 cameras, 1 handycam, some AA batteries to charge as well. If they all took about 2 hours to charge each, its still going to take a few days to charge them (if I dontleave them to charge overnight, which I dont like to do)
Got to remember to bring my GPS, my Suunto Observer without the strap (new strap waiting for me in Boston), allt he CF cards I own, some DV tapes and alol the bags I need (mobility is important, and so’s the need not to look like a tourist. Not too interested in attracting snatch thieves during holiday)

As I was checking the internet and news recently, I came across an event that was happening in Putrajaya here in Malaysia. It seems that the F1 Powerboat race is in Malaysia this weekend. I quickly packed up my bags with my camera and ran over to Putrajaya from KL and reached in the middle of the race at about 2:40pm.

Continue reading “2004 F1 Powerboat Malaysia”

Beginning to like gmail… click on an option and it appears. Click on the shortcuts on your keyboard (usually 1 key like ‘c’ for composing a new mail) and it appears just like that. Dont have to wait for it to take 10 seconds to load like other email systems. I’ve not used my search function (which is probably why it was created anyways) becuase I still dont have a lot of mails archived in it.
You have a function to create your own labels and to label each email as well. Which I find quite useful. I have labels for “office”, “useful” and others.

Its got other features like importing address books from outlook and yahoo mail, which I tried to use but wasn’t working so far. Otherwise, all the mails you send out will automatically be inside the address book (the email address of the destination party, of course) and all you have to do is to go into the contacts page and add some names to it.

So far, its simple, its fast and its fun to use. The only problem is now I maintain 3 different email accounts which are accessible on the web… which one to retain!?!?!?