So we were watching Star Trek:TNG during dinner and this weird perfume commercial started playing and then Conrad decided it needed some honest rebranding and it all went downhill from there.
My right hand’s still messed up, so this one was done 100% left-handed. Y’know. To make it sexier.
anyway, sorry. sorry everyone.
This commercial came on while we were watching ST:TNG on Hulu and Yuko did what needed to be done.
theodinspire asked: My friend is looking for the "cheapest, not shitty" android phone. Any recommendations?
I don’t know when this was asked, but the answer is simple: It’s the Nexus 4. In fact, I would go so far as to say there are two phones on the market: the iPhone 5 and the Nexus 4. Nothing else should enter the minds of most consumers.
Lucky Penny is happening over at Johnny Wander for the foreseeable future and I couldn’t be happier. Some amazing work from two of my favorite people.
Hey did I mention the RSS feed works?
For a while I’ve been working on an easy-to-use library for running compiled XPath queries against XML and HTML. It’s now on GitHub under an MIT license. Go get it.
Let me use small words and type slowly because Spotify and these other nimrods are just.not.getting.it.
If I pay $X per day/month/year for your service
you do not ever Push Notify me an ad
that’s why I’m paying $X per day/month/year for your service
period.
Got this today myself. Was equally unimpressed.
Some great Nero album covers.
“We believe that you buy games to be entertained, not to be whacked over the head every time you make a mistake. So we don’t bring the game to a screeching halt when you poke your nose into a place you haven’t visited before. Unlike conventional computer adventures, you won’t find yourself accidentally stepping off a path, or dying because you’ve picked up a sharp object.
We think you’d prefer to solve the game’s mysteries by exploring and discovering, not by dying a thousand deaths. We also think you like to spend your time involved in the story, not typing in synonyms until you stumble upon the computer’s word for a certain object.
”
It’s available on Steam.
Big night, huh?
In our last post I sent out a desperate plea for a software-based SSD cache solution for Windows. It appears that one does in fact exist!
The solution appears to be called Dataplex by a company named Nvelo. TechSpot indicates that the licensing for the software is sort of cumbersome and a pain, but once installed the benchmarks hit the numbers I’m looking for. That review also happens to be for a Crucial drive, a company I have very positive experiences with overall.
Strikes against the solution would be lack of support for Windows 8 primarily, and the fact that it drives up the cost of bundled SSDs with additional licensing fees1. Either way, I’d rather let a computer do my data shuffling for me, so the few dollars certainly don’t bother me.
If nothing else comes up this may well end up being my solution. This has the additional benefit of allowing me to start looking at AMD Trinity based solutions for a settop box I’m putting together to play Steam games.
That 50GB cache drive is $85 on Amazon, though my understanding leads me to be believe this is in part due to some serious over-provisioning on those drives. ↩
Recently, I found out it’s relatively easy to turn a platter drive and an SSD into a Fusion Drive on any Mac, which was convenient as I had torn out the optical drive in favor of a 128GB Samsung 830 SSD for my MacBookPro8,1 some time ago. A quick Time Machine backup and a few console commands later and I was off to the races with what I called my Fauxion Drive.
The results were astounding. The system never hesitates to perform any action, but I also no longer have to deal with manually managing where files and applications live, which earlier was accomplished with a number of symlinks to spaces on my platter drive. I speculate this has also led to better battery life, as individual, oft-accessed files that would have lived on the “data” drive have been implicitly cached to the SSD, allowing the HDD to spin down. Also writes are all implicitly cached in a 4GB tier on the SSD, meaning the HDD is conservatively touched for all writes. In short: this is the system I’ve always wanted, here, today.
It’s now time for me to change my Windows PC into a Steam Box: an appliance-like installation of Windows 8 meant for using Steam in Big Picture Mode. I have no intention of manually managing storage between HDD and SSD ever again. So I’m on the hunt for solutions on the Windows/PC side.
During the announcement of Apple’s Fusion Drive, I heard a number of PC enthusiasts/observers indicate that this kind of technology has been around for a while, and the Fusion Drive is nothing new or astounding. As the owner of a Seagate Momentus XT1, I knew that certainly wasn’t what I was looking for, but was curious about the other offerings.
On the radar immediately is Intel’s SRT, or Smart Response Technology, which comes with some notable restrictions, most damningly it will require me to purchase a new motherboard, as it is limited to very new Ivy Bridge chipsets2. With Haswell peeking its head around the corner, I’m loathed to upgrade a component that will be obsolete within the coming months3, meaning I suppose I’m on the hunt for a software solution.
On the software side, I can find reference to Windows ReadyDrive, which was apparently built into Windows Vista, though I can find little information about actually using it. Worse yet, that appears to be my only option; there do not appear to be software-level solutions for creating a Fusion Drive-esque construct in Windows.
So here’s my plea, tumblr: if Fusion Drive is really just repackaged old tech, how do I get my heads on some of this sweet old tech for a retrofit Steam Box?
In fact, it’s currently paired with the 830. Writes are not cached, and the SSD tier is limited to 4-8GB, which is a fraction of the OS itself. ↩
And the Z68 Sandy Bridge chipset. ↩
Haswell brings with it a compatibility-breaking socket change, the LGA 1150, opposed to the presently-used LGA 1155. ↩
from Scott Pilgrim vol 3, which I’m currently working on (colorizing; it comes out in May). I just think this panel is cute.
The last five years of my life, summarized.
