Are computer games a waste of time?
Wednesday February 21st, 2007
Yes, it definitely is! I played “Counter-Strike” for years, but I would do it again if I’d given the chance to choose.
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Archive for the ‘interesting things’ Category
enjoying music
Monday February 5th, 2007
Today, I went to Gravis, a store selling all things from Apple and equipment for it. Because I just sold my iRiver SlimX iMP 550, I wanted to check out the Apple Ipods. There was one other major reason why I went to Gravis. They had all Shure earphones there for customers to try. Because Shure earphones are extremely expensive, I wanted to test them. I myself only own a pair of Sony’s MDR-EX 71 SL.
RAM error, what next?
Tuesday January 23rd, 2007
As some of you might know, I use a pair of 512MB Twinmos Twister Pro Dual Channel RAM. They’re not only the fastest DDR1 modules around, but they permit overclocking without voiding the warranty. Of course, they weren’t cheap when I bought them almost 2 years ago. Around last week, my computer started crashing and I ran memtest86. It showed me several errors during test 5. I couldn’t believe it, because I didn’t even overcloak those modules. Anyway, I wrote to Twinmos, asking about the “lifetime warranty”. And what response did I get? “We don’t give out warranty on these modules anymore”. WTF? These modules are not even 2 years old! It seems like the Twinmos lifetime warranty is limited by them to the time they are still producing the product. But actually, for those who bought the RAM later than me, they might not even had 1 year of warranty. What a rip-off!
international green week
Last Saturday, my girlfriend and me went to the “International Green Week” in Berlin. It’s a exhibition from the food industry. Everything you can find there has something to do with our everday food. The price for a day ticket is € 6,00 for students.
blessing in disguise
Saturday December 30th, 2006
Yesterday, Liu Chengyang (we call him Liu) and his girlfriend Pan Junli (called “Trampeltier”), Qian Le (someone else with similiar name like me), my girlfriend and me wanted to go to Snow Funpark, an indoor skiing hall in north Germany. Because they have been overbooked the last two days, they recommended that we should arrive before 9 am, so we could still get tickets. Anyway, to get there on time, we had to get up early and meet 6:30 am. 2 minutes before 6:30, Liu called me and told me he had an accident. Quite shocked I asked him what happend and he told me that he broke one of the wheels of his car by driving into the curb. But luckily we were able to get the wheel changed at A.T.U. and we could continue our journey 2 hours later. The trip was around 130 miles, so we had a brake at “Walsdorf Ost”. After we all went to the bathroom and sat back in the car, it wouldn’t start, so we called the “ADAC” (a car club in Germany) to ask for help. And in less than 5 minutes, a ADAC car came by and found out that the battery just died. Luckily, the ADAC guy had a reserve with him and installed it for us. 30 minutes later, we were ready to go again. Qian Le already thought it could be some hint for us not to go skiing, but we still continued the travel. Around 11:30 am, we finally arrived in Wittenburg, where the indoor skiing hall was. It is supposed to be the biggest in europe. With over 1000 feet in length, 30° declination and 260 feet width, the hall even had a half pipe. But because the hall just opened at December 8th, the half pipe wasn’t ready yet. the entry was € 15 that day for 5 hours, day tickets weren’t available because they were overbooked. Because of that, we were able to get tickets for 1:00 pm. It was finally time for the fun to begin! The piste was quite long for an indoor hall, but the snow was too thin. The top part of the slope was completely ice, so everyone was sliding and falling there. They tried to fix it, but failed miserably. But for € 15, it is a really good value.
christmas is coming
Friday December 1st, 2006
It’s december again and Christmas is coming. Well, I should be very festive and motivated in the university. But first, I need to be awake. Like every day morning, I get woken up way too early and it is not very astonishing that I am very tired after I got to the university. How to help myself out in this problematic situation? How to survive another day of endless lecuring? How to become motivated? How to become festive for Christmas? Is there even a solution for this?
IFA berlin 2006
Sunday September 3rd, 2006
IFA (“Internationale Funkaustellung”) 2006 is the number one cosumer electronics exibition in the world. My girlfriend, her little sister and me went there this sunday. It wasn’t as crowded this time, but there were still a lot of people. The reason is simple: Nothing really new was invented this year. The major part of the exibition was about big screen TVs. Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, LG, LCD and plasma TVs everywhere. I found a 102″ Samsung plasma-TV, but nobody from Samsung could answer my simple question about how high the power consumption of that huge thing was. There were even a few brands from China. Highsense, Haier and some other Chinese companies had rented pretty big spaces there. I personally liked the apperance of Highsense, althought I don’t really like their LCDs because my parent bought one which was exchanged 2 times in 7 days because it simply wasn’t working correctly. Now they have a Haier, which is also having some problems.
Anyway, the impression I got this year from the IFA is that all the big German companies were simply trying to sell the consumer their old products instead of presenting new ones. A prepaid cellphone C139 from Motorola for €20.00 from T-Mobile. Sounds cheap? Well, it isn’t. You can get one for €12.50 on eBay. A small and not bad looking color cellphone for only €12.50.. Isn’t that less than the production costs?
travelling to the past
Monday July 17th, 2006
Einstein said, when you move faster than the light, you will see the time running backwards, making it possible to see the past. Well, I had a little different experience with seeing the happenings of the past.
creativitysquare.com
Monday May 29th, 2006
I finally found some time and got this project working again. If you are being uncreative lately, you should go and play a little. It will definitely help you. Give it a try!
power consumption
Tuesday May 16th, 2006
You think upgrading your computer is expensive? Ever though about the power being even more expensive? My old Windows server used an AMD Athlon Thunderbird C 1400 MHz (73W). The CPU temperature was always above 70°C. It’s like you are using electricity to heat instead of using it to compute things. My other Linux server, an AMD Athlon 650 (70W), not to mention my Desktop PC with an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (77W) are also power eaters. Now with 4 computers, my electricity bill would be € 80 every month. If I use Virtualization to put my Windows and Linux server onto one machine, I would save a lot of power money, but it would slow my systems down a lot. So I would have to upgrade my server to let both systems run on one machine.