The Life Of A LittlBUGer

Yup, it’s that time again where I say “wow, it’s been a long time since I last posted”.  And it’s true but it’s not the point.  I no longer own any of my stuff related to littlbuger.info and as such have more time to deal with my family and work and whatnot (yes, that was the excruciatingly short version of the whole long story, but whatever).  Thus this will probably be my last post here as there’s really no point, though I’m sure no one cares as my blog never really got read by anyone.

But just in case, thanks and farewell.  Here’s a couple final pictures that I thought were funny.  Enjoy…

The obvious (yet technically correct)…

and The Even More Obvious (and even more technically correct)…

Please read the important announcement located here: Press Release

It should be ready by all.  Thank you.

I am the master of overclocking! Behold! My un-touched screenshot showing proof of concept of how I overclocked my 2.2 Ghz system to over 44 Ghz!

Screenshot:

I challenge someone to beat that (without editing their screenshot)!

NOTE: Those of you who are keen enough to spot the subtle hint in the picture may know what’s really going on here…

(If you’d like to know how I did it, feel free to contact me)

As I mentioned yesterday, I had TWO stories, so here’s the second.

A few months back I thought it would be cool to try and get a Nintendo Wii for my family as my oldest son is just now getting old enough to understand and play games and so it’s fun enough to play with him.  But I also wanted to get my wife, the non-computer-literate and non-gaming person that she is, somehow back into gaming if I could.  I figured, what better way than the Wii?  Obviously after only a bit of research, I found it was impossible to get a Wii locally and nearly all stores online were out of stock unless I got it on eBay if I decided to pay nearly twice as much.

So after a while I began to lose hope until I noticed an ad (on my own website even) about getting a Wii.  I clicked it and it brought me to a site called Online Reward Center ( http://www.onlinerewardcenter.com ).  It described something by signing up for free and then completing a certain numbers of offers from their website, if all went well, they’d send me a new Nintendo Wii.  Instantly my first thought was that it was a scam, like most of these types of things are, especially when I noticed that if I went to the main website (without going through the ad), there wasn’t even a way to get the Wii through their own menus.

But alas, I wanted a damn Wii, I wanted to try something new, and at that time, I didn’t care what consequences may occur.  So I joined and began browsing through all of their ‘offers’ which were spread out between 3 different categories (like Bronze, Silver, and Gold or something).  Before I even got to those offers though, they tried to trick me into signing up for a truck load of other offers that had nothing to do with me getting my Wii… I mean pages and pages of offers that I had to say No Thanks to before I finally got to the main offers I needed to complete.  It said I needed to fully complete 8 offers (4 from the lowest category, 2 from the middle, and 2 from the highest) and then continue from there.

So I began browsing and picking the offers I wanted that I thought would be the easiest and cheapest to do.  Examples were signing up for the Blockbuster Online movie rental thing (even though I’ve been a huge fan and long time member of Netflix), signing up for a small PayDay Loan (which I just immediately pay back right after I got it), signing up for a trial offer on a certain electronic device, or signing up for a trial offer on some software.  I knew that whatever I signed up for, as long as I met the full requirements of each offer, that I would promptly cancel each offer/subscription before a full month was up.

So I did the offers which took an hour or so to initially do, including the actually finding of the offers themselves.  All offers obviously required some sort of initial payment.  I estimated in total that my payments were around $125, which was fine.  Then over the next few weeks, as I waited and made sure I fully met all the requirements, I slowly canceled each offer as needed and kept checking back to the Online Reward Center site to see which offers have been ‘Reported’, meaning the company who does the offer reported to them I successfully did the offer and met the requirements.  After about 3 weeks, all buy one were successfully reported.  The damn Blockbuster one was the only one which didn’t want to report.  So I had to end up waiting for another week or so before I could finally contact the Online Reward Center company and manually report it.  This also forced me to pay another month of the Blockbuster rental, so now I was getting near $150 total thus far.

Now, it wasn’t really all fun and games in doing the offers and then canceling them.  Some of the companies made it difficult to cancel and 3 of them charged me again even though I did already cancel.  So I had to call them back, along with my bank, to get it all sorted out and get my money back.  Luckily this really wasn’t an issue, it was just time consuming and whatnot. Once those were taken care of and the Blockbuster offer was finally reported, I checked back on the site and it said that I successfully met all of the requirements, so now I had to fill out a ‘Gift Voucher Form’ and send it to them.  Meaning I had to print a form out, fill out the information, get it notarized (yes, notarized!.. you know, getting the official county seal of approval on the damn thing), and then send it back to them via standard mail.  So obviously, I knew this would take a good week in itself to get done and get back to them.

Well, it finally did get back to them and the status on their site changed and now said all was good and they were sending out a Gift Shipping Note or something to whomever needed it so that my Wii would be ordered and shipped to me.  At this point, I was both excited and scared/anxious at the same time.  I thought, what if this works and I get a Wii… though it required a bit of time and effort, I spent almost half as much as if I could have bought it in a store.  Then again, what if this whole thing was a scam and now I’m out $150 with time wasted for nothing?  What if the package I receive is not a Wii at all, but a fricken NES or something in its place?

So the worrying began when around 2 weeks or so later I still had nothing and no updates were posted for my account on the site.  That was until the next day, I finally got an email with a shipping notice and tracking number from UPS!  Whoohoo I thought!  So I waited another week for it to arrive and guess what!  The box was empty!  I was totally scammed!

No, not really, actually I was just lying right there.  Ha ha, gotcha!  Seriously though, it did arrive, fully intact and brand new in the box.  All parts a standard Wii package would come with and it works great.  I would have never thought that something like this would actually work and I would actually get my Wii for paying less than at a retail store.  Now my wife, kids, and I are having some good fun, though still learning too.

So I just wanted to thank Online Reward Center for their efforts and hope they continue in their ways and continue allowing people like me to get new technology and products for cheap (though through lots of time and effort).  I’m enjoying my new Wii, after almost exactly two months since I first signed up for the site, and I couldn’t be happier.  Now, if I could just get a nice new laptop for only completing the same 8 offers…

Man, has it seriously been nearly 3 weeks since I posted here?  Damn me… damn me to hell!

Anyway, I have a couple of things to share today.  First off, one of my new projects at home was to setup a system where I could backup all of my music, photos, and DVDs/movies to a home server or some external HD even and then be able to play those directly on my TV.  I mainly wanted this because of my DVDs.  When you have kids, you end either losing DVDs, getting them ruined or broken, etc.  So by backing them up electronically and then playing them directly to the TV, nothing is lost and it’s easier and faster to actually get the movie started.

The first thing that happened that allowed this ‘dream’ to come to reality was when the company I work for was going to throw out some ‘old’ computers.  I said, hell, I’ll take one home.  So I did.  It is very basic, Celeron 2.4 Ghz CPU with 256 MB RAM, 80 GB HD, etc. but still, probably powerful enough to eventually stream some media to my TV.

So I began research a month or so ago into media players that would be some sort of set top box that I’d put under my TV along with my DVD player and whatnot.   I searched left and right to try and find the best deal and best band for the buck.  Everything kept pointing to the Apple TV, but since I loath Apple and it really wasn’t quite what I wanted anyway (as it required iTunes and whatnot other crap) I had to find the next best thing.  It seemed that next best thing was the DLink DSM-520.  So I ordered it, it came, I installed it relatively easy enough.  Then I read up on it some more.

It seems the best way for me to go about things was to use their media software on my ‘new’ home server to share the folders I wanted to share which had my movies and such and to also first re-encode all of my movies to mp4 format.  I figured this would be OK as I could still get the main movie at good quality with OK file size.  So I did this so several test movies, installed the software, poked holes in my firewall and such and then did some tests.  Took me a while to realize that the DSM-520, though it had built in wireless capability, just wasn’t going to cut it wirelessly.  not because of any slow downs in movie playing or anything, but just because I couldn’t really ever get anything to work.

So I decided, since my TV is upstairs in the living room and my home server is downstairs in my office, I should try the powerline ethernet adapters to allow an ethernet connection through my power lines in the house.  I bought a pair of 200 Mbps Adaptec ones and after a very easy setup, I could see the wired connectivity was there and working fine.  So I wired it to my router and then to the DSM-520 and hoped for the best.  Though things were slightly better, it was still a 50/50 chance that any movie would even start playing and the DSM-520 was still just generally slow and sluggish on the menu.  When it did actually play, it may skip every now and then during the movie and I found out the remote was absolutely horrible at doing any chapter skipping or fast forwarding and rewinding.

So I thought about upgrading the home server a bit (such as adding more RAM, adding in a dedicated sound and video card, new power supply, etc.) to see if that was the issue.  I ordered the parts, got them installed, tried everything again, and absolutely no change.  So I began posting on the DLink forums and whatnot and no one was of any help as I’ve already tried all of their suggestions software-wise and hardware-wise.  So now I’m fed up.

Being pissed off and frustrated at the same time, I decide to think things over a bit.  My setup was maybe a bit unique.  Though I had the home server, the actual media I was sharing was on a 500 GB external drive connected via USB to the home server.  It was stored, actually, on a Klegg 500 GB NetDisk.  So I thought… hmm… maybe it’s the Klegg drive, or maybe I need something from Klegg to make it work?  So I began looking at Klegg…

Soon I found what seemed to be quite a little and amazing device, the Klegg MediaShare.  It could do everything the DSM-520 could and then some.  It could even act as an enclosure, meaning I could put a HD directly into the device so I wouldn’t even need a server to stream media from.  So after more research, though I found the main website to contain barely any information and it was supposively sold at only one location, reviews were fairly good and I noticed it could potentially play .iso files directly!  This means that I could do a full backup (menus, extras, and all) of a DVD to a .iso file and it would play directly through that.  The other bonus was that it didn’t require any software, it just looked for any open shares or shared folders on the network.

So again, I put my faith in this new unit, purchased it, set it up replacing the DSM-520 and low and behold, though it could see my server, it didn’t see any shared folders though I explicitly shared them for this purpose.  I was instantly frustrated until I actually looked at the manual and noticed something.  When talking about sharing folders, it didn’t say anything about using Windows XP Pro and having Simple Sharing disabled, it went through instructions with Simple File Sharing ENABLED.  So I did just that, re-shared my folders, and voila, it can see them!  So I navigated through it’s menu and clicked on one of my .iso movies and viola, it starts playing immediately!

I was so overjoyed at this moment, I didn’t know what to do.  So I just watched the movie for a while to make sure all was OK, even tried the remote out which actually works as it should and was impressed.   So this basically helped conclude my overall project as I knew I had a working solution for what I wanted.  Sure, I would have to have larger files for the DVD backups and such, but hell, space is cheap these days.  I just wish I would have bought the Klegg MediaShare right off the bat!

So in conclusion, I’m going to give a nice big THUMBS UP to Klegg and a nice big THUMBS DOWN to DLink for comparable media sharing capabilities (who knew this post would turn into a review!).  I’ll also state some pros and cons for you that were the main points I looked into:

 DLink DSM-520

Pros:

• Lots of information and active updates and support from main website
• Comes from a huge and widely known company
• Somewhat large userbase
• Has a large menu and the ability to view YouTube and other videos from online
• Wireless and wired capabilities
• Basically silent operation

Cons:

• Can’t play directly from .iso files or other DVD file formats (such as .vob, etc.)
• Remote is just plain horrible
• Menus and loading times are quite slow
• The device itself is overly large
• Can’t act like an enclosure
• USB interface can’t handle larger external hard drives

Klegg MediaShare

Pros:

• Menus looks great and easy to navigate
• No slowness or sluggishness in menus
• Remote works as it should
• Can play directly from .iso or .vob files
• The device itself is quite small
• Is an enclosure so a HD can be added directly to the device thus bypassing the need for a server at all
• USB interface can handle larger external drives
• Wireless and wired capabilities

Cons:

• Comes with a fan to help cool internal HD (if you put one in) and thus is a bit nosier than I’d like
• Relatively no information or updates from main website
• Small userbase
• Pretty much unknown company (other than the fact they bought Ximeta I think)
• Can’t play YouTube or other videos directly from the internet

And of course, links to both products:

DLink DSM-520: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=438

Klegg MedisShare: http://www.kleggusa.com/product_mediashare.html

FYI… I have a new affiliate system on my hosting/billing site ( http://billing.littlbuger.info ).  If you or anyone else wishes to register for an account for free (unless you already have one), you can then use the affiliate system to make some extra cash for yourself, and you don’t even need to purchase any hosting package.  Not only can you make money by having others purchase hosting through your affiliate link, but if you find someone who wants a free hosting account and they are willing to put my ads up and they have high traffic, I can arrange for you to get a percentage of what’s made through the ads as well.  I am also kind of in a bind this week as I have personal bills to pay that I will be unable to do due to issues with the server I had to pay for recently.  If you want to do the affiliate system to help get us both extra money, or even find people that want to donate because they’ve enjoyed my downloads site or something, please feel free to do all that you can.  Thank you so much, it’s appreciated. 

Well, I know it’s been awhile again, but oh well. Life is busy, suck it up.

I just had to post today because I came across such a cool site and idea: The PimpStar

“The PimpStar is a huge leap forward in the evolution of the wheel. With the PimpStar’s built-in full color LED lights, microprocessor and wireless modem, you can display virtually any image, including text, graphics, logos, and even digital photos!”

Now, to me, when I first saw this, other than the ridiculously stupid name, I thought it was a neat idea. That was, until I watched the ‘promo/demo’ video: PimpStar Video

I’m not going to spoil anything, but seriously… seriously??!! Then I saw the price neat the bottom of the page… yea… no thank you.

Oh, and the picture of the day is: What Video Game System Should I Own?

Thanks for playing!

Yes, Thanksgiving has come and gone and I was terribly ill throughout my 4 days of vacation.  It was kind of a time of hell for me, especially trying to deal with my family as I went through it, but alas, I’m still here, working and OK on Monday.  Luckily, for the first time ever, my wife was nice enough to be kinder than usual while I was sick and decided to give me a little bit more computer time than ever before.  As thus, instead of going the Vista route as that OS is horrible, I decided to wipe my PC and start from scratch with Windows XP Pro x64 Edition (the 64-bit edition, yes).  As I can conveniently use my job and get a valid license and copy of the OS, I went this route to see if there really was any performance benefits of using a 64-bit OS over a 32-bit OS, as well as any programs that ran natively in 64-bit.  As I’ve been finding out, I was correct and things have been working quite nicely.  It took me a couple days to get everything back up and loaded, but it was worth it.  I’ve only had one minor driver issue, which is actually with a device I don’t even use, so I’m quite happy.  Gaming has been great and whatnot else so that’s all I need for the most part.  I’ll have to test it more but for now, I’m good. 

Also, I’m sorry for the lack of posts recently, but work has been very chaotic lately as a program I’ve been working on is coming to a close so I’m trying to get everything ready, including documentation and whatnot, so ‘play’ time at work is down to a minimal amount.  I’ll try to post more later, but for now, please enjoy my rant above.

Well, as some of you may know, I have a gaming laptop.  And for the most part, it’s great.  But it does lack the handy RAID 0 that I miss on my old PC and of course the dual video cards, but that’s OK.  Or so I thought until I started playing the damn Crysis demo!  Holy crap, I thought BioShock was a little bad (I mean, I could do it with maxed out video settings at 1600×900 resolution and everything was perfectly smooth), but not Crysis, oh no.  I can barely get away with everything on the ‘Medium’ setting and a 1440×1050 resolution (or whatever the hell it was)!  This is a new laptop for me and I’ve played at least 10 new games on it fine and then suddenly this?!  BAH HUM BUG (no early Christmas pun intended)!

Anyway, because of my frustration, I decided to look around for things I could possibly do (other than buying a new damn laptop) to help increase my overall system performance.  And I’m not talking about stupid simple things like malware/virus scan, defrags, file cleaning, disk checking, startup optimizations, registry cleaning, driver updates, etc.  No, I wanted something more, something maybe part software part hardware based.  And then it hit me, just like that… and out of the clouds came eBoostr, ready to quench my thirst for speed!  I was overjoyed to see such a small and new program to actually seem to live up to what it says it can do.  And the fact that it trumps Vista’s built-in similar technology is just another plus for me.  ;)  Based on some initial tests, the program said I could only sustain about 10MB/s random read/write on my current HD (7200rpm 160GB SATA) but with my old USB drive I could sustain over 23MB/s?!  What, how could this be?  I must be dreaming!  But then I ran some other practical tests and saw some decent results, so I moved on…

But that wasn’t enough, no, not for me.  After doing testing with the software and realizing it’s potential, I knew I needed something better than just my old 512MB Cruzer Titanium USB drive.  I needed the fastest USB drive a consumer can buy.  And thus I found the amazing 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT .  My mouth watered at the thought of a possible 25MB/s or so sustained read/write capability.  I knew I must have one to get the max out of this new software.  But alas, this software can handle up to 4 devices!  And though I have that many USB ports, all of them buy one are in use!  GAH!  So what is a guy like me to do?  Remember that he has a 4-in-1 card reader on his laptop as well!  Here we come 4GB SD card!  That should hopefully give me a good 8GB of total combined fast access cache and make me a happy camper for the rest of my days (or for the rest of this laptop’s days).

Of course, I thought about getting the 8GB versions of each above, but seriously, do you really think I crap money out of my ass every day?  I’m already going out on a limb here to do the stuff I mentioned above (and thus, I graciously thank any and all donations, especially large ones…  ).  Feel free to give your suggestions on other ways to improve my system performance.   I’m here to help, as usual, but sometimes I need help myself. 

Oh yes, how could I forgot.  Your funny link of the day is: Fox News Porn.  Enjoy! 

Today I thought I’d grace everyone with a fun experience I had with Gateway a couple years ago.  I’ve already posted it on the wonderful site ClientCopia, but I thought I’d repost it here as well for your enjoyment.  :-)   So here it is:

I was working on a computer at my work that had a strange error (I work in the IT department). After much troubleshooting, I decided to chat with Gateway online (gasp!) to see if they could help, or just give me a replacement. Here’s the chat log with the original explanation on my problem. Nothing was edited except for me being nice and removing the person’s badge number (note his spelling/grammar).

“After doing a routine image restore, the computer suddenly locks up right after the Intel Boot Agent screen (of which we don`t use). Many things have been done to resolve but nothing works. We think it`s some issue with the on-board LAN/NIC. Help/suggestions are needed and if nothing else works, a replacement is required.”

Jason: Welcome to Gateway Remote Assistance. I am looking at your account and the information you submitted. I will begin troubleshooting with you in just a moment.
Jason: Hello (my name)!
Me: Hello.
Jason: have you reinsall the driver?
Me: As I stated when I filled out the form for the chat session, the system hangs right after the Intel Boot Agent screen right after the POST screen. I can’t get into the BIOS, I can’t get to the Boot Order menu, I can’t boot off of a disk or CD, I tried re-setting the CMOS with no luck… nothing works.
Me: The only thing I CAN get into is the Boot Agent setup screen by pressing Ctrl+S, which does no good though as we don’t use it and there’s nothing there to help.
Jason: Have you try to boot in safe mode
Jason: then do the system restire there.
Me: Pressing any key, either F1, F2, F8, F10, whatever doesn’t work as it hangs the split second after the Intel Boot Agent section. Nothing happens after that. Nothing is accessible. This is why I think it’s the on-board LAN/NIC that is suddenly causing problems, for some unknown reason.
Me: If I could get into the BIOS, I would disable the boot agent, but I can’t. If I could get anywhere, I could fix it, but I can’t. Is there some sort of key combination I can press to bypass the Boot Agent manually? Or anything similar?

(a few minutes pass…)

Me: Hello?

(more minutes pass…)

Me: Anyone there?
Jason: yes.
Me: So can you help? Any suggestions?
Jason: Have you try to restore in safe mode?

(WTF?!)

Me: Did you not read what I said above? If I could get into Safe Mode, then that would be getting somewhere, but I CAN’T get anywhere. Even if I could get into Safe Mode, it wouldn’t do much get (meaning if I tried a System Restore) as our company doesn’t use System Restore.
Me: If you can’t help or you don’t have any suggestions, please send me to someone who can or please give me a replacement on the computer (or at least the motherboard) as it’s still under warranty.
Jason: Reinstalling your os is the last option .

(WHAT?!)

Me: Umm, it has NOTHING to do with the OS. This has to do with the HARDWARE. If I could update the BIOS, that might fix something as I may be able to disable the Boot Agent as it seems to be causing the problems. Anyway, thanks for helping. I guess I’ll be calling Gateway now for a replacement…
Jason: BIOS update,
Me: Yes, it would be nice if I could update the BIOS, but since I can’t boot off of a CD or floppy disk, it does me no good.
Jason: Have you try to change your boot option?
Jason: (gives web link to BIOS update download)
Jason: that is the link where you can download the bios update.
Me: OK, obviously you are not reading what I’m saying. For the last time, I can NOT get into the BIOS to change the boot order. I CANNOT also press F10 to change the boot order. The system hangs before anything like that can be done!
Jason: there is your bios update.

(Bangs head on desk…)

Me: Nevermind… I’m calling Gateway now…
Jason: It was a pleasure working with you. My name and badge number are Jason. Thank you for using Gateway Remote Assistance and have a great day.

Well, lessons learned, I wont be chatting with Gateway online anytime in the near future…