The Life Of A LittlBUGer

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

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! 

Once upon a midnight dreary,
Fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat here doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line, I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand,
I then invoked the “save” command
But got instead a reprimand: it read, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”
Was this some occult illusion?
Some manacal type intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.

Carefully I weighed my options…
These three seemed to be the top ones.
Clearly I must now adopt one; choose: Abort, Retry, Ignore?
With my fingers pale and trembling
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored

Praying for some guarantee,
Finally I pressed a key.
But what on the screen did I see? Again “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”
I tried to catch the chips off guard -
I pressed again, but twice as hard,
But luck was just not on the cards, I saw what I had seen before.

Now I typed in desperation
Trying random combinations.
Still there came the incantation “Abort, Retry, Ignore.”
There I sat, distraught, exhausted,
By my own machine accosted
getting up, I turned away and paced across the office floor.

And then I saw an awful sight
A bold and blinding flash of light
A lightening bolt that cut the night, and shook me to my very core.
The PC screen collapsed and died.
“OH NO! MY DATABASE!” I cried.
I heard a distant voice reply, “You’ll see your spreadsheets…nevermore!”

To this day I do not know
The place to which our data goes.
perhaps it goes to heaven, where the angels have it stored.
But as for Productivity, well,
I fear this has gone straight to Hell.
And that’s the tale I have to tell - your choice: Abort, Retry, Ignore.