Since I’ve entered college, I’ve noticed one bad thing: you don’t really have much room in that tiny dorm room of yours for a TV. Sure, you could make room for one, but that’s pretty inconvenient space-wise.

A nice alternative is to get a TV tuner. For those with desktops, it’s pretty easy since they’ll most like get a PCI or PCI-e one. For those of us with laptops, we’re most likely stuck with using a USB one.

Unfortunately for us, these USB tuners don’t offer fast enough connections to play console games on most of the time. There’s usually a lag on the order of 1-2 seconds. Quite inconvenient for most games. Fortunately for us, Adaptec has come out with the GameBridge.

(more…)

The new expansion is to be name Beyond the Sword and its content is to be more focused on the gunpowder age. I’ll be sure to pick this one up right away. For those of you who have looked at my about page, you can tell that I love Civ IV quite a lot.

Relevant part of the press release is after the break. (more…)

Another folding post from me. Don’t worry, this will probably be the last one from me for a while. With the release of the PS3 and SMP clients for Folding at Home, my interest in FAH has been rekindled (again.) I decided to make my own team (60521.) Feel free to join if you’re aren’t already part of a team (I’ll assume you all have been folding ) Btw, the link to the main folding page is on the right sidebar.

I missed reviewing the first one in a timely fashion, so I decided to review this one almost as soon as I got it. Unfortunately, even though it’s still good, volume 2 is not as good as the first one.

(more…)

It’s been less than a day and it seems as though the PS3 has already surpassed the performance of Windows-based machines on protein folding with about 4% of the active CPU count. Impressive.

Well, I should say: I got it again. The first time kind of sucked. I used the thing once before I did something to break it (hmm, I don’t remember dropping it or anything.) Good thing I had warranty on the thing. They sent me a replacement rather quickly. I just got it yesterday.

The drive itself seems pretty good. The only thing that I’ve done with it is to back up my entire laptop (which needs to be sent back, grrr.) I should probably just move some stuff from my D drive, which has like less than 8 GB, to this HDD. I did a benchmark on it and compared it to my 120 GB Western Digital portable HDD.

(more…)

At least, that’s what I gathered most from the various articles of its official announcement. I could’ve sworn that they announced everything but the release date months ago, though…

According to the project heads, the PS3’s FAH version takes advantage of the raw computing power of the Cell. They think that with 10,000 PS3’s, they could achieve petaflop-scale performance. Somehow I doubt they’d be so lucky…

I find it hard to believe that a lot of people would actually put FAH on their PS3’s. From what I’ve heard, PS3’s can be quite power-hungry. To leave the PS3 idle during FAH seems like it would use a whole lot of power. Oh well, more information can be found at the official site here. Some pictures after the break.

You can probably tell why by looking at this page. Won’t be able to fix this until after my exams this week…