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NOVEMBER 2004

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28th November 2004

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Installed mt-daapd today. It indexes up the mp3's on my Linux fileserver and serves them up as a streaming shared audio library in iTunes. It has support for Album Art and is very stable. Its amazing how with Rendezvous it just works, literally takes 10 seconds to get it going. Love it. Now if only it could decode my FLAC, re-encode to MP3 on the fly and stream that, I wouldn't have to keep two copies of my music on my server.
Track of the day: Macy Gray - My Fondest Childhood Memories

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22nd November 2004

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I've been messing around with XLink Kai for quite a while now. Its a neat multi-platform system that lets you play Xbox (and other console) LAN games tunneled over the Internet, kinda like Xbox Live! but without the subscription, and it works on modified consoles like mine. I have had the client installed on my desktop PC since I got my Xbox in February, but I don't use it much as its a little awkward. I've been waiting for a Linux release of the engine for a little while, and an alpha build has recently been available. Added a couple of entries to my pf.conf on my OpenBSD router to allow traffic through and loaded it up. It connected to the server and waited for my Xbox. Turned it on, the XBMC Dashboard shows I'm logged on, joined a room with my friend Teg, hit a button and Project Gothem Racing 2 loads up. Not a single hiccup, it seems all too smooth! In minutes we are racing around and I'm being badly beaten by some other people that have joined our game. I load up a track in Edinburgh and manage to hold my own for a little while in a Ferrari 360. This is awesome fun, my username is hussein if you want to join me on the next round ;)
Track of the day: Limp Bizkit - Rollin'

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20th November 2004

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Took my sisters to see the preview of The Incredibles today. I think the previous Pixar movies, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc and A Bugs Life were so good, I'm really amazed at how this one is even better. So much fun!
Track of the day: My Scruff - Chipmonk

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19th November 2004

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I was thinking about upgrading the processor in my desktop PC the other day. Its been running a crazy setup of 400MHz DDR (PC3200) ram, a 400MHz DDR bus nForce2 chipset, and a 333MHz DDR Athlon 2500+ processor. So its all been running at 333MHz DDR. There is some potential, a Barton 3200+ 400MHz DDR processor would be nice. I was looking at prices, and I really couldn't be bothered to spend a hundred quid for a processor. Overclocking looks like something fun to try out.

I had tried overclocking before, but the standard AMD heatsink is pretty rubbish and temperatures are pretty seriously high already, although I'm not having any stability problems: So it was time for some new cooling gear. I bought a Thermalright SLK-800U and three Thermaltake A1098 80mm 37CFM 30dBa fans (one intake on the front, one exhaust on the back and one for the CPU) from Tekheads. I placed my order at around 3pm yesterday, and I had it all with me at 10:30 this morning. Thats good service. The fans are not quiet but not too noisy. They do move a lot of air and I think they are a good balance between performance and noise. Three of them are quite bareable. The heatsink is one mega chunk of copper. I chose the U version because I really hate those clips where you have to use superhuman strength on a little piece of metal and it feels like any wrong move will put a screwdriver through your motherboard or rip a chunk off the CPU socket. This one fits through the mounting holes around the socket which means I have to take the whole board out of the case, but its worth it. I couldn't wait to put it together. A couple of BIOS options later, and voila, 400MHz DDR bus. The 2500+ has a multiplier of 11, so before it was running at 1.83GHz and now its 2.20GHz, exactly the same as a 3200+. It even gets detected as a 3200+ by Windows, Linux and the BIOS. I didn't have to touch the voltage settings and it was all totally stable. Almost too easy! Check out the temperatures: So even in its overclocked state, its miles cooler than before. It just shows how bad the original AMD heatsink is, and how the SLK-800U is just fabulous. It was running on full load for a very long time and the whole system feels totally stable. It seems faster as well. A couple of seconds faster booting up (now down to around 23 seconds) and its definately a lot snappier. Return to Castle Wolfenstein which I had on some insanely high settings running on Ubuntu Linux is now much smoother. I ran a few benchmarks to see what kind of numbers it gives:

SiSoftware Sandra 2005

CPU Benchmark 2500+

CPU Benchmark 3200+


CPU Multimedia Benchmark 2500+

CPU Multimedia Benchmark 3200+


Memory Bandwidth 2500+

Memory Benchmark 3200+


Futuremark PCMark04

PCMark04 2500+


PCMark04 3200+


Track of the day: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under The Bridge