Stuff over the week

Air Compressor

I went shopping the other day for an air compressor so I wouldn’t have to borrow one anymore. Suffice to say I was able to get one plus a duster-gun addon, so basically I have something that’s specifically made for cleaning dusty objects/components (e.g. my computer)

Microphone Stand

Another thing I found while searching for the compressor was a microphone stand. When I record at home, I usually hold the mic, which meant that I never could use the pop filter I had purchased with it. I was lucky enough to find a mini mic stand, which was exactly what I needed to conserve space. For 350 pesos, it was a brainless purchase.

Gaming

I was itching to try the new PC with some cool game, unfortunately, I played all the newer ones (or at least, the new ones I liked) already. So I decided to re-install some old ones. Namely, Prince of Persia 2 – The Warrior Within for the gameplay/story, and Doom 3, for the graphics engine everyone was raving about in the past.

To give an idea of the performance: 1280×1024, all settings maxed (save for the antialiasing, which I just set at 4x), WITHOUT a pagefile in Windows 1 This means most of the time, everything is working directly from the RAM (which is a risky setting, but very much doable). It is to be noted that I haven’t pushed the card to it’s “limits” since I simply put in the settings I would like to play with… not neccessarily what the card is capable of. I guess I’ll try maxing everything out one of these days to see if the framerates can hold.

Notes

Notes
1 This means most of the time, everything is working directly from the RAM (which is a risky setting, but very much doable

Upgraded

IT’S ALIVE!

Finally got my new setup up and running. I finished about 4am! Current Specications (as of 11.08.2005) are (upgraded items in bold)

  • AMD Athlon(tm) 64 3000+ (Venice core)
  • Epox 9NPA+ (nForce4) Motherboard
  • 2GB (2x1GB) Geil DDR400 DIMMs w/ ramsinks
  • Palit GeForce 6600GT 256MB
  • Terratec DMX 6Fire soundcard with audio bay
  • HEC WIN550AB 550W PSU
  • Thermalright XP120 Heatsink w/ Delta WFB1212ME (120x120x38mm 96CFM)
  • Seagate 80GB / 120GB Barracudas (other HDDs are now external)
  • Modded (painted) ECS 6-in-1 card reader
  • LG CD-R/DVD-Rom combo drive
  • Lian-li C-01 and F-01 aluminum drive bezels
  • Modded Lian-li PC-75 (handles, wheels, cathode)

All other stuff (extras) can be found here

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Time to upgrade

After my PC has been giving me problems, I’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade. But this time I decided not to really go for the highest specs, but to build a practical gaming system / Digital Audio Workstation.

Fortunately for me, a bunch of components which I’ve spent quite a lot on are still very much in the game and haven’t lost their appeal, such as the Lian-Li casing, the hard disks, audio card, cd-roms, monitor, keyboard/mouse, etc. I basically just had to change the Videocard and CPU. Unfortunately, the CPU I intend to buy entailed that I had to change the motherboard, since it was a different socket type. With such a drastic change, my current RAM would do the new components justice. And of course it was time for a new Power Supply Unit just to be on the safe side.

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Sony DRM Installs a Rootkit?

Sony DRM Installs a Rootkit?

An anonymous read writes “SysInternals.com guru Mark Russinovich has a detailed investigation of a rootkit from Sony Music. It’s installed with a DRM-encumbered music CD, Van Zant’s “Get Right with the Man”. (Mmmm, delicious irony!) The rootkit introduces several security holes into the system that could be exploited by others, such as hiding any executable file that starts with ‘$sys$’. Russinovich also identifies several programming bugs in the method it uses to hook system calls, and chronicles the painful steps he had to take to ‘exorcise the daemon’ from his system.” This house is clear.

via Slashdot

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Friendly reminder for PhpBB users

Thanks to some BP Onliners‘ messages, I was able to make sure I backed up our site’s database just in case.

Apparently, our sister site Hangad‘s discussion board has been hacked. From the look of it, either of two things happened. It’s a HTML/CSS hack, or the an administrative (or super moderator) account was compromised. I would have to go with the former based on the source code I saw.

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