General

CD-R King HDD Enclosure

By on Sunday, April 19, 2009

CD-R King sure has come a long way.  Starting with selling tacky and cheap CD-Rs they have become the purveyor of the tacky and cheap electronic gadgets. This is not to say the stuff they sell are useless. On the contrary, they’re quite usable once you get past the awful looks.

Case in point, I needed an enclosure for my 320GB 3.5″ HDD. It had been freed up of archiving duty upon the arrival of my Buffalo Linkstation. To reward it for months of hard work, I decided to get it an enclosure. The problem is that the prices ranges from P1,200 and up. Too much a reward considering 320GB HDDs cost about P3,000 these days.

So with heavy feet, I walked into one of the ubiquitous CD-R King branches. The stacks of goods were there, the line was there, the poor service was there. But I owe my HDD so I persevered and finally, it was my turn. I pointed at the enclosure (turo-turo high tech, yesh) and the sales lady showed it to me.

I checked the enclosure out and I decided it wasn’t bad at all. For P580 you get a nifty aluminum enclosure. It actually looked reasonably good except for a tacky translucent blue front plate. It the usual power cord, USB cable, driver installer (who needs those?) and a tacky and cheap plastic chrome stand. But best of all,  it even includes a tacky and cheap screwdriver. With a package like that, who can resist, yeah? So I paid for it, went home, put in my HDD, and now it’s spinning merrily away on my sister’s desk doing backup work.

Now if they can only fix the long lines and poor service…

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General

64-Bit

By on Thursday, April 16, 2009

64-bit processor technology has been with us for quite some time. The first 64-bit processor, the MIPS R4000, came out in 1991. Back then they were expensive and relagated to server duty. Intel’s first 64-bit processor, the Itanium, came out in 2001 followed by AMD’s Opteron/AMD64 in 2003 starting the move to mainstream computing.

Now, the technology is practically everywhere, even desktops and laptops, with the Intel and AMD having multiple 64-bit processor families. And yet a lot of people still don’t know this. They have this impression that all desktops are 32-bit and only servers are 64-bit. But that’s not the case anymore.

Oh, and if  you do have a 64-bit machine, do install a 64-bit OS,  so you can harness your machine’s full potential. You wouldn’t want to have 8GB or RAM onboard only to find that your OS can’t use it.

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General

2009 April 11 El Pinoy, Anilao, Batangas

By on Sunday, April 12, 2009

Finally went diving again after a long dry spell. I had no planned activities for the Holy Week so I invited Vinz for a dive and off we– Vinz, his girlfriend, Michelle and I– went. We went to this resort owned by Mike, a friend of Vinz’s girlfriend. It was a small, non-commercialized dive resort. We were joined by Mike’s wife and his in-laws so we had to take two boats to some sites near Dive and Trek where we dived while the ladies stayed on the boats. The dives were nothing spectacular but it was just good to be underwater again. Maybe I’m not ready to swap my dive gear for a surfboard just yet.

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General

NetTop Without The Net

By on Friday, April 10, 2009

The government has this initiative called the “NetTop ng Bayan” which is an effort to increase the affordability of PCs. NetTops are a type of relatively low-power desktop computers designed for performing basic tasks such as surfing the Internet, accessing web-based applications and rich internet applications, document processing and audio/video playback etc. Like netbooks, you can already use office applications and even play some games though you can’t carry them around as conveniently.

But to unlock the full use of nettops, you should have an Internet connection (that’s why it has the word “net” in the first place :P). But, unfortunately, our subscription rates are quite expensive. Typically this would vary from P800 ($16) for a 384 Kbps connection to P3000 ($60) per month for a 3 Mbps connection. So in a year, a nettop with connection charges doesn’t look so affordable anymore.

In Japan, for $60 you can already get a 160 Mbps. That’s 50x the speed! We can only hope for those speeds and prices. Maybe there’s going to ba a “Net Connection ng Bayan” or something otherwise it’s just going to be “Top ng Bayan”.

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