In my previous blog post I described how I fixed my Asus Strix GTX 970 DirectCU II OC graphics card by changing fans and thermal paste. I noticed 7% increase in measured performance. What I left out from the post that I also discovered and observed other methods for increasing the GPU performance.
Fallout 4 came out on year 2015. Before this, a realization came out, being that my old rig could not handle the new game in its current state. What a bummer. But there was a silver lining. Or bronze. Or at least iron, I swear.
A Finnish computer shop had a bundle campaign: Asus Strix GTX 970 DirectCU II OC graphics card + Samsung 850 EVO 250GB for 399 EUR. I considered this a deal and bought the bundle. I think they might have had free game voucher also in the mix, but Google evades me on this.
The GPU arrived and it had many problems, it seemed. First there were instability problems with strange block garbage. These cleared after I ditched my “high-quality” Intel DZ77GA-70K motherboard for Asrock Z77 Extreme4.
One issue was still present, being absolutely horrible fan noise. This had been present from the start. Seriously. You buy the thing, take it out of the box, run some stress on it, and the whole thing rattles like it is going to give out functional smoke any minute.
The thing is, that I was able to fix it. There is video about the results here, check it out first. Then we show you how we did it.
I have a constant need to debug specific C programs. Because I have mostly worked in constrained embedded systems Linux environments, in reality I have not had possibility to have a debugger available. So I never learned GDB. But recently I was able to compile the application binaries in a regular 32-bit Linux environment. I was finally able to do debugging with Emacs GDB after learning just one day. This crash course will probably help you if you want to learn GDB debugging with text mode Emacs. We will be using the gdb-many-windows variant layout.
If you are like me (which is quite unlikely but still) you really appreciate a clutter-free experience. I had been trying to find a proper watch for months but there seems to be one diabolical design pattern in every combination analog + digital watch. The designers try to fit F-117 cockpit worth of gadgets to the bezel! It just does not work. With tedious work I was finally able to find one simple watch that caters for my tastes, namely Casio G-Shock GA-800-1A. Read below for my introduction about the watch.
Have you ever resized your USB stick FAT32 partition in Linux Gparted and then in it has broken something and turned it to RAW format in Windows? I saw this thing happen to me. I figured a way to fix it, so here I present the whole ordeal.
Did you receive the 8050800C error from Windows update while trying to get the Windows Defender updates? I did with my Windows 7 Pro 64. Lots of sites tell a lot of stupid things to try, things that are only there to make the site catch more Google hits to serve more ads. Nobody seems to test their stuff anymore. I did. And I have a working, tested solution.
Terrible news. It seems that the windows scanning solutions leaks handles. I have seen it consume tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of handles. After enough handles are used, Windows crashes 🙁 Rest of the text is kept for posterity.
Recently my father gave me his old multifunction printer. It is a Samsung SCX-3205. It does not have Ethernet port for easy wired connectivity, so I decided to add it as a networked printer via my virtual Windows 7 installation running on my ESXi host. Everything worked fine after installation of the drivers, with one exception, the physical “Scan to”-button. It just didn’t do anything.
After I realized the Scan To button did nothing, I thought that the virtual environment was to blame. I tried to fidlle around in ESXi settings but the button remained mute. Then I hooked up the printer to my desktop machine and started investigating.
Recently I switched from Fiber Internet connection to VSDL. As a geek I of course have my own Linux gateway machine (I’m using Fit-PC2i from CompuLab). I had everything working fine before the switchover. I foolishly thought I would be fine by just disconnecting the cable from ISP Ethernet socket and plugging it in to VDSL modem in bridged mode. Things didn’t quite go that way.
I noticed soon that almost everything worked. Except few things. Some webcams were not showing anything, speedtest.net was barfing out, as were some web-based TV channel videos via flash delivery. Most notably, however, Windows Update was giving the less widely known 80072EE2 error. I’m running Windows 7 on my PC and Debian Stable on the gateway machine. I’m naturally not using any Microsoft WSUS technologies in the middle or anything.