New Car Stereo

I picked up a new car stereo - a JVC KD-R810. It was on sale at Best Buy, $250 marked down to $200 in one of their weekly specials. They always have some model or another on sale.

It's the first aftermarket one I've ever bought. Mainly, I bought it to get a USB port so I can listen to music on USB. This should replace the pile of unlabelled CDs in the car with a a single USB stick! (though it's likely that I will wind up with a pile of unlabelled USB sticks later.)

The secondary thing (which interestingly enough, is probably the most expensive component of the stereo) is a Bluetooth audio setup, so I can use my Blackberry in the car hands free.

I've never done any sort of installation like this myself, and I didn't like that I had to disconnect/reconnect the car battery. The last time I did something with the battery, I got some nasty sparks flying. I figured I'd let the Best Buy do the install. They finished the job in about an hour's time and showed me that all the speakers were hooked up correctly using the fade and balance controls. They demonstrated how it plays mp3s off of a USB stick. The tech couldn't figure out how to do radio presets so I guess Ill have to figure it out later. The rear USB cable sits in the glove compartment, and the microphone is sussed in the top middle of the windshield. It's pretty nice work I think.

They also said they can undo the install to put the factory radio back in for free, if I wanted to, such as if I was selling my car etc.

The install cost $70, the price of their USB/microphone deck install, and the only additional item I needed was some Corolla-specific wiring. So all told, about $300.

Anyways, looking at the unit in the dash now...

The unit sticks out of the dash a bit which I'm not used to - the old unit fit flush in the DIN slot. I'm also supposed to be able to change the colour of the displays and dials seperately... however a 2002 Corolla doesn't have a coloured lighting scheme unless you consider white lights on plain analog dials and plain liquid crystal displays some sort of theme. Maybe I'll just set the colour to white. :P

I can't seem to see the display when I'm wearing my sunglasses, what's the deal with that? Why is the protective cover polarized?

The bluetooth setup went pretty smoothly, you set a PIN and off it goes to sync with your phone. The voice dialling works very nicely. I hope the calls are clear too, but I'll have to find out later.

Its time to go root through my music collection. :D

Allen.

Banana Bread

Somehow the entire summer's slipped away, and I haven't blogged anything... or baked anything either! So I decided to bake a banana bread cause we had some bananas that were starting to hang around a little too long. I was intending to use the last 2 very ripe bananas, but Kathy decided to eat one, not realizing I was going to bake them. I was left with just one banana.

Anyways, I looked around the internet looking for a quick banana bread recipe, and generally they are like this:

350 degree preheated oven

dry stuff:

• 2 cups of flour
• 1 cup sugar
• a teaspoon each of baking power, baking soda, cinnamon
• half a teaspoon of nutmeg.

wet stuff:

• 2 eggs
• teaspoon of vanilla to make the eggs more pleasant
  
• half cup of butter (I used veg oil instead of butter)
• 2-3 very ripe bananas on the verge of fermenting into banana liquor.
  

Mix all the dry stuff in one bowl, mix all the wet stuff in a second bowl, then add the dry to the wet, and mix them all. I have this vague recollection that I'm not supposed to over-mix it or it becomes like chewing rubber. Put this in an oiled baking pan in the oven and let it bake. Typical time is about 45 minutes. Check with a toothpick or a chopstick lanced through it's heart, if anything sticks to your stick, it's not ready, bake for another 5-10 minutes.

Since I was short a couple of bananas, I just added a little extra oil and some water to shore up the moisture content, I didn't really measure. I probably didn't add enough.

Here's some pics of the end result:

after baking for an HOUR

Shiny...

I think I need a smaller pan or a bigger recipe, stuff always looks kind of flat coming out of it.

Looks good, tastes good, but a little bit on the dry side cause of the missing banana. Blah!

New Computer

Instead of crossposting from my games blog, I'll just point you there.

• New Computer
• New Monitors!
• Details
• and most importantly, Pictures!

Allen.

Thinking about Computer Upgrades

(crosspost from my games blog)

My computer had been acting a bit sluggish recently so I figured it was time to wipe the OS and reinstall it. However, the system kept bluescreening my Vista install. I couldn't get around it with whatever BIOs setting changes I had available, so I decided maybe it was time for this hardware to retire. I mean, I'd run it since about 2005. I figured I could at least save the CPU, which was a decent dual core AMD Athlon II 64 x2 4800+, which was a Socket 939 like my wife's single core computer. But when I installed the CPU on her system, it started crashing too. Also, putting her CPU in my system revived it.

It looks like my CPU had decided to go loony.

So, it was time to start thinking seriously about upgrades.

My system is at the point where if I buy a new CPU, it would start an avalanche of upgrades:

• Another motherboard with a modern socket to fit the CPU, since Socket 939 is obsolete.
  
• New RAM memory as well since my old DDR 400 is not viable for the new CPU/mobo.
  
• New power supply to match the sockets on the mobo and video card (why are they 6pin and 8 pin now instead of 4pin and 6pin? sigh)

The only things that I would be able to salvage would be my video cards, hard drives, case, and fans.

Each of the 4 new components - mobo, CPU, memory, and power, would mean $100 for a base model or a $200 for a future proof economical model, or even more for a hobbyist model. (Hello $400 motherboards and $700 CPUs) So I would be spending somewhere between $400 to $800 for the parts.

Those prices are fairly reasonable, however the problem is - what should I get? Or more accurately, which motherboard should I get? Everything hinges on the motherboard.

I want to have full bandwidth for my 2 video cards. SLI or not, I want it to have 16x1 PCIe for EACH card. Often, the data path is one 16x1 that they break down into 8x1 for each card. Thus you get reduced performance for each of the cards. I mean, you get more performance than a single card, but probably nothing like if you have 2 cards each with a dedicated full PCIe path. However, there isn't really a lot of data that I've found that tells me just HOW much bandwidth my video cards use, so I'm not sure if I REALLY need this or if I'm just being a hypochondriac when I think that 2 card SLI isn't running much faster than 1 card.

As a side note, I do want to run a 3 or 4 monitor setup someday. Probably not tomorrow though. The price of an ideal minimum bezel 3x1 monitor setup seems to be just under $2000 right now. I could get some regular widescreens and plug them in but I dunno how that will be. Plus, gaming - 3d games performance is geared for 1680x1050 or 1900x1200 screens, not... 3600x1900 or 4800x1900 screens. I would probably have to turn every detail off and it would probably still bring my video cards to their knees. Sigh. eyefinity gaming, which would handle it, would cost another $550.

I want it to support 3 Gb/s SATA, or even that new 6 Gb/s SATA and USB 3.0 However, I don't have any devices that go anywhere close to that sort of speed. I've always bought the best bang for the buck kind of drives usually. These still rate way higher than my bottleneck CPU and RAM though, so I'm not too concerned about that part of it. I definitely want it to have eSATA since I have an eSATA/USB2.0 HD dock. Especially since 1.5 Terabyte drives cost like $100 now. Currently I plug it in through USB2.0 and it's pretty slow - workable but.... slow.

I want the SATA jacks to NOT get covered by my video cards. My current mobo has 4 SATA jacks - and half of them are covered when I put in the primary video card. Is that on purpose? I mean I could understand if it was the 2nd card that covers the jacks, meaning you should either run the 2nd card OR 2 extra SATA devices due to bandwidth restrictions, but why is it under the FIRST graphics card?

Anyways, this means I am still looking for a good motherboard. Nothing really fits my criteria right now except maybe a 790FX or a 780n board, but those are like a year old now, shouldn't there be something newer/better?

Here's my two best bets right now (with google links):

• GA-MA790FXT-UD5P (crossfire)
• ASUS M3N-HT (sli)

In the meantime, I bought a used Athlon 64 x2 3800+ CPU for $35, my mobo claims it peaks up at about 100 degrees Celsius when running. :P I don't know if the CPU is bad or if my mobo sensor is bad, haha. It's still working, I mean, but I dont really have much hopes for it's longevity.

Allen.

btw, ebay is selling my old dead Athlon x2 4800+ CPU for like $200! That's crazy!

Shouldn't eggs be refrigerated?

This is at the local Chinese supermarket.


--------------------------
Sent using BlackBerry

Baby Explosive Bowel Movements

If a crib was an aircraft carrier, and Connor was an F-14, I guess I could say that we have been having some surprising and powerful liquid jet blast accidents. I mean, the jet wash sweeps right over the deck to places we prefer to be untouched by jet wash. It even jets uh, things, right off into the ocean sometimes. Rescue and recovery efforts are a difficulty we don't like to deal with on a regular basis.

Yes, I know these are F-18s

So we jury-rigged a Jet Blast Deflector on the deck, in the form of a rectangular plastic tub, placed on its side, and aft of the engines. It's done the trick, preventing an accident just last scheduled maintenance even.

These F-14s can be tricky to maintain. :P

Allen.

Edit:

Click the button if you want to see sprayed poop below:

Messy but at least we didn't have to replace kleenex boxes or clean the whole bed and carpet beyond again. Just the underpad and the basin. :D

Salt & Pepper Shakers

These are on every table in the cafeteria at work, and are absolutely cute.

Sent wirelessly from my BlackBerry.