Digital Nocturne

Gmail
The webmail that changed everything. I’ve taken part of its early beta since May 2004 and it’s still in beta until now. With new features coming every now and then, I couldn’t be happier with Gmail even if it’s still in beta stage. It changed the way I use email using threaded messages, labels, filters and a lot of storage. At this moment it’s about 2.78 Gb and still counting! Who needs to delete emails nowadays. Both Yahoo and Hotmail followed the same trend and beefed up their webmails. What sets Gmail apart from other free email provider is the ease of use and extensive use of AJAX. It loads fast and kicks both Yahoo and Hotmail nearly out of the competition (they are catching up though).

Digg
This is my favorite place to get tech news and other interesting stuffs submitted by users. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control together. Popular stories are promoted to frontpage when more users digg them. Users can also bury the story by reporting it as spam, duplicate link, bad link, lame or old news.

Netvibes
This is my favorite AJAX desktop. I tried out Microsoft Live, Google homepage and Protopage but nothing beats Netvibes’ functionality and ease of use. It has loads of great features like Todo list, webnote, online bookmarks and integration to Writely, Gmail and Flickr. I really like the way RSS feeds are displayed on each column and it’s very easy to customize how each RSS feed block appears.

Lifehacker
Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. Don’t live to geek; geek to live. I skim over all the entries posted in this site everyday just to find something new to make my life easier. I find most of their tips useful.

Del.icio.us
I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about social bookmarking and I didn’t care about it until late September. When I finally registered in Del.icio.us I really regret not using it earlier. The social bookmark phenomenon is amazing. You can discover many things from different people that scrape the internet for new links. I like discovering new bookmarks. It’s yummy.

Technorati
As a blogger, Technorati is my friend in boosting my traffic. Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs. You can claim your blog and watch how many people link or refer to your blog entries. You can search Technorati using boolean strings and tags. What’s more interesting is that all tags have RSS feeds so you can track any tags that interest you and scour anything that you can from them.

Memeorandum
Tech.memeorandum is like a frontpage of a newspaper where it gives you the most important news and updates. In fact, it actually looks like an online newspaper. It also automatically updates every 5 minutes and uses a proprietary algorithm to decide what’s important and relevant, ranging from news site to independent weblogs. I always take a look in Memeorandum’s RSS feed to have a wider scope of news online.

Wikipedia
Knowledge is power; Wiki is even more powerful. I’ve used it for assignments and researches countless times.

Measure Map (beta)
This statistic logger uses AJAX and Flash to display useful information about visitors, links and other helpful information to analyze my blog traffic.

a.scarywater.net
A.scarywater.net is an unlicensed anime fansub BitTorrent tracker. What more can I say?

… plus several invite-only BitTorrent trackers.

Gmail, Digg, Netvibes, Lifehacker, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Memeorandum, Wikipedia, Measuremap

I don’t think I’ll have much time tomorrow to write entries because of new year’s eve preparation so I’ll do this now…

Facts and figures of my blog for 2005

Top 5 popular posts (by no. of views):

1. Thoughts About PLDT MyDSL-W
2. Smart (?) Wifi
3. Rizal Stuffs
4. Konfabulator 3.0
5. Ending Microsoft’s Cowboy Spaghetti Code

Top 4 commenters:

1. me!
2. P4 – 21 comments so far, including trackbacks
3. Glenn – 11 comments so far
4. April – 7 comments so far

Top 5 referrers by country:

1. Philippines – 42%
2. United States – 20%
3. Canada – 8%
4. Japan – 3%
5. United Kingdom – 3%

Top 5 search strings:

1. gundam seed wallpaper
2. smart wifi
3. cheese
4. pldt mydsl plan 999
5. pldt mydsl-w

Top 3 referrers by domain:

1. google.com
2. images.google.com
3. technorati.com

Top 3 browsers:

1. Internet Explorer – 58%
2. Firefox – 39%
3. Safari – 1%

Most number of entries by month: November

Most number of entries by category: Insights

Overall I’ve made 190 entries since January 1, 2005 which is equivalent to an entry every other day.

All numbers are aggregated using measuremap.com and Webalizer.

Ever since BitTorrent was introduced to me, I chose Azureus as my BT client not only because it’s feature-packed but also because it gave me the fastest download speed possible in my DSL connection (512 kbps downstream / 256 kbps upstream). Azureus is built from Java and thus uses Java Virtual Machine (JVM). I didn’t mind using Azureus on my desktop PC because it has enough DDR RAM to run Azureus along with bunch of other application all at the same time. One disadvantage is that Java applications tend to use a lot of RAM after prolonged use because of JVM overhead. On my laptop I had trouble using Azureus because JVM sucks most out of my Penitum M 1.5 Ghz processor and 384 Mb DDR RAM (My laptop actually have 512 Mb RAM but 128 Mb is shared with graphics card). I tried other BT clients such as BitComet but I couldn’t get all the features in Azureus. Some features in other BT clients are implemented in a different fashion to get the same result but I prefered Azureus’ way. In the end I gave up using BitTorrent in my laptop.

Lately, I tested the recent release of µTorrent 1.3 and I was surprised that I am getting decent download speed comparable to Azureus, sometimes even faster, without the ridiculous overhead of JVM. It does not need any installation at all. Just downloaded it and you’re ready to seed and leech. With such a small footprint, I wonder how µTorrent achieves this performance. My laptop will love this BT client.

µTorrent at a glance (taken from the official website):

• Multiple simultaneous downloads
• Smart bandwidth usage
• File level priorities
• Configurable bandwidth scheduling
• Global and per-torrent speed limiting
• Quickly resumes interrupted transfers
• UPnP support (WinXP only)
• Supports popular protocol extensions
• Trackerless support (Mainline DHT)
• Localized to different languages
• Typical memory use less than 6 MB
• Incredibly small: 115 KB (slightly varies from each release but is still very small)

Azureus is a very powerful BitTorrent client. I won’t argue because it’s true; however, I’m switching to µTorrent because I need a fast BT client without much memory consumption. I’ll miss some features of Azureus not present in µTorrent but most of the features I like in Azureus are implemented nicely in µTorrent too that’s why in just a matter of days I’m fully convinced that µTorrent is going to be my BT client of choice from now on. µTorrent is still very young compared to other BT clients and it is gaining more users because of its efficiency.

Links:
µTorrent official website: http://www.utorrent.com
BitTorrent, µTorrent, utorrent, torrent

Good news video-codec junkies, DivX has released a new browser plug-in which supports all the major browsers. Currently only Windows is supported but MacOS X and Linux versions will follow soon.

This great plug-in allows you to play high-quality DivX video in full glory. The idea is to make DivX media viewable inside your browser so you won’t open it in an external player. It’s also loaded with great features like saving the files into your disk so that you can replay them later using the free DivX player. You can also switch to fullscreen mode right inside your browser. There are more useful features in this plug-in so if you want to try it just download it from DivX labs.

Supported browsers at the moment:

• Internet Explorer (5.0 and above)
• Firefox (1.0 and above)
• Mozilla (1.7 and above)
• Netscape (8.0 and above)

Links:
DivX Lab: DivX Browser Plug-In (Beta 1)
DivX, Firefox, plug-in

After 16 years of marketing campaign, Intel’s tag line “Intel Inside” is now on its way out.

With the approach of 2006 and the impending release of Intel’s new processor Yonah early next year, Intel had re-examined all the logos of its range of processors. And for the first time, the new desktop processor won’t bear the name Pentium. All Yonah processors will be referred according to the number of core in it. A Yonah processor with one core will be called Intel Core Solo while a dual core Yonah will be called Intel Core Duo.

The new Intel Centrino, featuring the new Napa and Intel wifi chipsets, will also adopt the new logo scheme. Mobile processors with Dual cores will be called Intel Centrino Duo while other processors such as Pentium 4, Pentium 4 HT, Pentium 4 HT Extreme, Pentium M, Pentium D, Celeron D, Xeon and Itanium 2 will also adhere to the new logo design.

Some online newspapers had reported that the word “inside” was allegedly dropped; however, when you look at the new logo set, the word “inside” is still there.

Links:
Neowin.net: Say Goodbye to ‘Intel Inside’
x86-Secret.com: Intel Core, Centrino Duo et logos (French)
PhotoBucket: New Intel logo from x86-Secret.com (101.1 KB)
Intel, Intel Inside, processor, logo, Yonah, Centrino

This is probably one of the best late christmas present out there. Wordpress 2.0 is now officially available.

Wordpress.org has been up and down erratically for several hours because the Wordpress team is current switching server. Don’t worry, within few hours the site will be stable again. I had a chance to download the official release just a minute before wordpress.org goes offline again. If you haven’t been there, the site has been redesigned. The new header of wordpress.org is similar to the one found in wordpress.com. The tiled background is gone and was replaced by a simple gray gradient from the top. I think that the new theme looks very simple without the tiled background. Perhaps I’m just used to the old design.

Anyway, I’ll be upgrading my blog very soon. I’ll do a couple of testing first in my local server. Don’t forget to read readme.html inside the zip / tar file because it includes the new install and upgrade guide.

Update: you may not notice it but under the hood I’m already running WP 2.0

Links:
Wordpress.org
Wordpress, blog, blogging

My graphics card nearly passed away today. I just discovered that its fan stopped spinning when I was doing a lot of Photoshop editing this morning. My computer just crashed and when I rebooted my PC, nVidia Forceware won’t load and my computer did not recognize my graphics card as it should be; It only showed as generic graphics card. Suspiciously, I opened my desktop case and inspected the GPU fan. Darn, it was stuffed with lots of dirt, virtually drying all the lubricant present in the small dynamo preventing it from spinning free.

Below are the techniques I used to rescue my graphics card fan. You may use similar methods if you encounter the same problem with your graphics card fan:

1. Pull out the graphics card from the motherboard and clean it using a soft brush (paint brush is fine, but not hair brush!)
2. Using an air compressor, get rid of all the remaining dirt around the heat sink of the GPU and the fan. If you don’t have an air compressor at home you may use canned compressed air. Alternatively you may use a vacuum cleaner set in reversed mode (FYI, there are vacuum cleaners that suck up and blow air simultaneously). You need to blow all the dusk away from the dynamo as much as possible. Practically you want to clean it first to avoid mixing dirt with your lubricant.
3. This is optional but recommended: Use WD-40 to spray on oxidized parts of the fan. It also protects it from rusting and dissolves all the dirt clogging the fan. You can buy this from Ace hardware. Take note: don’t spray WD-40 on the graphics card! What you need to spray on is the bearing of the fan at the center and the gunk of the blades. I also noticed that WD-40 will dry up easily as the graphics card heat up. As soon as I put the card back in my motherboard the fan gets noisy without proper lubrication.
4. Finally, oil the bearing of the fan with some light machine oil. It will hush the fan. Put it back in the motherboard, turn on your PC and watch the fan spin again.

This is a temporary solution only but as long as it extends the life of my graphics card fan I’m happy with it. If you are serious on replacing your graphics card fan don’t hesitate to buy a better one. Don’t forget to pair it with a good heat sink specially when you overclock.

graphics card, fan, WD-40