Getting a new keyboard soon

My keyboard is from Dell. It's that free keyboard that comes with a computer. It's been great, but it started making squeaky noise. The noise comes from not just one key, but from pretty much of entire left side.

I remembered a friend of mine told me to get the Arc from Microsoft. Huh? Keyboard from MS? He told me it was a beautiful one, and.... yup. It looked more than just a keyboard.

I seriously thought about getting one, but I ended up talking to another friend of mine.

Me: Do you know much about keyboard? I need to buy one. Do you have any recommendation?
Him: Buy a mechanical keyboard.
Me: Huh?

Mechanical keyboard. Yes, I heard about it at one point. To me it seemed more like high-end audio systems-something expensive, yet I can't tell the difference. But he kept telling me how good it was. Next day, he brought his from home for me.

This is it.

It's made by a Japanese company called Filco, and it had blue switches (I'll explain some other time).

How was typing on this keyboard? After a few minutes I could see why people talked about mechanical keyboard. It's just different in a very good way. It's like comparing McDonald's Cheeseburger and In-N-Out. It's like "I didn't know keyboard could do this"-kind.

I looked around to figure out which one to buy, and I ordered a Das Keyboard S Professional.
Once it gets here, I'll compare it with my old Dell keyboard.

MS SkyDrive

Last time I talked about the improved SkyDrive for Windows 8.
Until I wrote that post I've never cared for it, but since I wrote about SkyDrive I figured I should check out what it's like now.


So I went in there.
It's right on top of the hotmail menus.

Yup. It's right up there.

When you click SkyDrive, it'll take you to here.

When I went in, I saw 4 familiar icons up there with "Create: " sign. Oh, really?

So I clicked the W icon.

This is just wonderful. Click the picture to enlarge.

The interface is very much like MS-Word 2007 (I haven't really played with 2010, so I can't tell). It's missing many advanced features, but if you're not writing a thesis or research paper, this might be what you're looking for.

If you're looking for basic features, you don't have to buy these any longer. How nice.

SkyDrive with Windows 8

 Not so long ago, I saw someone's article somewhere saying why Microsoft will be successful with all those thing they start later than their competitors.

Mobile OS is much later than Apple or Google, they didn't have light enough OS for netbooks so they used Windows XP, they don't have cloud network thingy available yet (at least not like what people expect), and so on and on. But the thing is, because they're bringing these things out later than others, it is very unlikely that Microsoft will make the same mistakes others have made.

A few days ago, MS announced the SkyDrive service for Windows 8. This is their cloud services and it allows maximum file size of 2GB. They didn't mention the max storage space but currently it's 25GB. The announcement came not long after Apple stated their next OS would have deep integration of iCloud, so it'll be interesting to see who'll perform better in this service.


This video is their demo, and it looks pretty smooth.

 This is the CNET article about SkyDrive
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57381414-75/microsoft-confirms-skydrive-app-for-windows-8/?tag=mncol

Planning to buy an external HDD for backup?

I just ran into my friends on the parking lot while taking out my plastic bottles to the recycles, and at the conversation ended with something about backing up data in the external HDD.


This is a crude and subjective external HDD buying guide.


1. Capacity
Of course it should be large enough to hold your data, but you may want to consider making multiple backups. The system administrator in my lab backs up everything once a week, and he keeps this back-ups for a couple of months. You don't have to back things up once a week, but having a multiple copy can be useful.
I have 500GB FreeAgent from Seagate. I have about 120GB of important stuff, and I keep at least 2 copies of them. See the pictures below.

My 2 recent back-ups

I saved my data at the end of last year, and again about 3 weeks later. The reason for multiple copies is because you may make changes and overwrite your old back-ups, then say, "wait I need that file again".
Multiple copies prevent that from happening.
So, the good size is 4x(your data size). With this size you can have extra space for something else.



2. 2.5" or 3.5"
This is the size (diameter) of the disc in the drive. 2.5" is smaller and lighter, yet slow. 3.5" is faster but usually requires external power source. Because it needs external power, it's a bit hassle to carry around. If you're planning to travel a lot with it, get 2.5".



3. Connectivity
In the past USB 2.0 was very popular choice, but now it's giving a way to USB 3.0 and e-SATA. Get USB3.0 and/or e-SATA. Of course your computer should have USB 3.0 or e-SATA port. If you don't have USB 3.0 post yet, but planning to get a new computer soon, get USB 3.0 anyway. It'll work just fine with USB 2.0 port. At some point IEEE1394 (aka FireWire) drew quite a bit of attention, but Microsoft decided not to support that any longer on Windows 8 since USB 3.0 already exceeds the speed of FireWire.

Speed comparison. Do you see USB 3.0 there?

Super Pi

Have you wondered how fast (or slow) your computer was?

There's a small program that lets you test your computer's overall performance. Well, actually it tests CPU and ram.

It's called Super Pi. Do you remember pi? That's ratio between a circle's circumference and diameter.
It's such an odd number that never ends. It goes like 3.1415926..... and keeps going and going and going.
There's algorithm that calculates this never-ending-number's digits down to 32millionth below decimal point. 32 million digits. That's quite a lot.

Then it measures how long it takes to calculate that many digits, and you can compare this time to gauge your computer's speed.

This is where you can download Super Pi: http://www.superpi.net/

This is what you'll see when you visit their site. Download the second one with smaller size.

It's a zipped file, so you should unzip it. Once unzipped you'll find "super_pi_mod.exe" file.
Run it by double clicking it, and you'll see a window looking like the next picture.

Click "Calculate" and choose 1M or 32M.

The above picture is my record. 10.185 seconds to calculate 1million digits. Not bad. I guess it's typical for my CPU. If you're in that 10second neighborhood, your computer is fast enough for pretty much anything. My old computer took more than a minute to calculate it and I don't miss it.

32M option is another one people use to test speed and stability of the system. If something is wrong with your calculation (like when error occurs in calculation) the calculation won't reach 32millionth digit and the program will let you know something went wrong.

There are limitations and criticism regarding SuperPi, but this is certainly one way to measure your computer's speed.

What's your 1M time?

Why am I waiting for Windows 8?

I guess it's only natural for anyone to think like, "buy a new computer to test drive a new windows? really?"

Yes. That's what I did.

Well, that and something else.

Here are some videos I saw.
This one shows how fast Win8 boots.

Impressive, huh?

Another interesting feature is its Metro UI (user interface).

Interesting. But, should I get a touchscreen monitor to play with that feature?
Not quite.

This video shows what can happen.

And, even more.

Recently MS released Kinect for Windows, and people don't have to hack Xbox360 Kinect. This will open many new doors to anyone's wild imagination.

In other words, I can surf the web without mouse or keyboard. Nice~
The idea of having one OS for all - PC, tablet, and phone - plus a new input device concept is revolutionary.
Years from now we may buy new computers without keyboard or mouse. Just Kinect.

Anyhow, I bought a new computer because of these things. Will I be able to play with Kinect before Summer? I'll try to make it happen.


By the way, I still haven't explained how to install Windows from USB without DVD-drive.
My current Windows (Windows Developer Preview) will expire soon, and MS will release consumer preview (a.k.a. beta) on 2/29. I'll write how to do it in detail once I get that copy.

My new computer

It started with a rather dumb idea of me becoming an early adapter of Windows 8.
I don't remember where I saw the Windows 8 news first, but the idea of using hand gestures to control my computer seemed pretty radical.

It's almost like the scenes from the movie, The Minority Report.

To play with it I needed a better computer. My old computer (Dell XPS400) was a great one when I bought it, but that was in 2006. Now it was having hard time dealing with Windows XP.
It makes me wonder why computers slow down over time. It was still same Windows XP, but it's slower than in 2006.

Anyhow, I ended up buying parts and putting them together by myself.

I was a bit worried, but thanks to days of Google searches, I was able to figure out what to buy.

So these are what I've got:

Corsair Special Edition White Graphite Series 600T case. I chose this mostly because it was pretty. I had no idea how large it would turn out to be. It has 2x200mm fans in the front and the top for better cooling. Since I don't have any super hot parts I can't really tell if it's doing anything.

Asus P8Z68-V/Gen3 mobo. Some people told me it was too good for my CPU, but there wasn't much to choose from. I need LGA1155 socket with Z68 chipset because I wasn't planning to buy a graphic card right away. Some recommended P67 chipset which was a bit cheaper, but they don't have internal graphic. Plus, my new graphic card will be PCIe 3.0, so that really limited my choice.

Intel i5-2500. I really considered getting i7-2600K, but I realized there's no point of getting hyperthread feature. The most CPU intensive applications I'll run was Battlefield 3, and it doesn't support 8 cores. So, i5 was enough for me. Then I though I'd not mess around with overclocking, so it was i5-2500 (i5-2500K allows overclocking). This choice makes my Asus mobo look a bit too good for the CPU, but Ivybridge (Intel's new CPU) is coming and there's a good chance I'll switch over to Ivybridge with overclocking.

Cooler Master Silent Pro M600 psu. It is 80 Plus Bronze certified (80 Plus something means it's efficient. Google it for more) and modular (you can use cables only that you need. No dangling of unused cables on the power supply (see the picture. it's that neat.)

Corsair DDR3-1600MHz 4x4Gb ram. This is where things really went out of proportion. I wanted 8Gb of ram, but 4x4Gb module was on sale and it was only about $10 more. So, I bought it.

Assembly was super easy. The mobo manual had most of instructions, and after a bit of guess work, it was done. It was so easy, if you know how to flip the light switch, you're over-qualified for computer assembly already. Or it's almost like it. I'll write more about installing Windows 8 from USB later.

1st post

So, this is my first blog post.
I presume most people start their blogs with something lame, boring, yet safe.
I'm still not sure how this will turn out later, but here we go.