Archive for the 'Geeky Stuff' Category

My experiments with thermal compound on my EeePC

Published at 12:07 am on September 1, 2010 in Deep Thought, Geeky Stuff and tutorial.

I have an EeePC 1000HE. It’s a nice little netbook, but after multiple times of cracking it open to try and fix the fan, the thermal pads got a bit messed up and stopped transferring heat like they should.

The basic design of this laptop is something like this. On the bottom, there is the hard drive and RAM. Above this is a gap — maybe half an inch, I’m not sure — for airflow. The fan is on this level, on the left side. Due to the design, the fan really only moves the heat from the HDD and RAM. Then comes the motherboard, on which the two main heat generating chips are mounted — the CPU and (I presume, not 100% sure) the GPU.

Off the shelf, there are thermal pads attached to these chips. I’d never actually seen one of these before — they’re kinda like foam or rubber, but with apparently good heat conductivity. The heat sink is simply a large piece of metal that runs under the entire keyboard.

Now, back to my problem: my thermal pads had started to get scungy from dust and other floating particles that had accumulated while the laptop was disassembled. I decided to replace the pads with some thermal gel, in this case Arctic Silver 5.

I ordered a kit from Amazon that included two bottles of cleaning solution and 3.5 grams of Arctic Silver. First off, 3.5 grams is even less then it sounds. Second, don’t bother with the ArctiClean stuff; the first bottle is the same stuff as Goo Gone (lemon scented goop remover) and the second bottle was some sort of alcohol mixture. Thirdly, buy locally if possible, otherwise you’ll be paying $2.50 for the compound and $5.00 for Shipping and Handling. Or you may end up paying lots of money anyway because seriously, it’s a fucking ripoff.

I removed the thermal pads (turns out they peel off nicely) and purified the surface of the chips and heat sink with the cleaning solution. Then I applied a super thin layer (following Arctic Silver’s directions) to the chips, put everything back together, and it worked. Sketchily, though — it seemed cooler then before when at rest, but then is spiked past 70C when I did a stress test. I tried playing Diablo 2, and the laptop auto-shutoff after a few minutes due to overheating.

I cleaned the chips and heat sink (though it actually wasn’t marked, which should have raised some questions) and reapplied the compound, this time using a razor blade to get it nice and smooth. Put it back together, same deal. Checked the forums, found a mention of a 1mm gap between the chips and the heat sink. Ah-ha! No wonder the heat sink wasn’t marked — it hadn’t even touched the compound!

I reopened the case, added a good deal more goop to the chips, evened it out best I could, and then played D2 for a few hours. Success! Well sort of. Temps hover around 60C, which is about the same as before, maybe even 1 or 2 degrees higher.

Lesson learned: if it works, don’t fuck with it.

(I was going to post the “don’t fuck with it” flowchart but while looking through my pics folder I found this, which seem rather appropriate.)
drama lamma

Now, for some half-assed ideas on how to make it MOAR BETTAR. First, replace the heat sink with solid gold. Or silver. Or, more reasonably, copper. While you’re at it, modify the heat sink to dip down further toward the chips, so the metal is actually touching the chips. You’d still need some thermal goop, but less, which methinks would be better.

Also, extend the heat sink into the palm rest, which right now is plastic. I believe some Macbooks do this (apparently making them slightly uncomfortable). You could also make the keyboard metal, and figure out some way of effectively radiating heat through the keys. Or, have keyboard rise up at an angle (it’d have to be way sturdier then it is now) so the heat sink is directly exposed to air. Add a dash of awesome by having some small fans that pop of somewhere to blow directly onto the heat sink, and/or have fins rise from the heat sink to add to the available surface area.

BRB, patent office

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Lost in Blue: sexist game ever?

Published at 7:08 am on July 25, 2010 in Geeky Stuff, Random Stuff, rants and reviews.

No, that isn’t a typo, up there in the title. It really is the most sexist game I’ve ever played, not the sexiest.

The premise, in a nutshell: you are a teenage boy who gets thrown from a cruise liner (or it sinks, it’s not stated either which way). You wake up on a deserted island — but wait! It’s not totally deserted, because who washes up on the beach next door but a teenage girl from the same ship! She’s looking for her glasses, which you promptly step on. Whoops. So, taking her by the hand, you lead her to the conveniently located cave nearby.

She weaves. She feeds the fire. She braids rope. And, of course, she cooks. Here’s how it plays out: you talk to her. She says something like “Hi! How was your day?” or, “Did you hear my stomach growling? ^_^” (the emotion is basically how they drew that bit of artwork.) Then you tell her that it’s time to eat, you hand over all your food, and she says… “I’ll do my best! ^_^” Then while your character sprawls out in front of the fire, she goes over to the corner and cooks your meal.

The girl is useless. She serves an in-game purpose, I understand that, but they could have made her just tiny bit less like an ideal 1930s housewife.

You can take her for a walk outside if you want. There’s no leash, so you’ll have to hold her hand the entire time. Why? Apparently because she doesn’t have her glasses and is therefore completely blind. When you get to a knee-high ledge, your character has to pick her up, swing her around, and set her down. Then he jumps up beside her, takes her hand, and pulls her to her feet. She can’t climb any high ledges, like the boy can, and she can’t wade through swamp (maybe it’ll ruin her dress? Who knows!).

In short, she’s useless. And because of the game designer’s half hearted attempts at a plot, it’s hard to ignore her simpering brainlessness.

Dear game developers (and while I’m at it, Hollywood execs): we need more female heroes. Real heroes. Not a damsel in distress, not a love interest, not pure sex appeal. Heroes.

Thank you, that is all.

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How-to: WPA/TKIP on Linux

Published at 6:58 pm on April 14, 2010 in Geeky Stuff and tutorial.

It’s simpler then you think. Yes, it involves wpa_suplicant, but you don’t have to edit any config files or try to decipher the wpa_supplicant command that involves a dozen random, mandatory arguments.

First, install wpa_gui. It should be in your repositories (might have to look under “wpagui” — without the underscore). Run it. If it says something like “could not get status from wpa_supplicant” continue on. Otherwise, awesome! The program is a bit non-standard in it’s interface, but it’s really not as terrible as it may seem. Just hit “scan,” double click the network you want, edit the information with everything needed, then hit “add.” Should connect automatically after that.

To get wpa_suplicant configured right, it’s easiest to install ceni. This is a tool created by the sidux developers as a replacement tool for Network Manager. There’s a deb and source-code in the directory I linked, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Though it was created for a Debian-based distro, I’m confident that it’ll work anywhere. (Note: it’s a curses app — console based, but not command line.)

Once you get it installed, run it. If it freezes your system for ~30 seconds, don’t freak. It does that me, too. Dunno why.

Select your wireless card when prompted, then select reconfigure, then roaming. Then hit the continue (shouldn’t need to change the default options) and… ta-da! wpa_gui should work just fine. ^_^

Any problems/suggestions, feel free to comment.

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I am a worker bee!

Published at 9:35 pm on December 5, 2009 in Geeky Stuff.

Fr the first time EVER, I’ve contributed to an open source project. Yes indeed. I added Sublime Text to Wine’s AppDB.

Not much, no, but whatever. Still makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. ^_^

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The synaptic touchpad driver utilities SUCK

Published at 5:35 pm on December 3, 2009 in Geeky Stuff and rants.

synclient randomly seems to reset itself to the wrong values, and syndaemon –t is pretty much useless, as the touchpad turn back on if you hold down a key for more then a second, or if you hit another key within that time. So if you want your touch pad to auto-turn off while typing, you’re limited to < 60 characters per minutes. Fuck that.

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Review: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

Published at 1:07 am on November 26, 2009 in Games, Geeky Stuff and reviews.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor — for Nintendo DS

This game is, in some ways, very reminiscent of The World Ends With You. They’re both set in Tokyo, they both involve a 7-day countdown, they both have time limits for each mission, and they both have to do with the afterlife/underworld.

Devil Survivor, however, plays completely differently. It’s a tactical RPG with many layers of depth. You control a party of up to four humans. Each human is accompanied by two demons. There are no “action points” like some tactical games. Instead, you can take every action once per turn, in any order.

For example, you can cast a defense-boosting spell with one demon, and offence boosting spell with the other, then move towards an enemy, then attack the enemy, then cast a healing spell with the human.

Yes, all on one turn.

Demons are are like Pokemon, only cooler. But these creatures don’t come in poke balls — they’re bought and sold in a market. Any demons you defeat in battle are sent to the market. You then can buy them — bid on them, actually. Computer players bid against you, and can win if you’re stingy with your cash.

But not all demons can be bought — the really awesome ones have to be created. You can fuse demons together to form new type. This requires some strategy in order to get the best carry-over of stats and spells from you old demons to the new one.

Speaking of spells, it’s rather interesting how you learn new ones. Your demons learn them automatically, but your human party members have to fight for them. At the beginning of every battle, you can set the “skill cracks,” where you assign a party member to a particular demon’s skill. If you defeat that demon with that party member, you “steal” the selected spell. You can only assign three spells at once, per character, so your extra spells go in your skill folder. You can reassign them to your hearts content outside of battle.

Battles are interesting. You first choose what each of your fighters (your two demons and the human) are going to do. Then every body springs into motion and blasts the hell out of each other with crazy-awesome (and very pretty) spells. There’s six elemental types, to which every demon can be weak or strong against (or absorb, block, or reflect). Likewise, every spell is aligned to one of those elements.

After everbody finishes their move, each combatant gets a chance at an extra turn. These are awarded for doing certain things, such as scoring a critical hit, absorbing or reflecting a spell, or just being lucky. After the extra turn (if there is any) combat ends.

tl;dr: This game is awesome. If you like RPGs and/or tactical games, I suggest you rent/buy/pirate the game right now.

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Firefox doesn’t suck — Ubuntu does

Published at 12:05 pm on November 24, 2009 in Deep Thought, Geeky Stuff, Linux and rants.

“Firefox is bloated.“
“Firefox sucks!“
“Firefox runs faster in Wine, ZOMG!“
“WTF, FX?”

Complaints like these are quite common. A number of people are convinced that Firefox runs like crap on Linux — so slow that even the Windows version running via Wine goes faster.

I, too, was one of those people. When I ran Ubuntu on my laptop, Firefox would take ~5 seconds to switch tabs. It would hang while scrolling. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire took about as long as Firefox did starting up.

It sucked.

I thought Chromium was a gift from the gods when I found it.

But then I switched to Sidux, and last night I gave Firefox another try. And guess what? It’s fast! Not quite as snappy as chromium, but pretty darn close!

The only conclusion I can come to is that Ubuntu is doing something terribly wrong. What, I haven’t a clue.

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Some light reading

Published at 1:49 am on November 18, 2009 in Geeky Stuff, Python and programming.

Two tutorials I just finished up and learned a shit-ton from.

First one is on making a GUI with Glade, then tying it in to a Python app.
http://www.overclock.net/application-programming/342279-tutorial-using-python-glade-create-simple.html

Second one is on object oriented programming with Python, something I’d never understood until now.
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Object-Orientation-in-Python/

(note: both tutorials are kinda unclear at some points, so you actually have to use your BRAIN. I hope you don’t mind.)

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Alas, KDE…

Published at 7:49 pm on November 14, 2009 in Geeky Stuff and Linux.

I pine bittersweet for your lovely compositing, but your blemishes have become more then I can bear. Farewell…

*starts humping XFCE*

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Programming challenge

Published at 1:07 am on November 14, 2009 in Geeky Stuff and Python.

I found this on my computer. Don’t know where it’s from, but it’s obvious that it’s a challenge to make it better. Have fun?

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