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The under $600 price is very competitive on a per GB basis to smaller drives. I'm also thinking SSDs may eventually align themselves both for performance and bulk storage markets, with the latter being much less expensive because absolute speed isn't a priority. Even if access times are 100 us...

I've tried GIMP, and just installed Paint.net yesterday. One thing which surprised me about Paint-net was the very small footprint. Even with 60 additional plug-ins installed, it only took 32.6 MB (compared to 251 MB for GIMP. GIMP does more, but it seems Paint.net can do quite a bit of the...

The best bins of the XT-E and XP-G2 achieve ~160 lm/W @ 350 mA and 25°C junction temperature. Not quite the 200 lm/W of the MK-R, but not too far off, either. That said, I have a couple of lighting projects which are just begging for the MK-R, provided the price is similar to the XM-L2.

:drunk: Happy New Year! :drunk: Am I happy 2012 is over! It was mostly a very lousy year for me but at least it ended on a few high notes with the new system I have courtesy of the membership. I also managed to cycle 4293 miles-my second best year ever (best was 5001 miles in 1991). Hope 2013...

Playing around some more, I was able to create multiple pagefiles to use most of the ramdisk. Just open regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management key. In the "PagingFiles" multi-string value paste the following: Z:\pagefil1.sys...

Nope, no luck for me predicting sporting events. Even things I follow closely like the Tour de France I get wrong more times than I get right. Horses are even harder to predict than cyclists given that a bad day by either the horse or jockey can totally spoil the outcome.

This is definitely a hobby I would get into if I had more money and more open areas nearby.

I already have Windows 7 64 which I can use most of the time. I figured since I sometimes need to boot into XP to use my microcontroller programmer, I might as well make use of as much of my 16 GB as possible. The ramdisk driver uses PAE to access RAM above 4 GB which XP otherwise wouldn't...

I found a good solution to this problem. Since I'm now occasionally running XP on my new machine with 16 GB of RAM, I just created a ramdisk from the RAM XP can't access and placed the pagefile there, solving two problems at once. Any possible issues with not having a pagefile are solved...

I came across the Gavotte Ramdisk Utility today when googling if it was possible to get XP to use more than 4GB of RAM. While you can't (unless you have SP1 and enable PAE), you can still make use of otherwise unaddressable RAM with this utility because it can access RAM over the 4 GB barrier...

Merry Christmas to all!:reindeer:

Most of my predictions from 2004 did come true. We did have 10+ GB SSD drives in 2009, and so far we've been unable to scale mechanical drives past a few TB. It actually looks likely that memristors, not MRAM, will be the next big thing. MRAM may yet replace DRAM, although I doubt it will scale...

Mostly PIC microcontrollers but I occasionally need to program oddball EPROMs and other stuff for which USB programmers aren't available. The EMP-11 programs a huge range of chips. If all I did was PIC microcontrollers then USB programmers are readily available for about $15. In fact, I might...

I finally "solved" this issue, albeit not in the way I had initially hoped for. Before proceeding any further, I checked to make sure the parallel port was working by connecting my Samsung ML-2510. It turns out that the StarTech card didn't work at all when set to the "legacy" addresses but it...

I've been running XP for the last 6 years without a pagefile. I never had any issues that I'm aware of. Just for kicks I turned it on yesterday but haven't noticed any difference one way or another. The pagefile hasn't even been accessed since I turned it on. It seems it's not doing any harm...

A+ for balls, F- for brains. I get physically ill just looking at those pictures.

On my new machine (16 GB RAM and 240 GB SSD), I disabled the pagefile for that reason. I figured there will likely never be a scenario where I'll be using enough RAM that not having a pagefile will be an issue. And if that time ever came, RAM is cheap enough that I might consider upgrading to 32 GB.

Well, in a weird set of circumstances, I ended up with an old monitor from the next door neighbor 2 days ago. It's a 20" LG monitor, 4:3, and 1600x1200 (I didn't know that until just now). Or put another way, it has about 10% more ppi than what I'm using. This thread inspired me to hook it up. I...

The problem with viewing from a further distance is twofold. One, the screen won't fill my field of view (it's a 19" screen). Two, I'm nearsighted enough so that things start getting blurry at much beyond maybe 2 feet (wearing glasses to view a monitor from further distances results in worse...

All of the 1600 line screens I've seen are fairly large (i.e. 27" to 30"), and still have around 100 pixels per inch. I'm looking for something where I can't see the individual pixels at my typical viewing distance of around 15 inches. From my research, that would probably mean at least 200...

I'm still waiting on ultra-high resolution monitors, maybe something like 3840x2160 and 200+ pixels per inch. I'm tired of the "screen door" effect of standard displays. OLED and ultra-high resolution would be a really sweet combination. Until then I really have no compelling reason to stop...

I uninstalled VMPlayer and reinstalled it. Apparently it only installs the parallel port driver if a parallel port is present during installation (I didn't have one the first time I installed it). Now my VMs recognize the Startech parallel port (but not the other ones which don't have standard...

I'm going to put my A7N8X-E and power supply in another case for exactly that reason. I'd still like to be able to do almost everything on my new machine. I don't care much if I can't read floppies-I only need to a few times a year. The programmer however I might use every day in a busy week.

I don't really have that kind of money right now. I can get USB programmers on eBay for under $50 which can program only a subset of the chips this one does. To get something comparable, it would be $500 at least, plus the learning curve associated with new hardware (which I don't have time for...

Serial port headers seem to still be on many motherboards these days. My new MB has one also. It seems parallel port headers, if they're available at all, are only on micro ATX motherboards.

Just to update things I bought the StarTech card and the programmer still doesn't work. I set the I/O address to 0378 via DIP switches on the card, and then followed the instructions. I had to manually set the I/O range in device manager. 0378-037F apparently caused a conflict when I first set...

I'm happy for you also. Maybe I should lose 160 pounds too. :D (just kidding of course-I wouldn't weigh much more than my three cats put together if I lost that much weight).

What you describe is really more a software issue than anything else. A proper factory reset on a phone would overwrite all user data stored in flash memory. Apparently that doesn't happen, perhaps because it would take too long for the average user. Don't some phones store everything on a...

Erase should be sufficient. If you look here, one of the comments mentions the following: Actually, after a proper overwrite, there should be NO recoverable information in any modern hard drive. The thing about using atomic force microscopy only applies to a subset of PRML drives, which were...

If the drive failed, it's highly unlikely anyone except the NSA would be able to get information off of it. Certainly HP isn't going to bother. Most likely they will send you a new drive, and recycle the old one. Or even if they refurbish it, they'll probably need to low-level format the...

I agree here. That would put SSDs at roughly ten times the price per GB of mechanical drives. Even better, it puts ~200GB SSDs right around the $100 price point. This is about the most your average buyer is willing to pay for a hard drive. 200GB is a large enough size for many people to use as...

More on FIPEL lighting: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/04/12/2012/55131/fipel-more-on-the-oled-alternative-light-source.htm http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566119912004831 The second link has actual spectra, and they are indeed continuous, without the humps and...

I modded one of those fiber optic things with LED. You need to keep the original AC supply because most of them use an AC motor to turn the color wheel. To drive the LED I rectified the AC with a full-wave bridge and added a filter capacitor. I then used one of my automotive constant current...

DOS apps won't work on Win 7 64, either. I can however get them to work using either DOSBox or a DOS VM. DOSBox is actually better. DOS VMs under VMPlayer won't run full-screen, and won't run any higher than VGA.

This is starting to sound like an epic storm along the lines of Sandy. I might suggest to make whatever preparations you can should the power go out. I hope everyone gets through this OK.

Greg: You're 100% right about the "premium" cat foods. The problem with commercial cat foods is they use questionable things like meat by-products, and also contain grains. A cat isn't designed to eat grains, period. In fact, humans should have a lot less grains than the food pyramids say. I...

The color changing bulbs use red, green, and blue LEDs as far as I know in order to get all the colors of the rainbow. RGB isn't particularly good at CRI. Even the best carefully chosen wavelengths will only give a CRI in the mid 80s. You need 4 colors to get into the low 90s, and 5 colors to...

I'll admit that it's kind of embarrassing how a snow storm in NYC merits national coverage while events in other places which cause more harm are scarcely mentioned. I think SD hit the nail on the head-the media is largely centered in NYC, and therefore act like it's the center of the universe...

You have to climb that? I'm getting dizzy just looking up at it. :drunk:

Yep, variable color lamps are one of the big reasons to switch to LED. I think in the future we'll probably see low-cost general lighting LED lamps which produce varying shades of white. This is actually fairly easy to do compared to products which produce every shade of the rainbow. You just...

Here's some pictures: Leno at the dinner table: Jeannie warming herself next to the electric heater: Jeannie looking at the squirrels and birds:

Thanks for the condolences, Greg. The cat who died was named Leno. He originally belonged to our neighbors who constantly let him run around outside, and frankly didn't seem all that interested in his well-being. At first we thought he was a feral cat. We have had quite a few around here over...

I remember doing that from my high school and college days. Monday through Thursday nights usually ended up being a few hours sleep but I caught up on sleep over the weekend. Nowadays I find I need at least 9 or 10 hours to feel relatively normal, although some of that might be depression...

Most UPSes don't stabilize the line voltage so it's not surprising the voltages are the same. Usually UPSes will condition the line, meaning filter out surges and spikes, but won't reduce overvoltages. The fact the two electric water heaters died points to an overvoltage problem. Resistance...

Thanks for the detailed step-by-step procedure, mubs. I have an old Windows 98 PC which I very occasionally boot into just to see what software is on it which might be useful. I'll turn it into another VM on my new PC to add to the growing collection (my current XP stall, DOS 6.22, XP clean...

Someone apparently did get an EPROM programmer to work in Windows 7 by remapping port addresses. Unfortunately, his solution doesn't really seem applicable to my programmer but it is an interesting read. Now on to search (most likely in vain) to see if someone hit upon a similar solution for the...

It's hard to see how your meter reading could differ so much from the electrician's. Even very cheap meters usually read AC volts to 1% or so accuracy. The only way the reading could be that far off is if the voltage differs significantly from a sine wave. If that's the case then you have even...

Yep, that's the problem in a nutshell. From my reading, lots of other devices have this issue. It's a shame that modern motherboards without parallel ports won't let add-on cards use the legacy addresses. They took something which was working fine and broke it. Amazon has it for $43.24 with...

From what I've read, a PCI-E parallel port card (yes, such a thing exists) would have the same issues as a PCI parallel port card. Basically, it would end up with whatever address the BIOS or O/S assigned to it, with no way to manually change it. A USB->parallel port converter is just about...