So one day, I was working on a photo when I noticed that my eyes were perceiving the color incorrectly.. and I realized that staring at a blue desktop was the reason.. Soo... I went ahead and started my search for the answer.. and the answer was.. 18% Neutral Gray. Basically, I do this now, and will from this point on, forever do it to all computer desktops. Pick a nice neutral gray so your eyes don't go out of whack when you are photoshopping.

R = 214
G = 214
B = 214
@ Gamma 2.2

Is very close to 18% gray. So I highly recommend you do this, it's better for the eyes..

I have one of these for my office, an Asus WL-500G Premium v2.  I originally wanted a v1, but all they had left was a v2.  I have a Asus wl-500g Deluxe at home, that was my old firewall/wifi router until I got the pix 506E.

Now this asus is horrible as far as software.  It's got alpha software at best, and not so stable. So I didn't even bother powering it up with the original software.

I first installed DD-WRT, but I didn't find it so stable.  I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to install Tomato on it.

So I tried and I tried.. and nothing..  So I looked up the chipset, and it was the same as the Buffalo WHR-G125, which was supported by Tomato ND.  So I tried it and I got it to work!

So let's first review the hardware.. then we'll get to the software.

The hardware is "not bad".  I like the asus better than the linksys because it's nigh impossible to brick the asus.  Hold down the reset button, unplug for 10 seconds, plug it in again while holding the reset button, and it will flash.. you can then use the asus utility (or tftp if you are on linux or don't have the asus utility) and reflash the router.  Done!  I've tried everything and it's never bricked..  And flashing it doesn't require you to do strange things like rub your belly while you pat your head.

The Buffalo WHR-G125 and theWL-500G Premium V2 both use the Broadcom 5354 integrated chipset running at 240Mhz .  It's the heavily integrated chipset, integrating just about everything you need in a router onto 1 chip. I don't know about the price (I think the Buffalo is cheaper) but the Premium v2 has 8 megs of flash ram, vs the 4megs on the buffalo.  So when more goodies come out, it's much more hackable.  

Here's info about the chip (from its website:)

BCM5354
802.11b/g Router System-on-Chip with BroadRange™ Technology

The BCM5354 integrates a high-performance MIPS32 processor, IEEE 802.11 b/g MAC/PHY, 2.4-GHz direct conversion radio, USB 2.0 host controller, SDRAM controller, and a configurable five-port Fast Ethernet (FE) switch. The BCM5354 provides wireless LAN connectivity supporting data rates of up to 125 Mbps that is backward-compatible with standard 802.11 b/g.

The BCM5354 supports a WAN connection via its configurable media interfaces. The per-port programmable four-level priority queues enable QoS (IEEE 802.1p) for guaranteed bandwidth applications, DiffServ/TOS, and L2/L3 IGMP snooping. The IEEE 802.1Q VLAN allows flexible implementation of VLAN grouping and WAN port segregation.

	Features

• 240-MHz MIPS32® CPU core with 16-KB instruction cache, 16-KB data cache, and 1-KB pre-fetch cache


• 2.4-GHz direct conversion radio


• The BCM5354 achieves the lowest cost and highest performance router system-on-chip (SoC) integration for residential and small office, home office (SOHO) markets


• Time-to-market is significantly reduced through stable Linux® and VxWorks® kernels, board support packages (BSPs), drivers and toolchains

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not a huge fan of the MIPS chips... but I like them better than the ARM.  Of the 3 smaller chipsets, I prefer PowerPC, MIPS, and then ARM, in that order.  I find that for the same speed, the PPC's kick everybody else's ass, the MIPS is somewhere in the middle, and the ARM is significantly slower.

I have been running my Buffalo HDHG NAS behind it, as both an ftp server as well as running mldonkey on it, as a downloader.  I push up a few hundred gigs a month, and a few hundred gigs downloaded, and router does just fine.  I turned on QOS on tomato, and it is not too bad.  While I haven't found that I can "overload" the router, I do find that when there's a significant load, you can feel it.  That's not true with my pix at home, of course I can't compare them both, one is near enterprise level (especially now that I hacked the 506E ) and the other is just a SOHO router.  But with tomato, it's a significant booster as far as speed and stability.

What I do love about Tomato are the real time graphs, and the QOS control.  It's small, light, easy to manage, and just works out of the box.  I love that.  If I hack my pix some more and it dies, I'll buy another one of these and put Tomato on it.  There's no USB support on tomato, but that's ok, I think of it as a router that happens to do wifi also.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with this router, and highly recommend it over all the other ones for a Soho router.  It's got decent speed, and with Tomato on it, I'm sure it will spank most routers 10x the price.  Running some ADSL speeds, it will saturate my entire office line of 10Megs down / 2 Megs up.  So unless you've got 100Mbits coming to your house, this should do fine.  Like all Broadcom chipsets, max connections is pegged at 4096, but this generally should not be a problem for all but the hardest of hard core home users.  Too bad tomato doesn't support VPN, but I honestly don't think you want to use any SOHO router as a VPN'ed router to the central office.  It is what it is, a great home router or a small office router that doesn't require VPN.  The speed isn't bad if you don't have too many connections, good for <8 computers or so.  It's perfect for the office since I have 3 computers and that's it.  It's not a pix, and doesn't perform like one, but it's not priced like a pix either.  Best Asus WL-500G Premium v2 + Tomato the best bang for your buck as far as SOHO routers PERIOD.

The holy grail everybody has been searching for..

 RVMB to PS3 playable files using only Open Source Software. 

 Short and sweet, here it is:  

my encode_to_ps3.bat 

@echo off

mencoder.exe -ofps 30000/1001 -af lavcresample=24000 -vf harddup -of lavf -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=1200:aglobal=1:vglobal=1:vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=libfaac:threads=2 -lavfopts format=psp %1 -o %1.mp4

If you are using unix, you can change the "%1" to $1.

That's it!  This will produce a playable mp4 formatted file for you using mencoder.

You can change the vbit rate if you want to.  Also, the "threads=2" is useful to cut the encoding time in half (well, about 33%) if you have dual core.  If you have a quad core, change it to "threads=4".

That's it!  Convert all your rmvb's to play on the ps3.  I love the PS3.  I'm sony's biggest nightmare.. 

If you don't know what NTP is, then you are stupid but it doesn't matter because you should still download this program anyways.

NTP = Network Time Protocol. It is like fiber for your computer clock, it keeps it regular. There are billions of freeware NTP programs out there and THIS ONE IS THE BEST.

You can download it from here.

Why is this one the best? Because when you minimize it, it shows the date of the calendar. This is a feature I have long wondered why does not exist in windows. Windows just shows the time, but what about the date?? Or do dates just not matter when you are using windows??

I bought a pocket PC and it seems that regions, and languages does not matter when you use a pocket pc, you want to add another language support?? YOU CAN'T. It seems to be the way MS works, they decide what you need and don't need, and if what you need is outside the scope of what they decide you need, then you are wrong, and that's it.

What? You think you are right?? Don't make me get Balmer to throw a chair at you!

All kidding aside, this is one of the best pieces of software I know.

Set it to start minimized at startup, have it align your clock every hour, and you will know the date and have an aligned clock.

The first thing I do when I install a new Windows install is install this.

It's a "can't live without it" item.

This is the monitor I have.

Previously, I owned a Samsung 17" which I really liked, but that was 4.5 years ago, and now the prices are ridiculously low, and the quality is amazing.

I originally was looking for the version with HDMI, but as this is a monitor, there's only HDMI-video only, so I thought forget it. It does have both D-sub and DVI.

This monitor also has one of the most important features.. it uses a regular 3 prong computer power supply cable.



Those with the transformer on the OUTSIDE of the monitor are not as good.

With a maximum ratio of 5000:1 this monitor is beautiful.

One of the biggest questions that most ask is, with the availability of 24" monitors, why not buy a 24"?

Let me explain..

First, since 24" monitors are out, that's the most expensive. Since 22" are a step below, the only way to sell them is to drop the price, and so automatically 22" monitors are cheaper.

Also, do you have the desk space for a 24" monitor?

But the most CRITICAL of reason is this, when you sit down and look straight forward, assuming your monitor is reasonably place far away enough, you will find that 22" is the MAXIMUM your peripheral view can see without moving your head.

It sounds trivial, I know, but it's absolutely critical.

The fact that I can stare at the center and still see everything on the screen without panning my head like I'm watching a tennis match from center row, makes it absolutely the most important thing when selecting a monitor.

These are the little decisions that come back to haunt us later.

One hint, if you are using windows, the way to do it is to place the task bar on TOP for large monitors. Because looking so far down is difficult, top is where you want to place your task bar.

So how does this monitor do??

The reaction time is fast, and the video is smooth. One of the biggest problems I had with the old Samsung monitors was the power button, which is the one most often used. On the LG, it's a bug button on the bottom right side, below the LED blue triangle. It should last for years. The Samsung one was a small button that was only hinged on one side, making it prone to breakage.

The controls for monitor settings are shit, but like I keep telling people, when you've got it all set, how often do you really change your monitor settings??

I liken it to manual seat movement on a car. Buy the manual one if you don't share a car, it's probably 500lbs lighter than the electronic seat adjustment, so you can save gas, easy to fix if it ever breaks at all, and once you've set it, you don't really reset it, so carrying around 500 extra pounds is stupid.

A lot of people ask me what they should buy as far as computer products. I tell people that most of them are too stupid to think for themselves so they should just buy what I buy; when you do that, at least you get the benefit of someone doing some analysis vs blindly trusting the stupid guy behind the counter.

I have this guy in a RAID 1 configuration. Basically, it's a NAS++. It has a web interface, and it is fairly fast, but it cannot handle the amount of torrents I give it, so it's download is not really up to snuff. But the interface is excellent, and it should be a great solution for 99% of the people out there.

I love RAID 1, there's a sense of security you get with RAID1 you just don't get from single HD's or RAID0.

I use it to backup everything from my emails to my photos. But mostly for my photos. I envision we are 2 years away from everybody doing this.. the reason is, we have too many damn photos!! Can't back them up. So we need to run our own mini RAID1 at home. I do!

It's a great box, highly recommended. It's a little bit on the $$$ side but the quality is there.

Of course the first thing I did was upgrade it to beta software, and then hacked it so I could get ipkg on there running and working.

I don't want to download on it, the reason is, downloading to RAID1 is taxing; and also, isn't the point of a backup NOT to be so busy that it suffers from wear and tear and dies? So as you can see, I have a Buffalo HD-HG160LAN to do all my downloading.

At some point in your life, you will need some sort of backup of your photos and burning DVD's are not an option, maybe Blueray DVD's, but regular 4 gig dvd's aren't an option because I now have 320 gigs and I don't think 80 dvd's is the way to go. So you need a backup machine, and you need it to run RAID1, and this is the box I'd recommend.

I have the Asus assembled version of this graphics card, it has 512Megs of DDR3 on it instead of 256Meg. Is there a difference? I'm not sure, because I've never used the 256M version, but I'm sure there is when graphics come crashing down on you for movies etc..

Like everything I pick, there was a HUGE amount of thought that went into picking a graphics card.

So it went like this:

ATi or Nvidia?

I'm not a big Nvidia fan, so I picked ATi. I picked ATi for another reason as well, Crossfire.

The ATI crossfire lets you put in 2 ATI video cards and connect them together so you can output video while using the GPU power of 2 cards. Yes yes yes, I know the environmental electricity drain, but I wanted the option. Before my new system, I didn't upgrade my system for SEVEN years, so I had no idea what kind of speeds I'd be facing. So I ended up picking a motherboard that was crossfire enabled, and an ATi video card.

For the $$, I thought the HD3850 to be a much better value than the HD3870. I just didn't see the benefits for the cost, and I am a man all about the maximization of cost/benefit ratios.

I actually gave the people at the hardware store my "spec sheet" and they built it for me. One of the comments I got was from one of the nerds behind the counter, and he said that if he was building a system for himself, these would be the EXACT specifications he'd use.. So it feels pretty good to get affirmation.

The video is smooth, the playback on the Intel CPU is smooth, and the graphics look great.

Highly recommended.

I have always been a HUGE fan of AMD. I hope they never go out of business because we need competition to keep Intel innovating.

But recently, while upgrading my entire system, I was looking into which CPU to pick.

I ended up picking the Intel E8400 with the Wolfdale core. When you take a look at bang for the buck, this is the king of the hill. The E8600 is too expensive, and this is a much better processor than the QX9650 it replaces.

With a HUGE 6M of L2 cache, it's cranks. But it still is light on the electricity.


None of the X2's in the AMD barn can touch it, so while I love AMD, I had to pick the best bang for the buck, which surprisingly, is not AMD.

Oh well.. This CPU however is fast, and when ripping movies or burning avi's to dvd's, it absolutely screams. Stability has not been a problem nor has heat.

I don't know about in the future, but at least as of this writing, the absolute best bang for the buck in CPU, bar none.

I wanted a box strictly for downloading...so...
I recently bought a Buffalo Linkstation HD-HG160LAN.
At 17~19 Watts running at full blast, it seemed like a great choice..

I bought this for a few reasons:

1) It was on sale ~ due to the small HD..
2) I wanted the HG version because I prefer a PPC to a MIPS.
3) It's gigabit
4) I can install linux on it.

So I bought it, and of course the first thing you do is hack it.

I installed Freelink on it..

So I wanted this to be a downloading box only, doing nothing but downloading. All the torrent clients on linux sucked badly, and just ate CPU like it was free, and so I ended up picking the ONLY torrent client that had both DHT and low CPU usage... rtorrent.

I tried to get the gui interface to work, but gave up on it as it required a bunch of recompiles etc.. So what I ended up doing was removing the apache and php and all the other crap, and basically reverted it back to its original caveman linux box.

I then installed 5 items and that's it:

1) Screen ~ This program kicks ass in ways I can't begin to describe.

#screen rtorrent

This gets you to rtorrent, but running under screen, the multi-terminal program. When you are about done, Ctrl-A-D exits without killing rtorrent, so downloading occurs still.

When you log back in later to recheck your rtorrent, just type:

screen -r

and it reattaches the previous process. NICE.

2) rTorrent ~ of course rtorrent itself. None of the gui's worked all that well, and I found out you really don't need it.

All you need is a rtorrent cheat sheet and you will be just fine.

3) iptraf ~ It tells you what's going on as far as your network.

4) Openssh ~ Turn off telnet and uninstall it. Use Openssh instead!

(Optional)
5) vsftpd ~ You eventually will need to get the files off your box, and ftp is a good choice.. The reason this is marked optional is because if you have openssh installed, you can use SCP, (in windows, you can use WinSCP) and not have to install ftp.

The PROBLEM is, ftp for me downloads at like 30MEGS/sec, while SCP downloads at like 560Kbits/sec. OUCH.. So I leave ftp on..

Also, because only nerds know how to use SCP, everybody else needs ftp..

So there you go, the way to go if you want download in a box.

The box has more than enough CPU and ram to handle rtorrent, you didn't install apache and php and (cough cough hack hack) mysql or something like that, and so it's not CPU or memory ladened. This is the perfect download box.. Now if only I can get xfs working on it instead of ext3, I'll be a happy camper..

I decided that since my right shoulder kept crackling, that it was time for me to change from a mouse to a trackball..

And so the search began..

I categorize trackballs into 2 categories:

1) "Thumb" trackballs

2) "Hand" trackballs

The thumb trackballs are as they sound, they are trackballs where the ball is controlled by the thumb only. I am left handed and although I have mastered the use of a mouse with my right hand, I just can't get a thumb to do that much..

So I looked for a hand based trackball..

I wanted a scroll bar on the trackball, but all the ones that had it disappeared. I have to say that I use the scroll almost as much as I use the left click, and so it was a feature I HAD TO HAVE.

Well.. basically none of the trackballs fulfilled my requirements, and so I will probably start my own company to make a trackball...

It seems like Microsoft makes a pretty good trackball, or they use to anyways.. I guess those were the Bill Gates day huh?


But there were 3 I considered:

1) Kensington Orbit


2) Kensington Expert Motion


3) Logitech Marble Mouse


The old Kensington had all the features I wanted, like a scroll wheel, but the new ones don't. The Kensington Expert has a 'scroll ring" around the ball, a great idea but from all the online stuff I've read, most weren't so happy with it... and my God.. the price!!

So it was the Kensington Orbit vs the Logitech Marble Mouse left.

Well, I didn't see any Kensington's and the Logitech's were MUCH better priced.

I ended up buying the Logitech Marble Mouse.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Scrolling & Middle Click

So the software it came with was called Setpoint 4.2, which was a piece of crap. Don't bother installing it.

Instead, download MouseWare 9.80.

Scrolling: Set it so that when you press both buttons, it is set to Auto-Scroll. This gives you up and down functionality as far as scrolling, and the ball then scrolls.

Middle Click: Mouse Properties -> Buttons Screen, select Button #2, and then click "Modify". If you have set it to Auto-Scroll (Not Universal Scroll) it will give you an option of Chording the two buttons to produce a middle click.

I don't know about you hacks with low IQ's on IE (It's not me saying that or a linux bigot saying that, it's just a statistical fact, look it up..), but I use Firefox, and so middle click is LIFE. Without middle click, your life will be an utter POS...

So there you go, this is the trackball I have chosen, and these are the reasons. I'm sure The Kensington Orbit would probably have been just as good, but I couldn't get a hold of it here to try it out.

As far as the "smoothness" of the ball, it's quite smooth, It takes about 2 hours to get use to it, and then there's not much thinking involved.

So far, every app has been pretty easy except for photoshop.. But since I know CAD designers etc.. use a trackball, it then probably is my ineptness and not the ball itself.

The Logitech ball uses what is called "Marble Technology", it uses dotted speckles on the ball itself; 2 lasers in X and Y orientation is shot and bounced off a mirror reading the dots on the trackball. This way, it never gets dirty. There are 2 colors to choose from, a red trackball and a gray one, I have the red one.

I now have two of these: one at home and one at work.. I hope this fixes up my shoulder tendonitious..

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tips and Tricks:

One of the things I found was that my coordination was not good enough to get a nice straight vertical scroll from the ball. So I did something I thought was neat and so I thought I'd share.

Because the ball is a ball, I press my middle finger against the SIDE of the ball, acting like an axel point against the ball. Now with your fore-finger, you can scroll vertically and it will scroll straight up and down because your middle finger prevents the wobble.