Checksum Arcanius

Don’t worry, there isn’t a man-in-the-middle attack going on — rather, the recent news about a large security hole in all Debian-based systems spooked me enough to regenerate all of the SSH keys.

After a long absence that began with the great file corruption of 2008, the Checksum Arcanius Photo Gallery is back. Now powered by the much-derided (by me) Gallery 2, I have come to terms what what seems to be the best photo hosting software out there.

Well, after a bad powersupply and a slew of Blue Screens of Death during Windows installation, I finally tracked down the problem to the memory — either a dual channel issue, or just the particular DIMM that I pulled is bad. I had been steered away from this possibility by Memtest86, but it looks like it ended up being the real culprit. I’m sorry to the friends that I pestered with constant error messages in my frustration (each a new blue screen of death!). Some point soon I will try to verify that the DIMM I pulled is actually bad, or figure out if the Motherboard I got just doesn’t like to do dual channel with it, or what.

At any rate, once Windows was finally running, I installed some 92 updates, installed a little bit of necessary software, and then got to the good stuff: Half Life 2 and Supreme Commander. Both play like a dreamland. It rocks.

Now I just have to finish school, then I can have some fun!

My current desktop computer, the venerable Kaleidoscope, hails from early 2004, and is certainly showing its age. Apart from an occasional GPU crash and sticky mouse wheel, it also just isn’t holding its own in gaming anymore. Although computer games are a much smaller part of my life now than they were several years ago, I still enjoy the occasional LAN party, game of CS or TF2, and for a while I’ve wanted to experience Supreme Commander as it was meant to be.

So today, with the help of Theo and further consultation with Shai, I made the fateful leap. Aiming for instant gratification, I hit up Fry’s in Renton, where the prices were not the lowest available, but they were not far off and everything was in stock. The components I ended up purchasing (after many trips to the internet-connected computers to check newegg and pricewatch to avoid serious pricing anomalies) is as follows:

Antec Nine Hundred case
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R Motherboard (Intel P35 chipset)
Intel Core 2 Duo e8400 (3.0 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 45nm)
XFX 8800 GTS Video Card (512MB, PCI-E 2.0)
2x Patriot 2gb DDR2 6400 800MHz DIMMs

To round it all out, I got a modular power supply, the Antec NeoHE 550W Power Supply. Too bad this last piece of hardware was completely and craptastically broken out-of-the-box.

One of the most disappointing moments in the life of a technology enthusiast is that moment when, after assembling the brand new system, he pushes the power button and… nothing… at… all… happens.

Of course the initial fears are the motherboard, but we pretty quickly determined emphatically that the power supply was to blame. It appears to be completely dead on arrival, outputting no voltage and refusing to turn on at all. Pretty anti-climatic way to end a computer-building session, but what can you do? Other than write a blog post complaining about Antec’s crappy Q.A., of course.

Today is my last day of classes this quarter. However, my first class was canceled and the second happens to coincide with my Dad’s retirement party. As this is a once-in-a-lifetime event, I don’t mind missing it just once.

In other news, Joel and I just spent the last hour or so on a crazy run up to about 4 million acres in Warbook. It was a lot of work, and very intense. I can see how people get addicted to this game. As if I didn’t already know…

For a long while I have passively wondered how to use access keys in Firefox. Today, I finally used Google to learn, via Juicy Studio, that to use an access key, you must press Shift-Alt-Key.

Something to add to the useful information file.

And so, I shall win.