Edwood

Music Fidelity V-Link

The DIY Vehicle challenges are my favorites. Like the Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust. Now it was time to cue the music...

Monster Energy Drink, the blue logo one. Wish I had more scotch ale, finished that one last night. Although, I'm having to stay awake with work, so no fun drinks tonight.

Just cracked open a Growler from Stone Brewery. Highway 78 Scotch Ale Too bad they only last a week, tops. I'd stock up more. Actually, more like too bad Stone Brewery isn't closer to where I live. 2 hrs drive is not too bad though.

I live in a shoebox. Balcony space not much better. And not to mention, I'd like to spend a wee bit less money and back pain on moving a lighter weight egg. What's the smallest usable one? Remember, I'm only cooking for 2.5 people usually.

happy birthday, Nate!

I've been considering the Big Green Egg. What's the smallest one I should get for cooking for a family of 3? Mostly steaks and chicken.

Oy, lame ending for this season. WTF happened to that monster SUV thing crashing through a wall in the "here's what's in store for this season" intro?

The bag on the left.

I prefer 45ACP.

Nice run. Pretty campy map, not my favorite.

Well, I've decided to upsize my EDC bag, since I'm now carrying around a 12" Asus EP121 Slate PC. I'm literally running into Goldilocks and the Bags syndrome here. I have man bag murses that are too small, laptop messenger bags that are too big. Since Iron_Dreamer is visiting for the weekend, I tried out his Think Tank Urban Disguise 35 bag. And it's pretty much perfect. Not too big, not too small, it's Juuuuuust right. Except for the strap, since I like to wear my bags higher up, messenger bag style, the strap puts pressure across my chest, rather than the top of my shoulder. So I ordered a Tom Bihn absolute strap to use instead. I really liked it when I checked it out at MOAII. I won't be carrying a DSLR in it, but I'll arrange those padded dividers to keep my various gear in nice separate places.

Some more BLOPS fun. Cracked 35-4 Fun with the M14 w/ Grip. Listen to these videos wearing headphones, audio is from the JVC Victor SU-DH1 Dolby Headphone Surround Sound system. Click through to Youtube and watch at 720P for best quality. Crisis 35-3 Got 2 Chopper Gunners this round. No doggies, though.

Thanks. I'm timeshifting my birthday. Busy with deadline to meet for tomorrow morning. Hopefully, I'll be able to enjoy tomorrow. My wife tried unsuccessfully to buy Russian River beer at the liquor store that normally has it. Oh well.

Does Tom Bihn warranty cover cracked buckles and plastic hardware in general? Every bag failure I've had are those weak plastic buckles cracking, even the so-called Milspec 3" Warrior buckles on my Maxpedition Lunada bag cracked.

According to Tom Bihn site, the waist strap is optional. $5 option I think. I'd like the Aeronaut with the metal hardware Alice straps from the Sky Train. That would be perfect.

Yeah, I did the usual double tango install initially. I managed to call Microsoft and get it reactivated. But needless to say, next time I reinstall or build a new PC, I won't be using my legit keys.

I'm really insterested in the Red Oxx Sky Train or Tom Bihn Aeronaut. They seem to be directly comparable to each other. I think I prefer the side by side comparments of the Aeronaut vs. the garment bag style two stacked compartments of the SkyTrain. But it looks like the SkyTrain has better adjustable back pack straps. I really liked how quick and easy it was to tighten and loosen the Alice buckles on the SkyTrain. I didn't get a chance to check out the Aeronaut's straps all that much. Does the Aeronaut have quickly adjustable straps like the SkyTrain?

Dead motherboard in that sytem. I've got the 17-920 up to 3.8GHz stable now. I think 4GHz was a little to ambititious. Of course now that I swapped the mobo, Windows 7 activation is giving me the middle finger and won't let me reactivate despite it being a RETAIL upgrade verion. I'll be returning the middle to M$hit by installing a non-genuine version that works with no problems, unlike the ones I've actually paid real money for. Oh, and Top Gear rulz.

That case is fantastic. Much more practical, and very compact compared to the wooden box. Also, very easy to open as well, as it has the newer trigger hinges from Pelican.

I kind of like the Co-Pilots 3 side by side vertical pockets. Still seems too small for me, though. What's the big vertical bag in the last pic?

I love it when a plan gets together. <cue the music> I'm kind of pissed because the overpriced paperweight of my i7-920 system is a complete dead end either way (stupid socket 1366). I've been eyeing a fancy new i5-2500K system... I'm curious as to how much faster it would encode video.

Which version of Handbrake are you using? v 0.9.5 for Windows 7 (x64) works great for me. I was having a lot of crashes with Handbrake before, but turned out that one of my CPU cores was degraded too much for the undervolt level I had. So I had to crank up the vCore a bit and it's all good now. Handbrake pretty much uses 100% cpu and cores. Will fully stress the system, so if there's anything not working 100% in your system, Handbrake can and will often fail as a result. Had to run Prime95 and Memtest to figure out which part was failing. My aged E8400 C2D at 3.6GHz takes about 2.75 - 3 hrs to downconvert a 2hour 1080P h.264 file to a 720P x.264 file. That's with maxing out 2 cores. When I get my dead Core i7-920 @4GHz sysyem back up and running I'd like to see how much faster it will do the same conversion.

I gave up on trying to stream, convert, transcode, etc to anything like a WDTV Live, Xbox 360, PS3, etc a long time ago. (although the WDTV Live worked quite well, it's the slow and awkward UI that I didn't like) Ended up building a dedicated HTPC for under $200 with buying the cheapeast new mobo, cpu, and video card (emphasis on the video card) that could handle full 1080P h.264 and VC1 codecs. The rest was whatever spare PC parts I could scrounge up. No more headaches of playback, using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, it plays back 99.9% of what I want it to perfectly. Yeah, it's nice to have a video game system like XBox 360 or PS3 do more than just play games, but it's just too much of a hassle with a limited user interface that you have to fight with anyways.