Masamune v1.7

Masamune v1.7 Specs:
*Asus M4A785-M
*AMD Phenom X4 9750
*2GB G.Skill DDR2 PC6400
*Seagate 300GB ATA100 with 16MB Cache
*Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 with 512MB GDDR4
*Buffalo Evercool
*DVD/RW with Lightscribe
*Acer 19" 1680x1050
*480watt PowerColor

Tasty Hardware, Low Price

Asus M4A785-M $79

 

AMD Phenom 9750 $59

The Perfect Laptop?

Did ASUS just release the perfect laptop? The New ASUS G Series G73JH-X1 is a gaming powerhouse with a low price tag. For the price of $1499, you get a Core i7 720QM running at 1.6GHz with 6MB L2 Cache, 8GB DDR3 RAM, an ATi Mobile Radeon HD 5870 with 1GB GDDR5 graphics card,  500GB HDD, a 17.3" 1920x1080 Monitor, a DVD Super Multi drive, a 2.0MP built-in webcam and Windows 7 Home Premium. It's a bit heavy, as it's designed for gaming, but the sleek matte black styling and simplistic design, put it way beyond those cheesy Alienware computers. And since it's and Asus, you know your motherboard isn't going bad anytime soon.

PC Collection

When you start working on computers, parts tend to gather from all sorts of places. People give them to you like candy. I have decided to compile a list of all of my working and in progress computers, just for kicks.

Victoria

-2.5 GHz Athlon 64 X2

-2GB RAM

-300GB HDD

-Radeon HD 3870 512MB GDDR4

-Windows XP 64-bit (Uprading to Windows 7)

Lucy

-Dell Inspiron 6000

-1.5GHz Celeron M

-2GB RAM

-80GB HDD

-Ubuntu 9.10

Zen TV

-1GHz Pentium III

-256MB RAM

-10GB HDD

-Zenwalk Linux

Dell Dimension 2350 (in progress) 

-Pentium 4 (unknown GHz)

-512 MB RAM

-80GB HDD

-Windows XP Pro

iMac G3 (in progress)

-333MHz PPC

-288MB RAM

-6GB HDD

-Slackintosh 12.0

BP6 (in progress)

-Dual Celeron (Unknown MHz)

A killer combo

So I've been looking for projects to work on lately. Many of them involve programming and a few entail hacking apart some hardware. My newest project, if I can get it off of the ground, is working on an open-source application to store patient information which can then be used for reporting. To accomplish this, I will have to learn how to combine too of my favorite programming tools, C++ and MySQL. Both powerful in their own right; together they could create some killer applications. Here is a snippet of code I grabbed from Suite 101, a C++ programming website with lots of tasty articles for cooking up some sweet code. This is the required header information. Enjoy :)

#include

#include

using namespace std;

MYSQL *connection, mysql;

MYSQL_RES *result;

MYSQL_ROW row;

int query_state;

int main() {

return 0;

}

You can go to Suite 101 to find more information about how to do this.

Atom

Trying out a new template. The new header image is another of my Apophysis creations from a while back I named Atom. If you have never tried out Apophysis, I highly recommend the download. It's a completely free fractal flame creation tool, that can blow your mind if you know what you're doing. I'm still fairly new at the whole fractal thing, but I try. Give it a shot and link me your creations. :)

Canon SX20 IS

So lately, with the diminishing battery life of my Kodak Z740, I've been looking at cameras. Today I discovered one by Canon that caught my eye. The SX20 IS is a 12mp camera just shy of the DSLR Rebels. It features a super zoom of 20x and a flip-out LCD. I will let the pictures speak for the rest of it. $359 on Amazon

Zen TV

Update on Puppy TV:
Puppy Linux ran smooth even on an incredibly slow CD-Rom drive, however, it has some major wireless connection issues in which I prefer not to go into detail about beyond not being able to connect to a wireless network. I then tried gOS, the Ubuntu-based distrobution that is designed specifically for Google gadgets. After multiple restarts, I soon was able to determine that it just wasn't fast enough. So I decided to move on. My next distribution I chose was ZenWalk. ZenWalk is a Slackware based distribution designed orginally as a mini-Slack. After dropping a DVD drive into my Dimension L550R, I was able to fully install and begin using ZenWalk on my HD tv. It looks great and runs good enough.

 

I can now say that I have truly Zen Computed.