chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
Miniaturization
Aug 21st
I’ve been thinking lately, how much different technology has made our lives in the past decade. In particular the mobile phone. Mobile phones not only allow us to communicate verbally with other people they allow a whole plethora of possibilities from taking photos to querying Wikipedia.
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“Different” stuff in Windows 7
Jun 19th
I’ve put it off for a while but my laptop was getting extremely sluggish on wakeup and I needed a good reinstall as I’ve installed so much crap it’s unreal. So I figured it’s the perfect chance to try out the evaluation version of Windows 7 that I got some time ago but have not got round to trying. I’ve had a good play with it now so I thought I’d put up a post 
There are a lot of improvements with windows 7 but there are a few things that you will notice more than others and I’ll basically give a run-down of the things that look and feel different in Windows 7.
The first thing you will notice is the task bar, now sports a completely different more compact look and feel, it’s a kind of all in one task bar, system tray & quick launch:
From left to right, the Firefox icon is highlighted, this shows that the program is running. Second along is the Windows explorer icon, this is highlighted but also shows two other boxes behind it, this shows that there are 2 other Windows explorer windows open to make 3 in total. The Windows Media Player icon is there but is not highlighted this is merely “pinned” to the task bar and not running, running it would merely highlight it as the others are. The MSN icon also has 3 boxes indicating it has 3 (or more) windows open.
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My Android Desktop
Jun 5th
A few people have expressed an interest in my android desktop and I figured it was probably best to post all the relevant info here. Knowing me it will all have changed within a week though.
In the first picture the first thing that jumps out is the weather widget, it’s the best free one I’ve found, it’s called simply Weather Widgets Free and when you tap the widget it brings up a 4 day forecast too. It had no problem finding my location either, which you can set to use GPS to get the weather.
The other thing worth noting in the first picture is the little “1″ above my message icon. This is a widget called SMS Unread Count, which shows the number of new messages waiting, it also shows dialler missed calls too.
The dock bar at the bottom is part of dxtop, the custom icons used on the home screen and the dock are from 3 different icon packs: Vista, Windows 7 & Xbox 360. dxtop allows you to change icons for anything on the desktop or in folders by long pressing.
dxtop is also responsible for the dual tabs in the second picture, the first tab is the normal application list as you can see in picture 3 it makes the list 5 items wide meaning you can see more per screen.
The second tab is a task manager tab, it shows recently used apps, running apps and apps that are running only as a service. If you take a look at the fourth screen the browser is not running but was previously used, the link text is white, dialler in red is a running program and by long pressing it we can kill the process, the weather widget is in yellow which indicates that it is only running as a service and again long pressing allows us to kill the process.
The second screenshot is merely a folder which I added to the dock, all the icons on my dock are currently folders filled with applications or shortcuts, this is built in to android. To create a folder just long press on the desktop and select new folder.
Finally, the last screenshot displays Toggle Settings which allows me to toggle things like wifi etc, I put his as a shortcut on the dock, the very last one that looks like a power button.
Post your hardware failures and WIN A 4GB Flash Voyager Mini
Apr 6th
4GB Flash Voyager Mini
This is aimed at those who build or fix PCs, their own or others. I would like to know what your hardware failures have been so we know which brands are doing well and which components people should avoid. I will be collating at least two lists; One for top product failures and the other for top components that fail.
All you have to do is post a comment on this article with the hardware failures you have experienced along with the make of the devices that failed (no registration required), I’ll post the first one below so you know what to expect. Use a real email address so I can get back to you if you win and arrange the prize to be sent out. Please limit the failures to a maximum of 10.
The competition will run for at least 1 – 2 weeks (depending on how many people respond) but feel free to add your failures even after the prize has been claimed.
There are a few stipulations to this contest;
» I will only ship the prize to the UK, USA and most of Europe.
» You must detail at least one piece of hardware including the manufacturer.
» I need to get at least 100 people to respond to get anything meaningful, so if you can spread the word about the “competition” that would be great. Therefore;
» The winner cannot be announced until there are at least 100 respondents.
Good luck everyone and look out for the results.
A few new pages
Apr 4th
New hotness
I was snooping through Google Webmaster tools I was intrigued by their 404 error page helper which tries to add useful links to your error pages. So I decided to set about making my own error page which was as helpful as possible, I know that it’s not the most popular or important site, but it’s nice to do things like this just to see how it works and to get practice.
Main features;
» Dropped the ‘404′ as a lot of people don’t know or care what ‘404′ is.
» The message ‘Page not found’ displayed in French, German, Japanese, Russian and Italian, it also links to Google translate pages to translate the error page.
» Links to popular pages.
» Links to the latest posts.
» Search within the blog and the entire site through Google custom search.
» A link to the archives.
I understand some of it may be superfluous, but I tried to keep is as simple looking as possible whilst adding as much function as possible. You can have a look at how it works here.
I also posted up the 3360×1050 wallpapers in a post so it would be easier for people to find, check it out here.
3360×1050 Wallpapers
Mar 21st
I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, I’ve been busy (more on that later) for now though I’ve always found it hard to find dual screen wallpapers, especially ones in 3360×1050 resolution, hopefully these should help, read below the fold for some more previews and a big link incase you missed the one up there^
GDATA Antivirus
Feb 11th
I was looking for an alternative to AVG antivirus, maybe something a little more comprehensive, so I had a look around and according to this site G Data diagnosed the most viruses from a test bunch and hence one would think is the best antivirus to have. They have a 30 day trial so I figured I would give it a try, the program looks nice and seems not to take up too many resources, the fun ends there however…
Once installed the program kept getting stuck when scanning certain files on my disk, usually in fact the same one each time so finishing a scan was impossible even after 5 hours stuck on the same file. Even when I tried to heal infections the program froze for 5 minutes and failed to remove half of them.
The second issue with the program is that it interfered with my web browsing, half of webpage images did not load, some websites refused to load at all sometimes, including Facebook. It also scanned almost every file in a webpage including flash videos, so instead of getting a video straight up and streaming from Youtube I had to wait for the whole video to download and then be scanned most of the time.
Moar floorhorse
Nov 2nd
Floorhorse is claiming more lives every second of the day, as you can see the domain has been registered, not by myself, I was too much of a pussy and have already registered way too many domains recently. Including another today, I finally bought my actual name and ill be using it as email, probably will not put a website up, not at least until I have got all my other domains back.
Now to set about making a floorhorse generator!
Edit: Floorhorse collection
Trackmania mania
Oct 27th
It’s nice to have a desktop again, I get get onto things that weren’t possible with the piddly laptop, thankfully I should be getting a nicer laptop soon too. I’ve taken the opportunity to re-encode some of the videos on the site, so they now look nicer and sound better, I’ll also be uploading the multiboxing video instead of using the Youtube version.
I’ve also been playing some Trackmania, which is a nice free racing game, unlike most racing games though the tracks in Trackmania are manic, massive jumps and aerobatics make it a little different and the main premise (which I haven’t touched on yet) is the online play, rankings, teams and such. It’s good fun. Whilst the graphics aren’t brilliant they are nice and smooth. There are also lots of car models available to download from the net. Edit: Video is encoded and ready;
FLV 25MB (640×400/1mbps)GPUs push the boundries of home computing
Oct 14th
Gone are the days when GPUs were only used to make your favourite games look great, using GPUs to do actual computing tasks is the in thing. GPUs being harnessed for number crunching have already helped push the folding@home project past 4 Petaflops, the GPU client alone counts for around 2 Petaflops, for comparison that’s more than twice the computing power of the worlds fastest supercomputers.
Sticking with the folding@home client for now, currently there are around 20,000 GPU clients ‘folding’ producing around 2 Petaflops (2000 Teraflops) and we’ll assume for arguments sake that the average folder’s PC cost around £500, which is a little high as one can make a system capable of running the client for quite a bit less and I’m not counting montiors etc, but we’ll assume and average gamer. 20,000 x £500 = £10,000,000. Each Blue Gene/L (one of the top supercomputers around) hits around 6 Teraflops per rack each rack consisting of 1,024 dual core PowerPC based processors and cost (2004 data) around £1,000,000 each. Matching the price of the GPU folders Blue Gene/L racks thats only 10 racks pumping out 60 Teraflops, further; to reach 60 Teraflops with GPU folding the cost is around £300,000.
More to come on this, some of us have to sleep.
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