Chris Calabrese – My Blog

I recently upgraded the graphics card in my Dell Dimension 8400 to an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro. Everything looked good, and I was getting pleasing results from 3DMark. A couple of days later however, my computer started spontaneously rebooting itself for no apparent reason. As the graphics card was the only recent change, I did a little research in that direction and discovered the X1950 requires a 450w power supply and, alas, my Dimension 8400 sports only 350w. I didn’t want to hassle with a power supply upgrade, so I downgraded my card to an AMD ATI Radeon X1650 XT and now all is well. Hooray for me.

In a previous post I talked about the need for a screen saver even with an LCD monitor. I thought I should take a minute to mention the excellent screen saver I use: Yukiyama’s Hanabi Screen Saver 2. It looks nice, adapts perfectly to every screen resolution I’ve tried it on, and is compact (so it uses only a small amount of computer resources). The screen saver’s Web page is in Japanese, but the screen saver runs fine on my English-language Windows computer. The link you want is the one with ”hanay215.exe” in the title. The file will extract two versions of the screen saver: one with sound and one without.

I’ve tried those “fish tank” screen savers. The problem with those (and others like them) is that they use the computer’s 3D accelerator. When the screen saver starts, my 3D card kicks in overdrive, its fan starts running and it heats up. The Hanabi Screen Saver doesn’t use 3D so my 3D card stays quiet and cool.

By the way, “hanabi” is Japanese for “fireworks.”

A note about the above link: You should always be extremely cautious about downloading anything from the Internet, as computer viruses and other nasties can be hiding inside the files. However, I have used the above program for years and trust the downloads from that site completely. Whether you trust it is something you need to decide for yourself.

I’ve had some fun the last couple of days adding photos to my blog header. To facilitate this, I found the original Kubrick Photoshop template (“Kubrick” is the name of the default template in WordPress), then cut out everything except for the header. I also had to change the colors a bit because they didn’t exactly match the current WordPress default template.

You can download my modified template here. There is a readme file with instructions to get you started.

Note: To rotate the images, I am using the Random Image Script found here.

I struggled with wireless for a year trying to get a downstairs computer hooked up with a reliable Internet connection. Maybe I just bought the wrong router, but it was one dropped connection after another. Fancy antennas did not help, and neither did hitting my forehead with the palm of my hand.

I finally found the answer: powerline networking adapators from Panasonic. These nifty little boxes solved my problem in about 5 minutes. You take the main unit, plug the power chord into the wall and the network cable into your wired router. You take the second unit, plug it into the wall and its network cable into the remote computer. Voilà, 100 Mbps networking with no dropped connections, and no worrying about WPA keys or other wireless security mishmash. If you want to add another connection somewhere in your home just buy another unit. (When you add a new unit you have to synch it with the master unit, which takes all of 10 seconds. This is a security measure to make sure someone that shares electrical wiring with you—like a neighbor in an apartment building—cannot access your network if they bought these same units.)

I evaluated other powerline systems but the Panasonic came out on top for several reasons. You have a single, thin power chord, with no “power bricks” hanging from the wall. The units are beautifully designed; small, stylish, and everything is labeled in easy-to-read type. The manual is well written and easy to understand.

I never thought of Panasonic for networking products, but I am impressed. They are a little pricey; I paid $185 at Amazon.com, about 4 times the cost of a basic wireless router. However, it was worth it to get 100% reliable networking without the headaches.