Bob’s Educational Corner
Sqrrl101‘s A World With Technology
Eisenawesome’s Awesomeness
alphabete‘s Public Shame Glory Train

and several of my own works

Have a read – if anyone actually reads this blog other than my Toshiba Satellite review, and leave a few comments. hopefully theres something atleast slightly humourous or otherwise entertaining to read.

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What is love? What is this longing in our hearts for togetherness? Is it not the sweetest flower? Does not this flower of love have the fragrant aroma of fine, fine diamonds? Does not the wind love the dirt? Is not love not unlike the unlikely not it is unlikened to? Are you with someone tonight? Do not question your love. Take your lover by the hand. Release the power within yourself. You heard me, release the power. Tame the wild cosmos with a whisper. Conquer heaven with one intimate caress. That’s right don’t be shy. Whip out everything you got and do it in the butt.

By Leon Phelps

My brain has been working overtime, so there may be another post soon..but don’t count on it.

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Til next time…

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The laptop in question is the Toshiba Satellite A300/OC3, or according to all the fucking labels on it, the Toshiba Satellite A300 PSAGCA-OC301N which doesn’t seem to occur very frequently in google searches, making this laptop quite difficult (I use that word lightly) to find any non-commercial non-webstore sites containing any sort of technical information on. So here we go.

Off the shelf, this laptop comes with a 2ghz Intel Core 2 “Centrino” processor, with the model number T6400. It had 2ghz of RAM and a 320 5400RPM hard disk. The onboard videocard is an ATi Radeon HD 3470 with 256mb of onboard RAM. Straight out of the box, this laptop has the potential to replace an older Athlon X2, Pentium 4 or early model Core 2 Duo or Solo desktop computer, Bolstered with a larger hard disk, and some more RAM it can start to replace all but the medium-high to highest ended desktop computers. The machine comes pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit, but has the option to install Home Premium 64bit (Boot the machine while holding 0).

The wireless card in the machine is the Intel 5100, which works with Ubuntu linux straight out-of-the-box, and will even break a WEP connection using aircrack-ng (I broke my own home wireless as a test) without any need to change settings at all. Unfortunately it doesn’t like to work under OSX, however the onboard Realtek8168 LAN adapter appears to, although I haven’t really bothered. The range on the wireless card is pretty damned good too, I seem to be able to pick up my shitty netgear router from over 25 metres away, along with just about everyone in the houses adjacent’s wireless connections with pretty good signal. Unfortunately, the button that turns the wireless on and off is a switch, which sits on the very front of the machine. So if you’re a fat fuck, or lazy, and you have the laptop on your lap, resting against your gut, theres a good chance you’re going to accidently switch off the wireless, which is the most fucking irritating thing on the planet.

The laptop itself is very shiny and professional looking – until you start using it. The keyboard is black and shiny, the lid is shiny as as the mouse buttons and the finish on the wrist rests, and around the keyboard. This isn’t a problem when clean, but after use it all becomes very dirty very quickly. The finish smears very quickly with fingerprints, and the dried salt from sweat, making the machine feel unclean and look fucking gross.

The touchpad mouse on this model of laptop is highly accurate, with built-in scroll horizontal and vertical, at the right and bottom of the keypad. The scrolling takes getting used to, but it all ends up working seemlessly after a bit of practice. The touchpad is about the only thing that doesn’t seem to get dirty. One problem I have with the touchpad is the inability to change the side of the vertical scroll, as I use the touchpad with my left hand (but a mouse with my right). The big mouse buttons make a rather loud “click” which can be heard a room away if its quiet. This has annoyed me when someone else has been using the laptop and I can hear the click click click from the other room.

The keyboard on this model of laptop is glossy black, and so it smears with fingerprints very fast. It is also impossible to see in the dark, which is not a problem if you’re a touch typer so much, but to the person who requires the odd finger repositioning or to use a symbol button, it gets a little frustrating. there are 6 multimedia buttons which are LED lit, and part of the plastic, with a touch-sensitive pad that picks up your finger but not anything else apparently, which I’m not sure is annoying yet or not.

The speakers on the laptop are pretty decent quality Harman/Kardon (more like Karman/Hardon amirite?) that can be turned up quite far without distortion, and are capable of playing music at a reasonably quality.

Built into the laptop shell is a webcam and microphone, which comes with really annoying software, but has pretty decent resolution and the mic picks up voice loud and clear. Not sure if Ubuntu knows its there though (but if you’re using ubuntu you don’t have any friends to webcam with anyway AMIRITE?).

The laptop has 4 USB ports, one of which is also an eSATA port, a HDMI port which displays perfect HD, SVideo Out, speaker and microphone ports, and a card reader (SD, Sony Memory Stick/Duo, and Compact Flash), there is also an expansion port on the side (right where you can snap the end off anything hanging out, with an overzealous left hand). The laptop even brags the ability to charge your USB devices while turned off, as one of the USB ports has constant power. I assume it only works if the laptop is also plugged in, as I have not tested this “feature”. It also has a DVDRW. I wasn’t gonna mention that because I didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to wonder if it did or didn’t, but seeing as this is the internet, I assume there ARE people that stupid, and you MIGHT be one of them (hint: you probably are).

The battery appears to run for about 2 hours on “full power” mode under Windows Vista, and about an hour and 30 minutes on the default power setting under Ubuntu (which seems to like to run the fans pretty high the whole time). Powersaver Mode on Vista gets the machine to almost 3 hours, but don’t think about actually doing anything productive. The best thing you’ll get away with without frustration is reading Wikipedia or a similar mainly text site.

Seeing as this is not a gaming laptop, I’m not really inclined to talk about its gaming performance, but it runs Counter-Strike Source at about 100~ fps on medium-high graphics, Fallout 3 fares a little worse on medium graphics, and World of Warcraft is very much playable on medium-high.

To run this whole typed ‘review’ into the ground, and to sum it up, here’s the TL;DR version:

Toshiba Satellite A300/0C3 (PSAGCA-0C301N)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (Centrino) @ 2GHZ (T6400) – 800mhz FSB
RAM: 2GB (Single stick with 2nd slot available, total capacity 8gb under 64bit OS)
HDD: 320gb 5400RPM hard disk
Display: 15.4inch widescreen, built in webcam (1.3mp) + microphone, 1280×800 max resolution.
Videocard: ATi (Mobility) Radeon 3470 with 256mb onboard RAM, HDMI/SVideo out
LAN: gigabit wired ethernet, Intel 5100 wireless b/g/n
Unimportant shit: 5-in-1 Card Reader, DVDRW “super multi” drive, 6 cell battery, headphone and mic jacks, harman/kardon speakers
Dimensions: 2.7kg, 36.2cm x 26.7cm x 3.8cm (WxLxH)

Pros:
Decent desktop replacement, powerful and attractive
Decent mobile gamer
Cheap considering (mine cost about $1300 AU and they’re cheaper now)
Shiny (oooh shiny)

Cons:
Gets dirty FAST
Black keyboard you can’t see in the dark
BADLY PLACED wireless switch
Preinstalled software is very business-user oriented, and thus I had alot of stuff to delete when I first fired up the machine.

And this concludes my first (possibly last) product review. Hopefully that was…useful….
Until next time.

I never thought it would happen, but my Playstation 3 has become a staple of my daily entertainment, and with the addition of Trophies for just about every game I have, going through and earning them all is hugely satisfying, even if I don’t get anything out of it other than a little graphic and some “experience points” for my gamer tag. I’ll probably post more about this in the future, as to keep my posts smallish.

Soundwave music festival in Perth was majorly fucking awesome. Nine Inch Nails and Innerpartysystem rocked my face off, as did Bloodhound Gang and Alice In Chains, although admittedly I wasn’t really into AIC until after I saw them. Great show. Being crushed in the NIN moshpit was a bitch, but atleast I got some good pics. And video – albeit the one from right up close is not complete, but the one from further back is, even if the sounds a little bit crackly. Trying to hold my phone steady while being smashed in the back is a task and a half, but I kinda managed. Videos as follow:

Nine Inch Nails – Discipline – Incomplete

Nine Inch Nails – Burn – Complete

Anyway, enough of this shit for now, More random blabbing wank sometime later in the week MAYBE. L8Rz
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]]> http://fknb3st.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/testing-ink-blog/feed/ 1 squatdog //www.fknb3st.com http://fknb3st.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/new-years-day-09/ http://fknb3st.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/new-years-day-09/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:32:05 +0000 squatdog http://fknb3st.wordpress.com/?p=32 ]]> Well, what a totally uneventful year for my blog, which was predicted anyway as I’m too lazy or too drunk generally to think of anything to update it with. New Years Eve was pretty uneventful aswell, which is unusual, as I usually find myself at a party, or similar but this year I stayed at home and drank a carton (24 375mL bottles) of Mercury Cider and passed out at about 11pm.

In other boring news I recieved a Sony Ericsson C905 phone from Virgin Mobile, which only took them from the 20th of November when I ordered it until the 24th of December to ACTUALLY DELIVER IT. The phone itself is spectacular however, and I’m actually pretty happy with it, which is odd for me when it comes down to things with computers in them. Actually since my last blog post I purchased a new PC aswell, gotta love wasting cash.

I guess this will probably conclude my New Years blogpost. Stay tuned (within the next 6 months) for my ranting blogpost about the Cleanfeed internet filter. I promise it’ll be good
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Ever remember owning a 14.4k modem and only being able to connect to BBS servers via direct modem link, back in the early 90s? Thats how I started using the internet. Ever since when new internet technology has come out, I’ve upgraded to it. 14.4k on BBS, to 28 and 36k, running software such as Netscape, and mIRC, surfing the internet at speeds blindingly fast compared to 14.4. then came 56k – or standard dialup as we know it, the fastest thing since Speedy Gonzales and supercharged V8s.

People started filesharing over ancient, hardly used protocols (now days) and trading illegal software in droves not seen since Commodore 64 floppy-swap parties. The internet was finally kicking off as a world-wide, useable medium for everyone on the planet, not just rich folk and geeks.

So back to what I was saying before, next came ADSL, at 256kbit with a huge 64kbit upstream, it was faster than anything anyone could imagine. At this speed, which was 5 times faster than dialup, the relatively expensive cost didn’t deter many people at all. ADSL took off pretty fast in Australia, and I remember being one of the first people out of everyone I knew to move from shitty dialup, to awesome ADSL.

Of course this ADSL had a download limit, of about 10 gigabytes. 10 gigabytes? hell that was 4 times the amount I was downloading on dialup, 10 gigs is heaps…but the sad thing is, the SPEED WENT UP and the DOWNLOAD LIMITS REMAINED THE SAME.

Whos fucking STUPID idea was this? Give everyone the same speed, but make them pay for MORE downloads. and this of course happened more progressively. 512/128 with 20gb, 1500/256 with 30gb, all the way up to the age of ADSL 2+, with speeds of up to 24000/1000…at an affordable $60 per month….with 12 gb of download limit? WHAT THE FUCK? If you want a decent amount of limit, to not get yourself “shaped” (which I’ll rage about in a second), you’re looking at $80-100 per month, OR MORE. Instead of giving you a slower speed with unlimited transfers, they give you the SAME speed with different download limits.

Now shaping is what happens if you EXCEED your download limit. Your internet gets slowed down. Now if you have an 80gb download limit, and you use it up every month, you’ll find that you’re paying for half a month of decent speed, and half a month of DIALUP. The EXACT THING you got away from when you upgraded your internet 10 years ago. Most reputable ISPs slow your internet down to speeds of 64kbit. 64kbit? What the fuck is that useful for?

Not only, at 64kbit, can you not USE any of the internet, but its a slap in the face to speeds such as 24000kbit. Alot of businesses use ADSL2+ with companies that provide it, and as of yet, none provide more than 200gb of download limit (with a majority of that 200gb being “offpeak” quota, useable between 3am and 9am…) Ever tried to send CRITICAL emails at work, or rendezvous with servers in other states to synchronise data on a DIALUP connection? It DOESN’T. FUCKING. WORK.

Now I would gladly swap my 24000/1000 (which i only get about 5500/800 on, due to the fact that no ISP is willing to build another fucking exchange in this area seeing as no one has complained enough yet) with 80gb of download limit (40 onpeak – 12pm-2am, 40 offpeak – 2am-12pm) which i pay $100 PER MONTH for, for an unlimited 1500/256 account. This would be much more productive. Sure I wouldn’t have speeds faster than light itself (hypothetically, if I was actually near the exchange) but atleast I’d be able to USE the internet, the clutted piece of shit that it has become.

The US disposed of download limits so long ago its not funny. They don’t have these problems, and also, they don’t pay NEARLY as much as we do, for the same thing. Infact Australia has one of the highest internet costs in the whole world, and we hardly even GET anything out of it.

This is a serious problem, and it really needs REMEDYING IMMEDIATELY. Our internet in Australia is such a backwards piece of shit, that everyone in the world is laughing at us, including our own fucking government. They wanna spend billions of dollars to FIX this fuck of an infrastructure, and so they damned well should. They should have disowned all their lines and let them become public to encourage competition in the telecommunications department instead of selling the GOVERNMENTS OWN TELECOM COMPANY WITH THE LINES TO A PRIVATE COMPANY SO THEY CAN CHARGE $30 “LINE RENTAL” FEE. Gee, no one is getting fucked over with that, are they?

Fuck the internet in Australia. Whoever designed its current business model should shove a broom handle up his arse and jump off a roof.