So after a few months of using the 2D HD picture, which I was highly satisfied with I found out that glasses were actually $19 for the 2011 Samsung models. I also found that some 3D Bluray players on eBay that are slightly damaged but still work fine are around $60. So 3X $19 glasses = $57 + $60 bluray player = $117 to “upgrade” to 3D. I’m not including the plasma’s cost because I was going to buy that anyway no matter what. Suddenly this doesn’t look like such an expensive proposition.

Some movies have done a rather poor job implementing 3D and others look stunning. For example, Resident Evil Afterlife looks amazing in 3D and actually saves the film itself, making it entertaining enough that you are still enjoying the mind numbing action. In 2D I would’ve probably turned it off after awhile because there was basically no plot and just nonstop action. 3D saved this movie. It seems like it was just a tech demo for 3D rather than a “real” movie.

Thing is, film makers need to get an understanding of all the aspects of 3D and then implement them into “good” movies. That could definitely make it worth it. Some of the IMAX presentations like Under the Sea can be breathtaking, and then other 3D movies forget that they’re even 3D, the movie would be basically the same in 2D.

So the question is, is it worth it?

I would have to say it’s probably worth it IF you already have the TV, might as well spend a little and get the 3D stuff. If you’re upgrading your TV right now it’s probably worth it since the current good TV models are all 3D.

Basically, don’t don’t buy a TV just for 3D. Buy it for the HD display and 2D first and foremost, and if it has 3D, it might be worth picking up the extras to enjoy it. There’s not that much 3D content out there right now worthy of buying an entire setup, so just stick to your current TV.

Fad or Not?

Who knows. I didn’t spend much on it, ($117) so it doesn’t bother me if it sticks around or not. My TV displays the best 2D HD images I’ve ever seen.

It seems like a lot of companies are throwing a ton of money at 3D and really, if they get the hang of it I know movies can be beautiful in 3D, there’s a few gems out there that show the power of 3D. It’s a pretty solid tech, I mean colors aren’t lost and the picture can look great. The main issue right now is crosstalk which I’m sure can and will be resolved in the future for the most part. It’s pretty non-existent as it is. The glasses don’t annoy me but maybe it’s because I wear prescription glasses anyway and wearing 1 more pair really doesn’t bother me.

The only other problem I’ve noticed is slight dizziness from 3D. I used to never get dizzy while watching 3D, however I’ve just barely recovered from vestibular neuritis. So that’s probably the cause.

Configuring the remote for xbmc with eventghost can be very difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to map the remote’s keys to the actions that take place in XBMC. If you want to map certain buttons you need to remove keyboard emulation in EventGhost. I had to do that anyway because keyboard emulation was making my remote unresponsive in XBMC.

Other than that, it’s pretty simple. Just grab the actions from your remote and move them over the corresponding XBMC feature.

Another option, which I use regularly is the Android XBMC remote. This allows you to use your phone over wifi to connect up with your HTPC. The main reason I use it a lot is because I can’t type fast with the MCE remote, but with the android remote I can send text from my phones native keyboard which makes things much faster.

Other people solve this problem by using keyboards, but I prefer my android remote due to it having a smaller form factor, and I can type around 20 – 30wpm which is plenty for what you’re doing in XBMC.

Where else can you share your files? USENET! It’s even more secure than file hosts for sending your personal documents to others. You don’t need multiple file hosting companies to get the files you want. Usenet is decentralized so there’s no way for one part to get shut down and for usenet to not exist anymore!

Usenet has been the primary file hosting method for decades. It’s completely underused. If you want to feed your file hosting addiction – the best place is to head on over to usenet. Read my Binary usenet tutorial and get started today.

Put an end to “chasing the dragon” with file hosts.

Run antivirus scans from multiple programs. Try comodo, norton, kaspersky, avg, and whatever else really. Also run spybot search and destroy. If they can’t find or remove it, and you can’t put a name on the process – the only option really is to reinstall windows.

Backup all your data that’s important on the windows drive to another hard drive or DVD-R, usb stick, etc. Reboot, enter your bios and make the dvd drive the boot drive exit the bios. Insert the windows disc and reboot. Follow the install guide and reformat the windows drive, wait for the installer to finish and boot back up again. Time to reinstall all your apps and get your system back up and running.

This time try and be more careful, install a firewall like comodo so you can monitor what programs are doing. Also install noscript with Firefox to block malicious scripts on web pages. Watch your email messages carefully and don’t fall for anything. For more info refer to my guide on how to avoid various trickery on the internet.

E-mail spam

A big spot for getting infected is through your email. There’s many strange tactics employed, sometimes it’s a package you never ordered, the IRS saying they didn’t get taxes, or something like that. Anyway, they always make it sound urgent and you need to just download this pdf here. Which of course, is an exploit and will install a “virus” on your computer. Monitor your email closely – the IRS doesn’t use email, don’t open PDF files or any files of any sort unless it’s just a jpg from your buddy or something – even then you need to be careful. Many of these messages/files are undetected by antivirus – the people sending these out change up the code/signatures continuously.

Links in email – be very careful and monitor the ACTUAL URL that shows up when you put your mouse over it. Sometimes it’s disguised pretty well if you’re not paying attention – like www.irs.gov.pollywocks.com/exploit. The main thing to remember is that if your buddy has been infected with the email, they might send stuff to you, so don’t trust it just because it’s from your friend. Also don’t trust the sent from address – email is terribly easy to spoof. (make up names)

Most guys sending out these emails don’t care at all if they get in trouble so they will use trademarks from companies and make it look as legitimate as possible. You need to closely examine an unusual email before proceeding to do anything. These are the reasons why a ton of people get infected through email messages.

E-mail Phishing

The guys that do e-mail phishing are employing the same tactics I went over above – but this time they usually use a fake login page instead of trying to infect you – they might mimic a bank login page and steal your details. Again, paying close attention to the URL is a must. E-mail in general is an insecure method of communication so do not send personal details at all through it if it’s requested by an unknown party in a message. Everyone in your email inbox is an unknown party. The only time it’s “ok” is if you are sending it yourself to an address you know.

Online Adobe Exploits

The easiest way to avoid these is to run Firefox with Noscript enabled at all times. If you want to view an object from certain sites you can setup an allow list, and there are pre-made allow lists online for trusted websites. Noscript has saved me many times from being infected. These are just tough to avoid if you’re not being vigilant enough on the web.

Instant Messaging Phishing

Usually they say you’re going to get something for free if you give out your login details. Maybe money, maybe something else, depends on what they’re trying to get out of you. Never send your information to an unknown party.

Adware

Usually adware is for games that are advertised online. They require an install to play. Fortunately they usually play by the rules so if you read the terms of service you will see that the application installs ad supported content. If you want to avoid it simply don’t install it and cancel the installer. Some adware companies are more malicious than others, but the big companies are easy to uninstall if you want and show you the terms up front. These guys really aren’t all that bad to be honest for the most part.

There’s new schemes that come out every day – so just be vigilant while you’re on the web. There’s lots of things that antivirus simply won’t protect you from. Some things it will, it’s good to have but won’t stop everything. Unfortunately if you run windows eventually you will most likely be infected with something at some point. The “best” method is to run linux or mac osx along with antivirus and noscript. This gives you the best chance to not be infected with something – but even then there’s still a chance.

I currently own a Nano 1G, but it’s a pain for working out because it bounces around, and I’ve dropped it all over the place several times. I’m surprised it’s not totally broken yet.

So, this is what I think the Nano was designed for – extremely portable, wearable, music player. Nothing else. Why people nowadays expect an MP3 player to do more is beyond me. I remember back when black and white iPods were awesome. So maybe I’m too old to understand, but I didn’t think 20 was really that old.

I do however own a Droid Incredible, everything people are upset about missing from the Nano.

Anyway, I’m not going to show you a bunch of benchmarks because I’m sure you already know SSDs are fast, depending on which one you get they may be blazing fast. What you may not know is how they change the feel of the overall system. Boot time is cut in half, roughly, but I didn’t really care about that because I don’t even turn off my PC all that often.

What does surprise me is that applications overall feel more responsive!  Any application you put on the SSD for general use pops open faster and feels better in the interface. Not sure why they feel better while already opened, but I have separate windows + apps on the HDD and SSD and I compared how they functioned, the SSD wins hands down. Probably because the program still accesses the hard drive on and off while in use.

Storage: if this is an issue for you (like it is for me) install windows + apps on a 64GB drive and move everything else to a 2TB 72K drive or something. I have about 2.2TB of usable storage other than the 64GB SSD and it works out great.

One thing though.. If you’re sort of a power user and have lots of applications 32GB is definitely not going to cut it. 64GB+ will work. In fact, I cannot install all my games on the 64GB drive, so I’ll have to install/uninstall if I want the loading speed of the SSD. So in my case, I think I’d be better suited to a 128GB+ drive if I wanted to fit everything that needed speed on it.

With the storage issue, not being able to fit all games etc, is it still a worthy upgrade? You bet. Hard drive are obviously the bottleneck in most newer PC configurations, and with an SSD they really pop alive as far as general use

I really have NO idea why I didn’t get an ergonomic chair earlier. I’ve been on the computer for extended periods of time since I was about 10 years old. Always using crappy wal-mart chairs, that were NOT designed for what I was doing. Even when I did have money, all of it went to processors, video cards, speakers, monitors, and nothing went to my chair. The chair remained a POS from wal-mart at all times.

Now that I’m 19, I’m starting to feel some back issues develop. Those 9 years on wal-mart chairs for countless hours are starting to take hold. However, I think with this chair those problems may go away completely. (Only very slight pain from leaning over all the time has developed)

Anyway, the best way to describe the feeling of sitting on the Knoll Life Chair is “good”. Mine has adjustable arms that go up and down and side to side, which I would recommend. I think these are “High Performance” arms. Adjusting the height of the arms along with forward/backward and side to side really comes in handy depending on how you’re sitting or want to sit in the chair.

The seat moves forward slightly depending on how you sit on it, and you can slide it forward or backward as much as needed. You can of course lean back in the chair as well, and adjust the tension.

Overall, I have to say I’m super happy with this chair, it’s the first time I’ve felt comfortable sitting at my desk in years (No joke.) Even though I did not pay retail for this chair and bought it at an eBay auction, I think it’s actually worth the retail price of $808.

I was actually very scared of ordering a chair online without trying it out in person, and the only reason I got the knoll life chair was because of the auction and I didn’t want to pay more than $400 for my chair. Unfortunately, there really aren’t any shops nearby that sell “performance” task chairs. I was going to get the steelcase leap, but so far I’m glad I didn’t. This chair seems perfect for me. I really like the breathable back, and steelcase doesn’t have that.

Conclusion

Finally, a chair I WANT to sit on.

Update

6/16/10 – After sitting on this chair for a few months, I can form a more full opinion. My opinion hasn’t really changed – it’s still the best chair I’ve ever sat in. My back has not hurt since getting this chair. It makes the couch seem uncomfortable due to less ergonomic support Has also shown no noticeable wear, usually by now a $100 chair would have plenty of wear.

Definitely worth every penny.

DD-WRT is pretty easy to install, I’ve had to do much more in the past to get a modified firmware up and running. Mine came pre-flashed though, it was pretty cheap on eBay, so I don’t have first hand experience, but in the past I’ve had to solder certain points and jtag the device in order to flash it. I’ve also used telnet in the past to flash, so the steps for this router seem all too familiar.

Anyway, just from playing with this router I love it. So many things I can tweak and mess with. Mostly, what I’ve done so far is setup WPA2 for my wireless encryption, MAC block, QoS, and virtual AP’s.

WPA2 is the best encryption out there right now, so I’m happy with it, I’m also blocking by MAC addresses, so only known devices can connect. QoS (Quality of Service) is rather interesting because I can set priority to certain connections, so if one program is hogging bandwidth, I’m still able to surf the web at full speed.

Virtual AP’s is another interesting feature, it makes it so I can setup different AP’s that have different types of access. For instance, one could have the internet only, the LAN only, or both LAN and internet. This could be useful for a bunch of different things.

I can also adjust the wireless mW so that can help cover more area, but after a certain point you’re going to want to get a better antenna if you need longer distance.

So far, that’s all I’ve played with, but there’s many, many more features I may or may not use in the future.

Uptime on this router is awesome, it stays up for weeks.

Statistics are also pretty interesting, I can monitor all my bandwidth, how much bandwidth other devices on the network are using, overall internet bandwidth consumed, and LAN bandwidth.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with this router, and if you don’t have a dd-wrt capable router what are you waiting for? It’s worth every penny.

At first, I thought the HD5850 was going to be bottlenecked by my Q6600, after some in game testing, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I’m able to run Crysis at the max settings at 1920×1200, and have very playable frame rates. I tested a few other games and the result was just awesome. I probably got more than 2x the performance of my older card, the HD4850 which I bought when it came out. I don’t plan on upgrading the motherboard/cpu until the next gen cards arrive, such as the HD6850 or something, I’m sure by that point the Q6600 will just be too slow to keep up so a full system upgrade is in store around that time

If you’re debating about the HD5870 or the HD5850, 10 – 15% more performance just isn’t worth the extra cost in my opinion, just go with the 5850. Right now, it has the best price/performance ratio out there. I didn’t get all into the benchmarks and stuff yet, I might never get to it this time. Usually I always do when I get a new card and go quite insane with overclocking. I guess I’d rather just game than play with the benchmarks

Oh yea, almost forgot.. I’m extremely impressed with Windows 7, it runs great. I’m always on the computer for work or entertainment so having a good setup is pretty important to me. Below is a pic of my current desktop