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Make Your Own Soda/Seltzer Cheap

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

Ever want to get out of paying $1 per bottle of carbonated water? Well you can, and as it turns out, it’s pretty easy. I just purchased a kit off eBay that had a 20oz paintball CO2 tank, a regulator, and the correct soda cap. It was pretty cheap as well, around $130 shipped. The paintball CO2 tank can be filled at many places for around $5, it lasts for about 40 – 60 2 liter bottles, depending on how carbonated you make them.

Generally, if I drink 1 2 liter per day it’ll last a month and a half. I make them very carbonated though, about what you’d get from the store. One note is I push the PSI higher than you probably should, 50PSI, I found that if I put it lower it wouldn’t get carbonated quickly enough for my liking. However, this will vary depending on how cold the water is that you’re trying to carbonate.

How To:

1. Fill 2 liter bottle with water, leave some space at the top.

2. Carbonator attachment on bottle has a pin on top, push it down and squeeze the bottle to remove excess air.

3. Attach hose to carbonator by pulling up on the attachment and pushing down.

4. Screw down pin on co2 tank until you feel it pushing down on the tank’s pin.

5. Adjust PSI on regulator until it’s at 30 – 35PSI (Or higher, depending on how cold the water is in the bottle, 50PSI works best but not recommended by most.)

6. Release Co2 via the red lever on the side.

7. Shake bottle for 60 seconds or so.

8. Turn off the co2, unscrew the valve, remove attachment from carbonator.

9. Remove carbonator from bottle and enjoy freshly carbonated water.

Soda requires different steps, I haven’t done it so I don’t know. This process might seem complicated, but it’s really easy after you’ve done it a few times, and it saves a bundle of $ very quickly if you drink a lot of it. Personally, I drink it on and off but when I’m in the mood I drink 1 – 2 bottles in a day.

So there you go.. Quick, easy & cheap carbonated water. Forgive me if I’m using incorrect terms to describe the components Kit can be found at KegConnection.

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Tags: carbonated water at home, carbonator, co2 tank, soda
Posted in Technology Reviews/Guides, Tutorials | No Comments »

ATI EyeFinity Review – Different Monitors Sizes and Resolutions

Monday, May 24th, 2010

I picked up another monitor for productivity reasons – but I already had a 1680X1050 (22″) & 1920X1200 (24″) screen. I’ve picked up different monitors over the years and never bought them as sets. The 3rd monitor is e-IPS 1920×1080 (23″) – because I knew I wanted to start moving to IPS technology. The other 2 are obviously TN panels.

While doing all this, EyeFinity was not the priority. The priority was more screen space to work with. However, since I had the whole setup basically, why not mess with EyeFinity?

I had to set all of them at 1680X1050 since that’s the lowest resolution out of the bunch. That gives me 5040X1050 – which looks horrible out of games. I was pretty much expecting everything to be horrible since like I said, all 3 are different monitors, and the LG screen has these horridly big bezels. So, by far not the best setup for something like EyeFinity.

After getting in game however, everything looks good. I’m shocked. The bezels don’t bother me - I’m shocked. I was able to get the other 2 to line up with my 24″ – I’m shocked. My games are more immersive and I’m enjoying myself a lot – yet again pure shock.

So what does all this tell me? You don’t have to have the perfect setup to get EyeFinity enjoyable or working right. I’ve looked and I’ve looked – but I have yet to find anyone running EyeFinity with different monitors and resolutions like me. I am thinking about switching the 22″ and 24″ screen out for 2 more 23″ IPS Dell panels, but that is far into the future. At that point, I’ll have something to compare against and see if it’s really that much better than my current setup.

Lots and lots of people think EyeFinity is just a gimmick – well I really have to disagree there. After going EyeFinity – I don’t want to go back. I don’t think you can say anything until you’ve experienced it first hand for more than a few days. As you can see, I was very skeptical of the technology and thought it would completely suck. I was wrong.

Sure, it’s a somewhat costly setup, but if you need the monitors for productivity anyway, you can’t go wrong. Let me tell you, 2 monitors is 100x better than 1 and 3 seems like the sweet spot for me. Sure, spaces are cool, but if you need to see a bunch of things at once you can’t do that with spaces. (also remember that one panel must be DisplayPort or you need an active display port adapter for the 3rd monitor)

Conclusion

After having this setup for awhile – I can safely say that EyeFinity is awesome. Game play is just so much more immersive – and fun. It’s really really hard to form an opinion without experiencing it first hand which is going to be a drawback for this technology to spread. Also, yes I know that Matrox has had this technology for quite awhile – but you have to buy a $300 device on top of the $300 video card which makes it even less accessible to the mainstream audience. So ATI has done something magical – introducing videocards capable of driving 3 displays (FINALLY) and combining 3 monitors into 1 display – all wrapped into a highly powerful graphics card. I won’t be switching to nVidia unless they implement similar technology.

Picture taken before all monitors were lined up correctly..

Tags: ATI, Graphics Cards, review, Triple Monitors, Video Cards
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The Quest For 4GHz: My Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban Overclock Adventure

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

My old chip was a Q6600. Why was I upgrading at all you may ask? Well, my Q6600 could only hit about 3.2GHz, I wanted some more power plus the extra cores is a nice touch. Generally speaking, the Phenom II X6 is close to the performance clock for clock of my old Q6600. I also snagged a deal on frys.com where the processor + motherboard was only $260. I combo’d that with $80 DDR3 Corsair XMS3 ram (after rebate) from tigerdirect, and picked up a H50 cooler at retail price from newegg. ($80) I also intend to sell my old parts on eBay in the near future to help recoup some cost.

specs:

GA-890GPA-UD3H

4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333

Corsair HX520w PSU (If you don’t think this is enough.. I’ve done the calculations and even with the processor at 4GHz at max I’ll hit 480w or so, with everything fully loaded, 100%. Corsair PSU’s are slightly under rated, and will deliver 520W continuously without issue. I don’t intend to keep my CPU at 4GHz though so there really is no issue, or “pushing” the limits.)

1055T (stepping: CCBBE CB 1015BPMW)

ATi Radeon HD5850

Corsair H50

1x 320GB 72k drive

1x 500GB 72k drive

1X 1TB 72k drive

Overall, pretty cheap upgrade. Let’s start off by saying this was not exactly an “easy” venture. I thought it would be, but it in no way ended up that way. Starting from the beginning, I had to remove my old LGA775 motherboard with a Q6600.

That was pretty simple. Mounting the H50 was also pretty simple. The rest of the process was also simple, and what I’d expect.

So I power up the system, install windows, boot into windows, and all of a sudden… BAM my pc won’t start up. I keep pressing the button like an idiot and smell something burning. My worst fear was that the power supply was dead. I proceeded to disassemble my entire build, that I just put together. I took the power supply to a nearby computer to test if it worked. It worked without issue. So what’s the problem? I have to take out all my components to find out what is causing the problem. I take out the H50 radiator and fan and put it on top of my case.

I power on the system like this, and guess what? The H50 fan starts smoking and making sounds like it’s burning up! Immediately I power off the PC and take out the fan. I replace these fans with my antec fans I’ve had for quite some time. My antec 900 came with a bunch of them. No problems.

This whole process took awhile to sort out and set me back time wise substantially. Anyway, with this sorted out I went to begin overclocking my computer. I hit a wall at around 3.75 GHz, northbridge needed some more juice.

Then my ram timings/speed were getting messed up even with the highest divider. My motherboard is sensitive to the timings on ram for some reason, so I couldn’t boot with certain timings. Not cool. After struggling with the ram timings, speed, northbridge frequency etc, I was finally able to start booting at above 3.75GHz, and eventually was able to hit 4GHz. To make it stable, I had to run a lot of prime95 and ram tests. Prime stability came in at 1.5V. Worth all the hassle? Maybe not since I don’t think I’ll be running my CPU at 1.5V. I can get 3.8ish at around 1.38V. Extra 200Mhz for .12v doesn’t seem worth it. Of course, I just had to push it to 4GHz because it’s “magical” or something

3DMark06 run: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=13861077

Well, that’s that. I’m just adding some finishing tweaks to my setup and figuring out what the “best” overclock would be for performance, energy consumption, and heat. Probably about 3.8GHz, 4GHz turbo, with C&Q enabled.

This processor is noticeably faster than the Q6600, so I’m happy with my upgrade.

UPDATE: I settled on 3.5GHz @ 1.28V. Should be close to stock watts, at 4GHz it’s a 93% increase.. 93% increase for 500MHz isn’t what I’d call a good deal considering the cost of electricity here. I leave my PC on 24/7 so I don’t want to burn up too much. Haven’t figured out turbo yet, doesn’t seem to work correctly. Only bumps voltage to 1.32v which isn’t enough to do much with. Of course, I have saved the 4Ghz profile in my motherboard in case I need it for something

Again, my Q6600 ate close to 200w at 3.2GHz so I never ran it there much. I try to keep my overclocks a little energy efficient.

Tags: 1055T, computer, overclock
Posted in Technology Reviews/Guides | 2 Comments »

GGTS First Impressions

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

I got my GGTS about 3 days ago, along with an i3 & i6 atomizer. I know I said I was going to wait a month till I wrote anything about the GGTS, but I’m going to go ahead and write first impressions. I do have to say there was a definite “wow” factor. This thing looks nice.

The first thing I was most concerned about was the switch. This thing fires every single time since I’ve had it. The button also feels pretty good, and the locking feature is a nice touch.

I did try out the i3 atties and I thought they were pretty good, but I still like 510′s more. 510 @ 6V + 24 – 36MG PureSmoker e-Liquid seems to give me the most “cigarette” like experience. (Not sure how much VG/PG PureSmoker uses, but it usually does pretty well for me, I have some TastyVapor 10% VG and it doesn’t produce nearly as much vapor.) Vapor production in the GGTS VS Prodigy V2: HUGE DIFFERENCE. GGTS provides more vapor quicker. Taste seems to be very close but a little less than the V2.

I only have cr123a batteries (left over from the Prodigy V2 and I also picked up another set) so I can’t really comment on how it functions at 7.2V, 7.4V, 3.7V, and with different batteries. I’ll get to testing 7.4V with an i7 in the future probably, but I won’t use it all the time. I prefer being able to use regular atomizers, and at 7.2 – 7.4V you need the high volt atomizers all the time.

So far, I haven’t noticed much wrong I can really complain about. The GGTS has just “worked”. Oh wait.. there is one thing the brass/aluminum seems to get dirty easily, to keep it shiny you’d have to polish it a lot. Not really going to call this a drawback though.

So long as the GGTS holds up I really don’t think I’ll be buying more mods. I could, but I don’t think I really want to. Unlike the V2 I can’t find anything wrong with it, and it’s easy to handle and adaptable. Only thing I’m going to do is play around with different battery combinations and atomizers/cartomizers, and of course try more e-liquid. Yea, the GGTS is that good. I’ve almost got a “sweet spot”. Only “mod” I see myself possibly buying would be the AFS, and maybe some more imeoatties.

Tags: E-Cigarettes
Posted in Technology Reviews/Guides | No Comments »