Jared Heinrichs

  • Technology Blog
  • Winnipeg Computer Repair
  • Winnipeg Photographer
  • Cooking With Jared
You are here: Home / 2008 / Archives for December 2008

Archives for December 2008

Dec 31, 2008 By Jared Heinrichs Leave a Comment

i7 Info (overclocking)

Notes for myself

Good write up here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-overclock,2112.html

This is my first time playing with the Core i7, so I have an opportunity to share some of my learning-curve experience with you folks.

Most of you probably know that the Core i7’s frequency is determined by its multiplier multiplied by a base clock speed. The base clock works essentially like the front side bus (FSB) does when overclocking Core 2 CPUs and the i7 920 doesn’t allow control of the multiplier. So overclocking an i7 is very similar to overclocking the Core 2 as you up the voltages a bit and raise the base clock (abbreviated BCLK).

Intel has implemented something called “overspeed protection” in its Core i7 models, which poses a small problem. The CPU will put a stop to things if it draws more than 130 W/100 amps. If you draw more when overclocking, the CPU will throttle back its multiplier and lower the clock speed. Ouch.

There are two ways to deal with this limitation. The first is to find a motherboard that has an option to disable overspeed protection. Intel’s own boards have a CPU VR Current Limit Override option in the BIOS that turns overspeed off, and on the ASUS board we tested the option called “CPU TM Function.” If your board supports a similar setting, you’re in luck since you can then raise voltage as high as you like and overspeed protection should not kick in. The second way to deal with this limitation is to avoid it entirely. If we ensure that our CPU voltage is set low enough that it will never hit the 130 W limitation at 100 amps, we should be good to go. Now, 100 amps x 1.3 V = 130 W, so 1.3 V should be about the maximum setting you can use on the i7 920 without worrying about bumping into the overspeed-protection limitations. Since the stock voltage of the i7 920 is 1.2 V, this does give us some room to stretch our legs a bit.

We couldn’t find an obvious overspeed-protection option in the Gigabyte BIOS, but in our case it didn’t really matter since at 1.32 V, the CPU was overclocking to 3.7 GHz without the overspeed protection kicking in and lowering the multiplier. We did turn off Turbo Mode when overclocking because it constantly adjusted the multiplier and we preferred consistent performance.

In the end, heat limited us more than anything else. We settled on a final overclock of 3.7 GHz by setting our voltage to 1.32 V from the stock 1.2 V; we set the QPI/VTT voltage to 1.3 V from the stock 1.2 V; and we set the IOH Core voltage to 1.2 V from the stock 1.1 V.

One note about the IOH core voltage: when we tried to set it to 1.3 V, we experienced a hard crash when everything would lock up and the screen output would freeze. This is very odd, but when we backed up on the IOH Core voltage to 1.2 V, things were peachy.

We used two software utilities to record temperatures during our overclocking efforts. Speedfan reported a 42 degrees Celsius temp at idle and Realtemp indicated 52 degrees Celsius. The BIOS health monitor appeared to agree with Realtemp, which seemed very high for idle temps, even with the stock cooler.

The load temperatures reported by the Speedfan and Realtemp utilities were absolutely terrifying with the stock cooler. After a 1/2 hour Prime95 run, the temperatures plateaued as Speedfan reported 85 degrees Celsius, and Realtemp reported 95 degrees Celsius. (Chris: I can confirm–in my upcoming i7 920/Phenom II comparison, I’m also seeing the 920 peak at 85 degrees Celsius under load). Looking around on the Web, it seems that other folks are reporting high Core i7 temperatures as well. We experienced no stability problems with the machine at these temperatures so we decided to plod on, but we would certainly recommend a better cooler than the stock piece if you plan to put together an i7 machine for overclocking purposes.

For the Radeon 4850 HD X2, we did manage to overclock the memory from 993 MHz to 1,060 MHz even though the cores were unwilling to go anywhere. The 67 MHz increase wasn’t great and probably won’t make a difference in the benches, but it was better than nothing.

Now that we’re armed with higher clocks, let’s throw it down against last month’s E8500 machine and its impressive 4+ GHz overclock.

Filed Under: Computer Hardware

Dec 28, 2008 By Jared Heinrichs 1 Comment

How to resize a bunch of pictures at once

How to batch resize images with PhotoShop

I’m writing this tutorial with PhotoShop CS3 in mind, since that is what I use at work, but I’ve used PS since 5.0, so if you’re working with an earlier version of the program the steps are pretty much the same. Before you begin, put all the images you need to resize into a folder. If you’re a bit uncomfortable, make a backup copy of it.

  1. Open PhotoShop
  2. Select File>Scripts>>Image Processor
  3. In the new dialog window, select your source folder in the top section and your destination folder below that. I’d recommend creating a new folder for your destination, thereby avoiding overwriting your original files in case at first you’re not happy with the result, you can go back, tweak and try again.
  4. In the next section, set your desired quality pixel dimensions and file type. you’ll see a box marked Save as JPEG. Check that off if you want to make JPEGS, otherwise PhotoShop will retain the original file type. As far as quality goes, it’s up to you. You might want to experiment by manually resizing a few images and trying different qualities to see what suits you. Personally, I never go below 30%.
  5. Click Run to start the script and watch the magic.

How to batch resize images for zero fucking cash

What I’d suggest if you’re going to take the free route is to install GIMP (because you need an image editor) and then use one of a few other programs I’m going to suggest to handle the resizing. I’d walk you through writing a batch script for GIMP or how to compile a plug-in to handle batch resizing, but I’m afraid it’s more work than I’m willing to do and I’d bet you don’t have the attention span to put up with it since you read this blog. If you want to take a crack at it, this plug-in is pretty popular, but since I’m going to assume that not every reader is using Linux like me, it’s just better this way, I think. GIMP is cross-platform, like I mentioned, so get that. Once that’s settled, here are some viable options:

For Windows:

  1. MS Power-Tools Image Resizer: Microsoft actually makes a batch resizer as part of it’s Power-Tools collection. It’s from the corporate devil itself, but as I understand, it works well enough and allows you to batch resize photos with a simple right-click. You can find this program on this page.
  2. Picture Resizer: A freeware tool for batch resizing of JPG pictures and photos. It has a drag-and drop GUI. Link.
  3. Visualizer Photo Resize: Yet another freeware tool. Available here.
  4. PIXresizer: Free, free, free. Not a penny charged. Get yours now.

There others out there, but one of those should be work for you.

For OSX:

  1. ImageMagick: A command line application, but incredibly powerful. It’s open source and can be downloaded here. See it’s entry under Linux below for more information.
  2. Dropic!: This is a drag and drop app, but limits you to a choice of only a few sizes. It’s free and is located here.
  3. iResize: Batch resize and compress images in TIFF, JPEG, PICT, GIF and PSD formats. Also free and can be grabbed up here.
  4. Resize!: I don’t know too much about this one, but apparantly it works, is free and is here.

For Linux:

  1. ImageMagick: A free software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a large variety of formats. Images can be cropped, colors can be changed, various effects can be applied, images can be rotated and combined, and text, lines, polygons, ellipses and BÃzier curves can be added to images and stretched and rotated. It’s a command line application and often comes bundled with Linux distros, so chances are you might already have it. It’s very popular and highly regarded as well as open source. The project page can be reached here.
  2. bbips: A menu driven bash script that uses ImageMagick to “batch” process entire directories of images all at once. Go here.
  3. Picwiz: A simple picture resizing wizard that is meant to be called from a Konqueror context menu (for KDE users). Here’s a link to the SourceForge project page.

Filed Under: Adobe Photoshop

Dec 28, 2008 By Jared Heinrichs Leave a Comment

HOW TO WordPress Themes

Backgorund Info

When I first started out with WordPress I didn’t understand how templates were made. The learning curve is quite steep till you play around with the software by breaking and fixing it. I really recommend that you do this as it is probably the best was of learning the program. That being said it also helps to have someone around that can give you the basics right up front. When people are starting out I tell them to copy the wordpress theme file located in ./wp-content/themes/Default and copy them to something like ./wp-content/themes/TEST-THEME. This allows you to edit the files and if you mess up then you can easily copy the contents back in the structure and restart things. For the most part page.php, single.php etc… will normally all look very similar because most people want a consistent theme accross their site. Back and Forth arrows would most likely be on “post pages” to navigate between the blog posts but doesn’t make sense to have on content managment pages.

page.php

This file as you would assume is the theme file for any post that is labeled a page. It does not include posts, search page etc.

single.php

This file is called when ever you are wanting to see a single post. This differs from say when you open the blog where you might have several posts on the screen.

Filed Under: Wordpress

Dec 28, 2008 By Jared Heinrichs Leave a Comment

WordPress Dreamweaver Dropdown Menu

About WordPress Dreamweaver Dropdown menus.

I love Dreamweaver’s Drop down menu. The menu is great for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I am a beginner programmer and anything that can help me along I absolutely love. This “How-to” revolves around your “pages” in WordPress.  Once you follow my step-by-step instructions you will realize how slick these menus are as you don’t need to keep editing the menu file independantly of the content. You will need to make sure that you use your own SpryAssest or these ones that I have zipped up for you enjoyment: spryassets.zip

How does dreamweaver’s menu work anyhow?

Dreamweaver’s menu relies on Un-ordered lists, SpryAssets (Adobes own javascript), and CSS using very specific classes and ID’s.

My assumptions & post legend:

All code will look like:

<h1>This is a title</h1>

If I have to wrap code the indication will be on the next line using: my Line wrap symbol

<--LW-

When ever you see ” ./”  that means the root of the site.

I assume that you installed wordpress to the root of the site and not in a directory like WordPress or “Blog”

How do I install your WordPress Dreamweaver Dropdown Menu?

I recommend that if you are just starting out to use my directory structure. The reason why I suggest this setup is that it will make the drop down menu available to multiple themes if you so choose.

Where do I put the SpryAssests?

You will be putting the SpryAssests in th root .\ directory.

Where Does menu.php go?

menu.php goes in the theme directory you are working on. For example you are working on the Default Theme, you would copy it to .\wp-contents\themes\Default\

How does you theme know how to use menu.php?

Well there are 2 things that you need to do.

1.) Include the menu.php in the theme design.

Go to where you want you want the menu to show up in the code:

<?php include menu.php  ?>

** NOTE ** Make sure not to include the spaces between the ?’s.

2.) Include the propper calls for the Spryassests CSS and javascripts.

Go to the header.php file and add:

<link href="./includes/SpryAssets/SpryMenuBarHorizontal.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script src="./includes/SpryAssets/SpryMenuBar.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Go to the footer.php file and add this just above the </body> tag:

<script type="text/javascript">
var MenuBar1 = new Spry.Widget.MenuBar("MenuBar1",
<--LW- {imgDown:"SpryAssets/SpryMenuBarDownHover.gif",
<--LW- imgRight:"SpryAssets/SpryMenuBarRightHover.gif"});
</script>

How to get sub-menus.

Because I did say that this is a drop down menu we have to make sure that we use WordPress in such a way that the software will automatically create the drop down menus for you. In wordpress when you are creating pages you have the option of making the page a “main page” or a page that is a “member” of a main page. As one would guess any Page that is posted as a main page will be displayed as Top most part of the menu. If you make a page a sub-catagory of a page that page would be part of the actual drop down menu. For example look at my menu. You will notice that the first item in the menu is “About Us”.  It then has Jared’s Resume, Delila’s Resume, etc…

About us is a “main catagory” item. I told the other items to use “About Us” as thier parent in the Edit a Page screen in wordpress.

Filed Under: Adobe Dreamweaver, Wordpress

Dec 28, 2008 By Jared Heinrichs 1 Comment

Wooden Horse Race Rules

HORSE RACING RULES

Using a regular deck of cards, remove all aces and kings leaving 44 cards (two through queen). Set up horses in numerical order. Dealer deals all cards to the players until all 44 cards are dealt. Some people may end up with more cards than others.

First person to the left of dealer rolls both dice. The total number is the first “money” horse. Move this horse back one space BEHIND the line. Anyone holding this number in their hand discards that card and pays the pot. Example: A 2 & 5 are rolled. The 7 horse is moved back one space. Anyone with a 7 in their hand throws it in the discard pile and puts 25 cents in the pot. If someone has two 7’s, they will throw 50 cents in the pot and discard both 7’s, three 7’s is 75 cents, and four 7’s is $1.00. Now anytime a 7 is rolled, the person rolling the dice will add 25 cents to the pot.

Then next person to the left rolls both dice. The total number is the second “money” horse. Move this horse back two spaces BEHIND the line. Anyone holding this number in their hand discards that card and pays the pot (50 cents) for each card. If the person happens to roll the previous number (say the 7 from the example) they will pay the 25 cents and roll again.

The next person to the left rolls both dice. The total number is the third “money” horse. Move this horse back three spaces BEHIND the line. Anyone holding this number in their hand discards that card and pays the pot (75 cents) for each card. If the person happens to roll either of the previous numbers (say the 7 from the example) they will pay the amount for the number and roll again.

The next person to the left rolls both dice. The total number is the fourth and last “money” horse. Move this horse back four spaces BEHIND the line. Anyone holding this number in their hand discards that card and pays the pot ($1.00) for each card. If the person happens to roll either of the previous numbers (say the 7 from the example) they will pay the amount for the number and roll again. These four horse will not move again during this game.

Now the game can begin! The next person rolls the dice. The total of the dice indicates the number horse to move one space FORWARD. If a “money” horse number is rolled, the person who rolled it pays the pot the required amount and the dice are passed to the next player. Continue rolling the dice, moving horses forward or paying the pot until one horse reaches the end. The first horse to reach the finish line (last space) is the winner. All players holding that number card wins a fourth of the pot. If a player is holding two winning cards they receive half the pot, three winning cards will receive three quarters of the pot, and four winning cards will receive all of the pot. If there is any extra money that can not be split equally will stay in the pot for the next game.

Continue the next game the same way with the person to the left of the previous deal now the new dealer.

ENJOY!! AND GOOD LUCK!!

Filed Under: Board Game Rules

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

Categories

  • Board Game Rules
  • Camera
  • Computer Hardware
    • Blackberry
    • drivers
    • iPad
    • Magic Jack
    • USB
  • Damn Small Linux
  • Exam Notes
  • Facebook
  • FREE Flashcards
  • Games
    • PC
      • League of Legends
    • Wii
    • xbox 360
  • Music
  • Networking
    • Cisco Certification
    • Mitel
    • Palo Alto Firewall
  • News
    • Google
    • Microsoft
  • Operating System
    • Active Directory (2003)
    • Android
    • Command Prompt
    • Damn Small Linux
    • Group Policy
    • Hyper-V
    • IIS
    • ISA 2006
    • Mac OS X
    • Microsoft Exchange Server
    • Powershell
    • Security
    • SME Server
    • Terminal Server 2003
    • Ubuntu Linux
      • Adito Web SSL VPN
      • OpenVpn-als
      • Webmin
    • Virtual Machine Manager
    • Windows 2003 SBS
    • Windows 2003 Server
    • Windows 2008
    • Windows 2008 R2
    • Windows 2012R2
    • Windows 7
    • Windows 8
    • Windows Command Line
    • Windows Deployment Services
    • Windows Server Backup
    • Windows Vista
    • Windows XP
  • Phones
  • Photography
  • Photos
    • Animals
    • Misc
    • Nature
    • Portraits
  • Portfolio
  • Programming
    • CSS
    • HTML
    • jQuery
    • MySQL
    • PHP
    • Script
  • Programs
    • Acrobat
    • Acrobat Reader
    • Adobe Dreamweaver
    • Adobe Illustrator
    • Adobe Photoshop
    • Anti-virus Software
    • Antivirus
    • Backup Exec
    • Bittorent
    • Blackberry BESADMIN
    • Internet Explorer 9
    • Lightroom
    • Microsoft Office
    • Netbeans
    • Onenote
    • Outlook
    • Shelby
    • Sysprep
    • Trend
    • Video Editing
    • Visual Studio
    • Windows Live Writer
    • WireShark
    • XP Mode
    • Zarafa
  • Recipe
  • Review
  • Software Links
  • Troubleshooting
  • Uncategorized
  • Videos
  • Web Applications
    • Brage
    • Google
    • Spiceworks
    • Wordpress
  • Web Browsers
    • Internet Explorer
  • Web Server
    • XAMPP
  • Winnipeg
    • ISP

Try searching this site!

Copyright © 2021 Winnipeg Web Design