As part of the signup process, I could give UPS the names of other people living at this address so I could track their packages as well. Naturally, I wanted to add my wife, but when I tried, the UPS website said I couldn’t sign her up because she was already signed up.

I mentioned this to my wife, and she said something like, “Oh yeah. I signed up for that already. I tried to add you, but it said you were already signed up.”

I think this is our Gift of the Magi.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Love and Shipping Management

A couple of months ago, however, it started crashing. It would be okay for a few days but then it would start crashing over and over 5 or 6 times within a few hours, reporting a variety of reasons. Just in case it was a software problem, I tried repaving it — wiping out the hard drive and reinstalling Windows and everything else from scratch — but the crashing continued. If I knew more about computer hardware (and had supplies handy) I might have tried replacing parts until the crashing stopped, but that seemed like a lot of work for a computer that was kind of clunky and old fashioned. I decided I wanted a nice shiny new one.

As usual, I wanted something with a lot of performance. I’m not talking about a bleeding-edge gaming system — getting that last little bit of extra performance is way too costly — but I definitely wanted to find something speedier than a typical office computer. I started by visiting all my favorite custom gaming computer vendors — Origin, Maingear, CyberPower, Falcon, Digital Storm — and using their configuration systems to put together a whole bunch of different fantasy computers, trying out combinations of parts to see how the cost worked out for various options.

My search ended where it always does: With me realizing I could get exactly what I wanted and save hundreds of dollars by purchasing the parts separately and building the computer myself.  I’m not an expert at building PCs, but it’s not that hard these days. Tom’s Hardware has excellent instructions, a buying guide, and tons of component reviews. If you can wire up an entertainment system in your living room, you can build your own PC.

I can’t say that putting together a PC is a fool-proof operation, but it’s definitely fool tolerant: You might not be able to get it working, but short of major physical mishandling, it’s pretty hard to damage the parts. So you can just keep trying again and again until you get it right. And if that doesn’t work, just take all the parts to a storefront PC repair store with good reviews (not one of the big box computer stores) and tell them “I fucked up my build. Can you put it together for me?” It will cost you something, but it will still be cheaper than buying a high-end system pre-assembled.

I did decide to do one thing different this time: I wanted an overclocked PC. I had avoided overclocking in the past because it sounded like too much trouble. A CPU chip running faster than the manufacturer’s specified speed can be unstable, and wasn’t I trying to replace a computer that kept crashing?

The thing is, overclocking has become pretty mainstream. Both Intel and AMD sell CPU chips that have the clock controls unlocked, and several motherboard manufacturers sell boards that have the extra power management and specialized software you’ll need. The overclocking process is a bit complicated, and feeding a CPU too much power can destroy it, but as long as you’re reasonably careful, the worst thing that happens is that the CPU heats up more than usual. You can fix that by adding more cooling.

Oh, you can still do crazy, bleeding edge speed tricks. The latest one I heard of is “delidding,” which means carefully slicing the top off the CPU module to expose the circuitry inside and replacing the internal packing with material that conducts heat better. But for more mainstream overclocking, all you need is an unlocked CPU, a motherboard with overclocking support, and good cooler.

I finally decided to buy

• Intel’s top-of-the line 8th generation Core i7 processor. It only has 6 cores, but the processors with more cores are slower and I’ve generally found that peak core speed is more important for my applications than more cores. I rarely even peg all 4 cores in my current computer.
• I nice overclocking motherboard from MSI.
• 32 GB of DDR4 memory. Some of my applications are really memory hogs. I got 3200MHz RAM because people doing benchmarks were reporting that faster RAM didn’t make much of a difference for normal kinds of loads.
• A Samsung EVO M.2 solid state drive, because those memory hogging programs need to fill that memory as fast as possible.
• A 280mm liquid cooling system. It’s a completely sealed system, so there’s nothing to fill or replace. Basically, it works like a car radiator in miniature: There’s a pump attached to the CPU and it pumps coolant to a radiator mounted at the top of the case. Calling it 280mm just means that the radiator is attached to a pair of 140mm fans.
• A GeForce 1080 graphics card. My monitors are IPS displays for accurate color rendering for photography at HD resolutions, so I don’t need the much-more-expensive 1080Ti, which is for driving high-frame rate 4K gaming monitors. I could probably get away with a 1070, but the 1080 is only slightly more expensive.
• A 750 watt power supply. That’s more than it will ever use, but you don’t want to be straining your power supply.
• A Master Cooler MasterCase MC500P. At $127, it’s the most I’ve ever paid for a computer case, and it was definitely worth it. It has good cable routing and airflow, it comes with all the screws and hardware you’re likely to need, and it’s very flexible about how you mount components. It’s also just well made. All the removable parts reattach without having to fiddle with them. Plus it has handles on top to make it easy and safe to carry. It truly made the build much easier.

Once all the parts arrived, I started assembly. There were a lot of parts to connect:

• Clamp the CPU on the motherboard.
• Install the hard drive.
• Mount the motherboard in the case.
• Mount the power supply in the case.
• Install the memory.
• Run the motherboard power cable.
• Run the CPU power cable.
• Attach the front panel hard drive indicator light.
• Attach the power switch and power indicator light.
• Attach the reset switch.
• Attach the front panel USB.
• Attach the lower front fan.
• Attach the upper front fan (had to remove and rotate it to make it reach).
• Attach the built-in speaker.
• Install the radiator and fans.

At this point I decided to attach the pump to the CPU. This was the trickiest part because the base of the pump has a heat sink with fluid channels, and it is covered with a special heat-conducting paste that will be pressed between it and the CPU to create a good heat-conducting connection. If I got this wrong and I had to remove the pump from the CPU, it would mess up the paste and it couldn’t be used again. I only had one chance to get this right, or else I’d have to buy paste remover and more paste and clean everything off to try again.

Fortunately, everything went fine. I kept going.

• Run the pump power cable (via SATA-style cable).
• Attach the pump monitor cable.
• Attach the top front radiator fan cable.
• Attach the top rear radiator fan cable.
• Run the fan USB control cable.
• Remove the 3.5″ hard drive bay to improve airflow.
• Install the video card.

That was it. Everything was installed. I attached a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and then it was time to plug it in and turn it on. I it to show me the BIOS setup screen, but instead the screen remained blank. Uh-oh.

I had heard the fans spin up, and I could see lights on the motherboard, so obviously something was happening. In fact, the fans slowed down after a few seconds, which meant they were under motherboard control. So why wasn’t I getting video?

It turned out I had forgotten to run power cables to the video card. High-end gaming cards draw far too much power to run off the motherboard power bus, but I had forgotten to hook these up. So:

• Run video card power cables.

After that, it booted up just fine and showed my the BIOS config screen. I plugged in the thumb drive I had built and

• Upgraded the onboard BIOS software to the latest version.
• Installed Window 10 Pro.

Then I rebooted to Windows and installed all the rest of the software:

• Intel chipset drivers.
• RealTec audio drivers.
• Intel bluetooth driver.
• Intel network driver.
• Intel WiFi driver.
• MSI App manager.
• MSI Super charger (enables charging stuff on USB cables).
• Samsung Magician SSD management software.
• Corsair cooler control software.
• NVidia GeForce 1080 drivers and utilities.
• Windows updates.
• AIDA64 Extreme monitoring software.

With all the drivers installed and the operating system up to date, it was time to try some overclocking. First I wanted to see how the base CPU looked. So I fired up AIDA64 and ran the stress test. The CPU cores immediately heated up and the case fans all sped way up. And I noticed something odd: There was no air blowing out of the top of the case from the radiator. I held a piece of paper over it, and it got sucked down onto the fan grill.

Dammit. I had installed the fans upside down. The two front fans pull air in, and with the two top fans also pulling air in, the single rear exhaust port was probably not going to keep up. So I had to disconnect all the external cables, open up the case, remove the radiator, remove the fans and flip them, reattach the radiator, close things up, and try again. This time I got the air flowing the right way.

Now it was time to install the all software that makes my computer useful:

• Chocolatey install scripting software.
• Chrome browser.
• Firefox browser.
• Logitech unifying software.
• Microsoft Office 365.
• Epson workforce 845 printer drivers.
• Notepad++ text editor.
• 7zip file compression utility.
• Adobe Reader.
• Keyfinder.
• FileZilla FTP client.
• Greenshot screen capture software.
• Plantronics headset hub software.
• Slack messaging.
• BeyondCompare file comparison tool.
• Treesize.
• Microsoft Visual Studion 2017.
• Resharper.
• DataGrip.
• PuTTY.
• Java runtime.
• git source code control.
• Sourcetree GUI for git.
• R Studio.
• Python.
• PyCharm.
• Kindle reader.
• Logitech gaming tools.
• Steam.
• Google Earth.
• Ispy
• VLC
• Paperscan
• Brother P-Touch editor
• Photoshop
• Lightroom

That sounds like a lot to install, but I use a set of Choclatey config files to install about 2/3 of them automatically in one shot. It went pretty quickly.

So now I’m sitting here working on my brand new computer. It’s a little underwhelming. After all that work, it just doesn’t feel like a shiny new system. Probably because I’m doing all the same things with it as I did with my old computer. But with the clock running at 5 GHz, it does all the things faster.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Building My New PC

The cats are loving all the space. When we first brought them home, they were nervous but curious. They’d go exploring all these places they had never seen before, but every few minutes they’d come back to visit us to make sure we were still there, and then they’d go exploring again. Now they’ve settled into routines. Ivy the Norwegian Forest Cat likes to spend the day in my wife’s craft room, sitting on the chair by the window, soaking up the morning sun and watching the neighborhood. At night, she settles onto a cat condo in the middle of the living room. Beezle the Ragdoll is a little less predictable, although if he’s not sleeping on the bed it’s usually because he’s following us around to see what we’re up to.

The WiFi isn’t working well in the new space. It’s great here in my office, right next to the router, but it gets a little spotty in the living room, and is very difficult to get in the family room or the garage. It’s also surprisingly weak when I’m sitting in my car in the driveway, which is weird considering that’s in direct line of sight of my office window. I’m going to try mounting the Wi-Fi router high up on the wall to get better coverage, but I don’t expect much of an improvement. I think I’ll either have to move it to a more central location or find the old router from the condo and install it as a second access point on the other side of the house.

Our old kitchen had a lot of space, but it was mostly dining room. The working kitchen area was small and efficient. This one has about twice the cabinet room and three times the counter space. I’m still not sure how to organize it. It’s also a lot farther to carry stuff between the refrigerator, stove, and sink.

Because the floors are mostly hardwood or laminate, we decided to get a Roomba vacuum robot to clean the place. I was skeptical, because I’d always heard that Roombas weren’t very smart and didn’t work well cleaning more than a few hundred square feet, but my wife had done her research: This is one of the new ones that does mapping, so it can find its way around, and when its battery gets low it can return to its base to recharge and then pick up where it left off, because it can remember which parts of the house it’s already cleaned.

That’s not to say it’s problem-free: With two big fluffy cats, its bin is filled with cat hair every day. It also has a few problems getting around. Sometimes it flips up a throw rug and then gets stuck on top, and three times now it’s managed to bump one of the doors closed and get itself trapped in a room. One time it somehow found a gap between a piece of furniture and a wall that was just large enough for it to get into, but it couldn’t figure out how to get back out.

And then there was the time the charging cable to my phone disappeared. It had been pulled out of the charger, and we eventually found it under the bed. We think probably the Roomba snagged it during a cleaning pass, but we can’t rule out the possibility that one of the cats got tangled in it. It wasn’t us, so it has to be either the cats or the robot.

I think it probably says something about our lifestyle that “Cats or robot?” is a thing that comes up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at More About Life In the New Home

Thus began the Beep Hunt.

It’s one of the more annoying tasks of the wired life. I have a lot of electronic gadgets, and many of them are smart enough to let me know when they need attention. But few of them do it well.

The first time it happened was 20 years ago, when a pager battery got critically low in the middle of the night. It freaked me out. I started awake with an adrenaline rush and ran out into the living room to track down the strange noise. I guess that’s an old animal reflex — a strange and unexpected noise in the night could be a threat, so I responded in full fight-or-flight mode, ready to defend my family against the mysterious intrusion.

(Some of you kids may not know this, so I should explain that a pager at that time was a special-purpose one-way communication receiver. It works kind of like those things some restaurants use to tell you when a table is ready, except over much longer ranges. Someone who wanted to talk to you would call a special number you had given them. A computer would answer, and they could punch in a phone number where they could be reached. The computer would then send out a radio message to your pager, telling you the number. This was before widespread inexpensive cellular service, so you’d have to find a land-line to call them back. These were one-way devices because without a cellular antenna network, the signals had to go out over a small number of dedicated commercial antennas which used 1000-Watt bursts to broadcast the page over hundreds of square miles. Nothing you’d want to keep in your pocket could generate enough power for a return signal.)

This beep wasn’t a bad one. It was a long oscillating beep that happened every few seconds. They aren’t always that easy.

As far as I know, your brain uses three basic factors to figure out where sounds are coming from. First, there’s the relative volume difference between the ears, which works best when the sound is coming from one side and the other ear is hidden from the source by your head.

Second, there’s the different arrival time of the sound at your ears. As with the volume difference, it doesn’t work so well with sounds that aren’t far to one side because the sounds arrive closer together.

Third, there’s the way the sound waves interact with the structure of your ears. Your ear will attenuate different frequencies of sound in different ways depending on the direction from which the sound strikes your ear. This works best when the sound is complex, consisting of many frequencies, each attenuated a little differently, such as the rustling noise of an animal creeping through bushes — which would often have been a life-or-death concern for our ancient ancestors.

(Modern video games use a mathematical model of the human ear to simulate this attenuation in order to give you better directional cues for sounds. Warning systems for fighter pilots use a similar mechanism to make the sound easier to distinguish.)

Your brain has to pick the beeping sound out of a cacophony of other noises — everything from outside traffic and air conditioning to the sound of blood flowing through your head — so it helps if the sound is loud. It also helps if there’s a lot of information for your brain to analyze, which means that longer or more repetitious sounds are easier to localize. It’s especially helpful if you can turn your head and change the way the sound strikes your ears.

Thus, the easiest sounds for your brain to localize are long, loud, complicated, and repeated frequently. Of course, the easiest sound for a cheap low-power electronic device to generate is a quiet beep at a single pure frequency, and it helps power consumption to keep the duty cycle low by using a short duration sound delivered at a long interval. In addition, I think many devices are designed to emit a discrete and unobtrusive sound, in order to be less annoying. Of course, that only makes it more annoying when you don’t know what’s beeping, and you have to hunt for it.

My procedure for finding a beep is tiresome but fairly straightforward. First I stand sideways in the hallway of our condo, very still, with my back to the bathroom, waiting for the beep. This maximizes the sound difference from either end of the hall. If it comes from my left, it’s either the kitchen or the living room. If it comes from my right, it’s either the bedroom or my office. If neither, it’s probably something in the bathroom behind me.

This last time, it came from the office/bedroom direction, so I move to stand still at that end of the hall, with my office to the left and my bedroom to the right. It was coming from the office. I walked in and stood between the two desks, and quickly figured out it was coming from the VPN phone I use for work. Now I was close enough that it actually sounded like it was coming from the phone, and the display said something about incoming voicemail. I hit a couple of buttons and the sound stopped. Despite the message, I had no voicemail.

(When I first walked in, I noticed two of our cats sitting by the phone. It could be that they were curious about the noise, but I suspect that one of them may have stepped on a button. It wouldn’t be the first time one of our cats was responsible for a disturbing noise in the night.)

This wasn’t a bad one. It probably took me less than a minute. The worst beep hunt I ever had was caused by a failing battery in a UPS that emitted a pure beeping tone for one second every hour. The tone was so pure and high-pitched (which also makes it hard to locate) that even standing a few feet away, I couldn’t be sure where it was coming from. I had to find it by relative volume in different locations, which is kind of hard to compare when the beeps are that far apart. It took days to figure it out.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Beep Hunt

Some sample results:

• 70% of guys think that showing any cleavage is immodest.
• 71% of guys think seeing even an inch of skin between the bottom of a girl’s shirt and her pants is a stumbling block.
• 48% of guys think a purse with the strap diagonally across the chest draws too much attention to the bust.
• 40% of guys think that shirts or dresses (long or short-sleeved) with slits in the sleeves are a stumbling block.

On the other hand, sweatshirts with messages across the front do not draw too much attention to the bust. So there.

Remember: Use this knowledge only for good.

(Hat tip: Lindsay Beyerstein)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Modesty Survey OR How To Dress Like a Slut

I went on a date with Kristy last night and we ended up in the emergency room. Well, that’s the short version.

It’s not as bad as I make it sound. A close friend of Kristy’s (on blood thinners, I believe, for other conditions) called her while we were making supper. He’d been bleeding from a cut on his shin for a couple hours without clotting and needed to get to the emergency room.

We picked him up, got him there, and stood by while he told us jokes and funny stories for an hour or so as the doctor and nurses patched him, cleaned him up, and started in on some tests. All in all, this was a very successful trip to the emergency room. I made some mistakes, but no one died. For your benefit, here are a few mistakes not to make.

1. When removing items from the back seat to make room for the patient, don’t remove the bag containing your major first-aid kit.

2. Find out how badly the patient is bleeding and how much blood he’s lost before putting him in the car.

3. Even though you left the major first-aid kit behind, don’t forget about the QuickClot bandage in your carry-bag. Sure, you might carry it to deal with knife, bullet, shrapnel, or other accident related trauma type injuries, but it’ll probably help the patient with a popped vericose vein structure and thin blood just as well–but only if you remember you have it. Remember, review your kits often or they will be of little use when you are under pressure.

The idea is not to be looking out for opportunities to play doctor, but that, if you have only a little bit of knowledge, a clear understanding of where that knowledge begins and ends, and a fair amount of humility, you might end up being able to make a bad situation less bad.  Then again, maybe not; you pays your money, and you takes your chances.  But there are a fair number of times in life where doing something constructive right now is a lot better than doing the perfect thing days later. 
   
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* Yes, I have permission to post this, and name him, silly. 

This post by Joel Rosenberg at Windypundit was originally published at PSA: Where’s your kit?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Jumbolair