The BenQ S6: turning an MID into a UMPC

A UMPC, eh... Originally I was supposed to receive this last year, when my first plan to get a new laptop failed (shortly after August), and then my 1TB died the miserable death it did, preventing me from receiving this device until this month (February).

At its lowest cost ($49.99, seriously), it sounds like a really affordable computer considering I currently don't own one anymore (the laptop I'm using right now is borrowed). But at these specs, 800mhz Atom CPU, 512MB RAM, 2GB SSD with built-in 3G/BT/Wifi, a USB port and an Micro SD slot, is this really something I can use long term, if I eventually have to return this laptop?

Best of Yahoo comments Feb 22-24

For a long time now, I've been a Yahoo user, about 15 years now. Only recently did they allow comments on their articles, and for all the shortcomings Yahoo had in handling their articles, the comments was always the bright spot. Since I usually get a good laugh out of them, I decided to share what I encountered, the best of the comments I've come across on Yahoo on the listed days.

Ronda Rousey's latest win

I'm not into UFC, I don't know much about it except this girl who has been in the news lately, mostly due to the way she quickly defeats her opponents. Well, time is everything, and Daniel wins my vote for best comment of the article:

Family in Berlin lives without money

Living with no money. I'm sure we've all been there before at some point (yeah, even me). There's an interesting family in Berlin who lives without money, thanks in large part to the goodwill of others. It's an interesting read, which I suggest you do read it, and then when you get to the comments, you'll find out someone was clever enough to throw this gem out there:

No disrespect for those in poverty, but that makes a lot of sense if you think about it, and something many of us are going through these days. Thanks T-block for the laughs :D

Japanese Women Rent Their Legs to Advertisers

I'm a huge, huge fan of girls' thighs. My love for the zettai ryouiki transcends space and time. And lo and behold, there exists an advertiser that surely makes money out of suckers like me who cannot help but look at the girls' beautiful legs. But as always, Yahoo comments give no quarter to articles, and this comment'er raises an interesting question:

If you don't know what braille is, you seriously need to.... "feel" it up :P No really, look it up, and you will see why I, as a lover of girls' legs, laughed so hard at this.

That would mean it's totally legal to get all touchy feely with them! :D

Alex Smith NFL Gundam

I'm not an NFL fan, I'm more of a Baseball - Basketball dude. More so into Baseball due to my broken right shoulder, I'm always amazed at how the pitchers can throw a ball almost 100mph repeatedly, don't think I'll ever be able to do that.

But when it comes to the NFL, it's only those close games and interesting stories like the Madden curse that intrigue me. So with the 49ers and Ravens going at it this year for the Supa Bowl, I remembered something I had several years ago:

A promotion from Burger King back in 2007! I didn't know who this jersey belonged to, and it didn't hit me till now, this is the 49er's quarterback, Alex Smith. I, in all my zanyness, wasted no time:

This got me thinking, I should have gotten that Alex Gundam, and put this jersey on it, then it would be a true Alex Gundam :D And my pick for the bowl? I honestly would like the Ravens to win. You know, last year, a Person won the big game, so I think it's time a team based on an animal should win this time :P

Cracking my spine, a nearly 4 hour CoH match and more

Last week I cracked my spine. Did you ever crack your spine before? I'm not talking about the Bane breaks Batman's back in Dark Knight Rises, it's just a simple cracking of the spine that was the most frightening sound I ever heard from within my body. Maybe for some people it's normal, but it really freaked me out. That's probably because of the circumstances of how it happened, and it happened when I was asleep. The nightmares have become more frequent lately and in earlier nights I would wake up in cold sweat or my breathing was too high, to the point when I cracked my spine, I woke up very suddenly and my stomach went skyward and I gasped for air quite loudly. That's when I heard the crack and I tell you, it's not a sound I want to hear again.

Thankfully, it wasn't serious. The first thing I remember doing was checking my limbs to see if I was paralyzed, and all seemed well. Now that it's been a few days, I noticed some strange things due to the cracking of my spine. For one thing, I've not had those aches and pains on my upper body, and because my right collar bone has almost no muscles linked to my neck (nearly my entire right shoulder is broken), I used to have severe neck pain but not anymore. One side effect I do see was my thinking had been erratic, there were times when the information flows too fast, and other times where I felt lost, as if I had to do something but felt no urge to do it. Some of you might have noticed my sudden increase in participation in the Vivid Red Operation thread at Animesuki over the weekend, which was linked to this. Searching online yields mixed results, to some it is a good thing, to others it is a warning sign, as much as it felt good, I don't really want to go through that again. I still can't think straight and I go to sleep paranoid of it happening again. Though I think it is unlikely, last week was too strange a week. The weather was a lot colder than I thought it would be, and I ran up a little cold, and my nose was stuffed for a few days, so that might have contributed to my inability to breathe properly.

As if my weekend wouldn't get any weirder, I was playing a casual game of Company of Heroes Skirmish, and if you ever wondered how scrambled my mind was during this time, this ought to give a clear picture:

That's a 3 hour 51 minute match right there against the AI. Sure, many folks will say the AI is easy to beat, but not when I played. For some reason, I was off my game, I could never hold my ground on the only road into my territory, and when the expert AI double teams you with 2 Airborne commanders, it's a miserable hell. They frequently did back-to-back bombing runs, they'd drop anti-tank guns as if it's all they got, and I had to use mortar fire strikes just to burn them out. That went on so long, I only wanted to play a simple session to see if my thinking power was affected by the spine cracking, but for more than 3 hours, I was totally embarrassed and I had enough.

I had to end it as quickly as possible, and with my AI buddy doing nothing but spawning StuH's and losing them, I had to Hummel smash the nearest enemy base as much as I could (above). The only other time I played a nearly 4 hours match was when I had my old Sony lappy, and it ended up that way partly due to the laggy graphics. Now I know I really ought to take it easy if my mind is muddy, and NO GAMING IF YOU HAD A SUDDEN HEALTH CHANGE XD

War against mosquitos

I don't like mosquitos. There are some bugs I like, and some that I don't like, but mosqy's are definitely in the "do not want" camp. And for some reason these guys just want to bite the heck out of me. There were jokes about these local mosqy's wanting some foreigner blood, but I've just about had enough of them. Armed with my trusty electric swatter and my hand, I set out on a holy war against these pests.

Even the committee in my neighborhood caught wind of the sudden rise in mosqy's, and they set out to gas the place. I don't know what it was they were gassing, but that stuff seemed to have worked. Unfortunately for me, the mosqy's sought refuge indoors where the gas was less. My swatter has no effect when I'm at my lappy, and in the magnified image above, that mosqy was killed when it invaded my personal space. What happened was business as usual for me, but that dude was buzzing around my hand. In my surprise I rolled my chair back a little and the dumb mosqy landed on my trackball mouse. In 1 or 2 seconds my mind was a speedy mess: I could make a break for my swatter for a sure kill, but it would notice my movement and fly away, or I could risk my already hurt right hand and hulk smash. The end result:

I had to smash it. I'm not sure how fast I am, I know for sure I'm a terrible fighting game player, but these mosqy's are smart and I wasn't going to take a chance, but what this particular mosquito did was freaky. It was the first time in my life I saw a mosquito walking. I mean it was walking with those dangly legs, desecrating my royal trackball with it's bendy legs, I was half furious, half awe struck at watching something walk for the first time in my life after having seen them be flyers for years. By the way I have been a trackball user for 13 years.

Let's go modding

I did mention in an earlier post about mods, so here goes one. HP designed some really bad laptops. Strangely, I only notice this in their AMD lappy's, I don't really see this particular design in Intel based machines, which did lead me at one point to speculate that perhaps there was a conspiracy where Intel paid off these manufacturers to cripple AMD machines with poor ventilation, because I seriously doubt a manufacturer would be this dumb to adopt this particular fan design that HP used for their DV7 AMD-based series.

What you see is a downward facing exhaust fan for one of life's most hottest mobile chips, the Turion 2 Ultra series. From this angle you can already see how stupid this design is for a chip that idles at 59c (800mhz) and gets as hot as 83c (2.5ghz). Explain to me how a chip this hot is supposed remain cool when the exhaust is not only thin, but pointing downward where, you know, the surface of where the laptop is sitting on. As you can see above, the grills are extremely fat as well, prompting me to cut off some of them, and then I proceeded to carve out from the chrome lined part to the rest of where the cut grills were connected to. I wish I did a before and after pic, but I was fed up with the heat this machine was spitting out, and with permission from the owner of this lappy I wasted no time in cutting it. It paid off too, heat is down at least -3c from the usual temps, and for the first time in my life with this machine I saw the green checkmark in Speedfan.

First time a green mark. It had always been a fire icon, indicating how hot the temps are.

I paid a price though: my hobby knife slipped on the first carving and drove deep into my finger. Till now this cut remains, and it hurts when I touch it.

I also have to clean the laptop regularly as dust gets trapped very easily in that exhaust vent. Before I cut the grills, I painstakingly pulled out big clumps of blackened dust that was caught behind the grills, very very poor design HP, and that time you were one of the biggest PC makers, I sure hope you didn't hurt AMD's sales by designing fan exhausts like this, AMD laptop reviews would always mention the heat. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if I have to replace the thermal!

My left eye

I cannot cry anymore. That's the sad discovery I made last month November, and I believe it has to do with the tear duct in my left eye.

It started when I was watching the Strike Witches movie, and I was so happy, I had no idea it was going to be released last month and after the grueling 2 months of worrying about my 1TB hard drive, I was in desperate need of something to be happy about. And I was really happy to see the girls again, so happy I shed tears of joy, I missed the girls, I missed their pantsu, and when we first see Micchan, I was waiting, waiting and I cheered when her crotch came on screen, oh I loved it :D

Strike Witches means so much to me, when season 2 aired back in 2010, it was one of my most followed that Summer, and the girls make me so happy. But when it was all over, and I wiped those tears, I felt something was wrong. I was having that feeling whenever I feel a headache coming on, that all to familiar feeling I've felt many a time before, but this one was different. The pain was concentrated on the left side of my head around my eye, and I thought maybe I am having a headache, and I took it easy the rest of the day. Until the next day came by, and I still had the pain, I thought maybe it's one of those 2 day headaches I used to have, and I was watching less anime and sleeping more. This is when I went out that weekend, and the following week of my great Android kernel milestone I knew something was dead wrong. This pain was persisting. It was getting so bad, my eye started to hurt just like how it did back in April, and I then I knew right away, that it was my tear duct.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but when the glue sealed my eye, it was a very intense pain, it was the most painful thing I ever felt while conscious, and the one thing I'll never forget: I was crying my eyes out. I think it was a normal reaction the eyes do should a foreign substance come into contact with the eye, but my eye was really pouring those tears as if to eradicate the glue in my eye. And it hurt, I remember clutching my head and I wanted to scream, but the pain was too much to even say anything. And somehow, maybe I became traumatized by that incident, in that whenever I cry again, that pain I felt in April come haunting me and severely demoralizing me. After I found this out, any attempt to form tears in my eye yields the same result; the pain in my eye. So that time when I bought my 750GB hard drive, I was looking, searching the nearest drug store for an eyepatch, I thought if there's one thing I can laugh at about this whole ordeal, if I can find an eyepatch like that girl in Chuunibyu, maybe I can take a pic of me twirling my fingers while wearing that thing. But I couldn't find any. In fact there was nothing for the eyes, they had all sorts of bandages imaginable, but nothing for the eye! What the hell kind of drug store/pharmacy is that that doesn't have medical care for ones eyes? (it's Watsons by the way)

This hit me hard, as I'm a rather emotional person, and it is one of the reasons why I don't like to see a girl cry, because it makes me feel real bad. And now, I have to learn to crush those emotions so that I never shed a tear again. That's impossible, the only way I can do that is to become an annoying bastard who takes pleasure in giving other people pain, completely the opposite of my nature. I don't want to do that, and not to mention there is anime with great drama enough to make me cry too, now I can't watch those?

I can no longer spend more than 14 hours awake. I can't do those 18 hour days I so loved to do a few years back, my life has changed. It's this experience that gave me an immense amount of respect for those people out in the world who lost a part of their body, be it an arm, or a leg, and people who need to wear an eyepatch for the rest of their lives, I have mad respect for you folks. You don't ever let it weigh you down, and no matter how painful the pain is, you're still alive, and that's the most precious thing I am very appreciative of right now. I may need to change the way I live my life from now on, but at least I'm alive. I can still enjoy seeing the things I love to look at, and even though it's a lesser amount than before, I'm happy to at least see something instead of permanently losing my eye.

Nov 23 - Dec 9, two weeks of Happyness and despair

On the week leading up to Nov 23, I was going to return to full form and resume my bloggyness. Unfortunately, my cold was getting worse and if there's one thing I hate, that is letting my health spiral out of control. November 23rd was supposed to be my celebration, which so happened to be Thanksgiving Day as well, but being the mangatron is not a rosy life.

My down times started when I went out that weekend before Nov 23, and my main purpose of that trip was to see prices of external hard drives out there so I can make plans for the end of the month. My destination was SM Megamall, and I was horrified to learn of the pricing there. In all the shops I looked in at their Cyberzone (a collection of electronics stores in one place), the average prices for a 500GB drive was PHP3999,99, simply speaking that's $100. One hundred one's for just 500GB? That's pathetic, and the reason why I was surprised was because in CDRKing's website, that's the price for a 1TB, and the CDRKing at SM Megamall had 320GB's over php3000, and I saw one person buying that, my god I felt sorry for them, being ripped off at that mall. I know for a fact it's that particular mall, because CDRKing wasn't alone in those exorbitant prices, other shops selling Buffalo drives had the same ridiculous pricing.

Me not being able to speak the local language makes things harder (yeah not every store speaks english), as I was not sure if they have a "price guarantee" like in the USA. I thought of showing them their site and get the prices down to it, but they didn't have any bigger than 500GB >__>

When the month came to an end, I later knew why it was that particular mall with inflated prices, as I sought out my local CDRKing and their prices were the same as their website. I didn't get any donations (despite hurrying that Android fix ~__~), but I could not pass this opportunity much, I needed a hard drive now as 2 months went by with me stagnating with my 1TB, it was either I end my contributions to the online community or I take the chance, and thankfully I was able to borrow enough for the Toshiba 750GB hard drive (not exactly my proudest moment asking for money >__<).

It didn't take me long to open the enclosure. Full size 2.5inch drive detected! Eat that, WD and your proprietary trite.

Since my Expresscard only has 1 USB3.0 port, the Toshiba drive had to go USB2, which wasn't bad actually. The difficult part was getting whatever data I could get off the 1TB drive, and that took a mother loving 4 days, 2 days at only 12 hours, the latter 2 days I went round the clock copying via SuperCopier, a nice proggy by the way. That was when my new found happiness was starting to turn sour: I had an elaborate plan, see: I couldn't afford a new 1TB drive, no way was I going to sacrifice my health again, and since all I could get was 750GB, I was placing my last bit of faith in WD and their data lifeguard tools to write zero's to the drive once I copied what I could from it. My first problem was I was losing free space fast, 750GB wasn't going to cut it, and I needed backups fast, I hated playing triage with my data and "luckily" I was able to acquire 2 company drives at 60GB each. One drive died when I started to copy to it, and the other one was Mac formatted. My troubles kept piling up when I found out I couldn't copy Windows Mobile ROM kitchen's from the 1TB drive, and I had to say my final farewell to Windows Mobile development, at the hand of Western Digital and their defectively designed [external] drives.