Recent Entries
Energy Drinks
I think I have become addicted to energy drinks. I can't seem to get out of my morning funk unless I have 16-32 oz. of the stuff. It's expensive too. The drinks I like are always $.50-$1.00 more expensive than pop or Gatorade. They also crank my blood pressure up later in the day. I'll be sitting in front of the computer hours after I have had the drink and my ears and face will get hot. Drinking these isn't the worst thing I could be doing, but it's certainly not the best thing either.
July 3, 2009 at 05:56 PM
Speeding up Firefox in Ubuntu
I've been a little frustrated by the performance of Firefox in Ubuntu recently. Firefox's performance on Ubuntu lags behind Firefox's performance on Windows by a noticeable margin. Pages scroll slowly, clicking on menus can be unresponsive, and flash heavy pages can grind the browser to a near halt. It was not enjoyable.
A solution I found for the problem is disabling CPU frequency scaling from the Gnome CPU scaling applet or by turning off the CPU frequency scaling from the BIOS. Pages load and run much more smoothly now. Some Flash ads can still bog the browser down, but that seems to be dependent on the advertisement. AT&T's Flash ads seem to be particularly resource intensive and slow the browser down when scrolling or attempting to use the menus.
May 13, 2009 at 09:52 PM
Weekly Fuel Economy: 37.66 MPG
That's more like it. Some warm weather and a light foot always helps improve my fuel economy.
March 19, 2009 at 07:32 PM
Abit AV8 and SATA drives.
This is more of a note to myself, but if you plan on using SATA drives with an Abit AV8 motherboard you need to do 2 things. If it's a SATA 3.0 drive, make sure you have the jumper cap on the drive set so it defaults to the slower SATA 1.5 speed. The bios won't be able to recognize it otherwise.
Next, make sure you have SATA RAID ROM disabled in the BIOS if you do not plan to use the drive in a RAID configuration. If you plan on using it in a RAID configuration, you don't need to disable this option. I figured I would put this up to help anyone trying to get one working. I spent a week and unnecessarily bought new motherboard CMOS batteries trying to get this drive working. Remembers, to get SATA drives working with an Abit AV8, move the jumper cap and play with the bios settings.
March 7, 2009 at 08:29 PM
Weekly Fuel Economy: 33.3 MPG
A warmer week leads to better fuel economy. I am very much looking forward to spring so I can start using less than half a tank of gas a week.