Computers

The good news I have is not the imminent release of Apple's new version of OS X.

Microsoft released beta 2 of Windows Vista to the public. Curious as I am, I decided to see if I could download the 3.12 GB DVD image. I got a decent 200-180 Kb/s (hey, the whole world is downloading the file), but look at the progress I am making:

Negative 22 percent? The number actually went down when the download progressed (ie: it started at -1%). Internet Explorer must be cleaning up my computer before I can download Vista. Or someone's using a 'signed long' for the filesize and download that should be unsigned... A signed long can represents a maximum number of 2 'giga' (2*1024*1024*1024). Values above that are represented as negative. Ofcourse, the really interesting question is, what happens in IE if you try to download a file larger than 4 GB?

When Apple released the Mac Mini last year, I immediately wanted one (and bought one too). Over the past couple of weeks, rumors arose that a new, Intel based mac mini was to be released at yesterday's Apple Special Event. And it was.

Few people may have noticed though, that there are clear signs that the end of the world is upon us. Steve 'I-wear-sneakers-because-I-am-vegan' Jobs presented a leather pouch for the iPod, and the mac mini has a green led! Or has it?

My mac mini finally arrived last friday. First impressions: man, that's mini!

I convinced myself I'ld need a mac mini to testdrive my panoramic viewing engine. Unfortunately the 32 Mb of video RAM is really the lower end of the range of what's acceptable on OS X for my stuff. OS X also takes up quite some video memory to achieve it's spiffy Exposé etc tricks. However, other hardware accellerated panorama engines are starting to appear for OS X, and they have a bit better performance even on this mac mini, so I should be able to squeeze a bit more out of it myself...

I thought it may be a good idea for future reference to use my favourable Google status to tell the world about my experiences flashing the BIOS on my Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard.

Note: this post is a bit long and windy, but there's an hilarious tech support reply in the end...

A couple of weeks back I bought a new computer. Nice and fast, nice and cheap. In an effort to make the computer as up to date as possible, I decided to upgrade the BIOS. Using Asus (ugly-as-sin) Windows based flash utility, I upgraded to the latest non-beta BIOS. Unfortunately that resulted in a problem with my CPU fan, so I wanted to use the same utility to get me back to my original BIOS version. Turns out that it can't downgrade your bios. So instead I decided to try to see if the fan-problem was fixed in the available beta BIOS. Not only didn't that bios fix the problem, it also made my floppy drive inaccessible. 'A floppy drive?' you would say, 'what do you need that for?'. Well, for flashing your bios outside of windows...