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Friday, May 20, 2016

Bought a new mouse pad

Mantis

I have not been using a mouse pad because my wife and kid used to spill food on my old QCK Mini mouse pad which had a cloth surface. The current arrangement is such that my wife does not have to sit so close to the PC when feeding my kid, so it was finally time to get a new mouse pad.

The one I bought was a the RAZER Goliathus Mantis SPEED Edition. I bought it from a local eBay seller because I am cheap. I am not even sure if it is legit. That’s a risk I was willing to take. It arrived in about a week’s time so no complaints there.

This mouse pad has a cloth surface as well, but the surface is not as coarse as the QCK either. It also has a seamed border, which I am not sure is a good thing or a bad thing yet. I will soon be able to know. I know something which is not good about it compared to the QCK, that is it does not grip the surface of the desk as well as the QCK used to.

The mouse I am using on it is a Logitech G602. It seems to work OK, but I did not have much time to play any games with it yet.

IMG_20160520_070948

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Data copy speeds from my NAS to the Desktop PC

Remember I paid a lot of money for a router last month? Was it worth it, or did it only make a large hole in my pocket?

Well, I’ll let the following screenshot answer that question.

Untitled

This is a screenshot of a file copy dialog of Windows 10, which was taken while copying a ~4GB file from the NAS server to my Desktop PC via 802.11ac. It is copying at 70MBps+ speed. This is a massive improvement over 7MBps odd I was getting with the old router.

The Wi-Fi module in the Desktop PC, which is the onboard Wi-Fi chip that comes with the Z97i Plus motherboard, is rated at only 867Mbps. The router is the Asus DSL-AC68U running, not a recent firmware (not the latest, as I could not find time to update the firmware and test it today, after finding out there was newer firmware out.)

The distance is only about 3m between the antenna on the PC and the router though. But that is OK as I do not have any other powerful device farther than that. Also, the NAS server is connected to the router via Ethernet using two gigabit connections and load balanced using teaming in Windows Server 2012 R2. However, the hard drives in the NAS server are not using RAID to improve performance. So teaming the LAN ports probably does not make any difference.

Anyways, I am quite happy with the performance.

Now only if I could find some Crysis 3 local servers. There used to be local servers, but the popularity of Crysis 3 has gone down so much that almost none of them are operating. Although I was able to find a server with <100ms ping once, with everyone else having 200ms+ ping. I felt like god for a moment.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Marshmallows are no good!

So, no, exchanging phones with my wife DID NOT fix the GPS issue.

Today I had to drive to a shop to get some furniture about 25km away from my apartment, and the GPS acted up again. This was on the Nexus 5 my wife was using earlier. The phone was running Marshmallow 6.0.1. It was freshly installed couple of days ago.

The GPS problem persisted with Google Maps as well as Nokia Here maps. The issue occurred several times throughout the 50km or so total distance.

Thankfully I did not have to do a U-turn and correct the route. If I had to do that, I would have been super pissed because we had to make it to the shop before 5pm. And it was 3:40pm when we started heading for the shop.

Guess I have two options.

  • Switch back to Kitkat and enjoy a properly working phone, but look like a caveman.
  • Buy a new phone, making a hole bigger than AUD700.

Whether or not I go for the 2nd option needs very careful consideration. For the time being, I am back with Kitkat. *sigh*

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