Built a new PC and jumped into Ryzen ship

It's been a very long time since I've posted something, so here goes.

In December 2018, I built a new PC because I just wanted to. The old one wasn't terribly slow or anything. Just wanted to have some fun.

This time I went with an AMD CPU. Last time I had an AMD chip was in 2006.

Not all parts were brand new though. The video card and the display were bought from Overclockers Australia trade forums second hand.

Specs

New parts

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2 GHz
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15S
• Motherboard: MSI B450 GAMING PRO CARBON AC
• Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CMK16GX4M2Z3200C16
• Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB SSD
• Case: Fractal Design Meshify C
• Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS Plus Gold 850 W

Second-hand parts

• Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G
• Monitor: Asus PG279Q ROG Swift 27.0" 2560x1440 165 Hz (I've added a second monitor since then)
• Case Fans: Fractal Design X2 GP-12 (x2)

Old parts

• Keyboard: Corsair K70 LUX
• Mouse: Logitech G602 Wireless (I've upgraded it since then along with the mousepad)
• Headphones: Audio-Technica ATH-AD500X
• Storage: Western Digital Green 4TB  x2

I have never won the silicon lottery and it's same this time too. The CPU barely goes past 4GHz without ludicrous volts. The GPU core also doesn't overclock that much. So are the memory. Not the happiest camper, but love the change.

Hit the kerb

Today was a very sunny day indicating to us that the winter is coming to an end. We were planning to go out to a place nearby, but my son wanted to go to the beach. We picked St. Kilda beach.

It was not too bad, but I wished it was a bit warmer. The water was cold and hardly anyone was in the water.

The route Waze picked for me back home was not familiar to me at all. It routed me through many small streets. Turning to one of those streets, I hit the kerb and hit it hard. I didn't realise how narrow the street was!

Thankfully, the wheels are steel and it didn't damage the wheel. If it was an alloy wheel, I bet I would have to change the wheel. That would have been painful because it was already dark.

But the impact damaged the wheel hub.

Although it is an eyesore for me, I won't be replacing the wheel hub right now because brand new OEM hubs cost about $45 on Ebay. Super Cheap Auto is selling 4 piece hab caps for cheaper, so I might pay them a visit. Perhaps they have hub caps that show less of the ugly steel especially with that slight rust. That would be a win after all.

Decided to finally do something about the MacBook Air's battery

Since buying the Metabox N850HJ laptop, I had been using it as my primary computer. Yes, I didn't use the desktop PC as much as the Metabox laptop.

My wife has been using the aging MacBook Air. She hasn't been treating it well though. Its battery was in a very bad shape, and she doesn't keep it charged. So every time she wants to work on it, we have to first let it charge for a few minutes, otherwise, it would be very sluggish. I started observing this behaviour after upgrading to macOS Sierra. After upgrading to High Sierra, it is still behaving the same way.

This is the current state of the battery. It only holds 30% of the original capacity. It's funny how it says it's only done 713 charge cycles. I thought the battery was good for 1000 charge cycles before degrading seriously.

This could well be the last MacBook I would own because I cannot justify spending Apple prices. So I decided to buy a replacement battery for it. Apple would charge $189 for their "battery service" which I think includes a new battery but I wouldn't be surprised it didn't. I didn't want to pay that much especially for a 7-year-old laptop, so I went on eBay and ordered a cheap compatible battery. I don't expect it to be as good as a genuine OEM battery, but if it gives me several hours of battery power without blowing up, I would be happy.

The battery should arrive next week and this will the first time I open up a MacBook Air. Hope I don't kill it.

Bought a "new" CPU for the NAS

When we moved to our new house, we had to buy some new stuff and among them was a new TV. Since I don't like to spend big bucks on brand names, I ended up choosing a TCL which was full of new features. The model number is 55X2US and I'm happy with the purchase. Any TV would have been an upgrade since we used my 27" QNIX monitor for watching movies before.

I have some movies in my NAS and I set up PlexTV to make it a media server - among other things. I don't use on-the-fly transcoding PlexTV supports because the movies I have, play just fine at full source quality. It's not as if I had a choice though because the G1610T Celeron chip in my NAS is hardly a capable CPU. I've been experiencing slowdowns, especially when opening a movie (which I almost always have to do twice, because it errors the first time) and using the time-slider.

So, I had been waiting to upgrade the CPU in the NAS to a 45W quad-core Xeon. There are higher wattage Xeons available for the platform, but I am concerned about the power consumption of the NAS. The best overall chip is the E3-1265L V2 which is an IvyBridge one, but they go for $250 used. The next best one is the E3-1260L which is a SandyBridge CPU, about 10% slower than the IvyBridge, and it goes for half the price. Needless to say, this was the CPU I had been eying. I waited for few months until finally, I had had enough and I pulled the trigger on a used CPU on eBay from a US seller. The total cost of it was about AUD 120 including shipping. I might have been able to find a Chinese seller for a slightly cheaper price, but the delivery takes about a month.

Oh, I also had to buy a tube of thermal paste. I settled for Arctic MX-2 which set me up for about AUD 10.

Installing the CPU wasn't that hard. I followed this video to get an idea of how to take the motherboard out. I didn't run into a single issue during the entire swap.

I would be lying if I wasn't 100% confident it would work. It's not because I wasn't confident in the server motherboard or my installation, but because it was a second-hand CPU. It was from a top rated seller though.

The server managed to detect the CPU without any trouble. Once booted, I fired up CPU-Z and Realtemp to see how the CPU was doing. I started an H265 video transcoding job. It was amazing how cool the CPU ran. After an hour, it only managed to hit 71C on the hottest core. This might not sound amazing, but the CPU is cooled by a tiny passive cooler with one case fan responsible for maintaining some kind of an airflow.

I haven't measured the power consumption - I should - but I think it consumes fewer watts than with the Celeron because the CPU utilization is significantly less. This means the CPU is almost idle most of the times. Even at full load, the new CPU has only a 10W higher TDP.

Now my PlexTV experience is better as well. Pretty happy with the purchase.

No birthday present this year? :P

I used to buy some kind of a tech gadget for my birthday ever since I had started earning. But this time, it didn't happen. That's because I bought it a month and a half in advance.

It's a Google Pixel 2. That's my 2nd phone purchase since moving to Australia. I got it from Telstra on a $59 per month plan with 15GB free monthly data allowance. That alone is a good deal, but I got $100 gift card from JB HiFi and a Google Home Mini (which I will write about later) with it.

I was upgrading my phone from a Samsung Galaxy S7, which had become very sluggish for no apparent reason. I was paying $65 per month for it with only 7GB monthly data, so this is a good deal.

I got the White one. But I got a black case for it so the white body hardly reveals anymore. I loved the Spigen case that I had on the S7, so I had no reason to look for another brand. This new case has a sturdier kickstand than the old one.

While the Pixel 2 is a newer phone, it lacks so many features not only comparing with phones from competitors that were released around the same time but also the S7.

Improvements over S7

• Super snappy UI and fast app launches
• Tapping the fingerprint sensor takes me into the phone. With S7, you need to "press" the home button.
• No bloat (read: no bundled Samsung apps)
• Squeeze feature
• Better camera
• Full quality unlimited photo uploads to Google Photos (for 3 years at least)
• Stereo front facing speakers, but not really louder than the S7's single speaker
• Simpler but effective stock launcher
• Faster OS updates
• Double the internal storage
• USB type C (i.e. modern and reversible)
• Bluetooth Headset's battery level is displayed
• Double tap screen to wake

Things missing after switching to the Pixel 2

• Battery level is not displayed on always on display (but should be fixed via software)
• No hardware buttons despite having a large chin (i.e. software buttons taking up screen space) and slightly smaller screen size (5 inch vs 5.1 inches)
• The fingerprint sensor on the back (i.e. have to lift the phone up to get into)
• Terrible automatic screen brightness adjustments (reddit post)
• Large bezels
• No inbuilt Smart Stay functionality (screen won't keep awake while reading)
• The power button is hard to press (to double press to launch camera)
• No headphone jack and no bundled earbuds (but I use Bluetooth Earbuds almost all the time so not really a deal breaker for me)
• The battery is smaller, but I probably the S7 died sooner than the Pixel 2
• Photo shooting gestures missing from photos app (should be added to the Camera app)
• Supports USB type C which is also a disadvantage because now I had to buy new cables (I blew the $100 gift card on cables)
• No IP68 water resistance (only has IP67)
• No MicroSD expansion

So it doesn't feel like an upgrade across the board, but I give a larger weight to the snappiness of the phone, so it definitely is a worthy upgrade for me.

Other than those deficiencies over the S7, I have experienced few things that I have never experienced on the S7.

• Bluetooth crashed twice!
• The phone has rebooted a couple of times out of nowhere

But these things don't happen often, so I am not infuriated by it... yet.

One expensive purchase

I apologize for not writing much on the blog in the last few months. A lot of things happened and I'll talk about the biggest one of them all.

We bought a house.

This is by far the most money I've paid in my life. The one before that being the car at almost 1/50th the price of the house. :D

Now, the house we ended up buying was very small - 3-bed-roomer with a single garage - compared to what we originally thought we could afford. The land is a mere 220m3 in area. The Melbourne market is really competitive and house go for unreasonable prices. It is still a bit saner than Sydney market though.

Also, the area we bought was an area we didn't even consider initially. We bought in Mernda, which is about 35km North of Melbourne. 35km is not bad at all, but I work in South Melbourne, which means I have to travel through the city to get to work and back home. The average speed in the city is about 10km/h (i.e. it takes 30 minutes to travel 5km).

We had a decent amount of money saved up, but since I'm the only earner in a family of four, the amount we could borrow from a bank was very limited. We bought through negotiation because we couldn't handle the risks of going to a public auction, although we could have saved some money with the latter since it is transparent. The risk was that at the auction, your offer is unconditional. When buying through negotiation, you can do a conditional offer - subject to finances getting approved being the most common. If the bank doesn't lend you enough money, then you don't have to go ahead with the purchase. You don't have that option when buying at an auction and the broker advised against it because if the valuation doesn't come at the market price and the bank won't lend you what you need, you will have to find some mean to fill the shortfall. If you have the backing of the family (locally, that is), then there is less risk because you can find someone to lend that money easily. But not for us.

By the way, we didn't have to pay stamp duty for the house because we were first home buyers and they didn't have to pay stamp duty if the price of the property was below 600k and ours was well below that cutoff.

I don't want to say how much the house was, but it was between AUD 450,000 and 500,000. The mortgage is for 30 years at 3.69% fixed rate for the first 2 years. We put AUD 110,000 towards the house and the rest came from the mortgage. Our mortgage is not that large because we put a large amount in, and the monthly loan repayments ended up being about $150 more than what we were paying for rent at where we rented before. Not too bad, but it will rise in the future. Hopefully, I will be earning more by then which will cancel it out or put us in a slightly better position. Hopefully....

I'm happy that finally, we have a house. It would have been great if we could go for a double garage house because we would need to buy another car at some point and the Aurion being the beaten up one will have to settle for parking on the driveway.

I will write about things I learned in the house hunt in the coming days. Might come handy for someone or for me again in the future - who knows.to get to work and back home. The average speed in the city is about 10km/h (i.e. it takes 30 minutes to travel 5km).

Cutting down on waiting times

I wrote in a previous post that I got a new job in the city. While I love the job and the work I am doing because it is both challenging and I get to learn a new thing almost every day, there is one real inconvenience I have to face every day. That is commuting to work.

I have gotten used to the 1hr commute on the public transport. On a perfect day, it can be 50 minutes, but it can stretch as much as hours and 20 minutes. The actual I am on the move is about 35 minutes: 5 minutes on the bus, 15 minutes on the tram and 15 minutes on the train. The additional time comes from the transfers.

The trams and the buses are the real pain because they can get delayed a lot depending on traffic. That doesn't mean trains are always on time, but they are at least on time more than the other two.

There isn't anything I can do about the buses but today I found out that I can do something about the trams. At South Yarra station, which is where I transfer from the train to the tram to go to work, there is a digital display which shows when the next three trams are going to arrive. But there is no such display at the tram stop where I get aboard the tram to return home.

• On a good day, I will arrive there just time to catch the tram.
• On a normal day, I will only have to wait for a couple of minutes before the tram arrives.
• On a bad day, I will see the tram leaving, while I wait on the other side of the road not being able to cross to catch the tram. I have to wait about 10 minutes to catch the next tram.
• On a very bad day, I will see two trams pass me while I wait on the other side of the road!
• On a terrible day... I don't want to talk about it because cannot do anything about it.

If I knew when the tram actually arrives, I would know when to leave work, effectively scraping away the unwanted wait times. And guess what? There is an app for that!! That digital display at the South Yarra stop, right in my hand. So I know exactly when the trams arrive at my stop and I can plan my return a little bit better. Plus, it will also show my service disruptions as well, so that I can take another route.

This app is called tramTracker from PTV.

There are of course negative reviews about it on the Play Store, but that is to be expected. I thought 3.7 rating was pretty high for an app released by a government office. And I will also praise it until it drives me insane on of these days. But I feel that having the information handy is better than having a static timetable which is wrong more often than not when there is traffic involved.

Why I like credit cards

There are three reasons why I like credit cards. First, I don't have to pay multiple bills (at least, ideally). Seconds, I get to keep money in the bank account for longer thus earning interest. Third, I get rewards points.

When I was in Japan, I had two credit cards - EPOS and Rakuten; both VISA. The Rakuten card was the best because you could pay with Rakuten cards when shopping on Rakuten website and there were deals like 10% points on products sold there. But I had to use my brain a lot because it wasn't always beneficial to buy from Rakuten because Amazon was cheaper even after considering the points. Plus, I was anyway getting 1% points on every purchase I made using the card. I had earned over JPY15,000 in a couple of years I had it. It's a shame that I didn't get it sooner.

I earned some points from the EPOS card too, but the benefits were limited. The only useful thing we used them on was gift vouchers which we gave our friends when visiting them or use them for ourselves.

Now in Australia, I use an Amex Essentials Card. I get 1 point for every $1 I spend (normally), but the actual conversion is like $7.41 for every $1000 spent. And you can use these points to pay for the credit card bill itself, which is great. There are other offers like $xx off if you spend $xxx or more at a certain store. The most recent such spending was at a BP fuel station where they offered $10 back when spent over $40. They also credited me $50 when I spent more than $750 in the first 3 months of getting the card. I use the card as much as possible, but Amex is not widely accepted as VISA or MasterCard, which is a shame. But I have added it to PayPal and sometimes some shops allow PayPal but not Amex directly. Also, there are benefits for people who fly a lot, but that's not for me.

Today I was wondering if I could pay the bills using the card, but it doesn't look economical as they all charge a credit card processing fee. Optus charges 0.385% and ClickEnergy charges 0.6%. Technically they are both less than the points I earn ($7.41 per 1000 points or at 0.741%), but I found out that Amex awards only half the points when used on utility payments. So I would be only earning money at 0.37% which is less than what both Optus and ClickEnergy charges as fees.

Yarra Valley Water, which is the water company, does not even support Amex, but they don't seem to charge a processing fee. I could be wrong though.

The other thing I found weird is that Costco in Australia does not support Amex anymore. When we were in Japan, Costco accepted only Amex (or cash)! It's the other way round here. You can pay with VISA or MasterCard at Costco.

I guess I will just keep using it on grocery.

Oh btw, I forgot to tell that all these credit cards I mentioned in the post do not have an annual fee. And also I don't care what the interest rate is because I always pay the statement balance on the due date, and you should too.

Resume gaming?

After almost a year of not playing any games on my desktop PC, I decided to resume gaming. But I don't have the urge to play games as I used to. Probably it is because my PC is getting old. Well, it is only about two years old and it is working perfectly well.

Or probably because the Internet in my apartment is pathetic.

Or maybe both.

One thing I noticed, which I had noticed when I was playing games before as well, is that the PC run pretty hot in the small shoebox sized case. There is nothing much I can do about it though. I want to keep my overclocks, which is conservative because I care about the power consumption, but they are not helping the situation either way. Funnily though, the video card, which is the biggest power eater inside the case, never hits 80C. The CPU, on the other hand, loves to hit 85C while using Handbrake.

I don't think the video card is causing the CPU to run hot because the fans of the video card do not spin when I'm not gaming; which means there is no way that it dumping hot air into the case has anything to do with it. Besides, the CPU cooler is my 6 years old Antec Kuhler 620, which is mounted at the front of the case pulling cool air in from the outside of the case. So I don't think the GPU would affect the CPU temps at all.

Too bad I cannot test it. The display I am using needs a Dual-Link DVI port and my CPU's integrated GPU cannot drive it.

But I wonder if the effectiveness of the coolant inside the water cooler has noticeably deteriorated over time. I didn't even use the cooler for about 3 years and I switched to this when migrated my PC to my current case in 2015. In that span, I had 3 coolers which I used for more than a month.

Now that I have settled down in Australia, I was thinking of upsizing my PC back to ATX size, to give me more cooling and expansions capabilities. But that would be an expensive upgrade.

Exciting things at the new job

At uni, I studied to become an Electronic Engineer. I joined a software company after that and I worked as a Software Engineer for more than 5 years in Japan. After that, I moved to Australia and got a job as an Embedded Software Engineer. Finally, I ended up as React JS Software developer!

I love what I do. It is really challenging and exciting. That is not to say that the work I did before was not challenging. It sure was, but it was not exciting.

Why I call the work I do is exciting is because I am working with a modern technology stack, which is something I always wanted to do. So little of the technologies I used to work with is currently being used in the product we are developing.

Here are some of those technologies we are currently using in our project.

• React Native
• React A-Frame / A-Frame VR / THREE.js
• Redux
• GraphQL
• Feathers.js
• Styled Components

Those are cutting edge technologies used in the front-end market. Funny thing is that I had no experience with any of the above technologies before I joined the company. I knew about Redux and that's about it. Of course, I knew about React from the previous project but we used a very limited set of technologies in that project. I should still be thankful to the CEO and lead software engineer for believing in me.

And top of that, I am working on a brand spanking new Mac Book Pro 13" with Touch Bar. The dongle life is real though. I have two 27" displays attached with USB Type-C to HDMI adapters, a Corsair K70 Lux RGB and a Steelseries mouse attached via a USB Type-C to USB-A dock. Ans we have a multitude of Samsung Galaxy S6, S7 and Google Pixel XL phones and Gear VR, Google, Google Daydream and Google Cardboard HMDs for testing.

I won't talk about the app that we are building because it is not released to the public yet. When it is released, I sure will post something about it here.

Installed Control Center on my Metabox laptops - count up to the first freeze begins...

There was something I forgot to write in my posts regarding the random freezes on my Metabox laptop. That is, I posted about this on the Whirlpool forums. One thing that I was specifically asking for was about where I can download all the drivers from. Kris from Kong Computers (that's the store I bought the laptop from) had come across that thread and he informed me via email that he contacted Metabox about this and he gave me two links to download what I wanted. One of the links was to the full suite of drivers for my laptops. It was a 2.5GB-ish download. The other one was for the latest Control Center software (version 5.0001.1.33). Oddly though, the full suite had a slightly older version of Control Center software.

I was quite confident that the laptop was working well so far without a freeze, so I decided to give a shot at this latest version of Control Center. Of course, I created a restore point before installing it.

The setup went without a hiccup. The Flexikey app got installed along with it as well. Finally, I was able to get rid of the dreaded blue backlighting (I won't who's idea it was to use blue as the default backlighting colour!) and this time I settled with white. It's not perfectly white, especially on the bottom most row you can see blue and green tints, but it is useable.

I did not double click the Control Center software though. That probably is a bad idea.

Later on, I set up ThrottleStop using this guide. I don't need Control Center to do that for me. ThrottleStop is was more powerful.

So, the count up till the first freeze begins. Fingers crossed.

Resolved the Metabox N850HJ's random freezes?

A couple of weeks ago I had some time to format the drive in my laptop and install everything from scratch, in the hopes of fixing the random freezes that I had been encountering since buying it. I played safe this time. I didn't install any drivers manually; I left Windows to take care of it. I only installed the application software because I knew they were not going the cause any system stability issues.

Luckily, Windows managed to recognise and install all the required drivers resulting in no visible exclamation marks in the Device Manager. This was including the webcam and the fingerprint scanner, two of which are notorious for not wanting to be discovered by Windows.

I think the problem is gone. I have not experienced any freezes since. I think two weeks is long enough to conclude that the laptop is finally functioning as it should.

There is one issue though. I cannot change the colour of the backlight on the keyboard. It requires a software called Flexikey, but you cannot install just that software. It comes with another software called Control Center, which I have no use for. It messed with the power saving features and I am quick happy with the ones Windows offer out of the box. Besides, I would be using ThrottleStop to under-volt the CPU and do it manually. I am almost positive that the freezes were caused by this. So this means, I will be stuck with the stupid blue keyboard backlighting.

I will probably wait a bit longer and decide if I want to install Control Center and see if the problem comes back. I haven't checked; maybe I don't have to have it running at startup. When I checked back then, I couldn't find it being launched as a Startup program; so probably it was launched via a service. If I can just get the keyboard software launching at startup and not the Control Center, I won't be too worried about having the Control Center installed. Let's see.

Issues with the Metabox N850HJ laptop

Rememeber I bought a new laptop few months back?

For the most part, it is running very well. The keyboard is my favourite part. I can type way faster on this keyboard than the Corsair K70 LUX mechanical keyboard I have on my desktop PC.

But there are two issues with it that I haven’t been able to fix so far.

Track pad is garbage

The track pad is rubbish. I don’t know how they managed to make this so bad. The benchmark - the MacBook Air - is leagues ahead of it. But the MacBook Air wasn’t that great in Windows. So I believe it is partially due to the software.

Fuunny thing is that this laptop has the Microsoft Precision trackpad. It never advertised like that. I tried with various settings in Touchpad settings pane in Windows Settings (that’s a lot of settings) application, but I still haven’t been able to settle down with something that I liked.

Random (soft) freezes

I experience freezes every now and then. I initially thought they were hard lockups, but then by chance, I found out that if you put it to standby (by closing the lid), it would go into standby. If you open the lid, it would resume fine with no sign of any lockup. I thought it was the graphics driver. But running with either the Intel driver or the NVidia driver did not make any difference. It could be something else.

It is really difficult to troubleshoot this because this doesn’t happen often. It could happen daily. Or it might not happen for a week. There aren’t any errors in the Event Log either. I don’t have much bloatware installed because the laptop didn’t come with Windows installed in the first place. I installed it. But I am using this tool called Obsidian Tools to download and install all the latest drivers and software for it. So it could be one of those drivers that is messing with things.

I think reinstalling Windows and only installing the bare minimum set of drivers would probably be the way to go. If it works fine, then I can create a back up of it and experiment with one new driver per week or something.

The audio output is terrible

This is a real issue but this is not fixable. This is how it is and I have to live with it. Both the quality of the sound output and the volume are terrible.

Conclusion

I think I would be able to fix that 2nd issue (freezes) by reinstalling Windows. I should do this when I have some time.

The laptop is decent otherwise. It is holding up as well as I expected. It was not that cheap honestly, but I got a lot of hardware for that money. Sure, there were couple of better deals during the End of Financial Year sales in June on similar SKUS, but I have no regrets jumping on the purchase a couple of months before that.

Life updates

It’s been a while since I last posted on my blog.

One very important thing happened during that time. I got a new job.

It is kind of a fresh beginning for me.

Perhaps you had read the post I wrote about how I got my first job in Australia. That was an Embedded Software position. I used to develop Canon printer driver related applications for more than 5 years before that, and that is what got me my job.
But thankfully, the work that I directly carried out at my previous workplace was not related to embedded development at all, although the project that I was in was actually an embedded project. I had to work on the front-end of the product which we were developing. And it was a web based front-end, something that I had very limited experience on. To make thinks more dramatic, the front-end was to be built using the most popular front-end library as of today: Facebook’s React.

It was scary at first. But I felt that this was an amazing opportunity to work with a fancy new tech stack and start my career fresh. Not to mention, React.js developers are of high demand in Australia.

There weren’t any senior web developers who could guide me or mentor me at work. I had to learn everything from scratch by my own. And I did that both at work and at home. I made learning about the React ecosystem my hobby. If you know me, my hobby used to be playing PC games - Crysis 3 mostly. Would you believe me if I said that I haven’t gamed for more than 10 hours in the last whole year??? (Funny thing is that even after getting the job, I haven’t resumed gaming yet. I still have a crap load of things to learn. The crazy speed at which these libraries evolve and new libraries pop up are not helping either.

So, now I am a React developer now - officially. The project that I am working on at my new workplace, although I have only glanced the shell of it, it amazingly complex. Here’s a spolier: it’s a virtual reality, React-Native project. How much more bad-ass can it get? We already have a working app which we continously improve. The next step is to get it on the Google Play store. And this is only one of those fancy projects.

Oh and I am working on a brand new MacBook Pro with dual 27" screens attached to it. I also have a Corsair K70 Lux RGB CherryMX Red keyboard and a Steelseries mouse (cannot remember the model) connected to it. The dongle life is sooooo real. Probably I should have asked for an iMac, but the portability might be helpful.

The only catch is, the now 1-hour commute feels like an eternity compared to the old 5-minute commute. The new place is in South Melbourne. Because of the Melbourne Metro Tunnel project, I have to take a longer route for a few days. After that, it will become a 50-minute commute.

Bought a new laptop to replace the ageing MacBook Air

I finally pulled the trigger on a new laptop.

I didn't go with Apple, Dell or any other mainstream brands. I went with Metabox. Yes, you read it right: Metabox. They are also known as Clevo in other parts of the world. Gigabyte also seem to have these laptops sold with a Sager branding.

The model I went with is called Alpha N850HJ. It's cheap (for the specs) and pretty fast for what I want to use it; that is everything, but gaming. I don't plan to game on this laptops. The memory, storage and Wi-Fi options are user configurable, so I simply took the base model, upgraded the memory to 16GB and added the Intel 8265 Wi-Fi card. They had a promotion on the Hynix 512GB SATA M.2 SSD, so I went with that instead of an NVMe drive. I won't benefit from an NVMe drive; it's only for the bragging rights. I also decided not an operating system as I have a license I can use with the Windows 10 Creators Update, which just came in time for the laptop.

It ended up costing me AUD 1,487 although if you tried building it on Metabox website it would have cost AUD 1,507 + AUD 30 for shipping. I bought it from Kong Computers which saved me $50 including shipping. It took a week to get the laptop built, tested and delivered.

In terms of future expansion options, I can add another 16GB RAM card, a 2.5" SSD and replace the battery if it goes bad. Of course the existing M.2 SSD and the Wi-Fi cards are replaceable as well.

I will talk about my initial impressions about it in another post.

CPU temps of the Mid 2011 MacBook Air

I know my MacBook Air can get pretty warm, but I never measured it quantitatively. I don't know what people use to measure those in OSX; but luckily I have Windows 10 installed via BootCamp (i.e. natively) and I am familiar with the tools in Windows.

I downloaded the trusty duo: CPU-Z and Realtemp. This is the Mid-2011 MacBook Air from the SandyBridge era. The CPU is a Core i5 2557M, which runs at 1.7GHz with a max boost of 2.7GHz.

I didn't want to run any stress tests straight away. But I ran Windows Update and updated the other software installed in there while monitoring the temps. It was astonishing to see the temps hover around 85-90C with a CPU utilisation of around 50% according to task manager, while hitting a max of 95C. I have no doubt it will throttle if the CPU runs at 100%, and probably burn a hole in the bottom of the aluminum unibody chassis if I attempted to run Prime95. So I didn't. This was good enough proof that the temps were terrible in such a thin chassis. I wonder if dust has something to do with it, because it is a 5.5 year old laptop. It cannot be free of dust.

I wonder if it is worth getting it serviced at the Apple store along with the battery. It won't be cheap @ AUD 189. Honestly, I don't want to spend any money on such an old laptop.

New goal for 2017: 100wpm average in TypeRacer before the end of the year

When I was watching YouTube reviews on mechanical keyboards before I bought my mechanical keyboards (note the s after keyboard, because I had to buy two), I came across a site one guy used to test how well he could type on the keyboards he reviewed. It was called typeracer.

What you do on that site is, type - as fast as you can. You are given a paragraph to type and it shows the realtime words per minute. You have to type in the correct case, type the punctuations and type with correct spellings (correct, according to the paragraph) to finish each test. To make it fun, they have made it like a game, hence the name typeracer. While there is a practice mode which doesn't record the performance into your profile, this racing mode which you race against other people (or racers) records your performance into your profile. Of course, if you are cheap, you can close the race midway if you feel you are not going to get a good score and it will not be reflected in your profile. By default, you will be racing against some random people who are logged on like you, but you can also race against your friends by inviting them to a race. I haven't used this feature yet, but I think that is the most fun part of it.

So far I have done over 500 races and I average about 70 words per minute. There are people who can type faster than 150 wpm and you can check some videos on YouTube where they do it in real time. It is amazing how fast some people can type. Buy they have few tricks up their sleeves which I don't use. If they misspell a word, they would quickly press Ctrl + A to select all the text you typed into the text box, and type the word from the scratch. I don't do that. I use backspace to erase letter by letter and correct it. Doing the former method would save a lot of time in typeracer, but you cannot do that in real life when you are writing a document. I want to improve my real-world typing speed by improving accuracy, not by employing these typeracer specific "tricks". So I will probably continue to do it the way I do now.

Serviced my car for the first time

According the service manual, my 2007 XV40 Aurion only requires an annual service if driven under normal conditions. I don't drive the car often - I don't have to. When my parents were here, I hardly drove to work. I walked to work because it took only 20 minutes and because my wife had all the support she needed. There was no real urgency to get back home.

Since owning the car, I had only done about 7,000km, out of which about 1500km was for driving practice (my wife and I).

After the VVT-I hose burst incident, I wanted to get the service done as soon as possible. But I didn't know where to take the car to for the service. Toyota dealerships are known for ripping off people (as that is where they make up for the little margin they make selling cars) and some others are known for misdoings (like magically finding issues that were never present in the first place, leading people to believe that they did something).

After a bit of looking around, I came across a site called fixedpricecarservice.com.au (which they have renamed since to autoguru.com.au) where you can find mechanics to get the service done. They gave me several options with mobile mechanics. Mobile mechanics would come to your place and perform the service then and there which was not only convenient, but also you could monitor their work to make sure they weren't doing anything 'naughty'.

I contacted the highest rated one, but it didn't work out. Then I contacted the 2nd highest rated one called Australian Mobile Mechanics and they arranged the service to be performed next day. I told them that I had bought some parts (engine oil, filter etc) on sale and they deducted the cost for those parts. I lose the warranty on the parts, but the 1 year warranty on labour is applicable. The service charges ended up being $134, for the 105,000km logbook service. I was at 102,500km at that time. It is not cheap, but it is not that expensive either. Car service in Australia is expensive, because labour is expensive.

Fixing the Edifier Exclaim E10BT BlueTooth issues

About 9 months ago, I bought a new set of speakers for my PC called Exclaim E10BT from Edifier. They sound superb and they have a very small footprint. Both of those features were equally important to me when I was searching for a set of speakers.

However, it has a feature that I didn't really want or use, but it has started causing me a lot of inconvenience. That is BlueTooth connectivity. You can connect to it from your phone and play back music via BlueTooth. It sounds like a handy feature to have. But it doesn't ask for a key to input when you connect to the speakers. Anyone with a BlueTooth device can connect to it.

This would not be a problem if you were living in a big house. But I am currently living in an apartment and there are other people living near me. Someone has paired their TV or device to my speakers. Every now and then, they would connect to my speakers and I would start hearing nonsense through the speakers.

There is no way I can disable BlueTooth on these speakers. The manual doesn't have any information relevant to my issue.

However, I figured that I might be able to do something about it.

When the speakers are connected to a device via BlueTooth, another device cannot automatically override it. You have to terminate the existing connection by pressing the power button on the speakers, and then try to connect. So, if something from my end can connect to the speakers before that other pesky TV does, at least I have the control. Luckily, my desktop PC which the speakers are connected to, has support for BlueTooth. So, that device on my end can be the desktop PC.

I connected the desktop PC to the speakers via BlueTooth and observed its behaviour.

My wife's driving

Not having the car for a couple of days didn't affect our day to day life much. We had bought all the groceries for the whole week during the last weekend and it's only a 20 minute walk to work. However, we were worried about one particular thing. My wife's drive test was scheduled for Friday morning!!!

I towed the car to Chadstone Toyota on Monday. Thursday was Australia day, which was a public holiday. So, if I didn't get the car by Wednesday, my wife wouldn't be able to practice driving on Thursday and we probably wouldn't be able to go for the test on Friday. (Friday was a holiday at work, although it went out of our annual leave.) My wife has never taken the bus or the train by herself, which is the reason why this was a problem in the first place. I have to take her to the test. The VicRoads test centre we picked was about 40km away from home, as the routes there were less complex. Besides, the instructor was more familiar with the test routes there.Luckily, we got the car back on Wednesday and my wife was able to practice driving on Thursday.

On Friday, we could go for the test as we planned, and by some miracle, she passed it!!! This particular Friday was a good day for the drive test because there were less cars on the road, because many people were taking the Friday off to make it a four-day long weekend. The schools were still in holidays until 1st of February.

I would like to talk a bit about the events that led to this day.

My wife had to start the journey to obtain the Victorian driving license from taking the road rules test at VicRoads which happened in September. After passing that test in the first attempt, she applied for a learner permit which allowed her to practice driving with a full license holder on the passenger seat. If you are on a permanent resident visa, you can drive up to 6 months in Victoria with your overseas license. The 6 months is calculated from the first point of entry, which happened in October 2015 for us. By the time my wife moved here in April 2016, her 6 months were already up, so she had to get the learner permit anyways. (I had a couple of months before mine expired as I arrived in February, so I could practise driving myself.) After getting the learner permit, she took the Hazard Perception Test and passed it in the first attempt as well. This brought her closer to obtaining the Victorian license. Only thing remained was passing the drive test. (It's much easier to get the full license for people who have a overseas full license, otherwise it is a lengthy process.) Since she had not driven a car in almost 5 years, we decided to take some driving lessons first. The driving school we decided to attend was a Sri Lankan one called Learning Pedals. The instructor assigned to my wife was a female, and at the beginning she came to pick my wife up. After a couple of lessons, we had to decide where we would take the test, and we had to practice on the test routes to familiarise about the tricky spots. We could take the test at Heatherton or Burwood, but the routes were known to be a bit complex. We were hoping to take the test before my parents returned to Sri Lanka on the boxing day. So the instructor recommended that we go to Pakenham for the test because the routes were simple and it was easy to pass in one go. Since Pakenham was about 40km from our place, I had to drive her there for the lessons on Sundays. We had to take our baby girl with us as well, because she would need a feed. We left our son with my parents.