Tempted to buy a second hand R9 290

It seems that the coin miners have moved away from the Graphics cards based on AMD's GCN architectures to something else. There are so many second hand cards available in the wild, that are looking for a new home. If you go on eBay and searched for the terms "R9 290", you'll be presented with search results for a massive number of cheap R9 290/290X graphics cards going for dirt cheap. You could easily have a 290 for $290. 

Unfortunately, if I'm ordering from Japan, I'll have to pay for shipping as well as for duty. For a $300 card, it would be about $60, bringing the total up to $360. And that's without warranty too. That's reaching almost the price of a reference model here in Japan.

There has also been a non-reference model from a local brand (the same brand of my old HD5770 from 4 years ago) for around $360, but it is no better than the reference model. You might think that's OK for the price. But that's not. The reference model at least exhausts all the hot air out of the case through its exhaust vents. This card doesn't. It dumps all the heat back into the case and the case fans will have to do overtime to keep the video cards as well as all the components inside the case reasonably cool. So I should not think about buying this card to begin with.

Decided to auction my Haswell CPU as well

Now that shops in Japan are selling the Core i7 4790K CPU aka the Devil's Canyon Core i7 variant, I decided to give a shot at selling my current CPU. Why? Because my CPU doesn't overclock well at a decent voltage. I cannot think of owning a CPU that doesn’t overclock at least past the clock speed that I could overclock the predecessor to. (I managed to overclock my old Sandybridge 2600K for 4.5GHz)

If there is any chance that I would be able to make my PC shrinking project a reality, I would want a CPU that doesn't heat up like a nuclear reactor. Besides, it is fun to play with a new CPU.

If I sell the CPU to a shop, the most I can make is JPY26,000 which is a little less than what I would want. So auctioning is the way to go.

Apple's podcast app ruined my morning!

Today is Friday. That means, I should be able to listen to the new episode of PC Perspective podcast. Hoping to do exactly that, I opened the Podcasts app in my iPhone 5S as I woke up. I usually get ready for work listening to a podcast.

Sure, the episode was there. But as soon as I started playback, the app crashed. I reopened the app several times and with each iteration, it seemed to crash even faster.

Naturally, what you would do in this situation is try rebooting the device. But it didn't fix the issue.

Next option was to sync with iTunes and see. I connected the phone to iTunes and removed all of the podcasts that were there in the phone and synced the ones from the PC to the phone. I thought that a mismatch between the podcasts on the phone and the ones on the PC might have caused these crashes. I also cleaned the podcasts in iTunes before syncing them with the iPhone. No, that didn't fix the problem.