Archive for November, 2005

Cool Chinese Tools

On-line Chinese Tools. There are some great ones here including a flash card system for learning chinese characters and a complete dicitonary. Doesn’t have modern words like “venture capital” for example. or “blog”

Most of the tools are based on the CEDict project which does translations for free on the web. They are either web based tools or they are downloadables from folks like “East Asia Software”:http://eastasiasoftware.com

Call of Duty 2 Rocks

The reviews of this game are correct. The first Call of Duty just blew me away with its realism. From the shake mode when artillery landed to the sounds. Now this one is just more and more people and more and more of the same. I love it just the same.

The Russian front for instance is just a sea of people. It doesn’t shock and awe you like F.E.A.R does with its graphics, etc., but it sure is arcade like fun without being totally campy like Battlefield 2 which feels more like an arcade game

Here are some sources of information:

* WEapons information. Like most modern games they don’t have any manuals, so here’s a great source for all the weapons.

nVidia IDE Driver on nForce2

Win XP/2K – IDE (4.15). There have been many reports about how flaky this driver can be. Mainly on nForce3 chipsets.

For us, I found that our ASUS A7N8X-X with an old Athlon XP 2800+ would suddenly hang. Turns out that after much diagnosis, defragging a certain file on the system drive would cause the hang. Even using a low level boot time chkdsk would do the same thing.

Glad I remembered this IDE driver. Uninstalling it from the control panel and things now work fine with the generic Windows XP IDE driver. This has got to be one time when the old one works better than the chipset vendors driver, so beware.

If you are on an nForce2 and you have sudden hangs, it usually means that a very low level device driver has failed. No one ever suspects the disk, but I found it because it would hang on defrag.

Dimage 5400 Utilities

Software & Drivers | Support | KONICA MINOLTA. Where you download utilities for the Minolta-Konica Dimage 5400. The application is now old, it is called ImageScan 1.1.5.

Been scaning old slides. Most I do at 2700 dpi since they really don’t have the resolution and have degraded some.

Recover XP PIDs

RockXP download and review – recover XP activation code from SnapFiles. An exceedingly useful tool. Let’s you recover your XP Product ID from your Windows installation.

Learning Chinese

“Zhongwen”:http://zhongwen.com is a great site for understanding chinese as it has an online dictionary that includes roots and things. It also has some great resoruces for learning chinese including:

* Learning Chinese Online Page. This is one of many very good site for learning online and has pointers to zillions of other sites.
* “CD Title reviews”:http://www.csulb.edu/~txie/online.htm. A good list of titles that you can buy and most important they review their quality.
* “Forum”:http://www.chinese-forums.com/. Pretty cool forum site where folks ask questions.

IBEX Vantage JayVee

IBEX Vantage JayVee Details. Peter asked about this bike. It is a great size for kids. A great value too because it ships directly from the manufacturer. The folks at IBEX are great by the way. The components are high quality. Much higher than a Wal*Mart bike and it will last a long time.

And, as Alex says, “it is really, really fast.” We were cruising along at 18 mph the other day which is amazing.

George Hincapie in China

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Key Disk Backups

“CDFreaks”:http://club.cdfreaks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=81 has illustrated guides on how to deal with various copy protection schemes when you want to make a backup. If you’ve been buying lots of games like me and the kids wipe out the key disk, you are really hosed.

Benq DW1640 Update

BenQ USA – Drivers DW1640. Benq has a nice web site and clear support documentation for its DVD Rewriters. Folks at “CDFreaks”:http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=154261 seem to like firmware BSMB so upgrade if you have this drive (btw, they just announced the DW1655 which is as fast as the 1640 but also has this Lightscribe technology where with special DVDs, you can etch a label on it. Pretty neat.

In my case, I upgraded to the latest firmware. They have both a windows based firmware checker and also the DVD firmware can be updated from Windows. Very cool!

Also they have something called Qsuite shich lets you putz with the actual format, also QScan that determines the right speed for a given kind of optical media and WOPC which lets you handle poor media. Download this stuff now if you’ve got a Benq drive. The Qscan is kind of cool. Told me that my Verbatim 4x was actually good enough to write at 12x which is pretty neat.

They have another fancy feature called SolidBurn. What this means is that if the drive sees a new DVD writeable media (that can happen all the time as OEMs are always switching, so you never know from one batch to the next really who made your DVDs and what the quality is). So if there is something unknown, it will keep track in the drive itself and tell change its writing. It is basically learning from its burns.