iPlodding

The list of books i'll never read continues to grow as great works and greater drivel is penned each year, and hours of commuting eventually exhausts even a reasonable music collection and it doesn't take long to tire of news. As a motorist I did rather wish there was a bus or train that would take me the route so that I could read, fiddle with my laptop and work, rest or play for the entire journey.

Driving alone is not enough to excite me, and as a commuter you eventually dread the feel of the wheel. That is, until I started listening to audiobooks during the journey.

Formally "books-on-tape" and latterly "books-on-tape-but-on-CD" MP3 Audiobooks gave a shot in the tired arm of a serial commuter which is the context for this review. Not an individual audiobook or author, nor a particular technology, device or gadget. Just Audiobooks.

Continuing an aural tradition that predates the homeric epics, I stated by picking from the already long list of Books You Are Supposed To Read and I enjoyed both abridged and unabridged tomes from those famous authors - you know the ones. I moved on to a few more contemporary authors, and dabbled in science and education. There is nothing quite like a lecture series with pause, rewind and skip buttons to empower your learning beyond the restrictive structure that would otherwise be imposed.

The opinion on books you should read varies with each person you ask and I won't presume to prescribe or endorse even the ones I've really enjoyed, but I will recommend the experience of being read to. The spoken voice brings forward such character, its a different sensory experience to the written word and one you can thoroughly enjoy while travelling.

As a pedestrian I've continued to listen to books - both fact and fiction - on my journey into work. The return journey is usually reserved for music as brainwidth is a little lower at the end of the day. Audiobooks are cheap and plentiful in this day and age and you don't have to limit youself to the reading list prescribed by the literati, in fact I recommend against it. Go with what you enjoy and enjoy going with it.

I'll give hearing things five stars. Its like reading but its out loud and you can keep your eyes on the road.

Laps, tops, and laptops.

Since its launch in mid 2007 I've enjoyed the easy computing of the Asus EeePC 701. Spurned as "sublaptop" by the bulky, expensive laptop owning elite of its day it was the pioneer of a netbook revolution that reshaped the digital marketplace. Small, robust, lightweight and packed with features the Asus EeePC was also one of the cheapest laptops you couldn't buy - I got mine on import some 6 months before the UK release, complete with Chinese keyboard layout and mains adapter.

As a landmark in hardware the Asus EeePC provided WiFi, webcam and microphone and sported a shock-proof SSD all built in - in an age where all of these were expensive optional extras for the traditional laptop crowd. Even its big-icon tabbed UI paved the way for the tablet iOS and Androids that followed, challenging the desktop-and-start-menu status quo with a glimpse of the future.

After years of service, a few OS installs and bricking it every now and then the EeePC is currently close to being laid to rest. When its been good, its been very very good, but when its been bad its been horrid. Having a Netbook was once like holding a little piece of stardust future in your hands, but the world soon caught up and overtook the humble EeePC. While its battery life is alright "a few hours" doesn't feel like so much any more, and occasional wifi glitches prevent it from being the perfect coffee shop companion. The aged cpu and reduced memory are always 'just less' than you want for all but the most basic netbooky tasks. At around £160, I've had if for something like 160 weeks so its one-pound-per-week value for money brings a smile to my thrifty side too.

The new contenders were a new Gaming Laptop from Alienware - a beast of silicon and steel with a price tag to match, or Googles own Chromebook which follows after the EeePC as the next ultra-thin client netbook. Meanwhile Always Innovating were back in the limelight with their smartbook, packed with and experimental feature set and attractive low price tag. Macintosh also have a new tablet out, which is to be considered as a sleek appliance computer.

...However the final judgement came in favour of the new-model Asus EeePC. Packed with features and apps, its a 10" form factor netbook with a trick up its sleeve - the keyboard detaches and can be discarded rendering the device a touch-screen tablet for a best-of-both worlds device. If it delivers as well as its predecessor I can expect at least a four-year lifespan again and have joined the tablet revolution.

Fractal Design XL Case.

Sturdy and spacious, the case comes with two 120mm fans and a larger (140?) one, lateral mounted 3" bays and cable cavity which all add up to excellent airflow. The case is rock solid and has no sharp edges. Removable dust filters on the air intakes will be easy to wash and help keep the inside clean.

The PSU is mounted at the bottom with its own intake/exhaust and in a thermal chamber that isolates it and its airflow from the rest of the case. The Three large case fans have a variable speed control for them, there are USB, eSATA and 3.5mm jacks on the top of the case next to the power button. Mainly black, with a few white bits on the inside and a sleek door in titanium grey, the box looks great for what is ostensibly a functional item that you don't look at. Its got all the normal luxuries and a few extras thrown in I've not been able to find a fault with it.

It's larger than many cases however you measure it and heavier too - weighing in at 17Kg empty - the weight is likely to be a problem for me personally because I like LAN events and social gaming, but its not a negative about the design or engineering of the case. Its something you may want to consider before buying if you plan to travel with your PC or have a fragile table made of balsa wood and glass.

While 14 drive bays sounds like a lot, the ratio of 10:4 in favour of 3.5" bays doesn't make too much sense. In the Terrabyte age, ten drive bays is a lot for a domestic computer (~20TB) and I'd prefer to see three more 5" bays replacing the top four 3" Bays - it'd still be plenty of drive space (six of each) but provide a lot more flexibility as bay adapters are easy to come by, and I think the case came with one anyway. Its not a bad design decision, but its not a good one either.

Secondly, custom drive trays and screws - while they look great on paper - will ALWAYS cost a star in a review I write. One by one they ARE going to bend/buckle/break, and now i've got to keep track of specific screws for this case too (the SSD bays need screws 1 or 2 mm shorter than normal HDD screws). This knocks the case down from its perfect ten to a maximum score of nine and represents the only thing I might really regret about the case.

Lastly for consideration, I'm not going to subtract any for size and weight and I'm letting my first-impressions score stand at 9/10 but its a great score on thin ice. If the weight or drive bays are a dealbreaker then you might want to choose again, but otherwise the Fractal Design XL comes up aces - even 9/10 feel low for this superb case that comes up trumps in every category.

The Top of my Desk.

While I've slowly been tapping Alt-F4 for many years, I'd always had trouble finding a mature Linux desktop OS that I was really happy with. The problems were small and varied, but often there was something that stuck out as either a grumbler or deal breaker. It feels like I *should* be using Linux but its normally a bit uncomfortable, and a few windows games and apps have always provided excuses to stay with Microsofts burnt offerings.

While making a few hardware changes to my PC, it was left out-of-action while awaiting an RMA on a new component so I lugged my Ubuntu machine on to the table and braced myself for the worst. And as it happened the worst wasn't as bad as I'd expected. Wanting to be prepared I upgraded to Lynx, made sure Chrome was working and felt my way in the dark from there.

As a disclaimer, the Ubuntu machine is an old Core2 Duo with 4GB and an HDDs for boot, swap and data. I'm trying hard not to compare its performance to a modern PC, although obviously the weakness of the hardware are going to colour my experience.

First impressions were pretty good and I soon appreciated how dominant online services really make your desktop OS choice all but irrelevant. With Chrome installed I realised I was halfway there - having Mail, Docs et al. available at my fingertips. Google have been a key player in opening up the OS market for competition with a single power-play, and the old-world two horse race between Microsoft and Apple will never recover.

More than a day or two of Ubuntu was a stretch for me, so I installed Wine for Steam and my game(s) of choice. Installing was almost painless - (it was DOA and I had to google the errors) - but after a bit of dicking around it all worked. I'm not sure if I'm getting the performance I'd expect from running native, but its running all the same. I couldn't say games weren't a problem, but being able to install and run Team Fortress 2 without drama and trauma explains why there isn't a commercial Linux client available. Its just not needed.

I was also able to try out some Linux-specific software, in this case Darktable. Its a photo darkroom app that gives you white balance, and many other tweaks to just bring up the standard of your pics. Kudos to the Darktable people, it does what it does really well. I kind of felt weird not being able to airbrush, and perform a few other effects but Darktable assumes you took the right picture to start with and provides you with the Dark Room / Light Table tools and effects essentially allowing you a bit more control over the developing process.

Overall, Desktop Linux wasn't painful because I didn't have to learn anything. In years gone by, there was a brainwidth overhead which a more idiot-proof OS abstracted me from. I had a couple of problems with Eclipse Galileo and with Spotify. The former wasn't much more than "Sudo just fucking work" and the latter I suspect I shall work around with Wine or VirtualBox.

However even the worst gripes I've got are pretty minor, and nothing that would stop me using Ubuntu as a casual Desktop OS. The warm geeky feeling of running Linux finally washing over me, this brief cup of Ubuntu has taught me just how much the desktop market has shifted. Its reminder of how quickly things can change might serve as a glimpse of the future.

Loot

I've got plenty of loot queued up to review, just had a bit of a hiatus for a while. The SSD has had time to become part of the collective, but was a definite 'aha moment' for the technologist in me.

...And it went something like this. The shift between spending time and spending money - A Good HDD enclosure costs about two-thirds the price of an SSD drive, and then you have to buy the HDD too. The end result is that the SSD is cheaper, fast, quieter, lighter, and physically smaller than its magnetic uncle at the cost of lower storage capacity.

So on the subject of terrabytes, What needeth thou? You want some local storage, which is now a cache/buffer between me and the internet - the advantage of a cache being its close by and fast but capacity has increased faster than data rate such that a modern drive is 'slower' than ever. After my Level1, I've RAM, virtual RAM, local storage, NAS and then then internets with each layer getting more bloated, harder to search, slower and further away.

Anyway I'm here to talk about loot. The Latest loot being the SSD drive with nowhere to mount inside my case - which obviously means the next loot added to the basket will be a new case. Or two new cases, as the aha moment of storage was a mirror of my build philosophy which - of late - has been to put everything in a box and hope it boots. So I've found the excuse to talk about build strategy which only adds to the list of unblogged topics I want to pen and havn't gotten around to reviewinf the 64GB Crucial SSD that is lying forlornly on the bottom of my case suspended at one end by a power cable that has to navigate the passive cooler of an oversized video.

More about loot after I have sobered up. I really want some of those socks though. You know the ones? Yeah. Those Ones.

Minecraft Rendering

So, Minecraft is getting great press. Whether it a flash-in-the-pan boom and bust economy or a slow builder is irrelevant at this time. The Minecraft Guy had a pretty good idea, implemented it and is getting the recognition he deserves.

Pulling apart the game, landscapes seem pretty important. Without being able to render a vast landscape the game wouldn’t be worth a fraction of what it is. So I’ve been pondering on what it takes to pull off such a techincal feat.

The world is made of blocks. About 1m each is a fair estimation for a sense of scale, and the visible world extends to about 192 units until you reach the far clip plane. The far clip plane can be reduced to about 128 units by adding fog which provide us the ‘Far’ and ‘Normal’ draw distances and it can be reduced further yet with Short and Tiny draw distances.

192 blocks radius is a 384x384 area containing a theoretical 384x384x384 blocks in the observable world reaching a staggering 56Million blocks to cull and render.

A broadphase pass that doesn’t even attempt to render air and creates a render list based on the occlusion of block using its six neighbours drops these unimaginable millions to a contemplatable two dimensional 384x384 ‘surface’ approaching 150,000 cubes at six quads each, still getting on for a million quads.

150,000 is a lot of cubes, and view frustrum culling with a <= 90’ field of view will reduce this to a ball-park of (192*192) 36864 Cubes and CPU side backface culling gives you a three quad per cube total of 110,000 Quads. Its a lot, to be sure, but its a managable amount compared to the 300Million+ Quads of the unculled estimate.

110,000 Quads feels like a lot, but might just be enough to brute force. At this point I’d probably still assume we are Render Bound so a sensible step would be to divide the task separate threads for Render, Occlusion, Game and Network and rely on the Host OS to manage four threads well enough.

A closer far clip plane and a 128 unit draw distance does reduce this to around 50,000 Quads and a 64 Unit draw distance reduces it further to a mere 12,000 Quads to render. The draw distance can probably be increased above 192 quite cheaply with a combination of untextured blocks, chunk sub-sampling and render proxies.

Church Mouse

The latest addition to the family is a new JSCO noiseless gaming mouse. It may not look like much but its got it where it counts... Well, it doesn't have any balls but thats expected in this day and age. The JSCO mouse has REALLY REALLY quiet buttons. Quiet like you can hardly hear them, and it doesn't take long to really fall in love with its clickless slickness.

With four settings from 750-1600 dpi and a button to switch between them its darn quick to switch from a sensible desktop speed to an uber twitch fps turn-on-a-dime speed. Sounds like a gimmick, and probably is, but its a gimmick thats very likeable very quickly.

Two quiet thumb buttons, two quiet mousy buttons and ... Its Achilles wheel. The mouse wheel clicks like a Morse code dolphin. Actually clicking it is alright, but scrolling it just lets the whole package down. Feels like the wheel has left, right and center clicks giving you seven buttons plus uppy/downy scrolling which again is really nice.

Its a small mouse, lets call it compact. Smaller than the 'average' Microsoft mouse - you know the one - it kind of gets lost in the hand. But its not the size that counts, its what you do with it and you can do a lot with the JSCO without being heard.

Its a good mouse gaining high marks for excellent motion and a bunch of buttons. A couple of bonus points for being quiet and having dpi selection too gives this an 8/10. A quiet wheel and larger form factor would have earned it more points.