The Apple II - Apple's most important computer

I mentioned a while back that I've started up a new YouTube channel, and I'm probably going to end up writing up a post here about every video I create. I may eventually split these posts off onto a new blog that's directly tied to the channel, but for now, here we are. I've done a bunch of videos you should check out, including an IBM Model M keyboard roundup, a look at the $99 Nintendo 3DS, the AtGames Sega Genesis portable, and more.

Last night I published my biggest video yet, in which I hold forth on the Apple II.

I grew up with the Apple II and I still have my original machine (that's it on the right). Most of my videos are a little more spontaneous and have a bit more humor, I think, but I guess I just have some reverence for the subject matter here. This was my first computer and I've held a grudge against the company for decades about how they treated it.

Anyway, check it out, subscribe to my channel, and leave a comment if you want. I'm not yet to the point of actively marketing my channel beyond this, but I am trying to rely on advertising revenue to at least pay for the topics I cover on the channel itself :)

A new hobby (one of several)

I've recently found myself with more time than I had planned for or really know what to do with. A luxury for a lot of people, but it's left me feeling useless and in fact a little depressed. My mind starts drifting and I begin obsessing over dumb, meaningless things. For example, nostalgia for 1970's audio equipment, which I've never felt before in the slightest. I've realized over the years that this is just my way of coping with boredom; maybe my mind's way of staying sharp and focused, on something. This is just one of several things I've got going on right now, none of which amount to anything to anyone but me.

I've set up a little workshop in the basement and decided to try my hand at repairing some of the vintage audio equipment I've been picking up here and there. That old silver-faced hifi stuff sounds great and looks amazing, but you know what? It's all broken. All of it. Unless somebody else fixed it first, you can pretty much guarantee that at least some part of every component out there is not going to work properly. And most of this stuff got replaced, not fixed, when it broke the last time. So it's all still broken, regardless of what some Ebay seller says.

So far I'm having mixed success, but I'm keeping at it at least until I get discouraged enough to give up. This cassette deck above, a Sony TC-K96R, came to me with a blaring left channel that I've sort of fixed but only with a kludge. (As mentioned, it was described as "working fine".) It's listenable now after two new transistors and a level adjustment, at least, but one channel's maxed out and the other's almost at minimum, so something's still not right. It also needs a new belt, like basically all cassette decks do.

In the background, my Sony TA-1010 amplifier awaits new transistors and capacitors.

Should keep me busy for a while.

I'm pretty happy with Apple's refurbishment process

I'm personally more of an Android guy these days, but I do own a few Apple products. (I'm a seriously old-school Apple guy, though - my first computer was an Apple IIc, and I still own a IIgs.) I just recently had to buy an iPad for use in a point-of-sale system for the store I own. Since it's not really for me, I just wanted the cheapest iPad I could get without being ridiculous about it and going first-gen on Ebay - I mean the thing's gotta actually work.

I ended up buying a refurbished iPad 3 from the Apple store. This is Apple's bastard child iPad that was only on the market for a few months - but perversely, it's also probably the best deal in a used one. I was quite pleased when I opened the box! Unlike the "refurbished" Motorola Xoom I bought that was literally just the tablet and power cord flopping around in a plain brown box, with clear wear marks and even fingerprints on the tablet itself, there is literally no way to tell that this iPad isn't new.

Everything's wrapped the same way new ones are, and I do think the outer shell and glass are new. (I'd read this before but didn't quite believe it.) This is what "refurbished" is supposed to mean, and did mean back when I sold electronics for a living in the 90's. It's supposed to mean "fixed up to be like new again", not simply "used". I'm not a big modern-day Apple fan in general, but props to them for being old-school on this one thing and putting in the effort that the term "refurbished" really requires.

The only indication that this isn't a new iPad is the "Apple Certified Refurbished" engraving in the box, which I'm convinced is there to stop people from buying these and reselling them as new. You could, otherwise.

Pardon the dust - that's all my dust, not Apple's.

I paid $299 for this 16GB iPad 3 with a retina display, which is only a little more (and in some cases less) than Ebay sellers are asking. At the moment it's on sale even further at $269, which kind of pisses me off, actually, but whatever. It came preinstalled with iOS 7.1 and it runs a lot better than I expected, given what I've seen on my wife's iPad Air. The Air is noticeably lighter but actually feels slower. I think it has an even higher-res screen and the CPU just isn't quite up for it.

I still like my Sony Xperia Tablet Z better. But I highly recommend buying refurbished products direct from Apple, if that's what you're after anyway.

LCD monitors still suck - I returned my ASUS PB238Q

I wrote earlier about how happy I was with my new (to me) ASUS PB238Q monitor. Welp, I've returned it. Two of them, in fact. Here's why:

Ignore the vertical lines - that's a camera artifact. You may not see the real problem initially - some people don't. Stare at it for a minute. It might help to tilt your own monitor upward.

The right side's brighter than the left. I mentioned this in my earlier report on buying this display, but I didn't think it'd bother me so much. But past experience tells me that I'm extremely sensitive to uniformity issues, and over a few weeks of use, I found myself constantly fiddling around trying to find a viewing angle, brightness or color setting where this was not so noticeable. Like a moth drawn to a porch light, I couldn't stop looking at the brighter right side of the screen.

Monitor issues have a way of driving you insane over time. If you notice something soon after buying one, you may as well return it while you can. You will drive yourself to drink eventually otherwise. You have to stare at these things for hours on end, sometimes every day - if you're bothered by something you find early on, you're never going to feel any better about it. For me, uniformity is the big bugaboo.

All LCD's have uniformity issues to one degree or another - it's the nature of the beast. Here's a useful graphic that shows the problem:

An LCD screen is made up of many layers, and they're never perfectly even. The biggest problem is usually the diffusion layer, which is all the way on the bottom and is supposed to evenly spread the backlighting generated by CFL's or LED's. These backlights are most often along only two edges of the screen - either left and right or top and bottom. First of all that diffusion layer itself is never 100% flat, and then the light it spreads out has to pass through all these other layers that aren't 100% flat either. The lights themselves may be too close to the diffuser, or not evenly close on both (or all) sides.

We all just have to live with this to some extent, until some new technology supersedes LCD. (Come on, OLED!) It gets worse as screens get bigger. This is a big reason why I have a plasma TV in my living room.

In the PB238Q's case, both monitors I got had the exact same non-uniformity pattern - brighter on the right side, with a dark patch near the bottom just in front of the power supply. It seems the diffuser is probably being pressed inward at that location. I'm not sure why the right side's brighter, though, but it seems it's just how this model is.

Anyway I realize I'm never going to get perfect uniformity and many monitors are technically worse than this, but I found the pattern of non-uniformity on the PB238Q too distracting to ever ignore. So on its way to me now is a Dell UltraSharp U2412M, which Amazon has at a little more than $250 right now - a great deal on a 16:10 e-IPS screen (that's what I really wanted to begin with). We'll see if it's any better, but there are more professional reviews out there for it and they're all positive - and more importantly, they at least show that it's brighter in the center, rather than on one side. I should be able to live with that.

I still think the PB238Q is a really good monitor for the price - it just wasn't for me. Most people probably wouldn't notice the uniformity issues at all, or if they did, they wouldn't care. (I asked my wife if I was crazy and she said no, she saw it too, but it didn't bother her.) Other than the uniformity, I loved my PB238Q with its old-school industrial look and build quality, its awesome stand, and its IPS panel for cheap - that's a rare combo right there. But I just couldn't help but be distracted and annoyed by the light side.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some batteries to change...

Taming the Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 voltage regulator module (VRM)

This is kind of an oddly specific problem and solution, but this is a popular motherboard and I couldn't find anything truly definitive on how to fix this when I searched. Maybe this will help some of you. If you already know the problem and want the tl;dr solution: just run push-pull on your CPU cooler. Attach another fan on the back. That's it. If you want to know why, read on.

The Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 has been through four iterations now. One of the things they seem to keep changing is the design of the voltage regulator module heatsink - and apparently they never get it quite right. At least not for this board's intended purpose; it's supposed to be an enthusiast/overclocker board, but the high VRM temps mean you can't really overclock very far before throttling or other problems kick in. This is the area in question:

The revision 4 board actually has a pretty beefy heatpipe heatsink that's a clear improvement over the revision 3 board, and for many people (especially if you're running stock speeds) it should be good enough.

THE PROBLEM

It's actually twofold:

• This part of the motherboard is often a "dead spot" in terms of airflow, as it sits between (but slightly below) the CPU cooler and the case exhaust fan. Overclocking usually means a hefiter CPU cooler too, which further isolates this dead zone - all that heat just sits there on the heatsink.
• This sink is still barely enough to keep the VRM at reasonable temps even at stock speeds. I was getting 91C at full load (running Prime95 torture tests). Overclocking even a little bit - without changing the voltage - bumped that to 94C. And that's in a case with six 120mm case fans, and lots of little holes all over the case for passive airflow. There's just no flow right in this spot.

Temps like that won't fry your system or even lead to throttling (I don't think), but they're not particularly healthy over the long term. VRM chips do have more thermal headroom than, say, a CPU, but I don't like any chip in my system to be running at close to 100C - and if you have a worse case setup than I do, you could even be exceeding that.

THE CRAP SOLUTION

You could do something inelegant like attaching a fan or two directly to the heatsink, or using something like the Antec SpotCool to direct air onto it. I tried just hanging a spare 80mm fan off my CPU cooler to see if directed airflow would really help, and it lowered my full load temp down to 74C at stock speed. That's a 17C improvement - hey, it works! But it's also ugly and sounds yucky, and there's no easy way to permanently attach an 80mm fan in this area.

THE REAL SOLUTION

Go push-pull on your CPU cooler.

I took my bottom 120mm case fan and clipped it to the other side of my CPU cooler as a test. Luckily my Enermax ETS-T40-VD came with extra clips, but a lot of other coolers make it just as easy to attach an extra fan. Doing this, my VRM temps topped out at 81C at stock speeds, and 85C overclocked. That's a decent enough compromise, I think, and should be a pretty comfortable max operating temp for a VRM (remember, these are worst case scenario temps). I'm pretty confident these chips won't die before my next motherboard upgrade, and my CPU won't be throttled.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

ATX motherboards are pretty much all designed for downflow CPU coolers, because that's what AMD and Intel have used since Intel helped draw up the standard. With the stock cooler, the air expended by the CPU fan ends up being directed through the heatsink fins towards the RAM and VRM before being pulled out of the case:

But with most push-only tower CPU coolers, the airflow is directed too far above the VRM to do much good beyond cooling the CPU - it just goes in a straight line through the cooler and out the case. The extra "pull" fan just helps draw the VRM heat into that flow - it's not so much that it's pushing it directly out, instead it's pulling the hot air in behind it before expelling it out along with the CPU heat. It's obviously not as good as having air directly on the heatsink, but it's good enough. And it has the side effect of helping your CPU temps a tiny bit too, without adding any noise or ugliness to your case. I would bet a fan that "leaks" airflow a bit to the sides would actually be slightly better for this purpose. I'll eventually move one of my TB-Silence fans to be the pull fan on my CPU cooler - these have "ENERMAX" punchouts on the sides that should allow some air through the housing.

(BTW, yes I fixed my RAM slot usage up there - the board's manual confused me. And I've got all four slots filled now anyway.)

Enermax ETS-T40-VD CPU cooler upgrade

So what's wrong with the stock AMD CPU cooler?

Well, for one thing, just look at it! Despite being made by Cooler Master, this thing uses a tiny fan on a downflow heatsink - proven to be less efficient than tower coolers. And that fan - at full bore, it sounds like am Embraer Brasilia at takeoff power. It technically works well enough at stock speeds, though forget about overclocking, and if you're doing anything heavy, prepare to wear ear plugs most of the time.

Monitoring my temps with AMD's overdrive utility, I was getting thermal margins of about 16C with this cooler - or about 54C absolute temp according to HWINFO64.

(I bent that top left fin back - just hadn't noticed it before taking this photo.)

I specifically sought out the Enermax ETS-T40-VD - a just-discontinued model that's getting harder to find, but one of the few coolers that uses a red LED fan (and blue, and blue + red, in various combinations). And it's reasonably priced (assuming you can still find it), highly effective and reasonably quiet. I got mine from AAAwave. Enermax's current models are pretty similar but use a thermal heatsink coating (not really necessary) and different fans that have either blue or white LED's depending on the model... or none. This one has both blue and red, and 18 of each. Keee-razy!

Isopropyl alcohol and a paper towel is the easiest way I've found to clean thermal grease from both heatsinks and CPU's. I bought this bottle probably 10 years ago, as you can tell from the label.

You can already see one of the problems with the stock heatsink - look at the sides (beyond the thermal grease) - see how dull it looks. Well, that's true of the part under the grease too:

This thing really needed another round of polishing. You can actually feel that texture - it's like brushed aluminum. Hardly the ideal surface to mate to a CPU.

Installation of the ETS-T40-VD was pretty straightforward. Unscrew the old plastic clips, screw in the new included backplate and metal brackets, then screw the pressure plate for the heatsink on top. The hardest part was figuring out how tight to tighten the pressure plate screws that hold on the heatsink itself - I didn't want to crush the CPU, but did want to keep the otherwise free-moving heatsink from slinking around. One thing I do like about stock coolers is that they're pretty much idiot-proof, and they always click in with just the right amount of pressure. Not so with aftermarket coolers that are made to be "universal".

After installation. This thing's a monster. It almost touches my side window - if not for the bulge in the Corsair C70's side panels, I never would have fit the case back together. On the plus side, the height of the cooler means RAM clearance is not an issue at all. The fan sits about a full inch higher than my standard-height RAM. It's also surprisingly light - it supposedly weighs a little more than 1 lb. but it doesn't feel like it. I'm not at all worried about warping or cracking my motherboard.

Here it is running in normal light. I've chosen to run it with the red LED's because that's the theme of my case. Wait for it...

And here's the full case in the dark. Spooky! The power and HDD LED's bother me - I may mod those at some point. The case fans are Enermax TB Silence 120mm fans with red LED's - these are a little different than the TB Vegas Duo fan that the CPU cooler comes with, but they work well (though are not really "silent"). I'm also using the two Corsair plain black fans that came with my case - one on the bottom of the case, one in the back.

With this cooler, my stock temps dropped from 54C at load to 37C.

And I can't even hear it over my case fans, even at full load. It's 120mm and runs at the same speed, so there's no reason I would.

One thing I will caution with this or any other tower heatsink - use fan grills! I don't have any yet, but the one time I stuck my hand in there to try to change the LED color, I ended up with a fan smacking my finger, which led me to instinctively rip my hand out of the case, which then got caught on the top fin of the heatsink, which then bent. And it bent from the middle, so it's basically impossible to bend it back. Oh well. All for the lack of fan grills!

I recommend replacing the stock AMD cooler. And while I'm sure other coolers work just as well, I'm very happy with the results from this Enermax.

Next up: overclocking, and taming the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3's voltage regulator module!

Motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrade: going (almost) all the way

I mentioned earlier that it had been probably more than a decade since I last upgraded my PC. Sacrilege! When you go that long, things get away from you to the point that you can no longer just upgrade a component here and there - the interfaces don't even match up anymore. So a little while ago I had hit up Ebay for a used but somewhat recent Intel DP35DP and Q6600+ combo - just to get my feet back in the water:

This at least got my desktop up to the speed of my 2 year old laptop... but you know what? It just didn't look right in my Corsair Vengeance C70 case. That case demanded something beefier. I decided I wanted a modern gaming system again.

So when the latest Micro Center circular presented me with a deal I couldn't refuse, I jumped on it:

The components:

• AMD FX-8320 8 core CPU ($129, on sale from $179.99)
• Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 rev. 4 ($94, on sale from $159.99)
• Not pictured - 8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport RAM ($66, on sale from $99)

I took Micro Center's 2 year replacement "warranty" on the CPU - which even the service guy told me is basically just a 2 year extension on their return policy. Come back in 2 years, get a CPU upgrade for free! (Well, really for the $20 it costs for the warranty. Still a good deal.)

My previous desktop processor was an AMD Athlon XP... 12 years ago. I'd been Intel pretty much ever since. I was kind of disappointed to learn that AMD's still got a lot of the same issues with their CPU's - they run hotter than hell, they require their own electrical substation and their memory controllers were scrounged out of Intel's garbage dump - but their raw performance per dollar still can't be beat, and that's at stock speeds. An Intel CPU that runs this fast would cost twice as much, and have fewer cores. I do a lot of video encoding, so I can never have too many cores. Give me ALL THE CORES.

I also read after installing the 990FXA-UD3 that these boards are known for having heat issues with the voltage regulators - but more on that in another post (there is an easy solution).

It's actually a pretty sweet looking board - I like the black and, uh, black-ish silver look. Stock CPU cooler for now, but I'll be talking about upgrading that in another post. I wanted to see how much of a joke this cooler really was first. (Hint: it is more of a groan-inducing pun.)

Closeup of the RAM and CPU cooler. The RAM isn't the prettiest, but it gets the job done. It's also not the fastest, but it... gets the job done. AMD CPU's can't really stress RAM much anyway, so it's fine.

Installed. Matches the black C70 case perfectly. You will notice that I don't have a decent graphics card yet - that's the final piece of the puzzle, and I should have at least a GeForce GTX 760 by early June. Hopefully the 800 series will be around by then and will knock a few bucks off the cost of the 760's (I doubt I'll be able to afford an 860 regardless).

Installation of this board in this case was like butter - in fact I've never had an easier time building a computer (for all intents and purposes, this was a new build). Everything worked on the first try and even Windows 7 played nice - no reinstallation necessary, just a lot of new automatic driver installs and a call to Microsoft's automated re-activation service line. 

The full C70 case with the new components installed.

Performance-wise I can only give you some anecdotes. Right now I'm mainly using these new components for ripping and encoding Blu-Ray discs for my tablet - actually an extremely CPU-intensive task if you want decent quality and small file sizes. I'm using MakeMKV and Handbrake to do the work, encoding at the full 1080p using the "slower" preset, x.264 and "High" profile, no filters, 2 pass encoding at 2000mbps with turbo first pass. With the old Intel setup, I'd get maybe 9fps if I was lucky. (The Athlon XP gave me more like 1.5fps - intolerable!) The Q6600 was fast enough to do about one BD disc in a 24 hour day.

This new rig is giving me about 50fps on the first pass and 30fps on the second. That's at the stock 3.5ghz. That's fast enough to re-encode a BD disc in an evening. It feels very fast! But still, someday we'll be able to do this kind of thing in 5 minutes - there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Next up: CPU cooler upgrade and overclocking!

New monitor - ASUS PB238Q

I bought a new monitor, only my third in the last 15 years. This is a big deal - it's the one part of your computer that you're staring at literally the entire time you're in front of it. One big rule I've always had with my computers is don't skimp on the I/O devices. Keyboards, mice, monitors - I try to buy good ones and I buy 'em to last.

That said, I do have a budget. I chose an ASUS PB238Q. This actually isn't a brand new model, but that can be a good thing - it means the manufacturer's had time to work out the bugs. It also means that product's good enough to have been in production for a while.

Same goes for the Model M...

Whenever I shop for anything, I start out mostly "cold" but with a set budget and a set of bare minimum specs and features that I want. Then I filter and scan those products over and over and see if anything starts to jump out at me. Something always does. Then I say "that's the one!" and pull the trigger. I've never been steered wrong that way.

I knew I wanted at least 1080p, 23", a matte screen, an IPS panel, and DVI input. That was the minimum, and I wanted it for $200 or less. The more I looked, the more I knew the PB238Q was "the one". Check this:

• IPS panel (AH-IPS, from what I've read)
• 1080p matte screen
• Did I mention it's matte? Matte matte matte! The whole monitor is matte, including bezels and stand.
• 6ms response time (not as fast as a "gaming" monitor, but faster than many IPS panels - a good compromise for image quality)
• Pretty much every port you could ever need - VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort
• It comes with all of those cables! Well, except HDMI for some reason.
• Swiveling, height adjustable, tilting stand that also rotates 90 degrees
• USB hub if you care
• Speakers if you must, but they are extremely well hidden if you don't
• Chunky-ass construction - it looks like a tank, and it is!

I read before buying that some of these monitors have had cross-hatching issues, while others suffer from light bleed. Again, this is why it can sometimes be a good thing to buy an older design that's still in production - my monitor has neither of these issues. Mine was built in December 2013, so it's not an older panel that's been sitting on a shelf - it's a new build, and maybe they've just improved the quality control. The nice thing is that it seems like this thing was way ahead of its time when it was introduced in 2012, so it's still a good monitor today - but I only paid $206 for it (actually $168 after applying some credit card points).

Now, that said, it's not perfect - all LCD panels suffer from screen uniformity issues to one degree or another, and it's just a question of how noticeable it is. I'm particularly sensitive to this (it's a big reason why I have a plasma TV), and I do notice some lighter and darker areas of this screen with an even white or light grey background color, such as on many web sites. It's not visible in photos, videos or games and it's not bad even on white - in fact I couldn't capture it on camera - but I've seen more uniform LCD's than this one. Hey, at $200, there's still going to be a compromise or two - and this monitor seems to excel otherwise.

Not many ~$200 monitors can do this!

ASUS is capable of building solid stuff, and they're also capable of building junk. It depends on the line, and their mood that day. This is part of the "PB" series, which stands for "Professional Business" (the "PA" series is "Professional Artist" and is a notch higher - they take the time to pre-calibrate those displays). I've had the best luck buying "business" hardware even for gaming. "Business" and/or "Professional" is really just code in the computer industry for things that are built a little more rugged than your AOL-using grandma would need and less blingy than your pre-teen daughter would like. This monitor definitely has an old-school feel - and that's fine by me. It's made of very thick plastic, and the bezel has a matte texture - not the thin glossy crap that's trendy right now.

No, you can't see any uniformity problems above - that's just light from my window reflecting more off one side than the other. In fact, the right side is very slightly brighter than the left under even lighting.

You can actually see the better color accuracy of the PB238Q vs. my laptop in that photo, though. White on the PB238Q is white. Most people these days are used to the bluish tint that TN displays put out, but this thing displays white as white.

I will say that it's interesting how 1080p resolution almost looks low-res on a monitor this size these days, and if I replace this in a few years, that'll probably be why. My laptop's 1920x1080 also, and I'm used to the pixel density that res gives you on a 15" screen. I remember my 23" 1920x1200 Apple Cinema Display HD at work seeming unbelievably huge and sharp when I first got it about 8 years ago, but times do change. For desktop usage, you can definitely see the jaggies in text at 1080p on a 23" screen. Soon we'll all be moving to 4K... and then we'll need to be running 4 SLI graphics cards to keep up with that resolution.

The viewing angles and swivel stand in action! Honestly, my plasma TV's kind of spoiled me on viewing angles, but this thing's pretty good. Definitely better than my laptop, which is well-known for having a nice screen. (It's still probably TN, though.)

I'm not going to do a full review because honestly, it's not like I'd be the first and anyway, I don't have the equipment yet. My gaming graphics card is probably going to end up a birthday present, so for now I'll just be doing TV, movies and desktop stuff on this monitor. It's still a huge improvement over the $60 Hanns-G 16" TN monitor I was using before :)

Corsair Vengeance C70 case... abort! abort!

Just a follow-up to my previous post. Got my Corsair Vengeance C70 today. Hurrah! It's a beautifully badass case in person. Unfortunately, I immediately discovered this:

It's small (and I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, but part of the back and side top pieces seem to be overlapping the wrong way), but this thing cost me $109 on sale. I did think about just dealing with it, but come on. You shouldn't have to put up with poor manufacturing like this in a brand new product for any amount of money. It's going back.

This kind of thing seems to happen to me pretty much every time I order anything. I don't usually write about it, but my order history is littered with returns for manufacturing defects, shipping damage and just plain idiocy by the store I've ordered from. (The Guitar Center transgression linked above is not the only one; Newegg once sent me a TV with no packaging at all. It was literally just loose in a box, complete with accessories flopping around against the unprotected screen.)

It's particularly disappointing because I bought this case in part due to the many online videos espousing Corsair's manufacturing and quality control, and this specific case's "ruggedness". Oh well. Live and learn. (Learn what, though? I'd love to know how to have greater success buying products that aren't f'd up.)

The desktop PC lives! IT LIVES!

I just ordered this - my next PC (case):

It's a Corsair Vengeance C70. Has all the features I wanted: rugged all metal construction, tool-less design (in fact the side panels are held on by those visible latches, which is awesome), side window, lots of fans. And a reset switch that's got a flip-up cover like you're arming missiles in a fighter jet. It's got character without looking like H.R. Giger designed a Fisher Price toy, which describes most "gaming" cases these days.

I'm getting back into PC building. I used to do it, back when it was just a bunch of nerds trying to save money and not hardcore gamers trying to build the most tricked out LED-lit system possible. In fact, my current PC can still directly trace its lineage back to my first-ever DOS-based machine, a Packard Bell 486 desktop from ~1993 (it looked something like this). I eventually wanted to add more RAM, so I needed a new motherboard and a new case. I took the remaining stuff out and and put it all in an Antec tower that I never took pics of, then upgraded again to this stylish little number when my new video card wouldn't fit:

That was my PC from around 1998-2002. I liked that case a lot, with its frosted plexiglass, chrome accents and stark white body. This was when most people still had boring beige boxes (including Macs!). I couldn't even find a non-beige CD-ROM drive for it. That one is still from my old Packard Bell - it was one of the last components to get upgraded.

I also bought an IBM Model M keyboard in 1999, when they started to get really hard to find (mine was made in 1996, one of the last years of production):

Keep that in mind.

When I upgraded again in 2002, I went silver and black and jumped on the hot rod bandwagon:

This was a new thing at the time - windowed cases and internal components lit up like a Christmas tree didn't exist yet. At this point, there was finally nothing left of my Packard Bell. The floppy drive was the last component to go - it had to be black.

But I realized I pretty much had a whole second computer's worth of spare parts lying around - and what I still needed would only cost me about $100. So I decided to build a second machine in 2003 mostly from parts that used to be in the white machine above:

Lian Li - pure class, baby! This thing became a Home Theater PC. My first-ever post on this blog was about the wireless keyboard I bought to control this PC from my couch.

Eventually I got distracted by the novelty of gaming on a laptop, and when I did want to play on my couch, I reached for my PS2 or Dreamcast controller. My twin towers sat neglected, used mostly for things like cataloging photos and watching DVD's.

I just like this photo. My wife and I used to share the same desk.

At some point I swapped the guts of my two silver boxes with each other because I just liked the Lian Li better, and that became my primary machine. But it basically remained stagnant for close to 10 years.

This is my desktop now. Like, literally right now. Same case, same keyboard, same speakers. But I've finally upgraded it to something less than completely embarrassing. It's not a screamer, but I now have a Core 2 Quad with 4GB of RAM. So I'm only about 2 years behind instead of 11.

My hand was forced, and strangely enough it was my tablet that did it. I wanted all my concert BD's on my tablet, and neither Google nor Apple make that easy (because they want you to buy stuff again from them... which isn't really possible when all your stuff's from overseas). So I rebuilt this machine as a video ripping and encoding workstation.

But now I want to game on it. I never thought Steam would take off and I never thought I'd be into it, but it did and I am, and my laptop's getting a little long in the tooth for today's games. Time for more desktop upgrades! And I may as well make it look cool while I'm at it. Hey, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. In addition to the incoming case, I'm hopping back on that LED train, baby!

As for the Model M, probably gonna keep it for now. After all these years, it's still the One True Keyboard™. Though maybe I'll check out one of these to match my new case someday.

By the way, I watched a lot of reviews on YouTube as I narrowed down my case search. As a result, I now subscribe to this channel:

Can you guess why?

Yep, I really love her voice.

Cup no Fuchiko-san - Miss Cup Edge - Japan 11/2013

This was funny.

One of Japan's big memes right now is "Cup no Fuchikosan", these little capsule toy girls meant to sit on the edge of your cup. The name itself is a play on words - "fuchi" means "edge". They come in all different poses. My wife and I spent our entire dinner at Hooters Ginza playing with them. We got a lot of attention from the waitresses.

Apparently this has been going on for months now, but it was just on TV when we were there so there was another big run on these toys. We searched around all over for them and finally found them in a Tokyu Hands, which had a big display.

People have gotten really creative with these and now there are photo books and all manner of merchandise related to them. Amazon Japan has 11 pages worth of results for "Cup no Fuchikosan"!

We bought them in their original form, as capsule toys. Opposite that display above was a bank of capsule machines in the middle of the floor.

So cute!

Sony's "Perfect Day" PS4 commercial doesn't get the joke

I wrote about Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" in my post about the Most Amusingly Misunderstood Rock Songs, my listicle of songs that people and companies - especially companies - seem not to even listen to before appropriating them for their agenda. If you haven't read it, you should - it's one of my favorite posts that I've written (and it gets Googled a lot).

Anyway, Sony's now using this song in this PlayStation 4 ad that I'm seeing about six times an hour. And it's a glorious meta misunderstanding. They're actually using it ironically, which the song already is, but in a way that would only work if the song isn't. That's like one of those YouTube parodies of songs that are already parodies, always by people too dumb to realize the original song already is one. They're giving you a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge without realizing that that's already the joke and they're not in on it.

Well, I'm still buying a PS4.

I'm the 9th best player of MLB The Show in the world (and I could have been better)

I'm warning you now: this is a stupid post. Sometimes I write stuff here just to document things that I am personally proud of, even though I know not a single other person in the world will care. This is one of those times.

A full season after its release (meaning people have had a lot of time to get good at it), I've had the 9th best Road to the Show career in MLB The Show 2013 for PlayStation 3 of anyone in the country. I am a god of video game baseball.

Here's Professor Peanuts - that's my in-game nickname used by the announcers.

Those stats are other real people around the country. In some stats I'm higher than 9th (I think I'm 3rd or 4th in stolen bases), some a bit lower... I'm averaging it to 9th.

5,915 hits, .370 lifetime average, 1,468 home runs, 4,283 runs, 4,777 RBI's, and 1,381 stolen bases in a career that spanned 27 seasons and stints with the Nationals, Rangers, Brewers, Mets, Reds, Red Sox and Yankees. I won the World Series with every team at least once. I hit over .400 four times.

My MLB records:

I was happy to break that punk Barry Bonds' single season HR record. (And I did it clean! No PSN purchases of points - I earned them all legit.) But I was kind of sad to break Ichiro's hits record.

My all-time run record didn't get recorded - bug in the game. I was oh so close to that stolen base record! (I know, more steals isn't necessarily better.)

I could have kept going - here were my final season stats and ratings:

.357 BA, .754 slugging, 50 HR and 174 RBI's at age 45. All my ratings still maxed out. Stupid game forces retirement at 45. I really wanted to see how long I could stretch it out. Could I make it to age 60?? (There's a balancing act between performance and ratings, and it's supposed to get harder as you age, but I was having no trouble at 45.)

After about age 38, nobody will offer you a contract no matter how good you are, and you need to try out at spring training every year. No problem, easy to impress a team when you have 99 ratings in everything.

But at age 45, you just get this as soon as the off-season ends. The only option is "retire". That's not exactly realistic. Neither is a 60 year old player, but if a 60 year old player with better ability than most 20 year olds did exist, you can bet there'd be a team willing to take a chance on him.

This is the unceremonious retirement screen. If a guy like this retired in real life, they'd be having parades for him in every city in the country. All you get in this game is three lines of text about how everyone's gonna miss you. No better reward for all those hours put in? This is the ultimate role-playing game - it takes a long time to get to this point. I did some math and figured I must have spent about 400 hours just on this career. (I actually played a lot of the games; I didn't just sim everything.)

There were times when I wondered if there wasn't something more productive I could be doing with my life.

Anyway, can't wait until next season on the PS4. I'm gunning for you, "SMOKETHETHESKY"!