G.I. Joe : The Rise Of Cobra

Too late for reviews and nothing exceptional for a summer popcorn flick. Kudos for going to hell with the plot and story, this type of movie shouldn't even bother about the plot, just go for stylo fights and you have a winner. Michael Bay you hear that, screw the storytelling and focus on fights, yeah?

Exo-suits' screen-time too short and too meh, they should've scrap it altogether and kept them for any upcoming Crysis movie. There were only 2 good duels, both over too soon, which is real shame.

Reasons to watch:

• Ray Park as Snake Eyes
  
• Sienna Miller looking all stylo in leather.
• Shirtless Lee Byung-Hun (Storm Shadow). I found his spoken parts pretty good too, way better than some other non-native English speaking Asians.
  

There will be a second G.I. Joe movie, its a no brainer. They better give Snake Eyes more screen time especially the duels and bring back Lee Byung-Hun.

First Attempt At Soldering

Success, except for mixing up the position of two different colored LEDs. Ah well, at least it still worked. Will need to pick up some solder wick next time, couldn't remove a small but significant amount of solder from the incorrectly soldered LED(s). And one LED wasn't working...

Pardon this newb here going all hooha over soldering, but it's a new thing to me. It felt like brain surgery, you gotta keep a steady hand when feeding the solder wire to the iron. Oh, and the melted solder, LIQUID METAL!!!
I think I was supposed to have done soldering in Living Skills (Kemahiran Hidup) aeons ago, but being the lazy student I was(WAS!), I skipped class and left the solder parts in its packing collecting dust in some obscure corner of my room. I certainly regret throwing the whole packet away, now I have to buy them with mah own dough.

The ugly, and amateurishly soldered back of the circuit.
It's a flip-flop circuit, whatever that is. While I recognize the components, I have no idea how a bunch of resistors and a couple of capacitors & transistors work together. The LEDs form a heart shape and blinks. Need to redo another set to display in my car and room door. And, also understand what & how a flip-flop circuit works.

What I learned:

1. Tie up hair - My soldering iron has severely burnt hair on it.
   
2. Ventilation - I hadn't realized this until I left and re-entered my air-conditioned room, naturally it reeked of solder fumes.
3. Wet sponge and thinning the solder iron
4. Clear/Neat table - Bro very nearly touched the hot solder iron. *gasp*

DEFCON 17

Was held from 31 July to 2 August in Las Vegas. Makes me sad all the interesting stuff happens in places I could never go, would've been nice to attend the speeches, though it wouldn't be of much use to me since I have no hack skills, code or otherwise. Hopefully I'll have the time (and the discipline) to learn C-prog before the year ends.

A bit sad I missed the dates, assumed it was in mid-August or something, had planned to follow updates. Something always happens there.

In case you were wondering, Defcon is an annual tech & hacking conference. It has its own set of really unique events (eg coffee wars?) , but the main draw to me would be the guest speakers and badge hacking, and the occasionally 'happenings'(this year's was a fake ATM in the hotel spotted by a con-goer, among others).

July to August

I shall have to content with oogling at the TopGear calender since my main computer has been down for the past 2-3 weeks, courtesy of Virut. Missed 4 episodes I think, and there's no one to leech from =( Good handling pwns drag-racing anyday, L-Ferrari Scuderia & D-Dodge Challenger.

Gadget Woe : iPod Touch 2G

Said gadget is starting to freeze regularly, giving me an assortment of freeze sequences and patterns, very unlike computers that have specific symptoms. First started when I tried to play a video on low battery, then it kept getting more frequent. Not jailbroken, only music and minesweeper. Multiple hard reboots(sometimes it takes a handful before it finally works again...), restore imminent. Probably time to spring-clean my apps, music & videos anyway.

iPod-kun, don't die on me yet. But if you do, please do so before my warranty expires, kthxbai.

Very Much More Computer Woes

I shall wait for holidays to commence in a weeks time before attempting to restore that infected PC to working condition again. Reformatted, reinstalled, only to find out that my installers were infected too. PC has bricked, again. Maybe I'll just move on to Ubuntu since that PC is only used for web browsing & torrenting. Meanwhile, plugged in on rig instead.


Opened case, lots of HDD connecting and disconnecting. Careful not to spill chilled barley drink.

Keyword : Virut

Much More Computer Woes

I've gotten OS working on another partition, but its still infected, though haven't gotten the fatal explorer.exe error, which will be so sooner or later. This virus starts from , its found in the Windows>system32 folder. From what I've read, this virus variant modifies .exe programs, saved webpages and screensavers. Even goes through zipped/compressed files. So far I've managed to nominally block net access for it and 1.exe through a firewall, but I can't get netstat to stay open long enough to check my connections.

Here what happens, reader_s connects to net, downloads more malware. Your temp folder in Windows will be filled with illegible files(each prolly meant to send out spam), and multiple copies of InternetExplorer and svchost.exe show up in the task manager processes. But that's not all yet, since it modifies any ***.exe, its just a matter of time before it gets to crucial OS executables, then you'll have a corrupted OS. In other words, (as someone put it) a glorified lit-up brick.

Hopefully the computers stays in working condition until my hols, infected or not. Will try cleaning the registry in Safe mode without networking, if not then there's only zero-fill(HDD) left. Till then I just hope it doens't gain the ability to infect media files. Will also get Ubuntu asap.

ARE YOU INFECTED?

More Computer Woes

So I just wasted 10 hours of formatting and installing OS/drivers. After the mandatory restart from Service Pack 2 installation, OS was screwed. First it wouldn't boot normally, so I went into Safe mode to do a system restore. Next thing I knew, no OS detected.

Have installed OS(again...) on a second partition. My deduction is that some malware interfered the SP2, possibly carried over from the data copied from the infected HDD. But virus scan came back with nothing. It could be possible the OSes with the same serial clashed, I had a slave HDD with the same serial OS. But then again it was OK until SP2 was installed.

Another estimated 2 hours before SP2 finishes downloading. Got a fresh SP2 installation from microsoft site. Funny I couldn't access MS official site all this while until this OS install, malware again?

Computer Woes

The last month or so has brought an onslaught of tech woes, mainly computer-related. I'm typing this post as I'm in the midst of backing up a whopping 40GB of my mum's stuff on DVD.

So, what happened? A lot.
1) Serious virus infection.
2) Dying HDD.
3) Formatted the wrong HDD.
4) Ultimate, unremovable virus(es)

Solved (1) with simple scan through Spybot to remove system.exe

(2) was the source random freezes, finally escalating to a reboot loop. Bought new HDD, but it doesn't end there.

After making sure that all data were safely on the slave, I went through the motions of formatting the new drive. Scroll down, choose partition, press 'D', ENTER. I can't remember the exact sequence of events, but what I do remember is when I loaded a fresh OS, the first thing I did was check the secondary drive, only to be greeted by a pop-up asking me to 'Format drive to use'. Which meant that I had deleted the partition, which meant the HDD was blank, which meant every single bit of data accumulated over the past few years are gone, zilch.

So on to the web to look for ways to recover data. HandyRecovery4 worked well except for some files with name too long. Happiness.

Now onto (4), this batch of viruses, infected through USB drives, disguises itself as New Folder. Disables task manager, connects to the net on its own, and finally, screwed explorer. Impossible to do anything since its always running, including in Safe Mode. Only option left is a full format.

Building The Rig - Part 4

Part 1 - Pre-shopping Research
Part 2 - Buying & Assembling
Part 3 - Troubles
Part 4 - Look! It Runs Crysis!!1



Bro's blog has a trove of screenies.

Building The Rig - Part 3

Part 1 - Pre-shopping Research
Part 2 - Buying & Assembling
Part 3 - Troubles
Part 4 - Look! It Runs Crysis!!1

My personal adage, fortunately or unfortunately, never fails. When it comes to computers, nothing ever goes smoothly. After the assembling, it was time get those some juice into our rig. Lots of excitement on my bro's part, I tried to warn him.

To make things easier, I've arranged our woes in chronological order.

Booting up the tower
Since we only had one monitor, we had to switch VGA cables. (A VGA cable connects your monitor to your CPU.) Ready to plug into the new rig, only to find out that the new PSU only had one slot, already connected to main power line.
Solution: Bought a VGA-to-3pinplug, the same one that connects the PSU to the electrical socket.

No video input when the old comp was working 10 mins ago?!?
Before we went out to buy the VGA cable, I wanted to use the old computer. CPU boots ... "No video input" No way a perfectly fine computer could die in a space of 10 minutes. Panic & frustration on my part after an exhausting night assembling, sms-ed big bro. Opened the casing to reseat all the cards, while taking the opportunity to clean the CPU fan(which has since stopped its loud humming sound).
Solution: Bro had connected the VGA to the onboard graphics(which I assumed is spoilt or smtg) instead of the graphics card.

Formatting and OS installation went fine. Drivers and apps followed suite.

Every single game crashes
By this time, my bro and I were stressed out to the max. Plonking down RM3000, we envisioned the perfect gaming rig, capable of running the latest game engines smoothly and on high graphics settings. Horror of horrors, not one game could run longer than 30 mins. Its like buying a Lamboghini only to realise you can't drive it for whatever reason..
Awfully dreadful feeling, took the mood out of everything.

We spent about a few days scouring the web for solutions, updated drivers, tweaked with clockspeed and fanspeed, all to no avail. We reached our final straw and implored our dad to take us back to Low Yat to let the professionals handle it.

Culprit: Faulty RAM, unstable OS and the most crucial, I hadn't used the screws to separate the motherboard from the casing, resulting in the current getting grounded. In other words, the computer crashed due to insufficient power, especially when runnning games that stressed the system.
Switched to Kingston RAM as recommeneded, though Corsair's RAM looked cooler, but anything goes as long as the rig works.