It doesn’t work.

Okay, that’s a lit­tle bit un­fair; it’s prob­a­bly more ac­cu­rate to say that it doesn’t work as ex­pect­ed. The Tu­niq Sanc­tum hard drive en­clo­sure is a 5.25″ bay de­vice that holds a 3.5″ (or small­er, I sup­pose) hard drive, and pur­port­ed­ly not on­ly re­duces the noise out­put of the drive but al­so helps to keep it cool. This de­vice, un­for­tu­nate­ly, ex­cels at one aspect of its claimed pur­pose and fails at the other. While it does in­deed keep noise levels down very ac­cept­ably, the Tu­niq Sanc­tum en­clo­sure, due to the lack of air­flow in­side the de­vice, fails to cool the hard drive ad­e­quate­ly. In fact, leav­ing the hard drive in­side the en­clo­sure will prob­a­bly de­crease the hard drive’s life­time due to the 60+ de­grees Cel­sius tem­per­a­tures some­times ex­pe­ri­enced in­side the de­vice. Read more…

There’s been a lot of talk re­cent­ly about why PC gam­ing is “doomed”, main­ly be­cause of the ev­er-grow­ing amount of PC game pira­cy. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think that PC gam­ing is doomed at all, although I do think there will be a sig­nif­i­cant shift in the way the PC game mar­ket works – to­wards a more con­trolled dis­tri­bu­tion mod­el, per­haps, like Steam.

This is what I think about pira­cy, how­ev­er. It’s a self-sus­tain­ing cy­cle, in a way: high video game prices en­cour­age gamers to pi­rate games in­stead of buy­ing them, “forc­ing” video game man­u­fac­tur­ers to raise prices or keep prices high in order to not lose rev­enue. Those high prices in turn con­tin­ue to en­cour­age pira­cy. This loop is not nec­es­sar­i­ly un­break­able, though there are sev­er­al fac­tors that, in my opin­ion, con­tribute to its sus­te­nance: Read more…

This is a neat trick I found in Fire­fox. This works at least in Fire­fox 3 and may al­so work in Fire­fox 2; I do, how­ev­er, en­cour­age you to up­grade if you’re still us­ing Fire­fox 2, as the third re­lease brings about many need­ed en­hance­ments in per­for­mance and mem­o­ry usage. Us­ing a book­mark, one can turn the lo­ca­tion bar in­to a sort-of com­mand parser, there­by cre­at­ing a sort of “key­board short­cut” for that book­mark. This in ef­fect al­lows you to cre­ate your own cus­tom “key­board short­cuts” or “lo­ca­tion bar com­mands”. Here’s an ex­am­ple of how it works. Say I want to cre­ate a short­cut for Google Im­age Search. I can go to the Im­age Search page, and right click the box, and se­lect “Add a key­word for this search”:

En­ter some name for your search; the name doesn’t mat­ter. (Al­ter­na­tive­ly, you could sim­ply cre­ate a new book­mark; its tar­get (“lo­ca­tion”) should be some­thing like http://www.google.com/search?q=%s, where %s rep­re­sents what will be searched on. Right-click the book­mark you just cre­at­ed and click “prop­er­ties”.) This di­alog box will pop up:

In “key­word”, type the “com­mand” that you wish to use to ac­cess this short­cut. In this case, I would use some­thing like “imgs” or “is”. One-let­ter key­words do not seem to work very well. On­ce you have en­tered the key­word and closed the di­alog, you can type in the lo­ca­tion bar (press CTRL+L to get there quick­ly):

imgs cute pup­pies

Press en­ter, and be­hold your search un­fold­ing be­fore your eyes.