… and yet, I managed to get my USB stick to half-working condition again. Not great, but good enough to get my data off of it. Oh yeah, this one also broke during my year long 2008 – Year of the Dead Hardware ‘event’, even before my headset died. Actually, it wasn’t really a hardware failure that caused it to break but my own, dumb self. While at Games Convention 2008, I had stuck it into the front-USB port of one of the recording PCs and while I was messing with said PC, trying to get its capture card to work, which was a pointless adventure as I later uncovered its built-in cinch connector wasn’t for video at all and I was missing a dongle for it to channel the cinch video input to it’s S-Video connector, …. but I disgress. So I had stuck my USB Stick into this PC and as I kept getting under the table, to mess with the video inputs, and back up, I ended up kneeling down on the stick and breaking its connector off. Not a happy moment, but it’s all better now! ;)
Given the bad omen that the old call sign brought my new PC (its motherboard died about 14 days after I built it), I’ve decided to change its name. Granted, the old name was a troublesome Kilrathi colony, the new one is the Kilrathi homeworld which eventually got blown to bits by the Temblor Bomb. (Yeah, I’m a huge Wing Commander fangeekdork.) Hopefully that won’t happen to my freshly reassembled box. ;)
P.S. Huge thanks to computeruniverse who kindly replaced the defective motherboard for free (incl. shipping and everything). They’re definitely worth their money!
Doctor Frankstein would be so proud, but let’s start this story from the top. In the beginning, there was darkness. Then, a whole lot happened (insert your favourite religious or scientific belief about how Life, the Universe and Everything eventually happened to exist, here) and by the end of the year 2007 A.D., I found myself half-wanting, half-coerced to buy a new PC. The fact that my most recent system, named ‘Citadel Station’ after the space station on which pretty much all of the System Shock 1 game’s story was set, was over five years old (check the date on these gallery pictures), and that it broke down completely, might have influenced my decision making process a little. The end result is that one Sunday afternoon I sat down and ‘clicked together’ a new machine. (more…)
All right, I’ve been to lazy to write again, but I guess this one needs to be finished. So, together with a few of my fellow gamer-FM colleagues, I went to Leipzig last weekend to do the audio/video techie stuff for a booth there. Read on for a small recap and the link to the few pictures I made. (more…)
Whew. After having spent over a week in Hannover, I’ve finally made it back. In case you hadn’t noticed, I went to CeBIT for the World Cyber Games 2006 Samsung Euro Championship, together with a few friends from gamer-FM, to help with the coverage of the event. Now before you start asking what’s new in the IT world, let me tell you that I haven’t seen anything from CeBIT apart from our booth in Hall 27, the Heise booth in Hall 5, which I visited to grab the latest Knoppix DVD and get my PGP key signed, and parts of Hall 14 and 15, which I passed through on my way from Hall 27 to Hall 5 and back. I can tell you that we used an Analog Way EVX8022 Video Switcher/Mixer and 3 dual core AMD PCs for Video/Media Playout and Streaming/Recording stuff though, but you probably don’t care anyway.
Oh, I did snap a few pictures here and there (whenever I remembered to and wasn’t too lazy to go get my camera) which you can marvel at in the brand new gamer-FM @ SEC 2006 gallery.
