In late 2007, I purchased a Zune 80. I had weighed the options available, the design of units at the time, and the software used to sync them. My experience with iTunes and a borrowed iPod nano had been, suffice to say, less than stellar. Of course, the Zune software was just as clunky, but […]
So, you all know the problems I have had the past few months with video scaling, right? Well, with me having to restore windows on this machine, I naturally had to reinstall the video card drivers, and what would you know, scaling actually works again via GPU. All I can say is that something is […]
So, sometime last year, I decided to see just what the Windows ReadyBoost feature would do on my desktop machine. Yes, I know the feature is designed with laptops in mind, but at the time I did not yet own a Windows 7 based laptop, so there really wasn’t much I could do, save for […]
So, for yet another year, rumor around the internet is that Apple is finally going to kill off the Mac Pro computer line. It’s the same story as previous years: Apple has not said anything major about any changes to the Pro line, when compared to the typical overhauls done every season to the other […]
So, right, with all this talk about Instagram on Android, and me being a guy who likes to take random photographs, I decided to check it out. Oh, those on my Facebook can see the chaos that has come. I have been snapping pictures of virtually any possibly interesting scene just to try out the […]
So, here we are. 5 years ago today, I sat down with a friend and registered the domain https://www.xadara.com. 5 years ago I made the decision to set up a top-level domain presence on the internet. I don’t honestly know how I came up with the name. I know I wanted something unique… something I […]
Eeyup… 5 years is a long time on the internet… especially for a site that has been funded as a labor of love. I am already writing a small history of the site… one entry in which I just posted before this one, so I will leave you all with just the cake… 🙂
So, upon waking up today, I learned that Nvidia had released a new driver set (295.73). Cool, after waiting 2 months, I had another chance to get my video card scaling working again. Wrong. These drivers behave identical to the previous set, or indeed, ANY driver set I try to use: they simply refuse to […]
Yeap. The Xadara blackout in protest of SOPA and PIPA has ended, along with that of apparantly a dozen or so “major” websites, many websites with cult followings, and indeed, possibly over 1000 smaller sites, and personal web pages. It actually seemed to have a good effect, as President Obama reportedly said he would refuse […]
From 8Am to 8Pm tomorrow, January 18th, 2012, Xadara will be “on strike” as it were, in protest to the ProtectIP and SOPA laws trying to be passed through the United States governmental system. I’m not going to make some longwinded post about such, explaining what these things are, why these laws are so horrible […]
So, yesterday, I had to fix a friends laptop. The machine in question had your now classic situation of malware that behaved like normal antivirus software. This type of malware is beyond annoying for the simple fact that it tends to restore itself after a cleaning. Indeed, just being able to even gain access to […]
Power supplies are the most overlooked component on any computer. However, in many ways, it is the most critical part of the entire machine. Without enough power to the components, even the most capable system on Earth will behave poorly, if even boot. For me, my OEM 250 Watt power supply (a Lite-On 5251-08) just […]
If you use facebook, then you HAVE to have seen this happen more than you would like: Someone posts a status, and then, they like their own status. Now, if this is a post celebrating something major, or if the person has finally expressed something they have wanted to say for years, then it is […]
Why can’t video cards ever keep correct aspect ratio? It’s very simple: If you are playing a game on a widescreen monitor, and the game is in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, the game should display in that ratio, with black columns appearing on the side of the monitor. It should not be stretched […]
It was bound to happen within the first 2 years: I thought my video card was dying. Well, more correctly, I though the fan on it was dying. The card, a PNY produced Nvidia GeForce 9800GT, was overheating, reaching temperatures of just over 100 degrees Celsius, in effect cooking itself to death. Even with the […]