Search results

  1. M

    WiFi coverage options for a house

    I'm renting a two-storey house which I want to cover with WiFi. The problem is the first-floor ceiling seems to be made of concrete or something that blocks WiFi signal. The signal is great on the same floor as the router, but as soon as I climb the stairs the signal decreases to almost nothing...
  2. M

    Need a new PC in Middle Earth

    Handbrake, gaming. Day to day usage isn't so heavy, but encoding blu-rays takes a lot of multithreaded CPU power. Aiming around $3000, but everything will probably be from New Zealand - simply not worth it to ship from another country because of shipping costs and customs taxes. New Zealand...
  3. M

    I miss duck

    I'm living in a fucking backward town of 70,000 people where you can't buy duck to save your life, and the only Chinese restaurant serves "Peking Duck" like this: The worst thing is the backward-ass provincials here think this is the "real deal". Fuck me.
  4. M

    Looking for a case

    I just moved into a new place and bought a new desk. Because of the rather unique design constraints of the room, my existing case (an Antec 900-2 from about 6 years ago) no longer fits. What I'm looking for is a case that can be placed on a desk rather than at my feet. I'm looking at the...
  5. M

    What's happening here?

    This seems to happen pretty much every time my computer loses its internet connection, which given our terrible internet is once every 5-10 minutes on average - but that's another story. For comparison, the tiny little blip to the left of the big spike was around 800kbps out and 500kbps in -...
  6. M

    Home (network) improvement

    TLDR: Not so good internet connection. Looking for ways to improve it for me. I'm living in a flat with a couple other people. I'm by far the heaviest user of the internet, probably about 200-300GB a month. The second guy (let's call him No2) uses maybe 40GB a month (Skype and Youtube), the...
  7. M

    Weird HDMI issues with audio out

    I have an LG IPS224 connected to my laptop via HDMI. The video works fine. The audio is really annoying. By default it seems that if the laptop has an HDMI in, the audio goes through the HDMI. I'd really like for the audio to come directly out of the 3.5mm jack on my laptop, but either I'm...
  8. M

    External GPU

    Does anyone have experience with using an external GPU with a laptop? I have an Acer Aspire S7, so connectivity is a bit limited, but there is an HDMI out which should be able to provide the bandwidth. Is it possible to buy an HDMI-in, PCIe-out adaptor, or buy a GPU designed for external use?
  9. M

    Help me out here

    I'm not very good with social protocols and such, but I had a question. In a party or other kind of situation where you're mingling with people you don't normally talk to, if you're talking to someone and they say they're just going to get a drink or food or whatever, is the expectation that...
  10. M

    My 6950 acts like an iGPU

    As above. I reinstalled Windows cause I had some problems with the way the GPU was working originally, but now that I've done it I can't get it to work properly at all anymore. I've installed the drivers and done everything else I should have, but it's still that jerky, low res weirdness that...
  11. M

    I have a shapely leg

    Of lamb. ~2.4kg / 5.3lb It's defrosting right now. Suggestions for slow roast?
  12. M

    Netflix calling out US ISPs

    http://www.dailytech.com/Verizon+Threatens+to+Sue+Over+Netflix+Congestion+Warnings/article35026.htm Can someone explain to me just how Netflix appealing to their customers is going to help? If I understand correctly, many places have only one ISP, and thus there are really no consequences...
  13. M

    A couple of networking issues with Acer Ultrabook

    As some of you may know, recently I was in the US and there I purchased an Acer Aspire s7. Now that I'm back in New Zealand I'm having some issues with WiFi and whatnot. 1. The laptop won't automatically connect to my home's network. When I get home, I have to manually disconnect from the...
  14. M

    Concatenated passwords

    So if I have a password, abcd1234, for a website, and a second password, efgh5678, for a second website, how secure would the concatenated password, abcd1234efgh5678, be? If someone is attempting an account hack on someone, is it common practice to add combinations of already-known passwords to...
  15. M

    Chrome doesn't register certain mouseclicks

    Anyone have this issue? I have an Acer Aspire S7 (the 2014 version). It's touchscreen as well, which will become important later on as it's where things start to get confusing. So I've noticed that after a while of browsing Chrome, the program will stop registering certain actions from the...
  16. M

    $25 a day

    So, as some of you know I was recently in California, and that I rented a car for the duration. Well, during the same trip my parents took the opportunity to come up as well and we spent a bit of time together in Arizona and Utah going around looking at rocks. The thing is that I'm 23, and...
  17. M

    Dear California: a PSA

    Driving a big SUV doesn't make you a better driver. Tailgating doesn't make you a good driver. Being able to go fast in a straight line doesn't make you a good driver. Being able to cut people off doesn't make you a good driver. Knowing how to use the horn doesn't make you a good driver. Being...
  18. M

    LA traffic

    Can someone explain to me the following situation: I'm driving along, mid-Saturday afternoon (so shouldn't be too much traffic) at 50-70. You know, speed limit, flow of traffic, etc. etc. Then, out of the blue, everyone starts stopping. I go from 60 to literally a standstill in a quarter mile...
  19. M

    Looking at a new laptop

    http://www.amazon.com/Sony-SVP1321GG...s=svp1321ggxbi Basically I want: Ultrabook-style form factor. Definitely less than 4lb. 8GB RAM 256GB SSD. Budget $1500 hard max. Very much prefer <$1300. 1080p display would be nice but optional. Pretty much everything else spec-wise is...
  20. M

    Leaving for LA tomorrow...

    Any recommendations for things to see/do/eat? I'm there for 4 weeks, but I don't know how much free time I'll have. My friends who have been to LA before say I have to go to the Cheesecake Factory, and In-N-Out, etc. Also, I'll need a SIM card and a plan, and I'm tossing up between these...
  21. M

    Anyone tried Office 2013?

    We got it as part of the Home Use program. Having used it for about 3 hours (just Word for now) it feels like a piece of shit. Pretty much every single action now has an animation, even the caret moving, and it's been smoothed out and slowed down like it's trying to hide a hardware/software...
  22. M

    WTF did I just see...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmsRcsl_xA Enjoy.
  23. M

    I'm watching Life after People

    The most annoying thing about the show is the incessant dramatisation of even the most mundane things. Want to say snakes rise up? Can't say "the snake population grows". Oh no. You have to say "65 million years after the age of the dinosaurs, snakes, the eternal symbol of evil, once again STAGE...
  24. M

    I just started...

    rewatching the whole Star Trek series. I decided to start with I - III first, then the original trilogy after. Currently at IV. This was the second time ever watching the Phantom Menace. I was 11 when it came out, and I couldn't figure out why people hated on it so much. Well, now I get...
  25. M

    LA ATOTers:

    I have a few questions. I'm going to LA next March for 5 weeks, and I'm deciding whether to get a car or not. Cause I'm under 25 it's going to cost somewhere in the vicinity of $1300 for the month, so I'm not really sure it's a good decision. * In general, how reliable is the public transport...
  26. M

    Need a phone

    Ever since my SGS3 died a few months ago I've been (barely) surviving with my SGS. I didn't realise it when I bought it, but the SGS really is just a cheap knock-off of the iPhone 3GS - it looks exactly like the 3GS, it tries to act exactly like the 3GS, and on both counts it imitates well, but...
  27. M

    Is there any chance...

    Of Anandtech or someone else doing a David Kanter-style re-analysis of PhysX? You guys might remember this article here, written by David Kanter basically talking about how the CPU PhysX is somewhat deliberately written in x87 instead of SSE to gimp performance. Nvidia said that with...
  28. M

    Computer spazzing, need help

    This morning my computer just decided to up and stop working in the weirdest way. When I started my computer this morning, before it got to the Windows loading screen, it BSOD'd. I didn't get a picture or anything before it restarted. After that, it would just not start at all. After POST it...
  29. M

    Netflix

    What's the deal with what/when they add to their collection? I know TV shows sometimes go on as they're broadcast or relatively soon afterward, but some movies and some shows are only available in DVD or not available at all. Do Netflix add to their streaming collection gradually over time...
  30. M

    Can someone please tell me...

    WTF is wrong with this sentence: "A continued hypertensive state results in further damage to the renal circulation, causing leakage of more massive blood components, including proteins such as albumin, which had previously been confined to the intravascular space." Word keeps throwing a fit...
  31. M

    Video Games Live on Twitch

    http://www.twitch.tv/twitch/new Didn't search, so don't know if it's a repost or not, but I thought people might be interested. They're starting with interviews from composers of video game music and producers etc. involved with the recording and the concerts, the actual Video Games Live...
  32. M

    Diophantines

    So first off, just as an FYI: already figured out the answer. No "do your own homework" posts please. My final equation for this problem simplifies down to 98x - 5 = 199y, where both x and y are integers below 100. My problem is that diophantine equations don't really seem to be about elegance...
  33. M

    Blink

    Does anyone know when a stable (i.e. not a nightly) Google Chrome build based on Blink rather than Webkit will be released? Read the Techspot article about Google cutting out 9 million lines of code from Blink, and was wondering when I might be able to test it out, especially on my phone where...
  34. M

    Higgs and mass

    So the Higgs boson has (probably) been found, and it's mass is (probably) around 125 GeV. And my understanding is that this particle is responsible for all mass in the universe. My question, then, is this. A proton is just shy of 1 GeV, so how does a proton get its mass derived from the Higgs...
  35. M

    Subs showing in VLC but not MPC-HC

    So I have a video encode of Les Miserables in mp4, H.264 in Handbrake. The subtitles are in the video, but aren't burnt in and aren't on by default. The first couple of times I played the file after I encoded it, the subtitles worked perfectly. However, I stopped playing it for a week and...
  36. M

    Can one one help explain this to me?

    I plugged my SGS3 to charge last night, and then halfway through the night it seems to have stopped charging. The list of processes doesn't show anything unusual, and it isn't awake or anything for a particularly large amount of time at night (as you can see from the graph). Is it something...
  37. M

    Is my keyboard dying?

    Last week I had this problem where my keyboard would only register alternate keypresses for some keys (e.g. when I press . it would only register as > ) and most of the time it wouldn't do capitals at all, even when the Shift key or the Caps Lock key was down. This was annoying, and I thought...
  38. M

    Identify me a spider

    Couldn't get a photo of it because it was too small for my phone camera to focus properly, but I found it while picking blueberries. It was around 5mm long with a diamond-shaped abdomen and 2-3mm long legs. The body was light brown, but there were 2 stripes on its back running horizontally...
  39. M

    The Verge

    I am disappoint. My friend said the Verge was this awesome site with great reviews. So I went on there expecting something that would give me a site with the kind of attention to detail and precision as Anandtech. And then I go on there and discover it's little better than the likes of CNet or...
  40. M

    Peugeot 207 vs Suzuki Swift GLX

    So we're looking for a new car, and we have pretty much narrowed it down to two choices, the Peugeot 207 and the Suzuki Swift GLX. Both are small 4-door hatchbacks, the 207 is 1.6L and the Swift is 1.4L. Pros about the Swift: It's a manual It's got the indicators on the right hand side...