Rant 642 / Stay Cool

After so many months of almost daily graphics card crashes, I'm beginning to consider searching for a way to solve this not-very-life-threatening issue. First is to come up with the cause.

My prime suspect is heat. It is only logical.

So I googled for it and found this interesting list of mad ways to cool your PC. I didn't know cooking oil is an electrical insulator.

The case fan case actually looked doable but apparently it takes a bit of software skills since the motherboard controls the case fans. You'll have to adjust the BIOS or something to make it run all the fans as one.

Couldn't find anything easy and practical.

One solution I thought might have worked was to attach an extra fan on top of a fan on the casing, but according to some those fans will wear out faster since they're designed to last only if they run below a certain speed. An extra fan will make the original fan run faster.

Next I found this programme called SpeedFan which allows me to check the temperature in my computer to confirm my suspicion. I will be keeping an eye on this programme from now on, especially when I get crashes.

Right now, my graphics card (GPU?) is running at 55 degrees Celsius, which is surprising given that I'm sitting here in my air-conditioned room with the air conditioner blowing straight at my computer at fan speed 2 out of 5 and set to 25 degrees Celsius.


Then it shot up 4 degrees when I opened Empires.


10 mins after I switched off my air conditioner, it rose by 2 degrees. No game is running at the moment.














The "trick" in creating the 3D illusion is to have 2 slightly different images sent to each eye.

I was playing Empires when someone mentioned "parallax mapping". Having no idea what that means, I thought that maybe it had something to do with 3D because it reminded me of parallax error.

It was then that I thought that what if you have 2 monitors, and each monitor can only be seen by one of your eyes? Now if the game allows for 2 cameras side by side, each feed going to each monitor, wouldn't I be seeing 3D if I place a cardboard in between the monitors to split my view?

If so, is there a more portable way to do it? Monitors aren't cheap after all.

What if we have 2 screens as small as those on handphones? Place them in a helmet and the only problem there would be the temperature.

Or else, two periscopes combined to form some sort of huge glasses is possible too. The point is to split my view such that each of the two visual input only goes to one eye.

In the case of the periscope/spectacles, each monitor can be placed to the right and left of the user. The periscopes will then direct the sight of each eye to the respective side. The problem here will then be the weight, unless it is combined with the headphones so that the top of the head is used to support it.

Now I'm pretty sure the programming part wouldn't be that hard. In fact, I think mods can be made to implement such a view in games. But I am not a programmer, so this may not be true.

If this works, any game can be made 3D.













So the other day I ordered from a flyer we received recently. Name's Pastamania and the price is slightly higher than what I'm used to. But we can't eat Mac all the time, right?

So my order went above S$50.

Ordered a Family Treat combo plus a Banana Desert Pizza and a Apple Crumble Pizza.

In the Family Treat combo, I picked

Vongole Fusili with Home-made Broth
Creamy Chicken Fusili
Regular Salami pizza
Regular Hot Basil Chicken

(Vongole home-made broth = a white-coloured clam broth, regular pizza = 10")

Those 4 were the customizable ones. The combo also came with 3 chicken wings (plain and came with some not-particularly-special chilli sauce), 2 sets of garlic toasts (about 6 1-2cm thick slices of french loaves) and 5 cans of Coke.

The two main course pizzas were not outstanding except they only come in thin crusts. The pasta was good but I don't eat pasta outside often anyway. The chicken wings were the same as those anyone can find in any hawker centre. Garlic toasts were garlic toasts... okay at least they were crunchy and not soggy.

The cans of Coke were one of the first things that caught my eye. Almost no other restaurants give this many cans and there's a good reason for it.

Coke is incredibly cheap. In powder form, some (if not all) restaurants can buy it so cheap it costs less to acquire than mineral water. In fact it is cheaper to buy Coke at McDonald's than mineral water. Since the cans and the extra water do not cost a lot more, it's easy to see that restaurants can buy them in bulk at extremely low prices.

Hence, anyone who knows these can deduce that those cans of Coke are there as a very cheap way to bulk up the list to make it look like it's worth more. Cheap filler.

Still, we wanted to try it. At first I only picked the combo but I thought I'd add in those two dessert pizzas to make it a little more different from the usual stuff we can get from Pizzahut.

The dessert pizzas are smaller but they are something I've never tried before. They aren't particularly sweet, which is good, and quite filling for desserts at those prices. The Apple Crumble pizza costs S$4.30 and the Banana Dessert pizza costs S$3.90.

The Apple Crumble pizza contained slices of canned apples and sprinkled with, well, crumbles. These "Crumbles" tasted like the pie crust except crunchier and sweeter. It's probably a modified version of a pie crust dough made with more sugar and torn into bits before baking.

The Banana Dessert pizza contained slices of bananas and chocolate chips. The more accurate name for this is a chocolate banana pizza.

Both of these might have been very sweet if not for the abundance of pizza crust relative to the amount of sweet toppings.


I'm not sure if I will be ordering it again. I like the pasta but they need to come up with a more decent combination. Using Coke just makes it look cheaper IMO.