Tomas' log of stuff

First test at blogging through Live messenger.

As we enter 2007 the number of US Troops killed in Iraq pass 3000 - who knows how many innocent Iraqis have been killed. I guess this signifies the trend for 2007 as well, another newsyear overwhelmed by signs of the Americans complete inability to "get" the middle east, and to figure out what to do with it. Or maybe as important - what *not* to do with it. Anyways, some pictures.

After 4 years with my trusty old Lian Li PC-6099 (image) case it's time to find something more suitable for the current inventory. The new high end components put higher demands on the case cooling, most noticably the passive motherboard cooling, and also the custom coolers I installed on the cpu and gfx card depend on a better airflow than this older case provides. It was a work of art at the time, but the quadruple 80mm fixed speed fans make too much noise compared to the effect.

After several months of waiting and watching Lian Lis product lineup, considering cases such as the excellent PC-V1100BplusII and PC-S80 I finally found a case I think is just what I need. Lian Li PC-A10B is an extremely stylish case with an excellent airflow design which while it isn't specially noise dampened as such, should allow me to run with all fans at minimum speed and thus become practically silent. If there's still some resonnance or something I'll consider adding pads on the side walls.

It's also getting great reviews over at Overclockers Café and Case.Closed, which is no disadvantage either :)

I also took the opportunity to add a card reader to the system so I don't need to get the portable reader from the camera backpack each time I want to read the CF cards. This excellent Sunbeam I/O panel adds e-sata, usb, and audio connectors as well as fan controls to the package.

I've been holding off posting here because I've been hoping to find somwhere with a wifi hotspot, but so far all I've got is a few locked down networks and dodgy gprs links. So I guess I'll have to postpone posting more pics and catch up with that later. Until then I guess I'll post some text updates. We stopped by the aquarium in Bergen on Saturday. I got some nice shots of the penguins there, just for Baldido. They even had some Gentoo penguins there... The bio-tech-geekness factor over there was almost overwhelming. The rest of the aquarium was pretty cool too.

Friday was spent driving acrosss Norway from Oslo to Bergen in great weather and through some impressive scenery. We deliberately took a route that noone had taken before or not in so long that they didn't remember it anyway. We didn't stop much, so I didn't take many pictures during the day, but I Uploaded two to picasaweb, one from Aurland and one from Gudvangen.