What's new

30 June 2009

Hey, whaddaya know - there's another Photon-light sale on!

This one gives 20% off all lights and accessories (including all rechargeable and non-rechargeable batteries), and there's a smattering of other markdowns.

As usual, I get a cut of the action if you click here and buy something!

22 June 2009

A bold new computer metaphor.

21 June 2009

Letters!

19 June 2009

I haven't begged for money for more than nine months...

...so I thought I'd have a really big beg this time.

Anybody wanna help me buy a new PC?

19 June 2009

Next stop, clay tablets: It's possible to back up computer data onto ordinary paper. And it's less silly than it sounds!

8 June 2009

I just wrote a blog post about a couple of Australian "economic stimulus" programs which Aussie readers might find interesting.

(My apologies to readers who already subscribe to my blog's feed.)

31 May 2009

Letters!

16 May 2009

Which kind of sci-fi super-battery should you ask the aliens for?

30 April 2009

Letters!

(Also, mail to dan@dansdata.com was bouncing for a bit. It's fixed now, though; please re-send anything that didn't get through.)

18 April 2009

Would you like to live forever?

31 March 2009

Ask Dan: A PC for the parents?

24 March 2009

Letters!

13 March 2009

In the unlikely case that you have not yet bought quite enough Photon lights, they've got another sale running now. The list prices for various of their products have been reduced a bit now, and there's a "March Madness" sale running on top of that, until the end of the month

As usual, I get a cut of the action if you click here and buy something.

26 February 2009

A "200Hz screen" can be any one of at least three different things.

23 February 2009

Letters!

21 February 2009

We're all prisoners of game theory.

25 January 2009

Letters!

24 January 2009

Are you going to believe me, or your lying eyes?

14 January 2009

I'm back from my holiday, and yesterday wrote what almost amounts to another flashlight review on my blog.

(If you'd like to be automatically notified of new posts on Dan's Data and How To Spot A Psychopath, I remind you that the Dan's Data feed is here, and the How To Spot A Psychopath one is here.)

2 January 2009

I done reviewed me a hard drive.

It's all environmentickal.

31 December 2008

More letters!

31 December 2008

GPGPU and the Law of New Features.

18 December 2008

More letters!

16 December 2008

Letters!

16 December 2008

Four SATA SSDs, compared.

(Plus one low-cost ring-in.)

10 December 2008

Photon sales mentioned too frequently here. This one reduced to point form:

* Many price reductions
* Free US/cheap international shipping continues
* I get a cut if you click this and buy something

Message ends.

10 December 2008

Letters!

4 December 2008

Letters!

29 November 2008

Whoops - I forgot to mention, even though I'm sure you were all hanging on my every word, that the Photon Light people have a 15%-off-all-lights Thanksgiving sale going at the moment. It ends on the third of December.

(They're also still doing the free/super-cheap shipping deal I mention below.)

26 November 2008

Internet washing machines, and magic rip-off boxes.

21 November 2008

Ask Dan: Box O' Drives wanted.

11 November 2008

Letters!

4 November 2008

Ask Dan: Intel or AMD?

4 November 2008

Ask Dan about RAM.

27 October 2008

Letters!

26 October 2008

On nontransitive relationships.

You know - like in Street Fighter.

16 October 2008

I wanted to love this thing. But the manufacturers just won't let me.

11th October 2008

The Photon Light people are doing the free/flat-rate shipping thing again. All orders ship free in the USA, or for a flat rate of only $4 for international deliveries. No matter how much stuff you buy.

(And you still get volume discounts, which start at quite small "volumes".)

Their "Knives and Tools" department also now has a selection of Leatherman tools, including the nifty new Skeletool and Skeletool CX and the classic Leatherman Wave. If you want something key-ring sized, they've also got the not-at-all-new but still-very-good Leatherman Micra, and three models of the more recent "Squirt" - the P4, S4 and E4.

The full-sized tools are all as cheap as I've seen them anywhere; the Micras and Squirts cost a buck or three more than the usual online-store price. But the free-or-cheap shipping deal more than makes up for that.

There's also a closeout deal on the versatile "Fusion" light I reviewed years ago. It's not cutting-edge technology any more, but it's also not almost sixty bucks any more. While they last, Fusions - including the funky red- or blue-beam versions - are now only $US31.95.

And, as usual, if you follow my affiliate links and then buy something, I'll get a cut!

6th October 2008

I'm sorry there haven't been many updates here, but I've been blogging like crazy on my other site.

If you're unable to get through the day without reading something I've written, I suggest you subscribe to my blog's RSS feed as well as the one for this site.

28th September 2008

Letters!

27th September 2008

Lemon-fresh power supplies.

14th September 2008

Letters!

8th September 2008

Ask Dan: Network nuisances.

7th September 2008

Ask Dan: Video fiddling.

7th September 2008

Ask Dan: Sound 'n' such.

3rd September 2008

I haven't begged for money for several months now...

...but I had a Hobbylink Japan order open for a while, and now they've finally gotten the backordered stuff together and want me to pay them. But in the meantime I've bought other crap on eBay with my PayPal slush fund, so there's not quite enough balance left!

The horror!

I may have to pay for this with money from my own actual bank account!

You therefore have two options:

1: Pitch in a couple of bucks, if you like this site, to help me purchase a Solar Science Coaster, a Science Egg Experimental Telescope, a Cross Copter, a Mechanical Rabbit Hopping Type, a Twin Motor Gearbox, a Submarine Motor Mini and an Educational Construction Ball Caster.

2: Go and buy some of those things yourself, on account of how they're awesome. I'm not actually starving, here. But HLJ aren't paying me for this advertising, either.

See also the Gakken Machamo Centipede, which is another backordered item at the moment but still only costs about $US115 delivered.

HLJ, as I've mentioned before, also offer a wide selection of radio-controlled tanks, from the relatively affordable current versions of the Marui Airsoft tank I reviewed long ago, to the tiny but cheap Kyosho tanks I reviewed a little later, to the rather expensive Tamiyas, like my Sherman and Pershing.

Regrettably, the Combat DigiQs have long since been discontinued. But Tamiya are making a version of the famous "Bruiser" again, and it's on special at HLJ at the moment.

No true R/C enthusiast can say they wouldn't sell at least one of their less important internal organs, or less important children, in order to own a Bruiser.

So the choice is yours, but one thing is certain:

Your money must be converted into fascinating Japanese hobby goods, one way or another.

UPDATED
June 3rd, 2009:
The new PC that's worth buying

People aren't buying a lot of new cars, or new computers, right now. And fair enough, if you suspect that coming up with enough money for rent and food may be tricky in the near future.

Home entertainment always gets a boost when people can't afford fancy restaurants or overseas holidays, though. And PCs don't cost as much as cars. So you could definitely do worse than decide that now's the time to finally upgrade your old Pentium 4 or Athlon XP or whatever into something that can run Fallout 3.

When I last updated this side-column product pimpage, Intel's Core i7 CPUs were brand new, and the cheapest model, the "920", was clearly better value than pretty much anything else on the market. Especially if you intended to overclock.

And that's still the case.

AMD's Phenom II CPUs would be a very attractive upgrade option if they worked in standard Socket AM2 motherboards, but they only sometimes do; feel free to look up the motherboard in your Socket AM2 computer and see if it's Phenom-II-compatible, but be prepared to be disappointed.

For a guarantee that a Phenom II CPU will work, you need a Socket AM2+ or Socket AM3 motherboard. If AMD were the only game in town then this wouldn't be a terrible hardship; the new Phenoms are good processors, and well-priced too. But for bang-per-buck, if you can't just drop in a faster CPU on an older motherboard, Intel remains the way to go.

The Core i7 line has sprouted a couple more CPUs, one of which is particularly interesting.

The original chips were the i7 920, 940 and stupidly-expensive Extreme Edition 965. Now there's also the 950 and Extreme Edition 975, and they're not just speed-bumped versions of the previous chips.

The 2.93GHz-stock-speed i7 940 is slowly dropping in price, but it's still rather painfully expensive. When new, it was $AU1089 from m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market, and now it's dropped all the way to $AU918.50, 84% of the original price.

As I write this, though, the new Core i7 950 has just become available. It costs the same as the 940 (actually a couple of bucks less, a glitch AusPC may fix), and has a 3.06GHz stock clock speed. If that were the only difference, then it'd obviously be preferable to the 940 at the same price, but only barely so.

The interesting part, though, is that the 950 has the new "D0" processor stepping - the original i7 stepping is "C0". The new stepping make the chips a little less power-thirsty and a little more overclockable. It's not a night and day difference, but it's may still be enough to tempt overclockers away from the low-end 920, which was previously the obvious choice for anybody who wants to run their Core i7 CPU faster than stock.

The 920 is still very interesting, though. It's down to $AU495 delivered from Aus PC Market now, which is 54% of the price of the new 950, for a great deal more than 54% of the performance. The stock 920 clock speed is 2.66GHz, which is 87% of the 950's stock speed; even with the D0-stepping advantage, the gap between the maximum stable overclocked speed of the two should be even smaller.

If you really want to shoot for the stars in your Core i7 overclocking, you have to get an Extreme Edition chip, because they have an unlocked multiplier. The 3.2GHz-stock-speed Core i7 Extreme 965 was the original flagship i7 CPU, but it's now been replaced by the Core i7 975, with a stock clock speed of 3.33GHz and an inspiring $AU1749-delivered price tag.

The 975 overclocks better than the 965 because of the new stepping, and it's got a faster QuickPath Interconnect speed and so is a little faster clock-for-clock than a cheap 920, but its bang-per-buck score is, of course, still lousy.

So my conclusion remains the same as it was when the Core i7s were new: The higher price of the fancier i7s is not justified by their real, but small, improvement in clock-for-clock performance and/or overclockability. The 920 remains good value even if you don't intend to run it faster than stock. If you do intend to overclock, it's easy to find giant skyscraper coolers to suit Core i7's new socket, even here in Australia.

(Note that if you order a whole assembled PC with a humongous cooler in it, responsible stores like Aus PC Market will not install the cooler before shipping the PC. This is because these heat sinks are so huge that if someone drops the carton only a short distance, the motherboard and/or CPU could be damaged. If you ask nicely, though, Aus PC should be fine with installing the cooler retention frame on the motherboard, so all you'll have to do is clip or bolt the heat sink itself in place when you receive your computer. If the frame isn't pre-installed, you'll probably have to pull the whole motherboard to install it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying an assembled PC.)

Australian shoppers who'd like to buy just a Core i7 920 from Aus PC Market can click here to do so.

 

7,072 megabytes per dollar!

A couple of months ago, I was pretty impressed to see a "1.5Tb" Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive selling for $AU247.50, which added up to 5,780 genuine megabytes per dollar.

You can do even better now, though. A Samsung EcoGreen "1.5Tb" drive will now set you back only $AU233.20 delivered to anywhere in Australia, from Aus PC Market.

I write about the EcoGreens, and their WD competition, here. These drives spin at 5400RPM rather than the usual 7200, but their gigantic data density means they're still more than fast enough, especially if you're just using them as an add-on data-bucket - perhaps along with a cheap USB drive box.

(If you order a drive and an external box from Aus PC Market, by the way, you can use the "assemble" option at checkout to tell them to install the drive in the box for you, for no extra charge.)

A "1.5Tb" drive is, of course, not really 1.5 actual powers-of-two terabytes in size, for reasons I've talked about on many occasions. You can expect a "1.5Tb" or "1500Gb" drive to format to about 1397 "real" gigabytes.

But who cares, when it's this cheap?

As of mid-2009, the 1397-real-gigabyte Samsung gives you substantially more storage per dollar than any other drive I can find on the Australian market, if you don't count the very dodgiest of eBay dealers.

Aussie shoppers who'd like to pick up a 1.5Tb Caviar Green from Aus PC Market for $AU233.20 can click here to do so.