Keyrock

How quickly can you get to Hartford, Connecticut? As an aside, a baking stone makes all the difference.

Is the pretty boy going to play? I heard he was hurt.

Before After

Yeah, I will be cheering for them too. Unfortunately, they drew the Group of Death™.

For purely comedic purposes, that would be pretty fantastic. The level of butthurt would be tremendous.

I gotta say, the default negative pressure setup of my Antec case is working pretty well. I have my PSU set so it blows its hot air downwards, out of the case, which also seals off that potential entry point for air. The side vent is conveniently located in the exact spot next to where the GPU fans are blowing the hot air off the cooling block, soit, along with the vent on the back, make for a place for the hot air to escape and simultaneously keeps air from coming in that way. That leaves the front vents as the only remaining major point of entry for air, and since there are 3 fans blowing air out, new air must come in to displace it. If I put my hand in front of the vents on the front of my case, I can feel the air being sucked in, conveniently, where there happens to be a dust screen. So far, I've topped my GPU out at 63 degrees while playing The Witcher 2 at max settings (minus Ubersampling), and that's with the fans at only 55%. I've never seen the CPU go above 60 degrees. Maybe Antec know what they were doing after all?

Ah yes, the <whatever sport is being talked about in this thread> sucks trolls have come out to play. Very good, gentlemen, jolly good contribution. As for the footy tourney itself, I suspect ze Germans will take it this year. I would very much like the Oranje to take it, but they had their chance 4 years ago and ****ed it up. They've fallen off significantly since then. Colombia is my dark horse as they have a favorable group to come out of. As an aside, why not make this the Official World Cup Thread, and rename it to something like "How Will England **** It Up This Time? The World Cup Thread" or just "The World Cup Thread" if that's too much of a mouthful?

That's not exactly going out on a limb, though. England underperforming and getting eliminated much earlier than they should have been is a quadrennial tradition.

I suppose a publicity stunt/prank is better than actual deforestation.

I finished the prologue in The Witcher 2 and am now starting the game proper. I had forgotten that when you first arrive at Flotsam, Roche introduces himself to the guard as Emhyr var Emreis, Spice Merchant. I can see it just now, the White Flame Dancing on the Barrows of his Enemies moonlighting as a spice merchant by night.

"Go home, numpad, you're drunk." /numpad tries to grad the car keys "Oh no you don't, you'll kill somebody out there. I'm going to call you a cab."

No I don't. Maybe you sit huddled over your keyboard, but I generally lean back with my arms somewhat outstretched typing and using the trackball. my face is 2 to 2 1/2 feet away from the monitor, which puts it in perfect view to have it fill my vision. Also, I like to lick the snail trails off my monitor.

Yeah, I agree not pre-ordering is generally, as a rule of thumb, the correct course of action. I will, however, make an exception for CDPR as they have yet to do me wrong and their business practices have been far more palatable than the competition. They have always supported their games for months, neigh, years beyond the initial release, and have given away every piece of DLC for free to their customers, even DLC so robust it could borderline be called an expansion pack. Like their games or not, and I very much like their games, they treat their customers right and have earned some good will. Of course, I fully respect and support those that choose not to pre-order a CDPR game. It's their choice and ultimately a wise move. I choose to pre-order because I trust CDPR and want to show my support and because I am confident they won't burn me. Of course there was a time when I also thought this way of a different company... But I digress. In other news, The Witcher 3 has been confirmed for SteamOS, and, by proxy, for Linux. Nothing has been said regarding the GOG version supporting Linux, but considering GOG has already previously said thet they will be supporting Linux in the vague chunk of time known as the future and the fact that a Linux version of the game will be released, it only makes sense that the GOG version will have a Linux build too.

Yeah, I never use the numpad anyway so buying a 10-keyless keyboard was a no-brainer. Also, it's so nice to be using a mechanical keyboard again. I had been stuck with a membrane keyboard for too long. I'll reiterate how impressed I am with the sturdiness of the Cooler Master Rapid Quickfire. The housing is plastic, but it's thick, strong, and rigid plastic. The keyboard has a surprising amount of weight to it for one so small and not made of metal, and between the weight and the rubber feet on the underside, there is no chance of the keyboard sliding around as you use it. Time will, of course, be the ultimate judge of the quality, but it feels extremely solid and well put together.

I would absolutely buy a Dandelion-centric game.

I always assumed any flawed kata resulted in seppuku.

Asia was rather hit or miss. They put out some good stuff, but never, in my opinion, anything nearly as good as the masterpieces from the legendary bands that the members came from (Yes, ELP, King Crimson). As for drummers, obviously Buddy Rich was a legend among legends. Phenomental. I'm a Billy Cobham man myself, he's always been my favorite drummer.

Say what you will about Maria Sharapova, I, for one, am not a huge fan of the excessive grunting, but that woman has nerves of galvanized steel. Congrats to her on winning her second Coupe Suzanne Lenglen. Alrightey, bikey bike time for me.

I'm watching the French Open ladies final. Highly entertaining. I'll hop on the bike whenever it ends.

That reminds me of my old Opteron 160. That was the best freakin' processor. I overclocked it by 800 MHz on stock cooling and ran it that way for some 4 or 5 years. Socket 939 was freakin' glorious.

I read that in a Veruca Salt voice.

Yes, I stopped using regular mice many many years ago. I shall never ever go back.

Here's a (poorly taken by a terrible photographer) picture of the rig: I need to get me that gel pad thingie to put in front of the keyboard for comfort. Also, I'll eventually clean up and bundle up the cables behind the desk.

Well, if all you're using it for is streaming games and videos and you say it already does that well enough, I don't think I could give you a compelling reason to change anything. The biggest benefits of using Linux, rather than Windows, for a HTPC type build are two-fold: 1) Linux is a free OS that will get the job done just fine, so you save the $100 or $200 or whatever you would have otherwise spent to install Windows on the machine. Since you already have Windows on there that's a moot point. 2) Linux has a WIDE variety of different window managers and Desktop Environments, rather than the single one you get with Windows, ranging from big, bloated, full featured desktop environments with all the bells and whistles, to extremely light-weight window managers, to everything in between. The CPU and memory the Windows desktop, or one of the big bloated Linux desktop environments like KDE or Gnome 3 or Unity chew up is a drop in a bucket for a modern i5 or i7, but for an older and/or cheaper, much weaker chip and system with much less memory, having the desktop chew up considerably less resources could be a big deal, but mostly for running different applications and multi-tasking. If the system you have with Windows already runs HD videos well enough, I can't really see any reason to switch if that's mostly what you will do with it. I've never tried to stream video from a Windows machine to a Linux machine, but I'm sure it's possible. Still, since it already works well enough with Windows, I can see no real reason to switch. As for streaming games, Steam will handle that just as well whether you are running Windows or Linux (or OSX). The amount of resources you do or don;t save on the HTPC is rather inconsequential since whatever game you play will be running off a different, presumably much more powerful, PC. Bottom line: If you were building this HTPC currently and didn't already have Windows on it, I would absolutely recommend using Linux as it would serve your needs and save you the price of a Windows license. Since you already have Windows on the machine, I can see no compelling reason to switch.