Modern monitors today have IPS+VA in one, which means great vertical viewing angles and also 100% color gamut reproduction. So one does not need to choose either and just get both, for some 200-250 dollars. However, they only have 1000 static contrast (read below why this was important for me) and many of them suffer from backlight bleed issue (near bottom of the screen), or produce high-pitch noise. Another thing which I found interesting is that not all IPS monitors make up to 100% of the palette, make sure you read description about how much is exactly covered.

Bought this phone on 2-year contract from a Virgin Mobile booth. On a side note, it's not advertised as “601”, but I figured this one is closest to the specs of the phone being sold in Canada. Anyway, starting day one, this phone was showing wireless signal problems (mobile network). I live in the GTA, your experiences may vary. I used RF Signal Tracker to investigate. Note RF signal tracker is not very stable for monitoring purposes, so for best results leave your phone open/unlocked with screen on.

This was originally planned as a series of articles about things to consider when buying/building your developer's PC at home/work. I never got back to expanding it beyond the bullet list plan, but I think this list is useful enough to be posted on its own, so here it goes. Most of the points reflected here were written >0.5yr ago, and I kept 99% of the original text. PC (hardware) - custom built Motherboard, any known brand full ATX motherboard, at least 8GB of memory if no virtual machines, and at least 16GB if virtual machines are planned.

This is just an experiment I've planned for Christmas, to verify if powerlines are any good, a couple years after they became popular on the market. So I picked a rather new adapter kit, which was supposed to deliver 500 megabits over a 100 Mbit connection, which sounded kind of interesting. Namely this one: TP-Link TL-PA4010KIT (AV500 Nano Powerline Adapter Starter Kit). It is advertised as “high-speed data transfer rates of up to 500Mbps”, so let's see what the real figures would be.

I decided to drop some good words about this camera after my last (positive) experience with it. This will be an article from an average home user with a slight hardware/software background. I will provide my personal experience and opinion regarding use of this camera. Expect all statements to be supported by facts, but do not expect lots of research effort being put around each. Okay, a little bit of history of my purchases.

First benchmarked using latest Passmark. Then did some tests with latest Aida64. What's interesting here is that both processor and memory speed keeps fluctuating. I have not found a good explanation for this behavior.

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 G7 Mushkin Enhanced Chronos SSD - 2.5” 240GB SATA III MLC (MKNSSDCR240GB) (RAID1) 2 x Seagate Savvio 10K.5 hard drive - 300 GB 2.5” 6Gb/s SAS 10000 rpm 64 MB Buffer (ST9300605SS) Benchmarked with CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 on Windows 2008 R2 Std + SP1.

Here is what I got: Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 16GB 4X4GB DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 Dual Channel Memory Kit After installing it, I noticed weird blue screens and sudden application crashes on a fairly new workstation. They did not happen very often, maybe 1-2 times a day, so not devastating, but quite annoying. Tried many things to remedy, but then decided to check memory with Memtest. During the first 15% of it I got over 100K errors in one specific region of the 16GB range, so I estimated 1 stick is faulty.

Here are the results from CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (x64), connected over USB2.0 and USB3.0 respectively. Very diligent with specs, and actually performing better at USB2 than advertised by ADATA. Looks like a good deal for 30$.

Asus RT-N12, DD-WRT v24-sp2 build 14896 (08/07/10), mini image (4MB firmware size), connected to the internet, later being referred to as Router 1. TP-Link TL-WR1043ND, same version, regular firwmare (8MB), later Router 2. Despite routers run on Broadcom and Atheros chips, it was possible to configure them to cooperate. Both internet and local network are now working.