Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Love love love The Dark Knight

I saw it twice at the movies, one of the few worth $9+. We bought the DVD and sat on it for 2 weeks, waiting for the Xmas/New Year break to watch it again... and it was SO worth the break. Christopher Nolan captured what I have always loved about the Batman with this movie, he's a true hero in every sense of the word without seeking any of the glory. In a way he is like Sam from LOTR (an Xmas tradition of ours is to watch all 3 extended LOTR movies), he is an under dog true to the cause regardless of any recognition. The Dark Knight is just one of those movies I will never get sick of watching, even though I know whats going to happen next.

I can't wait until the next one.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The Wind makes a great PS1

For the last few weeks I have been experimenting with emulators on my MSI Wind. The first was Project64 which plays Nintendo 64 games and works well. Then this week we finally got rid of our spare old monster of a TV, I had been using it to play my PS1 and PS2 instead of having yet another box in our TV cabinet. This gave me a new challenge of hooking up my Playstations to my PC monitor or finding another way to play my games. After messing around with a TV that didn't want to play ball I decided to look for an emulator to run my games. I found the mother load of emulators at www.emulator-zone.com, ePSXe had the top rating and I now know why. You have to do a little searching for a PS1 Bios (in the usual places), but once located and after the setting wizard I was playing MediEvil on my over clocked Wind.

Happy days!

Now all I need to do is make ISOs out of all my PS1 games. Sadly emulating PS2 is a different animal so I'll just have to drag it downstairs when I want to play.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Ubuntu 8.10 and Suspend

I have been running the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex for almost 2 weeks now on my Wind and have been really happy with it. Last night around 7:30 PM I put my Wind into suspend and forgot about it (normally I shut it down over night). This morning to my surprise, 12 hours later, I hit the power button and my Wind booted right to the login screen for Intrepid. I entered my password and expected to see a warning message about my battery being low but to my surprise I still had 3.5 hours battery life remaining.

Simply awesome!

Monday, October 27, 2008

Watch them Bios updates.

So when I read that MSI had released a new Bios for the Wind I was pretty excited. On top of allocating more RAM to the integrated video the fabled Turbo feature was back. So I flashed my Bios and all looked good until I noticed my wireless connection had become super flaky. I had replaced the stock wifi card with a dell 1490 because it works with Windows, Linux and OS X, so I thought maybe that was the issue. There is an extra stand off on the mother board that a lot of people said should be removed because it causes issues, so I finally got up the courage to take the pliers to it and no improvement. Finally tonight I decided to roll the Bios back to 1.06 and I'm back to a nice speedy Internet experience.

So the leason learned here is don't be so quick to install the newest thing.

By the way I love my wife, she bought me both my Ibanez guitar and MSI Wind. She's the bestest!

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Ever Changing Wind.

So I've had my Wind for a few months now, and last night I think I completed it's evolution by installing the latest Bios 1.09

Back when I first read about the MSI Wind there were three things that got my attention

  • a 10 inch screen
  • an 80 GB Sata HD
  • the ability to over or under clock the CPU on demand
Well the Wind started shipping and the first thing people noticed was the over clocking feature was missing. MSI had removed it from the Bios and there was no word about it ever coming back. Like a lot of others I decided to buy a Wind anyway and I haven't had any regrets, so far I have:

  • added another stick of Ram giving me a total of 2 GB
  • installed a Dell 1490 Wifi card which works in Ubuntu, XP and OS X
  • applied a custom skin from skinit.com
  • installed a 320 GB Western Digital Scorpio
  • installed Ubuntu 8.10 w/netbook remix, XP home and OS X 10.5
  • updated the Bios to 1.09 w/over clocking set to 15%
Now I can sit back and enjoy my triple booting goodness... at least until I hear of another great mod for my Wind.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Skined MSI Wind


Skined MSI Wind
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus
Here is my MSI Wind with the Radiohead skin I made on www.skinit.com
I love how subtle the colours are on the black of the Wind.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Music studio.jpg


Music studio.jpg
Originally uploaded by kiwiboyus
Pretty messy looking right now.

Cleaning up my music set up today.

We are picking up a new desk today for the spare room. Right now it's just too messy and not very inspiring.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Loving my MSI Wind.

Like many others out there, after the Asus EeePC came out I wanted a mini notebook. I've had a Acer Travelmate 4202 for the last 2 years and loved it, but it's still a little big and heavy once you start carrying it around for a while.When I first read about MSI's Wind I knew it was the one I was waiting for, the 10 inch screen and 80 Gig hard drive clinched it. So two weeks ago mine arrived (I'm using it now), and I'm loving it!

The first thing I did was install another Gig of RAM and swap out the internal Wifi card for one that would work with Linux and OS X, that's right I'm triple booting!

My next customization is a skin for the top of my Wind, I ordered it from www.skinit.com I plan to post pictures as soon as it's on.