I’m going to be performing cleanup on Teh Blarg, there’s no need for 6 years of garbage, uninteresting (potentially incriminating, lol) posts. If the page you are looking for results in a 404, it’s most likely gone forever. You can check Google cache or the web archive. Good luck!

Moreover, I don’t really like the whole dated category approach to this site. If I find the time, I may switch it over to using tags, as it should have been from the get-go. Edit: success with tags!

I’m looking at buying a new laptop soon, an Asus G71Gx gaming grade laptop. It turns out Best Buy has the best price on this laptop. As someone who would rather pay less when possible, I began to seek out cheaper alternatives than paying $1300 +tax for this notebook.

First off, see if there are any better prices out there. Traditionally, Best Buy is not the best source for cheap systems.

Next, I live in Vancouver, Washington. We have a 7.7% sales tax. Right across the border is Portland, Oregon — 0% sales tax. That’s instantly going to save me $100.10. In order for this to work, you have to go into the store, not online; unless of course you’re willing to just have it shipped to someone who lives in Portland.

Next, search for coupons for Best Buy. These are somewhat rare, but there are some 10%-off-anything coupons that surface from time to time. Make sure that what you are buying falls into the “acceptable categories” as explicitly noted on the coupon. Can’t find any currently.

Next, find gift cards. Ask your friends if they have any they want to sell. Look at online for sale forums. Check eBay. As long as the person selling the gift card is reputable, this is a great way to save money. For example, I just purchased a $250 Best Buy gift card for $238 buy it now -$23.80 for Bing cashback, -$4.76 for eBay’s cashback incentive plan, -$2.38 because I paid with PayPal through my credit card. That makes the final price for this $250 gift card $207.06; a 17.18% discount.

Next, as I mentioned previously, pay with credit card (assuming you pay it off, and have a cash back incentive plan). This is an easy 1-2%.

Finally, don’t accept any upselling that Best Buy will try on you. You don’t need the extended warranty, you don’t need the new peripherals. Don’t be a sucker for their highest margin area of the business.

With these principles applied, I’m going to take a $1400.10 laptop (including tax) and get it for $1084.80 (5*207.06 + 50 – 0.50).

I’ve been having various issues on my hacked Sprint HTC Touch Pro. It seems to be getting progressively worse, which is extremely frustrating. It’s really making me lose faith in the Windows Mobile platform, regardless of what is actually to blame in this circumstance.

I’m working on a MightyROM install from ~May 2009, so at most 3 months stale. At some point, there began to be lag upon text entry when sending SMS messages. It would take about 200 milliseconds to respond to text input from the keyboard, and the lag mounted with extended input. At the beginning I was able to finish typing an entire text of ~130 chars meanwhile it was only about halfway done displaying what I typed. More recently, it has further issues; sometimes when I input, instead of outputting the character I type, it outputs the same character over and over. No idea why, incredibly frustrating.

Another main issue this device is having is that sometimes the keyboard will stop working altogether. Only a soft reset is able to restore functionality to the keyboard. Pulling my hair out.

I saw a MightyROM update that said:

Text Lag Removed.
This was done in the previous release, although comes with a warning, therefore I shall explain. While in “Threaded-SMS” mode, previously you would see your 0/130 text count in the top left of the screen. It has been noted that this is the reason for texting lag. The counter has been removed and you will now notice that texting lag has been completely resolved. Small price to pay for a responsive keyboard.

I’m really hoping this fixes BOTH of my issues. It might make this device usable again. I just installed this new version of MightyROM, so we shall see.

Edit: Confirmed problem #1 is gone. Problem #2 appears to be related to a loose ribbon cable, which essentially means (fixable) poor device design.

I hadn’t received any comments in the past few months, I figured it was just because I hadn’t put out any new content.

Then I realized that I couldn’t even leave a comment myself. I received an email from a buddy saying he had a similar issue.

So I checked the logs:

WordPress database error Table './{db_name}/wp_comments'
is marked as crashed and should be repaired for query SELECT * FROM
wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY
comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 15 made by require, require_once,
include, get_sidebar, locate_template, load_template, require_once,
dynamic_sidebar, call_user_func_array, WP_Widget->display_callback,
WP_Widget_Recent_Comments->widget

Went to the mysql database physical location and did the following to fix it:

# myisamchk wp_comments.MYI
Checking MyISAM file: wp_comments.MYI
Data records:    3914   Deleted blocks:     347
myisamchk: warning: Table is marked as crashed
- check file-size
- check record delete-chain
- check key delete-chain
- check index reference
- check data record references index: 1
myisamchk: error: Found 3913 keys of 3914
- check record links
myisamchk: error: Keypointers and record positions doesn't match
MyISAM-table 'wp_comments.MYI' is corrupted
Fix it using switch "-r" or "-o"

# myisamchk wp_comments.MYI -r
- recovering (with sort) MyISAM-table 'wp_comments.MYI'
Data records: 3914
- Fixing index 1
- Fixing index 2
- Fixing index 3
- Fixing index 4
- Fixing index 5
- Fixing index 6

So I purchased a 16 GB Runcore ssd (aka the fastest available ssd) for my Dell Mini 9 to replace the SuperTalent 32GB ssd (aka the slowest and cheapest available ssd) I’ve been running on for the past few months. I bought the Runcore used for $55 shipped on HardForum, and sold my SuperTalent for $20 to a fellow enthusiast at work.

I had an elaborate scheme of how I would resize my 32GB partition to <16GB, then direct copy it over to the new drive, then have it automagically work, but after copying there was some corrupt data, so I decided to just start over. Nothing worth saving anyway. That’s the beauty of a netbook, no local storage is required.

Now for the benchmarking, I used Bart’s Stuff Test 5 for hdd speed benchmarking, and these are the results:
on the old hdd:
3019 blocks written, 754MB
Max/s: 5.2MB
Avg/s: 4.3MB

on the new hdd:
3059 blocks written, 765MB
Max/s: 23.8MB
Avg/s: 23.6MB

Woah! Huge difference… I can really tell, everything is a lot more responsive, and Windows 7 runs very smoothly.