Author Archives: Ingoal

Ingoal and Windows 8

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Just as Microsoft was realising windows 8 to the public I thought to myself: oh well, let’s give it a shot…a brand new microsoft os for 29.99€ (upgrade offer 32/64bit) and available via digital download – I like.

So I started by downloading and generating and install images afterwards and then I started the upgrade process (Windows 7 –> Windows 8) with the options to keep both files and programs. Upgrade itself went smoothly up to the point where the “windows based part” of the installation (aka configuration) should have been started. I was staring at a blank screen, but the computer itself was working (blinking leds for hdd etc).

Then I made a big mistake, I didn’t think about the situation and thought the upgrade was faulty and that I should do a clean install. But in the clean install I wound up at the same point. So I thought about what it could be…and the only reasonable explanation was the graphics-card or the monitor…but as the monitor worked fined (post-screen and all), i was left with the option graphics card. You gotta know that I have a custom mini-pc that I built a few years back featuring an mATX-Board with integrated graphics cards (Nvidia Geforce 6150) with an DVI-riser card. So I searched in my box of “old cables” and got myself an old vga-cable (blue plug) and *drumroll* I had a picture again.

To make a long story short, I had similar problems with Vista and Win7 as well, but in those I could get the dvi-riser card running with a few tricks…no such luck in windows 8. So for the time being I worked with the analogous connection, but quickly checked Amazon to see what was out there for cheap. Suffice to say that I hadn’t been keeping uptodate with the pc hardware developments like I used to – so I was pleasantly surprised to find a “low end” Gainward GeForce 210 with 1GB of ram for under 30€…how times have changed!

Yesterday the shipment arrived and I installed the new graphics card in under 5 minutes and *drumroll again* now I’m back with a digital connection dvi/hdmi and everything is running smoother than ever (you gotta remember that the old integrated graphics were a few years old)…I like! And with ClassicShell installed, the windows “standard part” just looks like Windows 7 again…best of both worlds!

…and that is my only caveat with Windows 8 – why in the world would you take away the Start button without an inbuilt option to choose whether you wanted it or not Microsoft? That is lame…

Happy new year!

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…don’t worry, this is a scheduled post as I’m offline at a new year’s eve party…nontheless I wanted to be on time to wish all of you a very happy and successfull 2012! :-)

Happy New Year 2012!

Regards,

Ingoal

Happy holidays, merry christmas…

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How time flies, I can’t believe that I went almost a year without posting around here. I guess the whole social media thing is taking over my eagerness to communicate…and so I find myself posting on both facebook and twitter regularly, while this blog has become somewhat mute.

I’ll try to keep the blog a little more up2date again…we’ll see how that goes. Anyway…the real reason I went online and opened the blog was for a simple reason – to wish all of you a merry christmas, happy holidays with your family, friends and loved ones!

Yours truly,

New year new install

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Hehe…I managed to screw up my windows installation today, so today is reinstall day. Thanks to my ssd configuration the reinstall is pretty quick, but it’s still a hassle to remember all the stuff you had on your computer and reinstall it all…oh well…almost done and the system feels extra snappy again – not that it was sluggish before or anything, once again thanks to the ssd as my system drive.

iPad crazyness and stupid people

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I mean okay, the iPad seems to be way cool and in all honesty, I’ll probably order one once they become available over here in germany (depending on the price which is yet to be determined), but what the hell is going on?

Over here there’s a new crazyness about this “new” auction format where there’s an item, e.g. the ipad, which starts at 0.01 Euro and an amount of time x. Every time someone bids, the time y is added (e.g. 10 seconds) and the price increases by an amount z (e.g. 0.01Euro). The ultimate winner of the auction will pay the end price, but wait, there’s a kicker. Every bid in an auction costs 0.5 Euro (0.675$).

So, there’s one winner and x people bidding, in the end there’s the lucky winner and x people having payed for nothing…and even the winner might really be a loser.

See the following example which I witnessed this afternoon:

crazy

crazy

So, let’s do a little math:

1. The iPad has a value of 499$
2. There were 4986 bids for 0.675$ (0.5Euro) a pop, which equals 3366,25$ for the site running the auction.
3. The “winner” of the auction is the ultimate loser, 1524 bids + the final price = 811,87 Euro or 1.095,79$

Wtf is going on here? This auction platform is like printing money, I guess there are more and more idiots getting up every morning, you just have to find them and they’ll hand you their money…sad..really sad…

2009

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Well, the new year is already a few weeks (errm months) old and I didn’t have much time to blog around here…busy busy…work work work…all good though, just wanted to give you all a headsup that I made it safely into 2009…may it be a blessed year for you and yours….

Another busy weekend…with sports

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Due to a minor injury less doing sports and more watching sports. The olympics, german football league starting…and what not. Along the way I worked off my last freelance jobs…so the coming weeks should be a lot less crowded…at least when it comes to working, unless I get the new job I’m applying for, then the “workless” times could be over quite quickly ;)

Sporty weekend

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Football preparation for the new season has started two weeks ago and so far I didn’t miss a single training session – so far. Today I missed the first one, a friendly match, as my foot is shining in different colours ranging from green to blue. It wasn’t the best idea to train on friday after suffering the injury on thursday, but oh well. Nontheless a lot of sport going on.

First of all, the Beijing Olympics…so far nothing much going for the german athletes when it comes to winnnig medals, but at least some of the national teams seem to be in good shape (e.g. handball, basketball)…it’ll be fun to watch them compete for the next few days/weeks.

Secondly, the german professional football season is about to start next weekend, so in good old tradition the competition for the german football cup ( “DFB Pokal” ) started this week…so far quite a few good matches and no major upsets…

Alrighty…enough about sports, I’m going to do a little sport myself now…called “couch-surfing” ;)

…and we’re finally back

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After a weekend from hell, we’re finally back. On friday evening I received a disturbing text message from my hoster, my server has been disabled due to outgoing DoS attacks. After that one I decided it was time to move on and do a server reinstall as the server has been exploited before, so it was a good time to switch to a new Operating System. So I did that all of saturday and all seemed well, although some stuff was lost (backup-scripts not fetching subdomains, etc)…but the main problem remained a dns issue that kept my sites from being accessible. Today I finally got a hold of a server guru at my hoster and he found out what was wrong quickly. D’oh. The install of plesk had a wrong standard setting, it blocked ingoing DNS-request, nice firewall config…NOT…D’oh. So now everything is back up and running again…minus a few sites which databases needs to be recovered…I’m doing just that now…wheeeeeeee….le’s hope all goes well…I certainly hope so….