Minecraft Server Upgrades

Once again I've fallen woefully behind on keeping telefpreen updated with new content. I could say that it's the fault of going back to school for a master's degree, or the fact that I've been spending a lot of time working in my garage (I recently acquired a first generation Mazda Miata and have been fixing it up), but the fact is I just haven't had much inspiration from the tech side of things recently. I had a backlog too, but all that stuff just doesn't seem particularly relevant or interesting anymore.

Anyways, I digress. After running the "Low Budget" Minecraft server for a short while, we identified some problem areas, and a number of players made some very, very generous donations to make it a seriously top notch setup! Imagine my surprise when Amazon packages started arriving with stuff like an SSD, more RAM, and a Corsair closed loop CPU cooler!

The big issue in many Minecraft servers isn't the speed of the CPU or the ram allocation, it's actually the hard disk's ability to read and write "chunks". Chunks are the basic terrain unit of Minecraft, and to keep resource demands in check a player will only ever have a certain radius of chunks loaded around them. The more chunks you have being modified or generated, the higher the demand on the hard disk because those portions of your world are getting read from (and any changes saved to) the server's map file. An quick demonstration of this is to start a new world and have a few players go into creative mode and start flying in opposite directions. The server will grind almost to a halt- the RAM isn't used up, the CPU isn't breaking a sweat, but the hard disk is getting hit with so many read/write requests that it just plain can't keep up!

Imagine my delight, then, when a brand new 60GB Kingston SSDNow drive arrived! On top of that, a matching stick of 4GB Kingston RAM, a Corsair H55 CPU cooler, and a set of Corsair AF120 quiet case fans meant that the server was in for a seriously cool overhaul, all thanks to generous players!

Back to the upgrade bench it went, and the installation was rather uneventful considering how easy everything is to hook up. Here it is looking fancy on the workbench:



Once it was all buttoned up, I reinstalled the OS onto the SSD and got the server back up and running. Even with more fans running than before, it was far quieter. The bigger RAM allocation meant that I could allocate a full 4GB to the Minecraft process and have tons of overhead, and the CPU cooler meant that even running a 24/7 instance of Minecraft the CPU temps rarely climb north of 32° C. The biggest single difference, though, was the SSD. Whereas before a few players wandering could lead to a reasonable amount of chunk loading lag, now it took a concerted effort and a few nuclear TNT explosions to generate the same type of latency.

All in all, I'd say it was a great success!

The amended system stats are now as follows:
Cooler Master N200 Case
Asus M5A78L-M LX3 Motherboard
AMD FX4130 CPU
Corsair H55 CPU Cooler
8GB Kingston HyperX blu DDR3 1600 RAM
Corsair CX430M Power Supply
MSi Radeon HD6570
1x Kingston SSDNow 60GB Solid State Drive
1x Western Digital 320GB Hard Drive

Another System Build for 2013: Low Budget Minecraft/Media Server

What originally started as idle speculation and a bit of research turned into another system build for 2013. I had $325 in spending money set aside, and I was curious to see if one could build an acceptable HTPC and Minecraft server out of such a tight budget. It wasn't going to be easy by any means, but it seemed feasible with a little bit of clever shopping. I had three perfectly good 320GB Western Digital HDD's from 2006 laying around simply collecting dust, and Black Friday deals were approaching, so I had a good head start.

The first step was deciding what to put it all in. I wanted something that would be reasonably easy to work on, but compact at the same time- a micro ATX mid tower seemed like my best option because there were no HTPC cases that really stood out to me as a great deal, and ITX boards tended to be a bit more pricey. I actually considered a number of cases, like the Corsair 350D and the BitFenix Prodigy (mATX version)- The 350D because of how much I like my 650D, and the Prodigy because of the hype surrounding it and how intriguing it looked. Both cases came with rave reviews but I ultimately had to pass them up in favor of something less expensive. After all, they both weighed in at around $80 to $100, which would cut pretty deep into the budget. After reading up on a number of the more budget friendly cases, I decided to use a Cooler Master N200, which seemed to strike a good balance between having the features I was looking for and keeping the cost down.

Next up were the guts of the machine, and the very essential selection of the CPU and motherboard. I considered trying to squeeze a Haswell i3 into the budget, but there was simply no way it was going to happen. During my Black Friday shopping, though, I came across a deal that was just too good to pass up- an AMD FX4130 bundled with 4GB of Kingston HyperX blu DDR3 1600 RAM, all for $106. A price like that made my decision far simpler, and since I hadn't yet built a system with an AMD processor, I figured a little variety would be nice. There was a basic FM3+ motherboard from Asus on sale as well, the M5A78L-M LX3. The only real complaints I could level against it would be the fact that it only has 2 fan headers, and that using a UEFI BIOS has spoiled me. Landing within the budget had to take priority, so those were minor issues that I could easily live with given the $45 price tag.

The last details to sort out were the power supply and a modest video card. I allowed myself a bit of luxury by going for the Corsair CX430M as opposed to the plain CX430. The modular cable system, in my mind, is a must have for any system build, lest the whole thing turn into a colossal cable management nightmare. Even though the CX430 is only "semi modular," it ultimately is a non-issue since you'll always be using the 24-pin and CPU power anyways. In regards to the video card, all I really needed was enough muscle to be able to play full 1080 HD videos- a passively cooled video card would have been nice, but I found a nice Radeon HD6570 from MSI that didn't look like it had too obnoxious of a fan, and despite being a 1GB DDR3 version, was more than enough processing power for decoding 1080p and then some, as well as having an HDMI output.

All told, with some clever shopping I got all the parts necessary for $317 including shipping! (What sorcery, I actually came in under budget!)

So, how well did it turn out? For the price point, I'm very pleased with the results.

The Cooler Master N200 case is a really great budget case. Though I could certainly tell that it was "made to a price point," overall I'm quite happy with it. Features like tool-less drive bays and fancy cable management grommets are nice, but not necessities in my opinion, so their absence was not a negative. Cable management was reasonable, but like many cases the back side panel could have used a fraction of an inch more room to make it less of a pain to fit.

It all went together with a minimal amount of fuss, and it happens to look rather slick on top of that:

 

Recap:
Cooler Master N200 Case
Asus M5A78L-M LX3 Motherboard
AMD FX4130 CPU
Stock CPU Cooler
4GB Kingston HyperX blu DDR3 1600 RAM
Corsair CX430M Power Supply
MSi Radeon HD6570
2x Western Digital 320GB Hard Drives

Magnepan Tympani 1D Repair/Restoration: Part 2

I last left off my account of this project with the unfortunate revelation that the tweeter needed total replacement. Once the replacement tweeter had arrived from Magnepan, I could continue my work on fixing everything up:



The new tweeter turned out to be a little wider than the original unit, which meant we would have to widen the hole in the frame for it. This meant it was time to do some cutting. The damaged portions of the frame would have to be cut out as well and mended before the whole unit could go back together- not so much for structural integrity or aesthetics, but because I was worried leaving a hole in the frame might effect the sound of the tweeter. First up was drilling some holes to roughly mark out the corners of where the widened frame hole would lie:



Then, out came the jigsaw. Cutting was more of a pain than initially expected because the blade wanted to wander through the rather thin particle board, making carefully measured cuts wobble much more than I would have liked. It didn't exactly have to be pretty, though, because in the end the sock was going over it- it just had to hold together and not buzz. Anyways, after the new wider hole was cut we removed the damaged sections of frame:





Using some scrap from what was cut off of the frame I made a patch for the lower damaged portion:



For the upper portion, there was a lot more material missing and a scrap piece wasn't going to work. A quick trip to a hardware store and a cheap sheet of particle board later, I had cut out a piece that would serve as the backing piece of a 2-part repair:



Next up was a liberal application of wood glue and some clamps to keep everything steady while it set:





After that, I used another scrap piece from the original particle board to make sure the side of the tweeter had a nice flush surface to mount on:



After a little bit of fitting with a file to let the new tweeter sit flush in its hole, it was ready to mount to the frame. The tweeter itself came with adhesive on the sides, but the instructions recommended further attaching the tweeter to the frame with extra hardware. The use of bolts was considered for this job, but in the end the original factory attachment method of rivets was used:



A little bit of caulk was applied to seal up the smaller holes and cracks in the frame, and then it was time to handle the wiring. The existing tweeter wires were soldered onto the terminals of the new tweeter, and hot glued down in their new positions:



Then it was time to re-sock the whole assembly and put it all back together:



The fabric of the sock had actually shrunk a little while being off the frame- even 40 years of being held taut with staples was not sufficient to stretch the fabric out. I'm assuming that at the factory there was some sort of tool or weight to assist in the stretching process, since pulling manually took a lot of effort to get just barely enough fabric over the end. After a liberal application of staples we had the sock secured:



It was just a matter of soldering on the terminal plate again, and then reuniting the panel with the rest of the unit:



I checked the terminals once again with the multimeter to verify that all was well, and it was time to hook them up!

So, the final verdict? These sound simply amazing. They're not as sensitive as "normal" speakers, so to keep my center channel from overpowering them at a given volume level I had to tweak my receiver a little bit. Also, their bass response isn't as good as traditional speakers, but my woofer more than makes up for any deficiency in the low frequencies. I'm sure a well-trained audiophile with equipment could detect the difference between the left and right channel now, based on the age difference of the tweeters, but for me at least the difference is barely perceptible and possibly just placebo on my part. This was an awfully big project but I'm really, incredibly happy with how it turned out!

New look, various updates

Telefpreen has a new look- I figured it was time for a bit of a refresh from the almost-default page style in 2009. Alas though, I am not a web designer so I decided to keep it simple.

The Lepai LP-2020A+ article from July of this year has been updated with a parts list, apparently it's gotten a few search engine hits and I received a request to give a bit more detail about my modding of the unit. Hopefully it'll catch on, I'm still really happy with how my unit turned out.

I'm still working on the Magnepan restoration article(s), the speakers themselves are finished now but I'm occupied sifting through some pictures and battling writer's block to detail the rest of the fix. Also, look out for another PC system build article and my thoughts on the Nintendo 2DS, which I recently picked up and have been quite happy with.

As always, more to come.

Magnepan Tympani 1D Repair/Restoration: Part 1

Recently I acquired a pair of super cool, high end Magnepan planar speakers that were provided free of charge, but with the caveat that the left channel's tweeter was intermittently buzzing. Far be it from me to turn such a find down, considering how neat they were. Unlike conventional speakers, they rely on a voice coil embedded in a diaphragm to produce sound, which allows them to have excellent response at higher frequencies. These speakers are big, though. One channel consists of 3 panels approximately as tall as I am, and each panel is 16 inches wide. That's a lot of real estate, so I actually had to tear my room apart and rearrange everything so that they would fit next to my TV.

They looked pretty imposing, even in the maelstrom of moved furniture, lamps, and just about everything in the room:



When all was said and done and I hooked them up for a test run, it appeared as though the move had finally administered the coup de grace on the left channel's tweeter- everything else was responsive and sounded great, including the left channel's other two panels. Unfortunately, the tweeter was thoroughly unresponsive- not even an errant buzz could be brought forth from jiggling connectors. I took out my trusty multimeter and measured the resistance across each speaker's terminal, and confirmed that the tweeter was indeed dead. There had to be a break in the wire somewhere.

Alas, it was time to take the panel back to the "operating room," also known as my dad's lab. After detaching the stands, separating the tweeter panel from the rest, and removing the sock, we got to survey the guts for the first time:



There was no obvious break in a wire or something of the like, so we knew the problem had to lie somewhere in the tweeter itself. Out came the multimeter again, and measuring directly across the terminals of the tweeters yielded the same result. It would have been a lucky break if the problem had turned out to be one crappy little corroded wire or solder joint, but no such luck. The next step was to take apart the tweeter itself and see what the problem was.

We desoldered the terminals to the tweeter, flipped the speaker over, and neatly taped off the grille to make sure no foreign material got inside:



Then we drilled out the rivets holding in the speaker:





The speaker was separated from the housing now, but the adhesive that originally held the tweeter in place for assembly was holding fast. I tried to gently pry the assembly apart from the frame, and a lot of it separated easily with a little bit of gentle encouragement from a putty knife and some car trim removal tools, with the occasional tap from a hammer.

What I failed to take into account, though, was the fact that the particleboard of the frame and the adhesive were now nigh 40 years old, and their bond was starting to get about as strong as the material itself. The tweeter released from the frame, but with a sickening crunch it brought some of the particleboard along for the ride:



I'm no expert, but I think it's safe to say that's not good.

A little bit came off near the top and bottom of the tweeter, which would have to be repaired before reassembly. Fortunately, upon closer inspection the structural integrity of the speaker itself was not affected whatsoever and all I was actually looking at was some cosmetic damage. It would still have to be repaired, but I wasn't fighting for a lost cause just yet:



I'm getting ahead of myself, though. It was time for the postmortem on the tweeter unit. I was hoping it could be saved- Magnepan themselves said that as long as the Mylar wasn't buggered up it could be revived. Alas, there was a tear in the Mylar and the speaker coil itself had snapped in a few places. It was remarkably thin wire, making it extremely hard to see where the breaks were. The tweeter was beyond repair at this point, so a call to Magnepan and $250 later, a replacement tweeter for the unit was in the mail. Once it arrived, we'd get down to repairing the frame's damage and mating the new tweeter to it!

GTA V

GTA V Review

I should have made this entry a little earlier, but I was tracking down a very frustrating BIOS bug on my new computer- apparently under some situations it is possible for the BIOS clock to just plain "freeze" and stop advancing unless Windows 7 pushes an update to be BIOS clock via time sync. Lots of strange behavior would ensue, because the frozen BIOS clock would push its sync back onto Windows intermittently, causing the time to reset back wards at approximately hour intervals. It was a relatively simple fix, but immensely annoying to track down because the obvious cause would be a defective CMOS battery, but the battery read a solid 3.3V, which is exactly where it should be.
Anyways, on to Grand Theft Auto V.

If I had to describe it with a single phrase it would be "Incredible entertainment punctuated by moments of abject, controller-throwing rage." Now, don't get me wrong here- the game is very, very good. Impressive graphics, cool missions, really well designed environments, and a lot to do. The AI is even really, really convincing in spots when it comes to creating a believable, "living" city. The problem is, sometimes that all falls to shit and you're left wondering where the fun went.

I can forgive some of the minor transgressions like weapons switching flaking out sometimes when entering or leaving vehicles, leaving you flailing like an imbecile trying to punch someone who's about to shotgun you in the face from across the road. This sort of crap happens in lots of games. While getting wasted sucks, it's not the end of the world, especially considering you can skip missions now if you run into a mission you just can't clear. Other details, such as police shooting you in the face for stepping over an imaginary line I can likewise forgive- sure, it is annoying and I do look forward to a day when a police AI sees a player wander into a restricted area and reacts based on how they got there. Crashing a car through a checkpoint while firing at the guards should provoke return fire, while wandering in on foot and unarmed should get you tackled and escorted off the premises. We're not there yet, but I hope we get there soon.

Where I really start to lose my enthusiasm for a game is when things get into the "clearly visible" realm of artificial difficulty and/or careless coding. Careless coding being a sort of buzzword for things that should have been thought of but weren't. For instance, one mission has you chasing a stalker down and "teaching him a lesson." At first I thought this would mean beat him up as opposed to outright kill him- silly me. Anyways, I crash his car and proceed to drag him out to administer said beatings. Suddenly, this mildly obese white dude tears off into the sunset like a cross country runner on crack. He didn't ever get tired. Ever. He literally had magical infinite sprint powers, so me thinking I still had to beat him up chased his dumb ass across creation trying to taze him to slow him down. I guess part of me foolishly thought that there might be a difference between "teach a lesson" and "shoot in the face" but regardless, should said mission critical NPC really never get tired, ever?

That's relatively minor but it stuck out in my mind because of how much time I wasted- it gets worse. Police chases are made artificially difficult because policemen will mysteriously appear from the ether to continue a car chase, and when on foot they also are equipped with uncanny x-ray vision to detect you from two buildings down when you're hiding in an alley that's utterly hidden from their view. Non-police hostile NPC chases for missions devolve to the point of silly, blatantly (and I really do mean BLATANTLY) obvious rubber-banding- in one instance I was being chased by the bodyguards of someone I had just assassinated. The opportunity provided itself to go off-road, so I started to ride across the beach in order to lose them. It was going quite well until I noticed that the blip for the bodyguard's car was warping towards me on a direct a-to-b straight line, at a rather acute diagonal and at regular intervals when I would start to "lose" them. We're talking 100% unabashed warping at 400 MPH across a beach here. I found it particularly amusing that when I clicked the "look behind" button the rubber-banding stopped abruptly and the bodyguards disappeared into the distance and I lost them.

It's not all terrible though, and I haven't made a big deal out of that stuff to say that the game as a whole is not worth your time. The heists are excellent, and like I said the game is, for the most part, great. The problem I have is that when you set the bar so high in the first place, you can't help but feel a bit disappointed and annoyed when it starts to play like some B-list game that you'd more expect to have its fair share of bugs and nonsense to wade through.

Summer sale reviews: varying levels of disappointment

Before I begin, I've got some exciting projects and whatnot in the works. It all depends on how quickly the parts arrive and how quickly I can get to work on it, but I'm restoring an older pair of super-audiophile tier planar speakers, which is very exciting. There's also Grand Theft Auto 5, which I've been playing fairly relentlessly the past few days, and to top it all off I've got a Nintendo 2DS preordered and I'm going to try my hand at Pokemon X/Y when it releases in two weeks.

Anyways, moving on to my experience with the pile of games that I bought on Steam during their summer sale. I'll be running down the list that I had made in my previous summer sale post:

Borderlands 2 Season Pass DLC
In terms of  hours of content added to the game this is a big win. It's pretty entertaining and there is a TON of quests available for you to mess around with, including side quests. I've been running through it with a friend and so far it feels like we've barely scratched the surface. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem quite as polished as the original game and I've noticed a number of silly glitches that just plain shouldn't be there if everything was tested properly. Things like gun sounds just dropping out in certain areas, clipping through scenery, and spectacularly glitchy ragdolls that explode off into the sky. (I'm guessing this last one is a PhysX bug because it happens on my GTX 780 computer but not with my 5850 computer) All in all though, definitely worth the extra coin for all the goodies you get. If you liked Borderlands 2 to begin with, it is well worth it.

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission
Sadly disappointing. I haven't tried to play though a lot of it to see if it gets better. Despite looking quite good, its awful voice acting and poorly explained interface really put a damper on the experience. 

Chivalry
I'll admit to having bought this one simply because of the hilarious Birgirpall video. It's actually pretty damn entertaining, though the learning curve can be a brutal- you pretty much get slaughtered relentlessly until you learn how to fight well. Best played with a big group of friends, though I've yet to get much play time in.

Dishonored
Liking it so far, though I find it rather annoying that the game presents you with a whole array of awesome ways to kill things, and then asks you to kindly refrain from murder. Finding it a bit hard to get drawn into it because of that looming threat of "bad end" hanging over your head, and trial and error stealth being the other option.

Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon
Far Cry 3 was quite fun. Annoying as hell graphics bugs aside, it was quite a fun game punctuated with a few moments of abject rage. The AI would wildly flail between being bumbling incompetent fools and omniscient god kings who knew exactly where you were the moment you so much as farted. This does not make for fun stealth gameplay. Add to that the attack dogs appearing out of thin air and the bullet sponging "heavy" enemies that are immune to headshots and take essentially an entire loadout of ammunition to kill and you've got a recipe for frustration at times.

After all is said and done, though, hip firing a PKM light machine gun at pirates and barrels of fertilizer while a field of marijuana burns down around you, with this song playing in the background just goes so far over the top that I can't help but remark about how memorable it was. It was hilarious, over the top absurd, and most importantly, incredibly fun.

Kerbal Space Program
Absolutely addictive and incredibly fun, but hampered by a few really frustrating interface issues. In all fairness, a number of these complaints are being addressed in the upcoming .22 patch, like the ability to save and "paste" in sub modules. It's intensely annoying to design an awesome lander or probe, only to have to rebuild it from scratch if you want to retrofit it onto a different rocket, or vice versa attaching multiple varied payloads to a successful rocket design. Thankfully, this and some other little annoyances will (hopefully soon) be taken care of, so I have to give credit where credit is due.

It also sort of bugs me that there is no automated telemetry available- though launching into orbit on completely manual control is great at first and really gives a great "seat of your pants" experience, I feel like establishing a nice clean orbit on autopilot makes later missions less stressful and more fun, because you still need a rocket that can do the necessary maneuvers. There's a mod for that, though- the community is quite active with generating their own content, making the game all the more fun to pick up and play. Definitely recommended.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River
I don't like it. At all. I was hopeful considering it had the Flashpoint name, but it was a huge disappointment. I went into the game fully expecting there to be the occasional AI derp here and there, but I was truly not prepared for the three ring circus of idiocy that ensued. Blue on blue everywhere. The uninspiring graphics, lifeless weapon handling, and overall clunky interface didn't help either. I didn't even bother playing any more after the first hour or so.

PAYDAY
I'm withholding judgement on this one until I get some more time with it, playing with friends. Initially, it seemed like a very poorly organized and explained clusterfuck of a heist game but that could simply be because I was thrown into "the deep end" and didn't have much time to get a feel for things before I was running around aimlessly, trying to figure out what to do to be useful.

RAGE
Also less fun than I hoped it would be. Still haven't gotten much time in, but I say it always is a bad omen for a game when you shoot someone in the head and their reaction is to say "ow" and continue attacking you.

Receiver
Really cool little independent game. A bit on the difficult side because of its main attraction, the fully functioning and correct firearm handling. There are so many key binds you initially have to pretty much play with the help menu open. Not so sure about it's long term appeal, though.

Strike Suit Zero
Still need to get more time with this one. So far though, it looks pretty nice. Though I don't really dig the space shooter genre as much as I used to, barring some absurd difficulty spike or other fatal flaw, it looks to be a nice diversion from my usual fare.