All posts filed under: Personal

Crunch-time

Published by Matthias Gall

I didn’t talk to my girlfriend very much lately. I didn’t read many blogs. I didn’t watch any movies. I didn’t breathe much fresh air. I didn’t use my PC for anything more than listening to music or fetching mails. I didn’t sleep much more than four hours the last two weeks or so. I neither wrote a single line of code for DVW nor attended the last sechsta sinn team meeting. I have a new game on my desk right next to me but I didn’t even bother to install it yet. I get asked whether I’m sick because I look like a zombie when I creep around the office in the morning at noon. I currently drink so many energy drinks that my heart beats heavily when I finally try to get some sleep (so eventually I don’t get any). I’m sitting here with the MacBook Pro on my lap, big headphones with music on my head and two separate headphones in my ears, one connected to the MacBook and one to an …

Internet Fraud

Published by Matthias Gall

I saw the following advertisement on AutoScout24 today. 5300 EUR for a 2007 Audi A3 ragtop. This looked too good to be true, indeed, but still I couldn’t hesitate to contact the seller. The telephone number shown in the ad turned out to be a fax number, so I tried to get in touch by email. I received a reply about 15 minutes later.

Farewell adidts.sys BSOD

Published by Matthias Gall

I promise, if this isn’t my very last posting on hardware and hardware driver issues (todays topic), I will add an own category. But since I finally found a solution for my last PC problem, namely BSODs caused by adidts.sys, I feel the urge to blog about that. adidts.sys is the SoundMAX high definition audio driver for the onboard audio which came with my ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. The driver version available on the ASUS homepage, where I went frequently to check for an update, is still V5.10.1.4530 dated 2006/07/10, but now I learned that there are actually two newer versions available on the ASUS FTP site. I tried 1988b_32bit_510014560.zip and it worked like a charm. I just updated the driver from the hardware control panel instead of using the setup.exe, and finally, my last woe was gone. Update: Although this fixed my BSOD troubles, I recognized that I did not have a stereo mixer available to record the output of my sound card. I tweaked around a bit to handle this, too. Let me …

Hardware, again

Published by Matthias Gall

After years on a 60Hz CRT at 1600×1200, I decided to get a 20″ TFT. It’s a Samsung SyncMaster 204B which is one of the cheaper models on the market, but it turned out to be a real bargain and I am really satisfied with it. I like the pivot function. Although it is unfamiliar for me, I always wanted to have a better overview over the code above and below the cursor, and I know that this is the only solution left if you use a relatively high resolution and relatively small fonts. So I’ll try to get used to that. When I tried out the pivot function, I recognized the only drawback of the hardware so far: I found it quite hard to rotate it 90 degrees, and I missed snap points. This is our game, DVW, at 800×600. Another view of my hacker cabinett with flash. To the left you can see my old tube which I now use for chat and debug windows. Although the CRT takes a lot of room …