What we really need is a government effort to develop the worlds first space elevator. The first country to do this will have a monolopy over the space industry as it should reduce the cost of sending objects into space by 95%. Not to mention all the patents and intellectual property that could be profited from.

If the UK decided to do this it could create many jobs and establish the UK as the leaders in a new field. I’m sure it would go a long way to sorting out the UK debt crisis in the long term …

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image
https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

Utilu IE Collection
http://utilu.com/IECollection/

It’s a patent application for walking through walls. There are several gems in here including “Upon reading his explanation, I realized that the thunderstorm is actually a hyperspace physics phenomenom.” and my personal favourite “How to generate negative mass, traverse hyperspace and walk through walls, even with a dog”.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20946878/Walking-through-walls-US20060014125A1

A quick Google and there are several patents by the same chap JOHN QUINCY ST. CLAIR.

http://www.google.co.uk/patents?id=nB-dAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=US2003/0197093Al&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iUHzTsy-HI3H8gPMo8jGAQ&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=US2003%2F0197093Al&f=false

I’ve gone for the 2011 socket motherbaord P9-X79PRO due to it allowing for 8 DDR3 RAM slots and this incredible bargain processor, the Core I7-3820.

One problem I found with this board was the lack of room for a heat sink which meant some modifications to my Thermaltake Frio so it didn’t block two of the RAM slots – not to mention the incredibly picky BIOS it comes with.

But anyway some usage case benchmarks in 7zip:
At this point it setttled down to 6.9MB/s but averaged 8MB/s. This is with just about every setting maxed out for ultra compression and using 8 threads over all 4 cores of the processor. When it completed it ran at about 25GBs of data compression per hour. The majority of the time the processor had switched itself to turbo mode and was running at about 3.9Ghz. Also it may have got slightly more speed if I wasn’t simultaniously running 3 virtual machines and writing this blog post.

Here is the setup so you can view all the options I had – I was still RAM bound but I was compressing a 33GB directory! I’ve decided 32GBs isn’t enough and that I need more RAM :)

Further testing with a server backup shows the compression is improved by upto 20% due to using 32GBs of RAM and the tweaked settings rather than just 4GBs as I was before. So I’m currently recompressing all my old backups – which should save me around 600GBs of disk space.

I know it’s seated properly and it’s supposed to be compatible RAM.

Rather than buy new RAM – I wanted to flash the bios with the latest version. With this motherboard you can do it – without any RAM, CPU or GPU! The feature is called Flashback. (It will also work with all these components plugged in so don’t pull them out unnecessarily)

1. Download your motherboard BIOS rom file from ASUS website.
2. Place it onto a USB flash drive. Ensure the Flash drive is formatted to the FAT filesystem and not NTFS etc.
3. Make sure it’s the only file on the USB drive (a precaution)
4. The ROM file needs to be named perfectly for your motherboard model. In my case it’s P9X79PRO.ROM. To find your correct filename, you can look at the root of your installation DVD where you will find a correctly named factory default ROM file.
5. Make sure your computer is plugged in with power to the motherbaord but the computer itself is switched off (no fans will be spinning etc).
6. To flash your bios simply plug your USB drive into the white port (White on mine anyway) of the motherboard and push the little bios buton next to it.
7. The light on the USB and the light on the button should flash until the process is complete.
8. Go make a coffee/tea it’s going to take 5 minutes or so.
9. Once the flashing has stopped try booting your system.
10. Hopefully you can now relax.

For those interested, the Ikarus is a two seater microlight aircraft with a maximum cruise speed of 194kph (120mph). See the Ikarus C42 wikipedia page for more details.

Go into about:config and set browser.cache.disk.enable to FALSE, then right-click and select NEW -> INTEGER and type browser.cache.memory.capacity and set to 100000 (for 100mb).

Now your memory is being used for the cache instead of your hard disk. If you have loads of memory (more the 2GBs) then you could set the cache figure to say 200mb or higher for even better performance.

I was thoroughly impressed with this regex. I’m not going to reiterate what other people have already explained. So instead I will place links to other blogs that explain this very cool regex primality test.

http://montreal.pm.org/tech/neil_kandalgaonkar.shtml

http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2007/03/18/a-regular-expression-to-check-for-prime-numbers/

http://zmievski.org/2010/08/the-prime-that-wasnt

Thanks to <a href=”http://rantsofageek.com/”>Theo</a> for sending me a link to this!

I’m a fan of difficult puzzles (ideally if there is a prize) to the point of sleep deprivation. Let me show you the Isis puzzle. It’s titanium, heavy and fits in your hand (but not if you have small hands, then you need two). It’s also nearly impossible to open. I’m not giving away any clues at all, we managed it and I’m looking forward to the next challenge.

I’m also a fan of LEGO and this year I was ecstatic to see I had the new LEGO NXT kit. I got bored of the default builds and chucked together this remote control arm in an evening. I’m hoping to improve it and bolt it onto a telepresence robot such as the Rovio.

The additional sensors such as the RFID sensor also look very interesting. I’ve been interested in cataloging everything in the house with RFID chips and then using multiple sensors to see if we can locate the items in 3d space. That way we would never lose anything :)

The other cool (some may say odd) present was my DNA results from 23andme. I’m not going into detail on the results but it was well worth the $206 and I think everyone should get this done ASAP.