Operation Walküre: A Quick Look at Valkyrie, the motion picture, and the theatre where I watched it at

It’s a decent movie and is certainly not too shabby. This is especially true if you’re into Germany’s militaristic past.

The film’s supporting cast features quite a number of actors I recognize, and the Hitler in the film really does look like the real one! I loved the suspense created whenever the Führer appeared, and as expected, Tom Cruise’s acting was stupendous. I don’t think I’ll have to reveal the movie’s plot here, as you might most probably already be well informed about Stauffenberg’s failed coup d’état and plot against Hitler’s life.

The cinema itself was pretty underwhelming. I was actually expecting to watch Valkyrie in my area’s best theater. But for some reason or another, the theater was not featuring the movie there. Instead, I was told to saunter off to another nearby theater of a much lower prestige which did feature it. The theater looked eerily vacant, seemed run-down and still carried a 1980s aesthetic of having incandescent light bulbs emblazoned all over the entrance to attract viewers. However, my cinema room had a “Lucasfilm THX” logo proudly displayed just next to its entrance. At least I know that I’ll be getting a worthy cinematic experience.

On the contrary, I did not; the projector’s image was too large for the screen! In other words, the white screen left out a border on all 4 sides. Worse still, near the beginning of the presentation, the projected motion picture went awfully out of focus for a good 5 mins or so, requiring someone working for theatre to manually readjust the projector. When asked to rewind the film a little, that dude did not (I don’t think the projector is capable of doing so anyway). As a result, I missed a few minutes of the movie. What a bummer! Furthermore, a few of the seats were broken. I don’t expect them to be replaced in the foreseeable future anyway, for the theatre is simply not worthy for a renovation.

I think that THX metal plate has been there for quite some time already. It may have been placed there when THX went around certifying cinemas, and that was a long, long time ago. I just can’t believe that it’s still THX certified when almost everything has fallen into disrepair.

To sum up, I openly recommend you to catch this splendid movie. It’s too bad I couldn’t watch it the way I should have, but I do hope you will.

"Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!",
T’ang


(image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie_(film))

Notes from the Lab

I bought a pair of Kingston 2GB SO-DIMMs from a Best Buy Boxing Sale today. It was on sale for half the retail price, which is obviously a pretty darn good deal. I installed it without much difficulty on my brother’s 2-3 year old Dell laptop, replacing his old 533MHz, 512MB pair to the spanking new 667MHz, 2GB pair. The installation process couldn’t be easier; I just had to loosen a couple of screws, pop a cover open, release the retention brackets, remove the old sticks, slot in the new ones and replace the cover. The entire process took no longer than 5 mins.

As anticipated, Windows XP detects approximately 3.25GB of RAM installed. Some say that upgrading from 1GB to 4GB on XP wouldn’t give much of a noticeable boost in performance. However, my experience falsifies that statement. The enhancement is downright tremendous. Windows Explorer is now openly more responsive and switching between tasks is now an instantaneous process. My brother had to wait 5 mins after exiting Battlefield 2 just to allow the laptop to turn usable again. But no longer; the desktop now appears without delay upon hitting the ‘Quit’ tab.

Gaming performance has benefitted from a similar outcome; I can now run Battlefield 2 on the highest details on a 1280x800 resolution with 4x Anti-Aliasing. Previously, the laptop struggles to produce a playable frame rate with even the lowest details activated.

With DDR2 RAM prices now hitting a record low, there’s no excuse not to get more of it.

T’ang

Chinook--Red Hot Chilli Radeons Part 2

For starters, exams are finally over and I have roughly 3 weeks of holidays before school starts again on January. Regarding my graphic cards, I have done the necessary tests and have come up with quite remarkable results.

Like I said in my previous entry, I’ve installed ATI Catalyst 8.12. The manual fan speed control function did show up as promised. Now, I’ve complete control over my fans. As expected, the fan was set at ~26% during idle with automatic settings enabled. I dragged the slider to 50%, and easily, the graphic cards sounded like a helicopter with twin rotors powering up under my desk. I immediately reduced the speed to 40% and the whirring noise fell to within acceptable levels.

Now dig this: the temps fell to an astounding 52°C! Now that’s an accomplishment!


I’ve set up 2 profiles, one for gaming and the other for mundane computing tasks. With the gaming profile activated, the fans will boost to 40% of their rated maximum speed. While with the latter, I’ll let the cards manage themselves using the auto mode.

Beside the usual claims about performance gains (that seldom come true), I’ve noticed that ATI has added a CrossFireX feature in this driver update. Alright fine, it’s may not be qualified to be called a feature. But nonetheless, with it on, a CrossFireX logo will appear at the top right hand corner of the display whenever the Control Centre detects that CrossFireX is activated. Like I mentioned, it’s not exactly a practical attribute. I guess it just makes dual GPU users feel smug about owning cutting-edge technology.


ATI has also called this driver update the biggest yet. Primarily because it has made its Avivo Video Converter freely available for users. However, a recent article by ExtremeTech has dubbed this converter as ‘still in its developing stage’ and not ready for prime-time. If I recall accurately, real-world testing has shown that Avivo is a speedy converter but quality issues proved to be its biggest downfall.

That’s all for this topic people. Till the next ATI driver update!

T’ang

Red Hot Chilli Radeons

I guess I have just found out the reason why ATI’s Radeon stock cards always have a red cooler on them. I believe you will know the answer by the time you read the next few paragraph.

I was well aware that my Radeon cards were running well above 80 degrees at factory speeds. Even on idle. (That scale is in Celsius) I thought the 4800 series were meant to run that way and thus, I never had a second though about it. Guess what? I randomly rummaged through some forum entries today and saw that others had their 4870s running on 50 degrees on idle, 70 degrees under load.

readings of my primary graphics adapter

Let’s do the math. If others have their cards running ~40% degrees higher under load than when it’s idle, my ΔT should increase by approximately the same percentage right? Well, yes, I guess.

80 + 80*40% = >100°C.

Ahem…That number with double zeros sure looks familiar. I guess that’s somewhat beneficial: with that value, moisture that may have somehow condensed on my pc’s internals will be vaporized quickly.

(Note that this will most probably never happen, as the GPU's fan will automatically crank out a couple more rpms when temperatures escalate to hazardous levels. We all don't like toast components, do we?)

Ok, that won’t do; I’m in need for a remedy.

Later, with a simple google search, I found an article on one of my frequently visited sites: custompc.co.uk. It said that it is possible to increase the fan speed on the Radeon by performing some tweaks on an XML file. But then, upon clicking the second link, I was back to square one. Here’s why: the second link was a forum with a heading containing the following words, “Dead 4870 from adjusting fan speed?” And that was performed through the exact same method that was cited in custompc’s article.

Fortunately, I read further that ATI has made the fan control option freely available in its control panel itself (the Catalyst Control Center with v8.10 drivers). Perhaps it’ll be better if I downloaded that legitimate graphics driver and from there, take a safer approach to radiate a little more heat away from my cards.

I will be updating this column when time allows me to do so.

T’ang

(m)Apple

Dec 2, 3 hours following original post, update: Wow, my phrase in the parenthesis below was spot on! The clips got removed in just 3 hours after I posted this article. Way to go, 20th Century Fox! Jokes aside, be sure to catch that comical episode elsewhere :)

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I'll disregard my last statement to bring you this short post.

Remember the days where Nvidia's mobile graphics chipsets with heat related problems plagued the many Dell and HP notebooks? I sure do.

Well, I've got a feeling it's not over. Folks over at the Inquirer have found out the that the new MacBooks fitted with Nvidia graphics are also experiencing strikingly similar tribulations.

Whoops.

Plus, here's something to cheer Apple up: The Simpsons got another shot at mocking popular figures, and this time round, it's Steve Mobs and his prevalent Mapple.

(Don't be surprised if the vids get taken down, and soon)




Laugh it up,
T'ang