Monday 23 January 2012

A taste of Hawaii

Earlier this month I was privileged to be drinking Hawaiian Kona, and I'll try and do it justice in this writeup. This review is based on a single 250g bag of Type 1 Kona beans ground and prepared as 2, 3 or 4 shot espresso and the occasional 2 shot americano. The beans were roasted mid-december, stored in an airtight container in a cool dark place and ground immediatly before use.


Setting the Kona aside is its distinct sweet aroma like black forest fruits. There is an exciting berry hit from the moment you start grinding.
The initial sip is dominated by its sweet fruity fragrance that quickly gives way to a soft main taste, which is warm, but not earthy at all. The Kona then relaxes into a gentle, but slightly sharper, aftertaste that completes the palette.

Producing a rich dark crema I found the Kona difficult to under or over extract - you just can't go wrong with each cup coming out very similar to the last. Letting it steep for a little longer produces a stronger coffee but without the dark bite of a lot of South American beans. 
Prepared too quickly and under extracted the Kona still performs well but misses some of its magic.
The versitile Kona is ideal for espresso or strong americano and doesn’t need the extra water to bring it alive but nor does it suffer from a more dilute preparation.

I don’t take milk or sugar in my coffee, and although I didn’t try them I can imagine it blending very well with Vanilla or hazelnut syrup if that your style.

I know I’ll be returning to the Kona, and even the first cup won a top spot in my estimation.

Saturday 14 January 2012

Music to my ears

Another recent addition to the technological no-mans-land I inhabit has been my new amplifier. If you've not been following, I'm in the camp where computers should be seen and not heard so spent 2011 chasing down SSDs, Watercooling and all manner of technological wonders to calm my computer into silence.
I don't normally add pictures to posts but I think reviews are worth a little context so here it is:
I hadn't considered getting a proper amp at all until I saw this. Once your PC is quiet your amp and speakers start to matter and the unbeatable warm tones make this amazing amp the cherry on the top of your quiet build.

First impressions are very good, very good indeed. I don't have my full audio collection as uncompressed PCM but my limited selection of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and John Lee Hooker was more than enough to feel quite satisfied with the experience and bring a smile to my ears.

At an incredible price point for its quality, and able to drive 4,6 or 8 Ohms this amp completes your set-up whatever your requirements.

Its a small form-factor but unusual height so might not fit in all hifi cabinets/racks, but I couldn't bear to hide it way - placing this pride of place on my desk.

Its lightweight and compact at about six or seven inches wide.  There are no fancy bells, whistles or horns on this one.  It takes RCA stereo inputs and has Banana outputs and a single volume control sits just in range of the valves radiance so you can feel their comforting warmth on you hand every time you reach for the volume.


More extended listening added the London Symphony Orchestra and a selection of Rock from the past few decades with every note and beat reproduced at a quality that quite simply exceeds requirements.


I am quite literally bathed in the warming light of the orange glow while treating my ears to audio quality unmatched in the computing world. No amount of digital progress can rival the incandescence of a valve amplifier and this binds together two generations of technology seamlessly. The future is here, and its got valves in it.


It's time to wake up and hear the music. It's time for a valve amp.


Friday 13 January 2012

First Contact


Enter the Alienware TactX gamer mouse.!
Despite its glowing eyes and braided tail, the TactX unboxing was an understated affair. A plain black mouse in a plain black box it didn't have retail reviews and awards plastered all over it.  But lets face it, by the time you are holding it in your hands you don't need adverts.

Surprisingly small in the hand, the TactX delivers tracking that is Smooth with a capital Smoo. While I'd expected something a little larger, I don't have massive man maulers so its compact size isn't uncomfortable.

In-game config I found a little difficult to master in a hurry, since the motion and acceleration has quite a different feel it'll take a little time to master. However the first impressions are very good indeed. Configured at 3000 dpi the TactX represented a 100% increase in resolution from my previous mouse, which made a difference. Set to 5000 dpi the TactX really came into its own, although my tests were mainly performed on a "mixed ability" public server.

For context, I've always been a "casual sniper" rather than a nerdcore super-camper. At Medium range the TactX provided predictable fluid precision that scored plenty of solid hits.
Short range sniping was a frenzy of scope-and-fire meatshots that I would have lacked either the precision - or confidence - to succeed in before.  Being fair, both the short and mid-range are dominated by timing and reflexes rather than aiming so it was difficult to expect much improvement.
The high precision tracking allowed for a few Long-range and hail-mary headshots that I'm simply not familiar with so at some point I will crack out the marshmallows and learn about those cowardly long range tactics.

Satisfied with results, I tested my mettle against the Gog Clan.  Up against clansmen you see more tactical play, and a strategic cat-and-mouse mechanic with more well defined roles than the casual herpderpery of a public server. Against pros, the TactX helps as well.  I connected with crisp rockets and got some great scattergun meatshots - how much of that was a placebo-driven increase in confidence I'll never know but I had my A-game with me which is what I'm paying the money for.

Back to software to finish, the TactX control panel allows you to set up colour profiles, or roaming colours for the lights. There are about sixteen default colours, providing a whole spectrum but I've left mine at cool blue to match the LEDs on my PC.

A long-term review will have to wait until I've really put it through its paces, but for now fortune favours the bold - but the bold, it seems, favour Alienware.







Monday 2 January 2012

Slipped a Disk


In November 2011 I had some SSD Failures which made me cry a lot. QQ More, I know. Having to fall back to a Magnetic HDD is a first world problem but its the state of play - and heres why it pissed me off.

Buying value-for money I based my machine off of the Asus M78A-Pro. It included onboard video with HDMI out, so I knew that I could run the PC without a video card as a Media Player when I retire it from being a games/development PC.
It also has a good BIOS, and Six SATA slots. Thats the focus of this article - coming up with 'the best' disk config.

After fiddling in the Spring 2011 my setup looked like this:
The first slot is a 128GB Crucial SSD. This is my boot drive.
The second slot is for my BluRay drive.
The third slot is for a magnetic HDD (WD Green 1.5TB). Its housed in an enclosure to keep it quiet.
The fourth and fifth slot have 180GB SSDs in RAID-0.
The Sixth slot is empty.

Conclusions
Having an SSD as your main drive is great, and booting on SSDs is fast.  The capacity hasn't been a problem yet but I've used about 100GB. From a fresh install, Win7 took about 15 seconds from power on to desktop fully booted. These days its slowed to around twenty seconds, but still pretty fast. The Boot drive is a Crucial 128GB drive. Solid, reliable. Fast.

I don't use my computer for watching BluRays, so in hindsight a good DVD drive would have been fine. And I already had one so could have saved some money.  I think I only used it for the initial OS install, and actually an external/DVD drive might have been a smart choice and saved me an SATA slot for something else.

The magnetic HDD has been great. A huge capacity, its used for big installs to save room on the boot drive, media and some personal projects. Its never really a performance bottleneck as I don't use it for anything that is speed critical.

Lastly, SSD RAID is a great place to install games. SSDs are fast, and the stripe configuration is double the size and double the speed of a normal SSD.  Since all my games are easily installable, and saved games/profiles/user accounts are mostly online I'm happy with a two-drive stripe and adding a third for parity costs £200 more but gains me nothing so the last SATA port remains empty.
The Games drive is a pair of OCZ Vertex-2s.  Fast, cheaper, larger than the Crucial drive, this is where performance really counts.

Until ... BAH! One of the gaming SSDs failed. . . and then two weeks later so did the second. Even that £200 parity wouldn't have saved me.
The moral of the story? Not sure. The theory was pretty sound. I don't *much* care that I lost the SSDs. The machine is still fast, and I didn't lose anything I couldn't reinstall. The magnetic drive has my CD collection - but I've got a backup of all that anyway.

The SSD stripe was the crown jewel in the setup. Its still a fast machine but when you've run with the cheetahs once then everything else feels like you are plodding with the elephants. The come down of both OCZ SSDs dying within two weeks was heartbreaking.
I'm probably not going to buy from OCZ next time, thats all I can say.

We can rebuild it. Faster. Larger. We have the technology.

More news as it breaks.