GreySquare Blog

500GB External Storage – Leech On!

// April 25th, 2008 // No Comments » // General, Movies & TV, Tech

[The things in red are meant for the technically inclined]

All those torrent downloads and Netflix DVD backups left me with almost no space on my laptop hard drive. For the record I currently have 80 movies on my hard drive. So at last I decided I should get external storage. I got a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 500GB Hard Drive for $100 and EAGLE ET-CSESU2-BK Aluminum 3.5″ Black USB 2.0 External Enclosure for about $12 – The total setup was delivered to me in 3 days by Newegg.com and they work great. You can say that I would not need a 7200RPM drive with 32MB cache for external storage since the USB 2.0 speeds are no where near hard drive speeds. But still I see this as a future investment for my desktop.

You can see that with the total number of drive partitions I have I’m almost running out of alphabets. What if I had more drive partitions than the number of alphabets? I’ve never seen what Windows would do in that scenario. My current plan is triple a boot system with Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Future plans include a quad boot with Mac OS X Leopard. Mac on my Dell Vostro … Hmm.

Facebook Chat and Why I Think It Sucks!

// April 23rd, 2008 // 14 Comments » // General, Tech

Its a rat race. That’s what it is. I do not seem to get the point why Facebook needed a chat window for its already cluttered and lame looking interface. Google has chat. Microsoft has chat. So may be they thought lets get chat too.

The online friends functionality it shows was already available. And if you see a friend online you can always post a message on his wall. And he can reply back if he wants to, then and there. Its not like you need an entirely separate area for chat, some other area for posting walls and yet another area where you send messages. I mean wall posts are public and messages are private – I can understand them. But why in the name of god do you need chat?

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There was one blog the other day where I see people whining about no “folders” in Gmail in the comments. Gmail has labels. Why do you need folders? And what is the point of different webmail clients if they all look, feel and offer the same? If you cannot live without your “folders”, please DO NOT use Gmail. What I don’t need right now is Google doing something stupid and adding a chat interface as default to Orkut, just because Facebook has chat too.

Assassins Creed And Xbox 360 Controller Fetish

// April 14th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // General, Tech

I wanted to own a game pad/controller like forever. When I was a kid I had a thing for joysticks. I literally used to dream of owning one. But I neither had the time nor the resources needed to buy one. Later one when I used to game a lot, particularly the Need For Speed games, I really wanted a game pad so that racing could be more fun and less pain due to hours of keeping you fingers pressed on the keyboard. But India is one of the most expensive places to buy gadgets, even used ones. So I wanted to buy one as soon as I came to the United States. An Xbox 360 Controller was the obvious choice due to its great price/features score.

So I went on ebay to look for one. I had to go into a lot of research since I was divided between buying a wired and a wireless Xbox 360 controller. I came to know that the wireless one needed a receiver to work. And moreover it has a battery pack which has to recharged every now and then. So instead of buying all those thing I went in for the wired controller. And the deal I got was simply unbelievable. I got one for $11.49 which roughly translates to Rs.450 which is dirt cheap if you ask me. And the controller I got was in like-new condition. The real reason I bought the thing was to play the game I had my eyes on for a while now – Assassins Creed.

This is THE game of the year if you ask me. And not playing it without an Xbox 360 controller will take all the fun out of it. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions were released in November 2007 and I’ve been drooling over their screenshots ever since waiting for the PC version which came out on April 9th 2008. The huge 6.5GB game is in my download queue now and I can’t wait to try it out.

Demonoid’s Back – Again!

// April 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // Tech

One of my all time favorite torrent trackers – Demonoid.com is back online again. As you know from one of my blog posts, Demonoid was finally taken down in November 2007 after their intermittent service in the month of September that same year. All the old user accounts are working now(mine did) and the torrents are there and the tracker is up and running providing blazing speeds as usual. Their welcome back post from April 11th 2008 states that a new site admin’s here and that the site itself may be going online and offline over the next few weeks(Site Maintenance?). But whatever bro, we’re just happy that you are back.

Sunday Low

// April 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // General, Tech

A quick look at my Google Analytics page for my website just revealed an interesting fact. Over a period of 1 month the Sundays had the lowest traffic in any given week.

[Click on the Image to View in Higher Resolution]

The majority of the traffic is due to the page on Naruto, which is entertainment if you ask me. And one would expect that Sunday should be the day that generates the highest amount of traffic for such a topic. But the data is quite contrary to the popular belief. Before you guess as to which country is deciding this trend – Its United Stated of America which accounts for almost 50% of the traffic.