tekHedd – the blog

My overclock, it turns out, was a bit too much. So that’s why all the games were crashing! Well… It’s summer, and A/C is for whiners and old people who might die of stroke. Give me a beer and a nice fan and I’m set. That is to say, a nice fan, not one of those annoying oscillating fans.

But the heat means a proportional rise in core CPU and GPU temperature. Noooo! I had to drop my CPU core clock a bit and all my crashing went away, well, except for those damn memory leaks of course. You can’t play games with an insane overclock in mid-July, unless you like to live in a freezing cold house. No thanks, I get that all winter.

And after all, what’s the difference between 2.5G and 2.4G? I can’t tell the difference. I have two cores, so the MP3 player and other stuff isn’t stealing CPU from the games. By just backing it off that tiny bit, I am now able to run the fan at a much lower speed, which means my computer is almost civilized.

And then there’s the PhysX card. Whatever that does. What exactly does it do anyway? I know it’s supposedly “physics processing”, but I can’t really tell–the bottleneck in a combat sequence always seems to be waiting for textures to load. And it has a noisy little fan. I’m glad nVidia bought them, but sad too. Somehow I don’t see how nVidia will care about acceleration beyond that marketing bullet point.

I guess I’ll blow something up.

GuildCafe, er, I mean GamerDNA uses pixel font sizing. The fonts are very small on high quality monitors, although they would theoretically be a very nice size on my old 800×600 CRT. Adjusting font sizes in FireFox 3 also scales the images, and is not satisfying to the palate!

Don’t suffer, use this tiny script to make the fonts less squintabulous. You will need three things:

• FireFox
• The GreaseMonkey add-on
• The GamerDNAPointFonts greasemonkey script

You should look at the script source before running it, to verify that I’m not trying to hack your system. :) It should be reasonably easy to understand even if you’re totally non-technical.

I realize there are other add-ons that are specially made to adjust the size of fonts globally, but I felt that GuildCafe (now GamerDNA) deserved special attention.

I’m now blogging at tekhedd.com, since GamerDNA seems to be phasing out the big GuildCafe blog in favor of the more modern web 2.0-styled “2day i plaed sum halo N schooled sum srs lamrz!” blog. OK, so you don’t have to blog that way in experiences, but the format doesn’t encourage any sort of introspection or elaboration. It also discourages the use of long words, like “introspection” or “elaboration”, for that matter.

NEway, i wl be @ tekhedd.com blogging CU ther!  :)