Saturday 28 August 2010

Making a Dell M70 Precision quieter

Simple, get a Western Digital Scorpio 40GB drive, WD400UEDTL (or WD400UE) (not a newer 80GB one, the M70 BIOS doesn't like them) off Ebay, make sure it's EIDE not SATA, slot it into an M70 hard drive caddy, and put it inside the M70. Not sure how to remove the existing drive from the hard-disk caddy - I had to buy a new caddy from Ebay, and put the Scorpio in the caddy. Then you install Windows/Linux/whatever from a boot CD.

If the CPU is noisy, get http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/ and set Main Operating Mode to Automatic temperature control.

You'll now have a laptop quiet as a whisper!

Saturday 7 August 2010

Movie cliche: The Bad Guys' Secret Code

In films from all ages, we have the classic cliche.

Basically, the bad guy, with the good guy (in captivity), and some henchmen (say, 2 of them) are in a room at the bad guy's base.

Now, pay close attention: The good guy makes a wisecrack, and the bad guy nods to a henchman, who punches the good guy.

Do you see the problem here? How do the henchmen know what a nod means? Or a finger click. Or a summoning finger? Simple: The screenwriter couldn't be bothered to have the bad guy say "Punch him" - or for that matter, to pay the cab driver after a long cab ride (another cliche).

Now, examples of this:

*Casino - They're about to do something nasty in a casino backroom. De Niro nods to a guy and he stops.

I can't think of any right now, but you heard it here first.