Intel Core i7 desire

One of my colleagues recently purchased a new Core i7-based desktop computer from TigerDirect. He’s been raving about the machine ever since. “It’s so fast”, “It shows up as 8 processors”, “I’m ripping a DVD, watching a movie, and running 3 VirtualBox instances and I still cannot slow down the thing”.  My frugal self dismissed those comments at first, though I was happy that he was happy. My old machine stills runs fine for what I do most of the time.

But then I started dreaming — what could I do with a newer, faster computer ?  For one, I wouldn’t have to put all of my Kongregate flash games to Lowest Quality.  I’d be able to play some of my older games at their highest resolution. JAlbum would be a lot faster generating my photo albums. Manipulating photos in Gimp would be a lot smoother.  And I would also be able to run some things in VirtualBox, so as to not mess up my host system to try something out.

Having not been on the market for several years, I had no idea of what is out there. I soon learned that I should stay away from AMD, that Intel’s Core i7 is the fastest by a mile, and that Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Quad are coming down in price nicely.  I’d want at least 4 GB RAM, which puts me in 64-bit Operating System territory, but it seems that Kubuntu support is pretty much there. So I’ll take that risk. If I do come across a critical program that I need that is only 32 bits binary, then I’ll run it in a VirtualBox VM, on a 32-bit Kubuntu install.

For Core 2 Duo, I decided that I need and x8200 or greater, for a Quad Q9xxx, or any Core i7. I based this on features in the processor listed in http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/core2duo.htm

With Core i7 performance so far ahead of the rest, I may go with the i7, but I’ll of course be paying for it. Especially since there is no competition at the moment (AMD has not matched it yet). The cheapest i7 goes for around $750 at the moment from Dell. http://www.dell.com/home/desktops#subcats=&navla=&a=55103~0~2869930

Between $750 and $900 there are several options from Dell, NewEgg,  HP, and TigerDirect.

I’ve set a maximum price for myself of $600. This means I’ll have to wait out the summer at least, or get lucky and find a good Mail In Rebate or special for a certain configuration.  I’m checking several deal sites almost daily now to see how close those prices get to my level. Some sites:

http://www.dealsofamerica.com/desktop_deals.php

http://dealnews.com/categories/Computer/PC-Computers/PC-Desktop/48.html?filter=c:48;&e=0

It’ll be worth it. I purchased my current, 5-year old machine for about $300, cheap even at the time. I figure that $600 may not last me 10 years, but at least it will last 5 years, and it will give me truly top line performance. I’ll enjoy that. Note also that this is still only a fraction of the cost of a Mac!  I have no Mac envy, since Kubuntu looks so nice, and KDE 4.3 appears to be just that much easier to use.

Also, my current computer can be re-purposed. I haven’t decided if it should be a dedicated computer for my children, or if I should use it as Media Center (perhaps running MythBuntu ?).

mp3 ID3 tags with Kubuntu Linux

Finally. After years of dinging around with EasyTag, a manually patched AlbumArt-qt, and lots of trouble, I finally have a working setup. With KID3’s support for album covers in its April release, I finally have one tool to do the job.
My workflow for organizing music files:

1. start with a directory of mp3 files
2. directory is named “artist – album”
3. each song is named “track title”, where track is always 2 digits (meaning leading zero’s for those under 10).
4. After the Naming step, I tag each file with KID3. I usually do several directories (albums) at once.  With KID3 now, I can search for album covers from the File menu. In the dialog that follows I typically pick Google, but sometimes Amazon gives a better result. Clicking Browse in that window opens a Konqueror browser, with the search results. I pick the imagine I like, view it at full size (I usually go for around 500×500 for album cover, not sure why), and drag the image in the drop zone in KID3. Make sure all files in the directory are selected, and the image is applied to each. If you make a mistake, simple click the picture tag in the ID3V2 section, and click the Delete button on the right.
5. Once done, I save the files, which tends to take some time on my old computer.
6. Now it is validation time. I’ve tried to get Amarok to see the covers, but no luck. I think they still do not support the APIC ID3 tag, or perhaps not with an empty description. Although I generally like what Amarok is about, this is a showstopper. Luckily Songbird has come of age, and proves to be a great album cover browser, especially with its MediaFlow add-on.  To view my newly tagged files I copy them to Songbird’s library directory, and view them in Songbird. If all looks good, I move the files to the “Done” directory that contains all my neatly organized music.
7. I haven’t done any genre or year population. Not sure if I would use that, and it seems more hassle than it’s worth. Automated download of the info is available, but sometimes overwrite other tags incorrectly.

So check out KID3 and Songbird!  Both work great on Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).

Window effects on old desktop

My desktop computer is about 5 years old. It has an old AGP graphics card slot. Years ago I upgraded the card to an expensive ATI AGP card because I wanted better performance for Need For Speed: Most Wanted.
On Linux I never really got the card to work to its full potential — X never seemed to want to do all the acceleration and after many hours of fiddling (at several different occasions) I gave up on it.
Then I got a new machine at work. Any new computer that replaces a five year old one seems fast. And it had a good graphics card. So I have KDE 4.2.1 with all the nice wobbly windows, shadows, transparency effects, desktop cube and so on.
Of course at home I was envious. And I realized that I never tried installing the latest ATI driver after upgrading to Kubuntu 8.10 and KDE 4.2.1. There’s now a cool “Hardware Drivers” program under Applications->System. It lists proprietary drivers that previously were tedious to install, even for a seasoned Linux user.
After backing up important data to the external drives, I clicked “Activate” in the Hardware Drivers program. It said it downloaded and installed the driver and asked for a reboot. I rebooted, and it worked! That’s been the least painful install ever. Surprisingly the effects are very smooth. Sometimes they take up to a second to kick (when moving a large window), but it all feels great. So I’m actually smiling and happy again with my old desktop that feels new again. Thanks Kubuntu!

1TB external disk under $100

New digital cameras have 10+ megapixels and high definition video capabilities. With exotic trips and young children there is always ample opportunity to capture those moments.
But the back-end of photo and video taking is that there is a growing need of digital storage. With a large digital music collection and 12 years of digital photo’s and videos we needed more space.
I already owned a 500GB MyBook, that works well, but filled up quickly. I looked for the 1TB drives to drop below the $100 mark. When the Fantom drive did (after mail in rebate) I bought it from Buy.com. I was worried about the brand, as I had not heard of Fantom. It turns out they just make the casing, and there’s a Western Digital drive inside.
It is well made, feels very solid, is quiet and as fast as needed.

Some deal sites helped me find this deal (and many others):
SlickDeals, DealsOfAmerica, Deals2Buy, DealMac.

Bottom line – I love the drive, and deal sites are a great tool to find a good price.

Free Online City Building Game

After an open Beta (test version) since October 2008, Nile Online 1.0 has been released. The game is a city builder like Caesar III, Pharaoh, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, and Children of the Nile.

You start with a small palace and a small amount of resources. You produce goods and resources and build out your kingdom by upgrading your palace. The game is a social one where trade with other players is a big part of the fun. Still, trade or other player interaction is not required to have fun. There’s very little military action, and it’s optional at that.
This is a browser based game meaning no downloads needed (not even flash). Firefox of course works best, but other browsers are known to work as well. Since it is online, the game can be played from any computer.
When you have a busy life and cannot afford to spend hours on a game, Nile Online is perfect. You can play even just 5 minutes a day to keep things running. Further into the game upgrades of the Palace and Shops take longer and longer, with the final level upgrades taking 50+ hours. Yet by optimizing resources and perfecting labor allocation, scheduling lucrative trades and timing things right you can advance ahead of other players and make the top 100.
The game can be played for free up to a certain level, and depending on strategy anywhere from 1 to 4 cities can be founded. Tokens (called Scarabs) can be purchased for relatively low cost and spent on upgrades, new cities, enabling pyramids, or fun things like dancing monkeys to liven up the scene.
I joined the Beta at the end of October and I have been playing almost every day since — so the game is entertaining for several months. Great fun for great value.
With the game going live only hours ago, there already are over 400 players, I suspect mostly Beta players, but it looks like the new round is starting off in all earnest. It is going to be a fun ride.

Check out the game!

Same computer, faster, cleaner desktop

For while my computer has been slowing down. Simple tasks like copying photos from an SD card over to the computer seemed to take forever.  Starting applications like Firefox would be slow too.  Not only that, even if I didn’t do anything, and leave the computer on overnight, the next day, it would barely do anything, until I logged out, and logged back in again. Now my computer is about 5 years old, so of course I started dreaming about a new, fast computer. But with the economy as it is, we’re really keeping our spending in check, so a new computer (unless the old one really breaks) is not in the budget.

Then KDE 4.2 was released. Not only was the install supersmooth, this version really makes my computer fly!   File operations are smooth again, applications start faster, and the computer doesn’t come to a crawl overnight. The desktop looks clean, yet tasteful. I have flexibility in move widgets from the taskbar to the desktop depending on if I want a smaller or larger version of it.

Bottom line: KDE 4.2 on Kubuntu 8.10 rocks, allowing me to get some more mileage on my old computer.

Internet, TV, Phone, Mobile bill

We pay a ridiculous amount for our telecom services each month. And it seems we pay more for services we use less ! A break down:

• Phone: $199/year or $17/month. Needed because cell phone signals do not reach into our house. We use a VoIP provider and love it.
• TV: $20 for the most basic package. We hardly ever watch TV. Considering turning this off and just using the $1.50/movie/day Red Box in our grocery store. It does give us a $10 discount on our internet access.
• Internet: $40 for the second cheapest package. Internet is vital, especially because we also need it for our VoIP phone. I think it is reasonable.
• Wireless: $75 for two mobile phone plans (family plan). We have more rollover minutes than we know what to do with. Hardly ever SMS/Text. No data plan. Cheaper plans are very hard to find, and even the pay as you go is not all that cheap (they hit you with $1/day if you use your phone that day).

This adds up to some $150/month. That’s a lot of money, yet I cannot seem to find a way to lower these. Verizon recently put FIOS in our neighborhood and I expected some sweet deals (that I would have used to negotiate lower rates on our current providers), but it turns out that their initial offers are actually more expensive than our current plans, plus having been burned by Verizon in the past, I expect them to raise their fees in a year or so.

The only thing I can think of is to go to a lower (slower) tier for our internet. Perhaps we’ll try that out and see how it affects our phone quality and streaming of TV shows.

Of course, if we have good ATT reception, and streaming internet radio and shows was good enough, we could just get an iPhone and hook that up to our big screen TV    We could do all our browsing on the device, and cut out our phone, internet and cable TV costs for a data plan increase on the mobile service (for one of us).  I wonder, could I hook an iPhone (or other 3G smart phone) up to a wireless access point in our house as the provider of internet access ?

Investment strategies for company stock

I am way overinvested in stock of the company that I work for. The knee-jerk reaction is that that is a bad thing. But there’s more to it.

• ESPP: For years I maxed out in ESPP contributions, getting company stock at a nice discount. I’m a buy and hold person, so I never sold any of it. The stock has been up and down since I started working, but right now selling would mean selling at a loss.
• Stock Options: For the first several years employees annually received stock options in addition to a cash bonus. We sometimes also received options when we got a promotion. Options of course are a mixed blessing — if they are underwater (as most of mine are today), they are worthless. But they also pose no risk, and since I got them for free, as a bonus, I really have nothing to lose. They vest over 4 years, and expire at 10, and my first batch of options still has several years before expiring.
• RSU: As part of an incentive bonus we sometimes receive Restricted Stock Units. They vest over 3 and 4 years, buy pay out dividend even before they vest. It’s a great incentive to stay with the company, because unlike options even with the lower stock price, my take when I sell is 100% (minus taxes, etc).
• 401k: many of the funds in the 401k portfolio available to us have our company in their portfolio as well — so I have some exposure there as well.

I’m optimistic about the company’s future (and I really should take emotion out of investing!), so see no reason to sell these shares or execute the options, but I am trying to come up with an exit strategy. Part of me says to just hold everything. It’s easy, and I hope to ride the market’s recovery in a year or two, just like I’ve been riding it down with this stock.

The other part of me feels the exposure as a great risk. I could start by selling of the ESPP account, perhaps in a piece-by-piece basis, (like my previous post on automatic investing). Automatic sales would be a wonderful thing, I wonder if ShareBuilder does that too ?  Ie. each month, sell a certain number of shares, or a certain dollar amount. That would cost me the $10 fee for the sale each month ($120/year), but it would get me out of my position at lower risk than selling everything in one shot.

Of course I could then use the proceeds for an automatic investing plan, so it almost becomes and automatic diversification plan. How cool would that be — to put in maximum exposures and let the system diversify for you.

Since we’re in a down market right now (and my company’s stock pretty much followed the indexes up and down the past few years), this might not be the smartest time to start this sales cycle. Not trying to time the market, but I could set a lower limit that would first have to be reached before I kick of this plan. And I feel no rush — I can wait two years and see how things look at that time.

Once I do start selling, the question becomes when to stop ? Let’s say I dump all of the ESSP shares (is that a bad idea?), I cannot do much with the options, but I could sell the RSU as soon as they vest. I could also reshuffle the 401k into different funds, but the funds are doing fine, so I don’t feel as strong a need to do anything in that area.

How much exposure to the company I work for is too much ?  Another way to ask the question: how much exposure to any single company is too much ? 10% of my portfolio ?  I do not want to get spread too thin either.

Cost Effective Automated Investing

I really like the idea of “dollar cost averaging”. I’m looking for advice on how to do this in a cost effective manner. I’m not looking for 401k, or IRA investing — that’s already maxed out and taken care of. I’m looking to invest the money that’s sitting in my savings account, and that’s not assigned as Emergency fund. I’m looking to invest some money once or twice a month (depending on fee schedules — I’m quite flexible, I just don’t like wasting money on fees).

Regular brokerage fees for buying and selling run anywhere from 4-20 dollars. If you’re only investing, say $250 at a time, that’s a large overhead: once for buying, and at some point later for selling. Especially if you’re also selling using the dollar cost averaging technique.

In my research I came across a ShareBuilder review, where people go into some options. Of course, that review is over 8 months old, which in our internet world means it is almost irrelevant.

I like the idea of ShareBuilder — it seems simple and easy, and the $4 buy is manageable, although I’m not clear on the fees on a sell.

Somehow I can’t find myself trusting Zecco — the idea make sense, and I’m sure they are legit, yet with ING behind ShareBuilder, I may have to give them a chance.

TD Ameritrade and E Trade having very nice trading and research tools, but IMHO lack the simplicity that saves me, the casual investor, time and money.

Lastly I could see if I qualify for free trades at my brick and mortar bank, as loyal customer or something, but that seems so …. last century!

I wonder what others have done, and what has worked well, and not so well.

Please heat pizza before eating

In a recent health binge, I have not eaten or heated up pizza for several months. Today I broke down and got a frozen pizza to indulge on. Reading the instructions, the first thing it said was: please heat before eating.

Yes, thanks. That got a good laugh, just trying to image some idiot trying to bite into the frozen mess.  Any more useful instructions out there ?  Maybe I should start eating more junk food for good laughs.