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Apr 28
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This guy made my night! 
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Mar 26
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Playing around with some Google NGram tonight! It lets you search trends in books over the last 500 years or so. Thought this was interesting…. (click for awesomeness)
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Feb 05
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Comparing the playability of the stock DTX900 module, Addictive Drums, and Studio Drummer. This isn’t meant to show off any skills (as I’m primarily a marimbist) but if you’re thinking about using VST/AU’s for an electronic set, this will give ya some food for thought.
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Jan 29
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Ok this is a bit off topic, but I recently got a 15in i7 macbook pro to replace both my core2duo MBP from 09 and my Mac Pro tower from 07. Here are some interesting tidbits of information in no order.
The i7 is roughly 5-10 times faster than the core2duo at video encoding. It’s twice as fast as my 2 x 2.66 core2duo Mac Pro.
I have the 6770m graphics card and most games run faster on it than my Mac Pro with the 4870 in it, except SC2 and Crysis which run significantly better on the 4870. (all tests done in 1080p)
Battery life in my Core2Duo was waaaaaay better. Of course, it had integrated graphics though. The new 15in has integrated Intel 3000 graphics as well as the 6770m and is suppose to intelligently switch between the two. Problem is, opening some things like firefox makes it use the beefier card. Just so you know, battery life on integrated about = 6 hours, 6770m is about 2-3.
So solve this issue, there is a little program called GFXCardStatus that lets you manually force the integrated graphics card when you want better battery life. This works great for most things, but in order to use an external monitor or projector (which us teachers use everyday) you HAVE to use the 6770m. This of course means that My laptop won’t make it through 2 classes without needing to be plugged in, where my core2duo would last through 4.
So I guess there are tradeoffs between power and portability. I almost got the 13in i7, but decided not to because it doesn’t have quad core yet. Since the i7′s have hyperthreading, my 4 cores turn into 8 so video encodes super fast. A duel core i7 would only give me 4 virtual cores.
Of course all this theory was thrown out the window today when encoding episode 15. I noticed that my 8 virtual cores of awesomeness totally cause my 5400 RPM hard drive to bottleneck. So unless I get a 7200 RPM drive or an SSD (not likely) I can’t take advantage of all that power. In fact I only used 60% of my processor during the whole encoding process.
Theoretically this means that having 4 cores maxed on a 13in MBP would be about equal to having 8 cores half way maxed on a 15in. Sooo. Anyone want a 15in Mbp?
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