The Parable of Watching Welding on TV

I decided to share this here, not sure why but I do know I need to update this more often.  :)

Today my parents were talking with one of their old exchange students on Skype and I had the thought to sneak up and pop a balloon to scare the exchange student.  Then I realized that wouldn't work because the pop wouldn't be loud on her end.  I thought back about how I'd always been taught to not look at a welding arc, and it's for good reason!  On occasion I find myself looking away out of habit when they show somebody welding on TV, but it's safe to look at on TV.  Like how the balloon pop isn't loud to someone talking on Skype.


The reason is the computers' limitations.  The microphone can't pick up sounds as loud as a balloon pop, and the speakers on the other end probably can't make sounds that loud.  Same thing with the TV, the camera can't pick up light as bright as a welding arc, and the TV couldn't display it even if the camera was that sensitive.

Then I realized, this has spiritual connections.  It may be a little technical or far fetched, but it was meaningful to me.

God is sending us messages all the time.  He speaks to us trying to guide us to happiness, or, the more fertile parts of life (1 Nephi 16:16).  The scriptures describe God's voice as still and small (1 Kings 19:12) or as a feeling (Galatians 5:22).  The message he is sending is the most amazing message we can hear in this life; more glorious than anything we can message.  Are we able to receive it?

First, we might not be sensitive enough.  We may only feel part of the message, nor not believe it when we receive the message the first time.  How might we grow sensitive enough to hear it?  My best understanding is to practice listening.  Spend time focusing on listening to what God has to say every day.  This happens best through personal scripture study and prayer.  That's part of why those two things are mentioned over and over.

Second, we might use the message to hurt ourselves.  The scriptures talk about the Jews missing the mark and this knowledge they sought became a stumbling block (Jacob 4:14).  They started wanting spiritual knowledge that they weren't ready to receive, and it caused their downfall.  Do you believe all that God has taught you?  Do you keep wanting to learn more but aren't doing the simple things God has taught you to do?

Sometimes it seems like I keep hearing the same message over and over from God.  Sometimes it was conference, or it's talks at church, and I realized it's because I'm not listening.  When I stop listening I stop progressing.  Leaning back on the Book of Mormon lesson, the pointers on the Liahona stop working, and I start to get lost.

So what do we do?

I know that as we keep trying, God will strengthen us.  His message will get brighter and brighter in our hearts.  We may feel like we aren't getting anywhere, but we are getting somewhere spiritually.  Every day we hold to God's word and live his commandments we grow stronger spiritually.  Our desire and ability to repent increases.

I know God loves us.  We may not understand how he expresses his love, but it is always there.  He will help us understand if we just listen.

I got a bigger memory and lots more RAMs! 8000 RAMS!

InvisibleBread.com, go check it out!

When upgraded to Windows 7 it said it needed 2GB of RAM.  I had done fine with 2GB on Windows XP so I thought I didn't need to change anything.  When I got everything installed, updated, and ready to go, I tried to play a game.  It was painfully slow!  I went back to see what the problem was and found that Windows 7 used about 1.3 GB of RAM just idling.  I thought Windows 7 had better memory management!  It seems it does, but it just needs twice as much as Windows XP did.  Figures.

So I go on the hunt for new memory and find that RAM has changed in these last few years.

Old motherboards used to have a FSB rating which is the speed the motherboard runs at.  The memory, processor, and peripherals would then be set at a multiplier of this if they ran faster.  The wrong combination of speeds would leave one component waiting for the others to catch up.  Getting the right speeds made the whole computer run faster.

These days on AMD motherboards they use HyperTransport.  To describe it simply, it's like upgrading a traffic light from a timed light to an automatic one.  It basically directs traffic instead of just letting it pass at a set interval.  So with this, there is almost no correlation between processor and memory speed.  Get the speeds you need and they'll talk nice... except in my situation.

My motherboard is an ASUS M4A785TD-M Evo, which says it supports AM3 processors and 1800 MHz RAM OC.  I found out the OC means when they made the motherboard they set it up so it theoretically could run with faster memory, but they didn't really test it (or couldn't because the memory didn't exist yet).  With a little research I found out AM3 processors don't like memory that runs faster than 1333 MHz anyway.  So, any faster memory wouldn't work anyway.

I ended up getting two 4GB Crucial chips.  It clocked at 1333 MHz with a latency of 7.  (Model BLT2KIT4G3D1337DT1TX0.)  I went with 7 latency instead of 9 because it was only about $3 more expensive.

My motherboard still had the old BIOS that came with it, and when I put in the new RAM the motherboard wouldn't even POST.  I was about to send the memory back when I decided to try updating the BIOS.  The BIOS update version 2104 fixed it, except the timings were set for a latency of 9 instead of a latency of 7.  After some more research it seems you have to manually set timings.  Motherboards don't check that on their own.

In the ASUS bios under JumperFree Configuration menu I had to set the memory timing to manual, then change four settings.  First, I set the tCL, tRCD, tRP to 7.  Then I set the tRAS to 24.  The rest I left at automatic.  After I saved and rebooted it worked like a charm.

Free upgrade for my computer!

I was researching my computer's AMD Sempron 140 Sargas processor on Newegg a while back. As I read some comments on the processor I noticed that people have been able to "unlock" a second core on this processor. I purposely bought this processor because it was super cheap even though it only had one core and was thus a little slower. I liked the idea of getting a free second core, so I found out how to do this "unlocking". All you need is a motherboard that had a SB710 or SB750 chip on it and an Advanced Clock Calibration setting in the BIOS.

My super cheap motherboard had the SB710 chip and the setting so I turned it on and found the settings made no sense at all to me. I turned on an "Unleashing Mode" and left it at it's default settings. That sounded like it might unlock something, right? When I restarted my computer it reported that it had an AMD Athalon II X2 4400e processor and it displayed the message "Two Cores Unlocked!!" as it booted. I ran some tests and the processor did indeed seem to have a perfectly fine second core. The only down side I've found is the processor temperatures went up from 38 C to 42 C. Pretty cool to suddenly get double the power for your money.

I wondered what in the world AMD had to gain from this selling more powerful processors but just disabling part of it. I found three reasons that made sense. First, they get tons of free advertising from it. For example I'm blogging about it right now! It might be worth it to spend a little money to get people to talk about your product. Second, they may have just found a obscure problem under extreme conditions with one of the processor cores when they made it so they disabled it and sold it cheaper to cut their losses. Some people have found it doesn't work when they try to unlock extra cores. Third, they may be disabling the processor because people want a cheap single core processor. They could save the costs of building a whole new machine to make this specific processor and just disable one core and sell what people are willing to buy.

The second thing I found out is about NTFS on larger hard drives. I recently erased everything off my computer and reinstalled it to clean things up. I have been sticking to an old file system called FAT32 that came about with Windows 98. When NTFS came out years ago I researched it and everybody said it was terrible, so I stuck with FAT32. It seems now that Microsoft has since improved NTFS and on today's large hard drives it actually runs much faster than the old FAT32. I did some testing and here's what I found.

I have a RAID 0 made with two 40GB SATA hard drives. When it had FAT32 on it it would write at about 45.045 MB/s and read at 57.641 MB/s. I reformatted the drive with NTFS and now it appears to write at 42.024 MB/s and read at 64.776 MB/s. So it takes a little longer to write files but it reads much faster. Since most the waiting on your average computer is for it to read files I'd say it was a nice boost for no cost. Now I'm curious if it would have an effect on my 250GB hard drive, the only problem is my wife uses that hard drive as a networked drive with Mac OS, and I hear that you can't access NTFS with Mac OS. I'll have to look into that further.