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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

⁂
Claire Keane
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
ojovivo

roma★
Not today Justin

Janaina Medeiros
taylor price

izzy's playlists!
i don't do bad sauce passes
Show & Tell
Game of Thrones Daily
$LAYYYTER

shark vs the universe
Misplaced Lens Cap
Today's Document

Origami Around
hello vonnie

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@nschimme
Deprecated
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My Tumblr blog is no longer updated.

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Guide to add zRAM on the Synology DiskStation DS212j
My Synology DiskStation DS212j has gotten slower over the years ever since I bought in 2012. DSM operating system security and software upgrades introduced feature bloat that required more memory and caused memory to page to disk. Wikipedia gives an amazing overview of why paging is bad and why zRAM is amazing for memory constrained PCs.
zram (also called zRAM and, initially, compcache) is a Linux kernel feature that provides a form of virtual memory compression. zram increases performance by avoiding paging to disk and using a compressed block device in RAM instead, inside which paging takes place until it is necessary to use the swap space on a hard disk drive. Since using zram is an alternative way to provide swapping on RAM, zram allows Linux to make a better use of RAM when swapping/paging is required, especially on older computers with less RAM installed.
Pretty cool, huh? The Android community often uses zRAM as a way to bring back older devices back to life and I figured I could do the same with my aging DiskStation that only came with 256MB of RAM compared to the more recent DS216 that comes with twice that at 512MB.
I successfully compiled and added the zRAM module to my DS212j and wanted to share the steps. My DS212j uses the Linux kernel 2.6.32 so this guide should be applicable to any Synology DS that uses the same kernel.
Some small jumps and blooper highlights at Whistler last weekend!
Crazy Pow at Mt Bachelor in Oregon
We decided to hit up Oregon and were lucky enough have it dump. Amazing times!
Gaming with XDMA CrossFire Passthrough on Ubuntu 17.04
I have used Windows as my primary OS ever since I was a teenager because I am a gamer. Ironically, my gaming hobby also introduced me to my programming/Linux hobby (and now career) which are always at odds with one another. I can either game, which has an unfortunate requirement of needing Windows, or hack, which usually requires Linux. This meant I had to constantly dual boot between Windows and Linux or suffer with a virtual machine with poor video performance. Not ideal.
However, a few years ago the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) project enabled near native Windows guest performance by passing through a host video card to a guest. I was extremely interested in trying this out but was deterred by a lack of proof that SLI or CrossFire worked since my other, other hobby is also being a hardware enthusiast.
All that changed when I discovered a post authored by Duelist detailing that he had successfully got his XDMA Radeons to run in CrossFire! I gave it a try it myself and found that documentation was sparse and mostly geared towards Arch Linux. I have a preference for Ubuntu and couldn’t really find anything modern that would help me. All in all, I was successful and am extremely happy with the performance of my box. Hopefully this guide will also help others that have multiple Radeons that they wish to CrossFire!

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Intel Smart Response Technology vs Windows 10 Tiered Storage Spaces
I have used Intel’s SRT (Smart Response Technology) as a way to boost the performance of my slow spinner hard drives ever since they introduced the SSD caching technology alongside the Z68 chipset for Sandybridge in 2011. SRT works by caching heavily used data onto the speedy SSD with a fall back to the HDD at the minor cost of requiring a RAID driver on Windows boot.
The technology behind Intel’s SRT is nothing new and has been standard in the industry as a way to boost the performance of database servers. The software has been reimplemented many times in the form of flashcache, ZFS, and bcache. Not wanting to be left out of the server market, Microsoft also implemented tiered storage spaces for Windows Server 2012 by following the same concept but adding their own twist. They introduce a hot/cold tier concept where the SSD is portion is self-balancing and keeps hot data within itself for fast access.
Enthusiast’s who want their games to load fast without shelling out $$$ for a large capacity SSD were stuck with using Intel’s SRT because Microsoft never ported the tiered storage space technology to Windows 10. This was until Windows 10 build 10565 secretly introduced it without any press release.
Microsoft’s tiered storage space technology ought to be more advanced than Intel’s software based caching and should be able to replace it and perform better. My personal goal was to do that and then measure it.
LEDE and Debian on the NETGEAR Centria N900
I authored a post on liberating a WNDR4700 router more than two years ago which garnered some interest in the community on developing a proper OpenWRT image. I’m happy to report that it finally happened! The LEDE (Linux Embedded Development Environment) team is fully supporting the apm821xx system-on-chip and are generating nightly firmware images for our use.
Modded R9 390X BIOS for the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290/290X
Introduction
I am a PC enthusiast and enjoy putting together computers, modding them, and subsequently writing about it. I am also the tinkering owner of two PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 video cards that I have used now for over a year. This is the story of how I worked to break through the overclocking ceiling that was being limited by the stock BIOS.
I picked the PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 cards as my purchase choice because they are amazing workhorses. They are factory overclocked at 1040/1350 MHz core and memory and are competitively priced compared to other manufacturers. They are also differentiated from reference R9 290s cards due to the additional 50 millivolts of voltage that has been added to their core voltage and a heavy cooler which make them great overclockers. I have been able to overclock the pair of cards to 1120/1450 MHz core and memory until one of the cards died and I had to send it in for RMA.
My journey into BIOS modding started here. After a few weeks of waiting I received a PCS+ R9 290 model in the mail that came with Samsung memory. This was somewhat problematic since my other card had Hynix memory but I considered myself lucky because Samsung is well known by the overclocking community to be the best manufacturer of GDDR5 memory. Their memory is able to perform at a tighter set of timings and overclock at a higher frequency compared to what other manufacturers’ products are capable of (and therefore should be superior to my other card with Hynix memory).
I happily plugged the card in and got straight to overclocking where I was horrified to find that I could never push the card past 1150/1375. The Samsung RAM refused to overclock beyond that! There had to be a way to get this card to overclock more and I was dead set to figure out how through research.
Yvonne in Lake Louise
The drop in oil prices lead to a cheap Canadian dollar which in turn led to a an amazingly frugal Canadian vacation! We enjoyed our trip and would highly recommend our fellow skiers and snowboarders to check out the Big 3 in Banff.
Click to view the above video in glorious 60 fps!
Mojave National Preserve and Capitol Reef National Park
We recently bought a Subaru Forester and we decided to take it out on a crazy winter road trip to view our national treasures: our National Parks and Preserves!

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Migrating from QGLWidget to QOpenGLWidget
A year ago I migrated an old Qt4 project to Qt5. The migration was relatively painless and a huge success with the exception of the QGLWidget powered OpenGL canvas. In Qt5, this widget has been deprecated and currently mangles text rendering on Mac OS X retina displays as shown below:
The only way to fix the mangled text is to migrate to the QOpenGLWidget that was introduced in Qt 5.4.0. Overall, this widget is pretty similar to QGLWidget and Qt has done a decent job describing the differences as well as providing an example of working code.
With that information in hand, I decided to try my luck migrating it over the weekend where I ran into some trouble. Here are some of the more annoying differences that I discovered:
qglColor(), qglColorClear(), bindTexture(), and renderText() are not available.
QPixmaps aren’t supported anymore and you need to substitute QOpenGLTexture.
updateGL() has been renamed to update()
Blending seems to behave differently when utilized with multiple transparent textures.
Modded ASUS MG279Q drivers with 60-144 Hz FreeSync range
The ASUS MG279Q was released with much fanfare because it was the first 144 Hz IPS panel that supported FreeSync. If you looked beyond the MG279Q quality control issues (and subsequently won the panel lottery) the only problem with this display was a limited FreeSync range of 35-90 Hz.
A lot of people questioned why buy a 144 Hz IPS monitor if they would be effectively limited gaming to 90 fps (frames per second) but no other solutions existed. Luckily, a German hacker discovered that you could extend the range of FreeSync by modifying the EDID portion of the monitor driver. The total FreeSync range could now be extended beyond 35-90 Hz to 31-110 Hz or 54-144 Hz!
FreeSync excelled at providing smooth gaming at low frame rates so a lot of gamers usually picked the 31-100 Hz option. Gamers were overjoyed with the November release of the Crimson drivers made that old FreeSync range completely obsolete. The Crimson drivers introduced a “low frame rate compensation” feature where frames at a lower frame rate would now be multiplied into the higher range that was supported by the display.
This meant that having a high upper bound was more important than a wider range or a low lower bound. The driver eliminated the lower bound FreeSync limitations by multiplying the frame rate by its highest supported multiplier. For example, beforehand games would run in 35-90 Hz FreeSync in the following manner:
30 fps = 35 Hz 35 fps = 35 Hz 48 fps = 48 Hz
In Crimson, they run with the low frame rate compensation multiplier:
30 fps x 4 multiplier = 120 Hz. 35 fps x 4 multiplier = 140 Hz 48 fps x 3 multiplier = 144 Hz
How to blow your budget water cooling your PC
I am a PC gamer and I love building frugal, quiet enthusiast PCs with a focus on maximizing performance per dollar. This is the tale of how I was at odds with myself and ended up blowing my budget by going all-in on a custom water cooling loop.
Introduction
In 2012 I bought the three HP ZR2440w monitors because I was playing EVE Online and wanted the additional screen real estate. This was a terrible decision because powering that many pixels forces most gamers into buying multiple video cards easily jumping past $500. I somehow managed to persevere and make it work with a single $250 Radeon 6950 in a semi-acceptable manner until 2015 when I started playing Tomb Raider. At this point my PC barely chugged along at sub-30 frames per second and I started to get a serious case of the upgrade itch.
The absolute breaking point for me was the upcoming 2015 release of the Witcher 3 game where I knew that I wanted to play that at 60 frames per second. My 6950 was clearly past its prime so I ended up purchasing two $250 Powercolor PCS+ R9 290s which can handle 4K resolutions and therefore handle the Eyefinity 5760x3600 resolution. After a few weeks of research and a power supply upgrade the two cards finally arrived and amazed me with their performance. They powered through the games; spewing out a constantly high frame rate but at the same time crazy amounts of noise as the fans whining away to deal with the temperatures.
Unlike the cost that I was willing to sacrifice on, the noise that the 290s put out was something I absolutely did not want to compromise on. In the past I had an interest in water cooling due to how it could make a PC more quiet but I was always put off by the price tag. I did know that it was quite effective from my experience of using a $50 Zalman LQ320 water cooling AIO kit built for water cooling a CPU. I had modded it to fit on my Radeon 6950 by performing the “Red Mod” resulting in near complete silence during gaming that I quickly grew accustomed to.
The noise that the two R9 290s were generating was already too loud for my standards and that was in the winter with low ambient temperatures. I knew that any noise that I was experiencing now was only going to get worse come summer. This is when I started seriously investigating how to water cool my PC and discovered a large community of helpful enthusiasts and hobbyists who helped me do my research, build a loop, and therefore write this blog entry.
Building a MSI Z97-Gaming 5 Yosemite Hackintosh
I have been building computers ever since my uncle helped me build my first PC at age 13. The fascination of installing, tuning, and then finally using the machine has been a vice that I have been enjoying ever since. I have now built over a dozen Linux and Windows PCs over the years but the ☼perfect hackintosh☼ has always eluded me.
For those of you who don’t usually mess with the internals of computers, a hackintosh is essentially a standard commodity Windows PC running the OS X which powers MacBooks and iMacs.
Why do people go through such lengths to have OS X? It’s mostly preference, but in my case I’m doing this for my own personal education and curiosity.
My Family’s Phở Bắc Recipe
People always said that my mom makes amazing food. I was so spoiled by the fact that I got to eat her cooking every night that I never bothered to learn how to cook any of her dishes. This included phở-- especially phở.
Phở broth takes a whole weekend to make from scratch. Why would any bachelor put himself into that position when he could go to a restaurant and buy it? Unfortunatley, it wasn’t until I moved to the west coast that I realized my mistake. My mom grew up in northern Vietnam which cooks the regional variant of phở called phở bắc which is different from the southern varient of phở that most places here in the Bay Area cook. If you want to have phở bắc (and a nice dose of Schimmelmann nostalgia) you need to cook this type of phở yourself.
Luckily, my mom visisted and I was able to document her dash-of-this, until-it-looks-right steps while she showed me how to cook phở from scratch!

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Migrating your project from Qt4 to Qt5
I worked on a hobby project called MMapper back in graduate school that served as my escape from the daily grind. This project is pretty much responsible for my career as an engineer due to how much fun I had hacking on it. I fondly remember how ecstatic I was combining my love for gaming, playing the role as product manager and engineer, and building something useful for my users/fellow gamers.
Unfortunately, I abandoned my project back when I started my day job and the years have not been kind to it. I had always meant to migrate the source code from Sourceforge to GitHub and also remove some technical debt by upgrading it to the latest version of Qt but something else would always get in the way. I sat down back in September and decided that enough was enough! Little did I know that it would take more than a weekend to finally get it all working...
I traveled to Peru over winter break and managed to scratch one of the wonders of the world off of my bucket list!
We utilized Alpaca Expeditions (aka the Green Machine) to organize our 5 day hike of the Inca Trail and had an amazing experience full of awe-inspiring sights and exquisite three course cuisine. It's pretty crazy how much the Chasquis (our porters) can carry given the altitude and then at twice the pace that we were going at.
We also used Tarantula Expeditions to explore Sandoval Lake in the amazon forest near Puerto Maldonado where we saw hundreds of species of plants, insects, birds, and animals including leaf cutter ants and giant river otters. I highly recommend this if you're a fan of animals. I'm still amazed that I saw a bunch of plants and animals that I had only previously seen on PBS.
Some things I should mention to people who want to come to see Machu Picchu:
Don't drink chicha before you start your hike. I'm pretty sure that is how I upset my stomach.
Do the Inca Trail for at least 4 days! The hike was the best part of this trip. I don't think I would have gotten nearly the breadth of knowledge from just doing the train ride and bus tour to the top of Machu Picchu.
Make sure you pick a reputable company to plan your expedition. Don't skimp here! I heard rumors about a lot of people who had to bring snacks because the food sucked. We never had that problem plus we were able to enjoy our trip because we had enough porters so that we didn't have to carry much.
Do spend a few days in Cusco acclimating. The altitude is killer.
Don't bother spending any time in Lima. It's pretty similar to any major city.
Do check out the Amazon forest and Lake Sandoval. It's amazing! (although everything is trying to eat you-- so bring bug spray)