edwardrake

not bad for being in the boonies. best day for months. will it stay this way?

Spent a fair bit of time searching for an ITX format, quiet computer for the bedroom. I needed something that performed well & suitable to attach to a swing arm knocked up by the local metal man bolted to the wall over the bed on which the monitor is mounted. Came across Zotac GeoForce9300 MiniITX w/ Nvidia graphics chipset designed for home theatre/Blue Ray etc & any other use. Installed Core2Quad Q9400, 2 ½ inch Seagate & 4 Gb RAM. The board measures 170mm x 170mm x 50mm inc fan height, full spec & high performance, wireless keyboard & mouse. Plenty of reviews on the net, see AVSForum. Have an acrylic case on order made for this format, meantime mounted the board & HDD in a wooden electric switch box (60 baht) all mounted on the swing arm. Virtually silent except when CPU temp rises the fan speeds up, various methods to overcome this if you need absolute silence. DC to DC fanless power brick also silent, built in Wifi. I found only one firm importing Zotac units on Asoke but I'm sure there are others. Nothing at all in this format in Panthip. Running 24 hrs a day for 2 months, works perfectly, no CPU heat issues, handles heavy loads with ease. Board price 5,400 baht, CPU 6,500 baht, memory & HDD 4,000 baht. Tiny, fast, silent & a fair price. The project was slightly experimental but very pleased with the outcome.

I have to admit - I'm wondering where you got the swing arm made up as I keep thinking of getting something similar set up - was it with a standard VESA mount on the end? (accepts all LCD monitors up to about 26 inches).

It would primarily be used to watch downloaded TV programmes, so more likely to go for an ION-based dual-core Atom board, which should be significantly cooler running than a Core2Quad (i.e. Zotac ION mini-itx board).

mike - the computer guy I bought from in BKK lent me a IONITX for a week trial & I gave it back. I run a fairly heavy load, charts, databases, Word, ACDSee, Access, SnagIt & Firefox with anything up to 200 tabs open. IONITX couldn't cope & slowed to a crawl. CPU temp on the Q9400 is warmish 43C night 53C day, no problems yet. Under this load occasionally it gets bogged down & sometimes slower than my desktop w/ E6700 CPU. The desktop has two PCi video cards which does a lot of the work so I’m going install one of them in the 9300 see what difference that makes. If all you need is movies the ION should be fine.

Re swingarm. All made up from scratch at the metal shop. The horizontal arm (1) is ~5 feet bolted to wall w/4 bolts. The wall plate has a vertical 180 degree hinge. A vertical arm descends (2) ~3 feet from the horizontal arm to a second horizontal hinged arm (3). Both (2) & (3) are sleeved ½ inch box tube that slide to extend/adjust. Attached to the end of the lower horizontal (3) is the descending piece (4) to carry the monitor, descends ~20” then forms a U-shape with one more hinged bracket/plate drilled for VESA mounting. I’ve had it for years but vaguely remember price about 1000 baht. Best gadget in the house.

Spent a fair bit of time searching for an ITX format, quiet computer for the bedroom. I needed something that performed well & suitable to attach to a swing arm knocked up by the local metal man bolted to the wall over the bed on which the monitor is mounted. Came across Zotac GeoForce9300 MiniITX w/ Nvidia graphics chipset designed for home theatre/Blue Ray etc & any other use. Installed Core2Quad Q9400, 2 ½ inch Seagate & 4 Gb RAM. The board measures 170mm x 170mm x 50mm inc fan height, full spec & high performance, wireless keyboard & mouse. Plenty of reviews on the net, see AVSForum. Have an acrylic case on order made for this format, meantime mounted the board & HDD in a wooden electric switch box (60 baht) all mounted on the swing arm. Virtually silent except when CPU temp rises the fan speeds up, various methods to overcome this if you need absolute silence. DC to DC fanless power brick also silent, built in Wifi. I found only one firm importing Zotac units on Asoke but I’m sure there are others. Nothing at all in this format in Panthip. Running 24 hrs a day for 2 months, works perfectly, no CPU heat issues, handles heavy loads with ease. Board price 5,400 baht, CPU 6,500 baht, memory & HDD 4,000 baht. Tiny, fast, silent & a fair price. The project was slightly experimental but very pleased with the outcome.

here being my house. got WIFI in the near-boonies from an independent & most of the time you can get onto sites without too much problem though it deteriorates as the months roll by. he set it up 6 months ago & international speed was about 2.5 Mb, after years on dialup it was nice. speed has dropped gradually to under 1Mb as seems to be the way to the point you cannot make a decent VOIP call, internet calls now garbled garbage.

any boffins out there know why web pages load fairly fast but VOIP calls are impossible? is there some switch they flick to limit what you get? why the difference?

P.S. We simply want a phone to more or less do what we want not what Apple & the carriers want or have to enter awkward lines of code in the APN field which btw some carriers will destroy, one known to do so is Vodaphone. No billing to call accounts for data unless permission is given with a toggle to switch off outgoing data via the call account & still receive calls. fairly simple stuff.

now using SBSettings, EDGE is down 200 minutes in 2 days without any EDGE use & CALL account's down 100 baht after one local call in same period. I'll uninstall Boss & see if that does any good.

Somehow I doubt it. Maybe time to knock this particular Apple model on the head & go with the Gary A idea. I bought if at MBK. Took it back after a month or so for some software thing & the little b swapped my pristine screen for a damaged one, didn't notice till i got back, by then too late. So it goes. in spite of which i must say i like the iPhone even though the one i have hates me. A new screen is 4000-6000 baht without a doubt a copy, new back is 6000 baht guaranteed copy. when my kid comes over at Xmas i'll get him to bring a used 3G & we'll have a 6 inch nail driving ceremony for the old one right through its tiny little CPU. that'll learn it.

Anyone happy with their wifi, 3.5" non-Apple phone?

That’s very good Gary A.

Twice so far on an iPhone AIS burned EDGE & CALL accounts down to zero by stealth, knew nothing about it till I tried to make a call which was impossible seeing as they’d nicked all available baht balances in all accounts.

When at home, WIFI, EDGE & PHONE all switched on by default, if it doesn’t lock onto the WIFI signal for whatever specific neurosis at the time it switches to EDGE. Like many, surfing for hours on end, day & night like a deranged nitwit without a life so it doesn’t take long to use up the whole EDGE account. Not too serious, 100 baht for the 30 hour package, all I need for tootling around town surfing of course true to my obsession.

Next. At the house again when it can’t get a WIFI signal, if EDGE account is empty or switched off it gamely switches to the CALL account & eats that. WIFI in this location not perfect, erratic, line-of-sight from an antenna 400 yards away on a 30 storey condo block roof which in turn comes 5 km from an antenna in town so maybe that’s why it’s patchy WTFK. WIFI is fine most of the time, when it’s not it allows account raidings, passing control to AIS without informing Master. A collusion of interests?

Installed SBSettings Very nice. Toggling EDGE off stops AIS raping your EDGE account when you want to use WIFI & the signal is weak/dead. But one fatal flaw, some of this has been posted elsewhere I think, sorry if I'm repeating stuf ....

With PHONE on & EDGE off it’ll attack the CALL account and use it up if the WIFI signal dies. Only way around this as far as I can see is toggling PHONE off as well rendering your iPhone a non-phone & a surf only gadget. SBSettings should have an option to block outgoing calls & accept incoming but they seem to have forgotten about this Catch 22.

Time to buy a watch phone riveted to the wrist & graduate to multiple iffy tech device carrier status? Some of them look nice, sort of stylish StarTreck lumps, wonder if they’re any good … I’m pretty good at wrecking things. Had this iPhone for 10 months, it now looks 10 years old, cracked screen, multiple water damage blemishes under the glass from face sweat when making calls making it hop to random pages when it feels like it (someone should get a class action suit going against Apple for selling phones with screens that sweat ruins), bulge on the aluminium housing near the bezel exposing interior lights from sequential drops onto tiles, scratched all over back & front.… you could say it has some character… or otherwise… now & again it writes characters in the SMS field all by itself, occasionally attempts to self-insert a phone lock code. My theory is Thailand & technology are a dodgy combination & hold myself blameless.

I talked to an AIS rep about the account auto-switching & after a long struggle she promised to restore both accounts, 500 baht on the call account & 30 hours on EDGE, which she did with a severe warning she would grant this on a one time basis only. Strangely a few days later she added a further extra 30 hours to EDGE. Maybe she felt guilty, if so a first for me in 10 years in LOS.

Debiting CALL accounts for internet use is a hostile manoeuvre IMO. Why bother with a call account on a NetSim card if they debit call accounts without distinction when EDGE is used up? No mystery there, pilfer all accounts as fast as poss by any means & render to top-up status.

Do True & DTAC work the same way I wonder. Anyone know? On a per case basis trivial but annoying, threat of serial pick pocketing. Apple’s sleazy call-sharing business model must rake in a fair bit with 30 million users from the switching method alone. People with locked phones are more or less screwed. Apple designed the switches & the carriers take advantage of them with the usual non-disclosure policy. The AIS rep said something about people taking legal action against AIS.

cobra, in airplane mode mine still gets WIFI.

Also discovered from a helpful AIS shop rep if you do multiple EDGE connects say on the STOCKS app you get dinged for each connect even if it’s a couple of seconds each. You can easily do 20 chart lookups in a minute, 100 lookups in 5 minutes, 100 minutes debited for the use of 5. Nice work if you can get it.

Abrak, what the carriers are doing is toggling your phone account the way they like with your assumed consent, I think without disclosing. I doubt they view toggling your phone as ridiculous as they tot up the extra revenue it brings in.

whether we can afford it or not is hardly the point. Case in point, I had a bank account at a well known Swiss bank for a while till I discovered them helping themselves to 1000 francs a month under certain non-disclosed circumstances for doing virtually bugger-all (for executing PAPER gold transactions, the non-published 1000 francs was in addition to the published array of commissions, fees & misc admin friction charges). The last I had to do with them before bidding them farewell was after ordering a number of kilo bars to go into safe custody. They informed me they didn’t have any actual bullion on hand in the vault to sell me & I’d have to wait 2 weeks & no I couldn’t lock in a price b/c banks don’t take risks preferring the surer certainty of fees. This by the way was the purpose of opening this account we’d discussed in detail in Bangkok previously at an expensive lunch which they paid for. At the time I thought it must be pretty costly flying bank execs around the world to lunch with would-be clients. The initial expenses are soon recouped. On another occasion when all the banks were going bust a while back I asked them to close my account and put the balance in PHYSICAL BANK NOTES in an allocated vault account. First they said they’d never heard of such a request before & talked as if I was insane. Furthermore to do such a thing I’d have to fly over to Zurich & personally walk the cash (which they would have to order in from some other mysterious source) from one ugly banker’s desk to another in the same building, same office & sign off in the presence of a certain named senior official all of which must be set up in advance with booked appointments etc. They couldn’t do it because they didn’t have any PHYSICAL CASH in the bank worth talking about, just digits on a screen. Somewhere along the line they billed me 175 francs for transferring the money from a fiduciary account to a current account, in their view worth a 175 franc gouge for something I hadn’t asked for. I found this out by accident a few days later & after a barrage of well chosen expletives they removed the charge. All I’m talking about is the infinite volume of bs we’re confronted with all day long.

In AIS case they filch small amounts by devious means. In the bank case they just make up crap as they go along & see if you fool enough to buy stupid stories. A lot of people need a bang round the side of the head as they say in South Central.

===

now have Boss Prefs & SBSettings. what happens if Boss has EDGE on & SB has EDGE off? Will AIS rip my accounts off then send an extra bill for being a stupid farang?

this one weighs an ounce. not sure if it's developed yet

http://www.gizmag.com/go/6771/

Having seen the GPS dog collars that are available these days, they are still of such a size that I think a small Chihuahua would need some sort of steroids to be able to walk around with them on.

It's a very nice idea though, and you would imagine that they in time come up with smaller versions.

here's a few.

http://www.tradekey.com/ks-smallest-gps-tracker/

http://www.gizmag.com/catsi/12066/picture/84469/

http://www.gizmag.com/cuman-gps-tracking/11462/

http://www.navigadget.com/index.php/2009/0...s-receiver-ever

http://thefutureofthings.com/pod/1199/velo...ps-tracker.html

bracelet style http://www.cats-i.net/

the one on the right is 45 x 35 x 12mm to 70 x 45 x 8mm, depending on the model. http://www.cats-i.net/

Any luck?

Afraid not. We put up 50 posters with his pic all around, nothing back. If someone picked him up he may have a decent life wherever he's gone. Found out the male dogs in charge of the bitch chased him onto the road then the dogs at the local shop on Petchkasem chased him 1/2 mile further up the highway & he missed his soi to get back home, scared out of his wits in traffic. An outdoor dog but not a street dog, he'd never been near Petchkasem Rd.

Looking into GPS doggie collars. The new ones are smaller & use a sim chip instead of sim card, plus RF frequency that gives a position fix if the dog is taken indoors when the GPS signal is cut off, RF pinpoints location inside a house or building. Ideally the tracking stuff would display on say an with Google Maps.

3. When people talk about an "unlocked" iPhone, does that just mean it's able to be used with any provider? Isn't that what all iPhones are that come into Thailand? The Mac store said they are selling the exact same thing at the same price as the True store.

An unlocked phone is one that can be used with any sim on any network.

I think I am right in saying that True has the sole rights to import Iphones into Thailand and all its iphones it sells are unlocked at the factory. You can buy them at a relatively low price and lock yourself into a True contract for a couple of years or you can buy them at a 'retail' price and use with any network. They are not selling the 3GS yet.

In the likes of MBK they basically sell 2 different types of 'unlocked' phones. One, the most expensive, is a factory unlocked phone from another country. This has the advantage like the True phone that it can be updated on Itunes and never relocked. Second is a software unlock which takes a locked phone that can be used exclusively on say the AT&T network and renders it usuable on any network. These locked phones can be bought 25% cheaper than factory unlocked for the 3GPS. The unlocking process takes less than 15 minutes. However, when software updates come out you must wait a couple of weeks for a fresh software unlock in order to upgrade your phone. There is no guarantee that Apple wont find a way to prevent you upgrading your software.

Software unlocking used to be a necessary hassle because it was done in conjunction with 'jailbreaking' the phone which enabled the installation of 3rd party Apps via Cydia. Most of these however have been rendered obsolete by upgrades to the phone itself such as video, MMS, landscape email and SMS while others have simply been replaced by iphone Apps. It isnt really worth jailbreaking an iphone anymore as far as I can see.

only reason I jailbroke was to install SBSettings app to allow rapid access to WiFi, EDGE, Phone on/off toggles from virtually any screen.

It persistently logged onto EDGE even though the WiFi signal was present & burned the EDGE account down in a few days.

When the EDGE account got to zero it proceeded to the talk time account & ate that for desert. AIS Net Sim.

Toggling EDGE to OFF has prevented this silent rapist thus far.

Guys, if anyone comes across my little 2 year old Chihuahua, Oscar, please let me know.

He ran into some trouble. Usually he stays close to the house, fairly secluded. This time a bitch on heat got him interested & took him in the direction of the Petchkasem Highway, 500 yards from the house. My place is between the beach (Krisda Thanon) & the main road, 1/2 mile south of Oriental Beach on Petchkasem, 5 km south of Cha Am.

The locals saw him a few times near the road. Being so tiny he got attacked by the bigger male dogs & last seen heading north up Petchkasem Road past Oriental Beach going against traffic about 7 pm last night. I don't think he got hit by a car, heard various motorbikers tried to catch him & he ran off. By the time I started to search it was dark. This morning searched up & down the road, no sign of impact. It's possible someone cornered him & picked him up, if so he could be anywhere. Traffic at that point was southbound toward Hua Hin. I'm sorry to say he wasn't wearing his collar last night.

Large reward to any kind soul who can locate him. . Cheers everyone.

here's Oscar. my phone number is 081 008 2215. Thanks again.

Guys, if anyone comes across my little 2 year old Chihuahua, Oscar, please let me know.

He ran into some trouble. Usually he stays close to the house, fairly secluded. This time a bitch on heat got him interested & took him in the direction of the Petchkasem Highway, 500 yards from the house. My place is between the beach (Krisda Thanon) & the main road, 1/2 mile south of Oriental Beach on Petchkasem, 5 km south of Cha Am.

The locals saw him a few times near the road. Being so tiny he got attacked by the bigger male dogs & last seen heading north up Petchkasem Road past Oriental Beach going against traffic about 7 pm last night. I don't think he got hit by a car, heard various motorbikers tried to catch him & he ran off. By the time I started to search it was dark. This morning searched up & down the road, no sign of impact. It's possible someone cornered him & picked him up, if so he could be anywhere. Traffic at that point was southbound toward Hua Hin. I'm sorry to say he wasn't wearing his collar last night.

Large reward to any kind soul who can locate him.**email removed per forum rules--please PM the poster--sbk Cheers everyone.

Breaking certain 'important' federal laws: Killing a US Citzen and counterfeiting US Currency are examples, I think tampering with the smoke detector in an aircraft toilet might be another

But as Bonobo states, subject to treaty.

largely depends on whim, mood, arbitrary interpretation of law by the whatsits targeting random supects, & misc unfortunates

iow, is this your lucky day, or theirs. khao chai khap.

We manufacture these machines locally for domestic use and export.

Please PM me should anyone be interested in this technology.

Cheers.

please let me know about your ozone machines. air or water?

Edward