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This post highlights my discovery of one of the weirest ways to bring a computer back to the functioning state. My problem started when I woke up this morning to a complete power outage as a result of wind storm that took place in the Hamilton region last night. Unfortunate for me, I had ignored the high wind warnings sent out last night and had left my desktop running to crunch away at some data. With no surge protection, I can’t say I was surprised to see that the computer would fail to turn on when the power was restored in my area. The problem in my case was a continuous blinking light on the power supply of the unit (Depending on the power supply, you may not have the light). In the normal state, this light should emit a steady green glow to indicate a properly functioning power supply (picture shown below). With almost no hope of fixing the computer without replacing the power supply, I decided to look around on the web and found a tip involving a hair dryer.
So, you proudly rip non-downloadable audio streams by placing a microphone near your computer’s speakers eh? Unfortunately, you might have noticed that this method results in a significant loss in sound quality in addition to a lack of stereo sound (A big disappointment if you were thinking of placing the final product in a mp3 player). So, what other methods are there to capture sounds from a webpage when you do not have access to a download link? Meet SoundFlower, an open source software available for Macintosh hardware running OS X 10.5+.
Flash has always had a tarnished reputation amongst the internet community when it came to resource usage. It is not a surprise, seeing that a 480p Youtube video running in fullscreen mode is capable of triggering over 30-40% CPU usage (A task that only uses about 10% on VLC). For many of us still holding onto older hardware, the sluggish web browsing experience created by Adobe’s monstrosity of a plugin caused nothing but headaches. This is all true until now. Recently, Adobe announced the latest generation of flash player: Flash 10.2. One of the key features highlighting this version was the ability to tap into the power of the GPU in order to offer full hardware acceleration. This feature was codenamed, “Stage Video” and is an API that will be implemented on all major sites upon the release of the final software.
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