Cooling your Computer [Projects]

 

Last time I addressed this topic it was to come up with
a few things that can make your computer running smoother. This time I’ve found
a series of projects of the more experimental kind. Keeping your computer clean,
is something anyone can do, but rebuilding (partly or complete) it might be out
of your league. But a fun read still. You’ve probably heard about water cooling
systems, but what about mineral oil, or liquid nitrogen ? I didn’t think so…

Homemade

I recently came across a picture where someone had built an entire PC-case
out of fans. I have lost that photo, but I imagine you would need quite the
power running all those fans. Not very economical perhaps. The fun part about
all the following projects is that they can actually be performed at home. And
it doesn’t take much know-how to do so either. I post links for further reading
for those interested. Also, Should any of you decide to try one of these
projects, we would LOVE to publish an article about you and that project, here
at Mintywhite.

Water Cooling system

Water Chilled Heat sink

Remove the old Heat sink, replace it with a water chilled one. Add some
tubes, a pump, a radiator, a valve, a fan and a small water tank. Assemble it
all inside your Desktop Cabinet. Boot your computer. Enjoy a slient, cool
system.

Pros: It’s a well-tested system that works well. It is easy to get
all the parts you need, both as loose components but also as a building kit.
Reducing high-load temperatures by as much as 40°C (104°F). Relative
inexpensive, though you should expect between $100-200, depending on your kit of
choice.

Cons: Modification of the case is needed. The case also need to be a
large High Tower variant. Water leakage will cause serious problems, so regular
maintenance is a must.

• Link
  to a project

Verdict: Possible

Submerged in Oil

Yes, I am not kidding. You take a tub of sorts, remove
the hard drive, and power supply, add about 8 gallons of a liquid, and you
should be good to go. There has been many projects on the subjects with a lots
of different approaches. Many kinds of liquids have been tested, among these are
de-ionized water (caused blackout after about 5 minutes), motor oil, vegetable
oil and synthetic oils. It seems the best results comes from using clear mineral
oil. Oil does not lead electricity while it keeps the components cool. Tests
show components may live longer than normal.

Pros: Total silence. No noise what so ever (except from the hard
drive and power supply, which of course shouldn’t be submerged - even though it
seems that the project shown on the right have succeeded in doing so). The only
rebuild necessary is to remove the CPU fan, and seal the Processor. You can use
any tank you choose, from a tub to an old aquarium. It’s a very cheap and
inexpensive solution.

Cons: Choosing the wrong oil, will cause a distinct odor. If leakage
should occur the results will be about 8 gallons worth of oil running out on
your desk and furniture.

• 
  
  Link to project 1 (in
  a Fish tank)
  
  
• Link to
  project 2 (in a rebuilt cabinet)

Verdict: Possible

Using Liquid Nitrogen

This is the ultimate in home-built PC Cooling. Little rebuilding
is necessary, but you do need an open case. Remove the CPU heat sink. detach the
fan, and weld on a copper tube to the heat sink. Insulate the tube with proper
material. Re attach the modified heat sink. Fill it up with liquid Nitrogen and
Boot the computer.

Sounds like utopia ? Well not quite. Back in 2003, a few guys did this
project to be able to squeeze at least 5 GHz from an Intel P4, without causing
system crash or overheating. They achieved to overclock 200 MHz (factory
setting) to the record speed of 5255 MHz. Not very strange as the Liquid
Nitrogen kept the processor and surrounding units at about -190°C (-310°F).

Pros: Extreme overclocking capabilities. Little or no
rebuilding.

Cons: Where to get Liquid Nitrogen? It needs constant refueling.
Extreme safety precautions are necessary. Expensive.

• Link
  to Project

Verdict: Don’t try this at home

Get FREE books (Password: mintywhiteBooks)

©
Windows
Guides, 2010. Rich
Robinson | Cooling your
Computer [Projects]

Further Reading

• Increase your
  Computers perfomance, Chill it [How To]
  
• R.A.M – What is
  it and Why do You Need it? [updated]
  
• 5
  Ways To Take Revenge Using A Computer [Computer Fun]

Ants Marching in a Death Spiral [Video]

An unusual event to witness, the death spiral (a.k.a. circular milling)
occurs when ants get separated from the colony and start following the pheromone
trail of other ants in a circular pattern. The ants will continue the death
spiral until they die from exhaustion (unless a lucky few manage to escape).

Ants Circle [via
Geeks are Sexy]

Here is a second video of this phenomenon that we found for you.

dancing ants
[YouTube]

Want to know more? See this interesting bit of information about a 1,200 ft.
circumference ant death spiral observed in 1921.

Ant
Death Spiral [The Ant Room]

IE9 power tips: the secrets of pinned site shortcuts

This is the new feature (one of them) in IE9 I was telling you about.
 
Chris
 

Pinned shortcuts are the killer feature of Internet Explorer 9, as I noted in my review of the IE9 beta yesterday. (For a quick refresher on how pinned sites work and why they’re so useful, see “Treating websites as apps.”)
The most common scenario for using pinned apps is to put them on the Taskbar, as I illustrated in my report (and as Microsoft has showed off in their demos). Indeed, that is the right choice for your absolute favorite sites, the ones you use all the time, like a web-based mail client or your Facebook or Twitter page. That lets you treat the site as if it were an app. And as I pointed out earlier, you can also open additional tabs alongside your pinned site to keep groups of related tabs in the same window, identified on the taskbar by the icon of the pinned site.
A closer look at the Internet Explorer 9 beta (screenshots)
But if you just look at the official demos, you might not be aware of a few cool tricks you can try with pinned shortcuts.
(A note right up front: IE9 doesn’t run on Windows XP, so everything in this post is intended for users of Windows 7 or Windows Vista with SP2.)
To master pinned site shortcuts, you first have to understand what they are.
Under the covers, IE9 saves pinned shortcuts using a new registered file type for Windows, officially known as a Pinned Site Shortcut. It is almost exactly like a regular Internet Shortcut except that it has a .website file-name extension instead of a .url extension. In fact, you can turn a regular web shortcut into a pinned site shortcut, or vice versa, by changing the extension.

Although Microsoft’s demos make a big deal out of the Windows 7 Taskbar, you can actually create pinned shortcuts anywhere in the file system. So, you can drag the icon from the address bar onto the Start menu to pin a shortcut for the current page to the top of the Start menu. If you want a pinned site shortcut on the All Programs menu and not at the top of the Start menu, tap the Alt key to make the classic menus visible, then click Tools, Add Site To Start Menu. (The keyboard shortcut is Alt, T, M.) You can also drag that icon onto the desktop, or into any Windows Explorer folder to create a perfectly good pinned site shortcut there.
And although you can’t pin a shortcut to the Taskbar in Windows Vista (that feature is new in Windows 7) you can create and use pinned sites on the Start menu and the desktop.
There is nothing magical about a pinned site shortcut. The .website extension tells Windows to call Internet Explorer with a set of special startup switches:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” -w “%l” %*
The –w switch is what causes Internet Explorer 9 to treat this process as a pinned website rather than a standard web page. The remaining parameters tell IE9 to use the saved location and any other switches from the saved shortcut.
For your most favorite favorites, the websites you visit every day and leave open all day, it makes sense to pin them to the Taskbar in Windows 7. But for other sites, you might want to preserve this option without cluttering up your Taskbar. For those sites, use the option to save them to the Start menu. The advantage is that Windows categorizes pinned site shortcuts (the ones with the .website extension) as programs for search purposes, and it returns results from the Start menu instantly, before it even begins to search the rest of the index. Thus, when you start typing a search term, you see a listing at the top of the Start menu that includes both installed programs and websites you’ve saved as pinned shortcuts. When I type the letter Z in the Start menu search box, here’s what I see:

To  take maximum advantage of this feature, use the Alt, T, M shortcut and then edit the properties of the saved shortcut so that it has the name you want, not the one the site designer assigned. Click Start, click All Programs, and then right-click the shortcut and click Properties. That opens the Properties dialog for your saved website shortcut. In the box at the top of the General tab, give it the name you want to see (and search for) in the Start menu. On the Website tab, you can edit the Start URL if it includes details you don’t need, and you can also customize the Tooltip Name so that it accurately describes the site itself.
If you want to customize pinned shortcuts on the Taskbar, you’ll find them all in this folder:
C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
Pinned shortcuts on the All Programs menu are here:
C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
I’ve found a few more neat tricks that IE9 is capable of, and I’ll share them in a follow-up post.
Update: In the Talkback section, Speednet provides a nifty list of some of the other advantages of pinned shortcuts:

The big features (only available for Windows 7 users) is the ability for Web sites to directly interact with the pinned shortcut. Those interactions are directly controlled through META tags
and JavaScript.

If you’re a web developer or even remotely interested in the topic, the full comment is well worth reading.

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Moon Crater Map Reveals Early Solar System History

 

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The first complete topographic map of the moon and its craters has revealed
details of billions of years of bombardment by asteroids, and the history of our
early solar system. Among other things, the map confirms theories of an
onslaught of massive asteroids around 3.9 billion years ago that likely
evaporated any water on Earth present at the time.

“Ever since the surface of the moon could be photographed, scientists have
counted craters on the moon and tried to decipher the projectile bombardment
rate and the geological history of the moon,” said geologist James Head of Brown
University, lead author of the study in Science September 16. “But
until now we’ve had uneven or low resolution coverage.”

The map was created using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
that has been circling the moon since June 2009. The orbiter measured the
height of the surface by sending billions of laser pulses towards the surface
and measuring the time it took for the pulses to return. The method is precise
enough it would have been able to detect a small house if there were one, Head
said.

Once the map was made, Head and his team cataloged all the craters bigger
than 12.5 miles across, over 5,000 craters in total.

With the catalog of craters, the scientists were able to confirm there have
been two different eras of asteroid pummeling in the solar system. In the most
ancient regions of the moon the craters are all different sizes, large and
small. But in the younger regions of the moon that were resurfaced by volcanic
activity, the craters sizes are much smaller.

“The evidence we have is that the shift happened
before the dominant mare
[these volcanic flow regions appear as dark spots on the moon] were created 3.6
billion years ago, and probably before that,” said geologist Caleb Fassett of
Brown University, co-author of the study.

Planetary surface geologist Robert Strom, who first proposed the theory of
the shift in asteroid types in 2005, argues the shift was a result of of a
repositioning of Saturn and Jupiter around 3.9 billion years ago. The
gravitational pull of the planets causes there to be regions of the meteor belt
where anything that enters gets ejected. A shift in the positioning of the
planets would have changed the location of these regions and caused a relatively
sudden expulsion of meteors of all sizes that happened to be in those, now
vacant, areas.

“The intense bombardment that happened around 3.9 million years ago, the
earth didn’t escape that,” said Strom. “Earth was impacted so much and by such
big objects that it’s likely that if there was any water on Earth at that time
it would have been evaporated. And any life would have been terminated.”

Since this recalibration of the asteroid belt, only relatively small
asteroids have drifted into these vacant regions and been booted out, Strom
said. Small asteroids drift over time because they are affected by solar energy,
where as large ones have so much mass they are relatively motionless.

Mapping the topography of Mars and Mercury in the future will also help to
confirm this theory, Strom said.

The accurate map of the moon was also used to confirm the oldest regions on
the moon are the southern near side and the north-central far side. The moon was
volcanic about half of its history, until it cooled to the point where the
volcanism shut down around 2 billion years ago.

Images: NASA/LRO/LOLA/GSFC/MIT/Brown

See Also:

• Our Solar
  System: Now With 2 Million Years More Maturity
  
• Edge of Solar
  System Is Not What We Expected
  
• Pieces of
  Infant Solar System Found in Comet’s Wake
  
• Oldest
  Martian Meteorite Not as Old as Thought
  
• Moon
  Water Dreams Evaporate
  
• Asteroid
  Impact Craters on Earth as Seen From Space
  
• Millions
  of Tons of Water Ice Found at Moon’s North Pole

 

 

By Whitson Gordon How to Keep Your Workflow in Sync Across Computers Between home and work desktop PCs, laptops, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones, you have several digital workspaces in your life. Here's how to keep them all effortlessly organized, so you can spend less time fiddling and more time getting things done. Most of us deal with multiple computers nowadays; we work from home, from the office, and even at the local coffee shop. You may have any combination of a desktop computer at home, a desktop at work, a laptop at home, a laptop at work, a netbook for couch surfing, and other number of machines you have to deal with regularly. Unfortunately, you can end up spending a lot of time trying to keep your digital workspaces synchronized—apps, layouts, organization methods, or whatever other computer customizations help save you time—defeating the purpose of setting them all up in the first place. Here are some of the best ways to keep your workspaces as closely synced as possible, so when you move from one to the other you can pick up right where you left off. Note: If some of this feels familiar it's probably because we've covered most of these methods separately before; this goal of this guide is to bring them together in one place to help you set up a synced system. The Tools to Keep it All Together First, you need a way to sync your data across machines. For most of these examples, I'm going to use the popular file-syncing utility Dropbox, mostly because it's simple, free, and it's what I use. If you have, say, an Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive account already, you could use something like previously mentioned Gladinet to mount that storage as a virtual drive and go from there. With this space set aside, you can store important documents, files, and portable applications (if you're a Windows only user), so even if you find yourself working from a computer that isn't one of your usual machines, you'll still have your pre-organized digital workspace wherever you go. Also, while it may seem archaic, you can always make do with a regular old flash drive—they're cross-platform, inexpensive, don't require syncing, and your computer will immediately have access to your data every time you plug them in (although Windows users may need to assign it a permanent drive letter or mount it to an assigned folder). With that out of the way, let's get started syncing.

EPA’s Pollution-Busting Cops Have Lost Focus, Say Watchdogs

The federal government’s anti-pollution detectives have lost their focus,
allege government watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility.

According to documents obtained by PEER under the Freedom of Information Act,
the Environmental Protection Agency’s investigation unit is understaffed and
referring fewer cases for federal prosecution than during the Bush
administration.

“We’ve been contacted by special agents in the EPA’s Criminal Investigation
Division saying they feel that the program is headed in the wrong direction,”
said PEER executive director Jeff Ruch.

PEER’s announcement, which came days before the 40th anniversary of the EPA’s
Clean Air Act, is the latest in a series of CID controversies.

During the Bush administration, when the EPA at large was under political
pressure to skew many of its scientific decisions in favor of industry, CID
investigators were assigned such environmentally-unrelated activities as providing
security at Super Bowls and all-star games.

Rather than pursuing corporate wrongdoers, some of the agency’s elite,
badge-carrying agents became personal errand-runners for then-EPA chief Christie
Todd Whitman, who used them to pick up laundry and walk
her dogs.

Backlash sparked by attention from PEER and other activists prompted review,
and the EPA under President Obama has — despite concerns over chief Lisa
Jackson’s industry
ties and prior pollution enforcement record — been far truer to its
mission.

But according to PEER, much work remains to be done.

“The overall point that agents are bringing to us is that the management of
CID has lost focus on environmental prosecution as the purpose of the program,”
said Ruch. “Things are adrift.”

Employment records released by the EPA to PEER show that in June, there were
just 173
CID investigators (pdf), well below the 200 required by the U.S. Pollution
Protection Act of 1990 and fewer than the 180 investigators employed at the end
of the Bush administration.

“You’d think that to the extent you’re going to do more enforcement, having
more inestigators would be a good idea,” said Ruch.

According to an EPA statement relayed by agency spokesperon Stacy Kika, those
numbers were accurate when sent to PEER in June but no longer apply. “With
recent hires, EPA currently has 192 agents in its Criminal Investigative
Division and another 20 in the pipeline,” said the EPA.

PEER’s documents also show that CID referred only 339
cases for federal prosecution (pdf) in 2009, well below the Bush
administration average of 365 cases per year. The agency doesn’t conduct
prosecutions itself, but suggests candidates for legal action to the Department
of Justice.

The EPA replied that it had opened 387 cases in 2009, the highest number in
five years. But Ruch said that cases referred are a far more meaningful
number.

“Opening a case just means that you’ve started an investigation, which may or
may not be concluded, which may or may not be referred for prosecution,” he
said. “We’re focusing on the number of cases that EPA took to the Justice
Department and said, ‘You should prosecute.’”

Stated the agency, “Special agents are carefully allocating our finite
resources by going after the biggest, most serious offenders.”

PEER will deliver further critiques of CID in coming months, said Ruch.

“What we’re hearing, on an anecdotal basis, is that a lot of the focus is on
bureaucratic minutiae, at the expense of putting polluters in jail,” he
said.

Image: Chemical waste on a beach in Lake Charles, Louisiana photographed
in 1972 by Marc St.
Gil as part of the EPA’s Documerica
project.

See Also:

• The ’70s
  Photos That Made Us Want to Save Earth
  
• Obama’s Most
  Important Science Decision: Picking EPA Head
  
• EPA
  Reverses Controversial ‘Human Guinea Pig’ Rule
  
• EPA
  Chief Cooked Books on California Clean Car Decision

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working
on an ecological tipping point
project.