October 9, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Camera, Google, Graphics, GSOC, Hardware, Photography, Sony

My new Sony Cybershot DSC W110 Digital Camera

Finally after a long wait, I bought this Sony Cybershot DSC W110 Digicam from Hyderabad Central yesterday. Actually Deepak came to my room and said there is huge offers on Digicams in Hyderabad Central. I didn’t think twice and me, Pankaj, Bansi and Deepak headed to Central. But we found that there were no offers on Sony. But I had already decided to buy this model. So who cares for the offer. After a few minutes of bargaining ( i suck at bargaining ), I bought it for Rs. 9600 ($210).BTW I bought it from Third I Digital shop.

Features : 7.2 Megapixels, 4x Optical Zoom, High Sensitivity ISO3200, 2.5″ LCD Display, Face Detection, Smile Shutter, Full HD.

Accessories : Camera + 1GB Memory Card + Battery Charger + Battery + USB, Audio/Video Cable.

Gift : The shop keeper offered a scratch card with the camera. And I won three days and two nights holiday anywhere in India 😀 Nice.. aint it 🙂

We clicked some shots in Central. Here are few.

Left to right : Kulbir Saini, Nitin Bansal

Deepak Vig

Pankaj Saini

Then We headed to my favorite destination in Hyderabad, City Center. We had burgers as usual. Pankaj did some shopping while we “ogled” at few “good looking” girls. We moved to crossword (a boook shop in City Center). We decided to leave for home. As we came out of Crossword, there were some dandia performance by some group. We captured some shots there as well.

Left to right : Nitin Bansal (Welcome to Sajjanpur wala Bansi :P), Kulbir Saini, Deepak Vig

Few more shots and we headed back to the divine place .. IIIT Hyderabad 🙂

We forced Pankaj to go for Dandia but unfortunately he couldn’t find a funti as only couples were allowed 😛

A big thanks to all the people who provided their views and helped me to by this cam 🙂

PS : Thanks to Google for all the dollars.

April 29, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Graphics, Hardware, Internet, LAN, Life, Monitors, Motherboards, Servers, Speakers

My New Computer

I have been equally passionate about computer hardware and open source ever since I joined IIIT. Friends usually tease me by saying “Hey dude, you didn’t by any IT product this month :D”. I always keep dreaming of a better machine and a lot of machines in my room. And the worst part is that I spend whatever I earn in buying new hardware ( I hardly spend on other things like buying flashy clothes, shoes etc.. looks crap to me.. a wastage of money to be precise :P).

I bought my first personal computer in May, 2006. I used it as much as possible. Then there was a puase for a very long time because I didn’t have cash to buy new hardware. In November 2006, I got RAship in BIRC and hence I got cash 😀 I bought another 160GB hard disk in June 2007 because that was the craze at that time. And because I had to support more upload space on Bordeaux’s FTP 😀 Few months later in August 2007, I bought a new 19″ ViewSonic LCD monitor by spending all the cash I earned till then from RAship and other contract works 😀 Again it was like no cash, no new hardware.

So, by that time I had two monitors and a single cabinet which was not capable of supporting dual display 🙁 As I was out of cash, I had to work harder to get more cash. I did so. And earlier this month I bought new Altec Lancing 2.1 Speakers.

And following them, I bought this monstrous brand new computer. Here is the configuration for the new desktop.

Processor
As I am an AMD fan, so there is no question of going for Intel. I was thinking of buying Quad core initially but then gave up the idea because the cost was increasing beyond my budget. So I decided to go for AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+ (2.8GHz dual core, 2MB L2 cache). This was the first one with 2MB L2 cache with the lowest price 😀

Motherboard

Selecting the motherboard was a really tedious task. Because AMD released its latest 780G chipset recently. A few bugs were reported in forums and I was a bit paranoid while selecting this mobo. But ignoring everything, I decided to go for Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G chipset because this motherboard is currently carrying the best onboard graphics card in the world. ATI Radeon HD 3200 is the onboard graphics card for the mobo. The other reason for going with this mobo was the damn HDMI port 😀 May be it will come handy when I’ll have my LCD TV 😀

RAM

The easiest part to select. I went with Transcend DDR-II 800MHz 2GB x 2 ( total 4GB). I think thats enough for the coming year.

My room has become messy and its really really becoming hot due the heat emissions from the two damn processors.

BTW, the new cabinet has this awesome small LCD display for displaying temperature and other system activities.

My room now looks like this …

So, I have my own small LAN here where I do all the testing stuff with different servers and firewall configuration. I have got a new platform for exploring the world of computer networks. Its fun to work on two machines 🙂 Ok. Here is the last image with Antitrust on one machine and I Robot on the other 😀

Adios,

Kulbir Saini aka General Bordeaux 🙂

November 11, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Graphics, Internet, Life, orkut

Google cum Orkut Rocks !!!

I was just killing time on IRC and was browsing some random sites. I opened my orkut account to check if somebody has written a scrap or not. The layout was as usual but there was written Happy Diwali before my email address at the top. I took my mouse to it and I just realized that it was a link to some javascript. I just clicked on it thinking that it would help me kill time easily as it would waste another 2-3 minutes browsing some more crap on orkut. But … after clicking on that link, I was presented with a brand new layout with a diwali theme. The theme was just awesome. I captured it before the feature goes away. Here is a snapshot, if you are late to check that out. Really, google does everything out of the box !!!

August 29, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Graphics, Hardware, Life, Monitors, Movies, Success, Windows

My new ViewSonic VG1930WM 19″ WideScreen LCD monitor

Finally after stumbling for almost 2 months, I have got my brand new ViewSonic VG1930WM 19″ WideScreen LCD monitor. I gathered the money almost 2 – 3 months ago, but was not able to decide which monitor should be purchased. For last two months, I stumbled on Samsung SyncMaster 940NW which was a bit costlier for the features, AOC 199S which was also costlier, ViewSonic VG1930WM which provided the same features, but the price was a bit attractive. I browsed through enormous monitor reviews, huge price lists on the internet and what not. Then in the beginning of this month when I was about to go to buy the monitor, I was told that the Paradise market remains closed on Sundays. Then, we have hectic schedule throughout the week, so could not go. Then these hyderabad serial blasts went off, again a hurdle.

Finally, today ignoring everything else, we, me and ajay somani went to paradise computer market. I got my ViewSonic and ajay bought a Seagate Sata II 500GB external hard disk with Seagate casing. I bought the monitor for Rs. 10200/- and ajay bought the HDD for Rs. 8700/- .

The monitor is really wide and its looks are just awesome. I can’t express my happiness and monitor’s beauty in words. The monitor support a 1440×900 resolution and has a fantastic response time of 5ms. It also has the inbuilt speakers. The complete technical specs of the monitor is here.

Here are the pics …

Here is a video as well.

PS0 : I am very happy today … of course I have reasons 😀

PS1 : We will have a data center with ajay’s 500GB HDD 😉

PS2 : I am planning to get either a XFX nVidia GeForce 8600GT or I’ll go for mobo and processor upgrade so that I can use my old Samsung SyncMaster 793S 17″ CRT monitor with this LCD monitor in dual display mode. Now, that would be the coolest(?) thing 😀

PS3 : I am a bit showing off 😉