www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zll_jAKvarw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Y6AeIJmI4

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7zo2zY1Zqg

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

To run torrents on my server I used Torrentflux. It’s a PHP-webinterface to BitTornado and it has a nice community and forum where they regularly post hacks to add new features. After a while I found out there was a different version (fork) of Torrentflux with more features and I switched.

TF-B4rt

This fork of Torrentflux is called Torrentflux-b4rt. It adds a bunch of new features, including some improvements to the interface and support for multiple bittorrent clients. TF-b4rt supports BitTornado, Mainline, Transmission and Azureus.
Azureus support is provided through a piece of middleman software called Fluazu, which talks in XML to Azureus. This (and being written in Python) causes Fluazu to use quite a bit of CPU cycles. About 10-30% on my 2.13Ghz Core2Duo server. It’s also a rather delicate system, if you manually delete a torrent through the Azureus-GUI/console, or disk, the webinterface starts to bug. It will show torrents running that aren’t, and you can’t delete them because it’s convinced they’re still active. But even if I didn’t do something like that, Fluazu got confused with my torrents.

The main reason I wanted to use Azureus (and thus, Fluazu), is the support for global download/upload rate-limits. However, the extra CPU usage for Fluazu was bothering me and I looked for alternatives.

Azureus Web Interface

Azureus has it’s own web interface. Two actually. The HTML Web-UI, and the Swing Web-UI. I tried the Swing Web-UI and it works rather well. You upload torrents, Azureus downloads them. Because it talks directly to Azureus it’s more reliable than Torrentflux-Fluazu.

Installing the Swing Web-UI breaks support for TF-B4rt/Fluazu.

Clutch

Another webinterface is called Clutch. It’s a webinterface that talks to the Tranmisson daemon. Transmission is a fast light-weight torrent client. Using the daemon version, you can have multiple uploads with a global upload/download limit.

After loading about 20 torrents in Transmission, I was using about 1% memory, while Azureus used 9.5%. CPU usage for Azureus was 2-4%, while Transmission rarely got above 1%.

Torrentflux-b4rt provides the most functuonality. It has some features you can’t find in the other two. For example you can enter RSS-feeds for torrents that get downloaded automatically and you can upload multiple files at a time. Also you can stop/start/delete all torrents and data at once. It also supports multiple users, multiple torrent-clients and has more extensive statistics. Because of all these extra feature, Torrentflux is also used in hosted solutions.

Unfortunately it doesn’t support global upload/download limits on its own. It needs the Fluazu/Azureus combination for this. And using this combination is rather CPU intensive. So all in all, Torrentflux-b4rt is a great solution if you don’t need the global upload/download limits.

The Azureus Web Interface is very nice if you’re a single user. The Azureus bittorrent client has a lot of features so having a web interface to this powerful client is great. It’s quite a bit more resource intensive compared to BitTornado or Transmission, but it does feature advanced features like the distributed tracker, which allows you to download torrents of which the original tracker is down.

Transmission+Clutch has a very clean interface and turned out to be the best choice for me. It doesn’t have all the advanced features of Torrentflux, but it does the basics just right. It requires few resources, allows you to set global upload/download rates and it has a feature to start/stop all torrents at once.

The Piranha is Razer’s second attempt to create a gaming headset. You can read what I thought of their first attempt here.

First impressions

The Piranha looks like a typical headset. On-ear cups, flexible mic-boom and an adjustable headband. The Sennheiser PC150 follows the exact same recipe.

An obvious difference (at least in the dark) is the glowing Razer logo. To power these LEDs the Piranha has a small USB plug. This plug is not used for anything else, so if you don’t like the blue LEDs, simply unplug the USB connector.

Cables and connectors

A nice touch is the braided cable. This rope-like cable feels like you could climb a mountain with it and will certainly last a long time. The braided cable splits into three rubber wires for the audio, mic and USB plugs. The three seperate wires are very long compared to the two short wires on the Sennheiser PC150. This enables you to have the microphone input and headphone output some distance apart.
The Piranha’s heaphone-plug is connected to the control unit of my Logitech Z-5500 on my desk, while the microphone is plugged directly into my soundcard. This wouldn’t be possible with the Sennheiser PC150 without an extension cord.

Halfway the braided cable there’s a small inline volume control, mic switch and shirt clip. The volume dial feels ok, and the shirt-clip does what it’s supposed to. Unfortunately the mic switch feels very cheap and flimsy. You could easily switch the mic on/off accidently.

Headset and sound quality

The headband has some padding and can be adjust to fit nearly any head. The mic-boom is attached to the left earcup and can be easily adjusted. The boom itself is flexible and you can bend it into position.

The microphone will enable others to hear you loud and clear.

I’m not too impressed by the ‘uni-directionality’ of the microphone. Typing on my keyboard was picked up just as easily as my voice. Overall the microphone is good for a gaming headset.

The other important aspect is the sound quality of the headphone. The Piranha produces a darker and bassier sound than the Sennheiser PC150, which is also a bassy headphone. Overall it’s not bad for a gaming headset, but it’s not really better than the PC150.

Conclusion

The Piranha is a nice headset. Decent sound and microphone quality, good ergonomics and a solid quality feel (mostly). The Piranha doesn’t offer any new features for a headset, but it does a good job of the basics.

It suffers most from headsets like the Sennheiser PC150, which offer almost the same features for half the price. In the end I would recommend this headphone to anyone looking for a good gaming headset. But I’d also point out the cheaper alternatives and HiFi headphones.

Pro

+Well built headset, very nice cable

+Microphone and sound quality are OK

+Good ergonomics, comfortable

Cons

-Expensive

-Cheap microphone switch

I recently received this mouse as part of a christmas-gift from Razer, and I’ve decided to write a review about. In my opinion most hardware sites don’t have proper mouse-reviews. They either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are afraid they won’t receive any more review samples if they’re too critical. One notable exception is ESReality.

I think I do know what I’m talking about, and I don’t get review samples anyway

You might have read my review of the Razer Barracuda headphone/soundcard combo, if you did, you’ll know I might be a fan of Razer, but not a fanboy.

Keeping with Razer tradition, the Lachesis is named after yet another venomous snake. I’ll start off with some specifications.

Specifications (and what they mean in plain English)

4000DPI 3G laser sensor

This means you can move 4000 pixels on screen with just 1 inch of mouse movement. Razer calls it a ’3G’ laser sensor, which means you should be able to move this mouse at high speeds without the mousecursor skipping (like the Razer Copperhead 1G laser mouse)

On-board memory

Using the drivers you can save button bindings and macro’s to the memory inside the mouse. When you take the mouse to a PC that doesn’t have the Razer drivers, you can still use the settings in this memory. This way you can use advanced macro’s without the drivers. You’ll only need to drivers to save them to one of the 5 available memory-profiles.

Adjustable DPI

Using two buttons you can change the DPI in 125DPI intervals. This is again possible without drivers (as long as you keep two buttons bound to DPI changing of course).

1000Hz ultrapolling

By default, USB mice report 125 times per second (125Hz). The Lachesis can report 1000 times per second. This will cost you quite a few extra CPU cycles, but will make the mousecursor move smoother. I don’t use 1000Hz, but 500Hz, because I can’t feel the difference between 500 and 1000Hz ingame.

Shape and feel

Besides the specs there is the shape of the mouse. It’s an ambidextrous design, which means both lefties and righties can use it. Compared to the Razer Deathadder it’s a rather small mouse. A lot flatter and less ‘fat’. If you have big hands it might be a bit too small.

The Lachesis has a lot of buttons. 4 on top (5 if you count the scrollwheel), 2 on the left side and 2 on the right side. You can only use either the left-side buttons or the right-side buttons (depending on if you use your left or right hand). Compared to the oversized sidebuttons of the Deathadder the side-buttons on the Lachesis feel small.

The entire mouse is covered in a kind of rubber, the same used on the Deathadder. Like all Razer mice, the buttons are more sensitive comared than you’d expect from a normal mouse. This might take a while to get used to, but in my experience it makes your clicks register slightly quicker.

Scrolling feels exactly the same as on the Deathadder, almost silent and with very good feedback ‘clicks’.

The mousefeet are made of the Razer-standard teflon. Which ensures smooth movement across your mousing surface.

Drivers

The drivers installed without problems. They look a lot like previous drivers and even have the same BSOD-inducing bug the Copperhead and Deathadder have.

If you use Windows XP and multiple users the following will happen: ( I know it will because I’ve tested three different mice on 2 different PC’s and 2 fresh XP installs)

1. You power on the machine and log in using USER1

2. You leave for work/school/cafe and keep the PC turned on

3. Your friend/girlfriend/brother/parents log in using USER2

4. When you get home you log out USER2 or use ‘fast user switching’ to switch without logging out.

5. Approximately 10-30 minutes later you’ll get a blue screen of death directly after pressing a mouse button.

Besides this annoying bug, the drivers worked perfectly.

Taking it out for a spin

Sure you can use this mouse on the desktop, but it’s meant to be a gaming mouse. So the natural thing to do was to start up Team Fortress 2 and start fragging!

Ingame I bumped the DPI to 4000 and lowered my game-sensitivity to compensate. This way I got the most precision while maintaining my normal mouse-movement-to-ingame-view-turn ratio. I normally use a Deathadder which is a right-handed mouse. The Lachesis being ambidextrous and smaller took a while to get used to. After an hour of fragging I mastered the Lachesis and played as well as with my Deathadder. The mouse is easy to hold, the buttons are easy to push and headshots are almost automatic. A very pleasant experience. However, I did start to experience some annoying quirks. While I was playing as a sniper, I had to lift the mouse off my mousepad (Razer Exactmat) to keep tracking an enemy. When the mouse left the mousepad, my sniper suddenly looked down. Simply every time I lifted the mouse, the view of my brave soldier would shift down a bit. Being a sniper is almost useless like this.

Another problem I found was ‘ghost movement’. Sometimes the mouse just shifts your view up/down/left/right. It only happened once very five minutes, but it also seemed to happen just when I was in combat.
Yet another problem is something I’ll call axis-lockup. This means that sometimes, for whatever reason, the mouse stops responding to all movement on a certain axis. You’ll either only look up/down or left/right. This ‘lockup’ only lasts a second, but is very annoying.

I tried switching mousing surface from my Razer Exactmat to my desk (white with some texture). Ironically this surface worked better than a Razer-brand mousepad. Still, the quirks remained. Today, Razer released a beta firmware aimed at fixing these problems, but unfortunaly it didn’t fix these problems for me.

These sensor problems should have been caught by Quality Control. I experienced these problems within the hour, there’s no way this could/should have slipped by QC.

Conclusion

Pro

+Good grip

+Ambidextrous design

+Great buttons

+High accuracy

Cons

-Lots of bugs in the current sensor firmware

-Only two of the four sidebuttons are usable

Verdict

Obviously the Lachesis is a mouse with a lot of potential. Extremely high resolution, movement speed and a good design should make the perfect combination for a great gaming mouse. Unfortunately the bugs in the laser sensor make it impossible to recommend this mouse to anyone right now. Also it’s a rather expensive mouse when you compare it with the Deathadder and Diamondback 3G. Both of those don’t have the sensor bugs and have been around for a while..

So to sum it up. If you’re looking for an ambidextrous gaming mouse, buy a Diamondback 3G. If you’re looking for a right-handed gaming mouse, get a Deathadder. If you want the latest and greatest gaming mouse, wait for a firmware that fixes the bugs in the Lachesis.

To be fair, the Deathadder had some problems when it launched as well. Fortunately a few firmware updates fixed those. Let’s hope the Lachesis gets the same treatment and ends up being just as good as the Deathadder.

During the summer my trusted gang of geeks and I head out to Campzone. A great outdoor LAN party (in tents/caravans), that lasts for 11 days. You bring your own bed, take a shower every now and then, but you still end op sleep-deprived and smelling like cheese.

That’s why during the cold winter months, that same gang of geeks and I go to Relaxion. Relaxion is an indoor LAN party, but with an interesting twist. It’s held in vacation homes. During the low-season, these vacation homes are relatively affordable. So the Relaxion crew books about 10 of these vacation homes. A bunch for an entire week, and the rest for a weekend.

This year was the third time we went to Relaxion, and again, we went for a weekend. The vacation homes have real beds, showers and a bath. A pleasant change from the big halls and concrete floors of normal LAN parties. After 2,5 days of gaming you end up relaxed and refreshed!

I made some snapshots and another gang of geeks made a video about Relaxion.

With 5 disks in a system, this would force me to create 3 graphs, or 1 graph with the temperatures of the 4 disks connected to the RAID array averaged into a single line.

I’ve always wanted to move from MRTG to RRDtool, because RRDtool can handle multiple datasources per graph, and has more options.

However, I found RRDtool very hard to configure compared to MRTG. So I went looking for an alternative.

Cacti is a front-end for RRDtool, which makes it easier to create nice graphs. If you just want to graph routers, it’s even easier to configure than MRTG. But if you like to have custom stats, like the Areca HDD temperatures, it takes a little more work.
Cacti has some nice guides on how to create graphs and new input methods on their site, but even with those it took me quite some time to create my first graph.

By now I’ve migrated all my graphs from my personal MRTG page to Cacti

Areca has made some excellent tools available to monitor your array and attached disks. For example, Areca’s web interface can show you all the disk temperatures.

In Areca’s web interface you have total control over your RAID array. You can add/remove disks, create new arrays and do a check on existing arrays.

But it’s annoying to have to log in to this web interface just to check the temperatures of the disks. Also, it doesn’t come with nice graphs and history information. It just shows the current temperatures.

Areca has also made a CLI utility. Using this utility you can do the same things as in the web interface. I’ve used the CLI utility to generate the data needed by MRTG. MRTG can only handle 2 datasources in one graph. Having 5 disks total (1 bootdisk, 4 RAID member disks), I would need 3 graphs to monitor the disks. So I decided to create a little BASH script that would take the temperature of the bootdisk, and the average temperature of the 4 RAID disks and feed this to MRTG.

I got it for 150€ on a LAN party. It has fresh batteries which should be able to power the server for 80 minutes before it gently shuts it down.

The LAN party I was on is called Campzone it’s an 11-day outdoor LAN-party in tents and caravans. People bring all kinds of high power devices to this LAN. Like deep fryers, toasters, fridges and ovens. This can cause the power to fail and during the two small power outages, the UPS performed perfectly.

The reason I got a UPS is because of the hardware RAID array in my server. It’s an Areca 1210 with 256MB cache. To safely enable disk write caching you need to make sure the power never fails unexpectedly. Else the data in the write buffer will get lost.

There are two options to ensure the Areca’s buffer doesn’t lose power. The first is a small BBU (Battery Backup Unit) which you can buy for about 90€. The second options is a UPS.

So when I saw the UPS for 150€, I thought this would make a good excuse to get one.

APC Smart UPS 1500, rear

APC Smart UPS 1500, hot swappable batteries