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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

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MockingjaySince I have previously reviewed both of the first two movies, I feel compelled to review the third movie, even though it’s part one of two. It will be a short review, however.

The movie takes off from pretty much the same moment Catching Fire left off, and we start to see District 13, and as those that have read the book know, it quickly becomes Katniss throwing a fit that Peeta wasn’t gotten out when the dome collapsed. It’s extremely sad everytime you see Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hopefully they won’t CG him into the second part of Mockingjay.

The movie stays relatively true to the book, and even includes a nicely done monologue of information that should have been in the earlier books: Why President Snow wears and smells of Roses.

All and All, I enjoyed the movie, and don’t want to give up too much incase people haven’t seen it, or read the book.

[xrr rating =4/5]

Arctic MX-4

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mx4_4g_g00_2I have a couple old Mac Pros sitting in the corner of my work office crunching numbers, and rendering randomly. Their CPU’s are always at 100%. I’ve had them apart half a dozen times to do upgrades, and I’ve never been very happy with the CPU temps. I’ve traditionally used Arctic Silver 5 (AS5) since it’s what I have a large tube of, and generally like. But, as I said, I’ve never liked the temp the Mac Pros run at, and because they’re at 100% all the time, the AS5 never has a real chance to “break in” (which requires many many hours of several thermal cycles). So, last week, I bought a tube of Arctic MX-4 (to be clear, Arctic Cooling (MX-4) is not the same company as Arctic Silver (AS5). The biggest advantage of the MX-4 being it has no break-in period.

Because the Mac Pros have Xeon 5300’s in them, I used the instructions on the Arctic Silver site for a “Horizontal Line“. After tinting the heat sink and heat spreader, I applied the compound and remounted the heat sinks. On power up, and after the machine had a chance to warm up, I am getting 42C and 44C on the two heat sinks at 100% load after 24 hours. On the Mac Pro I haven’t re-done yet, by contrast, I’m getting 44C and 50C. Mind you, those numbers are on a machine that I’ve never put a lot of effort into “breaking in”.

Of interest, I did notice that some of the AS5 on the machine I did looked like it had “broken down”. It was brownish, and had slumped quite a bit. Could be the AS5 I have is too old, or that because it never got a break-in period, it never settled into position, I really don’t know, but it was pretty gross to clean off the CPU heat spreader.

So, I’m happy, and hopefully those numbers will continue to hold. I will be re-doing the second Mac Pro next week. We’ll have to see if the same numbers show on that machine. Will definitely post those results as an update.

Re:load Pro Monitor on Raspberry Pi

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RLP Monitor Raspberry PiNow that I have the Raspberry Pi, and the Re:load Pro, I wanted some way to monitor things. Luckily, someone else did the work! While I have no problem running it on the Mac, that defeats my purpose of the Raspberry Pi. So, I grabbed the source, and worked on installing it on there.

Here’s the long and short of it.

You need to download and compile node.js from source. This will take a LONG friggin’ time, so go have dinner. Watch a movie. Something. For me, it took about 2 hours to compile. After that, you need to install optipng, and libjpeg-progs (sudo apt-get install optipng libjpeg-progs). Finally, you have to install node-serialport (sudo npm install serialport). After that, you can install rlpmon by cd’ing into the directory, and running “npm install” (basically, follow the directions on Dean’s github page for the software.

After that, you’re good to go. Enjoy!