mattgadient.com

I picked up Civ 5 on the day of release. I haven’t been much of a Civ player since the original game, but some of the previews looked good so I thought it might be worth a look. Now that I’ve finally beat the game on every difficulty level, it’s time to put my experiences [...]

I recently did some benchmarks which can be found here and here. After a lengthy period rendering a scene, I’ve made a few observations: Mac vs Windows with Maya 2011 I can’t really give any comparisons when it comes to speed (they seem to be roughly equal), but Apple’s Mac OS is really impressive in [...]

In part 1, I did some testing with a pretty simple scene, where you were looking at multiple frames rendered within a minute – a frame rendered every 10-20 seconds give or take. The diminishing returns when dishing out a simple scene to be rendered across the network are HUGE. In fact, I did another [...]

UPDATE: Using an AMD 6-core machine (@3.5Ghz), I ran the same renders mentioned in the writeup. The machine managed 7 frames per minute solo. When any combination of the machines below were added to maya.rayhosts (1, 2, or 4) and I rendered using the network machines, the performance always dropped! It seems once your master is [...]

I recently came across my old Kill-A-Watt device, and decided to see how much juice a few items in the house pulled either when on (and not in use), or when completely shut off (but plugged in). TV-related stuff (all shut off but plugged in): An old Admiral VCR – 7 WATTS An old RCA [...]

Paying PST online in Manitoba (for retail sales for example) is now possible. However, unless you scroll down the page on the Manitoba Finance website (it’s not currently among the links where you’d expect to find it – there’s a banner below all the information), you may not see it. It’s called TAXcess, and can [...]

In my first playthrough of Leliana’s Song (a DLC to Dragon Age Origins), I found what I initially thought to be a bug… I’d looted a Mages Collective Cache for the Find the Mages Cache quest, and died. Upon loading my save, the cache didn’t seem to be clickable anymore. As it turns out, it [...]

I really need a rant section… Few steps if you want me to bite my tongue to keep from lashing out at you. I won’t mention the site/business because I don’t want to give them any traffic whatsoever.

Installing Snow Leopard on the H55M-UD2H is relatively easy. I’m using an i3, but due to the lack of full support (no Apple Macs use it at present), I’d suggest going with the i5 which has recently gained some support. I have provided a DSDT which I finished most of – it has all the [...]

Recently, Apple dropped the price of their developer program to $99. I decided to grab it. Apple lists the main benefits on their site: -Mac OS X Pre-Release Software -Development Videos -Apple Developer Forums -Technical Support I’ll go into a few details (as much as you can while staying within the NDA anyway), but if [...]