Linus, Luke and Yvonne from Linus Media Group hate the environment, because "it's not practical" (clickbate)

As many of you know, Linus Sebastian from Linus Media Group got his car destroyed by fans at his recent LTX event ... a car, that was worth hundreds of Canadian dollars ... and now he's allegedly looking to buy a new car, and maybe a motorcycle.

Jump to minute 34 ... and you'll see ... how misinformed an alleged tech tuber, his wife and friend can be. I will never listen to their advice again... extremely superficial guys, they need a lesson in ... EARTH, aka. the planet we live on...

Research environmental stuff on your own, all I have to highlight is that all gas/diesel burning cars (including Hybrids and Plugin hybrids) have emissions, some of which end up in their own cabin and in the cars behind/near them, poisoning the drivers and passengers...

1. In Canada you can get the Tesla Model 3 in like 2 months, if you order it today

2. You don't want anything less than a Model S or X for your family, if you can afford it (~80K USD), as they have those huge HEPA filters, which will save your kids from lung cancer

There's nothing like it in other cars ...

3. Teslas are safer than Volvos in avoiding collisions and in collisions. The only fatalities to date hit solid concrete barriers at 80-120mph, not survivable in any car, IMO ... and another owner was putting his faith in autopilot and wasn't paying attention to the road, ignoring autopilot warnings ... crashed into a semi truck, which was crossing the road illegally.

4. Electric cars with sufficient range (200+ miles) and fast charging stations all over the place ARE THE MOST PRACTICAL CARS for city traffic AND long distance travel. All Teslas have at least 200 miles of range, even if you buy a used one, and they all support supercharging, aka. 20 to 80 percent refill in about 30 minutes, but you usually charge at home at night, in about 8 hours max.

Live streaming on a low budget

I've been recording Dota 2 gaming videos for almost a year, but I never tried live streaming, as my hardware is barely able to record 720p 30Hz in mostly uncompressed format (1hour = 8GB). Little did I know that my PC is actually capable of live streaming Dota 2 (haven't tried other games yet) in absolutely acceptable quality in 720p 30Hz.

The video above was recorded using OBS and a cheap ass Canyon webcam for keyboard&mouse view. Windows and Dota 2 are installed on the SSD and OBS captures video onto the hard drive...

My PC specs are:

• AMD Athlon X4 845 3.8GHz FM2+ Carrizo
• MSI A68HM-E33 V2 mainboard
• 2 x 4GB DDR3-1600MHz Kingston Low Profile
• nVidia Geforce GT 1030 2GB GDDR5 64bit
• 60GB Kingston SSD
• 320GB WD Blue laptop hard drive
• some noname 450W ATX PSU and white computer case
• 21.5" AOC Full HD IPS monitor, overclocked to 75Hz, HDMI
• Myria MG7503 keyboard
• Logitech M170 wireless laptop mouse
• Canyon webcam

For streaming I use the Software x264 Encoder, as the GT 1030 video card doesn't support NVENC hardware acceleration, and a constant bitrate of 4000kbps, so the load on the CPU is as constant as possible. CPU preset is Ultrafast of course ...

Dota 2 is running in 1920 x 1080 resolution, almost maximum quality settings, capped at 60FPS, but in OBS it's downscaled to 720p and 30FPS, as my PC can't handle more.

NOTE: 720p is mostly fine for watching, but you should run your game in the highest resolution possible, so it doesn't affect the playability of the game. In 720p you may play worse than in 1080p, 1440p or 4K

There's one more important setting to modify:

Process priority needs to be set to HIGH on a cheap PC like mine, because the game is trying to maintain 60FPS all the time, while the recording/streaming quality is more important in my case. If the game gets lower proirity and FPS drops to ~40FPS, that won't affect recording/streaming quality... as long as it stays above 30FPS. So it's a kind of a balancing act.

Subscribe to my channel for more videos and live streams!

Intel - losing the moral high ground

There has been some immature name calling in the tech industry over the years, but in the past few years Intel was very quiet about competitors, as there really weren't many... or none at all... Now Intel came out with some quite questionable slides:

In this slide Intel tries to point out that all new generation AMD processors are based on the same Zen architecture, in the form of 4-core and 8-core dies... and they are somehow inferior, as they are glued together to form 8-core, 16-core and 32-core processors.

Well, all these allegations are mostly/partially true, but Intel forgot to mention that these AMD products are in fact not far behind in performance and efficiency - in some sectors are ahead of Intel ... and the price ... AMD prices are at about half of Intels's'.

Some tech journalists (including myself) argue that AMD's new "glued together" chip design is the future, as it enables manufacturers to throw out less partially defective dies. Rumors are circulating about a 99% yield on AMD's new chips, so I can see how that's a bit worrisome for Intel.

This so-called "gluing together" is called the Infinity Fabric, which allows all cores to communicate with each other ... improving multi-threaded performance... and Intel's processors can't do that (yet).

Long story short, shame on Intel for such immoral propaganda. It's not like they don't have the money to spend on R&D and come out with far better products.

Creating a USB 2.0 extension cable

Just before USB 2.0 goes extinct, I thought I do a little video about making an extension cable for it, as they are usually not cheap, if you want to buy them in a store.

First I went to my e-waste bin (sort of) and picked out a defective USB HUB, which was fried in an incident involving bad grounding. It's almost a perfect port donor:

I tried de-soldering the port, but was unwilling to cooperate, so I asked him no so nicely.

Next I chopped off the plug of a printer cable, which I got for ~25cents from Kaufland:

The easiest way I found to connect the right wires to the right pins, is to connect the plugs and use a wire-tester to make sure that no two wires have shorted. If you watch the whole video you'll see that I (intentionally) screwed up two wires, as the solder bridged the gap between them, but I fixed it with a box cutter...

For testing USB ports I use an old Bluetooth adapter, which I bought for 2 USD 10 years ago, so basically it has no value.

I only showed the green light blinking, which means the device is recognized by the computer, otherwise it wouldn't light up, OR if it received 5V, but wasn't recognized, then the little light would be constantly on.

This procedure is appropriate for the USB 2.0 standard, but for USB 3.x you're better off buying a brand name extender or USB hub. To make a USB 3.x extension cable you'd need very good soldering skills, and you also need to connect the cable's shielding in an appropriate manner. 

Tesla Model 3 launch date

Since Tesla's first reveal of the Model 3 more than one year ago, we've all been speculating about the technologies, which will be included in the new electric car, what range will it have, when will it be shipped to customers...etc.

Today we have most of the answers to these question, directly from the CEO, Elon Musk.

(1) 30 Tesla Model 3 cars will be ceremoniously handed over to first 30 customers on July 28th. 100 cars should be produced/delivered in August, >1500 in September ... >20.000 in December. All reservation holders should receive their cars in 2H2018-1H2019.

(2) The range of the first Model 3 cars will be around 300 miles, as a test vehicle was photographed at a supercharger and showed 95 mile range, when charged to 36%. So this is for the bigger/expensive battery pack (70-75kWh), while the smaller/cheaper battery pack (55-60kWh) will offer about 250 miles of range at the 35.000 USD price point.

(3) The Tesla Model 3 has one 15" center touchscreen, where the big majority of controls are accessed.

(4) The interior will be black, minimalist, improvements to cup holders, phone holders and other storage spaces.

(5) Model 3 frunk + trunk storage space is roughly half of the Model S, 14 vs. 30 cubic feet.

(6) Level 5 autonomy capable hardware will be preinstalled in all Tesla Model 3s, while autopilot features will cost extra, when they'll be available.

(7) Rear wheel drive cars will have an acceleration comparable to the first generation Tesla Model S. Faster and dual motor AWD models will come later, probably in 1Q2018.

(8) Durability of ALL NEW TESLA POWERTRAINS are being improved to 1 million miles

These are the most important details in my opinion. Tesla is finally releasing an affordable and extremely durable mass market car. Model 3 will be perfect for travel, city driving, taxi services, company cars and even for some light towing/delivery jobs.

The DIY temperature controlled fan controller

As I've said in previous blog posts, I've been having heat issues with my newly upgraded PC. The Athlon X4 845 Quad Core processor generates slightly more heat than I expected, so I had to increase the speed of the 12cm fan in the PSU and added another 12cm fan to the top-front of the case, also pulling out hot air at medium speed (7V instead of 12V).

Looking through my PC parts, fans and circuit boards I found an old fan controller, which I salvaged from a power supply a long time ago.

The green electric component is a temperature sensor, the wired plug goes into a fan header and the fan you want to control connects to the plug on the circuit board.

In my PC the fan on the CPU is PWM controlled, so I left it they way it was, and I connected the two 12cm fans to the controller and put the temperature sensor on the CPU's heat sink, as that's the biggest heat generator in the case.

The result was excellent. When in IDLE or light CPU usage, the big fans are virtually inaudible, but as soon as the CPU goes up to 50*C they start pumping out the warm air, so the CPU never goes beyond 57*C, not even in this heat (28*C ambient).

My next step will be to replace the crappy power supply, which adds significant inefficiency and heat to the system, as it reaches 72% efficiency only when under 50% load. At 25% and 75% load it's more like 60% efficient...

I've identified two candidates, which should do the job well:

• Inter-Tech SL-500 PLUS 500W, rated at 90.2% efficiency, but costing 118RON (30USD)
• Tecnoware FAL525FS12 520W, rated at 86% efficiency, costing only 60RON (15USD)

Both seem good choices, as Inter-Tech is a German brand and Tecnoware is Italian, but they seem a little too cheap for the efficiency they promise. On the other hand I don't need more than 200W and it'll be connected to a good UPS all the time, so if it's missing a couple of safety circuits, it should be no problem.

It all depends on my PSU budget ... I hope I can buy something a bit more serious, which will last me at least 5 years.

Kingston V300 60GB SSD - before warranty ends

Seeing my SSD's life estimation go down to 91%, I checked the actual date when I purchased it and I was surprised to see that it's almost out of warranty, being almost 3 years old (on July 19th).

Yes, I bought this 60GB SSD for 180RON (~45 USD, including VAT) 3 years ago. At first I abused it with downloads and frequent Windows/UBUNTU reinstalls, generating 10TB of writes in the first few months. After that I became wiser and upgraded to Windows 10, which is much better than the old 8.1 I was having frequents troubles with. I also installed a second drive, a 2.5" 320GB laptop hard drive, for downloads and games, taking the strain off the SSD. These two steps resulted in cutting the wear in half, generating another 10TB writes in the past 2-2.5 years.

As you can see I reached 20.5TB of writes, but only 12.5TB of reads. I've explained this before, it's because of the nature of digital storage and computers in general. Long story short, all files need to be written to the drive 100%, while reading almost always happens only partially, as apps and games may have file you never use ... or you abort a download ... skip scenes in downloaded movies ...etc.

These figures may not be representative of average SSD use, as I'm not an average user, but it does point out a flaw in traditional FLASH-based storage, which have a limited number of write cycles and unlimited read cycles ... exactly the opposite of what I need... I have another 11.5TB of writes left, after which the SSD may become unresponsive. In theory the drive's electronics will allow me to copy everything from it when the time comes, but I'm still making backups regularly, as you can never predict 100% accurately how/when hardware failures will happen.