Enabling SLI on non-nVidia supported platforms

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Enabling SLI on non-nVidia approved platforms has less of a pain-in-the-ass since nVidia allowed SLI on Intel chipsets, but enabling SLI on a workstation designed to take Quadro cards so it will work with Geforce cards is a little more of a pain in the ass.

In my configuration, I’m trying to enable SLI on an older Dell Precision 690 workstation with an SLI riser card. Normally, nVidia and Dell only allow with very expensive Quadro video cards in this configuration. However, I got myself a pair of GTX260 Core 216 video cards for very cheap and so I wanted to do a little experimenting to get this to work.

Plenty of modifications exist to enable SLI on non-supported configurations, and the solution I chose was DifferentSLI. However, this software patches the nVidia kernel-mode driver and then signs it with a self-signed certificate that obviously isn’t chained to Microsoft’s CA. This means for Windows to load, it has to be put into Test Mode to allow the kernel to accept a self-signed certificate and load the driver.

Since I already had Class 2 validation with StartCom, I embarked on a poorly-documented journey to sign the modified driver file with my Code Signing Certificate from StartSSL and load it, so I wouldn’t have to put Windows into that ever-annoying Test Mode.

Read the write-up here:
http://andrewpeng.net/computing/enabling-sli-on-a-dell-precision-690-with-geforce-video-cards

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SEO By Hand With WordPress

So among the sites I have spawned (GenesisDriven.com, AndrewPeng.net, Over-Boost.net) I’ve been reading on how to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to make it faster and easiar for Google and other search engines to index my site and make it searchable. According to this page:

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can’t crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html. Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it. 

And so I set about setting the permalink structure for mod_rewrite to this structure:

/posts/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%%post_id%-%postname%.html

Which is great, because WordPress will automatically redirect any of the standard permalink structures to your custom one, so people linking in will still have their links work. Content like pictures still use the same link structure so thats not anything to worry about. See where I prefixed %post_id% with %day% – this allows early posts with post_id’s with less than three digits to get indexed too.

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Dreamcast Mod Re-Incarnates iMac G3

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As a fan of the original Dreamcast, I find my self going back and reaching into the cabinet to play those games that were so much fun back in the day. Soul Calibur, Shenmue, and Crazy Taxi were among my favorates. Thats why I liked this mod so much – rip apart a old [mostly] useless iMac G3 (I have a PowerMac G3 as a router at home, so not so useless after all) and stuff the internals of a Dreamcast in it, complete with working display and controller ports! Click here for the mod, or click “Read More” to see all the photos, sourced from the original modder himself!

I had a couple G3’s laying around, and for some reason I had a 15″ LCD monitor. As I was cleaning up my workshop, these to things were sitting beside each other, the LCD looked to be about the same size. So I started taking shit apart. Dropped about 100 pounds of CRT monitor out of the iMac, and in went the LCD, fit just perfect

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