Harsh J

I’ve never felt the need of a UPS for nearly two years until now.

Was gaming early at around 12:30 yesterday with Karthik and suddenly my Zebronics SMPS (400W PSU) goes *Bang*. Just like a balloon bang under a water tank, yeah that kind of a resonating noise. No sparks, no fire but it definitely blew up! Oh I did have the very irritating burning smell though.

06:00 AM – I didn’t pay much attention then as I was feeling sleepy and had college to go to but my dreams, they already started showing me the new rigs I might get if this one conked out entirely.

05:00 PM (After College) – A friend of mine, Jayahari, agreed to help see whats wrong and dissected the SMPS (He does this pretty fast for any hardware ) and noticed some capacitors bulged and some stains on the circuit. Ok, so its definitely SMPS’s fault we thought and moved to Richie Street and got a new 500W PSU (The former was 400W).

07:30 PM – Hooked up the new SMPS and it still didn’t boot. Ok this is wrong, very wrong Then I noticed that none of the devices connected to my spike strip were functioning so I checked its fuse and it was kaput too. Damn, so it wasn’t my SMPS’s fault all the way, it was TNEB’s!

08:00 PM – Pulled out a newer spike strip from my electrical repository and used it to boot the PC, and it did fine. Jayahari couldn’t seem to forgive himself for not checking the power first rather than the SMPS. But he hooked the old SMPS to the main power, and it sparked out again, which made him quite content.

Now – Back online and need a new UPS to avoid another one of these *Bangs*

More:

Not one shop in Richie Street had any of the foreign brands Kalpik and others had recommended me to get. I had the budget and will to buy it while I had gone there but I just didn’t find any.

All seemed to be selling “Premium” Zebronics when asked about higher range stuff.

Discovered that PowerISO has a free Linux CLI tool for opening .DAA (Direct Access Archive) files and allowing conversion to other formats as well. Can be downloaded and installed from the .tar.gz package available at their website here or click here for a direct download!

College’s been pretty hectic, or I instead have been very lazy since my last blog post (27th January).

Other stuff am trying these days are problems, both old and new, from IIT-K’s Bitwise (Of course, in Python!). I did try the still-alive Krypton but I got fed up of it at the 6th level, lost my touch I guess.

Also trying to learn nasm bit by bit (Pun intended) but I can’t be an avid user of it any time soon, its hell mighty! .Net is going into my brains too, as my College’s Lab projects require it. IMO .Net’s pretty good to use, with its heavy abstraction, its very easy to build stuff with it. Strictly NO for efficient applications though. Its a dependency hell (sort of) too but thats okay with me.

Well thats all for now, more on what movies, etc I’ve seen, later! Darn records.