So I just got my passport reissued this week and I’m amazed how far things have come. I got my passport done close to a decade back when I had to fly to Austin. Back then getting a passport done was a pain – I had applied from Mangalore in Tatkal and since Mangalore didn’t have a tatkal processing system, it was forwarded to the Bangalore passport centre. I still vividly remember the day I visited – I stood in queue at 8am (was told to go early because the counter was open only till 12pm), stood there for hours after some initial confusion on where to go(which lost me a whole bunch of spots) and when I was 2 spots away from reaching the counter, the guy at the counter shut down saying they’re doing for the day even though it was 11:45am. Was so pissed but really couldn’t do anything but go back. The next day I went and stood in the line at slightly before 7 and somehow got through the document submission and had to patiently wait.
Mission Cooldown: Reign in on the burning Hellforge! [Aka: How I cleaned up the crud off my CPU heat sink/fan]
It’s been about 4 years since I built Hellforge. It’s gotten some updates:
- Replaced Gigabyte 7750 with an Asus Strix 970
- Added on a Samsung Evo 840 256GB
- Memory upped to 16GB
- Replaced the Logitech K210 keyboard with a Corsair K70 Lux RGB
- Replaced the CM default case fans with Bitfenix Spectre
But the one thing that has remained constant: the CPU heat sink and cooler. My old house was dusty and no matter how much I cleaned, within a week or two there’d be quite a lot of dust. I did a bit of superficial cleaning on the insides but never bothered cleaning the CPU heat sink/fan.
The hesitation comes mainly because I had a torrid time when installing the heat sink the first time and didn’t want to damage it. Off late the processor’s been running hot and the CPU fan’s been on overdrive pretty much all the time. Last week I was curious about the temperatures it was running at and HWMonitor – I wasn’t prepared for this.
That's not a good sign. pic.twitter.com/dOZL4BRnL9
— Sathya (@SathyaBhat) May 14, 2017
Basically the temperatures were close to Tj Max and I wonder how come the CPU wasn’t throttling. With temperatures at this level, I had to do something about this. And egged on with support of Alpha, I decided it’s time to clean it up.
Here’s what I bought to clean up:
- Compressed air can – A blast of this can get a lot of dust off but you need to keep this straight, so difficult to use this for hard to reach surfaces
- Hand pump – really useful for the hard-to-reach surfaces which can’t be reached above
- Isopropyl Alcohol – You’re going to use this to wipe off the remaining gunk off the heat sink and the CPU.
- Some tissues/cotton swabs to clean up the gunk
- CoolerMaster MasterGel – I settled on this after extensive discussion with Alpha. He suggested to get the cheaper one, since the higher priced version is more suited for overclockers
Now, for the pictures. You’ve been warned. This was how it was when I opened the cabinet
A Look Back At 2016
The 1800km Coastal Karnataka Roadtrip – Part 4 – Jog – Gokarna – Ponda – Palolem
I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. Part 4 continues..
With our trip almost at the halfway point, we were beginning to feel a bit bummed out that we were at the mid-point already. Then again, we reminded ourselves that we have few more days remaining and rather than looking at it as half-gone, we should look at it from still 4-more days to go approach. With this in mind, we checked out from our rooms, had breakfast and had one more glance at Jog before heading out.
The 1800km Coastal Karnataka Roadtrip – Part 3 – Malpe – Kavimane – Jog
I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. Part 3 continues..
Waking up beach side in Malpe, I was more excited than ever – we had a long day coming up.Kavimane, Kavishaila and more importantly, I was really excited about the ride through Agumbe. Agumbe is called as “The Cherrapunji of the South” due to heavy rainfall it receives, and the ghat roads leading to it are rather infamous. Plus driving through it in July meant that we’d be driving during the wettest month of the year and I wondered what would be in store.
The 1800km Coastal Karnataka Roadtrip – Part 2 – Mangalore – Kaup – Udupi – Malpe
I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip. Part 2 continues..
The 1800km Coastal Karnataka Roadtrip – Part 1 – Bangalore – Mangalore
I’ve always wanted to go on long road trips, but with both Jo and me working, trying to find a contiguous block of holiday has been rather difficult. With me taking a break and Eid holiday coming during middle of the week, we got a chance to do our road trip.
With a date set, we next wondered which route to take? We considered Coastal Karnataka(Bangalore – Goa – Mangalore – Bangalore) and Tamil Nadu(Bangalore – Madurai – Kanyakumari – Thanjavur – Chennai – Bangalore), but eventually decided upon Coastal Karnataka after consulting with resident travel expert Ashwin. He also suggested few additional places(OK, he suggested a lot of the intermediate places) and we decided on this route and timeline.
Keepin’ busy for a month
So when I resigned from CGI, I thought I’d have to stay through the entire 2 month notice period with the org. However, since there was no dependency on me, I was hoping for an early release and thankfully that did happen. I initially thought of joining the new job right away but decided to take a month-long break from work and relax for a month.
A month seemed quite a lot, however the days went by so fast I didn’t even realise that my break was over. So here’s somethings I did to keep myself busy(few of those I had been meaning to do since a long time, never got around to doing it)
- The first week was pretty much devoted to completing a freelance job I had with SAP – to write a 6-part tutorial series on how you can use SAP Web IDE and Github for collaborative development
- I also spent a fair amount of time in playing/completing games that I had been meaning to since a while: Tropico 4, Transistor, Just Cause 3, Journey, Pillars of Eternity, Broforce, Uncharted 3 and few more
- Realised how much working at home without a power backup would be a pain because of BESCOM’s sustained powercuts(couple hours almost daily, if not more)
- Became what Jo calls, “house husband” – do housework ie get fruits/veggies, chop ’em, do the dishes some laundry(they seem so easy.. took couple of hours easy)
- Cleaned the wiring clutter in our house, esp the one around my desktop. Bought 1m of velcro, used it to tie around lose cables coming from the landline, Ethernet cable from Act, tons of wires coming from/behind the desktop. It’s not quite pretty, but still loads better than how it was before.
- More cleaning, this time inside the desktop cabinet, tied up wires coming from PSU(which is not modular) and replaced the fan which came with the cabinet(which are incredibly noisy) with BitFenix Spectre. I’ve been replacing each of the fans in the cabinet with this one, they are pretty silent and for the lighting fanatics, they’ll leave your eyes dazzled.
- Went on a 1,800km roadtrip across coastal Karnataka and Goa(will post travelogue soon)
- Did some light reading for upcoming new role
- And lots of sleep, especially thanks to above mentioned powercuts by BESCOM
Overall, it was a good one month break which went by way faster than I imagined!
In with the new (job)
July has been a month of great changes.. I started my first job in July in Chennai – new city, staying on my own, earning my own money.. but that was about 9 years back.
This year again, July is a month of change. After 5 years(and few days) at CGI(erstwhile Logica), I will be moving away and onto the new unknown. Reasons for moving are many – completed my project, didn’t like the new project’s commute/timings, tech stagnation and personal growth are some of the major ones. Where to next, you might ask?
Well after all these years of corporate life, time for something new – will be joining Styletag.com as the DevOps guy. From Oracle to Rails, on-premise to AWS, this is something that will be a challenge I am sure, and I look forward to it.
Wish me best wishes 😉