Month: April 2010

Twittersearch on fan noise.

I believe i will have to bring back my Macbook Air. the fan is making constant noise and runs at 6/7ks rpm…not good.

The fan on my Newertech MiniStack 2.5 is failing for the third time. I really can’t say enough lousy things about it.

Solved one problem with iMac now have loud fan noise which is driving me crazy – !!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhh can’t stand it!!!

The noise of my fat PS3’s fan drove me so mad that I got a slim.

XBOX360turn down the fan noise please.#xbox360

New northbridge fan ready to install. The old one was driving me nuts with noise.

I HATE MACBOOKS!!!!!!!!!!! Why does the fan freak out and make loads of noise every time I try to film something?!!!!!!!!!

I hope my laptop fan thingie isn’t dying….I hate when it makes the odd noise….

Hm. My mactop fan shouldn’t be making that rattling noise, should it?

My laptop fan is making a buzzing noise. I shook it, and it just got louder. Just like a baby.

Checking on obscenely loud computer fan noise I’m tired of listening to. Time to crack the case.

etc. Needless to say my Dell laptop is doing the same too. All computers and piece of hardware start being silent and after some use they all are getting damn noisy, thanks to this weak design that is a cheap fan blowing hot air on an expensive silicium chip to make the temperature drop. Isn’t it stupid?

I know, we can’t really get rid of them for now, and the smaller fans are, the more they make noise and are unreliable. Hence the problem with laptops.

On the other side by making less powerful chip we can be fanless, like smartphones and netbooks are showing it. But of course we lose a lot of comfort (forget about the 24” screen and forget about the fast as “immediately” when loading a heavy web page).

Good old silent days, please come back thank you.

TDP

To understand how much we are close –and yet far away- to solve this problem and have both silent and powerful computer there’s a measure unit: TDP Thermal Design Power (in Watt). It represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is require to dissipate. The number is usually 20 to 30% lower than what the chip is able to output when really stressed out (video encoding, games). So you always need to have more than what your processor can dissipate. Of course the faster the cpu is, the bigger is the TDP.

Full List of CPU power dissipation (long loading is long). Wikipedia, I love you.

First there’s a huge dynamic: from the single core Atom running at 1.6 GHz you can find in netbooks at less than 3W to the quad core Core 2 Extreme QX9775 at 3.2 GHz rated at 150W.

To dissipate a cpu passively with a simple chip-sized radiator it needs a TDP inferior to 10W. In a really compact environment like a phone it needs less than 3W.

If you want to passively without any need of fans to dissipate a typical 2010 desktop computer at around 65W/90W with a midrange graphic card, you need like 25 Kg of steel attached to a radiator on the CPU. Temperatures at full charge are as high as 90°C (194°F) or more on a finger nail-sized surface. Don’t forget that we need to dissipate three literally burning chips in a computer: the CPU, the GPU and the Chipset which is responsible of all the interaction with components.

25 Kg of thick black anodized aluminum does the job. But man! 

Yeah it’s kind of insane.

For the rest of a configuration though, the problem is already solved even for the high end market: sound card? No need of fans. HDDs? Not really. SSDs? Not at all.

Because progress of making cooler chip is always matched by the progress of making them more powerful, we always end up on the last trend because manufacturers (basically five companies: AMD Intel Nvidia Motorola IBM) would say that “the market decides and people want more”. Hopefully they now know. They stopped pushing the thermal envelope and the clock rate to focus on resource management, adding more core for the same energy output after facing some problems of..

Reliability

A really important parameter in being satisfied with a computer or any digital device is to have the less maintenance possible to do on it. With the extreme temperature of today’s chips and the fact that they need fans, these weak points getting clogged and making noises or simply killing machines by dying, reliability is not better but worse than 10 years ago (is the fan 3 not working well or is my watercooling pump dying?). And it requires more management than ever before.

Before the Pentium and the 100 Mhz barrier, computers were not requiring any special care. Since circa 1997, fans are obligatory and IT help desks became Dissipation Garage.

In a fanless world, machines are maintenance free. They are virtually more stable than a rock in a field. They can be covered of dust like your media center under the couch, no problem. All year long, you don’t hear anything and you don’t have to bother at all. You know there is not going to have any problem unless something heavy fall on it or if there’s some water damage. Otherwise you can forget about it and that’s the beauty of the fanless design. You know it. Your TV. Your fridge (almost). Your Hi-Fi. I want that in the computer world. All around me. But there’s more reasons for going this way.

Sustainable development and human rights

First, we need to make these hundreds of millions of machines to be useful as long as possible to avoid stupid waste. Having fanless design all around would make it easy because computers usually come out useless because of the weak fan design. If they could work without any problem and any noise I still would have my old machines, computing for a cause 24/7.

Too much electronic waste. Way too much. Discarded electronics represented 5 to 6 times as much weight as recycled electronics, polluting entire region of the world.

Think about it next time you use your phone or your gamepad.

Second, we all know and don’t want to admit it that all the digital devices and computers are made by hands by 16-18 years old Chinese women working 90 hours a week (more at Kotaku). It’s called slavery and it makes me sick just to think about it. Especially whe
n as you gadget lovers, my eyes sparkle when they see a nice and new piece of hardware.

It has an awful human cost. And I want that to slow down and even stop some day. I want these girls to use what they actually make. I want them to connect and learn as much as I did and do, thanks to the magic world of computers.

So to resume in two lines it’s either:

more power=>more power consumption=>more heat=>more noise=>less reliability=>more waste=>more slavery

or

more efficiency=>less power consumption=>less heat=>less noise=>more reliability=>less waste=>less slavery

After decades of the first, I want the second for a while. Please?

So when I’m said that as a music producer I’m legitimately anal about the noise that machines make, it’s not just that. Really.

U.S. mom’s rejection of 7-year-old outrages Russia. Me too.

Like I said in a direct French-to-english-translation on Twitter, I was adopted at 6 in France and it was already hard. It still is, in some weird ways. So I’m not surprised. I just can’t believe that the US mom did that this way, fucking up the kid some more. She may not be a mother at all and that may be totally a good thing.

I read a take on a similar adoption working out well. Yeah, with people around for years, paying extra attention to a child growing up, it works. It’s just a gigantic energy investment and this mother was obviously not prepared.

Matching Lacoste shirts 10 years before they were hype in the Paris suburbs, sense of unity bla bla.

I said horrible things to my parents too. Like yelling I don’t love you and I want to go home (foster family) or secretly wanting really bad things happening to them. But things like that happen all the time with children, adopted or not. You’re just more eager to really express it when you don’t have any connection with your parents but a legal piece of paper.

And then you grow up. You feel that as adoptive parents they do a lot. Just by looking at how friends parents behaved could tell me that my parents with all the differences we had, were taking care of me and being attentive. Even if I didn’t like it. I was looking at it as a boring process before hitting 18 years old, the age where I could do whatever I want.

But it takes time. Patience. For both children and parents.

So in this respect, I think international adoption should only exists when there’s no more kids ready for adoption in the country. In the US each year there’s around 100 000 children available for adoption. Almost every year, half of them are not adopted. Searching for the poor kid at the opposite of the world always seemed weird for me. Weird in the way “you are just thinking that you are somewhat a god spreading happiness and it’s more about how you feel than actually helping a child” way. It’s even worse in France: 4 000 children adopted each year, 3 000 coming from foreign countries says Wikipedia.

Anyway, I guess the good thing is that adoption is happening less and less even if we’re talking much more about it now (adoption was huge in the 70s but taboo).

So you may ask: would you adopt a child? I wanted to when I was in my 20s. Now I’m 30 and man, I don’t feel I ever could. I don’t feel I could ever have a child actually. Trying to think about it is like googling google at Google HQs, a wormhole appears in my head and makes me feel like antimatter. Or something like that.

There’s not a day without thinking about building a passive house. The number of benefits from having a passive house (PH) is just the key and the answer to a shitload of problems, like global warming. It’s available right now.

The principle is simple: best insulation possible so that you don’t need classic heating system because machines and humans are enough to heat a superinsulated room. Also, trying to get the maximum out of the sun with big and wide exposure to the south.

Get the point?

Numbers? Well Wikipedia says it all:

• This is between 75 and 95% less energy for space heating and cooling than current new buildings that meet today’s US energy efficiency codes. The Passivhaus in the German-language camp of Waldsee, Minnesota uses 85% less energy than a house built to Minnesota building codes.^[25]
• In the United Kingdom, an average new house built to the Passive House standard would use 77% less energy for space heating, compared to the Building Regulations.^[26]
• In Ireland, it is calculated that a typical house built to the Passive House standard instead of the 2002 Building Regulations would consume 85% less energy for space heating and cut space-heating related carbon emissions by 94%.

When you think that the majority of carbon emissions come from housing more than anything else, you understand how much this PH is important to the world.

We just need to be effing efficient and Planet Earth will be fine.

More at ArchDaily. (photos by Paul Ott)

Anyway, the important thing in PH is insulation. Insulation is complex and you must think “wait, it costs a lot and it’s full of chemical stuff so PH being 100% clean, my ass”

You are wrong. Introducing to you the best insulation product ever. It’s 100% natural. It grows anywhere with no need of pesticides or fertilizers. After a natural treatment (mixed with lime), it doesn’t burn, nor can be eat by animals or bugs. Oh, and it’s water-resistant of course. Did I say that it was also an excellent acoustic protection?

It’s call HEMP. Which is illegal in the US of course, it would destroy so many businesses. Also, Monsanto doesn’t have the patent on that shit and never will so they’d rather ban it. US people, time to wake up.

That being said, what are the benefits of the PH in terms of Quality of Life? They are numerous:

• Inside temperature is homogeneous; it is impossible to have single rooms (e.g. the sleeping rooms) at a different temperature from the rest of the house.
• Since there are no radiators, there is more space on the rooms’ walls.
• The air is fresh, and very clean.
• A 100€/year of heating bill, even with bad ass winter is totally achievable.
• You need a third of the time you need to build a classic house. It’s 66% faster to live in the house you are building if you want: a PH for 4 people can be build in 4 months.
• Construction cost used to be around 14% more expensive upfront than conventional buildings but in Germany the cost is already equivalent. And if you’re aiming for a lot of wood instead of cement and choose hemp insulation over the conventional polyurethane and chemical ones, it gets dirt cheap (Paris price is around 7 000€/m² when you can build a PH for less than 2 000/m²).

The bad things:

• It doesn’t work well in a tropical climate.
• The house becomes a system. Therefore you need to tweak it from time to time (having plants so the air doesn’t get too dry, verifying ventilation systems and make them efficient all along the year, etc).
• Because you need to minimize the number of surface exposed to the outside, PH are by design meant to be as square and tight as possible. The more the house is spread out, the harder it gets to regulate heat/cool.

Do. Want.

I didn’t know what to aim for if I was thinking building a home. Now I do.

26°c. ‘Nuff said.

Time to get ready to drive to San Francisco and have a wedding weekend before getting back to LA all the way along the coast, looking at the ocean.

Sounds good to me!