ShadRS

Thanks for the help folks! Glad to know that I didn't misplace it.

Long story short I need to RMA my motherboard back to ASUS (this one). However, I no longer seem to possess the CPU cover plate. Not sure if I threw it away, the kid took it to play with, the dog ate it, or aliens abducted it. Anyway, ASUS seems rather draconian in their repair policy if said plate isn't on the motherboard when returned. Can anyone help me out with how to get a replacement cover plate?

Is there anything to improve holding the camera? It just seems like it would be awkward to hold for long periods of time if doing hand held taping.

Is a video capable DSLR as good as a dedicated video camera?

I am in search of a quality video camera, prefarable with internal storage, and capable of shooting HD video in MP4 format. The camera will have two principle uses: filming interviews and filming my forthcoming spawn. So indoor and outdoor usage. I've done a bit of looking around on line and cannot find any sources I find to be really reliable. Thanks.

I bought a set of Steelseries Wireless H earlier this year and could not be happier with my purchase. The sound quality seems pretty good to me, but I'm by no means an audiophile. They seem to hold a charge for a decent time and they beep when there's about 20 minutes left. Gives you ample time to find a chance to swap out the battery pack (and it comes with two).

@LinusTech, from a soon to be TechDad to an existing TechDad, any chance of reviewing some Kid related gadgets? I.e. baby monitors and things. I be more specific, but I'm not a dad yet and don't know what all is out there yet. Thanks.

I have a Constellation now, but if the opportunity presents itself I'll upgrade to a Retaliator or an Idris.

Thanks for all the suggestions! I was hesitent to use the powerline solution due to the age of the wiring (and I don't want to spend that much money on a solution that might not work). The running along the baseboards was nixed by the wife, that had been my earliest solution. So it seems measure and fishing is the best choice. Assuming I don't screw up and drill up into a room. :blink:

You may want to perform som error checking to garuntee the input value is greater than or equal to zero and less than the size of the array. Otherwise it will core.

The main topic seems to have been answered, but I thought I'd point this out. You called: ofstream file;file.open("C:\\x\\serial.txt"); Which, as someone said, wipes the file out every time you open it. If you wanted to open the file to append to it, use the following: ofstream file;file.open("C:\\x\\serial.txt", std::ios::app); But moving it outside the for loop was the best option in this case.

My wife and I bought a house this past summer. Its an older one, built in the 50s or 60s, and something about its construction just seems to kill wireless traffic if you're outside of the room with the router. This hasn't particularly been an issue for me till now. Now I have a gaming PC in my office and I want the internet to be fast and reliable. This just reinfored my desire to wire the house with ethernet. All the guides for wiring seem to involve going into the attic and gaining wall access by dropping things down through the header plates. Well, we have no attic, flat roof. We do have nearly a full basement (plus a few crawlspaces and one room on a slab). Can anyone make any recommendations or give pointers on how to run the cable in this situation? All I've come up with is to remove a wall and then drill done through the subfloor, but this seems excessive.

I have about 20 or so. I recently purged a lot though. Mine are a variety of tech, science, gaming, and history related channels.

I've ordered the parts for the gaming rig, itching to get started. @ciprian97pop, I waited, and I'm not super impressed, yet. Ok, to be fair, the reviewers aren't super impressed, I think a cheaper chip should be fine for the time being. But your point about no USB 3 and SATA 6 Gb/s is a good one (thanks!). The more advanced socket type will also let me switch to a newer CPU if I see the need in the future. Soooo, with that in mind, I've updated the HTPC a bit: PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks CPU: AMD A4-4000 3.0GHz Dual-Core Processor ($43.68 @ Mwave) Motherboard: MSI A88XM-E35 Micro ATX FM2+ Motherboard ($75.55 @ Newegg) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($43.92 @ NCIX US) Storage: Crucial V4 64GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($77.68 @ SuperBiiz) Case: Silverstone GD06B HTPC Case ($119.99 @ Amazon) Power Supply: SeaSonic 300W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($39.99 @ Mwave) Optical Drive: Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer ($45.37 @ OutletPC) Total: $446.18 (Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.) (Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-01-14 15:58 EST-0500)

Writing a compiler in the language that is supposed to compile is call Bootstrapping. It is one of the preferred ways of going about the whole process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29

I'll echo the crys of use an IDE. Eclipse is a great one with lots of nice addons, expecially if you get into having to deal with CMing your code.

Honestly, I left the optical drive on that one out of habit. I suppose I could always just swap the thing between the two machines if I need it on the Gaming machine. I want the 16 GB so that I can potentially game while I'm waiting for compiles/runs on the VM. And just in case, I've never thought to myself I have to much memory.

@dizmo - My previous PC is a bit too old to make salvaging anything from it worth while, I assembled in in early 2007. I may try to reuse the optical drive, but I think that's about it. Thanks for the recommendations folks. After looking at what people have suggested so far, here's what I'm thinking of: HTPC - This is pretty much @dizmo's suggestion pluse a SSD. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks CPU: AMD A4-3400 2.7GHz Dual-Core Processor ($42.97 @ OutletPC) Motherboard: MSI A55M-P33 Micro ATX FM1 Motherboard ($38.00 @ Amazon) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($43.92 @ NCIX US) Storage: Crucial V4 64GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($77.68 @ SuperBiiz) Case: Silverstone GD06B HTPC Case ($119.99 @ Amazon) Power Supply: SeaSonic 300W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($39.99 @ Mwave) Optical Drive: Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer ($41.98 @ Newegg) Total: $404.53 (Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.) (Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-01-12 19:05 EST-0500) Gaming PC - Based on @ciprian97pop's suggestion, but I switched it over to an ASUS board (they've treated me well in the past) and added in the third HDD for on the device storage quicker than accessing the RAID setup (someone suggested this). I also switched power supplies, I just really want to play with Corsair's i-series stuff. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($319.99 @ Newegg) CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($99.99 @ Newegg) Motherboard: Asus Maximus VI Hero ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($189.99 @ NCIX US) Memory: G.Skill Trident X 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($169.99 @ Newegg) Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($162.99 @ Adorama) Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.98 @ OutletPC) Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($84.98 @ OutletPC) Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($84.98 @ OutletPC) Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 4GB Video Card ($585.91 @ Newegg) Case: Corsair Air 540 ATX Desktop Case ($146.98 @ Newegg) Case Fan: Corsair Air Series AF120 Quiet Edition (2-Pack) 39.9 CFM 120mm Fans ($23.19 @ Amazon) Case Fan: Corsair Air Series SP120 High Performance Edition (2-Pack) 62.7 CFM 120mm Fans ($22.39 @ Amazon) Power Supply: Corsair 860W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($194.98 @ Amazon) Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($46.99 @ Newegg) Total: $2193.33 (Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.) (Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-01-12 19:09 EST-0500) For a total of $2597 USD. A bit more than the budget, but not overwhelmingly so. Thoughts?

Blah people responding faster than I can respond on this iPad. Must go "borrow" the wife's laptop.

Trying to respond and look at pcpartpicker on an iPad and my last response got eaten. Once more... @dizmo, that is a gorgeous case. I like the price points of Woodenmarker and dizmo's HTPC suggestions. And the more I think about it I like the blue ray player in it.

Deleted - double post.

A NAS is an option (that I should have thought of). I'll be purchasing in the next two weeks. I'll be using Redhat 6.5. I'll also be using the gaming machine for programming, mostly Java and C++. The HTPC does not need to be Bluray is a nicety, but not necessary.

Until recently I used a computer hooked up to my living room TV for everything, gaming, web surfing, watching videos, everything. I was planning on finally building a separate gaming machine (the wireless keyboard and mice aren't so good for twitch gaming), but the living room PC decided it had done to much for too long. It bit the dust last night. So what was my budget for a gaming PC, has now become my budget for my gaming PC and a new HTPC (my wife insists on having a replacement). 1. Budget & Location $2500 US to be split between the two. There may be some budge to the budget, but not much. 2. Aim The Gaming rig I'll use for playing things along the lines of Minecraft, TUG, Skyrim, Battlefield 4, and Civilization. Yeah, I have eclectic taste. I'll also be running Linux on a VM to do some programming work. I prefer a Radeon card due to Mantle, and would like it to be Crossfire capable (though I plan that for a future upgrade). For the HTPC, it needs to have an HDMI out and be able to surf the web, play Hulu & Netflix, and watch other videos. One of the two needs a RAID 1, 5, or 6 setup of at least a TB to store family photos/videos. 3. Monitors Due to the more constrained budget, I've decided to make due with a smaller HDMI 1080p TV for the gaming rig at the moment. But in a few months I'd like to expand to an Eyefinity display setup. So no monitors in the budget, but the graphics card needs to support both options. The HTPC will be using HDMI to connect to the living room TV. 1080p on a 40" TV. 4. Peripherals The peripherals (mouse & keyboard) for both machines will be a mix of reuse and purchases that aren't part of this budget. For OS's I have copy of Windows 7 and one of Windows 8 (got them free through work), haven't decided which PC is getting which. 5. Why are you upgrading? My last machine died while I was plotting for a separate gaming machine. So with all that said, what do you guys & gals recommend? Thanks.

Slight modification to lutzee's version: int main(){ enum loopExitCond { FAIL_LOOP = 0, PASS_LOOP = 1, EXIT_LOOP = 2 }; loopExitCond loopConditional = PASS_LOOP; int pinv;//pin variable int puk; int x=0;//variable for the choice int pin; int st;//counter for failed attempts at entering pin st = 0; //counters preset value pinv = 1234; //preset pin value while ( loopConditional == PASS_LOOP ) { if (x == 0) { cout << "Press 1 for access to Skynet\n" << "Press 2 to change the Skynets PIN :" << endl << "Press 3 to quit" << endl; // intro screen cin >> x; if( (x < 0) || (x>3) ) { cout << "Invalid Option, try again.\n"; x = 0; } } else if (x == 1) //first choice - Log in the skynet { while ((st != 3) && (pin != pinv)) { cout << "Enter the PIN code :";//pin entering code cin >> pin; st++; } if (pin == pinv)//success screen { cout << "You have successfully loged into Skynet" << endl; cout << "ACCESS GRANTED!" << endl; loopConditional = EXIT_LOOP; break; //so the programme ends here if you come this path } else //fail screen { cout << "ACCESS DENIED!" << endl; cout << "Authorities have been informed of an unauthorized intrusion in our system" << endl; loopConditional = FAIL_LOOP; break; //so the programme ends here if you come this path } } else if (x == 2)//second choice - changing the PIN code { while(puk != 123456789) { cout << "Enter the PUK code :"; //enter the PUK code screen cin>>puk; //puk input } cout << "Enter the previous PIN :"; //enter the old pin cin>>pin; // old pin input if (pin == pinv) //checking if the pin you put in matches the old pin stored in the pinv variable { cout<< "Enter the new PIN :" << endl; cin>>pinv; //setting the pin you just put as the new cout<< "The PIN has been changed!" << endl; //success puk = 0; x=0; st=0; } } else if(x==3) { exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); } else if(x != 0 || 1 || 2 || 3) { cout << "Enter a valid number!"; //Fail screen if you put it anything other than 1 or 2 at the beggin } } return 0;} You could also add something after the While loop to take advantage of the multiple exit statements, depends on your needs. I also feel the need to say try using more descriptive variables; but I'm glad to see you use lots of comments!