CPU transplant successful!

The Xeon W3690 transplant was a success!

Ads in WordPress email notifications

If you’ve subscribed to my blogs via email (all three of you), you might have noticed that ads suddenly appeared in the email notifications. The email notifications are handled by WordPress’ Jetpack plugin, and the ad injection is apparently a recent addition.

Despite the note that say “This post is ad-supported”, these ads weren’t inserted by me. I’m not a fan of the ads just suddenly appearing like they did and I really don’t like that it says “This post is ad-supported”, implying that I’m the one doing the ad injection and that my posts and blog are ad supported.

Except for the occasional referral link that might appear in a post here and there, none of my posts or blogs will ever be ad supported.

If the ads in the email notifications bother you, feel free to unsubscribe. You won’t hurt my feelings. In the meantime, I’ll see what happens and investigate other options for email subscriptions.

Update: Looks like while I was leaving a comment on the Github issue, the Jetpack devs undid the ad injection.

A Xeon CPU upgrade for the computer

I picked up a used Xeon W3690 CPU from eBay to upgrade the Core i7-930 currently powering my computer. Browsing around eBay, I found several for under $80. For two extra cores and a few hundred more MHz, it seemed like a pretty good deal to me so I picked one of them and bought it.

The existing CPU still works fine, but after seeing a few friends talking about computer upgrades, I did a bit of research to see what I could put into mine to give it a bit of a boost without having to do a complete computer replacement.

My choices were dictated by the motherboard revision (a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 Rev 1.0) and BIOS version (F7e). The best CPUs supported by this combination were the Core i7-970 and the Xeon W3690.

Doing my quasi-semi-annual computer cleaning and replacing the CPU will be a good weekend project. With luck, this computer will be up and running with a “new” and faster brain.