The ASUS MG279Q was released with much fanfare because it was the first 144 Hz IPS panel that supported FreeSync. If you looked beyond the MG279Q quality control issues (and subsequently won the panel lottery) the only problem with this display was a limited FreeSync range of 35-90 Hz.A lot of people questioned why buy a 144 Hz IPS monitor if they would be effectively limited gaming to 90 fps (frames per second) but no other solutions existed. Luckily, a German hacker discovered that you could extend the range of FreeSync by modifying the EDID portion of the monitor driver. The total FreeSync range could now be extended beyond 35-90 Hz to 31-110 Hz or 54-144 Hz!FreeSync excelled at providing smooth gaming at low frame rates so a lot of gamers usually picked the 31-100 Hz option. Gamers were overjoyed with the November release of the Crimson drivers made that old...
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I am a PC gamer and I love building frugal, quiet enthusiast PCs with a focus on maximizing performance per dollar. This is the tale of how I was at odds with myself and ended up blowing my budget by going all-in on a custom water cooling loop.
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I have been building computers ever since my uncle helped me build my first PC at age 13. The fascination of installing, tuning, and then finally using the machine has been a vice that I have been enjoying ever since. I have now built over a dozen Linux and Windows PCs over the years but the ☼perfect hackintosh☼ has always eluded me.For those of you who don’t usually mess with the internals of computers, a hackintosh is essentially a standard commodity Windows PC running the OS X which powers MacBooks and iMacs. Why do people go through such lengths to have OS X? It’s mostly preference, but in my case I’m doing this for my own personal education and curiosity. 
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People always said that my mom makes amazing food. I was so spoiled by the fact that I got to eat her cooking every night that I never bothered to learn how to cook any of her dishes. This included phở– especially phở.Phở broth takes a whole weekend to make from scratch. Why would any bachelor put himself into that position when he could go to a restaurant and buy it? Unfortunatley, it wasn’t until I moved to the west coast that I realized my mistake. My mom grew up in northern Vietnam which cooks the regional variant of phở called phở bắc which is different from the southern varient of phở that most places here in the Bay Area cook. If you want to have phở bắc (and a nice dose of Schimmelmann nostalgia) you need to cook this type of phở yourself.Luckily, my mom visisted and I was able...
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I worked on a hobby project called MMapper back in graduate school that served as my escape from the daily grind. This project is pretty much responsible for my career as an engineer due to how much fun I had hacking on it. I fondly remember how ecstatic I was combining my love for gaming, playing the role as product manager and engineer, and building something useful for my users/fellow gamers.Unfortunately, I abandoned my project back when I started my day job and the years have not been kind to it. I had always meant to migrate the source code from Sourceforge to GitHub and also remove some technical debt by upgrading it to the latest version of Qt but something else would always get in the way. I sat down back in September and decided that enough was enough! Little did I know that it would take more than a weekend to finally get...
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