Week 31: Storm Clouds and Geek Factor 5

So this weeks pictures are a couple of shots that I took coming back from Lindale on Tuesday night.  I had to take someone home from our group that night and we had been having some fantastic looking clouds.  I original was looking at the sunset, but I was driving and could not get a good look because of the trees.  Then a clearing came about, I pulled over, and these two shots were waiting for me.  The color shots were okay, but it was when I put them in Silver Efex Pro 2 that they really popped.  (I know this when I hear Ginger say Wow! from the couch!).


 I love storm clouds.  Always have.  This thunderhead was just building over Tyler.  The For Sale sign in the lower left, I had no idea I had that in the shot but it happened to fit perfectly into the shot!



I love the depth of the clouds in this shot.  Just layers, that the black and white really accentuated.  I wanted more of a silhouette with the trees rather than detail.

So this weekend I had a rare Saturday off.  So before date night I was able to play with my computer a little bit.  This is where the Geek Factor 5 comes in.  My desktop computer is getting older.  I am tasking it harder and harder with my Photoshop work.  I have an hp laptop too, but it overheats.  So I set about seeing if I could get it to not overheat.  Part of the problem is that hp did not design it well.  Using a program called HWMonitor, I was able to monitor the heat of the cpu.  So the first thing I had to do is disassemble the laptop to get to the fan, clean the fan and fins, and then apply new thermal paste (which you can only get in one place in Tyler!) onto the cpu.  Ginger asked how I learned how to do this, well, googling and just diving in.  After this I throttled the CPU to 90% and the heat dropped 20 degrees Celsius, well within acceptable ranges.  So I hooked my laptop up to see if it would perform better than my laptop.  Things were looking good until I tried to use a program called Silver Efex Pro 2 (the program I used above to get the black and white).  Well the stock graphics card in the laptop isn't supported and so it taxed my CPU alone because it disabled my gpu and my temperatures shot way up.  Wasted time?  Nah, I love working on computers and disassembling a laptop down to the motherboard (which means taking it ALL apart) is actually fun.Now I know exactly what I need, so indeed the research begins!

All in all, it was a productive weekend.  Now that I have my blog written I can go over and watch 60 minutes with Ginger.  Tell me why I have golf playing in the background again.....

Baa


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