Lawyer: But what about that tattoo on your chest? Doesn’t it say, “Die
Bart, Die?”
Bob: [conciliatorily] No, that’s German for “The Bart, The.”
[The spectators laugh, understanding]
Officer: No one who speaks German could be an evil man.

Following suit, I must say: The PCs, The. While doing nothing spectacular, my PC managed to do something incredible. Perhaps trying to create some excitement while I was doing the mundane, it promptly shut off and refused to boot while displaying the helpful text: Keyboard Error. Press F1 to Continue.

Thoughts and memories poured through my mind, “has nothing changed?”. I’ve seen this error a million times but never so clearly. Um. Ok. Can’t press F1 if my keyboard has an error stupid! I mean, this is DOS 5.0 coming back. My 386 told me “press F1, your keyboard can’t be pressed”.

Look at the image to the right. 1989. Same old PC thing going on. Yeah sure, I built my own (so have a lot of people) but would going to a friendly retail store change anything? No. Think Vista will change this? No.

Cheap hardware with nowhere to run

So, I unplugged everything I could and booted again. It started up fine although the BIOS had reset itself. Fine. You know, maybe it’s a crappy motherboard … but they all are! This is like the $120 router you get at a retail shop. It sucks. It breaks, it overheats, it has a zillion hardware revisions.

Come on, let’s go update the firmware on my D-Link. First, we hit the d-link tech support site. It says: Select your D-Link product from the drop-down.. Fine. I’ll pick from the list on the left. It’s 74 product families long. Ok. I pick my product family. Then I have 34 products to compete against. Ok, I pick mine. Then it says: There are multiple revisions of the DI-524, each with version specific drivers, firmware, installation guides, and other resources. Please use the descriptions and diagrams below to identify your revision. Ok fine, I pick my revision. But now there are 3 versions of the firmware. And, I know by experience that only the 2nd oldest one works for me, the other one crashes and drops packets.

Or, how about my D-Link network bridge which booted into a router? It’s the same hardware and admin page for a second when it boots and then it loads the “bridge” mode. They use the same hardware and just load the bride’s admin GUI on top of it. It’s hilarious, the bridge only has one network port (one is closed off by plastic) but for a few seconds I can see a router menu where I can configure two.

Ok fine, cheap hardware has some costs in terms of quality. Fine. I guess I should step up and buy a Cisco 877 for $500. I guess that’s the option these days. But I certainly see parallels when my motherboard’s website has a drop-down that says:

We recommend MSI LiveUpdate utility for painless and seamless update. Update latest BIOS and driver for your MSI mainboard decently.

Yeah, I run low-level Engrish.

Hai, bu nu hai (huh?)

I browsed around MSI’s website looking for some fixes and tips.

MSI wrote a password program:

The PasswordKeeper is a useful utility for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP,
If We all have many passwords (Mail accounts, web sites, secure files etc.), PasswordKeeper will make sure you never forget a password again.

Great. I really needed a password utility. Thank god I happened to stumble upon my motherboard’s support site. Phew. This reminds me of the NRA selling knives.

Yeah, ok, whatever. I’ll wrap this up quick and not bring in any Apple/Wii innovation versus “the same old thing” references. Oh crap, I just did but no matter because Macs run Vista, so what’s a PC? Something that does not run OSX and costs 10% less. That’s about it.

Macs run Vista, Dells don’t. Not that Apple is exempt from hardware blowing up and causing fires because everyone shares components all over the place.

Here’s the obligatory step-back opening statement of a rant. If I was ranting about baseball, I might say “I’ve been a fan of the national pastime for 25 blah blah”. If I was ranting about poltics, I might say “Every once and a while the clowns in Washington surprise me by blah”. So without further introduction, allow me to open this rant in this weak and typical way that exhibits my inability to be a real writer or pundit.

The gamer market. An unending showcase of consumerism and popular thought. Faster, more, better. Win, frag, hi-score. With so many products, so much assumed demand and furious pace, it’s no wonder why video games have outpaced the film industry for a while. $13B or some such market figure.

I am the kettle calling the pot a lovely shade of ebony. After all, I picked up a Creative X-Fi, buying into the hype. Sure, I hear a small difference. But it’s super small and not very super cereal.

Q:I want one, where can I buy it?!
A:You can pre-order it now at www.killernic.com. We will be announcing ‘where to buy’ locations soon!

Q:How much does the KillerNic cost?
A:$279.99.

Q:Why does Killer NIC cost so much?
A:Lag and Latency Reduction technology is extremely expensive to make, and quantities are extremely limited. Killer was designed from the beginning for Elite gamers who want an edge…who want to win.

Ok, whatever. $280 for a NIC that magically gets rid of lag. Here’s a thought. Take that $280 and bribe your congressman to pass a law stating that Verizon must share it’s new FiOS network with federal assistance. Or maybe just pay your congressman to ignore telco bribes. Your $20 gigabit card is fine. It’s your cable and telco company that isn’t giving you 20-50mb like even lower density countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden) are. US is far behind other places because our government is for sale.

Apple is announcing a $2499 desktop.

“8 fully buffered DOIMMs, an incredible design and beautiful, simple access to it all. We’ve had a lot of fun building great configurations for our customers. One standard configuration… Dual 2 2.66 dual core Xeons, 1 GB, 667 MHz FB-DIMM. 250GB HD. Nvidia geforce 7300GT, 256 MB and 16xc superdrive for $2499. I know what you’re thinking. Apple makes the best computers but they’re expensive. We’re going to bust that myth. Similar configuration about a thousand dollars less than Dell.”

Rofl. The cheap mac is here.

So let it be written, let it be done. All hail the OBEY, for Microsoft won.

I bought a 360 tonight. I cracked. I wandered into Best Buy simply to pander around the DS titles and maybe check up on any GBA releases. But there they were, a bunch of 360s and the wireless controllers everywhere. I watched a demo of Rockstar’s peace-loving, non-killing Table Tennis and realized the genius of a non-violent well designed game. It screams Zen. It screams mastering a simple task to better understand your Chi. It’s introspection. Ok, fuck it. New hardware rules.

Yep. So I got PGR3 because the demo was really a lot of fun. Table Tennis and FIFA World Cup Germany 2006. I got the wireless USB network plug (and it really is just a plug) and an extra controller. Didn’t get the Core package, that’s lame. Got the charger packs for the wireless. Coolest feature:

With the wireless packs, you turn off the 360 and it charges while staying on. After charged, it shuts down. Seriously, pretty good design. What a feature, it’s pretty non-intuitive but neat, huh?

Table Tennis is very well done. The graphics are way beyond anything my TV has displayed before. It’s pretty easy to say, on par or better than my PC. The gameplay is good. Playing Pong on a next-gen console pretty funny. I guess we’re not progressing as fast as we think we are. I mean, I go out and spend $780 on a console and I play Pong.

Yes, that figure is correct. And to all the Sony nay-sayers … the 360 was $400 and the wireless NIC was $100. So add in your blueray and maybe the PS3 looks, well, damn cheap at $600. However, I will still get the PS3, and the Wii (unless marriage changes all that), we all have our vices.

Here, the charger is still charging after powering off via the controller.

• If you turn off the 360 with the controller, it shuts down but the power supply stays on until the controller is charged
• If you turn off via the power button, it turns off right away and doesn’t charge

Neat-o.

I played that Hexic title that ships with it, very cool that game. Casual. I dunno if I’m going to sign up for Live or not … no one I know has Live … the crowd is pretty young. We’ll see.

Politically, this purchase has been rough because my better half bought me my Xbox 1. So in her mind, I’m trashing her present. It’s been hard to argue but I’m hoping to mod my Xbox1 and turn it into something. Maybe an emu box. Besides, some games still run. Dunno what to say, I played the Xbox1, it was fun, I love her to death but tech gets ousted.

Dunno what to say, bigger and better. The Xbox1 had some major issues, display, lack of real Dolby sound (imho) and wireless controller issues (logitech). I played the hell out of ESPN and Halo 2(ergh), but yeah the Xbox was my least used console. A very … 4×4 experience. Blocky, heavy, meh.

The 360 is clear, crisp. Makes me love my TV again. The sound is great, my receiver lights up with all kinds of fancy: “Hey! I’m doing digital! Hey! I’m doing 5.1!” lights and crap. Obviously, lots of important things are going on … so I clap my hands, jump on the couch and start urinating on my facey-face. It’s fun times for all.

Tomorrow, I come home before the chica, figure out loading MP3s and blast some PGR3 with a custom soundtrack. I dunno all the details about Media Center or connecting to XP, we’ll find out.

After reading a terrible, horrible Vista review on a Windows review site, I can’t help but laugh at Vista-ish promises. And I’m not turning a blind eye. I want Vista to be good, just as Paul Thurrott said. He’s not bashing Vista. After all, winsupersite.com has to be pro-windows right? But it seems even the fanboys are not falling for it.

Why do I see a vaporware review on gamespot? What’s up with the blatant windows logo placement all throughout the article? I feel like I’m in Windows occupied Germany here! Why is this being featured right next to an Apple bootcamp article? “Oh, they’re being fair. Featuring a Windows story and a Mac story.” Yeah, fine. I’m all for fairness. But Vista isn’t out yet and Bootcamp is. Obviously, bootcamp is a pretty simple app compared to an entire OS. But again, to the ends of vaporware, I banish you gamespot. You are getting paid for this Vista feature. You are getting paid in a major way.

What do I say? What do all my friends say?

“I use XP for gaming. I only game on XP. The only reason I keep a PC around is for games. Without games, I wouldn’t have a PC. In all the things I do with my PC, there is very little that I do outside of gaming. I guess PC iz t3h game is what I’m trying to say.”

Yes. Great. So no wonder why Microsoft is sprinting to gamespot throwing money at them. It’s all so clear now. No one is buying your Xbox360 so you better start making false promises and Vista compatible banner ads. That way, people will wait a long time for Vista to deliver us from evil and dry up the revenue stream of AAPL. Except winsupersite.com didn’t bite. And neither am I.

When AAPL releases their Intel desktop, I’m buying one. It has WinFS on it. It’s called spotlight. Every time I write a file, the OS indexes it. So there’s no Windows search dog and a 5 minute wait. “Yes! Just what I wanted! I always wanted a companion when I’m searching for my .txt file with Bobby’s phone number in it!”

Hey! Where is that .zip I downloaded? Hrm, what feels natural … what should I tell the computer to do … give me an animated character! Everyone knows that cartoons search filesystems! O_o

Anyway, look at the gamespot picture up top. “If this is DirectX 9, imagine how Unreal Engine 3 games will look in DirectX 10.” This is the most stupid thing I’ll hear this month. Thanks gamespot. Now I know things can’t get any dum-ar. What a relief.

1. The graphics API has as much do to with how pretty a game looks as skin has to do with how pretty a person is. “Oh, but pretty people have skin!” Not relavent. DX10 can make games look nice, shiney with all kinds of fireworks but only if you design it that way. DX10 isn’t going to be something you type in: “enable_dx10=true! go!”, and then Quake4 starts blowing your mind.
2. This is juvenile. “The Dodge Viper has 500 horsepower. Imagine a car with a million horsepower! Wow!”
3. Like Hic said: showing off a game’s graphics is like bringing your dog’s hair to a dog show.

Group think is a bitch. Even if Vista completely sucks, everyone is still going to buy it. Because, that’s what we run at work. That’s what everyone else is using. Bill Gates is rich, he must be smart (actually he is smart .. but he’s lucky too). Everyone runs Windows so everyone runs Windows. Fine, run what you want. But wave your finger at Gamespot for stuffing their ears with Gates money.

Jesus fucking Christ, I’m choking on my own rage here.

OLED 3d googles from emagin. Here’s the quick scoop. 3d googles have never taken off. Lots of companies tried to jump on the bandwagon mid 90s in reaction to the term virtual reality, which in itself never really took off. Maybe in a reaction to lawnmower man, I dunno. Lawnmower man was in 1992? Man, I’m getting old.

There have been lots of googles in the past. There have been all sorts of little tricks to pull off the 3d effect. There are pairs that use red/blue tricks, you put on old-skool 60s style red/blue glasses and a driver makes your CRT red/blue to create the effect. There have been grayish glasses that pull of this effect with sort of polarized lenses. Nvidia (since the 67 driver releases) have been supporting 3d stereo drivers for XP to ease this process.

More tech

Ok so, there’s a few things these glasses can do:

• Make you look stupid – ok this isn’t a date, so just ignore that
• Make a 3d model (opengl etc) really look 3d. Not just some flat image. 3d googles can integrate with the display driver to really go deep into the 3d stack (opengl, dx) to create a real-time “magic eye” effect. I’ve never seen it but I’ve read it creates real looking depth.
• Read your head movement. The reviews say it acts like a mouse, so you can map something in a game to be your neck moving around. This might be good for a handful of games, the rest, eh. It would take practice. Neat though.
• It’s all USB. One cable.
• It has headphones and a mic for input and output of sound. IE: voice chat and headphones
• Creates a 105″ screen in your face using OLEDs
• It’s way too expensive. $900. What.

Their site

If you go to their site you can see a demo of them. Well, it’s sort of a demo. It’s more like watching a guy where sunglasses and be magically transported off to magical lands of 1st-person action and race driving. Counter-Strike is the first game they show. Woot.

They have a great FAQ section. I can understand why. There’s lots of questions I have even beyond the ones that they have listed there.

Verdict

Honestly, I was looking around online just last week wondering where all this 3d glasses stuff has left off. A lot of the products really didn’t deliver (except headaches) and it’s uncanny to see these come out.

In the video a guy comes home in a button-down shirt and plays. Obviously, they are marketing to people like me. People who want to decompress after a day’s work but have too much expendable income. :) What.

Here’s what I’m waiting on:

• You have to run nvidia’s 3d driver with the same graphics card driver version. The 3d version is 78.xx and the graphics driver I’m using is 81.xx. They are a bit behind on the 3d bit. Probably because no decent glasses have been in demand. So boo.
• $900. Maybe tax season will be good.
• More reviews. Maybe I could see them in person. I want to know if they cause headaches.
• No DVI connector? Just VGA? Hmm. I have dual DVI so I guess I could just adapt one.

$900. Ah screw it. I’d rather get a intel mac mini that I don’t need. :P

You see, Mac mail is very stupid. Not just because Satan runs Mac. Not just because Steve Jobs sleeps with me regularly and punches my health, but really because of endless and large issues with courier-imap. My resume/professional email has no problem but my personal email box is just not happy with the iHate Mail app. It just refuses to work while Thunderbird hums along.

I have a billion messages but OSX Mail always was showing (333) in the Inbox, meaning 333 new messages, even if they are all read.

A friend’s adventure into Gentoo/IMAP made me want to get mutt (command line email) working with IMAP again. It gave me some BS error 333 times. I tried my other account, it worked. Ah! Two clients hating my account! A pattern!

I backed up my mail directory to a .tgz. Is 51MB. I searched for patterns. WTF is the difference?!

Eventually I saw 443 old files named susie.fuzzylemon.net. Hrm, not exactly the number I was looking for but close. I deleted them. They were probably after I renamed my domain and crap.
My server isn’t on that old domain name, maybe courier was trying to resolve those files.

I tried again and mutt likes it. Shows 940 messages (approx. right). I will try Mail.app tonight and posty an UPDATED: line.

TL got a Quad Core G5 today. It has 3.5gb of RAM in it and 4 cores at 2.5ghz each. That’s 10ghz of PowerPC amazingness.

After a dramatic rescue from FedEx who apparently wanted to keep it for themselves, we hooked it up to his two 24″ Dell LCDs. It was amazing. I reckon he has the best setup on the Eastern seaboard.

I know what people are thinking … what the hell does anyone need that kind of power for? Well Cubase is a hog. And this beast can push it.

TL is building a studio and he’s going to use this monster as the audio processing station. Record to a iMac and do all the heavy lifting on this thing. It’s going to rule.

We added in the 3gb dimms. The case was so nice to pull off. A really great plastic enclosure of happiness and joy.

I hope Apple doesn’t change anything. The Intel macs better rule.

Meanwhile, Apple updates go, we play around with dashboard. It smokes my powerbook even with 10.4.2 loaded. I noticed that 10.4.3 is a bit speedier on my powerbook. Don’t know if the quad core is the same, I won’t ever find out.

BECAUSE IT IS NOT MY QUAD CORE

*sob*

As god as my waitress…

Words cannot describe. 2x 24″ LCDs = 48″ = (2) 1920×1280 resolution.

This is nothing special but I’m bloggy anyway. I played the Xbox 360 at CompUSA and saw another demo at Best Buy. The one at CompUSA was running a demo disc (as was the Best Buy one) but the funny thing was it reset two times while I was trying it out. It reset probably because it was encased in plexiglass without any obvious venting. Wtf.

Overall I agree with the disabled wookie post on the 360, it’s very PC-like not really pushing any boundaries besides framerates. Although this is a large step up in the console world, I don’t think it’s going to be any kind of gaming revolution. Oops, I might have linked that last word on purpose.

Anyway. The framerates are crazy high even with all kinds of obvious shader tricks (heat mirage in the distance etc) and no doubt little boys will flock to it for crazy ultra-violent entertainment, ignoring all M 17+ stickers and blah blah blah. I’m sure to be one of these boys but probably after the hype settles down and you can actually buy one for less than $999.

It was the same old Medal of HistoryBook game playing on the demo disc. “Oh WWII! Oh the conflict! You damn kids today! Buy my mass produced media!”. The effects were neat but it wasn’t any different than FarCry, Doom3. And certainly wasn’t up to par with FEAR’s firefights. Still I longed for a keyboard and mouse because the controller was not built for first person shooters. That genre started with PCs.

It’s a step in the right direction and it’s way cheaper than a PC. I hope someone runs OSX on it one day, triple 3.2ghz PowerPC cores for $400 would be sweet.

Trying out Firefox 1.5 RC2 for Mac. 1.5 beta on Windows was a bit ‘betaish’ … Plugins didn’t work, it crashed a lot.

Anyway, I thought the way Firefox packaged their app was cool. In OSX, you can package and store folder background images, icon sizes, all kinds of stuff to really polish your ‘installation’. I put installation in quotes because installing under Mac is as easy as dragging and dropping. Which is exactly what Firefox is depicting here …

They want you to drag the .app file (which is a self contained application with everything you need usually to run it) to your Applications folder. Although you don’t have to do this. You could run it from you desktop or wherever. But that little folder with the gray “A” is supposed to be your Applications folder. Without any words, it’s clear they want you do drag and add (plus sign) the application. Clever! No words! No documentation changes across languages! Nice!

Also they appear to have changed the default icon for the .dmg file that gets mounted. How polished.

I don’t remember any of these details on 1.0.7 or earlier but I could be mistaken. Correct me, scold me, abuse me in the comments section. The safety word is watermelon.