Category: Techno Geek

Suckegg rides again

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Windows sucks, sucks so profoundly that words cannot express my loathing for it, yet it’s the standard OS for gaming and I love my gaming action, so I’m stuck with it. I took Friday off last week because windows registry cruft had finally gotten to the point where the machine was taking ~5 minutes to finish booting and no amount of registry scouring could cleanse it of the problem, plus the boot volume was writing a disturbing amount of error messages to the logs, making me fear for its life. It was time for the ‘once every couple of years’ clean install of windows.

Since I was having to go through this, I took the opportunity to buy a new motherboard and videocard. The motherboard only supported 1066 bus speed, leaving me unable to upgrade to newer faster cpu’s including the new wolfsdale 45nm cpus. The videocard has had overheating problems since the day I bought it – it’s an ATI 1900xt and I basically dislike the thing. Performance wise it was ok, but it’s been loud and flaky due to the heating problems the whole time I’ve owned it.

I went cheap but effective on the motherboard side of things, with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. It’s lean on the features but the right price and with a solid review and reliability record. The one thing it lacks is firewire, which my last board also lacked and I survived without (though not without the occasional annoyance). It doesn’t support DDR3 RAM either, but I figure I am at least one machine away from moving to DDR3 anyway.

On the videocard end of things, I switched to Nvidia after at least 4-5 ATI cards in a row. ATI still produces decent cards but the 8800GT I bought is basically the value performance leader these days and ATI cards continue to run hot and loud. I didn’t want a repeat of my last ATI card is what it boiled down to. It also helped that I found a deal on an ASUS for around $150 after a rebate.

The build went pretty uneventfully. The only problems I had were initially getting it to boot, which turned out to be because the cooler on my CPU has a broken peg which was causing it to not stay seated against the cpu. Boot, overheat, shutdown immediately. I figured it out pretty quickly and brute-forced a solution. Next time I upgrade the CPU I’ll toss the cooler. The other problem was me being a dummy coupled with bad labeling on my RAM. For some reason I had it in my head that I had 4GB of Patriot RAM, the the labels on the RAM are misleading, so I spent a ton of time fiddling with ram slots and BIOS memory timing settings before I had a V8 moment and realized all was already working well – I had 2GB and the machine was seeing it correctly.

On the OS side of things, I did a couple of things differently. For the first time I used a slipstreamed installer disc, in this case one with service pak 3. I had an initial blue screen with it but the second install went smoothly, and it was a beautiful thing to go to windows update and see only a small handful of patches instead of the usual hours worth of patches to apply. I also installed Ubuntu 8.04. I’m going to try and force myself to only use windows when I’m gaming and linux the rest of the time. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway I just figured I’d write up how the build went, as I’ve done a number of times in the past. The whole thing took me a full day and then some, though portions of it were spent watching progress bars creep by, fiddling with my DS or PS3 while I waited. The current build’s name is ‘suckeggridesaga,’ which is short for ‘Suck Egg Rides Again.’ Every one of my machines has been named some version of suck egg, cause, well, you know – Windows really does suck eggs.

Oh – one other thing to mention. Steam, as in the software service from Valve, is just awesome. I have at least a dozen games installed in Steam, and to get everything up and running again all I had to do was install a new copy of the steam client, log in once, then log out, copy 70 some gigs of data into the steampowered folder, and re-login to the client, and all my games just worked. Compare that to installing a dozen games using the physical media, then installing all the patches and adding in all the mods and addon content. There’s no contest – digital distribution is totally the way to go. The same was basically true of my gametap stuff as well – I copied over the client and binaries and all my games were good to go. Physical media for PC games can bite me. Given the choice, I will go digital distribution every time.

Another example of why you should never buy DRM content

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Digital Rights Management is such a crock. In today’s example of why you should never, ever ‘license’ DRM’d content, check out what’s happened to the customers of Microsoft’s MSN Music business. Microsoft is turning off the lights on the service and ceasing support for the infrastructure which provides the ‘keys’ which allow you to move your content from machine to machine. You can burn CD’s to rescue the content off the hardware (while reducing the quality), so you won’t permanently lose access to it so long as you take that step and accept the quality trade off, but you should never have had to do that in the first place. As I’ve warned before, stay away from services licensing DRM’d content. Emusic, Amazon, and others now offer unencumbered mp3 files at higher bit rates than Apple and the other DRM-encumbered music merchants. iTunes may be convenient but it’s supporting an untenable business model. To those who would say say Apple would never pull a similar move, companies don’t get much larger than Microsoft, and they just did it. Vote with your wallet folks.

Cool geek toy of the week

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Imagine being an 11 year old boy with a remote controlled car with an integrated webcam that you could look through using a wireless headmounted display while you drive it, effectively driving in first person mode. How cool is it that such a thing actually exists? Now imagine being a 41 year old man-boy trying to come up with a rationale for purchasing such a toy….

A blast from the past

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I was in a fraternity back when I was in college, and there’s been a sudden burst of activity related to a facebook group that was created for the frat. I got an email today that an old friend had uploaded a photo of me which cracked me up, so at the risk of much mocking, I post it here for everyone’s enjoyment. This was taken in roughly 1991 during a fraternity rush, during which we ‘murffled’ our hair to make it stand up on end dramatically. Check out the mane I was wearing that night:

Check out that 'do

Game finished: Call of Duty 3

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I’ve played most of the Call of Duty games at this point, including the various console ports. I’ve played through 2 on the PS2, and 2 on the PC (three if you count one of the expansion paks for the original game) and I played through 4 on the xbox 360 right after Christmas. I enjoyed that so much I went out and got COD3 for the Xbox 360, and played it through over the last couple of weeks. It’s nowhere near as good as 4 was, but it’s decent at what it is – a formulaic WWII console FPS. What novelty it has you can tell was tacked on because of the WII and PS3 motion sensing bits in the controllers, because there are these interactive sequences like ‘plant this bomb on the anti-aircraft gun’ which require sequences of button presses and twists, which on the wii or PS3 would have been actual motions with the controllers. They’re weak on the 360 because they feel contrived and because you can exploit them for a limited invulnerability by sprinting for the objective and initiating the sequence, which mostly keeps the AI from shooting at you so you can charge into insane situations and survive. The other new addition to the formula is scripted moments where you get jumped from around corners by enemy soldiers, which starts a ‘quicktime event’ style melee combat where you have to press the right buttons at the right time and speed. It’s basically as weak as it sounds, made worse by the fact that each of them requires whacking on the shoulder buttons, which it’s not easy to do quickly. There are also driving sequences and sequences where you control tanks or other heavy weaponry. These are just ok, and not as good as the ones in COD2, but they’re not bad either.

I didn’t try the multiplayer, because I already have the superb COD4 for that, not to mention Team Fortress 2 on the pc, so I figured why bother.

You can score the game for under $20 for the PS3 and the 360 if you shop carefully. At that price it’s worth it if you’re a fan of the genre, and who isn’t – after all, shooting nazis never gets old 😉

How to spend the perfect weekend

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We had perfect weather this weekend, with temperatures in the low high 60’s and clear blue skies. Susan and I took advantage of this and went hiking in the green mountains in vermont about 40 minutes north of Bennington:

Susan making her way across a creek

It was pretty much perfect – the hike made its way up a steep grade but at an angle such that it was never too strenuous of a climb. We saw a beautiful ice covered lake, followed a roaring brook for over a mile that the dogs had a blast frolicking in, struggled to follow a poorly marked appalachian/long trail section that was covered in sometimes deep and slightly treacherous snow, climbed an excellent quartz rock seam, and looked out over a Vermont valley with stunning views. There are more pictures if you’re interested, including a couple of movies and (after tonight) a panoramic shot of the view from the summit.

Dreamworks options Ghost in the Shell

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Ever seen Ghost in the Shell? It’s taken many forms over its existence (Manga, Anime, TV series, anime sequel, multiple videogames), but it’s best known in the US as a superb anime that came out in the 90’s. It was one of the first anime to (almost) achieve mainstream success in the US, and it deserved the cult status it achieved on video. It’s a meditation on the nature of existence wrapped up in a sci fi action movie that takes place in a blade runner-esque near future. I thought it pretty cool that Spielberg’s Dreamworks Pictures optioned it for a 3d feature. Here’s hoping they bring this project to fruition, I’d love to see a competent live action Ghost in the Shell.

Want access to the evernote beta?

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Evernote is an excellent little personal knowledge base. It runs on macs and pcs, will soon run on iphones and blackberries, and runs on the web. You can always get at your stuff no matter what platform you dump info into, and you can control what gets synced to their servers and what stays local on your machine. You can also control the availability of materials, making some publicly available and other stuff private.

Back on my bike

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Hurrah! The weather’s warmed up to the point where I can ride my bike to work again, yesterday being the first day I was able to manage it. I used some muscles I hadn’t been using so I was a bit sore, but really it’s minor. It’s also better for Soolin this year because when she can manage it Susan has graciously agreed to pick her up on her way into work and drop Soolin off in my office. Three cheers for the return of the warm weather!

Oh Rockband, how I love you so

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How much do I love Rockband? So much that I’m considering dropping ~$75 on a professional drumkit pedal to replace the flimsy thing that comes with the original drumkit. Check out the Omega Pedal. And if you haven’t been playing Rock Band, you’re missing out. It is hands down the best party game ever made, and it’s fun in its own right just playing by yourself.