Firing Squad has an article running today about the last days of 3dfx. 3dfx pretty much single handedly convinced consumers they needed a 3d graphics accelerator in their computers….well, I guess John Carmack/Id Software played a big role as well, but anyway, for about 5-6 years 3dfx totally dominated the business. They died shortly after releasing the V5500, a card I owned and liked and I was really sorry to see them go under, not just because I couldn’t get drivers for my card anymore, but because I feared there would be a loss of competition in the graphics card market. Fortunately ATI stepped it up, but it took them several years to really become competitive with nVidia.

Anyway, it’s a good article and has some insider dope on the last days of the company. I’m waiting to see if nVidia ends up using any of the patents and engineers they aquired from nVidia in their upcoming (xmastime) cards.

Check out this puppy. I can turn my ps2 into a tivo on the cheap. I will definitely be watching this closely. I haven’t bought the ethernet adapter for the ps2 yet though I do plan to get one as soon as there is a compelling use for it, which includes tivo functions on my ps2 😉

Posting that pic of the spider below has reminded me, my stylesheets are a mess! Maybe I’ll find it in me today to work on them.

Or maybe not 😉

..so the question is, does mt still work? I’ll know in about 2 seconds when I hit the post button…
I upgraded to the latest redhat so that I can get the neverwinter nights server to run reliably on this machine.

included in a recent listing of the new features to be included in the 10.2 update to OS X is the “Pulsating gumdrop of death pointer.”

Yee ha! Who wouldn’t want a pulsating gumdrop of death cursor in their machine! And what company but apple would play up that they have one

😉

So I’ve had my new machine up and running with Windows XP for about 3 weeks now. All in all I’m pretty happy with it. I did have to run out and get more ram because with 256mb it was struggling, but in general this has been the smoothest OS transition ever for me and it contrasts nicely with the nightmare of OS X on the mac boxes. But one issue haunts me. Every time I print a document, the OS helpfully points out that the document failed to print and offers to troubleshoot the problem for me. The only problem seems to be the OS not actually knowing what’s going on, because the documents are printing fine and sitting in the printer tray waiting for me. So what’s the deal? Who knows, like I said, yet another stupid windows thing.

It’s been a while. So that no one thinks I’m ignoring this space, I’ve popped in to post another cool link of the day, this one to a modern take on the reflectors you stick in your bike spokes so cars can see you at night. Enjoy. And Jesse? You’re getting one for xmas 😉

So….the new camera kicks ass, I am very pleased. Note the sample photo here, I was doing about 85 while I took this, the camera is set to basically medium quality, and yet you can simultaneously make out the hairs on the back of my hand and the trees on the side of the road.

note that I am fully aware this isn’t a very safe thing to do. Also note there’s not a car in sight.

I spent the weekend at Nick’s, at the end of which I concluded that technology sucks. It seemed like everything we tried this weekend when it came to computers ended up failing abysmally. In no particular order we:

• failed to get Nick’s WinME computer working such that it could copy CD’s (and I tried everything, yes, including updating the ASPI layer or whatever that thing’s called, plus I tried 5 different cd authoring apps)
• failed to get Warlords battlecry II working such that we could play a networked game for more than 10 minutes at a time (it kept crashing)
• failed repeated attempts to watch Battle Royale (I ended up solving this problem at home)
• We failed to fix Nick’s install of Urban Terror, which is prone to emitting an endless series of boinging noises (we made some progress but it is still broken)
• There’s probably a few other things I’ve since forgotten.

By the end of the weekend both of us were joking about what losers we were. On a positive note we did manage to get my Playstation 2 working with his stereo system. We had to go to Radio Shack and buy a box that converts RCA output to Coax output since his tv only has a coax in cable and you can’t run a DVD player through a VCR due to the Macrovision copy protection.

The lesson I took away from this weekend was: the PS2 rocks, never any compatibility issues. Just plug in a game and wheee, away you go.

Hey check out this thing Olympia introduced at CeBit. Turns any flat surface into a speaker for about $45. I want one!