Here I sit, all broken hearted…
You probably know the rest. I need to figure out what I’m to do. There hasn’t been a new post here in… ages, and I’m not sure if there really will be. I plan on keeping this domain, as I like it waaaay too much, but I’m not sure what to do with it. Blogs have never really worked out too well for me, and the other guy hasn’t posted here in just as long. I’ll figure something out eventually.
I got an email a couple days ago from a website that I haven’t looked at in… at least six months. The decade-old Neverwinter Nights forums site. For those who don’t know, I’m a huge NWN buff, and have a copy of both the original game, and the “Diamond Edition” DVD. That’s four separate CD keys that I have to keep on hand. I’m TERRIBLE at remembering where I put CD cases and booklets, so I was absolutely thrilled when I found that the NWN website had a CD-Key storage system built in. Yeah. In the website. That was just compromised. *sigh*
Usernames, full names, passwords (encrypted luckily), cd-keys, ip addresses, and everything else. All up for grabs. Great. Thank god I found my installed copy, so I still have access to my CD-Keys. (They completely disabled the storage system, so now no-one has access to it.) Another day, another attack, eh?
Windows 7 Ultimate is quite a nice operating system. I’d dare say Home Premium, Professional, and Enterprise are excellent as well. This coming from a compatibility snob who held out with Windows XP as long as possible, and even before that, stuck with Windows 98 SE almost until Vista was announced.
The subject of this rant, however, is the lesser variants of Windows 7, in particular the “Starter” edition. This version appears on most budget-priced computers, such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 that I got today.
Win 7 Starter at first appears to be a normal Windows 7 distribution. Okay, so Aero Glass is disabled to start with, and it looks slightly different when booting up. That’s just on the surface, though. W7S’s real flaws come when you attempt to actually do anything with it.
The first thing I traditionally do with a Windows install is customize the shit out of it. Wallpaper, colors, sound effects if possible. Windows 7 does typically come with a selection of sound schemes (Cityscape being my favorite of the defaults), a simple color changer, and a selection of pretty wallpapers. W7S, however, does not let you change colors (since Aero Basic can’t be color-shifted), does not let you change themes (as the entire “Personalize” control panel is missing – though you can force a switch to Windows Classic through System Properties by disabling visual themes altogether; except then you can’t change Windows Classic’s colors and are stuck with the basic grey)…and perhaps most offensively, you cannot change the wallpaper. Not only is there no option or control panel dedicated to this anymore, changing the wallpaper is also (apparently?) against W7S’s End-User License Agreement, meaning if you’ve used a third-party program to change the wallpaper, you may well have voided your warranty.
So this Dell’s not a bad machine. It’s a damn sight better than my old HP Pavilion. I’ll just make a point to either stick 7 Ultimate on it at some point, or else nuke it altogether and run Ubuntu instead. (Or try my hand at a Hackintosh experiment…)
Time for a technology-related rant.
I’m once again spending the weekend at Malachai’s place, this time with my PS3 in tow (which, by the way, this post was composed on – lol postin from mah ps3!). PS3, of course, has an internet browser built in. So I surfed my way to Youtube, intending to watch some old videos from my Favorites. I came upon a Top Gear clip of Richard Hammond and James May playing “car darts” – but lo and behold, the following error appears.
This video is not available on your device.
Apparently Youtube is now capable of singling out what platforms can and cannot play a specific video. Presumably this is at the behest of the BBC, but this is a very bad precedent. Those of us that want to have a full-featured media center in our living rooms now have just one more obstacle; this effectively means that a media center can only be a PC running Windows (because who knows, maybe some video site somewhere has blocked Linux and Mac OS X users as well!).
IIIITY bitty living space.
Malachai’s got a new rig.
For those of you that may be interested, I’ve gotten some new gaming muscle. As some may know, I have a habit of playing the newest, most graphically intensive games possible. The old machine (a modest AMD Athlon64 X2 at 2.67GHz. I’ll post the other stats below.) had previously been enough beefcake to handle everything I could throw at it. However, about the time Orange Box came out, it had ceased being beefcake, and had dropped to the category of boca burger. Thus after having beaten Left 4 Dead, which played horribly, as well as the new Wolfenstein, and some other rather graphics-intensive games, I decided to throw together a new one. The new machine, a not-so-modest AMD PhenomII X4 965 Black Edition, raises the bar back to ‘Beefcake Dominator’. (Alright, enough with the burger bun… I mean, puns.)
The Old:
AMD Athlon64 X2, 2.67GHz
Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA
2Gb OCZ Fatal1ty PC2-8500 (1066MHz)
Asus M2N-MX SE MicroATX
Apevia XCruiser-Black Midtower
EVGA nVidia GeForce 8600GTX 512Mb
Creative SB5.1d Sound
The New:
AMD PhenomII x4 965 Black, 3.4GHz
Western Digital Caviar Black 1024Gb SATA
Hitachi Deskstar 1024Gb SATA
Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA
Hitachi Deskstar 80Gb SATA
MSI NF750-G55 ATX
Ultra M923 ATX Fulltower
EVGA nVidia GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked 768Mb
Thanks to TigerDirect, I was able to put this all together, (plus some) with under $1100 including shipping.
As my good friend Weasel (who’s right next to me right now) says, “It eats green berets for breakfast, and right now, it’s hungry.”
Images
Just recently, (last Friday, if you’re interested…) I picked up three Palm handhelds. Two III series, one ‘x’ and one ‘e’, and a Zire 21. Acting very kid-in-a-candy-store, I got home and started playing with them. I found out rather quickly that the Palm hotsync manager (which has stopped being developed long before the Pre came out.) doesn’t support Vista 64bit or 7 at all. (I use Windows 7 64bit.) So to work around it, I installed Virtualbox on my computer, and a copy of Windows XP Pro atop that. After that, I was finally able to get the Hotsync Manager working, and have been spending my time since getting ebooks, OS hacks, programs, and other related goodness working on two generations of devices.
The programs thus far:
YAHM (Yet Another Hack Manager)
-This program allows me to ‘beam’ OS hacks back and forth between generations of device.
HackMaster
-This is the actual OS Hack manager I use. Works flawlessly, and is fast as hell.
Marbles^2
-The best damn timewaster puzzle game ever.
eReader
-Good ebook reader for palm. Supports the old OS 3.1 that’s on the IIIx, and has full grayscale support for the Zire 21. All-in-all quite good. Also has a DropBook windows client, and supports the PML markup language for creating your own ebooks from html and txt sources.
(Or, the continuing adventures of Zoey the Laptop.)
I’ve mentioned my HP laptop in the past – a Pavilion N5170 that was phased out of production ten years ago. Its age shows, pretty plainly, but a few extra attachments later and somehow I’ve got it playing more games than it has before. It’s becoming my old-games machine more than anything else.
I was at first disheartened that Half-Life somehow dropped to 2 seconds per frame when running in hardware-accelerated mode. But I wasn’t upset. After all, Zoey’s performance in software rendering was quite good, given its Pentium 3 processor clocked at 600 MHz.
Lately, though, I’ve been experimenting with games that can actually put the onboard S3 Savage/IX graphics chip to use, all the while discovering new limitations on what the laptop can do. I’m amazed at how relatively locked-down the hardware is; there are some things that the drivers refuse to let it do, and I know of no way to allocate additional memory to the graphics chipset. (Though that’s only become a problem in one large instance.)
The first game I tested recently was Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, the game that turned me into a gun nut. I wasn’t impressed with how it completely failed to display the in-game graphics, but then, I had assumed that it needed to run in Software mode. Upon (begrudgingly) setting the renderer to the S3 chip, though, not only did the game display graphics, but it actually looked just like the game used to on the Pentium 2 that I first played it on – right down to the texture filtering!
Then I remembered, I had some old discs for games that didn’t work on Francis (the Dell XPS gaming rig), among them being Star Wars: Jedi Knight. I remembered this game coming out at the precise moment that 3D accelerator cards were coming into fashion, and figured that if my S3 didn’t run it, then I wouldn’t bother with the thing again. To my amazement, it worked at a perfect 60 frames per second – even despite the game running from an ISO (which tends to negatively affect poor Zoey’s hard drive performance).
Here, though, is where I discovered the major limitation. The S3 Savage/IX does not have enough onboard memory to run at any higher than 800×600 with 16-bit color. Any higher, and the game will usually complain about it and revert to a “safe” video mode.
Zoey’s also played host to games that Francis suddenly decided to dislike, such as Links Extreme (with its Demolition Driving Range), Balls of Steel (with its Duke Nukem table), and a couple others that escape me at the moment. Ah, backward compatibility…even though I dislike it sometimes, I enjoy the fact that I don’t need to rely on it!
About this time last month, we had our Verizon-provided router die on us. Well, maybe the router itself didn’t die, but I had noticed that the power cable (a standard “wall wart” type) appeared to have warped a bit. Lacking money, I called Verizon to get them to ship me a new router.
That router showed up after a week. Took ‘em long enough, I thought, hooking up the replacement router (while first checking to see if the power cable would fit in the old one…it didn’t). This router somehow completely failed to connect to the internet, after three hours of it attempting to ping the ISP. So another router showed up in two days. This third router succeeded in getting the family back online, at least enough to browse websites and play World of Warcraft (which is really all my parents seem to care about, ‘Net-wise).
Unfortunately, this router being a slightly different model from the previous one, has quite a different web interface than before. It looks similar, and in fact the instruction guides are almost identical, but there are little things that prevent it from being as friendly as the old one.
Little things like, well, port forwarding. This router has absolutely failed to allow me to forward ports for things like serving files outside the LAN, hosting games on Skulltag or Half-Life, and seeding for BitTorrents. In some cases I can’t even join other peoples’ game servers. Even wireless support seems to be dropping the ball, with my XBox 360 being, at times, unable to connect to the Internet at all. This was not the case with the other router. Setting up port forwarding through the front-end proved to be a frustrating experience, even for Malachai, who does this sort of thing for a living. After three hours of fiddling about with it, neither of us were capable of getting my Linux server (Ferretcage) to have any presence outside of the LAN. There goes one of the main reasons why I set the thing up.
I am most displeased with this router, and I am not sure I trust Verizon to provide more. I might as well quit while I’m ahead, though, considering that if I were to get another router, there might be a chance that it’ll have an even more frustrating front-end than this one. Malachai continues to recommend that I buy the same model of router that he uses; that might actually be an option, but I’d need to keep this router around, assuming his model doesn’t have an Ethernet Coax port with which to serve Verizon’s FiOS TV channel guide and on-demand programming. (No idea why the cable boxes aren’t hooked up with Cat5 ethernet or similar.)
Those of us that run our computers with multiple displays have long known that Windows’ multiple display support is…well, somewhat lackluster. To run a game in fullscreen mode is to dedicate your “primary” display to the game, and nothing but the game, usually with no choice as to which screen is considered primary (except through some video card driver settings, which are not the easiest things to get to sometimes). Running a fullscreen game at anything less than your desktop resolution makes the other monitor scale and malform itself, moving any windows you might have had open. And if a game isn’t smart about not letting your mouse cursor “escape” from the game screen, a mis-aimed click could accidentally minimize your game, potentially killing you.
All this time, I thought that was the worst it could get. Then I played SWAT 4.
SWAT 4 is, presently, the last game in Sierra’s heralded police action game. It was released in 2003 by Irrational Games, better known for System Shock 2, and runs on the Unreal 2 engine. Unreal 2’s engine was pretty far ahead of its time, but there’s the problem – the developers assumed that, even though it performed slowly on the hardware of the day, that the load times and such would just speed up as time went on. Problem is, it doesn’t. Having a faster computer with a speedier hard drive and four times the RAM doesn’t affect load times one bit; the game still requires upwards of two minutes to load each level, and should you fail a mission, it has to reload the entire level.
I’m getting a bit off the point though…
SWAT 4, running on the Unreal engine, ought to be friendly towards the people that want to run their games in a window – that is, the people that run dual-monitor setups. Unfortunately, the game has a complete fit if you attempt to run it while a second monitor is active. When attempting to play the corporate logos, the game begins changing screen resolutions repeatedly, assumedly fighting with my NVIDIA drivers over whether or not there is a second monitor active. The game changes screen resolutions ad infinitum, while I can almost hear the music of Sierra’s logo video. This only stops when I press Control-Alt-Delete to open Windows 7’s “panic” menu. From there, I either have to terminate the Swat4.exe process, or wait for it to crash, with a claim that it cannot set its screen resolution.
After three such attempts to run the game, I finally checked to see if my multi-monitor setup was the cause of such issues. After waiting about three minutes for the game to start again (unsure of what it’s doing outside of showing a splash screen and wasting my CPU cycles), the intro videos play perfectly and I’m in the menus. Hmph.
The game seems to run just about perfectly outside of that; well, insane load times notwithstanding…I have no idea why the game is so hateful of extra displays, but I’m pretty sure this is the only Unreal 2 engine game that does this. (Feel free to correct me, though.)
What really sucks, though, is that since this game is over five years old and Activision has already bought out Vivendi Universal (the owners of the Sierra label that published SWAT 4), it is extremely unlikely that an official patch will be made that corrects this. Let it be known, though, in case someone in the future has issues with it: SWAT 4 doesn’t like multiple monitors!
Well, fellow geeks, I have discovered my new favorite thing. Google Wave. I just received an Invite from a friend of mine (House, as he is known on the Blaugh.) It’s like a combination of Google Mail, Google Talk, Twitter, and Facebook. So far rather amazing.
As Wave moves from preview to beta to release, I’ll be following it’s progress here, so be sure to check back here for updates on it’s evolution.