Listening to Podcasts each week is one of my favorite things to do while working around the house. Ever since the first iPhone rumors, however, I've found these to be ruined with talk of nothing but Smart-phones and services built around these devices.
Some people would consider smart-phones to be the future of technology, eventually coming to replace desktop and laptop computers, televisions, and even our portable gaming devices. To me that sounds like a very uncomfortable way to use technology. Forget having full sized keyboards, we'll have to learn how to type on devices that are no bigger than the palms of our hands. Whenever I want to program, I'll have a screen so small I'll need a magnifying glass to see the 80 characters that will fit on that screen. When I want to play a game online with friends, incoming phone calls will replace lag as #1 annoyance. Of course my favorite: When doing a remake of The Matrix, Agent Smith will have to be throwing basket balls at Neo on that rooftop so you can actually see what he's dodging on that tiny little smart-phone screen.
I know people are drooling over the prospect of having tiny projectors, phone docks that allow a full sized keyboard to be plugged in, and other frivolous junk that will make that underpowered, proprietary, locked-in smart-phone of theirs feel just a little bit more like a real computer. I won't fall into that hype though.
I don't honestly know what the appeal is, or whether these smart-phone are just a passing fad like PDA's they evolved from; however, I do know that 1) I won't be getting one, and 2) I'm sick and tired of having every news site and podcast be about some overpriced trinket and the stupid services like twitter that surround it.
If you think your smart-phone is the future of computing, go back to your corner. You can have my desktop when you pry it from my cold dead hands!
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Hello World!
Hello World!
I'm still here, my blog isn't completely dead yet. I haven't written much because I just don't want to go off on a passionate rant any more, those cause more trouble than they're worth.
I'm still thinking of what kind of interesting content I could put up here. I'm learning C# and writing up notes on it as I go along; I'm also watching a few movies from time to time that I could write about, and I've wanted to do a little more amateur photography that I might eventually post up on the internet. We'll have to see.
I'm a big gadget geek, but that content is all over the magazines before I get my hands on any of it. We'll just have to see what the future holds.
I'm still here, my blog isn't completely dead yet. I haven't written much because I just don't want to go off on a passionate rant any more, those cause more trouble than they're worth.
I'm still thinking of what kind of interesting content I could put up here. I'm learning C# and writing up notes on it as I go along; I'm also watching a few movies from time to time that I could write about, and I've wanted to do a little more amateur photography that I might eventually post up on the internet. We'll have to see.
I'm a big gadget geek, but that content is all over the magazines before I get my hands on any of it. We'll just have to see what the future holds.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Spore is a Waste of Money
It's amazing the hype Spore got, even more amazing is the difference between the videos Will Wright showed us a few years ago and what was published by EA about a month ago. Spore starts off fun, there are plenty of good elements to the game, but many of the most amazing parts seem to have been stripped out. No doubt, knowing EA, we will be given the privilege of buying the parts of the game that should have been there in the first place as expansions over the next few years. EA, I don't know how you've stayed in business, it's like you've made it a personal challenge to rip off your customers.
What really burns me though is how poorly thought out the space stage is, I've had to think up ridiculous ways of keeping track of how to get back to my home planet after traveling through black holes, and the constant calls back to your home planet or one of it's neighbors for one emergency after another means that you have almost no time at all for anything else and will be interrupted by an "emergency" as soon as you're half way through anything. The real kicker is of course your objective is to get to the centre of the galaxy; people make it sound easy, but you have to wade your way through thousands upon thousands of Grox controlled worlds while being attacked the entire time. If it doesn't sound bad enough, there's also a problem wherein even with the best possible interstellar drive for my ship I still manage only to get so far before planets get too far out of reach for me to continue and my only option is to get blown up.
I've read other people's strategies for reaching the centre of the galaxy, my only questions is why would someone waste that much time on such a fruitless goal. You'd think they were expecting a large cheque to arrive in the mail for wasting their lives like that. No game should fill up several days with the same tedious tasks repeated every few minutes. If I wanted to do work instead of fun I'd get a second job.
I want my time and money back.
What really burns me though is how poorly thought out the space stage is, I've had to think up ridiculous ways of keeping track of how to get back to my home planet after traveling through black holes, and the constant calls back to your home planet or one of it's neighbors for one emergency after another means that you have almost no time at all for anything else and will be interrupted by an "emergency" as soon as you're half way through anything. The real kicker is of course your objective is to get to the centre of the galaxy; people make it sound easy, but you have to wade your way through thousands upon thousands of Grox controlled worlds while being attacked the entire time. If it doesn't sound bad enough, there's also a problem wherein even with the best possible interstellar drive for my ship I still manage only to get so far before planets get too far out of reach for me to continue and my only option is to get blown up.
I've read other people's strategies for reaching the centre of the galaxy, my only questions is why would someone waste that much time on such a fruitless goal. You'd think they were expecting a large cheque to arrive in the mail for wasting their lives like that. No game should fill up several days with the same tedious tasks repeated every few minutes. If I wanted to do work instead of fun I'd get a second job.
I want my time and money back.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Half Life: Source
I had the day off work today and thought it might be time for me to try a game I haven't looked at before. Half Life 2 has been a favorite of mine since I first got the game, so I figured I'd get some of the back-story by playing Half Life. Half Life: Source was only USD $10.00 and because it used the Source engine I was sure it would work fine on Windows XP.
I got about half way through the game, and found the first third of the game as a whole to be reasonably fun, but mostly tedious and repetitive. I was quickly annoyed at how difficult it was to aim, how easily my character would be killed, and how hard the soldiers were to kill sometimes. This is something I might want if I were playing on medium or difficult, but I wanted to play for fun and for the back-story of the game, not to work myself into a rage. Maybe this was someone's idea of making the game interesting, but I was getting killed every three to five minutes and I kept having to do those parts over again sometimes more than a dozen times until I made it through.
If I had played Half Life before Half Life 2 then I would never have bought any of the later games in the franchise; after playing the game I'm surprised that Valve is still around today. There's only one kind of person that falls into the demographic Half Life: Source was created for: that would be obsessive compulsive gamers who don't know the meaning of fun, and consider it normal to put their fist through a few monitors throughout the course of a game.
It's no wonder so many people who played shooting games back in the 90's don't like the entire genre any more, from what I'm seeing they really were all quake with different monsters. Forget making intelligent computer players, instead you just jacked up their health to make them harder to kill, and then instead of being intelligent all they had to do was swivel on one spot on the map and fling grenades at you like a monkey throwing feces.
Thank all that is good in the world that game developers can no longer get away with being neanderthals hunched over keyboards. Games like Halo and Half Life 2 bring into play elements that have been sorely lacking from the 90's era shooters. No longer does a first person shooter have the simplicity of a repetitive map and rooms full of soldiers and monsters that can seemingly be able to have their brains mulched into hamburger by bullets while somehow landing one lethal head-shot after another on you.
I don't much care about the US$ 10.00 I spend on the game, but I do want my 8 hours back.
I got about half way through the game, and found the first third of the game as a whole to be reasonably fun, but mostly tedious and repetitive. I was quickly annoyed at how difficult it was to aim, how easily my character would be killed, and how hard the soldiers were to kill sometimes. This is something I might want if I were playing on medium or difficult, but I wanted to play for fun and for the back-story of the game, not to work myself into a rage. Maybe this was someone's idea of making the game interesting, but I was getting killed every three to five minutes and I kept having to do those parts over again sometimes more than a dozen times until I made it through.
If I had played Half Life before Half Life 2 then I would never have bought any of the later games in the franchise; after playing the game I'm surprised that Valve is still around today. There's only one kind of person that falls into the demographic Half Life: Source was created for: that would be obsessive compulsive gamers who don't know the meaning of fun, and consider it normal to put their fist through a few monitors throughout the course of a game.
It's no wonder so many people who played shooting games back in the 90's don't like the entire genre any more, from what I'm seeing they really were all quake with different monsters. Forget making intelligent computer players, instead you just jacked up their health to make them harder to kill, and then instead of being intelligent all they had to do was swivel on one spot on the map and fling grenades at you like a monkey throwing feces.
Thank all that is good in the world that game developers can no longer get away with being neanderthals hunched over keyboards. Games like Halo and Half Life 2 bring into play elements that have been sorely lacking from the 90's era shooters. No longer does a first person shooter have the simplicity of a repetitive map and rooms full of soldiers and monsters that can seemingly be able to have their brains mulched into hamburger by bullets while somehow landing one lethal head-shot after another on you.
I don't much care about the US$ 10.00 I spend on the game, but I do want my 8 hours back.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Luck!
Thanks to all those who wished me luck after my last blog post. A while ago I was contacted by Acronis after sending out an e-mail to them asking for support. I was told to turn up the task priority for backing up and that has significantly reduced the start-up times for True Image.
I'm not sure why the backup task priority was set to low, but apparently that also affects the speed at which TrueImage does a brief scan through each hard drive when starting.
As for the lock-ups when running a back-up task, that was due to incorrect file permissions which I had already instructed Vista to fix before. Something must have gone wrong with the takeown program that can be run through the command line, because it didn't in fact give me ownership of some files. Running takeown again and again didn't resolve the issue, it was only when I used the program to take the ownership away, and then give it back to myself that the problem was resolved. I would have liked it if TrueImage reported permission problems rather than simply locking up, but I think Vista still deserves 60% of the blame here for having a broken program as part of the core utilities included with the OS.
For the record, I do keep my software up to date, both Vista and TrueImage were the most current versions when I experienced these problems.
I'm looking forward to TrueImage version 12. As for Windows, I'm just waiting for Apple to provide me that "missing mac" minitower that I want so I can stop using Windows.
I'm not sure why the backup task priority was set to low, but apparently that also affects the speed at which TrueImage does a brief scan through each hard drive when starting.
As for the lock-ups when running a back-up task, that was due to incorrect file permissions which I had already instructed Vista to fix before. Something must have gone wrong with the takeown program that can be run through the command line, because it didn't in fact give me ownership of some files. Running takeown again and again didn't resolve the issue, it was only when I used the program to take the ownership away, and then give it back to myself that the problem was resolved. I would have liked it if TrueImage reported permission problems rather than simply locking up, but I think Vista still deserves 60% of the blame here for having a broken program as part of the core utilities included with the OS.
For the record, I do keep my software up to date, both Vista and TrueImage were the most current versions when I experienced these problems.
I'm looking forward to TrueImage version 12. As for Windows, I'm just waiting for Apple to provide me that "missing mac" minitower that I want so I can stop using Windows.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Make It Stop!
Someone please make it stop! These last two weeks of trying to figure out why Acronis TrueImage randomly chooses between 20 seconds and over 2 minutes to go from the splash-screen to the start page has been absolutely infuriating. I'm not sure whether to start screaming four-letter expletives at Microsoft, or Acronis. That's not the worst of it either, it's spend the last several back-ups just locking up without a way of restarting it without rebooting completely, and then it takes the 0-byte backups that it failed on and says they validate ok.
I've never had problems to this extent with Windows XP, but at the same time Acronis TrueImage has been the one problem app in these past two weeks of reinstalling as if it were buying lottery tickets and hoping for a winner.
I'm mad, I've backed everything for at least a year now using Acronis, and those back-ups are useless unless I can get it to work out it's differences with Vista. So much for Vista capable. To make things worse, I strongly recommended the software at work, and now that Vista is prevalent and all these problems are cropping up with Vista and Acronis, I just know it's all going to catch up to me.
I would have tossed my computer out the window by now if it weren't for the parking lot below, the debris might fall on someone's head and kill them, or worse it might give them a headache like the one that Vista and TrueImage are causing me right now.
Vista is almost done reinstalling again, for the second f*cking time this week-end in the hopes that this time around it will work. I'm going to get off blogger now to keep this passionate upwelling of hatred I'm having for Vista out of print and off the internet. Wish me luck.
I've never had problems to this extent with Windows XP, but at the same time Acronis TrueImage has been the one problem app in these past two weeks of reinstalling as if it were buying lottery tickets and hoping for a winner.
I'm mad, I've backed everything for at least a year now using Acronis, and those back-ups are useless unless I can get it to work out it's differences with Vista. So much for Vista capable. To make things worse, I strongly recommended the software at work, and now that Vista is prevalent and all these problems are cropping up with Vista and Acronis, I just know it's all going to catch up to me.
I would have tossed my computer out the window by now if it weren't for the parking lot below, the debris might fall on someone's head and kill them, or worse it might give them a headache like the one that Vista and TrueImage are causing me right now.
Vista is almost done reinstalling again, for the second f*cking time this week-end in the hopes that this time around it will work. I'm going to get off blogger now to keep this passionate upwelling of hatred I'm having for Vista out of print and off the internet. Wish me luck.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
My Files
I haven't written an update here in quite a while, and for that matter I recently got a new Microsoft Digital Media 3000 keyboard that I need to test out, so it must be time to write a new blog post.
Recently I replaced my Vantex NexStar LX with a QNAP TS-209 Pro II. The NexStar LX used the Fat32 format for the hard drive, only took IDE drives, had 10/100 networking, and when the filesystem didn't refuse a file the transfer speed would be a humble 3MB/s at most. I put up with the failings of the NexStar until I had Ubuntu on my Shuttle system, Vista on my main computer, and Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook, at which point the NexStar wouldn't work at all with any of my computers. Vantec wasn't much help, I send them an e-mail asking them if they were working on a firmware update that would fix these problems, and they promptly told me how I should be tinkering with my windows registry in order to get the NexStar LX and Vista talking again. After it became obvious that Vantec didn't care about how broken its NAS product was, I finally decided to put the money down on the QNAP device I now have.
The QNAP TS-209 Pro II exceeded all of my expectations, it's very responsive, the transfer speed with jumbo frames enabled is somewhere between 8MB/s and 12MB/s, and thanks to a little bit of user-error I got to see first hand that the RAID mirroring really does have my data protected. I did over $500.00 getting this device and the two 320GB drives it needed, but the speed and reliability is close to the professionally maintained network at work with real servers. The file server functionality, ability to back up to a USB hard drive if you'd rather have the internal drives use striping or JBOD, and UPS support are just icing on the cake. The QNAP covers all the bases I care about, and I would recommend this thing hands down as a rock solid and reliable network storage solution.
One of the things I tried with the QNAP was using the iTunes server, it worked perfectly so I thought of moving my iTunes library over to the QNAP. In my excitement I decided to tell iTunes to store it's library on the NAS after assigning one of the shared folders a drive letter; however, after giving some thought to how much I might be complicating things I decided to change the iTunes library back to a local drive and use a folder synchronizing program for the QNAP instead. Somehow, though, I had left iTunes with the impression that it should look for my music on the QNAP instead of locally, and when I tried to consolidate the library again iTunes just made duplicate local copies.
This is where I touch on the other subject I wanted to bring up: making back-ups of your local files. I've been using Acronis TrueImage for about a year now, and I've liked the product so much that I've kept up to date with every version whether I needed to or not. When I had these problems with iTunes I just shut down the program, renamed the old iTunes folder, and restored the original that was backed up just that morning. Everything was back to normal and I could get rid of the old renamed iTunes folder.
I couldn't be happier with what I've got right now; my NAS works very well and fast, my backup software saved me the trouble of having to rank all my songs in iTunes again, and this keyboard is pretty good too.
Recently I replaced my Vantex NexStar LX with a QNAP TS-209 Pro II. The NexStar LX used the Fat32 format for the hard drive, only took IDE drives, had 10/100 networking, and when the filesystem didn't refuse a file the transfer speed would be a humble 3MB/s at most. I put up with the failings of the NexStar until I had Ubuntu on my Shuttle system, Vista on my main computer, and Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook, at which point the NexStar wouldn't work at all with any of my computers. Vantec wasn't much help, I send them an e-mail asking them if they were working on a firmware update that would fix these problems, and they promptly told me how I should be tinkering with my windows registry in order to get the NexStar LX and Vista talking again. After it became obvious that Vantec didn't care about how broken its NAS product was, I finally decided to put the money down on the QNAP device I now have.
The QNAP TS-209 Pro II exceeded all of my expectations, it's very responsive, the transfer speed with jumbo frames enabled is somewhere between 8MB/s and 12MB/s, and thanks to a little bit of user-error I got to see first hand that the RAID mirroring really does have my data protected. I did over $500.00 getting this device and the two 320GB drives it needed, but the speed and reliability is close to the professionally maintained network at work with real servers. The file server functionality, ability to back up to a USB hard drive if you'd rather have the internal drives use striping or JBOD, and UPS support are just icing on the cake. The QNAP covers all the bases I care about, and I would recommend this thing hands down as a rock solid and reliable network storage solution.
One of the things I tried with the QNAP was using the iTunes server, it worked perfectly so I thought of moving my iTunes library over to the QNAP. In my excitement I decided to tell iTunes to store it's library on the NAS after assigning one of the shared folders a drive letter; however, after giving some thought to how much I might be complicating things I decided to change the iTunes library back to a local drive and use a folder synchronizing program for the QNAP instead. Somehow, though, I had left iTunes with the impression that it should look for my music on the QNAP instead of locally, and when I tried to consolidate the library again iTunes just made duplicate local copies.
This is where I touch on the other subject I wanted to bring up: making back-ups of your local files. I've been using Acronis TrueImage for about a year now, and I've liked the product so much that I've kept up to date with every version whether I needed to or not. When I had these problems with iTunes I just shut down the program, renamed the old iTunes folder, and restored the original that was backed up just that morning. Everything was back to normal and I could get rid of the old renamed iTunes folder.
I couldn't be happier with what I've got right now; my NAS works very well and fast, my backup software saved me the trouble of having to rank all my songs in iTunes again, and this keyboard is pretty good too.
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