So I noticed something very odd when I booted my Windows box yesterday, specifically something very odd on my Steam friends list.

I had two friends on and actively in-game, and both of them were playing something called Secret of the Magic Crystals.

This turned out to have been the Steam Daily Deal, making a five dollar game about raising magical horses into, apparently, an irresistible deal at $2.50.

Browsing the Steam thread on the Penny Arcade forums – a wretched hive of classy gentlemen – reinforced this impression. Grown men, who by all rights ought to have been living out vicarious male fantasies in Duke Nukem Forever or similar were, instead, raising and training unicorns, pegasai, and fire-breathing horses.

Obviously I needed to investigate this for myself.

As part of my campaign to skew Steam’s OS usage statistics – and because it just seemed a more appropriate platform for magic horses – I switched back to my MacBook and laid my money down.

First impressions were positive. The first thing you see, after selecting a save slot and engendering your character, is an actually-rather-attractive farm, with weather effects and a day/night cycle. It’s basically a menu from which you choose activities – you don’t ever walk around your farm, as far as I can tell – but it’s a really pretty menu.

It’s not the main draw, of course, so I dutifully followed the tutorial advice and trotted off to the stable to meet my first horse.

See what I did there? Honestly it takes a force of will not to fill this entire post with horse jokes.

Anyway, I met my first horse and it was a little disappointing. It didn’t have wings or breathe fire or anything, it was just a little colt sitting in a stable.

Again following the tutorial, I picked a brush off a nearby hook and commenced grooming.

Brush brush brush brush BAM.

My colt exploded into a full-grown unicorn.

Now, as far as mythical horses go, the unicorn is one of the duller ones. That’s a bit harsh, I suppose, but once you’ve gotten past “it has a horn and can detect virgins”, there’s not much to them.

Nonetheless, I had a unicorn. It was time to get to training.

Training takes place in the corral, and consists of mini games where I sent my unicorn jumping over gates, or walking down forest paths, or – and this was actually a little disturbing – dragging heavy loads along the ground, all of these while playing a little mini game involving pressing arrow keys at the right times.

This enhanced my unicorn’s stats, but also tired it out. After a couple of training sessions, he needed to go back to the barn for more brushing.

Brushing seems to really be at the core of the game. You have three different brushes – for body, head, and hoof grooming – and it seems like you really need to vary which you’re using; sticking to the body brush alone won’t get your horse back in the mood for more training.

A couple of rounds of training followed by grooming had most of my unicorn’s stats at or near the maximums, and it seemed like it was time to get to questing, which is how you earn money, which you use to buy more horses, or upgrade your buildings to hold more horses, or buy things from the in-game store to improve your horses, or well I didn’t really get too far into this; it seems pretty deep really.

Money, however, seemed like a good thing to have more of even if I didn’t quite have a handle on all the uses for it, so questing it was.

After the mini games in the training session, questing was a little disappointing. I opened my mailbox and the first quest was a simple request from a neighbor to go deliver a letter. Accepting this quest sent my unicorn prancing off-screen, leaving me with nothing to do but watch a clock tick away.

A minute or so later, he came back, a little tired, and I got a gift of 30… Well, 30 of whatever the in-game currency represents.

Since he wasn’t too worn out, and since I wanted to keep the money flowing in, I immediately opened and selected the next quest, from a neighbor who needed a horse to plough something.

Disaster struck.

A minute later, as my unicorn slunk dejectedly back on-screen, something was obviously wrong. He needed medical attention.
In the barn, I was able to do a checkup and determine that he needed medication – medication that was going to wipe out most of my earnings for the day, but essential medicine nonetheless. I dropped the 50 currency on the medicine, got a sparkly hypodermic, and then couldn’t figure out how to actually apply it.

It is an oddly helpless feeling to be staring at a sick unicorn, knowing you hold the key to its recovery, and yet unable to figure out how to make the two interact.

Worse still, when I closed the game to see if I could find any advice online, I apparently exposed a bug that resulted in the game not actually saving my progress, meaning that my unicorn simply poofed into the ether, lost for all time.

Now, this is clearly a game aimed at young girls, and I believe that this sort of bug is simply unconscionable.

Imagine, if you will, that you are the father of a young girl whose magical horse has just fallen ill and then – for all intents and purposes – died.

Imagine the Talk you are about to have with your daughter.

I don’t think the Dead Unicorn Talk is something anyone should have to endure.

That aside, there’s a lot of the game I haven’t seen yet, so it might be worth another go-round if they fix the save issue.

After all, those unicorns won’t brush themselves.

See, I did upgrade the hard drive in my Mini a couple of years ago, and I upgraded the hard drive in this Macbook Pro when I bought it, but I did completely new OS installations in both cases.  I’d never done a drive upgrade on a system where I wanted to keep everything intact, and I’ve never tried migrating a Boot Camp partition.

I was, therefore, rather surprised when it didn’t really cause me very much grief at all.  Turns out that I only needed two pieces of software to get my new drive installed and running.

First, I downloaded an application called Winclone, which claimed that it was able to back up and restore Boot Camp partitions.  It’s been discontinued by its maker for some reason, so it probably won’t be useful once OSX 10.7 comes out, but for now it’s highly regarded.

Second, I downloaded SuperDuper, which is an app designed to make bootable copies of hard drives.  It does rather more than that, to be honest; it’s designed as a full backup application, but the free version of it was enough to clone a drive and that’s all I needed it for.

At that point, all I had to do was run Winclone to copy off my 80GB Boot Camp partition to another external drive, put my new drive into a basic firewire-to-SATA case, run SuperDuper to clone my existing boot partition to the new drive, swap the new drive into the Macbook, reboot and restore the Boot Camp partition with Winclone.

It wasn’t 100% smooth, but only because I didn’t know that the Boot Camp partition has to be the last partition on the drive; I tried putting it on a middle partition and got missing hal.dll errors when I tried booting Windows.

Overall it was pretty uneventful until Time Machine tried to run.

Time Machine decided that every file on my machine had changed and needed to be backed up.  My Time Capsule had something like 9 GB of space free.

In theory, TM should be able to go out to the Time Capsule and delete old backups to make room for the new stuff, but in practice it crashed very very hard.

There’s also no way to easily delete Time Machine backups, as far as I can tell, so the only way I was able to unstick Time Machine was to actually format the Time Capsule through Airport Utility.

Starting with a blank slate, TM was able to run and did a complete backup with little drama and no further crashing, but it was a bit vexing to have to go with such a brute force solution.

Anyway, the end result is that I’m up and running without too much of my weekend lost and just a little bit of frustration directed at Cupertino.

See, we run a mixed environment here, a handful of PCs and two macs. Mostly the PCs are used for gaming, except for one laptop my wife uses for her VPN access to work, so the macs get used for media serving and my classwork.

I’ve only had one hard drive blow out on me in the last two decades, but it was enough to make me glad that I’d been backing up regularly and hence backup has remained a priority. This hasn’t been too hard to set up; both Vista and OSX come with capable backup tools, and we have a 1TB Time Capsule that makes the Mac side of things a set and forget affair.

There’s been just one little problem – the 1.1TB of, well, stuff, mostly video files, on an external drive hooked up to one of the macs, that hasn’t been regularly backed up because a) I didn’t have a second drive big enough to hold in and b) Time Machine, while a fine backup tool in many regards, isn’t designed for “put the stuff from THIS volume onto THIS backup device, the stuff from THAT volume onto THAT backup device”.

So, it hasn’t been backed up and that’s been annoying.

The other weekend, however, I noticed that Costco was selling 2TB external drives for $119, which is pretty crazy, so I bought one and now I had a backup device but no method of automatic backup.

Enter rsync. This humble little command line tool is the darling of lifehacker, and while I’d never used it I was fairly sure it would work.

This is where I realize that I’ve painted myself into a corner, writing-wise, because I don’t have much to say. I rsynced one drive to another, I added some files to the first drive, ran rsync again and it copied over the new files without doing a full copy again, so it pretty much worked without drama.

My only problem is that I can’t seem to make the –delete switch work; if I understand it properly it should remove files from the second drive as they’re removed from the first but I don’t seem to be able to make it happen. I’ll figure it out eventually.

Anyway.  So, I bought a Macbook Pro about a year ago, and I had some proper Apple stickers lying around from an Apple //c, and one thing led to another and the boring white logo on the MBP now looks much more proper.

Something that I didn’t realize at the time but that I’ve come to realize since:

Someone out there desperately needs to make a replacement case for the white plastic Macbooks.  It should involve transplanting the guts of a Macbook into a new case, and it should be modeled after the 1980s Apple Aesthetic.  It would be wicked cool.

This worried me a bit.  I mean, it was probably the most lauded independently-developed game of the last couple years, and I could not make myself interested in it.

Was I, I wondered, hopelessly lost to mainstream gaming, doomed to live a life of yearly Madden and Call of Duty games?  Had I, in short, lost my “cred”?

Turns out, no.

Last Christmas, I bought my wife a copy of World of Goo, which seems to have been Braid’s successor as the darling of the indie games crowd.  She played it a bit, and showed me how it worked, and it looked neat… but I had a lot of other games on my plate and it didn’t seem right to dive into her Christmas present.

Then came 2D Boy’s “birthday sale”, where they were giving away copies of the game to anyone who’d send them money… any amount of money, from a penny up.

I wasn’t that much of a cheap bastard.  I gave them five bucks to download the Mac version, let it sit around on the hard drive for a few weeks, and then decided to give it a go.  That was yesterday evening.

Today, I can say a few things for sure:

1) It’s a pretty short game, but it feels like a good length.  Think of it like “Portal” – it is Just Long Enough without wearing out its welcome.

2) The “Tower of Goo” level is a right bastard.

3) So is “You Have to Explode the Head”

4) Apart from those two levels, the game is consistently on the “fun” side of the “fun/frustration” line.  The game has nearly 50 levels.  That’s a pretty good ratio.

5) I feel that I have redeemed myself for my inability to enjoy “Braid”

Well, I’d say “back to playing Everquest”, but the heroin thing is more socially acceptable, I think.

Anyway.  So yeah, I’ve been sucked back into Everquest, but with a bit of a twist.

See, back in 2002 or so, before World of Warcraft came out and took over the MMORPG world by being, well, just a little LESS abusive than its predecessors, Everquest was really popular.  Popular enough, even, to get a Macintosh release, which represented the original game and the first four expansions.

The Mac version wasn’t popular enough to get expansions past that point – I think they’re up to at least 16 expansions for the Windows version, by the way – but it wasn’t really expensive to run either, so they’ve kept it up and running.

The last time they did anything to the servers, apart from a weekly reboot to clear stuff out, was January of 2005.  They weren’t adding anything – as far as I can tell, they never added anything to the Mac version after setting it up in 2002 – they were just fixing a few bugs.

So, Everquest in 2009 is a pretty different animal from Everquest in 2002.  It’s a lot more friendly in most ways, a lot quicker to level and many more things to see and do.

Everquest circa 2002, to get back to this post’s title, hates its players.  It is a fiendishly unforgiving game.  It’s full of time sinks, unfair deaths, and everything I normally hate in a video game.  It’s HARD, and playing on a server with a very low population – like the Mac server – makes it even more hard.

Put it this way: On a regular PC server, back in 2002, your character started out with nothing but a rusty weapon and a cloth shirt, but if you were diligent with saving money, you’d probably be able to, by level 20 or so, pay another person to make you some armor to replace the bits and pieces you’d been slowly looting off whatever few monsters you could find that were weak enough for you to kill.

On the Mac server, this isn’t an option.  Well, maybe it’s an option, but I wasn’t able to FIND anyone who’d make me armor, and I wound up having to acquire the skill myself before I could get dressed properly.

And yet, it’s more fun than the PC version.

For certain values of “fun.”

For values of “fun” that usually involve having a safeword.

But still, more fun.

It is awake all the time, though, since it can’t be in sleep mode and still work as a media server.  It doesn’t draw much power – about 30W – but that’s still, you know, something.

On the other hand, we recently had our Netgear wireless router die, and I replaced it with an Apple-branded one.  That, combined with a new feature of Snow Leopard, means that – now that I’ve spent the 45 minutes it took to upgrade the mini to 10.6.2 – the Mini now goes to sleep when it’s not being used, wakes up when the AppleTV wants something, and goes back to sleep afterwards.

I felt good about this, and then I got out a calculator to figure out exactly how much money I’d be saving.

Works out, it’s about $17 a year difference between having the Mac Mini staying “on”, drawing about 30W, and “asleep”, drawing about 3W.

So really, not a huge victory, but I’m sure we can find something to do with an extra 17 bucks.

We’re in the process of moving and going from a dual income family to a single income family.  Of course, this meant that we needed a new TV.

Even I will admit that the logic there is questionable, but since we had a pretty sizable chunk of savings put aside and had spent much less than I’d expected during the house hunting, a new TV materialized.

The new TV, by the way, is much lighter and will be far easier to move to our new home.  Also, because it has five HDMI inputs, I should be able to drastically reduce the rat’s nest of cabling behind the entertainment center.

On the other hand, when we hooked up our Mac Mini to the thing via a DVI –> HDMI adapter cable, we wound up with two choices for screen display:

Choice 1: a three inch black border on all sides of the Mac screen.

Choice 2: overscan chopping off the menu bar and dock.

Also, the Mini, while a fine machine in general, is one of the first Intel minis, so it has the lousy bluetooth and wireless modules, which made it frustrating at times to use with the Apple-branded KB and mouse we picked up when our Kensington wireless desktop died, AND it was pretty bad as far as contributing to the cable mess.

The solution, arrived at after some hours of thought, was to buckle down and throw money at Chairman Steve’s Hobby Project, which my wife graciously consented to after I picked one off the shelf at the nearby Apple store and walked around the store with it for a half hour whining.

I believe her words were along the lines of “Look, just buy the thing and stop trying to convince me you have rational justification for it”, but I’m not quoting her exactly.

So now we have a 40GB AppleTV hooked up to the TV, our iTunes content looks dreadfully nice, there are fewer cables AND I’m learning far more than any sane human would ever want to know about converting mkv files to something the AppleTV can play.

And we had a Mac Mini that suddenly needed a role to play, because hardware needs purpose.

For the record: Thunderbird and Firefox are dead simple to move over from Windows to Mac.  I’m very glad that I wasn’t tied to, say, Outlook.

I’ve had more hassles with the iTunes library, because I was trying to merge it with the library that existed on the Mac already and this meant putting it in /Users/Shared, and I have had more godawful permissions issues in the last two days than I ever hope to see again, but right now it looks like all my iTunes – US Store AND Japanese Store – and non-iTunes content are happily on the Mac and therefore on the AppleTV.

I am, however, torn between the simple joy that comes from being able to pop open a terminal session and chmod the frak out of folders until they behave and the deep conviction that NEEDING to drop into terminal and chmod the frak out of things is Just Plain Wrong.

Now, I still do have an awfully nice gaming PC at my disposal, and my plan is to use it to watch Blu-Ray movies and play the hell out of the wide assortment of games available for the platform, with the Mac being used more for schoolwork and kept largely game-free.  The disadvantage here is that if I’m booted into Windows, I’m not going to be able to pretend that I’m doing homework when I’m really slacking.

I’ve noticed a pattern, really.  We’ll be sitting on the couch looking through movie trailers, see a trailer for an upcoming movie – usually a sequel – and decide that we want to see an older movie based on seeing the trailer for the upcoming movie.

At that point, I will get hopelessly ambitious and try to rent the older movie from either Xbox Live, Playstation Network, or iTunes.

After checking all three services, I will have bugger-all luck, give it up as a bad cause, and we’ll watch a DVD we already own instead.

It’s not that I’ve tried to rent brand new movies, either.  I understand that there’s some lag between video release and online availability.  I’m trying to work with the system here.

As an example: This last weekend, my wife and I saw, in Front Row to be precise, a trailer for the upcoming “Transformers” sequel, which prompted some debate and yet another failed attempt to rent a movie.

See, in the trailer, there’s a Transformer that’s probably supposed to be Ravage, and I will date myself a bit here by pointing out that the only Ravage I’m familiar with is one of Soundwave’s cassette tapes.  A brief glance at the wikipedia entry suggests that there have been a gazillion different versions, but let’s stick with the cassette tape version.

Anyway, this led to a discussion about Soundwave, and how a dual cassette boombox wouldn’t exactly fit in with a modern movie, and I thought that they’d actually had a version of Soundwave in the last Transformers movie, only he was a CD player or something, and we couldn’t agree on it, so we decided that we’d just rent the movie and see.

Now, this movie came out in July of 2007, and got a home video release in October of the same year.  Even the blu-ray release, delayed as it was due to the HD video wars, has been out for several months.

Still, you can’t rent “Transformers” off Xbox Live, you can’t rent it off of Playstation Network, and it’s not on iTunes.  It might be on Netflix’s streaming service, I guess, but we don’t have a Gold live account and don’t have a Netflix subscription.  I didn’t even bother checking Amazon, because the last I checked, their Mac support was still a little behind.

We settled on “Eagle Eye”, instead, which I didn’t realize starred The Guy From Transformers, and it turned out to be a reasonably good Saturday night movie.  The technology in it was only slightly more far-fetched than a mystical cube capable of endowing nearby technology with life, but what the hell.

It was the video store equivalent of driving all the way to the store, scouring the shelves, finding a copy of a new release mis-shelved in the “Documentary” section, renting it out of desperation, and finding it was actually a good movie.  Which is to say, good outcome but still a sense that one is settling.

I will give Apple credit for making the rental process reasonably painless; it took 20 minutes or so to download but that’s a small price to pay for not having to put up with the sorts of buffering issues you see with streaming video.

Still and all, it would have been nice to find the movie we actually wanted.  I can’t blame any of the services in particular for that, so consider this a general fuming in the general direction of all three.

PS: And, Apple, it would be nice if you’d let people who buy your computers, as opposed to your “hobbies”, actually rent movies in 720P.  Thanks.

Also it was all blue and glowy.

Problem is, it’s huge, and my computer desk has a built-in-keyboard drawer that’s really a little too small for it.  It made hitting any key on the top row kind of a pain, really – escape, all the F keys, etc -  but I put up with it because it made Everquest so much easier.

In a hopefully-Everquest-free-existence, I realized that I could finally use a keyboard that was a little, well, smaller, and that I could use without squeezing my big man-hands into a space that was really too small for them.

Enter one (1) Apple aluminum keyboard.

This thing – after a little bit of poking around the net to figure out how to swap the command and alt keys, and then how to make f13 work like a print screen key – is just freaking amazing, and I’m not just saying that because I can finally type comfortably.

So, one more tasteful white box for the steadily growing pile of boxes that say “Designed by Apple in California”