Taming the DVD collection hell-beast

Posted on May 2, 2009 by baudattitude

I’ve been putting off writing this for a while, because it involved a product that seemed to be out of production.  I’m not sure if that was ever true, but I was having a heck of a time finding them and it didn’t seem right to extol the virtues of something that was no longer available.

Background:

I’m moving to Eugene in a very short time here.  My wife and I have been in our current apartment for nearly nine years.  In that time, DVD has gone from something of a niche, expensive format to ubiquitous and cheap, and we have gone from owning a couple of hundred – when we moved in – to, well, something like three thousand DVDs which we are going to have to move out.

Oh, and we’re probably going to be getting a smaller place, because Eugene is short on large apartments and we don’t want to saddle ourselves with home ownership.

This is the point in a man’s life where he starts somewhat regretting the number of limited edition box sets that he’s bought.

I had two options, as I saw them.  The first was to stick all the DVDs in binders and throw away the cases, which I abandoned as a Crime Against Man and God.  The second was to rip all the DVDs to, mmm, about 10-15 TB of storage and put the physical discs in storage, which I abandoned as a Path To Insanity.

Fortunately, Atlantic, makers of cheap pressboard furniture and plastic storage, gave me a third way: Movie Sleeves, note the little TM symbol, or as they show up on Amazon: “ATLANTIC – MOVIE LUMEN 50 SLEEVES”

I’m not sure what a “LUMEN” is, but I’m not going to let it bother me.

Anyway, these things HERE are Movie Sleeves, note the TM:

moviesleeves

They hold 1 or 2 DVDs per sleeve and – most importantly – don’t require you to trim the covers.  I mention that last not because I’m particularly anal-retentive about lopping a half-inch off the cover art, like I’d have to do if I was putting them in slim cases, but because it saves a lot of time when you’re talking about thousands of DVDs.

It also means that, if at some point I had a Really Big Shelf and wanted to expand them out again, I could do so.

Here’s what they look like sleeved, which is partially a picture used for example and partially an attempt to raise this blog’s level of “classy” up a notch from the normal pandering:

dvdexample

See! Miyazaki movies, and not a panty in sight.  Obviously, this represents a classy establishment.

The packaging on these claim that you can squeeze “8 DVDs in the space of 1!” and it’s actually reasonably accurate.  Most of these are two-DVD special editions, the exception being the US Princess Mononoke, and here’s what seven DVDs in four sleeves looks like next to a single DVD in its original packaging:

heightcompare

Mind you, not all DVD packaging goes into these so cleanly.  If it’s anything other than a standard width DVD case, you’re going to have to pull out the scissors and get down to heartless package mutilation.

Anyway, moving this many DVDs is still going to be quite a trial, but, well, less of one.  I guess that’s about all I could reasonably hope for.

By the way, please do my budget the courtesy of not calculating the cost of 3,000 of these at 15 bucks per 50. I’m trying not to think of it.

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Where’s my check, Jobs?

Posted on April 29, 2009 by baudattitude

OK, I hate writing this, because it makes me sound like a corporate shill, or worse, a member of the Cult of Steve, which – in either case – I think entitles me to a little cut of the Cupertino good life.  Drop me an email and I’ll let you know where to send the check.

Anyway.

In a fit of insanity the other night, I decided that I would succumb to the omnipresent pestering by iTunes to enable the “Genius” feature, and let it crawl through my music library, no doubt uploading my most intimate secrets to impeccably designed aluminum-clad servers at Infinite Loop.  It was only able to identify about 3000 out of 8000 songs, by the way, a ratio which allows me to level a certain degree of smugness in the vague direction of Northern California.

That done, and a rather long re-sync of my iPod complete, I have been putting it through its paces.

It is, and this I say with ultimate grudgingness, fecking brilliant.

One of the biggest problems with a big music library is this:  Stuff gets lost.  Playlists are a pain to set up and setting your player to “random all” results in a hell of a lot of skipping tracks.

Genius lets you pick a song that you know you want to listen to, and then goes off and finds a bunch of songs that it thinks will go well with it.  When pointed at my first test case, Rick Astley’s magnum opus, it cheerfully provided me a set of 25 songs that read like a K-Tel “Best Love Songs of the Eighties” compilation; when pointed at my favorite Kotoko song, it pulled out a set of Kotoko, Hirano Aya, Dream, Hamasaki Ayumi, and Ohtsuka Ai.

The point is, most of the songs it was finding were songs that were lost in the limbo of “not in any playlist”, that I was rather in danger of forgetting that I had, and that were surprisingly close to being what I was in the mood for.

It’s the first feature, outside of the “iPod ecosystem”, that actually stands out as a compelling reason to use an iPod over any of the alternatives, other than the little problem that there are no serious alternatives any more.

Now I just need to figure out how to get it to recognize the 5,000 songs that it’s clueless about.

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What the hell is “mofumofu”?

Posted on April 27, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I was letting Google Image Search find me a new wallpaper – and, by the way, if you’re an anime fan, I strongly recommend typing “壁紙” into GIS and letting it fly, insasmuch as it’s Japanese for “wallpaper”  – when I found this cute fox-girl picture, and it has been annoying me.

Not the picture itself, that is, but the associated text.

kemonomimigallery-48

It says “mofumofu shitai? dame!”

Which I would translate as “Do you want to (mofumofu)? No way!”

“mofumofu” is, it seems likely, one of the many Japanese onomatopoeia, like “zakuzaku” for the sound of rustling or “dokidoki” for the sound of heartbeats,which pack a ton of of – culturally encoded –  information into four syllables

This particular one is presumably suggestive to some level, but no dictionary I can find has any translation for “mofumofu”, and while searching for it turns up plenty of instances on google, none of them feel compelled to translate it, so I have no idea exactly how suggestive this is trying to be.

But, you say, it’s just a cute picture of a fox-girl, what does it matter?

It doesn’t RIGHT NOW, but I have two years to go until I’m done with my Japanese degree and looking for translation gigs.  If I’m translating manga or games, “mofumofu” is the sort of vocabulary that I’m presumably going to run in to and be expected to be able to translate, and I had better figure out what it means sometime between now and then.

Edit:  It seems that “mofumofu” is a word that means the texture of being fluffy.  I suppose that makes sense.

Edit#2: (23 June 2019)

This post is over ten years old now and is the second-most-viewed page on this blog, and I finally got a really good answer.  See Elender’s note in the comments. 🙂

I never did get into translation, as an aside.  I am looking back at my enthusiasm from a decade ago and am a little bit shamed.

Posted in anime, 日本語 | 18 Comments

I have no career in waste management

Posted on April 26, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I had a friend come over yesterday for the sole purpose of wasting our entire evening away, controllers in hand.

Usually this is when I pull out some FPS or another that is too hard for me in single player and we burn through it in co-op mode.  I’m not too proud to admit that.

This time, though, I didn’t have any FPSes on the “to play” stack, so I was at something of a loss.

What I wound up doing, on something of a whim, was downloading a game called “gomi bako” from the Japanese PSN, with the idea being that I’d heard good things about it and that it would probably keep us entertained for a couple of hours – and by then, maybe we’d have an idea for something else to play.

Then we spent the next six hours playing nothing but gomi bako, until we managed to clear the single-player mode.

On easy “Sweets” difficulty, I will admit.

It’s a bizarre game on a couple of counts.  It’s fundamentally a dropping-things puzzle game, but it owes a hefty chunk of its lineage to Katamari Damacy.  The playfield is a trash can, of steadily increasing size – the first level puts you in a trash can underneath a desk in an office, the next level is a dumpster at the same office, the level after that puts you on the street outside and so on – into which things fall.

The idea is to, as things drop in, hit fragile things with less fragile things, breaking the more fragile thing into smaller pieces, and then pound the bigger, less fragile objects with things until IT breaks, and so on, reducing the volume of trash in the can and hopefully making it so you can get all the trash from the level to fit.

This sounds a little dull, but – like Katamari – the objects you have to deal with tend to be a little weird.  Pummeling a swan boat with old televisions to break it has a certain charm.

You lose when three things can’t fit in the trash can.

Periodically – if you’re playing on normal difficulty – you get something big and quite difficult to break dropped in, and then you have 10 seconds to break it or you get penalty objects dropped on you.  There are also things which shouldn’t be thrown away, and you have to gently put them within reach of a helper who will take them out of the trash.

Where it gets really fun is when it adds fire and explosives.

See, it’s hard to break EVERYTHING – some things are tremendously resiliant – and the trash can fills up pretty quickly.  This is why the game occasionally gives you things like lighted cigarettes, which you can drop on to burnable trash to light your can on fire.  This clears out trash nice and quick like, and if you drop something into the whole mess like, say, a propane tank, it will clear out your entire can while also flattening nearby buildings.

This is glorious fun.

The downside is, burning trash generates CO2, which is shown in the background of the level as increasingly bad weather conditions, and which counts against you at the end of the level.  So, it’s easier to win if you sacrifice the environment, which is I guess kind of the message here.  It’s a subtle and insidious way to point out that the best way to deal with trash is not to generate it in the first place.

Leaving aside the Real Message of the game, it is well worth playing.  The stuff you drop in to your bin is brightly colored and generally weird, you are cheered on and mocked by a cadre of small alien creatures in hard hats, and the music is upbeat and catchy.

Posted in ps3, videogames | Leave a comment

More embarrassment

Posted on April 24, 2009 by baudattitude

I told my wife this story with the caveat that I was telling her because I thought it was actually too embarrassing to share.

Oh, well, it’s best if I get it off my chest.

I’ve been inside my PC a lot lately – actually, I’ve been inside most of our PCs a lot lately, but let’s keep this on the main one – trying to figure out the answer to problems that have vexed me.  Most of them are heat related.  I have an E6600 Core 2 Duo in my machine and it’s been running at 46 degrees idle / 71 degrees under load for as long as I’ve known how to find out the CPU temperature.  This is within specs… but it’s a little high.  It’s not usually recommended to run over 65 degrees for any length of time.

Celsius, of course, not Fahrenheit.

I’ve put this down to insufficient ventilation.  I’ve got a Sonata II case, which is designed to be quiet, so I’ve just kind of figured that quiet comes with the tradeoff of running hot.

So, lately, I’ve been researching stuff like aftermarket CPU coolers and thermal transfer paste and stuff that is really about one level of geeky past my norm, and I ran across a forum thread from someone else running a E6600 who was also getting mid-40s temperatures on idle and 70+ under load, and it was a thread with lots of good suggestions about thermal paste and coolers and so on.

And then there was a post in the thread that said, basically, “push down on your CPU cooler’s restraining pins harder”

I decided to try this.

I had to push rather harder than I felt safe, and when I did so, there was a sad little crunching sound.  I did not like this sound.  It was not the sort of sound you want to hear coming from a motherboard when you are applying force.

It was apparently the sound of the CPU cooler finally – after two years – being snapped into place.

Temps are now 40 degrees idle / 51 under heavy load.

I feel rather sheepish.

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Geek Embarrassment

Posted on April 21, 2009 by baudattitude

Note: Geek “Embarrassment”, as opposed to “Shame”, which I have in great quantities.  Or perhaps “Shamelessness” is closer to the truth there.

Stick with this post. The embarrassment comes near the end.

Despite my occasional dalliances with Apple-branded hardware, I remain at heart a bit of a tinkerer and like to have a PC that I’ve assembled myself.  I won’t lie – I bought Crysis solely to see how my system would stack up against it, and was actually pleasantly surprised when it recommended that I run in “high” settings at 1920×1200.

My PC is built around an ASUS P5B motherboard.  This isn’t a top-end motherboard these days but I have no complaints; it was rather decent when I bought it and I haven’t run into any limitations related to it.  Really, it’s been something that I put in the case and have since mostly ignored, except for a recent optimistic BIOS update to get it up to date.

We also have a server, an HP-branded mini-tower.  It’s not a bad PC, at that – it’s probably 3 years old and did quite nicely for my wife’s gaming needs before she migrated to laptops.

But, it’s running three hard drives and it seems to get pretty hot and the case only has one 80mm fan with no provisions for mounting another, so I decided that I would pop it open, figure out what motherboard it was built on, and then figure out if it was a proprietary motherboard or if it would fit in, say, a nice Antec Sonata III case with lots of room for fans.

I opened it, found that it was actually built around an ASUS motherboard, and started googling the model number.

Turns out, it’s a micro-ATX board and should work in just about any case.  Good.

Then I noticed a question about the board, which went something like

“If I want the RAM to run in dual-channel mode, do I need to put it in alternating slots like on the P5B?”

…and my ears perked up, because when I installed my motherboard, I put DIMMs in the first two slots and figured I was probably good.

A couple of minutes more googling and I realized that I had a) crippled myself when I installed my RAM and b) been running with it like this for the last two years.

I moved one of the DIMMs over from slot two to slot three, re-ran Vista’s performance checker thing, and my “Vista Performance Index” rating went from 5.0 to 5.5.

OK, OK, I will admit that that doesn’t sound like a HUGE jump in performance, but considering that I’d been living with it for ages and the fix was simply to move one stick of RAM one inch over, it’s pretty embarrassing.

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They call me… Wayne.

Posted on April 18, 2009 by baudattitude

I discovered today the single most frustrating thing about buying games from Steam.

When you complete one, you can’t put the box on to the shelf with a satisfying thunk sound, reflect for a moment on your accomplishment, and take the next challenge off the shelf.

It kind of spoils things.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you could make little categories in the Steam UI, so you could drag the title from one category to another and so on.

Oh, well.

Anyway, back to the Wayne thing.

A few weekends ago, Steam put “Lost Planet : Extreme Condition” up as their $5 special, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to put one more game on to the backlog.  I hadn’t heard much about it, other than that the bosses were reputedly nasty hard and that you constantly had to collect thermal energy to avoid freezing to death.

This is why, in my opinion, they put “Easy” difficulty levels in games, and I’m not at all ashamed to have picked that path – particularly since, even on “Easy”, two of the bosses took 5+ attempts to beat.

The thermal energy thing turns out to be present, but it’s not really a concern during normal gameplay.  You get thermal energy from pretty much anything you blow up, and there’s plenty to blow up, so the only real purpose it serves most of the time is to make it so you don’t dawdle too much as you fight through the levels.  This is actually a little bit of a shame, because the game is bloody stunning running in DX10 mode and stopping to look around is actually worthwhile.

The game itself is pretty straightforward, consisting of a few hours of running from point A to point B, occasionally by way of piloting Giant Stompy Robots, and blowing the hell out of Big Damn Alien Bug Things.  There’s a story, also, and the sense is that the game designers spent a long time working on a complex backstory with multiple factions and deeply realized characters and then threw most of it out, because it’s a pretty disjointed affair.  The cutscenes are pretty, anyway.

One thing I like to do after playing through a game is go and read reviews, and this game picked up a few negative ones.  I saw a couple of points mentioned, often, as drawbacks to the game, and I will summarize them as follows:

The first point was that the game is a “lazy console port”, a claim most often backed up by the game’s frequent display of an Xbox 360 controller and on-screen tips that refer to Xbox 360 controller buttons.

The second point is that the game is “too easy” if you play it with a keyboard and mouse, because the mouse control for aiming eliminates the challenge of aiming for weak points.

I think that the reviewers have, perhaps, missed a vital point here.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Geek happiness

Posted on April 17, 2009 by baudattitude

One of the things coming out of preparing to move in July is a little bit of a technology refresh.  Knowing that I’m going to be pulling apart our network, AV setup, etc, and then putting it back together in a new place has been a great motivator to do some updating.

In related news, Newegg had 8-port gigabit ethernet switches on sale for 25 bucks and turn out to stock a wide range of cat 6 cable in all lengths and hues, and, well, that’s the sort of combination that rather encourages one to swap out some old hubs and wiring with an eye to the future.

We don’t, to be honest, have that many gigabit devices, but everything that can run at that speed now does, and it is a glorious thing to watch files whip across the network at that kind of speed.

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More Game Shame

Posted on April 16, 2009 by baudattitude

I spent part of last weekend finishing the recently-domestically-released Xbox 360 Oneechanbara game, which turned out to be exactly as advertised – you run around as a sword-wielding zombie hunter with a refreshingly relaxed attitude to her dress code, and beat the hell out of zombies. If you like slamming the X button and watching zombies get diced – and, hey, who doesn’t like that – this game satisfies.

Now and then, you will step into the role of your younger sister, who moves a little differently and wears a little more clothing but who is otherwise very similar to play – run around, hit things with swords until everything falls down, move on to the next fight.

Everything’s still good up to this point.

Unfortunately, you are occasionally forced to play as the game’s third character, Annna, and yes there are three Ns in her name, and those segments represent periods of time when the game is Not Fun, because Annna comes with some of the worst-ever camera angles I’ve ever seen.  Seriously, you’ll be using the game’s mini-map and radar to aim and firing blindly off the screen most of the time in the Annna segments, which is compensated for somewhat by Annna not really having to aim very much.

To round out the complaints, the game sends you through the same set of city streets / parking garage / sewer system levels over and over again, hunting for keys the whole way, and I spent the entire game figuring out stuff that the manual hadn’t been polite enough to mention, like how to use healing items – or even that I HAD healing items – or how to drive a motorcycle through the game’s single vehicle level with no instructions provided.

Back to the good stuff:  The publisher apparently decided to save some money on hiring English voice actors, so the player is spared that particular pain, the cutscenes look very cool even if the in-game graphics are about a generation-behind, a fair bit of the game takes place in a very recognizable street in Akihabara – and it’s an odd thing indeed when a game can inspire a feeling so closely akin to homesickness – and you get to fight a massive zombie version of Shamu.

It’s shallow, it’s eyeroll-inducing, it’s got a plot that might make more sense if the first two games in the series had ever been translated, and it was well worth playing.  Now I just need to pick up the Wii sequel, because, you know, got to see how the cliffhanger resolves.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | 1 Comment

A rare compliment

Posted on April 8, 2009 by baudattitude

I have just finished X-Blades, a game which has been utterly savaged by the gaming press, and I have just finished it for the second time because I got the bad ending on the first go-around and decided to, rather than simply hitting Youtube to see the good ending, play through the whole thing again.

And I liked it both times.

I say this even having paid full price for the game – it’s not a “well, it was cheap but you get to watch a cute girl beat stuff up for 10 or 12 hours”, it’s a “you get to watch a cute girl beat stuff up for 10 or 12 hours, and that’s worth the price of admission.”

I won’t try to excuse the game’s jiggle factor.  It flat-out panders to the basest of base instincts, but, well, being a male type person, I have base instincts and I am not going to feel shame for them.

For the record: I DO have a limit.  I can’t look at trailers for “Bayonetta” without cringing.

The graphics, if you can look away from the bethonged pixie in the middle of the screen to check out the scenery, are fantastic, the music is decent, and the beat-monsters-up/smash breakable objects to find hidden stuff/upgrade your spells/beat-up-more-monsters routine is very satisfying.  Granted, the voice acting is shameful, the enemy variety is, well, minimal, and the gameplay is repetitive beyond belief, but I found the positives outweighed these little drawbacks. 🙂  It’s also a pretty quick play, which I appreciate given my schedule this year.  I don’t know if my patience for the drawbacks would have persisted if it were 20-25 hours long.

Keep in mind that I was playing the PC version.  I have seen a few comments about the console versions having iffy graphics; all I have to say is that with a 9800GT it looked quite nice.  It also has a reasonably non-annoying copy protection scheme – you need to activate it, which is a pain, but once you activate it you can stick the DVD in a box and never drag it out again.  Considering how many games these days require online activation and then make you put the DVD in every time you want to play, I’ll cut them some slack.

It also has excellent joypad support – at least, when using the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows – so it earns a few more points from me.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment