Baud Attitude

It’s a Unix System. I know this.

Posted on May 29, 2009 by baudattitude

So, where to begin?

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.

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2 Weeks and Out, Man

Posted on May 29, 2009 by baudattitude

Two weeks left until graduation – well, graduation from my 2 year college, anyway.

I have one term paper and two presentations still to do, and I’ve only written a rough draft of one of the presentations. I should be more worried about this, I think.

After that, we’re packing up our entire lives into, presumably, a fairly sizable moving truck and hitting the road to our new digs, already rented and fairly palatial. A lot of packing to be done, of course, and a lot of taking books /DVDs / etc to the appropriate used stores.

I so prefer the Japanese term, “Recycle Shop”, and think we should adopt it as a country. I realize this to be fairly unlikely.

One thing that was moderately painful – we have a whole bunch of untranslated manga that we moved up from Los Angeles, there are no local used Japanese bookstores to buy it and I don’t want to try selling tankoubans on eBay considering that I’d probably lose any profits in shipping with their new policies.

I wound up tossing a full bookshelf’s worth into the paper recycling bin. At least they’re going to a better place.

Still getting along in Jeanne, though I turned off the PSP in disgust for the first time. There’s a fight where you have to kill two bosses and only have 12 turns to do it, and I lost solely because one of the bosses ran away and was faster than any of my characters – I could easily have set up a trap for her if I’d known which way she was going to run, and now that I’ve SEEN how the fight goes it shouldn’t be a problem on the second go, but it really seems like it was rigged.

rarr rarr rant rant

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Three months later

Posted on May 25, 2009 by baudattitude

…finally went back to Jeanne D’Arc, a fine strategy RPG and a highlight of the PSP’s software lineup, which I put aside back in February because I kept failing a protect mission.

It’s my considered opinion that, while all protect missions in pretty much any game ever are horrible vile things, there are ways to mitigate their horrible vileness. Take, for example, Half Life 2’s protect missions, where you’re escorting a character who’s pretty tough and actually serves as a considerable asset in fighting through hordes of combine soldiers – the “protect” nature of the mission simply serves to keep you moving through a level at a constant pace, rather than letting you dawdle.

This wasn’t one of those. It was a mission escorting a blindly-charging-forward NPC who died if any enemy so much as looked at him AND who did nothing to earn his keep.

Anyway, after several failed attempts at the protect mission, I went with the old RPG standby – if you can’t beat ’em, grind, grind again – and went back to earlier levels and got my core group of characters high enough level that they could more-or-less one-shot every enemy on this particular map.

After that, it wasn’t too bad and I got through on the first attempt after the grindathon.

I do find it funny, and perhaps a little worrysome, that one character, who I put aside in the early levels of the game as being rather boring, keeps getting prominent screen time in the cutscenes. I may have some more grinding in my future if he suddenly decides to take center stage.

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Convergence Fail

Posted on May 22, 2009 by baudattitude

So, there’s a rumor going around that Sony is considering starting up an iTunes sort of service for the PSP. It does make sense, in a way, because Sony does own an awful lot of content and the PSP could use some, even though their previous attempt at a music store in the US died a miserable, sad, and lonely death.

Anyway, seeing an article on Sony making another try of it made me decide to try something.

See, I have an account on Sony’s “mora” music store in Japan, which is gamely struggling along in the face of iTunes. It actually does have some advantages over iTunes for the Japanese market – for example, many fewer romanized track names – but it’s pretty shabby competition. The front end software, SonicStage, actually looks quite nice, but the store interface is a bit of a mess and makes it rather hard to find artists if they’re not currently featured performers.

Still, I’ve bought one track from it that wasn’t on iTunes, so I guess it has some point in existing. It’s obviously designed for Sony’s Walkman line of portable media players and can’t talk to an iPod, but there’s the whole buy, burn to CD, re-rip into iTunes workaround thing.

Anyway, the article about the PSP music service made me realize that, while I don’t have a Walkman PMP – I keep wanting to say “mp3 player”, but Sony is more fond of their ATRAC format – I do have a PSP, and some brief googling revealed that some people have had luck using SonicStage to move music on to their PSPs.

Things were going swimmingly, at first.

I launched SonicStage – I have to use version 5.0 to talk to the Japanese store, and there’s no English version of the software, plugged in my PSP, and was gratified to see that the software recognized it right away.

Things were, I considered, going quite well.

Then I dragged the track I had purchased over to the PSP, SonicStage copied the album artwork over, there was a brief pause and then I got an error message about not having the correct rights to transfer the song in question.

I tried this a few times, making sure that I had a “MagicGate” comptible memory stick and fiddling with different options in the software, but eventually gave it up as a bit of a lost cause. It seemed as though I simply wasn’t going to be able to move purchased tracks over to anything but an actual Walkman.

Then I thought, well, I’ve got SonicStage running, let’s rip a CD and move it over to the PSP. At least that way, I’d get album art on the PSP which has always been a bit of a problem. I don’t often use it to listen to music, but at this point I was just trying to find some justification for the hassle I’d gone through so far.

So I put in my copy of “Perfume : Complete Best”, was happy to see that SonicStage recognized it and gave me track names, waited through a bit of a long ripping process, and tried to move it to the PSP, at which point I was again met with an error message about not having sufficient rights to the music.

You know what, at this point I give up. I hope they do a better job with their upcoming store.

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First Person Shooters, Generic

Posted on May 18, 2009 by baudattitude

It might be a bad idea to drop back a few years for another game in the same genre after playing through a high-budget modern title like Call of Duty: World At War, but that’s what I’m doing: starting “Project: Snowblind”, a game which has extremely tenuous connections to the Best Damn PC Game Of All Time, and which makes me wonder if the project managers started every planning meeting with the following speech:

“Folks, we’re going to make something OK. We’re not going to push the envelope, but we’re not going to really SUCK. We’re shooting for “decent” or “passable” or “has a nice personality if you get to know it”. Just remember that, and we’ll get through this development cycle and get put on something else.”

This is perhaps a little harsh – I’m barely through the third level, so really I’m still in the training levels for the game, and it’s not like I’m disliking it or anything, but it really seems like the dev, art, and story teams kind of phoned it in.

Whoever wrote the little incidental conversations that NPCs have with each other, though, did a bang-up job. It is, perhaps, not the best testimony for a shootery game that the most enjoyable bits so far have consisted of standing around near NPCs waiting for them to talk to each other, but whatever else I may say about this game, it has that going for it.

Then again, there are a lot of games that don’t really pick up for a while and then wind up kicking all kinds of arse, so we’ll see what happens.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Apartment hunting is over

Posted on May 17, 2009 by baudattitude

I hate apartment hunting. It puts you in a position where you are completely subservient to the whims of landlords and have to write checks for “application fees” that come with little justification and no possibility of refund. Oh, and since every application comes with them pulling your credit report, each one dings your credit score a little bit, meaning that you’re basically paying to reduce your chance at each subsequent application.

On top of THAT, every landlord expects you to be ready to start paying rent the same day you walk in to the place, and yet expects you to give 30 days notice when you move out – so, you’re faced with either giving notice before you’ve found a place, and hoping that you can go through the whole process in less than a month, or paying rent on two places for a month.

Mind you, it’s nothing on the system in Japan, where you pay out approximately four months worth of rent as, basically, bribes, but it’s still pretty annoying.

And, yes, it’s possible that I’m simply not very good at the moving thing.

But.

We found a rather nice place in Eugene, put in an application and got accepted on the first pass, so we aren’t faced with going through multiple apartments, they’ve waived the rent through the end of the month and given us a rather sizable discount for signing a 12 month lease, so things are looking up.

Now we just have to move an awful lot of stuff into an apartment that is just a little bit smaller than the one we’re in now. This is where we see whether all the organizing and purging we’ve done over the last few months has actually paid off. 🙂

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It’s never the Italians.

Posted on May 16, 2009 by baudattitude

I have a vague memory, the result of not really paying too much attention in High School history class, that the “Axis” powers in World War II were Germany, Japan, AND Italy.

That having been said, I don’t remember ever playing through a WWII-based game where you had to fight Italians.

Call of Duty: World At War, being the most recent example of the genre to grace my disc tray, had plenty of Germans and Japanese, though, so I suppose two of three isn’t bad.

To get this right out of the way: Being that I have several Japanese friends, am studying Japanese in college, and find myself rather attracted to the Japanese design asethetic, playing a game where a large part of it consists of shooting Japanese is a little disturbing. Rather like watching Otokotachi no Yamato, it made me squirm in my chair; not the sort of reaction I expected to a nice bout of testosterone-driven shootery.

Apparently I don’t care about the Germans, however, because I gunned them down in great numbers.

COD:WAW is a game that was made by the guys who aren’t Infinity Ward, so I was a little worried going into it; they seem to get a lot of fanboy hate and it seemed as though some of it was probably justifyable.

There were frustrating bits. It keeps the same old Call-of-Duty formula of “fight endlessly respawning enemies until you manage to crawl far enough forward that your AI allies decide to catch up to you and help”, and it features some really brain-dead enemies. Mind you, I was playing on “Normal”, which is nowhere near the highest level of difficulty, but it was a little sad to, say, shoot some guy in the shoulder and have him ignore me.

Also, I had the game crash once – during a turret sequence that stands out as both really cool AND really frustrating – and I got stuck in the environment on one occasion, necessitating a re-try at the level.

Still, frustrating bits and occasional crashes aside, it was fun enough to stay in my optical drive for the best part of two weeks while I got time to play it in half-hour chunks. I don’t mind admitting that the last Russian level managed to evoke a truly visceral emotional response, which is pretty unusual for a video game.

Also, as I seem to be saying a lot recently when it comes to the PC version of games, it looks and sounds really really good. We’re at the point in this console generation where consoles, which start off at the high end, become medium-to-low end simply because technology moves around them. I’m sure that when we’re all rocking our Xbox 720s or whatever, the COD:WAW graphics will look hopelessly dated and archaic – for now, it’s good to have a decently-specced PC.

Oh, there’s a designed-for-multiplayer mode where you fight zombies, but I didn’t get much in to that. I have been told that this sort of thing means that I’m Doing It Wrong, but I can live with that.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | 2 Comments

I’d forgotten what junk mail was like.

Posted on May 10, 2009 by baudattitude

So, in preparation for the move, I took the large bin labeled – or, well, not actually labeled, it’s metaphorical – “shred before disposal” and put it through our shredder, an agonizingly slow process made worse by the knowledge that it would have been a lot less painful without the procrastination; as I reached the bottom strata I was finding stuff from September 2007.

Everything was in more-or-less-perfect FILO order, so it was kind of interesting from an archeological perspective. I ran across school bookstore receipts, amazon shipping notices, auto loan statements… and then, near the bottom, I found the point where I had told the credit reporting agencies that I no longer wanted to get pre-screened credit card offers.

I really didn’t realize, at the point where I did it, just how much junk mail it was going to eliminate. At a conservative guess, between CapitalOne and American Express “Blue” and Wamu and Chase and Citi and so on and so forth, I was getting 8 or 9 of these things a week. Figure about 5 sheets of paper per offer, 40 sheets a week… that adds up to a lot of paper I’ve managed to not get in my mailbox in the last year and a half or so.

There’s a web site run by the credit agencies you can visit if you want to have the same ephiphany. Mind you, I don’t recommend the “putting off shredding sensitive mail for 19 months” part of the process, but you can go with that if you want to.

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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:

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:

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:

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.

Posted in anime, organization | Leave a comment

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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