Proactively leveraging synergy.

Posted on July 28, 2007 by baudattitude

…or, in today’s installment, I am an idiot sometimes.

We had planned to have my gamerspouse and his wife over to our place today to look at vacation photos, since we racked up about 4GB of photos on our recent trip to Alaska and, well, you need to show them to people to prove you went somewhere and didn’t just sit around the house watching TV all week.

Plan A: We’ll load all the photos on to the Mac mini we have hooked up to the HDTV in the front room, then display them using iPhoto. Great plan. We’ve never used iPhoto before, but it’s a Mac, right? It actually turned out to be pretty easy to deal with, just took a while to import the photos.

Complication: We get a call. It turns out they can’t come over because a family member had to be in the hospital the night before, so they want to stick close to home in case there are any problems.

This throws a wrench in my plans, because they don’t have a handy Mac mini hooked to their TV.

This calls for:

Plan B: We’ll burn them to a DVD-video. iPhoto even has a burn to DVD option. This renders for about two hours and makes a DVD. Unfortunately, it’s really not very useful since all the photos are displayed for 5 seconds and then fade to the next photo – there’s no way to quickly flip through photos. Also, it means that all the nice high res photos are now downsized to DVD resolutions.

This calls for:

Plan C: We’ll put them on the Acer laptop, grab an S-video cable, and hook it in to their TV. I try this at home. It doesn’t go well, but it works… if we don’t mind having the Windows Fax & Picture viewer UI on the screen all the time. If I try to go to full-screen slideshow mode, it forces all the pictures to the laptop display. Also, over S-video, the picture is even worse than playing them off a DVD-video. Not good. But: time is short and it’s taken over an hour just to get this far, so we deal with it and I pack the laptop over and we get on the road.

We get to their house and I start setting up for the photo display session.

Complication: Their HDTV has front composite and component inputs, no S-video inputs on the front. He goes to get a flashlight so we can fiddle around behind the thing and get the laptop hooked up, and I notice the big white box staring us in the face.

Naturally enough, he has an Xbox 360.

…wait… that’s a Media Center Extender…

…I have a Media Center laptop right here…

15 minutes later, I’ve downloaded the necessary Media Center Extensions, the laptop is talking to the 360, and we’re looking at our vacation photos in 1080-lines-of-resolution-glory.

If I’d thought about it, I could have just taken over a DVD-ROM of photos, since the 360 would have happily displayed the photos right off a DVD-ROM… or even a USB flash drive.

Moral of the story: Don’t casually dismiss the extra multimedia functions of the Xbox 360, because they can save you a lot of hassle if you actually remember them.

That’s not much of a moral, I admit. You can probably adapt it to your own circumstances.

Posted in gadgets, travel, videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

I have no excuse…

Posted on July 26, 2007 by baudattitude

…for posting this, but it makes me giggle.

Light spoilers for Lucky Star 12:

Konata drags Kagami and Tsukasa to Comiket to help her buy doujinshi.

Kagami makes the mistake of opening one.

kagamiface.png

Posted in anime | Leave a comment

Apologies, actually fairly classy:

Posted on July 26, 2007 by baudattitude

My wife and I both tried out Vanguard : Saga of Heroes earlier this year, and we both kind of put it aside pretty quickly – not before we both got some nice PC upgrades as a result, though, so I guess every cloud has its silver lining.

At any rate, I’m guessing a lot of people tried Vanguard and put it aside. I say this because Sony Online Entertainment decided to apologize by sending us both postcards that say, basically, “we’re really sorry about Vanguard. Here, try “Everquest II” for free. Until September 15th. With all the expansions and stuff, also free. By the way, we’ve gotten most of the bugs out by now, and it doesn’t suck nearly as badly as you might have heard. Please try it. Did we mention free?”

So, a $40 game and nearly 2 free months of subscription. Not bad. I give you a thumbs up, Sony Online Entertainment, and I accept your apology.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Tron 2.0 : End Of Line

Posted on July 26, 2007 by baudattitude

Yes, I admit it, I have put off updating the blog while I played Tron 2.0 solely because I wanted to use that as a post title.

I’m a sad, sick man.

Anyway. I’m happy to report that patching the game to 1.042 does make it a heck of a lot easier – it’s either that, or the act of applying the patch somehow boosted my FPS skills. I don’t HAVE any FPS skills, so it wouldn’t take much…

Solid game. Helped considerably by the sheer nostalgia-fest combination of the visual style and music. My only complaint, really, is that the ending highlights one of the big mysteries of the game and then doesn’t actually answer the question for us. Presumably if they’d gotten to do a sequel it would have been wrapped up but, meh.

Roughly three weeks to go until I head to Japan for a week of Comiket and sightseeing and general immersion. I need to be done with at least the first season of “Let’s Learn Japanese” by then; right now I’m at episode 19 so I have 7 to go. I am very glad to have found out about this series; it’s a little corny but it really is helping fill in the gaps.

Let’s see… my TurboDuo seems to have developed sound problems during a period of non-use. Rather vexed about that; apparently it’s a pretty common problem with the capacitors in the sound section. It’s actually the console I expected to have problems, but I really thought it would be the CD or the back up memory that failed, so having the sound go out was a shock.

Debating whether to deal with sending off to get it fixed or whether I should just deal with emulation.

The only other console I’ve had a failure on (except from, you know, dirty cartridge slots) was our original Xbox. I had to buy a replacement power supply from the sadly defunct Lik-sang, and it was pretty easy to replace.

The long process of recording laserdiscs to MPEG-2 files is almost complete. I have a few discs of Dirty Pair episodes, all of Gandala, and Gamera vs. Zigra to work through and then I can dismount the LD player from the rack and think about the VHS hell to come – we have about 100 tapes left, and lots of them have 3 or 4 things on the tape so they’ll take extra work.

Time to cross another game off the “to-play” stack, watch the episode of Lucky Star I have sitting on my desktop, and call it a night.

Life is good.

Posted in organization, PC Gaming, videogames, 日本語 | 2 Comments

A weekend with Harry (no spoilers)

Posted on July 22, 2007 by baudattitude

I didn’t really catch the “Harry Potter” bug early on. We didn’t buy any of the books until the third one was out, then I read those and found out that there were going to be seven in total, so I didn’t read the fourth book when it came out as I didn’t want to be left with a cliffhanger.

Then, the movies started coming out, and we went to see those. I still haven’t read the fourth book, but I’ve seen the movie now, at any rate.

Then, with Deathly Hallows coming out… well, I felt the need to catch up. So, last weekend while the rest of the nation was off seeing Order of the Phoenix in theaters, I was reading that book and Half-Blood Prince.

Fortunately, I’d managed not to have Half-Blood Prince spoiled for me.

Then, like the pathetic fanboy I am, I trooped over to the local grocer’s and bought Deathly Hallows at their midnight launch event. I will confess I wore headphones just in case someone wanted to go loudly talking about spoilerish things, as I understand the whole damn book got leaked to the net early.

Then I stayed up until a godawful hour of the morning reading it.

Then we went to see Order of the Phoenix that evening.

It is difficult to imagine my reactions to both being any more different. I thought the book was a great way to conclude the story and a proper send-off for the characters, while the movie was a very weak collection of fairly disconnected scenes from the book and left out far too much.

The one-on-one duel at the end did, however, rock. And Luna was pretty cool.  I’ll give it those points.

Looking forward to hearing the office chatter on Monday. More to the point, how many people are willing to admit they did more or less the same thing. 🙂

Posted in movies & tv | Leave a comment

Raging 80’s Nostalgia

Posted on July 18, 2007 by baudattitude

So I’ve been trying out Tron 2.0 for the second time.  First time around, I didn’t make it past what I believe to be the training level.

This time, I’ve managed to get a bit further, and the atmosphere is, like, 3 kinds of awesome.  Being in a huge red vector tower with Recognizers zipping past the window?  Light Cycles on the Game Grid?  Yes, please, may I have another serving?

On the other hand, I’m not doing terribly well.  Which is to say, I’ve yet to go past a health recharge station and say “oh, I don’t need that, I’m fine” because I’m rarely fine – I’m generally quite banged up and I’m having to make liberal use of quicksave and quickload, which, while “run into a room!  get killed!  quickload! do it again knowing where the ICPs will be!” works,  it’s pretty lame.

Turns out there’s a patch that fixes a bunch of bugs and makes the game easier.  I think the exact phrase I heard that described what it did to the enemy AI was “Brain-dead” – and that’s exactly what I’m looking for.  Sadly, it also means I need to start from the beginning because old save games aren’t compatible, and if it’s NOT actually any easier, well, the joke will be on me.

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

Goals in life: Questionable

Posted on July 15, 2007 by baudattitude

Back from Alaska, and it was a fine time indeed. Saw lots of natural beauty, plenty of wildlife, and a few museums. A good trip. Much good food, in fact, too much – I came home at 193.6 and need to drop about 5 pounds now to get back under 189. But that’s not for this post.

You may or may not be familiar with the film “Trekkies”, and if you are not, I must recommend it as an enjoyable, if cautionary, tale. All you really need to know is that it’s a series of interviews with Star Trek fans, and at one point they interview a memorabilia collector who says (paraphrasing here) that what he really wants to do some day is build a really big shelf, a shelf big enough to display everything he owns.

It is perhaps unfair that I have, in the past, made fun of this man for having the construction of a shelf as his life’s goal.

I have, for several months now, been in pursuit of a similar goal. A shelf of my own, as it were. This has been a quite frustrating thing because, while I knew more or less exactly what I wanted – sturdy, wire shelving – I didn’t quite know where to buy the stuff. I tried Staples and Office Depot and they were unhelpful, I even went so far as to call restaurant supply stores since I knew what I wanted was used quite a bit in kitchens, I was generally frustrated at every turn. I found lots of places to order it online, but this stuff isn’t lightweight by any means – I wanted to be able to go into a store and buy it and it vexed me mightily that I was unable to do so.

Then I found the Container Store. And they had shelving, great stocks of it. And I felt as though a months-long quest was finally coming to an end.

That was on June 30th. We were going to leave for Alaska on July 7th. Buying and assembling shelving would have a) cut severely into our trip budget and b) taken way too much time. I had to put it aside.

July 14th we returned from Alaska, getting up at 4AM for a 6AM flight out of Juneau, returning home to beautiful northern Oregon at approximately 2PM.

By 4PM I was at the Container Store.

Today I sit proudly surrounded by a Shelf of My Own. I have loads of display space that is, as you will see, still largely unused, but I will be excavating many Cool Things from boxes and bins sooon.

Total:

2 “starter sets.” (4 x upright, 4 18″ x 48″ shelf)

6 18″ x 24″ shelves.

2 shelf liners. (1 x 24″, 1 x 48″)

2 packages floor protectors.

4 packages hanging hook thingies.

One massive pressboard entertainment center broken down and thrown away.

End result:

Left side and Middle: Laserdisc player, VHS deck, PC for capturing video, PC for downloading stuff, NAS, external drives, scanner, my main PC, a Dreamcast, monitor, etc:

shelfcomputers.jpg

Right side: CD player, MD deck, CRT monitor, Composite/S-Video to VGA adapter, switchboxes, receiver, consoles PS2 and older (newer consoles are in the living room)

shelfconsoles.jpg

It is… Glorious.

“Let’s Learn Japanese” Progress Tracker: 16/52

Posted in gadgets, organization, weight, 日本語 | 1 Comment

Where once there was madness…

Posted on July 4, 2007 by baudattitude

…now there is sanity.

Until yesterday, I had a large plastic bin full of cables, and a duffel bag full of the cables that wouldn’t fit in the large plastic bin.

This is AFTER a major thinning project I did a while back, where I asked myself questions  like “do I need to keep these half-dozen Commodore 64 drive cables?” and thinned it down from two huge plastic storage boxes to only the one bin and one bag of cables.

In addition, the cables weren’t sorted or tied or anything, and as is their natural behavior they’d pretty much knotted themselves into two giant balls of wire.

Two weekends ago, while my gamespouse was over, I needed to get out a single ethernet cable.  The shame associated with upending these giant balls of wire onto the carpet and then having to unthread the single ethernet cable was… well, it was shameful.  Really, that’s all you can say.

Last night, I bought a mess of zip-lock bags, hunkered down with these snarls and tangles and… can I say “thickets?”… thickets of wire, and now:

cablebin.jpg

Well, they’re still not really organized, but at least they can’t tangle.  Also I got a bit more thinning done and managed to get it down to only the one bin of cables.

In my other Big Win for Order, I found out that you can edit .ini files for both Thunderbird and Firefox to specify where they should store their data files – so, I tweaked them and now I can back my mail and my bookmarks up at the same time I back up all my other documents and source code and personal photos and so forth.

For the first time in, I don’t know how long, if I lose a hard drive, I can calmly restore everything important from a single DVD-R.

Life is slightly more under control in ways that are of import only to geeks.

Posted in organization | Leave a comment

15 Minutes with Hell

Posted on July 2, 2007 by baudattitude

Blame it on Deus Ex, but I figured I’d try another PC game. Give the consoles a bit of a rest.

So, I spent a couple of hours last night, when I should have been getting an early night’s rest, digging through plastic storage bins and desk drawers to look for PC games.

It’d be nice if it was all in one place, and it’d be nice if I’d kept more boxes (I still have boxes for Dark Forces and Knights of Xentar, for instance, but the boxes for Starcraft and Icewind Dale are long since gone. Why? Who knows why.) because it made me realize that we have a bunch of titles where the manual is in one drawer, but the game disc is in another drawer, or maybe it’s in the box which is in a bin… or maybe the box is in a bin, completely empty, while the manual and CD are in two separate drawers… I can not find the first Simon the Sorcerer at ALL, and I know we should own it.

Nonetheless, I pulled out a bunch of games and bits of games, and laid them all out and took digital photos, then shoved them back into drawers and bins without taking time to do any real organizing, and then I went over the photos to see what we had.

This is much easier to do than actually making lists from physical objects, by the way.

End result: We have a bunch of RPG compilation disc sets. If I wanted to play any Ultimas, Bards Tales, Forgotten Realms, Wasteland, Might & Magics… the list goes on, but if I wanted to install DOSbox and play some mid-80s, early 90s RPGs for the next year, I could.

I decided that was maybe a little too retro and that I would restrict myself to stuff made in the last decade, so I added a “release year” to my spreadsheet, spent some time on Wikipedia, and came up with a longish list:

1998:

  • Baldur’s Gate
  • Heretic 2
  • Incoming
  • Starcraft
  • Unreal

1999:

  • Aliens Vs. Predator Gold
  • Starcraft: Brood War
  • Wheel of Time

2000:

  • Deus Ex
  • Diablo II
  • Giants: Citizen Kabuto
  • Icewind Dale
  • Return of the Incredible Machine : Contraptions
  • Sheep

2001:

  • Serious Sam

2002:

  • Neverwinter Nights
  • Serious Sam : The Second Encounter
  • Simon the Sorcerer 3D
  • Warcraft 3

2003:

  • Bloodrayne 2
  • Tron 2.0
  • Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne Expansion

2005:

  • Ever 17

2007:

  • Tomb Raider Anniversary

…and some eroge which we won’t get in to as this is generally a PG-13 blog.

Setting FPSes and puzzle games aside, since I just wasn’t in the mood, I got:

1998:

  • Baldur’s Gate
  • Starcraft

1999:

  • Starcraft: Brood War

2000:

  • Diablo II
  • Giants: Citizen Kabuto
  • Icewind Dale

2002:

  • Neverwinter Nights
  • Simon the Sorcerer 3D
  • Warcraft 3

2003:

  • Bloodrayne 2
  • Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne Expansion

2005:

  • Ever 17

2007:

  • Tomb Raider Anniversary

A much shorter list.

Setting aside ones I wasn’t allowed to play unless I let my wife watch, it became:

1998:

  • Starcraft

1999:

  • Starcraft: Brood War

2000:

  • Diablo II
  • Giants: Citizen Kabuto

2002:

  • Neverwinter Nights

2003:

  • Bloodrayne 2

2005:

  • Ever 17

I’ve never played Diablo II. It tempted me because I’d heard lots of folks rave about it. Still, it didn’t seem right to start with the sequel game, and it had come bundled with the first game, so I decided I’d give that a try.

Install. Launch. Needlessly dark opening. Wow, these graphics are really 1996. Deal with it. Click to walk around. Click to talk to people. Click until I’m told to go to the church. Dark church. Lots of undead. Very, very dark. Game is called Diablo, not Fluffy Bunny Sim. Click on undead. Click to kill undead with fire spells. Click to kill undead with lightning bolts. Pick up items. Go town. Sell items and heal. Go back to church. Click click click click click loot sell heal cli..ooh level 2! click some more and soon I’ll be level 3!

…click…

…click…

Another level grinding game I do not need. Quit, uninstall, feel like I’ve gotten away safely, spend twice as long writing long rambling post on blog.

Tomorrow I’ll try something else. Probably Brood War. I finished the original Starcraft ages and ages ago but never got far in the expansion.

Posted in organization, PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Game harder, not smarter.

Posted on July 1, 2007 by baudattitude

It’s a good week for finishing games. In addition to Deus Ex earlier this week, I finally got through Mario & Luigi : Partners in Time. This was a Christmas gift from my wife, and I was a bit dubious about it at first… then I decided to buckle down and see how it was.

Answer: Really fun. I’m not well versed in Mario lore – so I’m guessing I missed a bunch of jokes – but the dialog had me laughing on several occasions.

The only problem I had was that the final boss fight turned out to be a 90-minute mind-numbing pain in the arse grind session. After I finally got through it, and after enjoying a fairly satisfying ending, I went looking on gamefaqs to find out what the heck I’d been doing wrong.

And yeah. I’d kind of stopped trying out new “Bros Items” about halfway through the game, sticking to Red and Green shells with the occasional Ice flower. Turns out, if you actually use some of the later items on that final boss fight, it’s damn near trivial. I’m not exactly going to go back and try it again… but I do feel a little silly.

I have no idea what’s coming off the “to play” stack next. I might get back to Final Fantasy II, I haven’t touched that since December and I was rather far in to it before I bought Ouendan, which displaced all other games.

One week left until we head to Alaska for our vacation. Cat care is arranged for, just need to pack and get ready for some change of scenery.

Posted in nds, videogames | Leave a comment