Imagine being an 11 year old boy with a remote controlled car with an integrated webcam that you could look through using a wireless headmounted display while you drive it, effectively driving in first person mode. How cool is it that such a thing actually exists? Now imagine being a 41 year old man-boy trying to come up with a rationale for purchasing such a toy….
Archive for the 'Techno Geek' Category
I was in a fraternity back when I was in college, and there’s been a sudden burst of activity related to a facebook group that was created for the frat. I got an email today that an old friend had uploaded a photo of me which cracked me up, so at the risk of much mocking, I post it here for everyone’s enjoyment. This was taken in roughly 1991 during a fraternity rush, during which we ‘murffled’ our hair to make it stand up on end dramatically. Check out the mane I was wearing that night:
I’ve played most of the Call of Duty games at this point, including the various console ports. I’ve played through 2 on the PS2, and 2 on the PC (three if you count one of the expansion paks for the original game) and I played through 4 on the xbox 360 right after Christmas. I enjoyed that so much I went out and got COD3 for the Xbox 360, and played it through over the last couple of weeks. It’s nowhere near as good as 4 was, but it’s decent at what it is - a formulaic WWII console FPS. What novelty it has you can tell was tacked on because of the WII and PS3 motion sensing bits in the controllers, because there are these interactive sequences like ‘plant this bomb on the anti-aircraft gun’ which require sequences of button presses and twists, which on the wii or PS3 would have been actual motions with the controllers. They’re weak on the 360 because they feel contrived and because you can exploit them for a limited invulnerability by sprinting for the objective and initiating the sequence, which mostly keeps the AI from shooting at you so you can charge into insane situations and survive. The other new addition to the formula is scripted moments where you get jumped from around corners by enemy soldiers, which starts a ‘quicktime event’ style melee combat where you have to press the right buttons at the right time and speed. It’s basically as weak as it sounds, made worse by the fact that each of them requires whacking on the shoulder buttons, which it’s not easy to do quickly. There are also driving sequences and sequences where you control tanks or other heavy weaponry. These are just ok, and not as good as the ones in COD2, but they’re not bad either.
I didn’t try the multiplayer, because I already have the superb COD4 for that, not to mention Team Fortress 2 on the pc, so I figured why bother.
You can score the game for under $20 for the PS3 and the 360 if you shop carefully. At that price it’s worth it if you’re a fan of the genre, and who isn’t - after all, shooting nazis never gets old 
We had perfect weather this weekend, with temperatures in the low high 60’s and clear blue skies. Susan and I took advantage of this and went hiking in the green mountains in vermont about 40 minutes north of Bennington:
It was pretty much perfect - the hike made its way up a steep grade but at an angle such that it was never too strenuous of a climb. We saw a beautiful ice covered lake, followed a roaring brook for over a mile that the dogs had a blast frolicking in, struggled to follow a poorly marked appalachian/long trail section that was covered in sometimes deep and slightly treacherous snow, climbed an excellent quartz rock seam, and looked out over a Vermont valley with stunning views. There are more pictures if you’re interested, including a couple of movies and (after tonight) a panoramic shot of the view from the summit.
Ever seen Ghost in the Shell? It’s taken many forms over its existence (Manga, Anime, TV series, anime sequel, multiple videogames), but it’s best known in the US as a superb anime that came out in the 90’s. It was one of the first anime to (almost) achieve mainstream success in the US, and it deserved the cult status it achieved on video. It’s a meditation on the nature of existence wrapped up in a sci fi action movie that takes place in a blade runner-esque near future. I thought it pretty cool that Spielberg’s Dreamworks Pictures optioned it for a 3d feature. Here’s hoping they bring this project to fruition, I’d love to see a competent live action Ghost in the Shell.
Evernote is an excellent little personal knowledge base. It runs on macs and pcs, will soon run on iphones and blackberries, and runs on the web. You can always get at your stuff no matter what platform you dump info into, and you can control what gets synced to their servers and what stays local on your machine. You can also control the availability of materials, making some publicly available and other stuff private. It’s also got incredible image recognition/OCR software integrated in it, so you can do things like hold a business card up to your laptop’s camera, import it into evernote, and then later search for the person by name and it will find the card. It’s even ok at recognizing my horrible handwriting.
I have 10 invites to their beta. It’s free - their business plan is to eventually start charging on the volume of materials you store on their server, so in one sense it’s going to be free forever if you’re frugal. If you want in on the beta, leave me a comment and tell me what email address to send the invite to and I’ll get you set up. If I don’t hear from anyone after a week or so I’ll hand them out over on inviteshare.
I should mention that it’s worth running through the short screencast on the homepage of the evernote site to get a sense of how it works. It’s really cool tech.
Hurrah! The weather’s warmed up to the point where I can ride my bike to work again, yesterday being the first day I was able to manage it. I used some muscles I hadn’t been using so I was a bit sore, but really it’s minor. It’s also better for Soolin this year because when she can manage it Susan has graciously agreed to pick her up on her way into work and drop Soolin off in my office. Three cheers for the return of the warm weather!
How much do I love Rockband? So much that I’m considering dropping ~$75 on a professional drumkit pedal to replace the flimsy thing that comes with the original drumkit. Check out the Omega Pedal. And if you haven’t been playing Rock Band, you’re missing out. It is hands down the best party game ever made, and it’s fun in its own right just playing by yourself.
I’ve noted other studies highlighting similar conclusions about the benefits of drinking red wine and black tea if you’re a type 2 diabetic. A recent article over on sciencedaily.com is more evidence that type 2’s should consider adding both tea and red wine to their diet. Check it out, and tip a glass or two back this weekend.
I bought a Thermaltake USB hard drive cartridge system for work last week after almost losing all my data on my laptop. Techreport has a lengthy writeup which I basically agree with, but a bottom line statement would be, for ~$50 this thing is excellent. I got it and a 500GB drive, partitioned half as OSX journaled file system and half as fat32, then backed up my mac and pc at work, using time machine on the mac and Cobian backup on the pc. Cheap, infinitely extensible, and cleverly designed. Well worth a look if you’re in the market for a backup device.
(stupid product name though)
Leopard is the latest version of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Last Wednesday I decided to install it. Little did I know what I was in for.
Like most folks, I have limited backups of stuff, and my mac laptop is the home of some pretty critical data - project timelines for my staff, project sheets for each of the major projects we have, a huge knowledge base full of all kinds of info related to my day job, and more. So I go to install the upgrade, choose the ‘archive and install’ option, and let it start. An hour later it pops up a very helpful ‘the upgrade has failed for unknown reasons, press to restart’ message. Aigh! I press to restart and the machine won’t boot from its drive. I boot from the OS dvd and it can’t find its drive. Needless to say I freaked out. Many machinations later and I could get it to recognize that it did, in fact, have an internal drive in the laptop, but the volume was hosed and it wanted to reformat. I couldn’t let that happen. With some trepidation I handed it over the our support folks for a look see, more because I lacked the time to continue looking into it than because I had exhausted all my options.
To their credit they did manage to restore my drive. Interestingly, they could never get Leopard to even recognize its existence, but they tried booting from a Tiger OS dvd and it recognized the drive straight away. They didn’t even have to run disk tools - once Tiger had ‘touched’ the drive, it was back to its normal state, and the machine was working fine again.
I have no explanation for how the above happened. I do now have a laptop running Leopard, and I now have several backups of it since the whole experience put the fear of ‘OMFG I lost all my stuff!!!’ into me. Leopard is pretty great once it’s running, but of all the OS X releases this one was by far the worst in terms of the upgrade process. Back everything up is my advice to anyone thinking of upgrading. It came out during this process that I was the 8th machine that was being upgraded to Leopard on our campus, and it was the second one to have a serious issue. The other one actually had data loss too.
The scenario: you downloaded some cool anime/samurai flick/bollywood musical, and you want to play it on your game console, but it has subtitles in separate .sub or .idx files. The solution if you run windows is to go visit the sub2divx homepage. It’s a little app that lets you bake those subtitles into the avi file so it will play on the consoles with the subtitles. There are some dependencies to get this running but the sub2divx page helpfully lists and links to everything you need. Just dump it all into one folder, point the app at the avi file and sub file, and off it goes. It’s fast too, a 2 hour movie broken across 2 avi files took me less than 10 minutes. It’s also flexible - you can tune the color, shadow, and highlight colors of the subtitles, adjust their position on the screen, and choose the font. It’s a great little tool.
(that would be cathode ray tube based television sets for the technotards out there)
Ok, so maybe they’re not completely dead yet, but as a symbol of their demise you can’t do much better than Sony stopping the manufacture of Trinitron sets. Trinitrons were for most of their existence the finest tube tvs you could buy, and I still own one today, the last of the great tube televisions in fact (an XBR960N for those keeping score). The irony from my perspective is that you still can’t buy a better tv than the one I own, if image quality and flexibility are your primary criteria. Anyway, a tip of the cap to the old crt as it fades into the sunset.
This one’s for Andrew, who asked me to post a photo of the back of my new receiver. I bought a new mid tier Yamaha RX-V3800 receiver for myself for my recent birthday. I scored it at a great price - they list for $1699 and I got it for $1099. I think Andrew’s mostly interested in the complexity of the back panel compared to older generations of hardware, but the irony is I’m actually using much less cabling with the new one because the HDMI ports on the far left each replace 6 cables for AV devices and 2 cables for audio-only devices. You should have seen the mound of cables I was able to pull out of my AV stack once I had this all connected. Anyway, the photo:
Got a webcam on your laptop or attached to your PC? Check out the asciicam, a cool little flash webapp which lets you grab images from a webcam and turn them into ascii art. A sample:
Bonus points for whoever can tell what that is. Anyway, a fun little diversion, which you can check out over here.
News of this is all over the web, but as a PA for my friends since I’ve actually had two IM conversations about this in the past week: if you’ve been holding off on buying a Hi Def DVD machine because of the format war, it’s officially and finally over. The writing was on the wall after the studio announcements at this year’s CES, but yesterday’s Netflix announcement about supporting only Blu Ray for rentals going forward is the deal sealer. Best Buy’s announcement is just icing on the cake. Don’t be tempted by the bargain basement prices you’ll find on HDDVD players and movies over the next couple of months. Retailers are clearing out stock. Meanwhile if you’re interested in jumping in now, get a PS3 - it’s actually a better Blu Ray player than almost any other device on the market, and it’s actually cheaper than many of them.
Skitch is this great screengrab/editing tool with great integration with existing services. It makes it really easy to take a screenshot of something, edit it, and get it posted online to your blog, flickr, wordpress.com, whatever. It’s been in private beta for quite a while, and I use it pretty frequently. At this week’s Macworld Expo they made the beta public. If you don’t already have a copy, give it a try, it’s a great little tool. This is a commercial product but they’re not yet charging. Right now only the Mac version is available, though a Windows version is coming as well.
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I haven’t been banging the RSS drum much lately. For a while I was regularly promoting it on this site. I guess at this point I figure either you’ve gotten the message, or you’re beyond hope. Still, I can’t help mentioning that two of my favorite RSS products, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, are now free. I used each for extended periods over the years, and paid for licenses to both of them, but stopped using them when they were acquired by Newsgator several years ago in a pique, angry because instead of solving the synchronization issue in an open manner, they tied the products to one commercial provider.
Synchronization isn’t likely to be an issue for most users, and they’re fantastic products. If you need an RSS reader they’re definitely worth checking out. NetNewsWire is for OSX, and FeedDemon is for Win32. If you don’t think you need an RSS reader… you’re not keeping up with the times, and you’re wasting your own time. Read up on it, then go grab one of the above and get busy!
You’ve probably heard of Disney’s Animatronics - the robots that enact scenes from history and popular culture at the Disney theme parks. I thought it was pretty cool that they recently added one of Woz in the famous garage, banging away on the keyboard and inventing the original Apple Computer.
Here’s a free, handy little utility for windows, Driverview, that provides a full list of every driver on your system. There are already ways to get this info but this little utility makes it more convenient to get at, puts it all in one place, and lets you export it to a text file.
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