Just another useless personal blog
I just received the replacement drive from the RMA of the dying one, and they kindly sent me a 750GB drive instead of the same 500GB model. Thanks, Seagate!
Too bad it’ll be part of a RAID-1 array and limited by the smaller drive’s size… I can probably take the extra space and ‘join’ it to the scratch drive for even more MythTV recording space, though. I’ll just have to read up on all this fancy new LVM stuff…
Y’know, considering that I almost always get a refund, you’d think I’d be mailing my taxes in early on and not on the last possible day…
Maybe things aren’t so bleak after all…
I went ahead and upgraded to Kubuntu 7 (Feisty), and it seems the new version of the X server no longer hangs with the version of the nVidia module I need for working TV-out support. And the crash when MythTV stopped playing was related to the GLX module not working. The GLX and Composite extensions can’t both be enabled at the same time, and Composite is enabled by default with the latest servers. But the Composite extension doesn’t work with this ‘legacy’ nVidia driver anyway, so disabling it allowed GLX to be enabled again, and then MythTV could use OpenGL properly and no longer crashes.
Next up was the sound card ordering problem. I have two sound cards in the system, an SBLive for regular system sounds, and the built-in motherboard audio, used to drive the TV. Kubuntu was detecting them in random order though, so sometimes the SBLive would be considered card 0 and the motherboard card 1, and sometimes vice versa. Every time I rebooted and started MythTV, I wasn’t sure whether the show’s audio was going to come out of the TV or the computer speakers, and if it was the wrong one, I’d have to go back into the config screens and reassign the audio device.
Fortunately, I found a page which describes how to permanently assign the sound card order, among other sound problems. Now the SBLive is always /dev/dsp and the motherboard is always /dev/dsp1.
And with that, all of the major remaining migration problems are now solved. Now I can get around to catching up on the seven weeks of recorded Lost episodes I still haven’t watched yet…
Update: Nope, the X server continued to freeze on me, it just took a little longer this time. It looks like disabling AGP entirely works, but then X takes up a lot more CPU time. Oh well, as long as it works…
Okay, maybe swapping to the nVidia card isn’t going to make things any easier…
I had a working configuration with it on the old Slackware box, but that was with a specific version of the nVidia driver. The ‘official’ packaged driver for Kubuntu is a newer one, and TV-out doesn’t work at all with the newer drivers for some reason. I can uninstall the packaged drivers and then manually install the old drivers and TV-out starts working again, but then the X server hangs on a regular basis. And even when it works for a while, MythTV itself crashes after you finish viewing a show on the TV-out screen, but not on the monitor. I can either have a working TV-out, or stability, but not both.
I could try upgrading to the just-released Ubuntu 7 and see if that fixes the X server hangs, but major version upgrades can be tricky and I just got everything configured the way I need.
I used to love fiddling with Linux as a hobbyist, with the fun being in the learning as I went along, but sometimes you just want something to just work with as little fuss as possible. Maybe I’ll just get a Mac Mini and use it as a dedicated MythTV frontend…
The Great Hardware Upgrade Of 2007 is still underway, but the end is getting closer. The new gaming box is fully set up and works wonderfully and…has been sitting in the corner, completely disconnected, for a few days now. Network, KVM connections, and desk space are limited and currently all in use, but I’ve pretty much finished moving data from the old Linux server to the new one, so I should be able to pull the old one out and move the new gaming box back in tonight.
I’ll still be waiting for a replacement for the broken drive for a week or two, but it was the second drive in the RAID-1 array in the new Linux server, so it can make do with one drive until the replacement arrives. The web and email services moved over easily enough, and MythTV was a lot easier to set up since there are prebuilt packages available for Kubuntu.
The major problem right now is that the TV-out doesn’t work so well on the new server. ATI cards just aren’t very well supported under Linux, and it took quite a while just to get it set up and working properly. The default configuration would crash the system until I disabled the GLX driver; the TV-out wouldn’t work at all with the default drivers; using the official drivers got TV-out working, but wouldn’t let me set it up as a separate screen at a different resolution; manually mucking with the configuration finally solved that, but then there were errors about DRI and Xv not being available; and I had to reinstall the drivers with special instructions to finally solve that.
Except that the TV-out is rather blurry, and doesn’t seem to scale properly when playing video via Xv. I’ll probably wind up just swapping video cards with the old system as well, since the old card has a much sharper TV-out picture, and the nVidia drivers are much more stable and I have a known working configuration for them.
I’ve been managing to lose weight fairly steadily since the beginning of the year, but it’s starting to plateau a bit and I can’t get in as much walking as I used to, so I need to try something different. I’m going to spend more time with my PlayStation 2.
Not with DDR, the primary cliche of geek exercise, though. Instead, I found a title called yourself!fitness, that’s supposed to analyze your current fitness, set up a workout program depending on what you want to focus on (weight loss, upper body strength, flexibility, etc.), coach you through the exercises, and track your progress. I have it set for weight loss for now, but the other goals will come in useful as well, lest I wind up thin-but-wimpy… You can also tell it if you have any extra equipment like hand weights or an exercise ball, and it will incorporate additional exercises using those. There are also different difficulty levels, so that you can bump it down to something easier if you’re having trouble keeping up, or ramp it up if you’re not exerting yourself enough (for example, at lower levels you do bent-knee push-ups instead of proper full-body ones).
I originally set it up for half-hour sessions every day, but hesitated and set it to 15 minutes for the first day, just to test. The workout went well enough, but upon waking up this morning I was still too sore to do a morning workout as I had planned, so I’m definitely way out of shape and can forget those 30-minute sessions for now.
The only problems so far are that it assumes that you have a lot more free space around you than I have in my living room, and it takes a while to familiarize yourself with the different exercises. Each workout goes through a number of different stages and exercises, and by the time I’d figured out how to match my movements to hers, that part would be half-over. And, of course, you look like an idiot while doing most of these, so make sure the blinds are closed…
There’s a meal planner as well, for sticking to a certain calorie limit. I’m a horrible cook and lazy though, so screw that. I’ve got better things to do than track down huge lists of exotic ingredients every day. :P
Now if only they had a 360 version so I could earn gamerscore points…
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED! Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
So much for one of the new drives… I was suspicious of it from the start since it made really odd squealing noises while seeking, but that clinches it.
Oh well, my MythTV box will have to soldier on as-is for a little bit longer.
Edit: And upon going to the manufacturer’s site to see about RMA procedures, I’m greeted with an “Internal Server Error”. Yeah, that’s instilling a lot of confidence…
Most of my parts are here now, but of course, things never go as smoothly as you’d like…
Continue reading “Murphy Be With You”
I’ll probably pick up the 360 version of Guitar Hero II eventually, but concern is already rising over one of the things that’s supposed to be a feature of the 360 version: downloadable songs.
It’s great that you can add more songs to it, of course, but the current pricing scheme seems a bit…excessive. The songs released so far are only available in packs of three, at $6.25 USD per pack, and are songs imported over from the original Guitar Hero, not new ones. Over $2 USD per song seems a bit much when their relative value was more like $1 each when you bought the original game. And the bundling scheme encourages them to put one good song in with two crummy songs, so you may wind up paying $6 for just the one song you really want.
I still like the 360 and Live service overall, but this is the kind of nickel-and-diming people were worried about finally coming to fruition… Hopefully they’re just testing the waters, response will be poor, and they’ll start doing more reasonable bundles and prices.
The rest of my parts should be here soon, so what all do I need to do when they arrive…
That takes care of the new system, but there’s still the old ones…
Plus recabling of the network and audio connections as needed. That should keep me busy for a while.
I’ll probably throw Win98 on D and keep it around as a ‘retro’ gaming box for the handful of games that don’t run properly on modern systems. If I can find the room for it…
Earth Defense Force 2017 (X360) – The graphics are a bit underwhelming for a next-gen title, the animations are awkward, the frame rate gets choppy at times, and it’s a bit repetitive. It’s still a ton of fun though, just because of all the frantic mayhem of fighting off huge swarms of alien ants, giant robots, and sky-blotting UFOs with a large variety of heavy weaponry.
Worms (X360) – The same old classic 2D Worms gameplay, really. Unfortunately there aren’t as many terrain and voice sets as the PC versions, due to size limits, and they got rid of a lot of the weirder and more powerful weapons. More terrain and voice sets will be available later on though, and it’s easier to find people to play against on Xbox Live than it was with the now-ancient PC games.
Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords (DS) – This is probably the oddest RPG I’ve ever played. It has all of the standard RPG tropes — character classes and stats, spells, equipment, towns with inns and vendors, quests to go on, etc., but combat is resolved by taking turns on a Bejeweled-alike grid where lining up different colours or symbols has different effects (gaining mana for spells, gaining gold, doing damage to the enemy, etc.). It’s challenging too, as you have to think ahead a few turns and try to avoid leaving the grid in an advantageous state for your opponent at the end of your turn.
Crackdown (X360) – Another GTA-like game, except this one puts you on the side of law enforcement. It’s a bit shallow in that there’s not a wide variety of missions and most weapons aren’t too useful (you soon run across an optimal combination that you can pretty much stick with for the rest of the game), but the firefights can get pretty intense. A lot of the fun is in just how exaggerated things can get — level up your skills a bit and before long you’re jumping up the sides of skyscrapers, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, picking up cars and throwing them halfway down the block, and setting off huge chains of explosions.
Trackmania United (PC) – It’s the same old Trackmania gameplay (essentially a faster-paced, modernized version of Stunts), but this version combines all of the terrain types and vehicles from the previous three releases, adds some new block types to the editor, and greatly expands the online community support. Your times on official tracks can now be registered on the global ladder rankings, you can organize into groups to compare times against each other, you can create tracks and publish them as an official track so that others can set times against it, and download others’ tracks and replays, all from within the game itself.
Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night (X360) – I’d played the various GBA and DS versions of Castlevania, but not this PS1 version, which was essentially the genesis of the current form of the series with its leveling, non-linear exploration, and variable equipment. This XBLA version is a perfect emulation of it though, and it’s pretty good. The voice acting is horrible and it gets a bit too easy after getting certain weapons, but it controls well and keeps things varied and interesting throughout the entire map.
Unfortunately, in one of the bonus modes where you can play as a character from the previous game in the series, the flaws of the 360 controller become a huge hindrance. You can pull off Street Fighter-ish moves with the characters, and although they’re completely unnecessary for the main game, they’re crucial to winning with this bonus character, as they’re the only way he can reach certain areas. They’re difficult to pull off reliably with the analog stick though, and the d-pad on the 360 controller is just horrible. Half the time you’ll accidentally hit a diagonal, ruining the precision of your current jump, preventing you from chaining moves, and making you land in the wrong place.
Space Rangers 2 (PC) – It’s hard to categorize this game, since it has a little bit of everything in it. It’s primarily a space trading/combat game like the Escape Velocity series, but missions and random events often take you off to something else entirely. Help defend an outpost and you’ll play a simple little RTS map. Get caught smuggling, and it becomes a text adventure as you try to endure or break out of prison. There’s even a Galactic Pizza Cook-Off competition. Most of the fun is in the core space sim though, establishing trade routes, upgrading your ship, fighting off the Dominator enemies and pirates (or becoming a pirate yourself), and maintaining relationships with the various factions.
Final Fantasy XII (PS2) – The story isn’t all that thrilling so far (though I have a long ways to go), but it’s one of the best-looking PS2 games and the gameplay mechanics are pretty good. It cribs a bit from MMORPGs, with real-time (though pausable) combat integrated into the zone maps. Party members are handled by letting the player set up ‘gambits’, which are sets of rules that control how they behave (e.g., if the target is weak to fire, cast a Firaga spell; if a party member is at less than 40% health, cast a heal, etc.).
Since I’ll be shuffling around my hardware soon, my MythTV box will be more powerful and might be capable of handling HD recordings. So, would it be worthwhile for me to jump on the HDTV bandwagon?
Not really, it turns out. In order to record HD broadcasts, I’d need an HD tuner card. There are plenty available and supported in Linux, but they have restrictions: they can only record over-the-air and unencrypted cable signals.
Problem 1: There are no over-the-air HD signals in the Calgary area. Maybe the local stations will eventually get around to it, but for now there just aren’t any at all.
Problem 2: Almost all of the digital cable channels are encrypted. These can’t be recorded because, well, that’s what the encryption is there to prevent. There’s no solution for this on the horizon either, as Canadian cable companies aren’t adopting the CableCard standard.
So for now, in order to record HD shows, the only option is to go with one of the cable company’s hideously-expensive DVRs, which are widely criticized for having a poor interface and limited capacity, and I wouldn’t be able to get at the raw recordings for long-term archival.
Oh well, I probably watch too much TV anyways…
Woo, I just received my order of an nVidia 8800 GTS video card, the second-fastest card you can get right now (the 8800 GTX is faster, but it’s a hell of a lot more expensive). New cards are due out soon, but nVidia’s new ones will mostly be cheaper mid-range ones that won’t be as fast, and ATI’s is delayed and reportedly quite hot and power-hungry.
Now I just need a system to put it in…
I haven’t been a big fan of RSS in the past, but I find myself using it more and more nowadays, due to exactly one new development: Google Reader.
It solves the two major problems I had before: 1) missing articles because of feeds with a small history, since Google does the aggregation frequently and keeps a longer list of articles, and 2) it remains synchronized when used from multiple locations, not tying it to a particular program install on a specific machine, so I can use it from home, work, and while traveling without any redundancy.
Edit: Though to be fair, Google probably wasn’t really the first, as there have been other web-based aggregators. Google’s interface and integration into the rest of your account certainly makes it a lot easier to use, though.
Oddly enough, the exact same thing has happened to me two out of the last three days now:
It’s been rather cold (below -20°C in the mornings), so I decided to take the train instead of walking. After getting to the platform and buying my ticket, an announcement that there would be a delay due to a breakdown came on. So I waited. And waited. And waited…
And then even after the trains started arriving, they were so filled up with the backlog of people that I couldn’t even get on them. Not wanting to be That Rude Guy shoving his way on ahead of everyone else, I had to let three trains go by before one with enough room arrived. In the end I wound up waiting over 40 minutes on Monday and 30 minutes today, for a train that normally runs every 5 minutes.
It only takes me 20 minutes to *walk* to work, but the problem is that you’re trapped. Even after you’ve already spent 15-20 minutes waiting and are tempted to start walking, a train could arrive any moment now and then you’d feel really stupid for walking and stumbling through snowdrifts and facing the freezing wind over the river when you could have waited just a little longer…
Update: And apparently there was another problem today, as there was a train waiting at the station the entire time I walked past, with a ton of people still on the platform. The train’s reliability lately has taken a serious nosedive. Fortunately it’s a lot warmer today, so I was walking anyways.
Well, it’s about time to upgrade. My PC has served me a lot longer than it normally would have; its major parts are now over four years old, and I’ve tended to upgrade every two or three years. The video card is also becoming unstable, and I have to underclock it by a fair bit just to avoid crashes in the middle of games, but it’s not worth replacing it alone when the rest of the system would be underpowered in comparison. My poor, overworked Linux/HTPC box is also hungrily awaiting the hand-me-down upgrades it will inevitably get.
So, what shall I replace it with? The Mac Pro is a nice machine…
Continue reading “Ssssshh…”
Subject: I will guide you to your first million;))
Whoa, no thanks. I have no idea what I’d do with that many smilies.
Subject: Full of health? Then don't click!
You’re right, I should save that health pack until the boss fight.
Subject: Forget about annoying 30-40 minutes before sex.
Hey, what have you got against foreplay?
Subject: Fifth Third Bank reminder: mail from Fifth Third Bank.
Sorry, but I’m actually signed up with the Thirty-Fourth Seventeenth Bank.
Subject: Wanna read the conversations your husband, wife, and kids are having on Yahoo and MSN?
Sure! I’d love to spy on both my wife, and, uh…husband?
Subject: PUSH PUSH PUSH
Why? Am I in the middle of labor? I hate sudden surprises like that…
Some of the more recent music I’ve run across:
The Shins, Wincing The Night Away – I’d only briefly heard a couple of their songs before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. The melodies are catchy enough, but the rather dense lyrics tickled my curiosity, and I had to check them out, even though I don’t usually pay too much attention to them. There’s an odd, surreal poetry to them that I don’t see a lot of in the rest of my collection, but I like it.
Front Line Assembly, Artificial Soldier – They got a lot of flak over the last couple albums for letting their side-project Delerium’s style slip into FLA too much, but this album returns them to an earlier, harder sound. I like Delerium too, but this is closer to what attracted me to FLA in the first place, so I still approve. The lyrics are still the same old apocalyptic doom-n-gloom, but it just wouldn’t be the same without them. :)
Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped – A good followup to Sonic Nurse, in much the same vein, even if they seem to have mostly dropped the extended multi-minute noise solos. And you can listen to it for free! (Flip4Mac support might be needed for Mac users.)
Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere – I saw this one on a lot of people’s best-of-the-year lists so I took a chance on it, but I’m fairly lukewarm on it overall. I like a couple of the tracks, like ‘Crazy’, but I guess this style (rap-hop?), still just isn’t for me.
Yoshi’s Island DS (DS) – It’s really more of the same of the original Yoshi’s Island, which is just fine as the original was a great game to begin with. This sequel primarily adds dual-screen support so you can see more vertically, some new minigames, and the ability to change between different characters as Yoshi’s rider (from between Mario, Peach, Bowser, Donkey Kong, and Wario), each of whom has different abilities that are necessary to get through certain spots or to find secret areas. It’s still a fairly easy game though, and I’ve already collected over 100 lives so far.
Viva Pinata (X360) – Beneath the cutesy exterior, this is fundamentally a resource management game. You have to figure out how to lay out your garden in the right way to attract new pinata types, try to breed them and keep them happy, fight off the bad ‘sour’ pinatas or convert them to good ones, prevent fighting among your own pinatas (some types don’t get along with each other) and take care of sick ones, and so on. Taking care of all this once your garden gets larger can get fairly hectic. There’s no real end goal, but it’s a fun enough way to kill some spare time.
Phantasy Star Universe (X360) – This is a rather unusual single-player/MMORPG hybrid similar to the previous Phantasy Star Online games, though I haven’t played those. There’s a single-player campaign that unfolds in chapters, much like many other RPGs, but the engine mechanics and world layout, with towns and instanced mission areas, are clearly designed to support the MMOG-ish multiplayer mode.
I’ve already got too many online game subscriptions as it is though, so I’m sticking to the single-player game. The story is pretty standard, and some of the crafting and collecting mechanisms look neat, but the combat and environments have been a bit repetitive so far. Hopefully it opens up and becomes a bit less linear later on.
Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana (PS2) – It’s very much an ‘old-school’ Japanese RPG, with an isometric view and turn-based attack/magic/item-choosing battles. Its main distinguishing feature is that instead of casting spells, you collect elemental resources by whacking things with a staff, and then use alchemy to combine them into magic items with various abilities. You can also combine items you find lying around to produce new items at certain shops, and you can often vary the ingredients you combine a bit to produce a different item.
The system’s interesting enough to appeal to the collector in me, at least. The story’s fairly light-hearted, but the voice acting isn’t all that great. If the catgirl in my party says ‘meow’ out loud one more time, I’m going to toss her in a sack and throw her in the nearest river…
Lost Planet (X360) – A fairly traditional third-person shooter, though fairly well-executed, as it looks great and controls well. It keeps you on your toes, as you have to keep moving and defeating bugs in order to gather recharges for your ever-decreasing thermal energy meter, and you occasionally get to hop into mechs for some additional firepower and protection. The boss battles are pretty good too, with a decent variety of different tactics necessary. Its main problem is that it’s really short, taking less than 10 hours to go through the single-player campaign, but the multiplayer is supposed to be fairly fun too (I haven’t tried it yet).
It can take me a while to catch on…
I was wondering for the n-th time whether Firefox was a lot more sluggish than it used to be or if it was just my faulty memory when it hit me. I set my account to use FileVault a while back. Encryption is slow. Firefox puts your profile in your home directory. Your profile contains your cache. The cache gets used a lot…
Fortunately you can move the cache to a different location by setting the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory property in the about:config page. I already had a /NonEncrypted directory used as scratch space for stuff I don’t want slowed down by FileVault, so I just made Firefox point at a /NonEncrypted/Cache/Firefox directory.
Firefox is now indeed a lot more responsive than it was before, and it only took me over a year to figure it out. :P