Archive for February, 2010
Denzel Washington Venn Diagram
“Someone has created a Venn Diagram giving us a visual representation of the many different haircuts and head-wear actor Denzel Washington employs in his movies. I’m not sure who created this image. I found it on Paul Scheer’s blog, where he commented “Finally someone breaks it down”. Scheer discovered the diagram on ziesgotyouhigh.“
Wolfenstein 2009!
Posted by jdodson in video games on February 26th, 2010
I am usually much further behind!
Recently I purchased Wolfenstein on PS3. I loved Return to Castle Wolfenstein and of course, the orginal Wolfenstein 3D. The new Wolfenstein game is pretty good. I wouldn’t say its as good as Halflife 2 or Fallout 3 but it is a very well put together game. It also looks fantastic. The game is open world-ish as you can travel around Isenstadt, your “home city” from mission to mission. Occasionally you can pick between missions you can start. So there is a certain level or choice, that said its still a pretty linear game.
In the game you can collect gold for weapon upgrades. If you missed doing this entirely you could beat the game but the game gets much more fun as you upgrade your weapons. The reason is you start kicking tons of Nazi ass when you upgrade your weapons. For instance, I am upgrading the sniper rifle currently. Its great to pick off people at a distance with one shot as well as affixing a bayonet to the gun and watching guys drop in one hit.
In a total abandonment of tradition, I went online to play Wolfenstein in deathmatch! Since its the PS3 version, when went online to play there was only one server with 3 people playing online! 
So I joined it. I was ranked about 4th in the mix until things got interesting and we had about 15 people in the match. I was about middle tier when I cut out of the game. It was surprised to find that it was so much fun to play online. I did better than I thought and may come back to play it online. I didn’t experience lag or or jitteriness so that was good.
If you haven’t at least tried the demo, id recommend you give it a shot. Demo on the PS3 and I believe XBOX 360 as well as PC.
9.10 – Now With More Candy!
Posted by jdodson in free software, tech on February 23rd, 2010
After dealing with swapping out a newer Nvidia card for an older one on my Linux machine I decided the easiest course of action would be to install the latest version of Ubuntu on it. Plus it would be cool to check out how far Ubuntu has come since Hardy. Ill sum up my thoughts in one sentence.
This free software thing is really incredible.
I think we are starting to see the free software desktop evolve to a point where all the functional parts exist. At this point its not about getting a great browser, image viewer/editor, music player, video player or ability to easily install software. All that stuff exists and in spades. Now the free software desktop is polishing itself to the point of decadence. And I use that word because in the past it was unpolished to the point of frustration. The default stock Ubuntu experience in its latest release 9.10 is like candy on top of cake. Or at leasts thats how it feels to me and I spend 99% of my work life on Mac OSX desktop. Ive used the Mac for 2+ years now and I can honestly say this version of Ubuntu is in ways better than Mac OSX. Im not going to get into specifics its just little things mostly. Like a easier time of desktop switching, resource management bars, middle click paste in linux and the power of apt-get and more. Oh and it doesn’t tie you down to vendor specific hardware…. That said depending on the hardware you can be in for quite a ride. Also the default theme in Ubuntu seems more elegant to me than the gun metal grey Mac OSX theme that seemed so sexy in 2001. Can’t a brother get a theme selection tool native on the Mac? No? OK then.
In Ubuntu 9.10 after installing the closed source Nvidia driver it switched my monitor to a lower resolution than id like. So I decided to simply use the free software 2D driver and not spend time in config hell. Yeah I don’t get the full power of the card but id rather things just work. And beyond that bit of driver annoyance which Ubuntu can do nothing about the experience is quite good. Suprisingly good in fact.
Head over to the Ubuntu site and notice the tour. I am happy to see this kind of progress and thank the free software developers that made it happen.
Ahh The Memories!
Good ol days.
“WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the best multiplayer game available. Yes, I’m talking about Bulletin Board Systems, originally text based and later augmented with ANSI graphics. The first public BBS celebrated its birthday yesterday, and I think it’s a fair bet that few of us would be engaging in discussion today if it weren’t for that simple little computer bulletin board in 1978. Why even our esteemed leader John Biggs ran a bulletin board system for a brief while!”
I wanted to run my own board but due to no extra phone line, I had to be content to have a setup that my friends could dial in when they called. It was called Demosis Erima, which is hebrew for public desert. Or at least I thought it was? The software I ran was JetBBS and I ran it because it was totally free and didn’t come crippled unless you paid money. I had LORD and Tradewars attached to it. Adam and I both pitched in for a license of Tradewars but LORD was the free limited version. I made the intro graphics in The Draw. I ran it on a 2600 modem which was pretty fast for the time. Later on I upgraded to a 14.4. I never owned a 56k in the BBS days. That was later when dial up internet was the rage.
Free Software Nvidia Drivers Make Me Happy
Posted by jdodson in free software, life, tech, video games on February 16th, 2010
Finally, my old hardware wont suck to use!
Last week I got a PC from my friend. I decided to make that something I play PC games on and use my other PC for home development. So I moved the Nvidia 7600 from my Linux desktop to the new PC and my old Nvidia 5400LE back to my desktop Linux development machine. This usually goes fine as the proprietary Nvidia drivers are first rate and the installer is easy enough to use. Well, turns out, its not as easy as it once was.
Nvidia seemed to deprecate my old 5400LE video card in the up-to-date proprietary driver sometime in the last year so I have to use the old legacy Nvidia drivers to get it to work with the proprietary driver. OK well that should be fine right? No it wasn’t. The old legacy driver didn’t auto configure xorg like the old one did. So basically, I installed the old video card ran the legacy driver setup and was in 800×600 land. Yippie. So it was a fun hunt to track down how to set the display resolution. Long story short the legacy driver doesn’t seem to really work well and I don’t have 3D on the card. I have the amazing 2D from the in kernel Nvidia driver but the rendering artifacts are annoying and font smoothing doesn’t work.
My choices at this point involve more pain of screwing with configs, hacking kernels and doing stuff I don’t want to do or reinstalling everything and having the setup process of Ubuntu work it out. I bet that would fix it all and I have backups, that might be less pain than the “magic config file hunt and change scenario.”
However, the long term fix in my opinion for Linux is to STOP using hardware that requires so much manual work. Which means, stop using hardware that doesn’t have relatively useful drivers in the mainline kernel. Which is why the recent inclusion of the Nouveau drivers that can do useful 3D is so sweet. Since I am not gaming on Linux anymore due to the pain involved in that(sorry, spent the last 5-8 years in Wine and thats not really fun) I don’t need super bling cutting edge 3D in Linux. Which is why the recent work in the free software Nvidia space is so cool. Its the long term fix for a problem that I hate dealing with in Linux.
HL2: The Lost Coast
Posted by jdodson in video games on February 16th, 2010
The coast was lost to any story but fun to play.
“Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is a small additional level for the 2004 first-person shooter video game Half-Life 2. Developed by Valve Software, it was released on October 27, 2005 through the Steam content delivery service as a free download to owners of the Microsoft Windows version of Half-Life 2. Lost Coast serves as a technology demonstration, specifically showcasing the high dynamic range rendering implemented in the Source engine. The level was designed with a variety of appropriate environments to emphasize these effects. In addition, Lost Coast was the first video game developed by Valve to allow developers to explain various elements of design as the player progresses through the level.”
Since I am on a new PC gaming kick and I downloaded The Lost Coast but never played it, I decided to give it a spin. It was really fun to go back and play Halflife 2. The Lost Coast is light on story, you just wake up and some sailor tells you to go up the hill and turn off a gun. I think this demo was trying to showcase some new dynamic lighting but my video card didn’t show anything I found impressive. Perhaps I don’t have the horsepower to run that sort of thing. Anyway, it was fun to play and if you have a Steam account it should be free to download.
Fun Games
Posted by jdodson in video games on February 15th, 2010
I got a hand me down PC from my friend Jeremy the other week. It is a fairly high powered AMD 64 3400+. After putting 1G of RAM in it and a Nvidia 7600 I had kicking around its a pretty decent older gaming PC.
A few years ago my wifes brother gave me Halflife 2 and I installed it at the time and setup a steam account. I didn’t play Halflife 2 much then because I was using Linux and it was a pain to play that way. After getting this gaming PC ready I installed steam on it and downloaded a few demos of games I heard were really good.
I downloaded Torchlight and Plants VS Zombies.
Torchlight
Torchlight is a game where you dungeon crawl to kill bad guys and get loot. Its extremely similar to Diablo. Music and all. Tthis game is very well done and the game play is really fun. After playing through the demo I decided to pick it up. The boxed copy was $20. The download was $20. I opted for the boxed copy because I saw 0 benefit to paying the same for a digital download.
Plants VS Zombies
Plants VS Zombies is from the company that made Zuma, Bejeweled and Peggle. I warn you, Plants VS Zombies is addictive. I played through the 60 minute demo and immediately pirated it so I could keep playing. Later that day I went to the store and bought it. I love this game I also picked it up for $3 on the iPhone.
I can’t recommend this game more. If I were you id pickup the boxed retail copy because it comes with the Windows and Mac version and its the same as buying it digitally on the Pop Cap site. Oh wait, its less on Amazon for $15…. Anyways.
You can play the game on the Pop Cap site for free but id recommend downloading the demo to put it into fullscreen mode.
Great Free Music
Check out the above sampler album “Ghostly Essentials Avant-Pop One.” Not only is the price right but the music is really great.
Free Software I Love
Posted by jdodson in free software, tech on February 2nd, 2010
Google Chrome
I have been using Google Chrome as my primary browser for a few months. Its a low footprint UI and its blazingly fast. I won’t primarily use a non free software browser so Google Chrome fits my needs in that capacity as well. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you need to. Compared to IE or Firefox 3.0, Chrome is a rocket. Add flashblock to the mix and it crashes less than any browser ive ever used. This runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is a music player ive used for years. It just keeps getting better and better. It can awesomely manage my 24 days and 12 hours of music. I use iTunes on my Mac and Rhythmbox on Linux. iTunes is a extremely bloated player and I have less music on my mac. I have a few gripes with it but largely it works really well. Ive tried Songbird but it just isn’t as good as Rhythmbox and I am still on the version that shipped with Hardy. To my knowledge this only runs on Linux.
PiTiVi
This project I have been avidly watching and hoping could release something awesome in a stable Linux distro I use for quite sometime. It looks like the next Ubuntu stable will see something great I can use and I excited. I don’t make as many movies as I could because the only tool I have for that is on a Mac in my living room. When I sit down in the living room I want to watch a video or play a game not edit video. The above demo video shows that its come quite a long way and I hope by next Ubuntu stable release it has titles and some transitions. Thats pretty much all I need for the basics and my videos dont do more than that.
Handbrake
I buy movies. I buy movies because I love watching movies. I rip my movies into a variety of formats at times to watch them on a mobile device or laptop. Think of it like ripping a CD. I rip the music I own as well. DVD’s come with copy protection to limit your legitimate use of them in this way but it doesn’t stop enterprising people from figuring out how to get around that. Handbrake is one such program. I mostly use it to rip movies to watch on my iPhone. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
LAME
I rip my MP3’s using LAME. It creates the best quality 320k MP3’s ive heard. I use grip to ensure I don’t have to write a script to rip a CD. grip is old school but the MP3 files it creates sound great and are tagged properly. Runs on practically everything.
VirtualBox
If you want a completely free replacement for VirtualPC or VMWare I recommend VirtualBox. Its come quite a long way in the past year and it works perfectly on my Mac and Ubuntu for virtualizing Windows or any other OS id care to. Did I mention its free? Runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and more.
The Phantom Menace 70 Minute Review
Watch this review.
“Chances are you probably didn’t like Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. You might be a Star Wars fan, or at least a fan of the original trilogy. After waiting in line for hours, days, weeks, you may have even written a mini 200-400 word review on an internet message board somewhere. If you were a working movie critic, you might have even written a 1,000-2,000 word review of the film for some newspaper or magazine. All of this exists in the realm of possibility…but what about a 70-minute video review?
Some guy named Mike from Milwaukee, WI put together a 70-minute video review discussing the many reasons why the movie was horrible. And this isn’t your usual fanboy rant, this is an epic, well-edited well-constructed piece of geek film criticism. In fact, the way I learned about the video was from Lost co-creator and Star Trek producer Damon Lindelof, who said “Your life is about to change. This is astounding film making. Watch ALL of it.”
This review is incredible. He pretty much nails why The Phantom Menace is not a good movie. Compared to the other prequels, its the best of the bunch in my view. I don’t find it a particularly good movie though. I wished for more, but the rage it caused the geek community is fun to experience at times and this 70 minute video review is one such example.