Month: April 2008

Categories
Feedback Gadgetology

Critical mass (storage)

Stop shirkin' and start workin'!I’ve been calling for backup for months, and at long last, backup has arrived.

I’ve spent most of today transferring files to a new 1 terabyte network drive that’s now sitting on my network. It’s a nice LaCie “big box ethernet drive” (hey, that’s what it says on the box!), which, I’m going to say judging by the size of the casing, is probably two 500GB hard drives in a RAID configuration. It’s got a lovely big blue eye that flashes when it’s being accessed. It hasn’t gotten extraordinarily warm, despite the fact that it’s sitting in a warm corner of a warm room (said corner also contains 3 other PCs and 5 LCD monitors, along with speakers and other gear). Very importantly (at least to me), you can configure whether or not you want it to be media-streaming capable. Remember the whole blow-up a few weeks ago with the crippled cell phones? Mass storage devices like these are starting to fall victim to the same problems: my friend Kent has a similar device, except made by Western Digital, which he got at a fire-sale price right before Christmas. But the pricing wasn’t just seasonal: WD wanted to clear the decks of inventory and get a revised version of the MyBook 1TB ethernet drive in the stores, which came with complimentary crippleware demanded by the RIAA which prevents the drive from streaming music or video files. Hey, thanks, RIAA, for assuming that the consumer’s a crook! Maybe we’ve ripped our own CDs to our own hard drives for use in our own home, ya know? Inconceiveable, sure. But it might happen. You never know. This LaCie drive has no such crippleware; those wishing to use it in a small business setting have the option to switch media streaming off. The security is scalable, you can assign passwords and user accounts from an insanely intuitive admin console accessed via browser, and for someone like me who might want to use it as a “breakout drive” (i.e. turn it off, pull all the connections, and evacuate with it in the event of fire, tornado, etc.), it’s not overwhelmingly big or bulky. I hope I never have to do that, but it’s yet another option to have in mind. I’m terribly pleased with it.

Anyone wanting to snatch one of these puppies up is more than welcome to pick it up in theLogBook.com Store; I managed to find the links for it in nearly every country except Canada, whose Amazon subsidiary doesn’t do the electronics thing. (What gives, Canada?) I heartily recommend it. It’s not cheap, but for someone like me who’s got a heap of media crowding out the other computers’ drives, and occasionally keeping work from getting done (this thing even takes up some slack for the Avid), it’s a beautiful thing. Should I ever completely fill the thing, additional storage can be added via a USB port on the back of the drive, and the casing is designed so that the additional drive – well, assuming you get the LaCie 1TB USB add-on drive – can simply slide into place on top of this one.

Home of the WOPR
A shot of the newly revised desktop on the Avid, which I network to the other machines to shoot graphics, audio and video files back and forth so often that I leave permanent shortcuts on the desktop. (For those occasions where I have to pull something from a less-frequently used directory, I keep the ol’ Win2K Network Neighborhood icon around under “Home of the WOPR” – WOPR being what I call my LAN.) As you can see, I very quickly named the new network drive Queeg – so stop shirkin’ and start workin’!

Oh, in case you can’t tell from the funky wide angles in these photos and yesterday’s accidentally humorous shot of Evan vs. Bowser, I’ve also replaced the fisheye lens I misplaced in Las Vegas. That helped to turn what would’ve been an otherwise innocuous shot of Evan chattering away into everyone’s favorite photo of the day. 😆 Speaking of which, you’d better believe that the gobs of baby photos have migrated to the new drive too.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Recovering from OEGE

This code disk means FREEDOM!Sorry I haven’t had a lot to say this weekend – Saturday I was either en route to, in, or returning home from Oklahoma City all day, and Sunday I proceeded to sleep in like a madman and then go feed horses (presumably also like a madman). I took the TVs and DVD player I used in OKC back to self-storage Sunday night, which marks an all-time record for me putting away all of my “expo wares” after getting home from a show. 😆 It was a decent show, pretty quiet, subdued and small though, and I strongly get the impression that while it being an on-school-premises event is a valuable backbone for it to have, that also hamstrung the promotion of it because everything from securing sponsors to putting up a web site (the latter of which never happened) had to be vetted by faculty. Putting it right around the end of the semester might not have helped in that regard either, since it meant that faculty was probably getting ready for, or grading, finals. Still, one lives and learns, and hopefully this show will make it to a second year. I sold about a dozen copies of the PDF DVD, a link to which I’m now contractually obliged to include in nearly every blog post or message board post I write, and not all of them went to Digital Press forum regulars, which was encouraging.

There were quite a few people who asked about it and didn’t buy it, and they were just as valuable as the folks who did fork over money: they gave me a very good idea of what to say on the actual ordering page, including clearing up a very frequent question, i.e. “Is this DVD the thing that’s showing on this TV screen, or is it emulators and ROMs?” I don’t want to denigrate any potential customers, but come on. I’m in a grey enough area with the commercials that are on there, but emulators and ROMs? That’d just be a suicidally stupid thing to sell on the internet. So into the disclaimer it went: yes, this DVD is what you saw on the screen – the timeline documentary thingie. Though three minor issues with it cropped up after I’d made the copies, in general, I’m very pleased with how the PDF DVD turned out. Maybe it’s a bit of an ego trip, but after watching that whole three-hour thing, and then the animated GreenhouseFX logo at the end with the music…that little logo animation just does not get old. Not for me anyway. 😛 … Read more

Categories
Gaming

Staring In Blimps: PDF DVD final table of contents & technical notes

Editing is completed, DVD authoring is about 85% of the way there, and I expect to have that done around lunchtime Wednesday. Where you see “items” in the list below, basically that’s one game segment, one vintage commercial, one data screen (covering rarities, history notes, system introductions, etc.), or one “year intro” (similar to, but different from the year intros on the OVGE DVD – I had to do the graphical treatment frame-by-frame manually on these buggers!). Why all the chaptering within a given year? Simply put: so there can be a menu system that lets you jump to literally anything on the entire disc. Also, if you want to skip to the next game, just hit the chapter forward button on your DVD remote, and there you go. I hadn’t had to take a menu system into consideration for the previous OVGE version, simply because it was shown at my booth and wasn’t distributed in any way. I’ve gotten a little bit of an education in DVD authoring out of this project…

And now, without further adieu, the list. … Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

Friend, foe or fan?

If you run, enjoy or just hang out at any kind of fansite, you might ought to pay attention to this legal case. I’ve got some plans to do a book later this year with material from theLogBook, and you better believe I’m watching this one very, very closely.

While I respect Ms. Rowling as the creator of all things Potter (and feel that the author of the other book perhaps could’ve done more to acknowledge her as such), this case is waltzing right into very dangerous territory. Intellectual property owners seem to spend an awful lot of time catering to superfans (or readers of superfans’ sites – let’s use Gateworld.net as an example), and cutting that particular cultural phenomenon off at the knees would have a worse effect than Paramount setting its internet phasers on Cease & Desist 12 or so years ago – mainly becuase back then, the ‘net was still more or less a curiosity, and now it’s practically another substratus of the world community. Fans will organize and rally against it.

Now, the flipside, to be fair: I’ve been in a copyright lawsuit (as the plantiff, no less), and my understanding of the law is that you’re on pretty stable ground so long as you bring your own scholarship and your own critical analysis to the table in a “derivative work”. A dictionary that probably leans very heavily on someone else’s written work is very likely not on that same stable ground. A book analyzing and critiquing the Harry Potter series would stand a better chance.

But when even the judge is urging everyone to settle? I don’t think anyone’s in any doubt that this case is wading into a minefield.… Read more

Categories
Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

PDF: The DVD – coming in one week!

He's all over the place! What an asshole!Well, I bet you weren’t expecting to hear that. Next Saturday at the Oklahoma Electronic Gaming Expo in Oklahoma City, the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD will make its debut. Almost four hours of classic gaming history, footage, commercials, rarities and trivia on DVD for your viewing pleasure – and at a Low Low Price too. (For those who can’t make it to the show, I’ll figure something out afterward…just let me get the show out of the way first!)

I’m sure there are probably some folks wondering where the hell the Classic Gaming Expo DVDs are, and all I can say is: I’m still working on them. A lot of the PDF stuff was pre-produced a little over a year ago, and just needed to be edited into the proper order now. I’ll put it this way: it was much easier for me to finish the entire PDF DVD project within the month of April, in and around and on top of looking after the baby, doing housework, and doing other stuff (not to mention shutting down the whole shebang every time a bad storm rolls through, so the gear doesn’t get fried – which means approximately 2 days a week of downtime, than it has been to try to get the CGE DVDs done. We’re talking about a difference of several hours of material, and material where the sound has to be endlessly tweaked vs. material where the sound mix is already, for the most part, done.

I also wanted to get one project done, and done well, to re-energize myself for the home stretch of working on the CGE project. I’ve run into some epic sound issues (which had everything to do with the Riviera making no provisions for me or anyone else connected to the show to record sound direct from their little microphone mixing board for the keynotes – I know some people are bemoaning the fact that CGE isn’t going back to the Riv, but let me categorically state that I am not one of them). I’ve been working and reworking one segment of the CGE project for nearly a month in and of itself, just trying to get the sound to not suck. We’re talking about chopping up the sound and editing and tweaking it on the order of 30ths of a second. That’s some seriously tedious stuff, but when you’ve got speakers mumbling to begin with, or making no effort to even sit near the microphone, this is the kind of thing you find yourself up against, never mind your everyday sound editing like knocking down the sound level of the guy coughing in the front row right underneath the camera’s microphone. I’ll confess to you here and now that I’ve grown very discouraged with the CGE thing: I thought we’d have access to the sound board, and that would mean that this thing would be in the can by now. Instead, I’m hoping and praying that maybe CGE 2007 on DVD will be ready for you folks around the time that we would’ve been doing CGE 2008 if there was a show this year. 🙄 Seriously, it should be done well before then, simply because having done the work on the PDF project has goosed my enthusiasm a bit.

For those who have seen the earlier incarnation of PDF at the Tulsa OVGE events, this one looks the same in many respects, but it’s vastly, vastly expanded – where the old one took all of about five minutes to blast through the video game achievements of the 1970s, this one takes nearly 40 minutes to get into the 1980s at all. There are twice as many game segments (including stand-alone dedicated consoles), more commercials than the original version, and more trivia bits, including iconic and unusual controllers, notes on vaporware products that were announced and then scrapped, and so on.

Even the PDF DVD has hit some technical snags, including a handful of items that went missing and had to be reconstructed from the original version, a major change in how I handled music for the project, and even new bits that had to be hand-animated from scratch. If you thought the old version was impressive, you better sit down for this one. Mainly because it’s twice as long, and you probably don’t want to be standing for that length of time.

For those feeling betrayed by the fact that this has gotten finished before the CGE DVDs: all I can say is, don’t feel that way. The PDF project has been in progress, at an even slower boil than the CGE project, for years. The announcement of the OKC show just gave me a little kick in the butt to put the other thing on pause for one month and crank this puppy out. Seeing how good the PDF project looks and sounds has renewed my enthusiasm for getting the CGE stuff done. As they say, stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you want to see some bits from the PDF DVD, here they are: … Read more

Categories
ToyBox

Doctor Who classic Doctor figures: ZOMG!

Doctor WhoYou know, when I knew I had a kid on the way, I vowed to myself that, unless Character Options started doing classic Doctors from Doctor Who, my sci-fi toy collecting days were over and done with. Then they announced ’em – go figure. But I wasn’t expecting them to look this good – this is a quick ‘n’ dirty composite I whipped up from the pics first published at this site. (It’s worth the click – they also have pics of the Zygon, Sea Devil, Robots of Death, the K-1 Giant Robot…)

I’ve been wanting DW merchandise that looks this good since these gentlemen were still all over the airwaves. I can’t wait to see the other five. I also can’t wait for hell to freeze over and Amazon UK ship toys outside of the UK. 😆 Needless to say, I may be saving up a few bucks and begging Mayhem for a Big Favor Real Soon.

Just a reminder – Father’s Day and my birthday are both coming up in the next few months. Just consider the above pictured plastic Time Lords added to my wish list. 😉… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Serious Stuff

Fun facts about Alltel and consumer deception.

I'm kinda mad right nowSo my wife got a new Samsung Hue phone from Alltel – nice little gadget, bluetooth, camera, the whole works, and pretty cheap too. I was even thinking about seeing if father’s day might come a little bit early this year after seeing it in action. 😆 The one hiccup she’d really had with it was when she tried to pair her bluetooth headset to it – she couldn’t ever get the two devices talking to each other, and had to go back to the store to do it, where one of their sales/service people took the phone and the headset behind closed doors and got them to work. That really should’ve been a red flag right there.

She wanted me to put the slideshow of Evan pics on there that we’ve both had on our Nokia phones for ages; this was basically an animated GIF that cycles through numerous pictures of the little guy from the day he was born up to the latest round of professional pictures we’ve had taken of him. With the Nokia phones, I was able to just bluetooth the GIF across and be done with it; this also accounted for the bizarre collection of ringtones that both of our phones sported, everything from the Lexx theme to Katamari music to the haunting Torgo theme to Starcon 2 tunes to a gob of ELO MIDI ringtones (don’t ask me how that happened).

Anyway, I couldn’t just send the files across to her new phone via bluetooth. After going through the documentation (custom printed for Alltel) and finding them extremely, almost suspiciously lacking in information about the use of the bluetooth feature, I did a little bit of digging around online and that quickly got my blood boiling. Here’s the deal: Alltel cripples OBEX file transfer on the Samsung Hue phones. You can’t use it. Only they can, on their premises. They’d rather charge you extra for a USB cable and their proprietary software, when in fact neither of the above should be necessary. They don’t want you to bluetooth your own MIDI files to your own phone in your own home. They don’t make money that way. They make money by you buying ringtones, etc. through their store, or through their affiliates who give Alltel a kickback to thank them for letting them sell to Alltel’s customers. They don’t want me beaming a few MIDI files across from my computer.

Via a member of the family, we actually have the ear of one of Alltel’s VPs, so we tried to play the old nepotism card, a phone call which yielded another very interesting fact: Alltel only sells one phone with all the features unlocked, and that’s the Motorola Razr. So hey, if you’ve got one of these unweildly, non-user-friendly bricks, there’s finally a perk in it for you. Yay for you!

In a few minutes we’ll be going to pay them a visit at the store where the phone was bought, point out that we were looking at getting a second one just like it, and then insisting that we can’t buy another one – or for that matter remain as customers of Alltel with any phone – unless this feature is unlocked so the phone works as advertised. I’m not glued to my cell phone 24 hours a day, I don’t txt my bff all the time (zomg!), I’m not really a “power user”. We just like having our kid’s smiling face on our cell phones, and a few oddball ringtones. Is that so wrong? Apparently Alltel thinks so.

I have a gut feeling we’re going to walk out of the Alltel store looking for a new cell phone provider.… Read more