Category: Internet & Technology

I’m watching CNN’s coverage of the US presidential election, and I had to laugh at what they came up with: WILL.I.AM being broadcast as…a hologram. A hologram? Puuuuhlease. A hologram is a projection of light. What CNN did, as near as I can tell based on Anderson Cooper looking at a monitor to figure out where should look, is just a green screen trick where they projected WILL.I.AM like a weather map. It’s a nice trick, sure, but don’t insult science by using a term that’s completely inaccurate.

Oh yeah, and Obama is the next president according to CNN – and by a huge electoral margin. I tend to skew pretty strongly towards right-wing, conservative political thought, but after the past eight years of watching “W” doing his thing, let’s just say I was rooting for Obama. This is a historic day in a lot of ways, and I think Obama is going to do some good things in this world.

And being the pragmatist that I am, I’m going to compare the current USD to CAD exchange rate of 1.13 to whatever it is tomorrow morning. 😉

I installed Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 the other day, and it helpfully gives you the option of where you want to store the virtual hard drive for the virtual machine you’re creating. I put it on my D: drive, which is a pair of 500 GB Western Digital drives in a RAID 1 array. I expected all the changes I made to that virtual machine to be kept inside the virtual hard drive. Not quite! Virtual PC 2007 creates a folder inside the documents folder called My Virtual Machines, then inside that it creates a sub-folder with the name of your virtual machine. And inside that sub-folder, it stores all of the files that it creates for disk undo changes. In my case, after only a week, it was 2 GB of files in total. Because I use FolderShare to sync my documents folder across all my PCs and laptops, this was 2 GB worth of files that were useless everywhere but the computer that was running the virtual machine.

I scoured through all the program settings, and couldn’t find any option that controlled where these files are stored. Ugg. The good news? I was able to move the virtual machine files out of my documents folder and into the same folder as the virtual machine hard drive on my D: drive and everything worked seamlessly – it didn’t even prompt me asking where the files went. I made a slight change to the virtual machine, saved the changes, and watched as the change was comitted to the folder on the D: drive.

So, if you’re curious about whether or not you can move Virtual PC 2007 files out of the Documents Folder, yes you can!

One word: wow. If I ever have an extra $2000 sitting around that I don’t know what to do with, I could easily find things to spend it on at Sideshow Collectibles. The Iron Man figurine pictured above is “only” $174, but the ultra-cool life-sized Iron Man bust is $699. They have amazing items from all genres: comics, fantasy, TV shows, movies, and a lot more. I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t want a replica of Thor’s hammer?!? Must…put…credit…card…away.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to do this, but my installation of Windows Vista Ultimate on my media editing computer was acting so funky it was time for a wipe and re-install. I’ve been watching it go down hill for a few months now, mostly around codec problems (which is a rant for another day) and random application crashes. This morning was the last straw though: I kept getting DEP (Data Execution Protection) errors when using Sure Thing label-making software. Crash crash crash. I was somehow wishing that Windows Vista was different in this regard, but Windows is still Windows: shared DLLs, shared codecs, sloppy third party development, and a tendendency towards instability over time. I’ve found Vista to be better XP – most of my installs last a good year – but it’s still a frustrating problem to have.

I decided to roll back to a squeaky-clean image I had created last year using Acronis TrueImage. The idea being that I have a version of Vista installed, activated, and with all the drivers I needed for the on-board hardware. I installed this clean version of VIsta (after dealing with TrueImage’s tendency toward idiocy in dealing with USB-based keyboards), then I let Vista patch itself up to current status. When SP1 never appeared I did a manual download and install. That worked well, and the final update I did was an NVIDIA driver update. After the install of the video driver, I rebooted my system, only to be presented with an error messages generated by my monitor telling me that the system was displaying a monitor setting that the monitor couldn’t match. I rebooted a few times by punching the reset button, then I booted into safe mode (which worked), but I was unable to set the system to a resolution that the the monitor would support. It’s worth noting that this is a 24″ Dell LCD monitor that runs at 1920 x 1200…so I can’t imagine what resolution the video card was set at (2560 x 1600?). System restore? It seems I turned it off on the image I’d created with Acronis TrueImage.

My only real choice left was a re-install from scratch of Windows Vista. I pondered whether to go 64-bit or not, but in the end I decided that I wanted compatibility more than any of the rather nebulous benefits of going 64-bit (other than getting to use an extra 698 MB of RAM). The install has now finished, and the system is fully patched. What I haven’t done, however, is to re-install all the drivers from Shuttle. After Vista installed, everything just worked: audio, networking, video, etc. In fact, looking at the Device Manager, there wasn’t a single unrecognized device. That’s quite impressive. So the question now is, do I stick with the WHQL-certified plain-jane drivers that come with Vista – which tend to be stable, but not optimized for speed – or do I seek out the proper drivers for my hardware? I updated the video driver of course, but I’ve left the sound, networking, and chipset drivers alone. Decisions, decisions. Opinions?

One thing worth noting: Vista absolutely screams when it’s brand new!

There’s only one computer magazine that I subscribe to, and I’ve been a subscriber for 12 years: Maximum PC (which started life as boot). I think the magazine is fantastic, and I trust the coverage I read in it – there are too many magazines on the market today that do little more than re-publish press releases with a few words changed. If the gang at Maximum PC tells me something sucks, there’s a really good chance it sucks. I think so highly of the magazine that I someday hope to write an article for the magazine as well (it’s a little dream I have).

My goodwill toward the magazine was tested the other day when I was filling out my subscriber card to renew, like I do every year, and I decided to check their Web site for some reason to see what the normal online price was. Below is my subscriber card (after some heavy use of the eraser tool)…$34.95 USD is what I pay for a year’s worth of the magazine, and this is the renewal price for current subscribers.

So imagine my surprise when I checked the site and saw that someone getting a brand new subscription was paying $5 less than I was…and if they signed up for two years, they’d save $20. When I renew my subscription, I don’t even get an option for two years! So it seems that I shouldn’t be renewing, I should be buying a new subscription each year. Amazingly, this isn’t an online vs. offline thing: when I checked my renewal rates using the Web site, I was offered the same “great” deal: $34.95 for a one-year renewal, and $54.95 for a two-year renewal.

Ultimately this isn’t big money, but it goes to show you that you shouldn’t blindly trust when a company is giving you a “good deal” as a “valued repeat customer” – check into it, and you might be surprised…

It’s funny, when it comes to buying technology, I rarely if ever “shop around” because most stores will sell the same product for the same MSRP, or close enough that it doesn’t matter. Imagine my surprise today when I decided to see who had a Linksys 802.11n gigabit router in stock, and I saw a 50% price difference in the products! London Drugs had it for $139, Best Buy had it for $149, and Future Shop had it for…$99! There’s no indication that the Future Shop price is a sale price – so there’s a $50 difference in price on a $150 product. I find it highly amusing that the Linksys Web site has been down all day…you’d think a networking company (Cisco) would know how to keep a Web site online. 😉

This past weekend I finished backing up 171.5 GB of data to Mozy, the online backup service that I use. It took a little over a month, and a lot of patience, but it all managed to get up there. So that means that in the case of a catastrophe here at the Dunn house (fire, flood, meteor strike) all of my music, documents, files, photos, and videos are safe and sound up on the Mozy servers. All that protection for $3.89 CAD per month based on a two-year payment. Tough to beat! Now I just have to make sure Ashley and I aren’t at home when that meteor strike happens…

UPDATE: Mozy alienated me as a customer when they tried to raise my rates by 1390% and now I don’t recommend them to anyone. No, that’s not a typo. I now use Crashplan.

I’m an old-school coming book geek. I started collecting real comics when I was 11 years old (Archie comics prior to that don’t count), my first series being The ‘Nam. From there it was Blue Beetle, X-Men, Spiderman, Wolverine, and on and on. I stopped actively collecting comics when I was 20 or so – I found I needed my money for other things and, in particular, I found it difficult to keep up with the cross-over series and spin-off series. I grew frustrated with how Marvel and DC seemed greedy, not content with having me collect one series about a certain character or group of characters. I still purchase about half a dozen graphic novels a year, but no longer collect a monthly comic book. I’d enjoy reading a regular series, but like any serial publication, it’s hard to come in mid-stream when you feel like you’ve missed everything prior. The point here though is that, since being a child, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of super heroes with super powers doing great deeds to keep the world safe.

This leads me into the actual point of this post: because I’m a “comic book guy” (though, thankfully, not as fat as the guy on the Simpsons) I’ve been playing City of Heroes (COH) for a few years now. When it first came out in 2004 I played it with a friend for perhaps a year and a half, then I stopped playing for a couple of years – and came back to playing it one or two times a week for the past year or so. It’s now a Sunday ritual for me; 12pm to 5pm, I’m relaxing and playing City of Heroes with four other friends online. COH is the first MMORPG I’ve found that’s really held my attention, because it’s really fun.

I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons Online, but quit that after a few months because it was virtually impossible to team up with other players (the servers were teaming with people that didn’t want to team up) and the missions were virtually impossible to accomplish alone. I’ve played a bit of World of Warcraft, but for whatever reason it didn’t “click” with me – it might have been the exaggerated comic-book style graphics, or the complex gameplay, or maybe it was just because everyone else in the world was playing it. Guild Wars was also a game I played for a few months, but I hated the ingredients-based system where you had to make everything cool instead of finding it in a treasure horde. I’m an semi-old-school Dungeons and Dragons gamer (the real old-school guys started with this), having bought the Red Box Edition (wow does that site bring back some memories!) with my allowance when I was about 12 years old, and I come from the school of thought that heroes should be out slaying orcs and trolls, not collecting ingredients like Mother Hubbard to make a potion. That’s so lame, and it’s just a mechanism put in place by the game creators to stretch out the time you have to spend online in their game. The only ingredients-based system that was ever really cool was found in the Ultima games (where did I put that mandrake root anyway?).

Back to the point of this post however: DC Universe Online…this looks amazing! As much as I enjoy City of Heroes, the graphics are looking pretty aged, and I haven’t heard a peep about a new version of the game with a new graphics engine. Although I usually avoid anything with Sony’s name on it, the preview video looks amazingly cool. This might be the game that I switch to when it comes out – though it depends on a bunch of things, such as the game play and the mechanics of the game. I can’t believe that Marvel cancelled their Marvel Universe Online game – done properly, that could have been amazing. I guess they’re too focused on making movies to make a game as well. At any rate, I guess I’d better start my work day now… 😉