BunkBlog

From 1up’s Essential 50 Videogames. Italicize the ones you’ve played, bold the ones you’ve beaten (or played to such a sufficiently high level that you could routinely beat the scores of your average joe). Make a note if you didn’t actually play it on its original platform, but instead played it on a MAME emulator or some “Greatest Hits” package.1. Spacewar (1962: PDP-1)
2. Pong (1972: Arcade/Console)
3. Space Invaders (1978: Arcade)
4. Adventure (1979: Atari 2600)
5. Battlezone (1980: Arcade)
6. Pitfall! (1982: Atari 2600)
7. Zork (1977-79: DEC PDP-10)
8. Game & Watch (1980-88)
9. Star Wars (1983: Arcade)
10. Pac-Man (1980: Arcade)
11. Donkey Kong (1981: Arcade)
12. Rogue (1980: VAX/BSD UNIX)
13. E.T. (1982: Atari 2600)
14. Dragon’s Lair (1983: Arcade)
15. King’s Quest (1983: PC)
16. One-on-One (1983: C64)
17. Super Mario Bros. (1985: Arcade/NES)
18. Gauntlet (1985: Arcade)
19. M.U.L.E. (1983: C64)
20. Dragon Warrior (1986: NES)
21. Ultima IV (1985: Apple II/PC)
22. The Macintosh (1984)
23. Tetris (1986: PC/NES/GameBoy)
24. Prince of Persia (1989: PC)
25. FaceBall 2000 (1990: GameBoy)
26. Doom (1993: PC)
27. John Madden NFL Football (1990: Genesis)
28. Sonic the Hedgehog (1991: Genesis)
29. Super Mario Kart (1992: Super NES)
30. Populous (1989: Amiga/PC)
31. Herzog Zwei (1991: Genesis)
32. Street Fighter II (1991: Arcade)
33. Myst (1993: Mac/PC)
34. Mortal Kombat (1992: Arcade/SNES/Genesis)
35. Virtua Fighter (1993: Arcade/32X)
36. Super Mario 64 (1996: Nintendo 64)
37. Tomb Raider (1996: PS/Saturn/PC/Mac)
38. Final Fantasy VII (1997: PS/PC)
39. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (1999: PS)
40. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998: N64)
41. Metal Gear Solid (1998: PS)
42. Half-Life (1998: PC)
43. Gran Turismo (1998: PS)
44. Parappa the Rapper (1997: PS)
45. Ultima Online (1997: PC)
46. Pokémon (1998: GameBoy)
47. The Sims (2000: PC)
48. Jet Grind Radio (2000: Dreamcast)
49. Grand Theft Auto III (2001: PS2/Xbox/PC)
50. Halo (2001: Xbox/PC/Mac)

I’ve seemingly played a lot of games (most of them 15 or more years ago) but don’t beat them. Eh. What can you do?

The printer naturally arrived in San Angelo while I was in San Antonio, and the FedEx office closed while I was passing through Eden. Checking the web site at the time I was supposed to be across town (near the FedEx office), I saw that it was supposedly not on a truck but was sitting at the FedEx office. Cool, I’ll swing by there. Nope, not there. The web site needed a kickstart, apparently, because the printer was on the truck, as of 7:52 am. This truck usually passes my house around 11 am, based on recent history. It actually showed up closer to 4 pm. Gotta love the holidays for slowing shipping service to a crawl.

Before I even unpacked the printer completely, I checked to see if the power switch worked. Yay! After pulling the fifty pound monster up onto the desk and printing the test page, there was much rejoicing. The thing is even bigger than I envisioned it, but prints pretty. Mission accomplished, finally.

So, the stupid printer is still in my house. The HP folks will send me a replacement, via next-day air, as soon as I let them know that FedEx has picked this one up. That will be tomorrow afternoon. Yay for taking time off work to wait for the FedEx dude!

Now, with Christmas being this weekend, maybe I can hope to have a printer on … Thursday? Oh, except I’ll be in San Antonio Thursday. Joy. So, maybe by Friday, but certainly before Christmas itself. In the immortal words of Mr. Garrison, Merry Christmas to you (yes, I did omit a word. So?).

Hewlett Packard is having a sale on their entry-level color laser printer, the 2600N. This printer has won awards and accolades when it was selling for 400 bucks. Now, it’s on sale for $319, with free shipping. Since my inkjet is old and ink is only available via mailorder and it is spitting and sputtering, I ordered a nice shiny laser printer. It showed up today.

I spent over an hour waiting at the FedEx center, after being told the package would be there at the time I arrived. OK, nothing to be done about it. Get it home, unpack the fifty pound beast, pull all the tabs, place it just so, install software, plug it in, flip the switch. And the switch. . . fell off in my hand. That can’t be right.

I tried to reassemble the switch, to no avail. So, I’ve got a fifty pound paperweight on my desk. Joy. I’m betting I won’t print anything until New Years. Ho ho ho.

After five days of cruising, the last one in some fairly choppy seas, it now feels like my house is swaying.

We’re back, safe and sound; photos and videos and all that are awaiting my attention. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

OK, you little deviants. I’m taking off for a week, cruising with my son and assorted family members to the Yucatan. It was supposed to be Cozumel, but I’m told that island is kind of hosed right now, so it sounds like we’ll be hitting Progreso and Veracruz. I promise to take a bajillion photos and videos – gotta justify the new memory cards and batteries, after all. 🙂

Try not to blow anything up while I’m away, k?

Looking at Norton’s activity log, for the past week I’ve been averaging 6 Sober worm hits each day. Contrast this with my usual 2 or 3 virus warnings per month, and you can imagine how much traffic this thing is producing across the entire internet.

What is the point of this stupid thing, anyway? I particularly appreciate the emails purporting to be from the FBI or the CIA warning me about my IP being logged while downloading illegal software/music/porn. Yeah, the CIA is tasked with domestic cybercrime. At least they didn’t send messages pretending to be from the NSA for a change. 🙂

So there was a small poll of the Top 20 English-language geek novels since 1932. Let’s see how I did – I’m bolding the ones I’ve read, and italicizing those I own.

1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson
6. Dune — Frank Herbert
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
20. Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham

I guess my geek cred is still intact, although the fact that I’ve not read Brave New World is somewhat shameful. It may be worse that there are a couple books (Lichen and Phlebas) that I’ve never even heard of before.

After helping way too many people unscrew their systems due in large part to Microsoft software inviting everyone into their hard drives, I’ve decided to do something drastic.

If you are visiting my webpage with Internet Explorer, it will now nag you to switch browsers. I’ve joined the Explorer Destroyer campaign, boys and girls. Oh, I haven’t gone totally ideologue on you – the site will still work for IE users, but mostly because I know people may not be allowed to use a secure and fast browser at their workplace. At home, though – please do yourself a favor and stop using IE. Not only does it ignore web standards (CSS2, PNG, etc), it’s a virus waiting to happen. I’ve had to use IE to access a couple sites recently – they almost invariably end up leaving some sort of electronic spooge on my system that takes me a half hour or more to remove. And I know what I’m doing. Other folks just say, “my computer is messed up” and eventually they stop using the machine entirely.

I’ve used a variety of web browsers over the years. When I first got a PPP internet account, I used Netscape (0.7 as I recall). As time went on, I tried IE 1.0, but stuck with Netscape. When Netscape stopped getting updates and became a giant bloated piece of dung, I reluctantly used IE for a while. When Opera came out, I grabbed it (even though I had to pay for it, it was better than IE). A while back, the Mozilla Project came out with Phoenix, which became Firebird, which became Firefox. They got sued out of their previous names, but I guess nobody wants to remember the Clint Eastwood movie so they’re safe now.

Firefox has tabbed browsing, built-in popup blocking (that actually BLOCKS everything, unlike IE’s attempt), and is fast. The program is significantly smaller than IE’s bloatware, but allows an impressive variety of extensions to be used. If you use Firefox, here’s the extensions I recommend:
Adblock – nukes any images from ad-serving web sites. Doubleclick, begone! Must-have for dialup users.
All-in-One Gestures – let’s you use the right mouse button to jump back a site, go forward, or do the hokey pokey. Until you use mouse gestures, you will not understand why people love them. once you use them, you’ll hate using a machine that omits them.
Flashblock – Allows you to decide whether to load that Flash-based content or not. Must-have for dialup users.

And here’s some that I like a lot:
TabBrowser Preferences – exposes many of the tabbed interface options that are hidden by default.
Forecastfox – shows a multi-day forecast at the bottom of your browser. Takes no space, and alerts you if there is a weather alert.

Apple came out with the latest iPod (with video, but not part of the name so nobody who isn’t in the know can possibly tell if it’s a “video” iPod or not on the shelf – WTF?) a few weeks ago. They accompanied the launch with a new offering in the iTunes Music Store – downloadable television shows. That’s right, instead of setting your VCR or TiVo, you can pay two bucks to get a 320×240 video of Lost or Desperate Housewives on your two-inch screen. Why?

This week, NBC announced a deal with DirecTV to offer commercial-free television shows for a buck an episode, delivered to the DirecTV Digital Video Recorder. You know, the box you can use to record the shows when they are played on television for free? Yeah. Why?

And, finally, CBS announced a deal to deliver television shows via the pay-per-view channel on Comcast cable systems, for a buck an episode. They won’t delete the commercials when they send you your copy, though. Um…Why?

I understand that television studios need to find new ways to generate revenue in the age of TiVo and the internet. Their standard commercial-supported model is going to have a hard time staying viable when people can easily skip the commercials. But, can’t they find some way to add value to their offerings, rather than removing the value that was already there?

I can rent a movie for a buck (three for a new release); paying two bucks for the episode of Lost that aired ten minutes ago seems kind of retarded to me. If you notice, none of these three networks is using the same system as any other. If you want to watch ABC shows, you have to use an iPod and iTMS. If you want to watch NBC shows, you have to subscribe to DirecTV satellite service. If you prefer CBS shows, move to a city that offers Comcast cable. Fox? Nope, not playing yet. And, the networks aren’t offering all of their shows on-demand – just a select few.

I don’t see anything here that I can’t do better with existing tools (TiVo, MythTV, ReplayTV, VHS tape) and without paying per episode. Damn, I already pay an insane amount for cable television – I’m not about to pony up another hundred bucks a month to watch the shows on a 2-inch screen.

Am I missing something vital here? Apple has sold one million downloaded videos, so someone must be watching them. More money than brains, as the saying goes.

If you haven’t been following the Google Print controversy, here’s the pinnacle of absurdity so far. A children’s hospital in England has a completely unique and unprecedented perpetual copyright (in the UK) on the sales and performance of Peter Pan in the UK. They are claiming that Google Print’s service will rob them of millions of pounds of income every year. Think of the children!

I wonder why they haven’t previously gone after the public domain work? You did know that the book is actually in the public domain everywhere but the United Kingdom, didn’t you? So, exactly what does the American site Google do that the American site Gutenberg Project doesn’t already do? Is it just a question of convenience?

(Via BoingBoing)

Obviously, the government cares about the opinions of its citizens. We’re going to have RFID tags in American passports starting in about 12 months. When this was proposed, the State Department asked for comments from the public.

Out of the 2,335 comments on the plan that were received by the State Department this year, 98.5 percent were negative.

Damn. It’s hard to think of 1.5% as a mandate from the masses, but then…oh, yeah.

Another article has this to say:

U.S. government efforts to make passports harder to forge began in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Now, I’m not 100% certain, but weren’t all of the hijackers on 9/11 here on legal passports, not forged ones? So…what does this do, exactly?

It reminds me of the ban on lighters, which was partially justified by saying that Reed was trying to bomb a plane with his exploding shoes, those shoes which he was trying to light with (wait for it) matches. Matches remain legal on airplanes. Just let it sink in for a minute. I’ll wait.

I got two new toys this week – a CD player and a camera. Not too exciting, eh?

Well, the CD player is to replace the CD/MP3 player I’ve been using at work. That one, the original RioVolt from 2000, is still working, but it has poor battery life compared to newer machines, and no radio. I like having the radio as an option. So, I’ve been looking for a replacement for a while. I even bought a rebadged iRiver Slimx from Sharper Image’s clearance rack a while ago – it was inop on arrival. So, a new Sony Psyc CD/MP3 player is now on my desk at work. Unlike most CD/MP3 players on the market (like the ones two of my coworkers have), this one actually has an alphanumeric display. Go figure – you have 100 songs on a disk, it’s nice to know what the song is other than “track 75.” Oh, and 22-40 hour battery life with one AA battery – sweet.

My other new toy, the camera, is a bigger step. My first digital camera was the Canon Powershot S10, which was the smallest 2 megapixel camera on the market at the time, with the best optical zoom. After four years, it finally gave up the ghost. I tried to take a still shot with the camcorder recently – ick. So, when Buy.com pinged me with a “for sale” sign linked to the new Powershot A610, I took a look. Half the price of that S10, uses standard batteries instead of the $35 ones the S10 used, over twice the resolution, swing-out LCD, double the zoom… Well, suffice to say, it’s sitting on my desk and it’s pretty sweet. It is slightly larger than the S10, even using SD instead of CompactFlash for memory, because it uses four AA batteries – this does lead to it working for 400 or more photos instead of the 150 I’d get from the S10, so I’ll accept the tradeoff. Still fits easily in a jacket pocket, so it meets my criteria of “the best camera to use is the one you’re willing to cart around.”

Downloading the latest OpenOffice.org release, the much-anticipated version 2.0 final, via BitTorrent. I’m getting 3.85 Mbps, which is about as much as I can possibly hope for, considering my download pipe is supposed to max out at 4 Mbps. Freakin’ sweet, man. This gets me a 75 meg download in under 3 minutes.

Now, to install it and see how it compares to MS Office.

This is quite possibly the strangest watch I’ve ever seen, and I’ve got a binary watch myself.

The little equalizer bars bop up and down, then two lights indicate the precise time. Bizarre, yet strangely enormous on your wrist.

Harvey Danger, the band which brought you “Flagpole Sitta,” has released their third album via BitTorrent as well as in stores. If you like the download, they’ve got Paypal set up for donations.

I seriously hope this is a succesful experiment for them. Any proof that bands can make more money bypassing the plastic-based distribution system (and the RIAA) would be a very Good Thing, in my opinion.

If you do a search for “I voted for the moron” on Google, you now get my post about the button and bumpersticker design I made. I wonder how frequently that particular search is made. hehe

In case you don’t know why the “Trusted Computing” concept is an inherently bad one, please go view the short video that was recently pimped on BoingBoing. It explains a bit, and hopefully it’s enough to get people to look into it more.

Trusted Computing is not a new idea, and it’s been growing lately. It’s all part of the same RIAA/MPAA mindset, the one that says, “Consumers are crooks and must be controlled by the copyright holders at all costs.” The technology industry (well, Sony anyway) stood up for your rights against commercial interests over 20 years ago, and for that we have VCRs, and MP3 players, and burnable CDs, and TiVos and all the wonderful things that allow you to control your own media that you’ve legally purchased. Now, the technology industry has largely been purchased by or merged with the entertainment industry. So, who will stand up for the customer?

Just to add a trifle more surrealism to your websurfing experience, I’ve added a little code to my site that displays the lyrics to the most recently played song from Winamp on the sidebar (bottom of the right side). Yes, I am a geek, thanks for asking.

Despite the things I’ve been hearing from my cow-orkers and family members, the FCC has proposed 2009 as the deadline to change from analog to digital television, and it looks like Congress is going to sign that into law. So, all of you who thought your television was going to stop working soon – don’t worry.

Here in San Angelo, the local cable company (sure, there’s theoretically more than one, but get real) has been in a pissing contest with the local CBS affiliate since the beginning of the year. This has resulted in no CBS channel available on the cable system, free rabbit-ears antennas for cable subscribers that ask for them, and a striking rise in the use of satellite television receivers.

I don’t get the satellite thing. Of course, I don’t get the fascination with digital cable either. Both of them force something on the consumer that is, in my mind, unacceptable – the adapter. This is nothing less than an external tuner, rendering the tuners in my television and VCR useless. Many people wonder why I think this is a bad thing. This can be summed up in one of the marketing points for the local Dish Network folks – they brag about allowing you to have televisions in up to five rooms in your house. Allowing you to have them, you see? Because, unlike television as broadcast over the airwaves of old, the satellite provider now controls your usage of the signal.

No longer can you watch one thing and record another – oh no, your VCR has to be connected to a second external tuner to record something that you are not watching in that room at that moment. Ah, but then the Dish folks point out they are offering a free DVR upgrade, so you can record the full digital signal of other shows directly on this magical box. Ah, but can you? When the television industry is trying to get legislation passed to allow the Broadcast Flag to rise from the dead, when Tivo now puts commercials on you recorder while you’re trying to skip commercials, when the broadcasters are coercing the DVR manufacturers to disallow permanent archiving of shows… Well, I don’t trust a DVR that I don’t control 100%, and the DVR from Dish network would be a DRMed, MPAA-friendly, unexpandable, unchangeable piece of junk to me.

I don’t understand why so many people find it acceptable to cede control of the airwaves to the content providers. There is a balance in copyright law; the citizens are assumed to have some rights too, not just the people in Hollywood.

So, until I can use a standard tuner in a standard television or DVR or computer tuner card, I’ll stick with analog, thanks.