BunkBlog

Just over ten years ago, I bought my first digital camera, a Canon S10. As with most of my big purchases, I bought last year’s model with a lot of research beforehand, and I was very pleased with the boxy little thing. Canon has been my go-to camera brand ever since (with the notable exception of our waterproof camera, as the Canon D10 was just too fugly to love). My most recent is an SX20, a break from my older point-and-shoot roots into a bigger camera with a giant zoom lens. As expected, in ten years the camera became much cheaper and much more powerful. This week, Canon announced their new lineup, and for the first time they have a camera with a suggested price of less than $100. So, just because I’ve got time on my hands, let’s compare my $500 camera from 2000 with the latest $90 camera from 2011.

 

Isn’t it great, living in the future?

I think this recent court precedent really shows the importance of personal encryption.  As in so many of these civil liberties cases, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for the person, as he’s an obvious drug dealer.  But, since it’s possible for police to do a pat-down of anyone at a traffic stop, and if “anything in your pockets” is free game for them to search through… Most of us don’t do a lot of illegal things, but we almost all do embarassing things.  As smartphones proliferate, many people are carrying the equivalent of a large filing cabinet of personal documents and photos and videos with them at all times.  Although the police have the obligation to do their utmost within the law to uphold the law, it’s possible that you may want to think about what you keep in your smartphone that you might not want a random stranger to see.  This goes double at border crossings or customs stations at airports – there is a solid precedent that customs agents can pretty much just take all your personal electronics and never give them back whenever you enter the USA.  It seems messed up, because it is.

The latest Doctor Who Christmas special, with Michael Gambon and Katherine Jenkins, is the best yet.  Of course, doing a Google search for Katherine Jenkins shows that she likes to show off her cleavage at public events, so bonus!

But, why was Rory dressed as a Roman soldier?  The final episode of last season, they remade the universe so the Rorybot never existed.  They’ve got a lot of explaining to do this spring.

I’ve had the Stealthbook for 2 days now, and I’m ready to give my first report.  It’s heavier than I’d think from a device with no hard drive; I assume that giant battery is the reason for that.  I unplugged it after giving it a full charge, and after one and a half nights of use, it claims to have 40% and just about 3 hours of battery life remaining.  The claimed 8 hours of use seems likely to be true.  The Flash plugin is flakier than a pie crust, and this illustrates some differences between ChromeOS and Chrome on Windows. If a plugin crashes in Windows Chrome, Chrome offers to restart it; ChromeOS doesn’t.  If all else fails, you can close Chrome in Windows and restart it; since the browser is the OS on the Cr-48, restarting the browser requires logging out and logging back in.  Since the login process takes only a couple seconds, the difference is minimal, although it does mean you have to type your password more.

Most web sites work just fine, including Youtube and LOLcats – although the Flash instability means that I may avoid them until a patch shows up.  Just as with any other Atom-powered netbook, don’t expect to run any fun Flash games on the Cr-48; Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook is a slideshow.  Netflix doesn’t work, as it needs Silverlight.  That is one thing which needs to be addressed in order to make the Stealthbook a replacement for Kat’s netbook – she uses that thing for Netflix streaming, LOLcats, email and Facebook.  I think a big question is the cost.  Nobody has indicated how expensive these machines will be once they are actually for sale.  You can buy a single-core netbook with integrated graphics for under 300 bucks.  Bumping up to a dual core or adding decent graphics power moves the Windows netbook into the 500 dollar range, which is awfully close to real laptop territory.  Even assuming the Microsoft tax is $100, it becomes hard to imagine the Chrome netbooks entering the market for under 200 and having anything like good performance.  We’ll have to see what happens.  I also didn’t understand the iPad, so marketers aren’t looking at me for guidance.

If you’ve never taken a programming or discrete math class, you should just move along. For the two of you that remain, here is the funniest binary tree Christmas joke I’ve ever seen.*  And a bonus max-heap joke!

* – This is also the only binary Christmas tree joke I’ve ever seen, so your mileage may vary.

I understand the USAF’s web filters must be working overtime right now, as they attempt to keep the “disclosed but still classified” documents from Wikileaks away from anyone in the military, while they remain available to everyone else on the planet.  Just nod and smile.  What I find particularly amusing is that there seems to be one way to ensure any arbitrary URL is blocked: add the word “wikileaks” to the path. I open up a news site and some of the images are red Xs – they are all named some variant of xxahbr-wikileaks.jpg or something similar.  There are articles in mainstream websites which are not available, even though other articles on the same site are – the articles which are blocked all have “wikileaks” in the URL somewhere.  I can’t even get to the Wikipedia article about Wikileaks, while I can otherwise wander Wikipedia with impunity.  It’s bizarre, and entertaining, and yet… A Fox News article my boss emailed me the other day, pointing out the USAF blocking which the USAF has not seen fit to tell us about – that article I could access, even though it had the offending term in its URL.  I guess Fox News is on the USAF’s “always trust” list, while CBS isn’t.  Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Imagine my surprise when UPS delivered an unexpected package this evening, which contained the new hotness, a Cr-48.  That’s right, skippy, I was chosen to get one of the prototype ChromeOS laptops.  12 inch screen, matte black soft-touch chassis, auto-updating magic box!  More in the days to come, no doubt, and I’m not going to post any silly unboxing photos – go to any gadget blog to see those.  Yay, new toy!

I built a computer in August, which was intended to be a reliable and semi-powerful machine, to play current games and work in Premiere and Photoshop.  Instead, I’ve been plagued with random shutdowns, crashing programs, and a growing hatred of technology.  The most recent issue is that downloaded games no longer work.  I buy most of my games via Direct2Drive or Steam or Impulse – I tend to buy older games on sale and boy are some of the deals awesome.  I grabbed Bioshock for five bucks last month, downloaded it, installed it, played it nonstop, and then I was done – all in one week.  I know, there is replay value by playing as a jerk instead of a nice guy, whatever.

Anyway, last week two games popped up as good deals online – Crysis and Bioshock 2.  I bought both (one from GamersGate and the other from Direct2Drive), and began the download cycle.  Both games are approximately 7 gigabyte downloads.  I’ve now downloaded Bioshock 2 seven times, and Crysis four.  I’ve downloaded them to my C drive, my D drive, to Kat’s computer.  Bioshock 2 has multiple methods of downloading the ZIP file – Comrade, Download Manager, and browser direct.  I’ve used each method at least twice.  Every time, I get a corrupt download. I’m using a computer with a direct ethernet connection, not wifi.  The download manager says the download is done and correct. But, once it unzips and begins installing, it craps out with a CRC error.

Same with Crysis, but there’s only one method of downloading that game from GamersGate.  I can only assume that two different games, from two different sources, must indicate there’s something wrong on my end.  Darned if I know what, though.  Anyone have six hundred bucks so I can get a rig from Cyberpower?  No?  Darnit.

My new best imaginary friend, Kenji Lopez-Alt, has completed a four-week experiment to determine what truth the “McDonald’s Burgers Don’t Rot” meme has behind it.  Most serious speculators assumed that the burgers and buns dried out in the air-conditioned interior of an average home. Surprise, surprise – that’s exactly what Kenji discovered. There’s nothing magical about it, just small burgers in a dry environment. Science!

I’m sure that none of our elected representatives are unduly influenced by the truly stupendous amount of money lavished on them by corporate contributors.  But just in case you’re curious about where that money comes from, how about a cool interactive political whore influence tracker?

Interestingly, here in Texas, the two US Senators have vastly different records on this issue: John Cornyn has received nearly 3 million dollars, while Kay Bailey Hutchison has only raked in 15 thousand. I disagree with Senator Hutchison on many (most?) issues of substance, but she does appear to keep above the money-grubbing fray.

Microsoft, in a stunningly brilliant move, has announced a new site, Games for Windows Market, to be launched on November 15th of this year. Wow. It’s a good thing nobody else has ever come up with that idea. Heck, it’s a good thing Microsoft has never launched a site for the same purpose before, maybe even a year earlier.

Magnets, how do they work?!?

If you’re a geek, you’ve thought of or maybe even built a home-theater PC – that strange device which is a full-fledged computer hooked up to your television. Most of the rest of the TV-watching public, however, is utterly uninterested in such geekery. They do want to see their Youtube videos and Netflix streams on the bigger screen, but they’re not interested in doing the hard work necessary to put them there.

Enter Google TV and Roku boxes and Apple TV. A simple, somewhat affordable (Logitech, why 300 bucks?) device, hooked up to your television and your internet connection, enter some passwords and usernames, BAM! Internet media on your television. That’s the dream, right?

Google TV has been blocked from streaming ABC, NBC, and CBS shows from the networks’ web sites. Think about this for a minute, and you may begin to see the point of view of Network Neutrality advocates. Google TV uses Chrome, the web browser, to access ABC’s website. The user on his couch sees the web site just as he would see it if he were using his regular PC to view that site. The same ads load. The same content is there. But, because the machine he’s using says (as it’s supposed to), “I’m a Google TV browser” – no soup for you.

Still here?  True, this is not an actual case of network neutrality being violated, because the ISP is not the one blocking content from flowing over their network. The content provider has the right, no matter how irrational, to prevent anyone from watching their content in any manner. They could capriciously decide that only certain blocks of IP addresses could view their shows online. They could browser sniff and decide that they don’t like Opera, even if Opera is perfectly capable technically of watching their content. They’ve decided they hate Google this week. By extension, their viewers, the ones who care enough about How I Met Your Mother to go to the CBS website and seek it out, the most avid viewers with the most brand loyalty – fuck them.

Interesting business decision.

We just got a little Garmin Oregon GPS unit this week, and our first outing with it was very productive.  We walked around the San Angelo State Park and found our first geocache.  Only a few cactus quills.  🙂

And now Kat seems to have some small idea of how to operate it.  We’ll see how that goes.

My first draft of the San Angelo State Park trails, in KML format.  Open in Google Maps or Google Earth – it is nifty.  All ready for some autumn hiking and geocaching with my baby.

I’ve been playing Burnout Paradise on my computer (the old one and the seemingly cursed new one) since August 6th.  As of last week, the game started giving me an error that I couldn’t buy any downloadable content, due to one of four possible reasons:

1. I was too young.
2. My account was not allowed to purchase content.
3. The content was not yet released.
4. I was not signed in to my account.

So far as I could tell, none of those things applied.  I’m certainly above the age where I need permission to purchase anything, I was signed in and the content was not only released a year ago, I’d seen it offered for my purchase just last month.  I certainly hadn’t blocked myself from purchasing anything, but I also could find no information about that in my account one way or the other.

After 3 days of email, and one 40 minute chat, here are the tasks which I’ve been asked to accomplish under EA’s direction, while telling them at every step that my ACCOUNT must be borked on their end and maybe there’s a setting in there which they could check:

• Clear the cache of my internet browser.  Since they couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me which browser engine is used for the in-game store, I cleared ALL of my caches in all 3 browsers (and both the 32- and 64-bit versions of IE).
• Buy content from the Playstation store. Neat trick for a PC game.
• Delete everything from my Windows temp directory. Sure, whatever.
• Kill every process running on my machine other than Explorer and Taskmgr that weren’t owned by System. Right, let me kill 90 processes – some essential – just for fun.
• Open 50 different ports in my firewall. Sure, whatever.
• Uninstall and reinstall the game, erasing all traces from the registry as well.  That took a while.
• Log in to the game. Duh?

Not only are some of those things bad ideas, some are even impossible or ludicrous.  If I killed every process owned by me that wasn’t Explorer, I’d effectively kill the browser I was using to communicate in the chat, as well as destabilizing my audio, video, and other hardware that has helper software.  Buying content from the Playstation store for my Windows game seems bizarre in the utmost.  I did uninstall and clear all registry bits and reinstall, as that MAY have been of some use.  I also cleared my caches, although the utility of that option still escapes me.

Naturally, after all this time and effort, including re-downloading a 3 gigabyte file, the game still won’t allow me to purchase any DLC.  I’m not even really planning to buy anything right now, I just figured after three days of seeing an error which I hadn’t seen the previous three weeks, there must be something WRONG that might need seein’ to.  This morning, they finally elevated this to second-level tech support.  WTF?  You would think my telling them that purchasing Playstation content for my Windows machine was ludicrous would cause them to elevate it, but no.  What finally put it over the top is when, on email #10 or so, the tech dork actually said I had to log in with my email address to access the game.  This is after I’d told them many times that the GAME was fine, the online-gaming portion was fine, the in-game browser was fine, it was just the in-game store which was broken, and gave an error indicating an ACCOUNT problem.  Finally, after that email where I told them they were ridiculous for thinking that I’d somehow logged in with someone else’s email address (which the game won’t allow and the game doesn’t use email addresses anyway), they finally said, “Oh, let me elevate this.”

I think the takeaway from this experience is, “If you buy an EA game, hope you never have problems.”

So, think there may be something amiss with my computer?

There are several computing devices in my house, ranging from a Nokia N770 to a 2006-vintage eMachines to a netbook to a DVR to this monster machine I put together.  This is by far the least reliable and most powerful of the lot.  Rather distressing, really.

The jeep was out of the Army inventory before I enlisted (I saw lots of CUCV and HMMWV and tracks and the occasional deuce and a half or five-ton), but they were legendary for their ease of repair.  These guys make it look incredibly easy to rip one apart and put it back together, in less than four minutes.  I think they’ve practiced.

I love this comic.  Anyone who has ever had to deal with grammar nuts complaining about prepositions and split infinitives, when those are bizarre latinate rules applied to a germanic language should be able to relate.

I haven’t built a new computer since January 2006, when I put together my MythTV box. I haven’t bought a new computer for myself since March 2007, when I bought a refurbished eMachines T6536. Since then, I’ve upgraded both of those boxes, with the eMachines ending up with two additional hard drives for a total of one terabyte of storage, an Nvidia GT220 video card and a PSU to handle it.  All that and it still only gets 67296 on the Crystalmark benchmark.

I just finished putting together a new machine, with parts purchased over the past 8 months or so. With a quad-core Athlon 635, 4 gigs of PC1333 RAM, Radeon 5770 video card, and two 500 gigabyte hard drives, it gets 186731 on the Crystalmark test. Sweet.

Now, to take on the crazy people in Burnout!

Because the only significant story in the tech press today is about Apple (as is true every time Steve Jobs gets on a stage), I have become far too aware of the various iPod and iPad updates announced.  I find it interesting that Apple chose to replace the most popular model, the nano, with a version completely unlike the one which sold so well – it now has a touch screen and no buttons. Since the iPod classic was not mentioned, one assumes it is being led out behind the barn for an Old Yeller moment.  That leaves the iPod Shuffle as the sole remaining iPod with buttons.  Apple has decided that you can either have buttons or a screen, but not both.

I personally use my Sansa Fuze in the car, and the tactility of the physical buttons is the only thing which allows me to jump past a song while keeping my eyes on the road.  I’ve heard that people who listen to their music while exercising are also quite fond of physical buttons.  Would those people now have to resign themselves to the screenless shuffle (4 gigs of music without a screen? Ick) or does Apple just not care if some portion of their market jumps to a Samsung or Sansa or Creative player instead?

Of course, this assumes that Apple purchasers are sane humans who weigh the balance of features they need and desire against the value proposition they’re offered.  I’ve seen no evidence that is the case, so Apple is probably safe in betting that everyone they’ve already hooked will wander into an Apple store in a hypnotic trance and buy the latest doodad that Steve says they want.