Tag Archive for 'computer'

Life update

Published
by
Cody
on June 15, 2008
in Personal
. 0 Comments

Unlike Bagel over at RationReality, my blog absence isn’t the result of sickness and depression, but of a rather sinister combination of finals, moving, and lack of an Internet connection. That last bit may cause some people to call me a liar and accuse me of avoiding my blog because I’m in a creative slump and couldn’t come up with a blog post if I was being held hostage in front of a computer and told that for every minute I stalled an innocent kitten would be denied fame on ICHC. Those people are wrong. In reality, I’m leeching wireless off of some poor schlob who couldn’t be bothered to change the default name of their wireless network, much less put a password on it. It’s a poor connection, and I’m busy with packing and moving, so I’m only connecting for long enough to post this and browse through Reddit for some laughs.

I suppose it’d be useful to explain why I don’t have an Internet connection. My family is in the process of moving into a house closer to town (okay, in town). Unfortunately, utilities like television, phone, and Internet service aren’t due to be hooked up until the 20th. Until then, I’ll be spending my time watching Farscape on my laptop and playing Mass Effect. Well, during the time that isn’t spent packing up my entire life and moving it to a smaller house. Fun.

And the month isn’t even half over. In about a week, I’ll be starting my summer job with the county (working for Parks and Rec). Exciting, huh? Yeah, not really. I’m going to be one busy guy, but I’ll be sure to make time for a rant every so often. After all, this isn’t the Mad Silence of a Raving Genius, is it?

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Ubuntu 8.04

Published
by
Cody
on April 16, 2008
in Personal and Technology
. 0 Comments

Following my computer problems of a few days ago, I decided to go ahead and make room to install a distro of Linux on my laptop alongside XP and Vista. I have to say, it was a lot easier than the last time I triple-booted. I installed XP first, then Vista, and finally Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu’s bootloader to it’s own partition, which allowed me to use Vista’s bootloader to load up everything (configured with EasyBCD). It all works perfectly.

I took the chance to try out the latest beta version of Ubuntu, which is due to be released in about 8 days (as you can see by the nifty counter in the sidebar). Compared to past versions of Ubuntu I’ve used, 8.04 is amazing. Sure, the actual interface doesn’t look or act much different (it’s a little shinier, perhaps, and the new search function is pretty cool), but the main difference I noticed is that I didn’t get a debilitating error upon start up. See, with older versions of Ubuntu installed on my Dell laptop, the wireless and graphics cards would not work, and the alternate drivers Ubuntu tried to use would break the system, forcing me to drop into a command line interface to install a special script. But with 8.04, everything actually worked upon start up, displayed in my native resolution of 1280×800 (instead of a rather blurry 1024×768). I had to do some minor configuration to enable the non-free graphics and wireless drivers so I could use my graphics and wireless cards to their full extent, but it was much less work than before.

I’m definitely pleased with this version of Ubuntu. I still doubt that I’ll like it enough to abandon Windows, but at least I haven’t needed to wrestle with it just to make it work right. Hopefully it’ll just get better once it’s out of beta next week.

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B0rked

Published
by
Cody
on April 8, 2008
in Personal and Technology
. 1 Comment

This seems to be a theme with me. I get my computer to perfect working order, and then I decide to mess with it. Why? I don’t know. Some kind of weird compulsion, I guess. Whatever the case, I broke my computer. Again. Well, that’s not completely true. It was only partly broken. For a while, I’d been dual-booting Windows Vista and Windows XP. In case you think that’s odd, I’ll explain why: I use XP for games and Vista for everything else. Games played in Vista tend to have a lower framerate than when they’re played in XP, so I’m sticking with XP for my gaming needs. However, I prefer the Vista interface, which is why it’s my primary operating system.

I recently bought a 320 GB hard drive for my laptop and completely reinstalled everything from scratch. Everything was going great. Then I tried to install Linux. Again. Honestly, I can’t tell you why I have to try this time after time. Maybe I figure that I’ll like it this time, even though I haven’t the past 17 million times. At any rate, it shouldn’t have been a problem to resize one of my Windows partitions and try out a new distro of Linux I downloaded (the beta release of Kubuntu with KDE 4, ’cause the screenshots looked pretty). Turns out, it was a problem. Vista didn’t want to play nice, so I turned to GParted. That stalled out, so I booted up XP and tried out Partition Magic. That completely corrupted my Vista partition, making it impossible to boot into it. Luckily, XP still worked fine, so I was able to go into damage control. Damage control failed horribly (even when I turned to the Vista install disk’s repair function).

Luckily, I had, in my infinite wisdom, completely backed up Vista the night before. Since the only important information on XP was saved games and a few documents, I backed up a couple of folders on XP and wiped the hard drive clean. This time, I was going to reinstall everything and include Linux with it. But I abandoned Kubuntu and went with plain ol’ Ubuntu 7.10, which has worked for me in the past. In a couple of weeks, Ubuntu 8.04 will be out, so I’ll be able to easily upgrade.

The problem now is that I still need to copy over all my documents to the reinstalled Vista. And then I need to reinstall all my programs. And fix all my settings. And update everything…

I just did all of this a couple of weeks ago. It’s killing me.

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Exclusivity sucks

Published
by
Cody
on December 4, 2007
in Gaming and Rant
. 1 Comment

I’m unintentionally continuing on my gaming post trend. I was watching G4 earlier and saw some stuff about a new action/role-playing game called Mass Effect developed by BioWare. It looks pretty interesting, and I’ve played games by BioWare before. They tend to have a big emphasis on story-telling, and I love games with an engaging story.

Unfortunately, the game was released only for the Xbox 360. What’s worse is that BioWare has no plans to develop the game for the PC. Another good game ruined by what I see as a lazy developer. I mean, the PC is still a good gaming platform. Why, then, do so many developers come out with games exclusive to certain consoles? I don’t want to buy a freakin’ Xbox. If that means I’m not going to buy a game like Mass Effect, then that’s the loss of the game developer. Ignoring an entire (and rather large) portion of the video game market is about the best thing you can do to get people to dislike you.

BioWare used to develop games for the PC, too. Even the most recent game they developed before Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was made for both the Xbox and the PC. Before that, they were PC-only, since no one thought an RPG could really work that well on a console.

I really don’t have anything against consoles. They have their uses. I don’t want to be forced to buy one, though. I already own a decent computer. Buying something else that only plays games is a bit…redundant. And to have to pay for multiplayer? Seriously, no thanks. But it seems like PC gamers are being left behind, especially now that gaming consoles can look better than high-end PCs without costing nearly as much. Of course, if you add in the gigantic HD television set needed to fully appreciate the look of console games, the cost can go up quite a bit. Realistically, though, the PC gaming market isn’t dead yet. It’s not even close. But when good games are made for consoles and not for PC, it can be just a little bit irritating.

Dammit, that G4 review is really making me want Mass Effect. It looks like a sweet game. Curse you, BioWare! You might make me buy an Xbox 360, but I won’t like it… I know, I’m weak-willed. Sometimes.

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Arcade games

Published
by
Cody
on December 2, 2007
in Gaming and Rant
. 2 Comments

I don’t know why video games today are popular. I mean, look at where they started. The original video games were all arcade games like Pac-Man and Asteroids. Boring and hard. When they got stories, the dropped the boring part, but some of them were still freakin’ impossible. A very good example of that is the game Dragon’s Lair. It’s an old game, but you can still find CD-ROM copies for the computer. I recently discovered my dad still had a copy, so I’ve been playing it. Well, trying to play it is more accurate.

Dragon’s Lair is seriously the hardest game I’ve ever played. When it comes to gameplay, it’s rather simple. You don’t always control the main character. You don’t need to know where to go. The trick is the timing. It’s a rather fast-paced game and if you screw up, you have to start over. You start off walking over a bridge. Your character falls through and these tentacle things start moving toward him. You have to mash down on the spacebar to make him swing his sword and then frantically push the up arrow to get him to climb up through the hole in the bridge while the tentacles are distracted. Easy, right? Wrong. If the timing is off by even a second, you’re dead. This sort of action does not stop any time soon.

It’s even worse that you only get 5 lives throughout the entire game. You don’t always start over at the beginning if you die within that limit, but once those 5 lives are up, you have to do the entire thing over again. This would make anyone go crazy.

I just don’t understand how games got past this point. In all honesty, I would have stopped playing after half an hour of a game like Dragon’s Lair if that’s all there was. Even Pac-Man can really piss me off. Games today can actually save your progress and have adjustable difficulty levels, but these old arcade games have nothing of the sort. They all had one difficulty level: impossibly hard. And yet video games survived. Boggles the mind.

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