spacer Glen's Weblog

XML Feed (what is this?)

15:27

permalink
5 comments

Giving Up Caffiene

About six years ago, I woke up one morning, realized that I didn't have any cigarettes left, and decided that it was easier to quit than to go buy more, so I did. It was remarkably easy.

About a month or so ago, I decided that caffeine wasn't having any positive effect on me, and all I was doing was fighting off withdrawals, so in the interests of removing my caffeine tolerance so that it could be useful to me in future, I decided to stop drinking it, and I did (with a one-week "OH MY GOD NOT THE HEADACHES" weening period of one can a day).

However, what they tell you about these things is rubbish. Quitting smoking didn't make me feel healthier and more spritely and give me my sense of smell back - it just made me feel like eating all the time. Quitting caffeine didn't make me feel vigorous and calm - I now just sleep for nine and a half hours a night.

This public service announcement bought to you by the man who took fifteen years to see a correlation between eating spicy food and getting stomach cramps six hours later. So you should probably ignore it.

16:05

permalink
0 comments

Explorer Breadcrumbs

Explorer Breadcrumbs does for Windows Explorer what I wanted Crumbler to do. It's a shame I suck and great that other people rock in my place.

14:48

permalink
0 comments

The Braying of Angels

Robert Hodgin does it again.

01:17

permalink
0 comments

Nvidia raid (nvraid) bluescreen after install

After getting my new E6600, MSIP6N and 8800GTS and freshly installing XP on my RAID array (which was a debacle requiring finding a floppy disc and a drive to hold the RAID drivers for the XP installer), XP decided to bluescreen on every reboot. Turns out that SP2 has its own RAID drivers which sort of get smooshed together with the Nvidia ones, causing all manner of insufferable badness. These instructions saved the day, and gave me a nice easy-to-install-for-once XP CD.

How-the-heck-is-anyone-supposed-to-figure-that-out stuff like this is still not enough to make me stop putting my PC together, bit-by-carefully-chosen-bit.

This post exists for people trying to find the answer to the same problem.

11:44

permalink
0 comments

A Non-Awful Time With Dell Tech Support

I was having a problem with my monitor, and it seemed like I was doomed to follow in this guy's footsteps. Yet shockingly I only had to wait 10 minutes to speak to a human, he only ran me through the same questions and procedures twice, only denied that there was a problem once and only bounced me to one other person, who then actually read the case history, only asked me one repeat question and only required one item of photographic proof before deciding to ship me a replacement (with a convenient box to send my monitor back in).

... It's kind of sad that I came away from that thinking "well, that was surprisingly easy" (perhaps because I had dealt with Bank of America support the previous day, where the people at the branch tell you to go home and use their phone support system, even when the problem is that their records for you are so broken that you can't use the phone support system).

12:22

permalink
1 comments

Instant Publishing

Part of the reason I post so little is that much of the stuff that I would want to communicate to my peers, I now put in my GTalk status message and let people read it there, since they're more likely to read that than this. It was easier in the days before popular link aggregation - I could just post a link to some crazy robot thing and add some useless thought and that would be enough to maintain the blogging flow. Now I assume that people have read those things elsewhere, and that's the end of that avenue of communication.

The other problem is that I spend a long time thinking and reading about the things I feel like posting, and when I'm done with that, the subject feels too obvious and trite, and so a post about it would be like saying "I am assuming that the people who read this don't know this obvious thing".

See, now I don't even feel like posting this. I mean, DUUH, WHY ELSE WOULDN'T I POST?

15:09

permalink
1 comments

Dear People Using Challenge/Response Spam Prevention

Stop it, you're making the internet worse.

Getting all your "please authenticate your message" spam makes me cross. I'm going to have to start clicking on all the authentication links I'm sent.

00:08

permalink
0 comments

Belizean Photos

spacer

The Belize Photos are up! Hooray!

PS I was in Belize.

23:15

permalink
1 comments

Sign of The Coming Apocalypse #152

Heard late one night...

Me: 5
Her: 1
Me: 7
Her: 3
Me: 8
Her: 2
Me: ... DAMNIT!
...
Me: 53916DAMNIT2

Yes, it's Lauren and Glen playing verbal naughts and crosses without a board, followed by Glen playing against himself and still managing to lose to a surprise attack.

This was then followed by a game of battleships on 8x8 grids held only in our heads, during which time SOMEONE MAYBE NAMED LAUREN managed to fit a 3-length ship into B3-5 without getting hit by a shell landing on B4.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you leave your Nintendo at the wrong house.

11:13

permalink
0 comments

Wii Second Guessing

One thing I noticed about playing Rayman Ravin' Rabbids (I got it last night) on the Wii is that I can't forget that I'm holding a bunch of accelerometers - I spend a lot of time wondering if the way the game tells you do things is actually the best way. For example, when the game tells you to move the nunchuck up and down rapidly, I wonder if moving it on two axes would result in a higher amount of measured movement (the combined delta on two axes may be greater).

Similarly, in the "throw the cow" game*, where you have to use the controller like a lasso, I wonder if they are measuring rate of change (in which case rolling the controller in your hand might produce the best result) or total force (where swinging the remote above your head on the end of the nunchuck cord might work the best).

Wii Boxing is a great example of all this - once you figure out how to actually trigger the different punches and movements, you get much better accuracy/power at the expense of any form of realistic punching motion.

* P.S. I threw the cow 129.92 meters, how'd you do?

13:06

permalink
1 comments

Melbourne Photos

spacer

Lauren and I recently returned to Melbourne for a week to attend a graduation and an engagement party. I started the week thinking "this'll be great - aside from those two events, I have nothing planned - I'll call all my friends!".

Next thing I know, I'm on the plane going in the other direction, and most of my friends remained blissfully unaware that I had even been in the country. DOH.

The photos are up, anyway. Other thoughts coming soon.

18:20

permalink
1 comments

Quick Wii Observations

  • As the sensor bar is just two LEDs, any game that relies on measuring the distance from the Wii Remote to the screen can be foiled by moving the Remote to the sides (so to the Remote's camera, the sensor's LEDs are closer, making it appear further away). It's a shame that Nintendo didn't add a third off-plane LED allowing the Remote to do proper 3D positioning through its camera.
  • Games that rely on multiple players with pointers (e.g. Super Monkeyball) often require the players to calibrate their controls at the start of each round, since each player may be at different angles from the television.
  • The Remote seems to be aware of absolute up/down - flipping the sensor bar and/or covering the camera then rotating the wiimote in a haphazard fashion (so as to induce gyro/accelerometer error) and uncovering the camera while the remote is upside down still results in the remote being perfectly aware of which way is up.
  • Further, if you hold the remote steady and move the sensor bar around in front of it, it will track properly - if you then rotate the sensor bar, it will work up to about 45 degrees, at which point the Remote cuts out (as what it's seeing and what its internals tell it are out of whack).
  • Wii Sports Tennis and Baseball don't really care about how you hold the Remote, as long as you produce movement - you can play both games by just rolling the remote along any axis, and don't have to mimic the on-screen actions (e.g. you can serve, forehand and backhand in Tennis by eating ice-cream with your Remote).
  • In games like Boxing and Golf, there are frequently better ways to control things than what the manual says - in Boxing, glove position is determined solely by rotation, not position, and you can also punch by flicking at the wrist, rather than punching outwards, likewise, in Golf you get more power/control by flicking at the wrist, rather than putting from the elbow).
  • General impressions are that the pointer is very accurate, the motion controls less so - I am wondering if a proper one-to-one sword combat game is even possible. I extra-want someone to figure out how to pair the remote with a PC (and write whatever drivers are needed), just so I can see how good/bad the raw sensor data is.
  • Super Monkeyball demonstrated that first person shooters could be very good on the Wii. Though after playing Gears of War on the 360 then Zelda on the Wii, I cry for the Wii's lack of processing power.
  • I can see this console getting a lot more use than my 360. I haven't seen anyone who didn't like it.

Archive

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.