Category Archives: technology

Widescreen monitor day 2

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di090527

Not quite worth it.

Yesterday I listed various good things about the widescreen monitor I bought then.  Today I will talk about what didn’t work so well.  Initially, Sims 2.

That is not really a big deal if you have two fairly good computers, as I have. In fact, I usually play Sims 2 on the other computer. It is slightly slower, but it is out to the side so I can keep half an eye on it but still do my writing on the primary computer.  The only reason I played it on the quad-core computer this time was that I wanted to see how it looked in high-resolution widescreen, and then it looked so good I wanted to continue to see it that way.  That was not to be, however.  After a while, it crashed.

The first crash came unexpected, and with a tiny cryptic error message saying something about 3D.  I’ve gotten used to playing for half an hour or more between saving, so I lost some progress.  And a few minutes later it crashed again.

After a few crashes, I gave in and installed the specific drivers for this monitor, from the CD that was hidden at the bottom of the box. Until then, the monitor had shown up as generic plug-and-play monitor. I hoped the problem would be solved now. Also, occasionally when changing screen resolution (including going into Sims 2) it would crash iexplore.exe, which includes the start menu and the task bar, as well as any folders that happened to be open at the time.  I would then have to close it using task manager.  (This is on Windows XP, I am not sure you can close Vista with the task manager. Then again I am not sure you need to.)  I expected all these problems to be fixed by installing the driver.

As you can guess, I was wrong.  But more than that, the next or second crash took Windows with it.  It showed a Blue Screen of Death blaming a driver named NV4_disp.dll.  So I went online and looked for a solution to this.  There were many different solutions, none of which worked.  The most common was to delete all graphics drivers and remove all traces of them and then install the newest driver for the video card.  I already did this a few days ago to get Age of Conan to work.  Doing it again had of course no effect on the Bluescreen.

(Incidentally, I have not tried AoC in widescreen. I am sure the game supports it, but one day of AoC was enough for me for now. If I enjoyed heart-pounding danger, senseless murderous violence and barely censored adult content in a disturbingly lifelike world, I would go to bed earlier so I could remember my dreams.)

Unfortunately I have not found any solution to the NV4_disp problem. What I have found out is that it takes too much time to play Sims 2 on my main machine so I can’t do anything else while the game runs.  So I have moved it back to the computer where it belongs. Although I do miss the big pretty highly detailed screen while playing it.  There is a tiny little temptation to replace the old LCD monitor for that machine with a large new widescreen too. It was an early model, and there are no Vista drivers to it at all.  And isn’t the picture getting a bit dark?…

Widescreen monitor

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di090526

With the onset of summer heat, what could be cooler than to replace my last CRT monitor with a new energy-saving LCD monitor?  Especially if it has twice the screen area despite taking up less space on my desk.

So after a LiveJournal friend assured me that City of Heroes runs great on widescreen monitors, and knowing that Sims 2 does the same, I went to my favorite electronics shop. They had a HPw2228 at a rather affordable price (by Norwegian standards), certainly much less than I used to pay for smaller monitors in the past.  And I have very good experiences with HP products in general.

Despite my reference to summer heat, it was actually raining today. No great loss, since it did not rain hard and I would have been drenched in sweat even if I was not drenched in rain.  The monitor is not THAT heavy, at least compared to the old CRT, but when you carry them for some minutes it starts becoming quite good exercise.  So much more since my arms are less exercised than most of my body.

I came home unharmed and switched the monitors. I did not even turn off the computer or log out, although I did save stuff.  That was probably a wise decision, since iexplore.exe died on the spot, taking with it the startup menu and the task bar.  Luckily I could still log off in a dignified manner using ctrl-alt-del and choosing the appropriate menu choice, in this case restart.  The machine recognized the monitor without me running the CD that came with it.  Well, perhaps not perfectly.  I have had one more iexplore crash since, and several Sims 2 crashes.  I may eventually install the driver, perhaps. Actually I don’t plan to use this machine much for Sims 2, but I do it now because I wanted to look at it.  It is awesome. These things are seriously habit-forming.

They are also known to increase productivity more than an increase in processor speed or hard disk space, according to a study a decade or two ago.  Being able to see more stuff on the screen at the same time is quite useful, sight being by far our most information-dense sense. It certainly helps when playing City of Heroes, but the study was about office work. Having reference works open while you write seems another obvious use.

Hopefully this will be enough justification for now. It is midnight again!

Age of Conan 1 year

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di090523

Sunset or sunrise for Age of Conan?

The Norwegian-made MMORPG Age of Conan is celebrating its first anniversary in Europe today.  For some reason it was released 3 days earlier in the USA.  Perhaps the Americans were used as guinea pigs…  Anyway, the game had one of the smoothest launches in the history of the genre (possibly less than City of Heroes, but better than the current top dog, World of Warcraft.) And then a  few days later, it all went down the drain.

Unfortunately only the first part of the game had been fully implemented and thoroughly tested.  The island where you play the first 20 levels is indeed an amazing masterpiece of storytelling and technology. After that, things started to fall apart, and the high-level areas were buggy and unfinished.  Lots of customers – most of them, I believe – did not renew their subscription after the first month that comes with the game.  The share value of Funcom fell, and the game was more or less written off by many gamers.

Be very careful about leaving a Cimmerian for dead…

Today, the game is earning a nice little surplus for Funcom, and there are new players trickling in by the day. It would seem that many of those who left, simply did not have the computers that could pull such a high-end game. Every month, a number of them get new computers for unrelated reasons. And thanks to Moore’s Law, the capacity of new computers double every 18 months.  If you had a three and a half year old computers last May – and that is not uncommon for casual gamers, especially if they are married – then by now a computer in the same price range is 8 times as powerful.  That makes a big difference with cutting-edge games.

In addition, Funcom has tweaked the game to run more smoothly.  And they have added content at the higher levels and fixed bugs left and right.  This is not exactly unique:  We say that the first year of any massive online game is “paid beta”.  Experienced gamers don’t expect it to be perfect right out of the box.

The game is still evil, though.  Vile sorcery, necromancy, demon summoning, even breasts. And it still splatters blood on the inside of your computer screen occasionally. Rumors have it that the game is less bloody in the German version, I am not sure if that is true.  But you can at least avoid fighting against other players if you want to (and not only in Germany).

In celebration of their anniversary, I opened my account again (it had expired along with my previous credit card when that was renewed for a few more years).  There were, as expected, hours of patches to download, since it is quite a number of months since last I set foot in Hyboria.

Once the patches were installed, I started the game.  I recognized the problem from last time, that my character was almost entirely transparent, only this time so was the terrain, except water.  I don’t remember it being quite that bad the first time.  I did remember however that back then, I had to pretend to change the video settings, even if I changed them back to the original. When I then returned to the game, the picture was fine.  Well, not this time.

I upgraded the DirectX to the March version, probably the last ever for Windows XP.  Still no luck.  I downloaded the latest drivers for my video card.  Still no difference.  I used Google and browsed a few forums, until I saw someone mention that you had to completely erase any trace of earlier video drivers before you installed a new one.  So I did, first uninstalling the last driver and then deleting all the nvidia folders on my hard disk.  I restarted the machine. Amazingly, it has a pretty good screen resolution even without the drivers, and without knowing what video card it has.  I installed the latest driver again, and restarted the machine.  This time the screen remained black. I waited for some minutes, but it did not change.  Then I checked the back of my computer, and yes: For some reason, the video output now went to the port that no monitor was attached to.  Before, it had gone to the other.  (The card has two, although I don’t use more than one.  It can display different pictures to different screens actually, but I prefer to have two computers for my two monitors, thank you.)

Anyway, the problem was now solved.  And the game does run more smoothly on higher resolution than before. Probably because of tweaks to the software, although I suppose the new video driver could be better too.

Right now I have finished playing, and am listening to a Cimmerian dirge that the game plays when not logged in to any of my characters.  It is awesome.  I believe I heard the same song in a valley in the game.  Anyway, I love dirges and lamentations. They rarely fail to cheer me up.  Perhaps there is still a drop of barbarian blood in me?   (Looking back at my younger days, I think that is not a maybe either, but maybe it is still influencing my taste in music, I mean.)  I know the melodies can be bought on iTunes.  (Or perhaps I should pirate it, given that I already bought the game.)  I wonder how my coworkers would react. I have a feeling that perhaps they don’t like wailing as much as I do… It really is beautiful.

I don’t miss the rest of the game much though.  City of Heroes is more my style, not to mention The Sims 2.  And in less than two weeks Sims 3 is upon us.  Believe it or not, I also have other things than games I want to have done while still alive, so… You probably won’t be seeing a lot of this.  I did secure some nifty screenshots though.

Friday

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I was writing a long gray entry again, but stopped.  It was a long day at the office, files kept coming in during the day and I had to do files for two of my coworkers who were absent. I was home a couple hours later than usual. And there has been the whole work week, with a little less sleep than I should have each night.  Yes, my day is starting to slide again. I have been able to hold it constant for a while, using the Holosync Dive for half an hour or sometimes more in the morning, but lately it is sliding again.  Well, enough about that.  I don’t feel like writing an essay tonight, let that be enough.

In other news, Linux (the freeee operating system) is progressing slowly but surely.  Last year, getting flash content (such as YouTube) to run in Opera under Linux was still hit & miss for me.  This time, I still had to look it up online, but it only took half a minute or so to actually get it to work.  So now I can play my brute in my browser window, although Tsaiko’s brute still flattens me in a moment.

It took me considerably more time to get the ICE (NMT) wireless broadband to work under Xubuntu Linux. I am not sure why, but I never got that to work before, which is why I bought the Vista laptop in the beginning of 2008. Now another Vista machine has been Linuxified. No more worrying about worms, virii, keyloggers and identity theft, all the usual stuff that Windows users have hanging over their neck day by day.  (Of course, I still have to not be a complete bumpkin that clicks on any mail claiming to be from my bank or Ebay politely asking me to enter my data again to avoid my account being closed.  Seriously, some people need to not use computers, or talk to strangers, alone.) Although the computer was more than strong enough to run Vista, so I won’t have that benefit (Linux runs better on older or weaker machines).

Oh, and another glass jar recycled! Wheee!  Just twenty or so left.

Why public libraries?

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di090404

That was perhaps not what he expected her to show him, but even so, there are many good things to see in the library.

No, I am not trying to make an end to them, although I suppose that is what would happen if people started thinking. (Because when people start thinking, they usually stop soon.) Every civilized country has public libraries, even that bastion of capitalism where you are otherwise supposed to earn your own way through life and where copyrights just go on and on for generations after the author’s passing. So why?

“Why” can mean “what was the cause” or “what is the purpose”. For the current libraries, the cause is probably that there have always been libraries, or at least for so long that people have forgotten their purpose. But the purpose certainly seems to be to let people read books for free.

Now there are two ways of reading library books: Either at the library, or you can borrow them home with you. If you borrow them, you have to return them after a few weeks. But there is nothing to stop you from coming to the library every single day and read the same book, unless someone else has got to it first. So clearly the purpose of returning the books is not to limit access to reading, but simply to keep the costs down by letting many people read the same book.

Enter the Internet. I know I have written about this before, but it is so long ago that perhaps I am saying this in a different way. Or at the very least, since then Google has continued to scan millions of books from around the world. But I know I said the same thing then as now: If libraries had been invented now, they would have been forbidden. If we had known the value of reading today as we did when it was new, they would be freely available on the Internet.

Now you may argue that if people can afford Internet access, then they can also afford to buy their own books. This is less and less true for each passing years, as computer and internet access become cheaper and cheater and more and more fundamentally necessary for a normal life – while books become more expensive if anything. But it is also a moot point from the “Internet=library” point of view. In all the years I used public libraries, I never had to present documentation of my poverty. It was probably assumed that if I really loved a book and had the money to buy it, I would.

Certainly this is the assumption of Baen Free Library. In fact, they claim on the very first page that they expect to make money of it, both the publishing house itself and the authors who participate. Ironically, such a transparent self-interest may deter some who would otherwise have acted in sympathy, but it is the more commendable for honesty. As Flint – himself an accomplished writer – says, what author would not be happy to see someone checking his book out of a public library? There may be such cretins, says Flint, but their books probably would get little love from those who got a chance to break them open before buying them.

(Incidentally, the music “pirates” have argued along the same line for years, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. Seriously, how many CDs have you bought without having heard at least one of the tracks beforehand? The notion that radio stations should pay to play music rather than getting paid for it is utterly, clinically insane. It is as if newspapers should pay to print advertisements. Of course, with modern file sharing technology, the advertisement IS the product. A golden age of opportunity has passed for the recording labels. But if the experience of Baen is anything to go by, the recording companies are still shooting themselves in the foot. Or, as a Norwegian commenter put it, shooting their prosthesis, as the foot is shot to pieces long ago.

Then again, perhaps books are different, appealing to the more intellectual in particular. (Although, if you randomly sample a bookstore, it is hard to give credit to that theory.) In any case, if free books in the library are a good thing, then free books on the Internet should also be a good thing. In fact, since most people still find reading paper easier than reading computer screens, people are unlikely to commit the crime of reading books just to taunt the authors or publishers. Their motivations are probably at least as good as (or at least stronger than) the average library visitor.

It is no big surprise that the US government prefers to let Google do the job. But it is rather amusing (in a scornful way) that the social democrat countries of Europe are unwilling to build good public libraries on the Net. Especially if you have a language different from the emerging World Language, your only realistic hope of delaying its death is to throw at your public every word and sentence available in the local tongue. In fact, you should probably pay them to read if you value your national heritage so much.

Anyway, I’ve already mentioned Baen, a pretty limited initiative. I’ll also remind you of Questia which is a partly free and partly paid library, with a particular angle toward students and the academia. But the tidal wave that may eventually absorb the phenomenon of books into the bitstream is Google Book Search. Despite the unassuming name, Google has scanned and stored literally millions of books, some of which can be read in their entirety or even printed out. (Please, think of the trees!)

I can’t say I mind too much that governments make themselves less relevant. The time is drawing near when governments as we know them will come to an end. The next level of consciousness will have no need for such structures, but will cooperate seamlessly like members of one loving family. It will probably not be in my time, more’s the pity. But all things will either change or end, most likely within this century. The age of books is also coming to an end, but not because we throw them away. Rather, they become drawn into the noosphere, and like ourselves they become gradually less physical, less confined in space and time. Our fates are linked, for without the books, our cultural evolution would have been incredibly hard or perhaps even impossible. The world we know, we owe to the book. In some form, it will always be with us, until the end of the world as we know it.

Out of sync and shape

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di090403 I have reason to believe that the word “headdesk” did not exist until the coming of  computer networks…

This morning I decided to skip the Holosync session. After all, I had slept 7 hours, slightly more than I usually did before I even started these experiments. Besides, I was planning to do a 40-minute LifeFlow 10 today, the first of these. The demos have tended to make me more sleepy rather than less, but that would be a concern for the afternoon when I did that brainwave entrainment.

But already on the commute bus to work I became very sleepy and napped for much of the way.  This is something that rarely ever happened even before I started syncing in the morning.  Perhaps if I slept only half the night or if I got up very early. But I was actually half an hour late (thank you, large intestine) and had slept for 7 hours.  Huh.  At work I became sleepy again after lunch, although 10 minutes of focused counting meditation cleared that up.  Still, later in the workday I became sleepy AGAIN and napped for 10-15 minutes.   Either the brain does get used to the morning sync or it has a really good placebo effect!

Still haven’t gotten along to testing the “industrial strength” version of LifeFlow as of 20:10 (8:10 PM DST). This is because of the Linux laptop.  I have used it almost exclusively to play music at work for a good while now, but I can do that with the Vista laptop.  It just isn’t as easy with iTunes as it is with Amarok, the KDE music player. Well, that probably does not tell you much unless you came here by searching for Amarok, KDE, or “Linux music” – and I sincerely hope this entry is many pages down on any of those searches!

Anyway, I don’t play much music anymore. It happens, but it has diminished greatly of late, and more so now that I can directly hack into my brainwaves with low-frequency sound effects. Between this and the speeches of the “researchers” in this area, my “recently played” list looks nothing like its old self.  So I took the old HP pavilion ze5600 with me home finally.

This ties in with my rant about Norton antivirus, last seen in my March 27 entry.   With my relationship to  Symantec back to enemy level (I know it’s been there once before) there is only a firewall between me and an Internet raging with worms.  Unlike viruses, which passively drift along with stuff you download (mail included), worms are actively trying to get into your computer and infect it through any one of the many thousand ports that opens you to the Internet.  The obvious solution is to have a firewall, which closes all these ports (think of them as small holes that worms may worm their way through).  My router does indeed have a great firewall, but… it gets in the way of downloading Japanese cartoons.

I have had neither the time nor the inclination lately to watch such “anime” as it is called.  But this is things that have come and gone in the past, although the fad seems to be slightly weaker each time it returns.  It seems like a reasonable goal to at least complete the series I have begun.  Besides, while it may be technically illegal, I still see it as a valuable cultural exchange that I should encourage. After all, it is not like you could rent these in your video store – or indeed any video store in the western world.  Some of them are even hard to find in Japan anymore.

Anyway, the short of it is that someone needs to run BitTorrent without a firewall, and if that someone is me, the worms don’t die.  This is where Linux comes in.   The small laptop has Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows, which means worms won’t work on it.  The two operating systems may do many of the same things, but they are very different inside.  Worms are all written for Windows, except possibly one or two for Mac.  Linux has simply too many different variants to be worth writing a worm for. It is not that it is impossible, perhaps not even harder than for Windows, but you will only infect a few machines, and then they change again.   So, by putting my Linux laptop on the network, I can download and upload anime without getting worms.

Of course, first I had to get the machine home. It is just a laptop, and I carried it in a suitable box along with cables and such.  It was not really heavy, but it still felt heavy after I had carried it long enough.  (I walk about 15 minutes from work to the bus station, and around 10 minutes from the bus stop home.)  My arms are ridiculously weaker than my legs now after I have not trained with the bow since I moved here, or years anyway.  I really should starting carrying a box with a laptop to work and back every day, except it would look kind of weird in the long run.

Connecting the laptop to the Internet was a snap, literally. I just snapped into place the network cable that I had once used for the Dell laptop.  (Unfortunately I never managed to get the Dell to run Ubuntu or Xubuntu, and then it kind of died. Or at least its screen did.)

Connecting to the home network, however, was surprisingly difficult.  I know I have done it before with an earlier laptop.  And the Ubuntu installation on Trine the tri-core computer accesses the network without a second thought.  But the laptop simply could not open the network named “ITLAND”, although it managed to see that it was there.  (It also saw a network named “WORKGROUP” that is the default Windows network, I believe, but that I thought I had removed.  This cannot be opened either.

I manage to set up access to one shared folder by using another alternative (Linux is big on alternatives). I used the choice “Connect to server” and gave the internal IP adress for the computer where my anime is stored, and the folder name on the network.  So I got around it that way.  I was also able to connect to part of the network for a while by running the network wizard on the Windows XP machine again with the same network name as originally and no other changes.  But it faded after a while, for unknown reasons.  I will probably continue to hack on it from time to time, but the temporary solution is good enough for what I wanted to do right away,  get more episodes of Astro Fighter Sunred, an old parody on the Japanese version of super heroes.

Why do I have to hack and rig these things anyway?  I should be able to rent the anime I want to see directly from the Japanese company that holds the copyright, and stream it directly to my computer using safe, reliable components of the world’s leading operating system.  There should be no need to hack, fudge, jury-rig or improvise, rely on the kindness of strangers and tiptoe on the shady side of the law.  Come the revolution, this is all going to change! But for now, Linux is the most revolutionary we have. And it gets the job done, with a little help from the Google.

Return of the snow

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di090326

So yesterday it snowed again, almost like winter. It is not winter though, it is white spring.  Today the snow plow was even here and made the scenery you see above.  It may still grow colder again, but for now the temperature stays above freezing almost all the time, so even if there comes some new snow now and again, it starts melting almost at once. It is like nature cannot really decide.

I feel a bit like that too.  I am a bit between fads, I think, so I don’t really know what will interest me tomorrow, if anything.

I uninstalled the Norton virus scan from my computer today and installed good old free Clamwin instead. Norton 360 is cool in that it actively catches worms and viruses if you are online without a firewall.  Which is the best way to be online, except for the worms and viruses, and especially if you are downloading fansubbed Japanese animated TV series that you don’t have time to watch anyawy. But it has its price.

I had Norton 360 for a year, even though it was kind of pricey.  I was even going to renew it, because I am lazy and money is not really a problem for a Norwegian, even of the barely lower middle class.  For a day the updater tried in vain to contact the server, or so it looked.  Eventually I started to suspect something, namely that it was trying to launch a website.  I changed default web browser to Internet Explorer instead of Opera, and it worked. Unfortunately, that was not a very reassuring trait, my antivirus program being unable to anticipate that I had another browser than the number one virus magnet on the planet. So it was only by a supreme effort of laziness that I continued the process. I filled in various information, including my credit card info, and sent it off.  The program chewed on it for a while, then told me that I had to try again later.  I tried a couple times, then waited a day or two.  When I tried again, the program came up with the same renewal screen – except the price was raised by about 40%.  Had I just happened to try to renew on the day they were re-pricing the product (and why would they do that anyway?) or had I showed so much commitment to them that they felt sure I would buy even at a much higher price?  We will never know, because I deleted Norton 360 from my computer.

I kept the free Norton scan, however.  It ran today, on its own.  A nice gesture. It found the usual cookies and stuff that I am better off having than not having, plus two viruses. These were in the browser cache, and since I had switched back to Opera they were harmless. (The viruses are written for Internet Explorer, remember?)  The program did not know this however and tried to seize its advantage by telling me that if I wanted to get rid of the viruses,  I would have to buy Norton 360.  Like fornication I will!  Norton virus scan deleted. If it is one thing that sets my teeth on edge, it is being treated like an idiot.  (Which makes sense once you know that where I come from, idiots are locked in a small room in the attic indefinitely, remember?)  Well, I’m not locked in by Norton anymore and hopefully I will find this entry the next time I am tempted to have any business with Symantec.  I tend to have vague memories of trivial things like this, and Google Desktop should do the rest.

I got new earphones recently too, but I can photograph them another day. This should be enough to convince you that I lived today too, always a bonus gift at my age.

Amazingly lazy

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di090302

I installed Word and OneNote from my Office Home and Student 2007 pack. This is already my third and last installation, as it is already installed on two dead computers. (Well, one of them is not melted down, but the power supply got lost during the move at work 15 months ago.) Now, why would I install it when there is so much great freeware?

“Because I can” is always a good answer, but in this case it was because I had set up OpenOffice to write in Japanese, and I can’t be bothered to switch back and forth between the two languages. That’s how lazy I am.

As for OneNote, I haven’t really missed it since I discovered Google Notebook. Well, until some days ago when I found that Google has discontinued Notebook in January. What, guys? It was awesome. Like OneNote, it let me just mark something worthwhile in a webpage and ”Note” it, and it would paste it in my current notebook with a link to the place I found it, and the title of the webpage. I had a bunch of small notebooks, mostly on various scientific topics. I still have them, since Google has not deleted the database. They have just disabled the Note function, so if I want to continue adding clips, I will have to separately copy the link and the title and paste them along with the text. And I can’t be bothered to do that. That’s how lazy I am.

But if this computer too comes to an end, then it is not obvious that I will run to the shop and buy another MS Office. After all, I may not be bored enough to do that, especially now that my workplace is on the other side of town from the computer shops. Besides, it costs money, which I have worked for. Lazy people have a healthy respect for work (and go to great lengths to minimize it). So next time, perhaps I’ll just sign up for Evernote.com instead. That’s how lazy I am.