SpaceRodent

First of let me say that Netflix streaming is awesome. I have XBOX Live Gold so I can use my 360 to watch it on my TV. My wife and I have been watching Murder, She Wrote. I love mysteries and the lead character, J.B. Fletcher, is like a female version of Sherlock Holmes.

It’s nice to see a program with older people in it. Seems that all the TV lately is all about the young people. It’s also great to see a world with no internet or cell phones.

Personally after watching a few episodes I figured the F.B.I. would hunt her down as being a serial killer since everywhere she goes someone dies and she “solves” the crime:)

I have been playing Wolfenstein for the 360 for the last week and was having a good time until all of a sudden whenever I loaded a save game past my last one the game would completely lockup and I would have to power cycle the 360. Some googling revealed this is a known problem if you get more than 80% of the items in the game. Being a completion-ist I hit it the 80% mark pretty quickly. So now my options are to:

1. Wait for a patch
2. Start a new game and don’t collect that many items

I have decided to wait and hopefully it gets fixed soon. It’s a wonder how this made it past the Q&A process.

I have been an iPhone user since February when I got the 8GB 3G model. I love it. I call it my tricorder. It has everything a geek on the go needs. I have about nine screens of applications and games.

A lot of my friends also have iPhones and most of theirs are jail broken and run the Cydia app store. I thought maybe I was missing out so I decided to take the plunge and jail break my phone.

There is a lot of documentation out there and I was a little nervous about doing it. I wanted to be sure I had the latest and most up-to-date information.

A Google query here and there revealed two primary methods. Every time I searched for “iphone unlock” ads for automaticiphoneunlocker.com were shown. Its looked good. I pay $29.99 and download a piece of software that does all the work for me.

Well there is a sucker born every minute and it was my time to be the sucker.

I paid the $29.99 and instead of getting a piece of software that does it automatically I got instructions and multiple downloads that pretty much mimicked everything else out there. Now the instructions were so detailed even a noob could follow them but still it was not automatic.

I had to follow this complicated 20 plus step process that involved wiping my phone and deleting everything on it. (I had backups so I wasn’t worried).

The whole process took about 30 minutes quite a bit longer than the five minutes the ad promised.

Okay so my phone was now unlocked and I had this Cydia app store icon – now what? Well that was the end of the instructions. At this point I had to do more googling and reading up on Cydia to see what exactly I could do with it.

In a nutshell its Debian apt-get with a nice front end similar to Synaptic on Ubuntu.

Okay what to install? Well more googling revealed something called winterboard which is a theme manager. From there I installed some different themes and a category application.

All of a sudden it was 1997 again and I was playing with Enlightenment (an awesome window manager for X). For its time there was nothing cooler. Gnome and KDE were babies and if you wanted something “cool” you ran it.

I was back in that mindset. What looks cool. Oh a neat clock. New icons! Look at that awesome wallpaper.

After about an hour playing with the themes and Cydia I realized that one of the reasons I love Apple computers and the iPhone so much is it just works (and it looks good in its own right too).

I have long since given up making my desktop and windows look “cool”. I am firmly in the function over form camp now.

I don’t want to tweak my phone endlessly. I don’t want to worry about upgrades breaking everything. I didn’t want to be cool; I just wanted an iPhone.

So I un-unlocked my phone.

M*A*S*H is my favorite TV series of all time and I typically watch the entire series at least a couple of times a year. One of the things that took me a while to notice was how well the DVD menus are. Each season has a different look and most incorporate scenes from the episodes in the episode sub menu. Fonts are different, they sometimes wrap to scene elements and in one case they are backwards.

I am including a couple of screen shots to make my point.

Here we see the menu tacked onto the ring and it almost looks like it should be there

The topic for the episode, exchanging red for blue, is used as the menu. I like how they used both colors.

This one is my favorite. In this episode Radar tries his hand at writing. I love how the font is backwards.

It seems to me this was the promise of DVD but very few movies and TV series really make use of the available media to make each disc unique.

I finished Shadow Complex last night. For those of you who don’t know Shadow Complex is a 2D Platformer in 3D that uses the Unreal Engine. It’s for the Xbox 360 and available via Xbox Live Arcade. It took me about 10 hours to finish it over three days on normal level.

This is the only game I can remember in a long time that as soon as I finished it I wanted to play it again! Luckily the game rewards this. When you start another game you continue at the level you finished at.

For my second play through I am playing on hardcore level. I am also striving for 100% completion. I had 68% completion on my first play through.

The game costs 1200 points which is about $15. The download size is 800MB. I guess the original 200MB limit is no more.

So if you have a Xbox 360 do yourself a favor and play this game!

My Favorite Machintosh Applications. In no particular order.

• Witch

  The task switcher that should have come with OSX.
  
  http://www.manytricks.com/witch/

• Path Finder

  Norton Commander for the modern age.
  
  http://www.cocoatech.com/

• Transmit/Candybar/Coda/Unison

  File transfer (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3), Icon management, Web development, News reader.
  
  http://www.panic.com/

• Adium

  Multiple IM provider.
  
  http://adium.im/

• OmniGraffle Professional

  Visio done right.
  
  http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

• Yojimbo

  Data management. Passwords, Notes, URLs – all at your finger tips.
  
  http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

• MacPorts

  Source based package managment system for OSX. Bringing a huge variety of UNIX/LINUX applications to the Mac.
  
  http://www.macports.org/

• Versions

  A beautiful Subversion client.
  
  http://versionsapp.com/

• VoodooPad Pro

  Personal Wiki with the ability to share on the network.
  
  http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/voodoopadpro.html

• Acorn

  Photoshop-lite.
  
  http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

• Scrivener

  Great note taking and thought organization. Virtual index cards.
  
  http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

• Snak

  IRC Client.
  
  http://www.snak.com/

• Marsedit

  Blog posting. I wrote this post in it.
  
  http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

• Disco

  Simple, fun CD burning.
  
  http://www.discoapp.com/

Well I did it. I quit Facebook today. Some of reasons are trite and some are well reasoned.

Let me first say that I like all my friends and love to hang out with them in the real world. Being connected to them on Facebook wasn’t really real to me. I didn’t feel any closer to them. I didn’t feel like I didn’t need to see them because we are connected on Facebook.

I also didn’t really care what they were doing. Don’t get me wrong I like my friends and am glad I have them but I don’t really want to know the minutia of their lives. When I finally do see them or talk to them there is nothing to say because I know everything!

From my perspective most folks were more interested in playing Mafia Wars and other games like it, taking quizzes or promoting their latest cause.

Things I am interested in:

• Marriages
• Divorces
• New Babies
• New Jobs
• New addresses, phone numbers and email addresses

Other than the list above; I just don’t care. Facebook did give me the above information but lost in a sea of crap.

Some of you might call me a hypocrite because I have a blog and I can accept that however I blog for myself; not caring if anyone else reads it. I think of my blog as a journal or diary. Something to look back on in the future and reflect.

Finally I am not saying Facebook is bad for everyone – just bad for me.

Today marked the third time I attempted to use the Facebook iPhone app to comment on someone else’s status only to have it fail due to an error and loose my comment.

Golden rule: Don’t lose data!

So I deleted it today. Not worth putting energy into it only to see it flushed. At the very least it should keep the comment around in some sort of draft state so it can be dealt with later but to just lose it is ridiculous.

I am very close to closing my Facebook account anyway since I get no value out of it at all. Zero.

I upgraded my Windows Vista Ultimate game system to Windows 7 Ultimate this weekend. Overall the system feels faster and I like the new taskbar. I really like the “snaps” feature that allows you easily tile two windows together.

What I didn’t like was they took away the Aurora screen saver – it was my favorite of any platform. Luckily I found it online.

My CPU doesn’t support hardware virtulization so I can’t run XP mode; oh well.

The upgrade took about four hours.

I have a Brother laser printer and it recently quit working. I tried everything I could but it just would not print. It was also just a week outside the one year warranty so I thought I was screwed.

I avoided calling tech. support because I have never had luck with it. I am a Linux System Administrator and self-confessed geek. I can certainly fix my own stuff! (XBOX 360 RROD not withstanding).

Well I am working from home today and finally decided to call and go through the process. I had too because I was considering buying another printer and wanted to make sure I explored all my options.

So I call and was talking to a human at Brother in about three minutes after telling the computer what model I had.

The nice lady had me turn off my firewall and print out the general settings. She asked me about one line on the sheet and I told her what it said. She then instructed me to the printer and changed that one setting.

All of a sudden my printer came to life spitting out test documents I had been throwing at it for the last hour.

Turns out somehow my printer got set to only listen to print requests on the parallel port and ignore the others. She just had me set it back to AUTO and all was well.

Total call time: seven minutes.

So not only am I relieved that my printer is working and I don’t have to buy another one but I am really happy I had such a great tech. support experience with Brother; makes me glad I chose them.

So sometimes the old dog can learn new tricks and sometimes tech. support can come through.

Tech Support: 1, Me: 0.