Christmas Eve

Normally I would be posting about some great new gadget I got or something that I really hate, but not this time. I don't have anything new to report at this point in time. I am just burning some nervous energy, because its Christmas eve and I typically don't sleep well anyways. I'm just downloading some Leo Laporte podcasts on my iBook, which I posted about a few days ago. Tomorrow morning I hope to get some new device full of circuits and covered in buttons, but I don't really expect anything. That is fairly unusual for me, not expecting anything I mean. I didn't specifically ask for anything, but I guess somewhere I had a list. If I get something cool other than T-shirts in the winter, I would love to make an unboxing video of it. I have never actually made one of those videos before and it sounds like fun. Well, its back to iTunes for me.

Empire Earth (the original)

Halo 3 has gotten really old. Last Year about December it was a Christmas present. I have played it so much I am really sick and tired of it. So I decided to dust off my copy of Empire Earth. I bought it during the spring on eBay along with its expansion pack, The Art of Conquest. The boxed set is called Empire Earth Gold Edition. I introduced a friend of mine to the game. He seems to like it well enough. The graphic detail is not bad for a game made in 2003. In fact the game seemed popular enough that Sierra Entertainment made a Empire Earth 2 and 3. I haven't played either of those however. Empire Earth features a vast array of units, buildings, and heroes spanning 15 different ages. I personally like the space age the best, because it has the most units and seems to play out the quickest. The stone age takes forever to build up a sizable force, and by the time you do the enemy seems to build some towers which are way to powerful and nearly impossible to destroy and easily decimate any army you bring. The middles ages are somewhat better, because you finally get access to some siege weapons and cannons. In the space age you can choose to fight in the air, over land, floating in water, or in the vacuum of space.
If this sounds like fun to you, try and find yourself a copy online, or maybe just buy one of the newer versions of the game.

Google Chrome

Recently I downloaded the Google Chrome web browser. A few months ago I used a beta version of the browser. Not much has changed since the beta, at least not anything that I could notice. The browser first struck me as being almost Mac like. It has a very clean interface. No file menu and very few buttons make the interface uncluttered and slick looking. You can have your home page be a page that contains previews of your most visited websites and all of your other bookmarks. The page is not unlike the speed dial page in Opera. In Chrome you can drag your tabs out of the browser and into blank space on the desktop to create a new window out of that tab. One thing I notice about it is the fact there is no search bar to the right of the address bar. Instead you search by typing your query into the address bar. It has a few issues that I have noticed, such as flash videos occasionally fail to load. While editing my blog colors in Chrome I noticed that the preview of the colors would not refresh, so I couldn't see what the page would look like with my new colors. I would love to see Chrome work well as Firefox someday. I recommend Chrome if you are fed up with Internet Explorers error and security flaws, or you just want an overall simpler web browsing experience. You can download Chrome at www.google.com/chrome.

Apple iBook G4

I've always been a PC user. A few years ago a friend inroduced me to Linux, but I never really liked using it. Now the same friend loaned me an iBook G4. Its not particularly powerful, but it works just fine for everyday web browsing and email tasks. The Macintosh interface is very simple and easy to use. Sometimes I wish it had a right click button though. Having to press CRTL and click to bring up a context menu is somewhat annoying. Software installation is quite easy. Download the file, double click the file, and drag to the applications folder. The operating system itself appears to be quite stable as well. The hardware is also simple yet elegant. The bottom of the laptop is one solid piece except for the battery. There are no stickers, vents, or panels that clutter up the bottom.  Overall the Macintosh platform is pretty nice. Its definately not a power user's platform. However if you are looking for a stable, easy to use computer, I would suggest a Mac. Just remember, that you will have to look for software that will work on the Mac if you want to do more than check email and browse the web.

Solving problems to create bigger ones

I solve computer problems all the time. Normally when I solve problems, things are supposed to work. However this was not the result in the case of "The day before Thanksgiving server crash". I was getting ready to leave school and go home for my extended weekend, when the server crashed. I place the blame on Symantec for causing this problem. It all started with a computer in the lab that had a registry problem. I decided that I was going to Ghost the machine. I began a ghostcast from the server, but for some reason the client would not recieve from the server. I began to think that Symantec Endpoint Protection was blocking the application. I decided to disable it, but still ghost would not work. I began to uninstall Endpoint, when I discoved that I needed to use the "directed broadcast" option instead of the "multicast" option. I finished the ghostcast but the Endpoint uninstaller was locked up. So I restarted the server, and when it began to boot Windows, a "ntldr is missing" error presented itself. The server 2008 disk does not have a recovery console, so I decided that the only option was to reformat and start from scratch. About 6 hours later we had reinstalled server 2008, reconfigured DNS, DHCP, WSUS, Active Directory, Routing and Remote Access, and File Serving. Unfortunately we still have to reconnect about 30 computers back to the domain.
I love to work with computers normally, but after spending the rest of my day fixing stupid server problems, I didnt really want to look at any more computers. Why can't technology just work? Where is the self repairing technology?
I dont recommend Symantec Endpoint Protection to anyone.

Bye bye Mcafee Security Suite

I have been using the Mcafee internet security suite for about a year. I think that overall is a user friendly piece of software, it is not great for power users like myself. Its virus detection and removal rates are not as good as other antivirus programs. I also experienced on several occasions a random "your computer is not protected" in which the programs firewall and anti-virus components had shut off. Clicking the fix button always turned them back on, but I never could figures out why they did that. I'm not the only one to have that happen. My friend tells me that his Mcafee randomly turns off on him too. Additionally the user interface is great for novices, however I had a difficult time navigating the programs over-simplified menu system.
This year I will be switching all the computers in my house over to Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. I already have it installed on my computer and I am currently evaluating it so that I can get used to it. Later I will write a post with more details on Kaspersky and my experience with it.

Dual monitors

For about two months I have been using dual monitors and I have to say that it is great. Most of the time I have a web page open on the left and my email, Skype, or a document open on the right. Studies show that using two monitors increase productivity by an average of 50%. That's quite a margin. I feel like it helps me to do things quicker like writing a paper because I can have a webpage open and read it while having my paper open and typing into it.
However there are drawbacks to a dual monitor setup. Gaming on dual monitors is practically worthless. For starters a lot of games will not support it. Next you will need a powerful graphics card to run the game on both monitors with any sort of decent framerate. Lastly first person shooter games look stupid because the gap between the edges of the screens is in the middle of your view. This is extremely irritating to look at, not to mention difficult to play with. Its like walking around holding your hand in front of your face edgewise from your nose. Sure you can see everything thing, but you have to think about what you are looking at.
All in all dual monitors are great, but you will have to disable one when you fire up a game.

yahoo pops is dead but...

For the longest time I have been a yahoo mail user. i don't particularly like yahoo, but I've had it for so long its hard to get rid of. I hate using webmail because thats a pain especially if you have more than one email account. So I use Mozilla thunderbird and yPops to receive my yahoo mail into my inbox (for free!). If you want official yahoo pop3 support you have to pay.
For the last couple of months I have not been able to receive my yahoo mail because yahoo updated something that causes yahoo pops not to work. Today I was browsing the internet for a solution to my problem and a came across an extension for Mozilla Thunderbird called Webmail. Apparntly you can recieve emails from yahoo, hotmail, lycos, and many other popular webmail services. It was fairly easy to setup and now I can receive my yahoo mail into my thunderbird inbox. Now the next thing to try is hotmail.

Maple story private servers

Lately I have been getting back into maplestory by playing on private servers. I quit playing Maplestory because training my character on Nexon's servers was slow and boring. But when I found out how easy it was to play on a private server, I signed up right away. The server I am currently playing on has 500x experience so leveling up is a breeze. It also has the benefit of being less populated than the official server, so less kill stealing and generally less lag. Playing on private servers seems pretty fun so, my new goal is to create my own private server for personal use. However there are a few problems at the moment. The developers of the OdinMs source are currently in a legal suit with Nexon at the time. Getting the source code may be a problem. Another problem may be finding out how to set up the stupid server properly. Oh well, If I cant make my own server I'll just stick to playing on them.

Power supply exploding

Today at work i was working on a computer that required me to install a copy of windows xp on it. I plugged it in and then went to turn it on and realized that I had forgotten to flip the switch. I reached back to the power supply, and when a flipped the switch, a loud bang and a big flash followed by a cloud of smoke came out of the power supply. Fortunately the computer was not damaged, although the power supply is going to be RMA'ed. The power supply was an Enermax noise taker 420 watt. For the rest of the day I was hesitant to touch any power buttons for fear of getting zappped.

Portal

I got an awesome game called portal. If you haven't played it you should. Anyways, after playing the game for about an hour it started to crash on me. I thought at first that it was just a bad file or something, so I reinstalled the game. After crashing on me several more times after that, i decided to check my video card temperatures( I have an Nvidia 7600gt). After running the game my temps were about 65 deg. C. That seemed pretty hot to me and that seemed to be why the game was crashing after playing for a while. It never crashed right away if my computer had just been sitting, but if I had played it for a while and got my graphics processor hot, then it would crash. So I went into my Nvidia control panel and made some tweaks to my GPU fan speed settings. Now when portal runs the fan on my video card spins 50% faster than normal. I will have to play for a while and see if this change keeps my game stable and running.

Sad face: xbox headset mod doesnt work

It was all good in theory, but after I soldered the 3.5mm mini jack connectors onto the wires for the headset and plugged it in all that anyone heard was static. I asked my friend over Skype to listen to his xbox headset over xbox live and tell me what he heard. he said static and gurgling noises. When I tried to record a message on xbox live all that played back when I previewed my message was static and gurgling noises. :(
Oh well.

thinking of upgrades

I was at frys electronics today and I saw a whole bunch of things that I could put into my computer as upgrades. I wanted a new headset, an x-fi sound card, a new power supply, a 9600 gt video card, a video capture card, a bigger hard drive, and windows vista. But now that i think about that, isnt that list a processor and a motheroard short of a new computer? why upgrade when I could just build new.
Since the hardware companies are always releasing new stuff, where does this upgrade cycle end? By the time you buy it its already outdated.

xbox 360 headset mod

I am working on a design for an xbox 360 headset plug that I can use to connect my 360 headset to my computer's mic and speakers. I want to do this because I use my computer to output the sound for the 360. I thought it would be nice to use the same headset for the computer and the xbox. This way I wouldnt have to put on the goofy xbox headset on top of my computer headset just to talk to people on xbox live.
I thought that I could strip the wires off of the xbox headset and instead of having a speaker and microphone, I could replace them with 3.5mm jacks so that I could plug it into my computers front audio ports. I'm not exactly sure if this would work, but I cant really think of another way. If I am imagining this correctly I think that the microphone lead from the xbox headset would need to plug into the speaker jack on my computer, so that when I talk into my comp. headset it outputs to the microphone of the xbox. Right?
I'll probably start within the next week or so and then I will see how it goes.

new blog

just got this blog. w/e. i have nothing to post about at this moment but I will keep you updated.