Planet GP2X

open2x: Open2x DR7

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:17:06 +0000

This has been out for ages, but nobody ever posted about it on the front page! Now supports F200 and many other new features and best of all it is available to download for all!See here for more information:http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/47311-open2x-dr7-for-f100-and-f200/

Skeezix: BLOG HAS MOVED!

Sat, 09 May 2009 03:07:20 +0000

I expect this will be the final post using this particular blog location. Please re-bookmark the new location:

http://www.rjmitchell.ca/~jeff/blog2009

Skeezix: Rant: Radio -- wheres the music?

Wed, 06 May 2009 15:07:21 +0000

I know I know -- picking on radio is not a difficult task. Like kicking a tree (easy target, since we don't talk about kicking people when they're down anymore.) Radio has its faults but I still enjoy it, and its vague sense of community and spirit.

I imagine most (or a significant portion of) radio listening is during rush-hour .. the morning and evening commuter cycle. Further, I assume (perhaps incorrectly?) that most people tune into the radio for some music. It may be that people tune in for entertainment of any kind but at least for me - some days I might enjoy a good raunchy morning show, while others I just want some good music. And since I'm commuting while chauffeuring around my beautiful baby girl I'd like to be able to find fun simple family or rock, and have the option to fine The Heavy for my return trip from the sitters.

The trouble is -- during the morning commute, there is _only_ talk radio. Roll through a dozen stations and you get only talk or commercials, never music, for an hour or more there. I don't get it. So the radio is simply not an option .. my little one is not interested in listening to people gab, she wants some Rafi or some Reggae (no joke.)

Sillyness. So either everyone else really wants talk radio or..... wtf?

Skeezix: Quotes: One from the Velveteen Rabbit

Sun, 03 May 2009 02:07:10 +0000

The rocking horse said..

"When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you've become Real."

Skeezix: Entertainment: Got me an Xbox, woowoo!

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:07:35 +0000

I've generally been a pretty low stress sort of fella.. things come at me and I've rolled with them, or just gotten my head down and survived hard or tedious things without freaking out. Its one of my super powers - Everyone has a super power, just that most people's power is being an idiot :) Alas, more often the last couple of years I've had my stress-outs - which is just not my style - but such is life right now. Hopefully I can return to form this year .. lose a bit of weight and if not relax, at least be cool.

My wife, bless her heart, allowed me persuade her to get us an Xbox for my birthday. ("Don't worry about my birthday this year.. we're too busy and I have pretty much all that I want", "You can get an Xbox" "Oh, this birthday is very important, we absolutely must get something.. Xbox you say?" ) She's not much of a gamer (though does adore her DS on occasion), so this is more a gift of compassion.. help for my ailing creeky old soul maybe more than its technical merits (rent movies direct to it, etc). She knows I've been a bit of a wreck of late, and this might help.

Also she knows I'm not one for relaxing too too much -- I love a lot of things, but I tend to just 'work' instead or even when into entertainments, I'll try to over-do them -- with free time so tight, trying to max what you get done in your moments is just a new way of stressing. I've often joked the ultimate gaming is software development itself since I enjoy it so much -- the fact of it is that I barely know how to relax, since my 'entertainment' is really a form of work. I guess its the same as people bringing their work home. I enjoy rolling up my sleeves and digging into writing a new game or handheld app.. wtf?! More though -- we all know the distractions the Net can offer, so when I'm working away on some code for this or that when I should be relaxing, its easy to just waste away the time.. so maybe with an Xbox I can learn to relax a bit, kick back with a rum and coke and play a game while sitting on the couch. Or maybe watch a show or DVD or movie without alt-tabbing to email every 10 seconds. Cool. Awesome. (In the evenings.. during the day if I get a moment, I'm going to sit on the back porch, damnit!)

So with all of these and many more over-thought factors, I've wanted an Xbox despite having a capable enough PC, despite half the XBox 360's library being available on PC, and despitehalf the 360's games being arguable better on the PC. (Games that are better played with a mouse, such as an FPS shooter, say.) Well, that and pure gadget lust of course.. the 360 can drive an HD TV, and its a new toy!

The Cons to the gadget-lust of course are the price of the machines -- not cheap, especially during this economy, and the apparent risk in the production values. And the fact that the games are so utterly good looking that they're destroying my interest in building games .. no way I can keep up with those production values! Anyway, if you listen to those on the Net you'd assume that its on the order of 50-100% of them failing within a month of purchase. Of course, most of us just realize this is the usual Net BS -- the grit in the system is most felt.

But it turns out, the production issues of the 360 and the bitching online is much deserved! But despite the scratched disks, the red-ring of deaths and other curious failures, people come back. The content is that compelling.

The purchase and install: So I went to a local store with a relatively easy return policy (a little wary at this point, but not much) and picked up the current 2-game bundle. Got it home, set it up and ignored it for a day until it was my turn for a 'night off' and set to playing. Noticed some curious sparklies in the TV display (and took a couple pictures for proof), and got pissed as hell. (I mean, we got this machine for the de-stress right?) Still, as a good friend of mine in IRC instructed, there was no need to get so PO'd and the store was quick to swap me another machine. (I read later that the issue was likely related to the 1080p resolution I was having it drive - I've a pretty respectible TV so I bloody well wanted 1080p. Apparently there are a number of issues that many 360's can't handle well at 1080p, but were I to drive it at a lower bandwidth output I'd not have had _that_ issue. But no way I'm laying down that amount of cash with a defective unit day zero, right?) This was an "older model" unit - I learned later about the many various internal improvements Microsoft has done over time, and how to pick them out in the field. The older ones run hot and have louder DVD drives, and tend to fail a lot more.... so just as well I had it fail first hour, rather than blow up in another more serious way down the road and get me into the refurbish cycle of hell.

Anyway, upon returning to the point of purchase the next day I found it highly odd that the EBGames (a variant of Gamestop for Canada) fellow gave me a naked 360 unit as my 'new replacement.' "The box is pretty beat it, I just picked it out for you." I mean, if the box was so badly beaten up then may I don't want that one for my replacement unit, but more to point .. with GameStop's well known 'switcheroo' issues, I don't want a naked unit. But whatever, by this time I was resigned to expecting it to also be bad and I was ready to come back for XBox #3. By this time I was mighty good at hooking the unit up and trying various cables to test, so it took only moments for me to hook up and find out Xbox #2 was flaky in a similar way -- it would not even do 1080p at all, just blank out in that mode. Peachy! Perhaps I could've settled with 720p like perhaps most users are, but again.. no way I wanted to settle on sub-par on a brand new purchase.

I did find out one could go to a different EBGames outlet with returns so headed to a more convenient location that was bursting at the seams with fresh new units.. and by new I mean in sealed boxes without damage and the latest system revision (running quieter and cooler I'm told, and with better overall reliability.) XBox #3 turned out to be the one, and has worked perfectly for a week or so now.

The lads I spoke with did suggest they'd seen a very high (30% or more) return rate on some models of the XBox, so the Net moaning is quite possibly well deserved. Or maybe I had been getting screwed by GameStop trickery, them playing the odds I would be happy with a used or screwy unit and didn't have a 1080p TV? *shrug* Who knows. (I do like EBGames .. usually a pleasant experience, as far as game stores go.)

The Content -- so, with all that really really annoying shenanigans out of the way, that I'd not have put up with normally -- the XBox 360 is amazing kit, if a little loud when the drive is spinning. (You can copy games to the hard drive if you have one, to make that moot. And to mitigate the risk of scratching your disks, that people talk about.. *sigh*)

XBox Live Marketplace, where you can get free or rental or purchase video, previews, games and downloadable content is fantastic. As usual we Canadians get the shaft so theres not much in the way of Hollywood movies up, but theres some. Still, theres a fair assortment of indie video (The Guild, *laugh*) and a huge variety of Xbox Live Arcade games, including demos and 'downloadable content updates' for games, free to nab. Pick a game, queue up a download, and go play or watch or something and it'll happily suck down the queue in background. Theres retro titles and redone retro (Pacman and new competitive Pacman, for instance) and quite a pile of great quality new games. *Really* impressive for gamer noobs like me.

The actual on-disc purchased games.. again, while existing in overlap with PC gaming, there is still quite a bit of really good stuff. I'm playing with Fable 2 now.. simply gorgeous and pretty cool.

I do find it very odd that a couple of games I've looked into have weird "family bullshit", that I can't help assume is poached from Sims or some shit. I used to be a bit of a hardcore gamer (more a hardcore gamer wannabee as I went back to my compiler), and I just can't take this stuff seriously. When I found out in Fable 2 you could get your character and go pick of game characters (NPCs, not real humans) for dates, sex, etc, have kids, buy a house or rent them out, and that you should 'go to work' (minigames) to get cash .. I was more than a little W-T-F. I go to work and have a family in RL, I don't need that stress in-game, thanks :) But fine you can mostly ignore this stuff without losing some pieces of the game.. but _seriously._

A few days later, I found out you can do similar stuff in GTA IV, which is really just about loose driving around a city and causing mayhem. Getting on your in-game cellphone to call people and arrange dates... .... .....

I'm told again that perhaps this is just in these two games, two very high profile Xbox 360 games, but still. *BLEH*

In summary -- all told, I'm pretty damned impressed. Wireless controllers with remote on/off is way cool for flopping on the couch. It seems a capable machine graphicly, and the library of both Live Arcade and real store purchases seems fantastic. Accessory options seem good -- with a baby sleeping upstairs I was curious if there was a wireless headphone set (not a headset for gabbing with 12 year olds) and sure enough, and even pretty cheap. So now I can nerd out on the couch with my wireless headphones and controllers and chill a little bit without disturbing anyone. Cool bones.

Aside -- For a long long time I've been saying that things will get to be 'good enough' for the average consumer soon. Its been a long time coming for video card technology, but audio seems to be a much simpler thing. We got "good enough" in the Sound Blaster 16 days imho, so nowadays a good enough audio solution in a computer is pennies. Video is still expensive as heck (couple hundred for a 'good' video card for a PC), but we're getting there. With the current console generation (PS3 and 360) we've got HD consoles in the home, and the graphics are pretty damned good. Maybe this generatoin or next will be 'good enough' that people will not need to upgrade much.. except of course for the artificial stuff, when the company retires its machines and makes new content only for the new one. I just hope the XBox 360 lasts another 5 years... we're not buying another console for quite awhile.

Skeezix: Cygwin: Using console Emacs in cygwin under Windows XP

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:07:12 +0000

On occasion I install cygwin on a Windows box so I can do some text processing with perl or other mundane tasks. (Usually I keep a VM with a full Unix distribution, be it Linux or FreeBSD on a USB keychain or on the disk.. but Cygwin can be handy, not to mention they've got an XServer and other crazy stuff working very nicely in Windows :)

One thing that always gets on my nerves is that regular Emacs doesn't seem to work quite eight .. more to point, I can't seem to quit it using the usual Emacs sequence of C-x C-c. Instead I've been using Xemacs, and being careful to launch it to background so it doesn't mucker things up. Rather annoying, if the tinest of things.

Turns out you can just add a Windows env var "CYGWIN" with value "tty" to clue Cygwin into working correctly; Emacs can be exited and works as expected. Apparently the issue is Windows is capturing C-x and buggering things up.

(Perhaps this is a well known thing to the Cygwin hardcore, but I don't frequent the message boards or mailing lists for it.)

Skeezix: PhoneSpam: I must admit a certain joy..

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:07:23 +0000

.. in mistreating these fellows. I used to just be nice to them as people are hard up and need work. But after they so often crossed the line or border-lined on harassment I've started to treat them as they deserve - Nothing in the decent persons code of conduct 2009 requires support of their broken business model or to condone their lack of ethics. The more we answer and deal with these people, the more we validate the mode of operation. (The actual guy on the phone, I know, you get your paycheque; but the guy who runs the company, how do you sleep at night? And how do you treat the telemusketeers who call your house?) Anyway, todays ever so slight amusement has provided a specific indulgence.

You see, they play in the gray area where you assume they're lieing, but you rarely really have solid proof. But we have recently moved, so we very much do have proof, and there in lies the guilty joy of the catch.

Bastard: "We've drawn a coupon here in our very office; a coupon you filled out last year. Do you remember it? It has been a long time.. back July of last year sir? It has your address and name! "

(like an address and name are some sort of secret thing? I'm not so quick to cleverness on my feat so I really should prepare a statement for such situations, but thankfully I am not _that_ anal :)

Nonetheless, it is a great thing to inform them that I know they're lieing this time, that they're out to scam me of something, and that I now have their phone number (since they didn't block it), and furthermore can look it up online or call it back, or set a fax to call it all day and night for the next year. I almost wish I had one of those trap programs that picks up the phone and plays receptive-sounding messages at them to keep them on the line all day..

Lieing bastards.

Skeezix: Ebooks: Another door shut .. ereader?

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:07:21 +0000

It is an odd world where you want to buy, but you simply cannot; or worse, that after you do buy something the entity may just pull the plug on it and you're out of luck. Its an odd world when your newly purchased full price car only works at 10 miles an hour except on certain entity friendly roads, or when you can only buy entity-branded seat covers. Or you are driving down the road, and yet violate some new term in the Terms and Ungreements that was just added, and they shut you down. Fun times indeed!

I think I have blogged often (or if not, should have, as this topic is close to my heart.) about the horror of DRM (or 'dieing rights movement') -- now, as a content producer myself I certainly don't have a problem with restricting content movement in ways I see fit, but as a consumer it sure makes me mad that I simply cannoy buy anything. The DRM is used to supposedly prevent piracy by the casual user, and to enforce region locking and so forth.. and I must admit in this day and age, region locking does seem a bit silly. As a Canadian I'm forever lamenting that these companies are turning my business away or generally making my life annoying as a consumer, which certainly seems backwards. Go talk to anyone, and they always ask me 'why do you even try so hard? just go download..' -- but its because I am a content producer, and if I want peopel to buy my stuff, it certainly makes sense for me to buy their stuff. And its the right thing to do. But gorramned, 'they' make it hard!

I know we've been burnt a few times by DRM .. buying a book and it later becomes 'unfunctional', or buying music only to have it vanish and be not-downloadable again by the company you bought from, or stop working when the company pulls the plug on that license or service (haha!) or disconnects your account , or be stuck with lower quality encoding value and thus need to rebuy, or any number of issues. I can grin and bear those issues for I've a fairly rigourous backup regime so I tend not to lose my files and I nowadays steer clear of software or platofrm lock-in DRM (ie; I simply will not buy ebooks in a form that ties you to one specific platform, since there is too much risk that platform will go under or be instructed to stop supporting you, or not be carried forward to your new platforms over time. These are not mythical but very real scenarios that _have occurred_, forcing people to lose their media collections. And of course, buying DRM-laden music from iTunes so you can only biuy iPods in the future just seems silly to me..) If you buy all Kindle books, you're stuck with Amazon in the future. If What if you want to buy from 5 different stores (god forbid!), are you supposed to buy 5 players for the media, and carry them all with you? No way. Shouldn't the industries create a common DRM, so people can buy whatever player they _prefer_ and then buy content as they see fit? I mean, you used to be able to buy a ghetto blaster stereo from Radio Shack or Sears or whatever, and it would play any tape casette or CD you bought at any store. Not now.

Anyway, the reason I post today is after reading some news about eReader turning on (or turning more carefully on) region locking, and even more content becoming unavailable to me to buy. ie: As time goes on, my options as a Canadian get less and less.. not more. w-t-f?!

This is really DRM-aside, but comes up in the same breath really. Now we all know there are a fair number of people pirating media out there (and it is a complex topic, where downloading music is entirely legal in Canada, if morally wrong. Thank our government for allowing things to go so wrong :/), but here I and so many people are -- ready to spend real hard won dollars on music, TV, video and ebooks.. and we simply cannot. We can't buy physical Kindle's here, despite the fact you can load your own media onto them. We can't buy the Kindle iphone software here either, nor use the Kindle books/newspapers, etc. We can't buy mp3s at the Amazon music store. We can't get shit-for-all movies on Xbox Live or iTunes Movie Store due to the old school contracts not permitting those outlets to sell. We can't buy books from hardly anywhere. So in Canada we can barely buy music, or books, or TV shows, or video. We can't use Netflix (US only). Seriously, is Canada so irrelevent? And the UK? Its only slightly better to the USians -- they _can_ buy, but of course they're DRM'ed all to hell, so we just pray their media keeps working down the road. People don't want to buy anymore, they want ease of rental and access .. but at least when you 'buy' a DVD, it shoudl keep working for a long long time.

It annoys the heck out of me, but it annoys me more to find over time the restrictions are only getting worse. In this enlightened day and age, and in the face of a bad economy.. you would think they want our money, they want the wider option of distribution. But alas, instead they're stickng to old models, to old agreements and trying to put back the ever popular region lock and enforce 'scarcity' and control on the digital world. They may win, I don't kow.. but whatever. I just want the option to buy something. As a content producer, I have sold my software anywhere that would take it, and given it away when I couldn't. The important thing is having my work, my art, my tools be out there, and I'd like a few bucks when I can. It doesn't make sense for me not to sell it to those with money, does it?

I hope they do not wonder why people are driven to piracy; sure, there are those who do it for various reasons, but I am sure a large base in there do it for there being no other choice. People want to consume, and if your model makes it impossible or impractical or a terrible experience, they will find some other way to do it. If you can go download something with 2 minutes of clickng, most will.

Skeezix: TV: Battlestar Galactica is over

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:07:12 +0000

This is the part of the programme where I bag on a TV show. The following is all spoilers (insomuch as I can spoil what they have already spoiled... zing!)

Now, before I get into it I must admit that I've greatly enjoyed much of the show the last few years; its has generally pretty tight writing, and they managed to even make you think they'd plotted a lot of the action out in advance. I will accept (though loathe) that the studio made them write in a bunch of filler, and I will accept that like a lot of this new style of show the last few years that are mystery, character and high drama driven (Lost, Desparate Housewives, etc and so on) that pacing is a difficult thing. All in all, an excellent and gritty science fiction show that I'd recommend to others. I will miss it, but I'm glad its over so I can have a piece of free time back :)

It is hard to end a dark show since you naturally want to end on a light foot; it is hard to end a show that has primarily been based in 'mystery' and fear of the unknown, since its a big switch to suddenly start revealing things without it just looking like you could stitch the first and last episode together and ignore the rest. You don't play a chess match for 19 hours and then switch it to checkers at the end .. the transition is tough. But mostly I think the writers got very good, got into the flow, of writing dark and gritty and when it finally came to spinning a happy thread at the end.. they just didn't know how to keep the gravity. To keep that tense and tight writing. They opened the door into fairy land and well through it. They admitted by their lack of tight finish to "we didn't plan it so much ahead, we're just going to cap off as much as we can and hope for the best!"

Spoilers!

I can sort of deal with the explanation that the two 'ghost' characters were just that - angels from god or some really advanced speces or whatever. Seems like a biiiig set up with a cop out ending, but okay. Seems like they were a little too personally motivated or felt (perhaps assumed by the watcher?) to be on one side or another, but .. okay, I can deal with that hand.

I'm not really sure I can accept that these little dreams and visions that characters have been having the whole show, that have been built up into something large, that really they just were planted by God or whatever to help the characters do a 20 foot walk at the end. Thats it? Find the girl, walk her through a door, you're done. Great, thanks, glad you set that upf ro 5 years. OKay, sure, maybe all this ghost and vision business was to guide Baltar to stick around and give a speach at the end.. but weak sauce. Course, Cavil decided it was all a trick at the end, so the speach was for nothing, and thus the whole multi-year plotline was basicly for naight. Yay! Seems the writers sure didn't know how big a part these visions were to play in the end, but they did know how it would play out.. so write it big, and then.. fizzle.

After battling for several years for the very survival of the species, they all decide to just give up all technology and rough it with some primitivies. A romantic idea for sure, especially after the hardships endured... but realistic? Ignoring for now the fact that bad guys were left out in space (and the Centurians were trusted to not come back and exterminate everyone), you're a society fighting for survival who just says 'hell, shit, lets destroy our ships and gear, and see if we can survive the first winter and guess which berries are safe to eat.' Seriously? We're supposed to believe that would happen? And that everyone goes along with it? Sounds like they wanted to write another half season about this, but just rushed it into a 5 minute sequence at the end since they didn't plan their timing out many episodes in advance. Maybe the military could handle hunting, but we'd love to see how Baltar's cult fairs alongside the other startups. Take those used to high tech living and let them scrounge for food.. good odds! (Queue up playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, however.)

Now, as Lee put it, this could be a way to break the cycle; by starting from scratch and basicly ignoring the entire history of both species so that no one learns anything.. just a random shot in the dark, and thats the future. As opposed to perhaps taking this new situation of Hera, and the two allied species, and trying to make a go of it together, say. Of course, this whole show was a set up for how Hera was the agent for survival for both species ..... and so what, are they saying all the other humans die out from starvation, disease, war with the natives, childbirth, etc, and only Hera's children survive long term? Thats pretty bleak, but it sure didn't seem that was suggested. It really just seemed like hera was..... fizzle. Another fizzle. The other humans have babies, too, yeehaw.

I can accept that Kara was some short term ghost, unlike the long termed head-vision ghosts. But with all that writing that she was going to carry both species to their doom.. and really it was she was going to lead them to their happy place. Fizzle.

But okay, all this is fine because they're safe now? A dead Racetrack accidentally launches nukes into the Colony; maybe the hand of god, or maybe Racetrack wasn't fully dead then.. whatever. Colony dead, or crashed into the black hole as later commentary suggested (they over-snipped the footage.. more proof of rushing it?) What is not explained is what the pile (a few? dozens? hundreds?) of Evil Cylon Basestars are up to for these thousands of years after the humans go all native on us. Do they just wander aimlessly in the big sky trying to find new Earth and die of old age? (Remembering that we don't know if the human-like Cylons age, but certainly the pure-machine ones do not.) Certainly, all those Cylons that took over the twelve colonies and New Caprica, they're still around. This pretty much seems a hard counter to the fealing of "we're safe now, lets burn our only defences."

Anyway, a great show with a pretty exciting ending. The show tried to feal realistic and consistent, and suddenly went implausible in the end. An okay ending, but just not where I'd hoped it would go.

Or maybe, as the SyFy (!!) channel likes to jerk with its customers and introduce filler and long delays between seasons, maybe this was deliberately a weighted copout, to leave room for the next two hour movie in the fall ("The Plan" from the Cylon perspective) or to lead into the new TV series ("Caprica", about birthing of the Cylons.)

Skeezix: FamilyTech: Wee Ride 'Wallaroo' bicycle seat for kids

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:07:13 +0000

In the middle of last year we went out and picked up our first bicycle seat for our little girl. If you're up early on a weekend or have time before/after dinner and want to burn some calories for yourself and have a blast with the little one, biking is a great option. It was still alien for me to be out the door at 7am to the park, but it was a fun way to pass the time and we ended up going out probably 4 or more days a week every week. Awesome.

That was this post should you care.

Now that winter is coming to close we're all very sick of being couped up inside - Play-doh is good, and colouring is great, but she just needs to get out and run and dig and climb.. she's sick of her toys and its getting harder to invent ways to entertain her :) So I plugged her into the old bike seat and with her new found words she exclaimed 'too tight!' and 'too big!' so it was time to retire that awesome little device -- at least we got a few months out of it!

After reviewing options at Zellers ($89.95) and Walmart (I forget) and Canadian Tire ($89.95) I checked out Toys-R-Us again, just like last time. Usually not an inexpensive place (and always a challenge to get a small child away from after a shopping run) they nevertheless, just like last time, had a pretty good price on the "Wallaroo" sized bicycle seat. $59.95 CDN seems pretty good for a device we'll work over all summer and likely have to discard next spring..

The Toys-R-Us page is here

After our first outing last night I thought I would offer a few comments; let me break it down into positioning and balance, size, cost and construction.

Position/Balance

The Wee-Ride we had last year was front-mount, by which I mean the chair is in front of you (between your arms when driving the bike.) This is convenient and clever for a lot of reasons -- you can see the child (and any mittens they may toss aside) and they have an unobstructed view. As she got older she also learned to hole the handlebars and attack the brakes and gear-shift, which was cute after the first surprise braking :) The new device is rear-mount which makes me a little paranoid since I cannot see her, but at least she can see me. I worry that she will tire of staring at my back, but hopefully the landscape whizzing by will entertain.

For what its worth in last nights first trip out, she was crying out 'Weeeee!' a lot, so I think she enjoyed it :)

With both mount-positions it was trivial to get used to the different weight and balance, and as a guy it was still easy to mount the bike. (Most guys I know swing their leg over the back tire to mount, but now I have to go bent-knee'd in front of the seat due to the large throne out back.)

Momentum is a little funny though with the new arrangement; if you're parallel to a curb and then jog-left to go up onto the ramp to the sidewalk you may feel this seat jiggle and sway as you do the sharp turn, say. When going off a curb or doing any quick turns or drops, you wil feel the resistance as the seat swings around back, since its pretty heavy (30 pound child) and big (tall!) -- it wasn't a problem, but it did surprise me a few times to feel that 'drag.' See below.

Size

The previous seat was a great size; small, comfortable for the child, and had a little padded play area out front (I assume should the child get whipped forward its to cushion the blow.) The new seat is more like a small throne, very large and high-backed. I've seen smaller rear-mount seats around so thought this one seemed large, but it does seem very comfortable - I had my daughter sit in it at the store - and lets her sit back, or lean into the chair at the sides. The foot compartments are pretty deep and adjustable for a growing child. Overall the chair seems well made.

Really, the goal (aside from carrying) of these seats is to keep the feet out of the spokes, and this chair should be fine; the legs naturally dangle into the approproiate compartments, and the plastic is molded around to cup the child at all points so she'd have to go out of her way to get into anything .. just dawdling or kicking will not be a problem.

The chair can be removed from the bike pretty easily, as the previous younger-child model can be.

Construction

The chair is a strong plastic and seems fine for its purposes; a large lock-screw is used to hold the seat to the mounting bracket, so that it can be moved forward or back as the child needs, and can be removed alltogether. There is a safety strap fixing the chair to the bike, presumably for use if the bracket slides down the post .. seems dubious to me.

The main curiosity is the design -- it uses a U-fork that plugs its tines into a bracket mounted on the main post under the real bike seat. The bent part of the U then sticks up and back over the wheel and the seat mounts onto it. Pretty clever in a way, as its a free shock absorber -- drop off a curb and the chair just bounces an inch, no biggy. It strikes me they could pretty easily have run a bar down to the wheelmount axle to make it much stronger, but maybe they would have had to pad the chair heavily or otherwise provide shocks... still, as long as the bracket on the post holds it should be fine. If it slides down then at worst the wheel will start to rub on the seat bottom which should present no danger beyond your deceleration.

Cost

The cost seems good -- $59.95 for a bike mount seat seems fine to me. $100 was starting to cross my line of interest, but I imagine thats where you get shock absorbers and such in the kits, but this seems a well built and inexpensive solution.

We loved the previous front mounted seat so much it gave me some trust in the brand, as foolish as that may seam.

Skeezix: Entertainment: Acquisition costs for media

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:07:12 +0000

I'm sure I've ranted recently about the cost of media in pure dollars (as opposed to in terms of entertainment guilt when you don't have time to consume all that you'd like.)

DVDs are the prime offender really; it used to be that Star Trek: The Next Generation seasonal sets were some $100 or more (Canadian), which was truly offensive. Now, I know that some series come in seasons of 10 while big ticket American shows are often in batches of 20 or 25 a year, so theres a cost increase there. And for geek material like ST:TNG the consumers are _perhaps_ more affluent or will grumble and pay up anyway.

Either way, it annoys me to find some very fine shows at $50ish per season, with others being far too high at $80ish, and some even more. It also annoys me that BBC labeled items are always in the $80ish area due to some supposed importing fee rubbish.

Anyway, when The Wire box set recently was on sale at Amazon.ca I put my money where my mouth is - the entire show (5 seasons, each comprised of 10 or so full hour long (not 40 min!) episodes) for some $100 dollars, that seems pretty fair, so I figure I can sort out some numbers for myself.

5 seasons * 10 episodes * 1 hour per episode (ignoring DVD extras which are nice too) .. so a good 50 hours for $100, or $2/hour of entertainment. OKay, that seems to be my number. The aforementioned ST:TNG season would be 26 episodes (guessing) * 40mins per episode (guessing) or 17 hours of entertainment for $100 (now about $60) .. or in excess of $5/hour, so thats way off my charts. Nowadays ST:TNG is $60 so thats about $3 and change per hour. Being ST:TNG it's near to my young heart, so I'd probably go for it.

I guess I'm willing to spend $2-$3 per hour on good solid entertainment, and will simply steer clear of high cost items outright .. I'm just not going to look $200 in the eye. (Consider Dr. Who .. how many decades of that is there? I just can't imagine buying much of it.. but if they made it cheap enough, they would get some money out of me. Theres a lesson there for the industry..)

Last night while browsing some ebooks and reviewing their usual rape-style DRM rules, I had a brainfart:

Base line: $2-$3 / hour of entertainment against video products (DVD)

250 page average novel, at say 90 seconds per page is approximately 6 hours, at $9.99 per book. That'd be a little over $1.50 per hour of entertainment, but pretty near the base line ballpark.

A video game used to be rated in the 50-60 hour range, but just as often nowadays a game is expected/designed to be sequal generating and so are broken up into smaller chunks of higher impact entertainment. Consider $60 for 30 hours as an average.. again, the magic $2 per hour spot.

Lastly, lets examine music; a typical CD might be say $16.99 for an hours entertainment. Ouch, thats why off the normal scale, but you do listen to music over and over and over more than re-reading a book. So maybe. I imagine if music was half that price it'd sell a lot more.. so ask Apple about that. (Note that if Apple is selling an album for $10US, they're pretty much establishing a cost to print and distribute and store physical media.. I wonder how well it stacks up against reality eh?) Is this $2/hour number a well known quanity, or vary wildly per individual? I'm in a rush now or I could throw some more values into the functions and figure it out.. but pass.

So there you go, now we have some concrete proof I'm a two dollar kind of whore.

Skeezix: Pandora: Application and firmware packaging and other magic voodoo

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:07:12 +0000

People have often been asking how applications and firmware will be packaged for the Pandora, and other variations -- how will apt-get work on the device when there are SD cards present, and so on. Now while the information that we're letting out is still subject very much to change, I did reply in a thread on the forums and I thought the discussion might be of interest to folks.. so I thought I'd repost it here.

See thread here

The main post I made, warts and all, is reproduced here. Many follow-up questions and answers by various team members are posted. Also see a discussion on the Unofficial Pandora Blog for some extra flames and discussion.

You can of course do anything you want; your box, open source evreything, make it do what you like wink.gif But let me discuss a bit from a normal user perspective (ie: not hacking in knee deep.)

The normal unix filesystem will be on NAND. ie: /usr, /etc, all that. You can reflash that to put a new firmware in and several groups are even working on alternative firmware (ie: gentoo etc.) Anyway, consider -- if you run a normal unix packager, it doesn't know about SD versus the normal filesystem. It would be unadvisable to put user homedir on SD by default, since you might not have SD in, or might swap SDs, or any number of scenarios.. so user homedir must also be in NAND by definition. This means if you use a normal unix packager like apt or whatever, its going to install things in /usr/local/bin say, and your homedir ~ etc, all on NAND, which is fine, it'll work.

But what if you keep installing packages that way..

1) They're on your NAND; which is cool, no worry about losing them. But..

2) You have limited NAND space; you might want to reserve it for user documents that you find important or whatever.. but do you want ot fill it up with new builds of firefox etc? I mean, if you want 500 packages, your NAND will not have the space for it.

3) The firmware lives on NAND; if you fill it up, it might be hard for the pandora team to guarantee theres enough space for next firmware update (ie: not a reflash, but a patch, say.) So it'd be nice to not have everyone by defaut using a packager that fills up the limited resource

4) .. and so on.

The trick is unix packagers assume the filesystem is where they want to put stuff. It is less likely to be the case on a handheld.

(You could format an ext2fs on SD and mount that and so lots of tricks, but we want to make it simple. For the knowbies, they can do all that of course.)

So a bunch of keener fellows have been banging out what we think is a better idea.

THIS IS ALL UP IN THE AIR AND IN DEVELOPMENT, SUBJECT TO CHANGE ETC AND SO ON.

The nitty gritty ideas we had were to divide NAND up into a couple regions; a firmware chunk and a user homedir chunk. The trick is we could use unionfs (or aufs, a newer union-fs style system). We'd make te union setup so that writes to the firmware filesystem are actually written to the user section in your homedir somewhere, an the unionfs proprerties make it so the system doesn't see this. ie: You write to /usr/foo and it ends up in your homedir in NAND, but reading /usr/foo works still. This way if you overwrite stuff in the firmware and blow it up, you just wipe your homedir and reboot, and bam, you're back to a fully working stock firmware. For OS patches we can mount the real NAND fs instead of the union, update the filesystem, remount he union, and poof. Seems brilliant to me, and allows normal packagers to just work, reasonably risk free.

Thats the firmware side.

The app packaging system we're designing uses some similar tricks, in theory. (We're still bangin it out, but its looking cool so far.)

We define a new package type, .pnd. An app could be whatever.pnd, and it includes the PXML file as defined by ED. (Though we've modified the contents of the PXML a fair amount since his last update.) The pnd could be a number of file formats (think of it like a zip file with a PXML appended to it, but we're likely going with an .iso format. Make an iso of the directory you want, append the PXML, rename to .pnd .. good to go.)

Insert your SD into the pandora, a daemon wakes up and detects the .pnd files in its searchpath, and it generates the .desktop files for the launcher in a configured location. (It could also be made as a module for matchbox or other window managers, but our current thoughts are to spit out .desktop files since they're pretty standard and should work simply.) you pop out the SD, the daemon wakes up and rescans, and removes the .desktop files in question. (It should also handle if you just rm the pnd file from within the pandora usage, etc.)

In essence, you go to the gp32x archive (say, or others), download a few .pnd files, drop them on your SD, and thats it. Just works.

More nitty gritty -- the idea is that when the system finds these pnd files, it uses filesystem tricks again.. using fuse filesystem it the pnd files are mounted as .iso's into the filesystem, based on their unique-id in the PXML say. ie: mount whatever.pnd into /apps/123456uniqueid123 and the PXML file part identifies which file in there is the executable and icon, etc. The launcher shows the icons based on the.desktop files, and when you tap one, the launcher knows which executable to run, right out of /apps/123etc/.

What makes this extra clever is unionfs again (ao aufs etc), so that any writes back to /apps/123etc/ go to the SD card instead (but the app doesn't have to know.) ie: Say, to SD card /pandora/appdata/123etc/ dir.

Anyway, the trick is you download a .pnd file, it gets shown in the launcher based on its PXML config. you tap to run it, and it gets mounted, run, and unmounted on exit. Everything works right off your SD including new/changed data. Your .pnd file remains clean (you can copy it to someone else, etc, or delete it) and your apps data stays on your SD card.

You can also unpack the .pnd files yourself into their directory and just drop it on the SD card. In that case, no mount voodoo is needed, so writes back to /pandora/apps/whatever just stay there, for those who want to keep it all together like a traditional gp2x app.

As to locations..

I've overkilled the design really.. everything is based on searchpaths. So pandora apps will use libpnd as their infrastrucuture (to save everyone rewriting all this every time.) A simple call will check the OS and find out the config search path (which can be altered in NAND as you see fit.) Then any time an app needs a config, the config search path is seeked to find it.. so you can use the default config in NAND as shipped, or put replacements of those config files on SD. (Pull out your SD and everythign reverts to defalut firmware config.. seems nice and safe to me!)

The search-path for where apps can be sought after is configured; by default the pnd files and unpacked pnds will be looked for in SD (both) in /pandora/apps if I recall right, including any subdirectories there so you can organize as you see fit, and also a path or two in NAND for built in pnds. (built in apps will probably be built into the normal filesystem like any unix app, but we could possibly include some apps as pnd files so that the user can remove them if they don't want them, to get NAND space back.)

Now, if you want pnd files to be droppable right in SD root, you just add a /pandora/conf/apps config file and put the search path into it, or edit the master conf file in NAND (/etc/pandora/conf/apps is my current plan for that.) Thus you can put .pnd files anywhere you want, but we'll have a defalut behaviour as shipp.ed

Now, before anyone complains, every single path and decision there is in conf files, so you can specify where you want to do things.

And you can use normal unix packagers.

And you can alter things to work as you see fit.

So I think we're keeping the usual flexibility, but also making something dumb-simple for new users, and yet you can play with it to customize it for those woh want to roll up your sleeves. There should be little risk since you can just eject SD cards and/or wipe oyur NAND homedir to revert to built in functionality. And in a pinch, if you wipe everythign out, you can reflash the whole firmware.

Safe and awesome.

Skeezix: TV: Consumption.

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:07:33 +0000

For a long time I sneered at TV; mostly a bunch of kruft, and I had a lot of good lit to tide me over. (For that matter I'm going back to re-read the World of Tiers and Chronicles of Amber series after wrapping up some recently re-released Parker crime noir novels by the now deceased Richard Stark.) The last few years have been different though, with some quality stuff available. More than I can possible keep up with.

I call it media-stress for those of us stressful personalities -- with a stack of books needing to be read, some PC games to play (Fallout 3!) and older TV or video to catch up on (still haven't seen the latest Indiana Jones film, and damnation to a friend of mine for putting me onto the crack cocaine of media that is The Wire), and even new TV (Doctor Who, Torchwood, BattleStar Galactica re-envisioned, Lost, House M.D., Dexter, Sarah Conner Chronicles.) My daughter insists on watching various Hi-5, Backyardigans, Super Why, Lazy Town .. all pretty good children shows. My wife has been sort of hooked on the new 90210 show, even.. at least, its a cool show to sit down and cuddle up after the baby has gone to bed. (BSG won't cut it there for her, shucks :) Not to mention Sopranos, Heroes, Rome, Deadwood and Supernatural. Man.

Who has the time? :) (And now my little girl seems ot sleep halfway well, so theres not so much reading or video watching at 3am..)

I'd really like to go back and watch a few old old shows; I prefer DVD and video files of late since you can just watch at your own conveniance, but the PVR does help. Still, looking at the original Doctor Who series, with hundreds of 'stories' (multi-episodes) at about $25 a pop, theres no way you can really afford to buy more than a few. A lot of good other shows, too .. I admit I'm a Hercules and Xena man, and Jack of All Trades and anything else with Bruce Campbell.

When did I become a media whore? Oh, right .. when I stopped having time to be one, I became interested in being one.

Besides I already know I'll stick to spending most of my free time coding, since my addiction is producing instead of consuming.

Damnit.

Skeezix: Gaming: Tips for PSP as a travel gadget

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:07:13 +0000

I've always been pretty impressed with the Sony PSP overall; brilliant screen, some good gaming options, music and video playing, and even a crappy yet capable web browser. Still, Sony (like Apple and a million other companies) likes to mess with its customers and so to really get the full value of your purchase you have to 'unlock' the device - imagine buying a car that can only fill half a tank of gas except on Fridays, where all you have to do is fiddle with this warranty removing knob to get the full deal. Anyway, planning for a short trip I have been mulling over what gadgetry would be good to bring along.

Ideally I won't need a gadget at all, but should like some options if I find myself bored with a napping baby. You could try for a micro-laptop such as a 'netbook' or UMPC but they tend to be pretty expensive (you'd cry if it were lost, stolen or crushed in transit) and too large for a pocket; a PDA which can excel at internet communications, ebook and multimedia, but tends not to be a solid game machine for long trips; a smartphone, should you wisk to have people bothering you on your vacation. Options options.

Anyway, for a short non-working trip, the things I'd like the option to do are: ebook reading (avoid carrying cumbersome and heavy books), video watching (from video files, not internet streams), some gaming, and idle web browsing. I'm not worried about email or heavy duty activities in this case. (Should you need to do email or document edittig or whatever, then you may want a netbook or whatever.)

Rearding ebooks, I'm not going to go on a tirade about DRM and locked up data and cost versus real hardcover books and so on - I've probably ranted about that before. Suffice to say I only use open formats such as RTF and HTML and textfiles; for the PSP there are few book reader options and no time for me to write a new one so I fretted a touch, though I eventually found the most excellent BookR open source app. Because it is not Sony-blessed you'll need an unlocked PSP (free and legal, if frowned upon by corporate masters.) This is what I meant above -- if theres no sensible book reader, they shouldn't be locking down a perfectly capable device. Likewise with video -- the built in video tools only let you watch low res video except for Sony UMD bought videos. Thats just evil in my opinion -- artificial limits to encourage you to buy their products.. a clear conflict of interest. Anyway I'll go on about that later in this post.

There are some really goofy attempts to do things on the level, such as an app that reads ebooks and spits out a million image files (multiple images per book page) and you use the PSP built in picture viewer to 'read' the book; you thus don't get a memory of which page you've read to, but it sort of works. BookR is a PDF reader - which provided some reservations up front as most ebooks you get in PDF format are DRM'd to heck - but with PDF now being more or less an open format numerous converters now exist. I used the OpenOffice export-to-PDF option to convert RTF files to PDF, and good to go. I don't know if the application can render 'big' PDFs with charts and embedded crazyness but when it came to various ebooks I've bought in unDRMd format or ones I converted myself, it seems to work very well.

Further, with the PSP screen being very high resolution in the landscape orientation (480x272), you can have a full-width comfortable read of most PDFs .. you just have to scroll down the page as you read, no biggy. The application lets you zoom and pan and rotate so you can accomodate most files, but you don't want to do that when reading. If you're converting to PDF yourself you can of course just use a larger font and set the page-width should you wish to make the reading easier on the eyes. All told though, I loaded up a half dozen books onto the memstick, and I think I'll be fine. This is a big one for me, a device-picking deal breaker, so good to know.

For video I thought to bring along some 'rips' of DVDs I own and videos I've downloaded. Sadly, most gadgets require you to 'transcode' a video into a format they can understand. This is pretty annoying, but I appreciate they're doing the playback via built in hardware and thus conserving battery. Doing video playback purely in software is a battery burner, and can be hard to keep up with the full framerate. (Mind you my older Palm and Windows Mobile devices could do it no problem, suggesting the fine TCPMP Core Codec people did good work.) Anyway, I found a bajillion freeware and open source tools to do the work (such as Universal PSP convert, and PSP Video Converter (pspvc), and others), as well as commercial offerings (from Sony and other third parties.) In the end, the freebie guys tend to work pretty well, and sometimes better. The commercial offerings tend to work easier and have better less cheesie UIs, but also tend to conform to the Sony recommended specs. Sony used to (maybe still does?) require video playback to be lower resolution that the PSP can actually show, to 'encourage' consumers to buy UMD videos on disc, which get full resolution playback. This is a dirty dirty maneauver due to conflict of interest for Sony .. selling a PSP, and also selling UMD videos. As I said, its like buying a car with things built in you can see, but are not allowed to use.. but you still pay for them. No way. So you have to unlock your PSP to get full potential - unlock a device you bought - the joy of the tech sector. Still, if you want to buy something that works well, has batch mode and so forth, there is Avex software which can convert to pretty much every device.

For DVD ripping I ended up picking up DVDFab (there is a free trial download as well), though there are dozens of similar products. DVDFab again honours the lower-than-real resolution, but does a pretty nice job of ripping straight from DVD to PSP ready formats. With their mobile option (a bit pricey altogether, but what the hell..) you can select a target device (ipod, PSP, etc) and it knows the appropriate parameters and voodoo.

In the end I carried a mix of videos at full resolution from open source transcoders, and some not-full-res rips from DVD using commercial apps. All told the PSP shows them both very well and the screen is so sharp (PSP original and PSP-2000, I've not seen a PSP-3000 in person). Win.

For gaming it is also worthy to unlock your PSP. (See a trend .. unlock for ebooks, unlock for superior video playback, unlock for gaming.) Carrying a pile of purchased games on UMDs is fine (I picked up little 5-pack carry widgets to keep UMDs stored nicely, cheap as dirt), but I prefer tech to lead to simplicity, not complexity. I don't wear a watch or carry a manpurse, or keep too much crap in my pockets. There are a few tools that 'rip' copies of game UMDs onto your memorystick. Usually this is for piracy, but stay clear. (I'm a software dev; I sell my stuff. It pays the bills, kthanks :) Anyway, you can rip your games into raw files or a ".iso" disk image using various tools. Games are pretty big, and some keen folks know about removing unwanted files and so forth, but its a big hastle. In the end, you can pick up 4 gig, 8gig or even 16 gig memory sticks, and put a few games on there pretty easily.

Anyway, I didn't bother with much of that; what I was interested in was the PSP's built in PlaystationOne (PSOne, PSX, whathaveyou) emulator. Naturally, just as with Sony's UMD resolution devilry, made it so the built in emulator is meant to play only specifically authorized PS1 games. On the one hand this is probably because they want to ensure the games play well in the PSP and not give you a bad experience, but its also obviously because they wish to re-sell you games you've already bought for a real PS1, and sell PS1 games to people who never had them before -- leverage old product for new revenue is bling bling to a company, of course. Still, with an unlocked PSP it is trivial to use open source tools to transform your PS1 ".iso" disc images into files the PSP built in PS1 emulator can use. Again you tread dark waters to get these tools sometimes, but they're legal and free, just frowned upon by Sony (of course, they just want your money.) Anyway, using a million variations of POPStation you can ready up any of your old PS1 games. I don't have many, only bought a few of the true classics. but more to point.. I converted Civilization 2.

Sure, in my Atari emulator you can play Civilization 1. But Civilization 2 for PS1 was designed for a handheld controller pad, not a computer keyboard, so works pretty well on the PSP. And I mean, its Civilization 2. A few hundred megabytes ,a fraction of your memstick, and you've got Civ in your pocket. Pretty hot.

Naturally, keep a couple good games in there; I keep Lego Indiana Jones in the UMD slot.

All told, the PSP is pretty inexpensive, yet a very capable device. Just you have to unlock it ('mod' with 'custom firmware' or the like) to get half its potential out there. If only Sony would release an official ebook solution.

Skeezix: Wisdom: The meaning of 'alcohol proof'

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:07:10 +0000

Originally I typed 'Widsom', which is somehow ideal. The real reason for this post is to enlighten other new fathers, as I am slightly less new at it by now. During some of the long long nights, you realize early that rum-and-coke is suboptimal as it is full of caffeine (and joyous rum!) As such, the next best thing would be rye-and-ginger, but finding the right rye is tough.

As a Canadian, I stand by Crown Royale. Or fall by it.

Anyway, my dad passed along some vital information long ago; people refer to an alcoholic beverage by its "proof", which generally means twice-the-alcoholic-percentage -- a 20% alcohol is 40 proof. But what does proof mean? What is the measure? Why does it exist at all, when you can say percentage?

What I've been told (which could be wool over my eyes for all I know) is that in the rum pirate days they of course had no easy way to discern the percentage of something.. but you could easily test how flammable it was. Certainly the moonshines and homemade beverages that've been thrust upon me burn brightly.. but this is not a colour or intensity test. The 'proof' simply refers to whether it wil burn at all, or whethor it will burn gunpowder. If something is too much water, you can't blow stuff up.

So naval folks, and pirates, and whosits, could easily tell if something was proof or not. I don't know how they sorted it out to be twice the percentage or the like, but what can I say .. as fireside tales go, this one is not bad.

Skeezix: Day by Day: I Bificus.

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:07:30 +0000

While mulling over some of the new features to be built into BattleJewels while trying to figue out how to keep my toes from freezing off (-20 celsius right now, with windchill making it -30 in the open.. well played Mother Earth!), I just had to say a few things.

Today's song is "We're not gonna take it" by Bif Naked. It might _also_ be the theme from the second season of The Wire television show, which my man Tux suggests is Tom Waits. Always very cool to really like something and then find out its performed by a fellow you're already a fan of.

Today's retro action puzzler is D/Generation; Portal is very classy of course, but for some reason I am reminded of this early underappreciated classic. Still, I'd take a plushy Companion Cube anyday.

(Oh, sorry, if you thought this blog posting would be useful, you must be new here. If I thought it would be read by anyone, then I must be new here. In truth I should be writing about Palm's possible comback device and OS in the new Palm Pre, but I'll save that for when they actually release some more developer information. I admit, there is lust.)

Skeezix: Quickie: Gamepark Holdings new machine, The GP2x Wiz

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:07:24 +0000

I've been meaning to do a writeup about the development versions of the Wiz that I've been fiddling with, but alas time has been short (darn those Christmas revelries!) .. but I must say something.

This is not a review, just a quickie.

Suffice to say that the Wiz is the evolution of the mighty GP2x device, hence their keeping of the GP2x monicker in the new device's name. It is not directly compatible with software for the regular GP2x, but thats okay. It is however an improvement on pretty much every aspect of the existing devices. Porting applications targetting the GP2x to the Wiz is pretty easy overall (with the only difficulty being that which we devs added ourselves by going right to the hardware of the previous devices.)

While the GP2x proper is a good size, the Wiz is smaller (which may be a risk to some people) and lighter, and fits well in the hand. Very pocketable and fairly durable, like a GBA Micro (just with no protection for the screen or case shine so keep your keys away.) I've got RSI or something the doctors cannot easily identify in my wrists so weight is something I'm very much aware of nowadays and this is a good fealing unit. The screen is bright and intense (OLED which some worry will dull after a few years, but I doubt by much) and the touchscreen is vastly superior in accuracy to the current F200 model. The CPU is a great deal faster than the current units. The button layout seems good (the original dev unit had a goofy button layout, but they've remedied it as they near actual release day.) It uses an internal battery and charge cable like most gadgets nowadays, not the AA battery approach previous machines used. I don't have final firmware candidates so can't speak for the interface or menus, but they're of little consequence anyway.. you spend most of your time in applications or games, and can replace a lot of the OS anyway with third party Linux distributions (such as Open2x, kudos guys!) Porting is as easy as ever, and the GPH fellows are making an effort to help the developers more than ever.

If you want a open source homebrew friendly platform, then the Wiz is really going to be a great machine when it arrives pretty soon. It ought to be a decent media player as well.

Disclosure: I've been handed both an early and a late model dev unit for the Wiz, but I do try to be fair in my benchmarks and comments. I can back this up. I am spending most of my time right now on Pandora development, but I expect to dive into some Wiz work soon, and I think the machine is targetted to go on sale end of Feb or begin of March.

Aside: _The Wire_ is some of the very best television I've ever seen. I've only just found out about it, as its wrapped up. Just as well because it seems like its 5 seasons are so utterly good as to be life destroying. Don't sit down to catch episode 1 when youi're about to go on a trip or have exams coming or crunch time at work .. you'll be fired. The Wire is _that good_. Buy it on DVD now, and watch out for Omar.

Skeezix: Gaming: Potion count versus server moves? Can we take the Eye of the Beholder around the water cooler?

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:07:24 +0000

Doing software development for a living means a lot of planning -- design work for the software, project planning to ensure dependancies come together, module and system integration strategies, testing and variance management, economics to plan the cost of various options and so on. During a recent session we sat around a table with a plethora of budget sheets arrayed before us .. this or that option, bundles of options by timeline, what we really want to push or not, and it occurred to me that all printed sheets with numbers scratched and appended and erased and lines all over linking things together .. just looked like Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, or "SSD" ship description and damage sheets for Starfleet Battles Tabletop games.

It wandered into my head that perhaps all those thousands of hours spent as a kid planning a D&D campaign or designing scenarios for massive fleet to fleet balanced wars might have been useful. You know, balancing an encounter between two 15+ ship fleets including frigates and battlecruisers, drone launchers and fighters, stealthed or agile ships versus dreadnoughts and allowing for effects of a Nebula or asteroid field .. thats nothing to shake a bag of Doritos at. How different is planning to take along so many pack horses laden with healing potions and speed boosters and spell components so you can handle the boss in the third plane, to figuring our the risk in relocating an old server or planning license counts for CPUs for a database?

Sure on the one hand, you could argue all that practice was useful, or on the other you could argue that the types of people who play those sorts of highly technical tabletop games are predisposed to that sort of work. Whatever.

Modern gaming has long left tabletops in the dust (there are some grand stalwart titles, and even a rising popularity in family games like Monopoly and Scrabble), but perhaps they all serve as more than just an idle amusement or passtime challenge.. perhaps all these online spreadsheet games (EVE Online) and time grinders (World of Warcraft) are good training for the toils of living, and possibly even help people in their time management, helping train (or damage) sharp minds.

Yeah yeah, get back to work! God, I'm such a nerd.

Skeezix: Pandora: Merry Christmas on shipday, we get Warcraft 2!

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:07:49 +0000

This one is for Pickle, the eminent DOSBox for gp2x expert. This man slaved and slaved to wring every last bit of hot DOSBox action out of the little gp2x. He's been helping us out sorting out configs and fiddling to get DOSBox working on the Pandora. I asked what a good game to check would be, as I had been trying out some 'lightweights' .. he suggested WC2. Briliant I thought...Check it out..

This is a stock DOSBox (by which I mean compiled from source, with no optimizations _at all_, and not even tuning the config. Its got the wrong cycle settings and full audio enabled and installed _from my Warcraft 2 ancient CD_. DOSBox in dynarec mode though, so its working its ass off here :) The good news -- runs nearly full speed, and fully playably. I've worked through the first Orc campaign mission. USB mouse and keybord.

Aside, I also tried Wing Commander 1 -- peachy. Civilization 1 -- perfect. Wizardry 7 Crusaders of the Dark Savant -- perfect. System Shock 1 chugged it, but thats fair .. its all software math emulation to do the 3d mode, but possibly with high enough clock and optimization.. maybe. We're just scratching the surface here.

The only thing thats chuggy at all is scrolling around the screen by mousing to the edge; was that smooth back in the day? Its possible with more units it would suffer more as this first campaign is nothing, but still.. this is quite an achievement.

Pandora was set to 800MHz .. and the Panda can go higher still; I probably should've tried for 900 or more to see if it corrected that one nit, but I was too busy drooling :)

Edit

For those of us so mightily curious, here is Dune 2 running; it is also playable (though I didn't complete any levels, it seemed just fine to play.)

Skeezix: Holidays: Nerd tips for Christmas decorating

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:07:55 +0000

We were decorating the house today for the Christmas season; the baby was out with grandma so we diug out the tree and ornaments, the garlands and lights, the figures and wreaths. We're not Chevy Chase'ing it but someday my frienbds.. some day!

When it came to running garlands up the stairway we decided not to wrap them around the the banister as we've done in the past - it makes the total length shorter, and the wiring in the thing tends to scratch up he handrail a touch. So what to use? String would be too slippery and we didn't have any dark colours around to stealth it in there. Being a good little nerd and eletrical junkie I had a good assortment of nylon cable ties around, including some black ones of 12" length. I have to say, they were perfect -- fast to apply, good and strong grip with no slippage, and easy to trip to the appropriate length to avoid nasty bits sticking out. And being black, they hide right in there against our dark coloured banisters. Perfect! (You can of course use the standard dirty-white nylon colour, white, black, and even brown ties.)

So there you go.. being a geek does have some use!

Skeezix: Pandora: Easy as pie to port to (ie: Linux to Linux port)

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:08:05 +0000

Was chatting with cpasjuste in IRC and he'd noted that before he even received his pandora devkit, he'd done a few 'quick ports.'; ie: Just getting them to compile in the tool chain we're all switching to for the device. I offered to give them a run so he wouldn't have to wait until tomorrow to find out if they worked and to our surprise.. they did! (You would think a run before even testing it once would fail...)

So I've already ported OutcaST (gp2x version that uses SDL that I was doing Wiz speed testing with) to the pandora last night (a quick port!), and now cpasjuste has ported Hatari (another ST emu), HUGO (TG-16 emu) and SMS (Sega Mastersystem emu.) His Hatari worked pretty well out of the box (including sound!), and the SMS as well pretty good; HUGO had some minor oddities easy to fix when he gets his dev board. FWIW, a USB mouse plugged into the Pandora worked on the GEM desktop, too, right out of the box. How hot is that?

I've got performance numbers for my OutcaST but I'm not sure I want to post here about them yet. Suffice to say that the pandora _blows the hell_ out of other handhelds; same clock, same naive port, same unoptimized SDL used for the display backend, so on and so forth (I have details in a private thread.) Much more blown away than I thought, too.. so the Pandora is both easy to port to, and frighteningly fast!

Cheers cpasjuste for your quick work, and to notaz for the pandora kernel and SDL ports!

Some quick shoddy pics (Sorry!):

OutcaST running, displaying the GEM Desktop

Hatari, in A_133 Automation loader for Xenon 2

Skeezix: Pandora: Unboxing the dev kit!

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 03:08:53 +0000

Everyone (me included) is already bubbling over with excitement and drama and cannot wait for the true Christmas day when the devices start shipping. With the devs being so utterly busy, I thought I might take a few pics of the just-arrived dev kit; maybe a few people will enjoy the pics; a few more will be relieved that things are in motion; finally still even more will be happy that there is another conduit for some information without bugging the poor guys. Mike agrees its okay for some leaks :) Theres not a lot of free time for me, and I'd rather be hacking anyway...

But if you do have any specific requests for pics, let me know :)

YES, I realize these are very nearly the worst pics ever; I'm no camera snob. I do need a tripod for steady shots, and some way to get diffuse lighting in. Daytime shots with a steadier hand.. I'll do that next week when I've got more than 30 seconds and don't need to work on installing bootstrap code :)

THIS IS NOT THE FINAL PRODUCTION BOARD. This is a mark 2 dev kit board and break out board .. which is to say it is relatively likely the final pcb, but the devs are surely able to change things as they see fit.

This is part hardware p0rn; part the excitement of being this close to starting some hacking on the bare metal of such a powerful and teeny little beasty. And equal parts fear and annoyance for bloody UPS leaving the package upon the steps in front of my house for a full 10 hours before I could get there to ensure it was safely cuddled in my loving arms.

Skeezix: Day by Day: Life Goals

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 03:07:52 +0000

I'm sure sometime in the past I started on a list of things I'd like to accomplish in life, and probably discarded it for foolishness. I know for sure I started a list of things I had done, major milestones, since I'm pretty forgetful and thought it might be nice. Then discarded that too, for foolishness :) But it occurred to me I could make a simple proposed life goals list now, akin to an Achievement in so many online game services ..

1. Work on bettering myself as a husband and father. (I don't say "be a good father" since that implies you can stop working at it once you 'get there.')
2. Work on bettering myself; my health (to live longer to be a better father, and to live better), to learn more, and to somehow someday .. learn how to relax and enjoy life, rather than forever trying to strive somewhere.
3. Listen to all the RUSH
4. Catch up on all the years of Dr. Who
5. Try not to laugh at Robert Jordan fans.
6 through 739. Complete a game of Sid Meier's Civilization.

Skeezix: Gametech: The Fusebox

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:08:03 +0000

No my friends, these are not the days when we typed in machine code from the back of Compute's Gazette magazine into our Vic-20 and prayed to Crom we got it right (and prayed the magazine didn't botch the typesetting.) No my brothers, these are the days when the big guys.. the banks and the auto-sector.. get their tax-payer funded bailouts while you stand in bankruptcy line knowing sure as hell there is going to be no bailout or mercy for your sorry butt.

The Fusebox is not the cheapest gadget but it is certainly not the most expensive, and where else can you order a brand spanking new 8-bit game console kit that you get to solder together to keep yourself warm in that bankruptcy line. While basking in the hotness that is coding your own little games. Remembering that back in the day when this was the norm they were lucky to have a framebuffer .. ah, our beloved Atari 2600s, rust in peace.

Yes, my brothers and sisters.. the Fusebox is niftyawesome. I only wish I had the time for such projects .. (instead I'll be hacking along on my Pandora and my GP2X Wiz machines while listening to Rob Zombie.)

(Hmm, where did the tone of this post come from? Nomatter, check out the Fusebox do-it-yourself console here)

Oh the humanity!

Skeezix: Gamepsych: The Philosophical Revelations of Sinistar

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:07:35 +0000

One of the great, unrecognized, philosophical geniuses of this century or any other is a figure known by some as Sinistar. Sinistar left behind a legacy of seven phrases that encompass his minimalist philosophy. We are fortunate enough to have with us audio records of what he said, so that we may greater comprehend his intent.

Sinistar will always be an enigma, as nothing is known of his life. It seems as if he lived a life filled with motivation and direction, as if desperately yearning to accomplish all that he could, before he could be brought low by those who would destroy him. Sinistar's revelations follow, with an interpretation of their intent.

1. I am Sinistar. Here, Sinistar clearly makes two ideas known. First, that he exists; he is aware and he thinks. The second is that he has a singular identity. He is unique, and, in a sense, alone. Some have argued that this may imply a sense of self-determination, but Sinistar's perspective on the free will debate is unknown. I believe that, with what little is known about his life, Sinistar would be a determinist. People are destined to act out their lives guided by the hand of another force. The rest of us are mere automatons, carrying out algorithms.

More follows --

Tis a simple thing; see here

Skeezix: Silly: Explanation

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:08:03 +0000

My dear friend Aphyd sent me this as a response to a futile question and I thought it was too good to let go.

Additionally .. someone drugged a spider to see what the webs looked like. Cool pics, see here

Skeezix: Gaming: Sony PSP and TV-out; I mean, glorious uber-nerding near the TV like an 8-year-old.

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:07:38 +0000

I've always been a fan of 'tactile retro gaming' .. ie: using authentic controls if you can't have the actual device around. ie: As an emulation author you'd think I'd be all for the technology (and I am!), but I also collect arcade machines - the full cabinets - and home consoles. It is always "better" (in terms of game feal) on the real thing (and brutal on your space and room aesthetics), and then on emulation if you don't have access to the real beasties. The reason of course is more genuine controls and also some of the magic -- there is something to be said (and also said against) having to insert and flip over floppy disks on a C64 or Atari 800, and type on a nasty old keyboard that was actually made up from calculator keys (no joke there btw, check your Commodore history friends ;)

Consider also the 'knock' noise Q-bert makes when he falls off the maze; thats actually a physical knock made in the arcade cabinet, and it cannot be replicated in emulation _period._ Nor can you replicate the aging monitor and the cigarette burns on the cabinet. But I digress.

What I'm talking about today is plugging consoles, even modern ones like the Sony PSP, smack into your big screen high def fancy pants TV. Its not a genuine display, but it is certainly in the spirit of that -- how many of us sat on the floor far too close to our big 1970's CRT TVs playing with crummy old joysticks that hurt our little paws. Atari 2600, Colecovision, etc. Those are sitting-in-front-of-TV systems -- thats how they were designed. Its also a nerdy social thing, playing games in the family room on the TV, not up on your laptop in an office or bedroom.

And in these modern times, it means firing up Commodore Vic-20 BASIC on 47" of fracking television. YEAH

In my household we're woefully behind times in the entertainment arena, but finally just acquired a new TV. I mean one that is more than 20 inches, and less than that in years old. So I naturally plugged in a SuperGUN (a Super Nova in fact) to bring up Rolling Thunder (the actual arcade game board) on the TV.. AWESOME.

But for normal people, whats the easiest device to plug into a big fat TV? Sure, your XBox or the like, running old games. Nice. You do that, we don't have any modern consoles :)

I picked up the Sony PSP "component cables" (not the composite ones) and jacked my little handheld PSP into the TV. Being on cables and without remote controls means I'm sitting up there, near the TV, wired to it. Like the good old days. Big TV and me, face to face.

First up -- running my ST emu and Xenon 2 Megablast. OH YEAH. Then Dungeon Master and the mummy that scares your pants off in the dark. OH YEAH.

Next up -- VICE emulator in Vic-20 mode, and Cosmic Cruncher. Spiders of Mars. Omega Race.

And then something from this decade.. Wipeout Pure. Sweet racing action.

The only problem here is the PSP letterboxes games, so you don't get the full fullscreen action (for shame!) like the SuperGUN does. Next up I'll have to try the GP2x and see about getting my ST emu going full screen there. Sexy. Or get yourself an X-Arcade stick for your laptop, or use a STELLA-adapter to plug your 20 year old Atari joystick into your computer. Whatever it takes, man.

An hour of true transcendant geeking. Modern TV runs pretty hot and winter is coming -- plug that old small TV gear into your big hot TV and get your game on!

Skeezix: Retro: Atari Jaguar console

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:07:38 +0000

Aside: My baby girl recently started speaking in 2-3 word sentences; last night when I tucked her into bed, she said "love you daddy." Another life achievement down, and well.. it just doesn't get much better than that one :)

Atari was a great company in so many ways, but I'll not go into that here. Their last real console release was the Atari Jaguar around the same time as the Sony Playstation (original), and we all know who won that race. Truly it was no competition.. the Jag was a cool platform, but it really could not compete with these more 3D oriented machines. And a lot of its software was _terrible_ (and that is being kind.) Still, it maintained Atari's playful feal with some games being very original, and always feeling like the designer was not so much a corporation but a drinking buddy. To me as a retro collector, an Atar fan, retrogamer and coder .. the Jag was always a like-hate relationship.

I mean, it had Dragon's Lair on CD. *heart*

But it also had Kasumi Ninja, which is not even as good as Custer's Revenge if you catch my drift.

Anyway, through my various moves I've dragged my poor Jaguar around, but today I've sold it off. A fine seeming lad picked it up and sounds like he'll have some fun with it, for which I'm glad. I mean -- we retro guys go through a phase of wanting to collect it all but in practice we just rarely have the space and eventually have to specialize. But more .. I like to get things into a good home, and if I'm not going to fire up this classy little beast, ever, might as well move it on along to someone who will. A museum piece kept in the dark is worthless.. a museum piece on display is worthy. So I'll miss this little machine, this indestructable black box (none of this red-ring BS in old hardware!) .. but on the other hand, my home will be forever clean of Kasumi Ninja.

Skeezix: Gaming: Spectating Nethack

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:07:34 +0000

I'm a closet Nethack nerd.

Nethack is a very complex and interesting dungeon-romp game, generally played out entirely in text (though various ports and lookalikes exist with simple or even very fancy graphical frontends exist.) This isn't a text adventure in the Infocom sense, but a top-down "Diabloesque" game (for more modern people, or a Temple of Apshai but actually fun game for old schoolers like me ;) Anyway suffice to say that it has such depth that very modern games barely scratch its surface (though they of course excel in other aspects, don't get me wrong.) So nethack (and many other Hack descendants such as Dwarf Fortress, Angband and so on) are worth playing even today.

This comes up because the 10th annual Nethack tournament is underway right now. One of those few times I can point at someone else and cry "Nerd!"

Anyway, I stumbled across this frightening and yet mega-awesome tidbit:

telnet nethack.alt.org

By which I mean in a Unix-like environemnt, just do that; in Windows, you can run a DOS-like shell and do that or use some shmancy telnet client. Anyway, telnet lets you essentially visit text displays on some other machine, usually for working on a server.. but in this case, it lets you play, or like some sick ASCII voyeur, watch someone else play Nethack.

You can of course download and play Nethack locally, but this lets you goof off without bothering to download it. But the main attraction to me.. is to watch someone, usually a far better player than me, play nethack. That is just downright nifty. I want spectator modes in newer games too, but this is really darned neat. Just can't wait for someone to scratch Elbereth into the floor with a cockatrice head and see what happens.

Skeezix: Cynicism: Psychic Nikki .. cheating!

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:07:32 +0000

I was listening to CFNY (a Toronto radio station) this morning and they had Psychic Nikki on; afterwards I thought to do a couple weeb searches on a lark and one of the links I stumbled across I found amusing:

Tinyfrog

In essence, a few people are tracking 'psychic's weebsite predictions, and noticed Psychic Nikki has actually retroactively added events to her posted prediction lists. As the events occur she watches the news and posts them to her old lists. As a regular to CFNY I'm tempted to call in and ask her about it -- really, with her forever bragging about accuracy and prediction hit-counts and so on, she shouldn't be 'cheating'. (Or go ahead and cheat, but then don't brag about accuracy.)

For shame Nikki, for shame!

*busted*