Linkstew

IGN XBOX reviews Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

This is the first game I've found myself really wanting to play for the Xbox. But I'm either going to wait until the Xbox gets a remodeling so it's smaller, or see if I can borrow my friend's Xbox for a few weeks.

Wow, this recall election is going to be crazy. And even if she weren't a cute Berkeley CS graduate, I'd consider voting Georgy for Governer.

Oh, and just to respond to her question of "I continue to be misquoted, and to have my quotes taken out of context. What's up with that?!" that she asked on her blog:

That's politics. What did you think you were getting yourself into? A clean fight?

I wish her luck, and I'll decide whether or not I'm going to vote for her once the election is a little closer. At the very least, she's worth checking out.

Oh, and don't forget the standard disclaimer of "don't forget to register to vote, especially if you've moved recently, etc." The election is October 7th.

So there I was, playing Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, when I noticed that "Hey, there are an awful lot of Medusas flying at me (in the "Room of Illusion," very early in the game, right after you first meet Death). With no randomness to their flight path whatsoever.

And then I remembered, "Hey, if you hold down B, Juste will just hold out his whip, allowing you to jiggle it around and hit enemies."

And putting 1 and 2 together with creative use of a band aid box and a cell phone [2], my Game Boy is now sitting beside me with an infinite number of Medusas flying right into Juste's whip (at 3 experience points a head), earning me as many levels as I want to take the time to ... let the game earn for me.

Blah, talk about taking any difficultly out of what is already reputed to be an easy game. Of course, I don't have to take advantage of this, but when I see a programmer who did something as stupid as this, I feel obligated to exploit it. It's not cheating if it's just right there in the game, right?

[1] The Belmont you play in this Castlevania.

[2] Just for the record, rigging the GBA SP to keep a button pressed is much harder than it was to rig the old GBA to keep a button pressed, thanks mostly to the partially recessed buttons.

UGO interview with John Linnell of TMBG

This article has a lot of great comments from John, and just to pick one to comment on: I can't believe that people would actually ask them to autograph burned CDs. That's crazy talk. Anyway, good interview. Recommended reading.

Damn generation gap. I made the same joke she did and didn't even realize it.

Mom: Also, how come you were up to early this morning? I was really surprised when you messaged me back so quick.

Me: Roofers.

Mom: Very funny. Caffeine I'd believe.

Me: I said roofers, not RUFFIES. You know, roofers, like the fuckers who come and bang hammers on the roof at god awful hours of the morning? Not the date rape drug.

Here's a few more comments on my shiny new 3650:

• As Mike pointed out in the comments, the "hang up" button usually takes you to the top level of the phone, serving much the same purpose as the "C" button I was so used to habitually pressing on my 5165. The reason I dismissed that as a possibility initially is that I came across some screen where pressing hang up asked me if I was sure I wanted to delete something, which is a bad option to press habitually. But now that I look, I can't recreate that behavior.
• As if it weren't ridiculous enough that my digital camera can run MAME to emulate arcade games, now my cell phone can emulate Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Unfortunately, the circular keypad is a little awkward for playing game boy games, and worse, it doesn't seem like it acknowledges two simultaneous button presses (so I can't jump diagonally, for example).
• The phone can capture short videos, but the quality is far from fantastic. I suppose it might be amusing in some circumstance some day. (If you want to watch movies taken with the phone, you need this quicktime plugin.)
• This program both addresses my desire for scheduled profiles and auto-keypad-locking (though I'm not sure if the auto-keypad-locking is working). I'm going to have to play with it for a few days to make sure it's not too buggy before I decide to buy it. Being able to address problems with the phone through third party software is a nice unanticipated side effect of having such a seemingly overpowered phone.
• Ironically, the one thing I still have yet to really do is use this thing as a phone. Besides three calls to AT&T technical support (Once about locking myself out of the phone because I didn't know the PIN number (see the end of the last post), once about not knowing my account number (which I needed to use the web site), and once about the web site not letting me register and giving me some error code), I haven't used this thing for its intended purpose.
• It was sufficiently non-obvious to me that the call volume was adjusted by pressing left and right that I had to look it up in the manual. I suspect I didn't realize this because of a little usability flaw: Since I was calling tech support, I was in menu-hell, and accordingly, pressing lots of buttons. When you type during a call, the numbers are entered into an on screen buffer, and when that buffer is active, left and right move your cursor through the buffer instead of adjusting the volume. To adjust the volume, you have to hit cancel to hide the buffer, which I was afraid to do because I thought that would hang up my call.
• When I was on hold for a few minutes, the speakerphone option was really nice to have.

Cnet's Top 10 Must Have Gadgets

Man, I know I'm a gadget geek, but I'm almost embarrassed that I own the top 3 items on this list, and own one more if you count my TiVo series one.

It's been more than two years since I got my Game Boy Advance, and in that time I had a lot of fun with the system. But as time passed, my ability to enjoy playing games on it diminished as I was often forced to sit in uncomfortable positions with a light shining brightly over my shoulder. So my primary reason for wanting a GBA SP was obviously the lit screen, and the other features were neutral in my mind. So, here's the bullet point version of what I think of of the SP:

• The lit screen definitely delivers as advertised, and I'm now free to play my games whenever and wherever I want. It's bright enough that it can even double as a flashlight when I'm walking down the stairs in the middle of the night.
• I was a little skeptical of the durability of the new hinge-based design, but now that I've fallen asleep on the SP a few times, it seems to hold up just as well as its predecessors. And when I shut the case before I fall asleep, the screen is even protected. Overall, a win.
• In contrast, it turns out the new metallic paint jobs aren't nearly as durable as the solid plastic colors of the original GBA. I've already got some scratches on the top of my SP that I have no idea where they came from.
• I'm amused to note that Nintendo made the same design decision that Apple did on the older PowerBooks: If the SP is closed and you're looking at it, the "Nintendo" logo is right side up. But if the SP is open and you're playing it, the "Nintendo" logo will be upside down to an observer.
• On that note, once I find my Apple stickers in my still unpacked boxes, I'm going to see if one will fit on the lid of the SP to cover the scratches, to make it look like a mini-PowerBook. =) Of course, then I'll have to decide if the Apple logo should be oriented PowerBook G3 or PowerBook G4 style.
• Though they don't say so anywhere I could find, "SP" is probably supposed to stand for "Super Portable." However, it's nowhere near as "super portable" as some of the micro-cellphones you can buy these days, and really, I don't think it's that much significantly more portable than the original GBA. I'm pretty sure it's thicker, and it's at most half as wide. Anyway, the point is, if you're worried about the size, it's small enough.
• In the other direction, though, is it too small? I don't think so. I even think that the L and R buttons may be a little easier to press than on the original, thanks to having more room to grip the longer body of the SP. However, I haven't played any L and R button intensive games yet, so I can't say for sure how comfortable it will be in the long term.
• As for the rest of the buttons, though I believe the primary buttons and dpad are a little smaller than the GBA, they're still easy to press. However, if you have big fingers, I could see problems with accidentally pressing A when you mean to press B.
• All of the buttons are recessed into the body of the unit (to keep them away from the screen when it's closed), and while this isn't a problem for the primary buttons, the start and select button can be difficult to press even for my not-too-big fingers. If your fingers are much bigger than mine, I suspect you might finding yourself using the eraser of a pencil (or maybe your fingernail or your pinky...) to press start and select.
• The volume control changed from being a dial to being a slider, and I think I liked the dial better. With the slider, I feel like I'm going to accidentally slip and turn it all the way up or all the way down every time I use it.
• Speaking of which, I'm still irritated that the SP doesn't have a headphone jack, and that EB claimed that Nintendo doesn't even make an adapter when I bought my SP. Also, reference this Penny Arcade strip.
• As for the position of the game slot on the bottom when playing classic games with bigger cartridges that stick out of the unit, it is a little irritating, and does prevent you from resting your hands on a table or your lap in certain cases, but it's not really that bad. And most games you'll be playing will probably be GBA games, anyway.
• I do kind of wish the unit had a way to put itself to sleep when the lid shuts, but I suspect that would require some software support that obviously isn't there in old games. At the very least, it would have been nice if the light and sound would shut off when you close the lid. Oh well.
• And the rechargeable battery pretty much kicks ass. Admittedly, it doesn't seem to last as long as a pair of AAs did in the GBA, but I'm playing with the light on full time, I'm not wasting batteries this way, and I can charge the unit without having to stop playing. Pretty much yay.

To sum up, the GBA SP is an overall win. It does have a few flaws in that the paint scratches easily, there's no headphone jack, the start/select buttons are kind of hard to press (but no worse than the Gamecube's stupid Z button), and classic Game Boy cartridges stick awfully far out of the bottom of the unit. But overall, if you're debating between buying a $70 GBA or a $100 GBA SP, the extra $30 will be well spent on the SP instead of another game in the long run. Consider that you'll save on the cost of batteries and glasses and it pretty quickly adds up.

The truth about Bowling for Columbine.

Heh, and just the other day, I realized that Michael Moore was fairly equivalent to a liberal Rush Limbaugh. Don't get me wrong, I liked Bowling for Columbine for the most part, but I thought it was pretty obvious that Moore was stretching to make his points.

Tribes trash Davis over gaming plan - State wants $1.5 billion from gambling revenues.

Wow, a few of the quotes in this article are insane. And Native American sovereignty is a damn sticky issue. I don't even really know where I stand on it. Well, food for thought.

Airport Extreme MIB: Information and Download

Oh, how exciting! Airports can be managed using SNMP now? (This is actually an important feature for a base station to have)

I got my new credit card yesterday, and though I'm still disgusted by it, I did feel a certain excitement once it was in my hand. But rather than let whim get the best of me, I got something I needed instead: a new cell phone and plan. In particular, I got the Nokia 3650 I've had my eye on for a couple of months.

I've been playing with the phone all evening, and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. The short version is it's a damn good phone with a lot of flexibility, but it has just a few little flaws. It's definitely a gadget geek's phone, though. Here's the bullet point version of my first impressions:

• Physical details:
• The round keypad is the first thing anyone'll notice, and it's really not that bad. The biggest problem I have with it isn't the layout, but rather that it's kind of hard to hit the buttons on the right side of the phone when holding the phone with my right hand. This is more of a function of the size of the phone than the layout of the keypad, and I don't think any of the smaller phones would fare any better in this department.
• The keypad itself feels a little flimsy, and I'm a little worried about how the directional pad will hold up to wear and tear. Hopefully it's trivially replaceable like old Nokia keypads.
• The good:
• While it's significantly larger than some of the micro phones you can buy these days, I don't think that's a bad thing. The size of the 3650 is just a little smaller than my old Nokia 5165 in most dimensions, but it's significantly lighter. This is all good.
• The primary reason I bought this phone was because it has bluetooth, and it synchronizes my data with OS X beautifully as advertised. Definitely worth it. It's also really convenient to transfer ringtones and other files to and from the phone with bluetooth. Very nice.
• While I don't really have much use for a phone that takes pictures or videos, it's still an interesting option to have. And while the picture quality is far from fantastic, it's actually much better than the old web cam I had back in the day.
• Voice dial is far from a new feature, but it's new for me, and I think it's neat. We'll see if I actually use it in practice.
• While I knew the phone had "polyphonic ringtones," it never occurred to me that that meant "MIDI." But it does mean MIDI, which opens up so many possibilities... most of them bad. Can you say "Gato's Song?" Heh. I'm pretty sure that if I ever wanted to kill myself, it'd be a simple matter of finding the most annoying midi ringtone possible and playing it for awhile in a public place.
• The nits:
• For some stupid reason, the only option for displaying the contacts is as "Last name First name," with no comma. What I'd really like is the ability to display the contacts "First name Last name," sorted by last name, but I'd be happy with "Last name, First name." The lack of a comma really bothers me for some reason. But Nokia released a software update to add sound recording to the video recorder, so there's still hope. I'm going to try mailing them.
• With my old phone, I got into the habit of pressing "cancelcancelcancelcancelcancel" a lot, just to pop out to the top level of the phone. With the 3650, there's not exactly a dedicated "cancel" button. On most screens, the right "soft button" is either "Exit" or "Back," which is effectively "cancel," so my muscle memory kicks in and I press that button a lot. The problem is, when I get to the top level, that soft button becomes an app launcher, so instead of just getting to the top level, I end up launching an app instead. Kind of irritating. I may just have to write a placeholder app to put in that position to solve this irritation.
• Other phones have an auto keylock function. Why doesn't the 3650? And thanks to the aforementioned inability to get to the main menu without looking at the screen, there's no way for me to lock the phone without looking at the screen. Bummer. I'll definitely have to find a solution to this problem. =\
  Update: It turns out there's an "auto-keylock" feature hidden in the security menu. The problem is, I just want auto-keypad locking to disable accidental button presses, but the security option requires using a lockcode, which might be more inconvenient than it's worth. We'll see.
• Nokia phones have had profiles for awhile, but when are they going to take profiles to the next level and allow the user to set times for certain profiles to be automatically enabled? "Use the work profile M-F from 10 am - 7 pm," etc. That'd be so awesome.
• The ugly:
• While trying to turn on the auto-lockcode feature, I didn't know the PIN number or the Lock Code for the SIM card, and I accidentally locked myself out of the phone. There's a "Personal Unlock Key" (PUK) that's needed to unlock the phone once it gets in this state, but it wasn't included with my phone, so I had to call AT&T and find out the PUK. The customer support guy joked that "there's nothing we can do for you," which at the time wasn't that funny, but in retrospect, it's worth a chuckle. I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't warned about that by the guy at the AT&T wireless store last night, but in the end everything worked out alright.

Heh, now all need is my obligatory yellow faceplate and I'll be set. =)

(I'm probably going to update this list over the next couple of days as I actually use the phone some)