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Wednesday, September 02, 2009
New Users Module
So far I’ve been pretty impressed with Expression Engine, the CMS software behind my current site. It’s quite capable and has more features than I could probably ever figure out. The core version is free for personal use, but doesn’t include many features that are found in the full edition. One of these features is the user manager. I’ve never been a fan of the idea of requiring my friends (or anyone) to need a login for my site and that will continue, but I think I’ve come up with a system that will work out pretty well. Let’s face it: spam is a reality. False comments required me to start using captcha’s to prove they were coming from real people. But I know typing in a captcha phrase is annoying, and has led to fewer comments. So I’ve added the ability to register yourself a username. Having a registered username will mean no more captchas!
I also have had a few entries lately that I felt should be kept more private than usual. This also goes against what I want my site to be about but reality is something to be dealt with, and I can’t be too careful in today’s world when writing about some things like my job. Lacking a “Friends Only” ability on my site, I’ve made these posts on Livejournal. The users module in Expression Engine now allows me to overcome that. By registering as a user on this site and being approved by me, I can host all my entries on this site which I greatly prefer.
Anonymous Level:
- Continue filling out all the form boxes as you have been doing
- A simple captcha text entry will be required to prove you are not spam
Member Level:
- Fill out the membership form once and you’re done!
- Doesn’t even require email validation (for now), instant access to advanced features
- Simply type the comment and press “submit”, no more name/site/captcha
- Choose or upload your own avatar to be displayed next to your comment!
- By use of cookies, you stay logged in (depending on your browser), so it won’t be a hassle to log in every time you visit the site
Friend Level:
- All features of the Member Level, plus access to posts marked “Friends Only”
- Create a member profile the same way as above and wait to be approved.
- No extra steps other than waiting/contacting me
To register on my site, use the links under the “Members” section on the right hand menu of this page, or click this link.
Any questions, just ask!
Posted by
eclipse on 09/02/2009 at 10:01 PM
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Saturday, August 29, 2009
Aspire to Greatness
Ultraportable laptops, or netbooks, are the fastest growing segment of the PC market right now. My first encounter with one was through Krhainos and his Acer Aspire One. I didn’t understand the point of it at the time. It was slow, the screen size was tiny, the keyboard was hard to use. It wasn’t until a few months later that I started to realize just how useful one could be. I travel a lot for work, staying in a hotel overnight 2 days a week. I tried to take my macbook pro around with me, but it was heavy and I even made a small dent in the side by forgetting it was there and pushing my seat back into the case. So I tried to get by with my iPhone. It’s nice to be able to use the internet at any time without having to carry my laptop around, but the experience isn’t quite the same. You have to keep zooming in and out, there’s no java support, and the screen is just too small to use for more than a few minutes. So one night a hotel, I started to think about my old Dell L400, and how it could be neat to have one again. It was a small, thin laptop, especially for those days. It had external drives, but that was ok because I wouldn’t need them on the road. By today’s standards it’s pretty slow, but again I thought I could get by because I was only using it for internet browsing. I searched but couldn’t find much right away. The one I did find referred to it as a netbook. I thought back to Jo’s Aspire One and realized that I could get a new netbook for about the same cost, with the same features and probably not quite as slow. Being a little impatient, by the end of the day I had talked a craigslist seller down to $240 for his week-old Aspire One (retail $379), and the experiment began.
I like my 15” Macbook pro for its dedicated video card. It’s great to go to LAN parties in Ohio and not have to take much more than it and a mouse. It’s getting a little old, but still handles most things pretty well. The new Acer is great too in that it’s super light, more durable, and cheeeaaap while still giving me good enough performance to run the latest operating systems and browsers. It’s great to be able to use a real web browser, AIM, iTunes, etc again at the same time. If you want to know how wide the screen is, the white part of my website just fills up the screen (1024x600). My biggest realization was that while I enjoyed having both performance and ultra-portability, I didn’t need both at the same time. The Acer is as small as my flight manuals and fits nicely into my kitbag at work. Once I have the software set up just the way I like, I plan to leave it there at work for good. I don’t need an ultra portable laptop at home, and I wouldn’t have to drag it through security each time I went to work.
The small size does have some limitations. The keyboard is 91% full size, so it’s a little smaller and takes a little bit of use to get up to speed with. Once I stopped trying to rest my palms on the base of the laptop I got a lot faster! I do like that Acer didn’t make any strange alterations in key placement like the Dells. I like the page up and page down buttons near the arrow keys, since the screen size is smaller both the arrows and page up/down get used a lot. The touchpad also takes some getting used to, since the buttons are on the left and right sides. It’s often hard to press the buttons. They are in a little groove and it’s hard to tell by touch what is the groove, what is a button, and what is the touchpad. It results in the mouse cursor getting pissed off and flying rapidly all over the screen. I am a big keyboard command person anyways and try to use a mouse as little as possible. Try to stick to tapping the mousepad for a click.
My Aspire One is the 160Gb Hard drive version, which means Windows XP was the default OS instead of Linpus Linux. I like XP, it’s compatible with pretty much everything these days, but Linux has its uses too. Like when a hotel wants you to pay for your internet and you don’t want to… So I was interested in installing a linux build on it. Jo had the idea of installing Moblin, short for mobile-linux. It’s a linux build designed for netbooks. It had some really great ideas such as a toolbar that hides to save screen space. When you’re only dealing with 1024x600 pixels, things like the start menu just waste your precious screen space. You want to give the web browser or whatever program as much room as you can. It was also able to boot in about 5 seconds. That is pretty impressive I suppose. However, the entire setup was just far too limiting. The OS is basically crippled, lacking almost every feature you take for granted in an OS, like samba networking and the ability to change the desktop wallpaper. Installing everything you actually needed took a lot of time and increased that precious boot time up to all the other operating systems. The chrome web browser it came with could be maximized, but a third party install of firefox couldn’t. You were left with wasted screen space, the very thing moblin was designed to prevent. The multiple desktop feature was impossible to use without a mouse, and more hassle than it was worth. Little things in Moblin also make it aggravating to use. After typing in a URL to the browser, it wouldn’t change focus to the actual web page. You’d try to page up/down and the cursor would be in the URL field still. You had to then take the mouse, and click on the page just to move it around. Ugh. So I ended up giving up on Moblin. I understand it’s a beta, but it’s not ready to be used as a full time OS and so I won’t.
I do love OS X, and so with some prompting by BobOmega, I started to look into turning it into a hackintosh by installing OS X. As I read about it, it got good reviews except for one part. The Atheros wifi card in the laptop wouldn’t work because apple doesn’t use their cards and there were no drivers for them. What good is a netbook without wireless internet? However, the Aspire One uses a standard mini PCI-E wifi card, so it was just a matter of buying a compatible card (Dell/Broadcom 1490) off ebay for about $15 and opening it up to replace the card. It arrived during Quakecon, but after a few days I finally sat down and spent about 2 hours performing the surgery. I had read a lot about what to do, and some horror stories, but all went surprisingly well. Removing the keyboard was the hardest part, taking about an hour itself. I popped off the F8 key while trying to release the little tab underneath it, but fortunately it snapped back on easily when the keyboard is removed. Afterwards, it was just a simple matter of unplugging the old card and plugging the new one in. I attached the wires for the antenna and closed it back up. It detected the new card right away and I was online instantly. My “macbook mini” is complete!
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OS X has become my main OS now. It gives me all the networking features of linux while being a good-looking and powerful OS. With the Spaces multi-desktop program, I can have a full screen web brower up, and press Opt + left/right to get to other virtual desktops with my AIM, iTunes, whatever, using just the keyboard. It’s easy, pretty, powerful, and user friendly. Everything a real OS should be. I see now why netbooks are becoming so popular.
Posted by
eclipse on 08/29/2009 at 02:40 PM
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Sunday, August 23, 2009
Like any other day…
Everything is normal as we are cleared for takeoff on Dallas/Fort Worth International’s runway 18L.
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Posted by
eclipse on 08/23/2009 at 11:53 PM
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Thursday, August 20, 2009
Quakecon ‘09
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I was very lucky to get the time off for Quakecon 09 this year, and it was a good thing because this was a good one. Dan came down with the normal group of Tim, Adam, March, Matt and Steve. Also there were Brian and Joe. As usual, they drove down, which took about 19 hours. They somehow get faster at it each year. Unfortunately I wasn’t at home when this happened because I was working, but a few hours later I got home to find about 15 more computers in my apartment than normal. It was pretty funny to see all the laptops everywhere and I wish I got a picture of it. People slept on our sofa bed, on our air mattress, on heavy comforters, and even on our footrest thing. By the time I woke up the next day, most everyone was gone already.
I had a slightly different strategy for the line this year. Instead of waiting all day to be at the front of the line, I wanted to wait until it started to move before heading down to the Gaylord. With Tim and Adam and the group volunteering, they would get in first and let us know when to come down. Typically we’d arrive at the line around 2pm and wait 9-10 hours for registration to start. On top of that, I had a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo in the mail from Newegg. My desktop is intel based for the first time ever, a Core 2 Duo 2.93 Ghz, Asus motherboard, and 4GB of RAM. Woot! It arrived mid-afternoon and I spent about an hour or two rebuilding my computer right before quakecon. It would give me some problems later, but nothing that ruined the experience. After I finished rebuilding my computer, Dan and I decided to head down and get in line anyways. I was pretty lucky to get a shirt right away as they were thrown to the crowd. I don’t hoard shirts anymore, but I like to get one per year. We waited for about 4 hours in total, which wasn’t too bad. Had I waited another hour after Tim texted us we might have been able to cut that down to 3 hours, but there were plenty of people who showed up after we did, so I don’t think it’s possible to entirely skip the line. That night you basically set your computer down on the table where you choose, and walk out. We had a good spot near the tech desk and the NOC, but next year we need to sit on opposite sides of the aisle, instead of around the table. If someone is on the other side of the table, you basically don’t see them the whole event.
This was the first year I woke up early enough to get down to the event when it actually started, 9am on Thursday. After dropping Alison off at the airport to go home for the weekend, Dan and I went to iHop for breakfast and then to the Gaylord. The layout was similar to the 2005 layout when it was at the Gaylord before. The vendors were straight ahead through the door with the BYOC to the right. I always like the sponsors that let you use their products while playing a game, like when Razer had the copperhead display. There didn’t seem to be much of that this year. There were some laptops like that, and some consoles and intel systems, but I could pretty much get the same experience at my own computer. I’m looking for stuff that will make my computer better, not just the same experience somewhere else. They did have cool stuff though, the new Wolfenstein game looks sweet, and playing Doom 2 was fun on the xboxes. I think it really says something when your game is still fun to play like 15 years later. These days a game leaves you bored after 4 hours. Bawls was there selling cases and drinks and we got one. Around the sponsors was a lounge area where you could watch the tourney matches with commentators describing the match. That was pretty cool and fun to watch. And there was the Quick Draw stage where they held the “how much of your humanity will you give up for something free” events and the Quick Draw Quake matches. It would be fun to play a quick draw match, but you have to be present to win, and the odds of me getting called are so low that I don’t think it’s worth my time to hang around there. I’ve also watched plenty of noobs play quake before, so the match itself isn’t appealing enough. If you want to win a shirt, it’s the place to be though.
We got to our computers and set them up. The main game this year was Quake Live again, like last year. They used Quakecon as an announcement for Linux and Mac support which is cool. Quake Live is a great game, and it’s basically what Quake4 should have been. And despite what people say, it’s NOT just Quake 3. Should I go into it? The weapon strengths are different which alters gameplay and it took a little while for me to get used to it. The machinegun is weak as all hell now. You can pump 100 rounds into someone and still not kill them, which means that getting your revenge frag is harder. Instead of going for the quick MG frag after you die, its now a better strategy to give it up and look for a weapon. Quake has always been a game about controlling items, and this makes it even more important. The shotgun is stronger but spreads more, making it strong enough to kill almost anyone at really close range, but even more useless if someone is medium/far distance. With a longer weapon switch time, it’s also harder to get the SG kill. The Rocket Launcher is similar. It does lots of damage when it actually hits you, and far less when you get hit by splash damage. You can bounce around your enemy all day and hardly hurt him, while he’s probably pwning you with Lighting. The LG seems to be the center of the QuakeLive experience, with it being found everywhere and ultra powerful, quick reload time (meaning you can switch from it quickly), and instant damage. You can own at QL by having a LG and switching to the RL to finish the kill. It also seems easier to rail people in this game. All in all, it’s close enough to be fun like Q3 and mastering the new skills can be fun. QL’s web interface and stats will let you play against people with the same skill level as you so you’re not just always being pwned by one person, and that’s probably a good thing. It’ll help people learn and like the game better so all in all QL is a win.
The events there were pretty hit or miss, like usual. It’s never quite been the same since HardOCP left, but I had high hopes for the Nvidia event and something called the hardware event. I heard a rumor in the forum that Nvidia was supposed to do something big so when I got the day right, Dan and I and the group headed down to it and were excited to see a big pile’o'prizes, HardOCP style. It became clear pretty quickly though that the prizes were for the few that they brought onstage. Not only did Nvidia have nothing to talk about, but they couldn’t even give prizes away without embarrasing themselves. They had a mod-a-PC contest between two groups that was okay, but then they wanted to wax a guy’s chest and when it came time to start eating live crickets and fish, I had had enough. I’m not sure but I think I was one of the first people to walk out of the mainstage. Like I told Adam and Dan, it’s not so much that I was grossed out, it was just boring. I’ve never been excited by people eating things on fear factor and such, and I’d just rather be in the BYOC if Nvidia has nothing to talk about. I was surprised when the rest of the group was behind me again in about 5 minutes and we decided to hit up Logan’s for steak. Much better use of the time, indeed.
The Hardware Workshop by PC Perspective the next day saved Quakecon events. This was basically a return of the HardOCP workshop, and those guys did a great job of putting it together and keeping it interesting. AMD was there showing off their overclocking tool, and it was cool to see just how far their processors could be pushed, but it could have been even better if they talked about the basics of overclocking. What steps to take first, where to start with, etc. Would have been very cool to learn some real stuff at a workshop like that. They did manage to overclock a 3GHz Phenom to 5.5GHz, something like that using liquid helium. Pretty impressive, but not practical at all. I don’t see a lot of 3dmark2007 tournaments anywhere. They called tickets for prizes and threw a lot to the crowd, even processors. Dan wants me to mention nvidia douche who somehow showed up again at this event. He was giving away prizes, but would run around screaming trying to pump people up but would rarely actually give anything away, and when he did he just gave them to people seated on the aisle. So we learned pretty quickly to not be impressed or excited from him. Everytime we turned around nvidia douche was there it seemed.
I didn’t feel like going to the closing ceremony or finals, and I don’t know who won the Shelby Mustang from Ventrillo. I still think that money would be better spent on more video cards for more people. A lot of people worked hard just to win a 99% chance of losing that mustang. Other than QuakeLive I played a little Quakewars, Q3…and uhhh…ok I guess I played a lot of Quake Live. Also got some more TV shows like Seinfeld, House MD, XFiles, Stargate SG-1. My plan to upgrade my computer right before QCon was mostly a success, although there were times when my computer threw an absolute fit. I didnt reinstall Windows XP, just let it redetect my hardware when it rebooted and reactived windows, and I got pretty good speed out of it. Quakewars looked great at 1920x1200, but then it would start to throw explorer crashes and firefox crashed a lot (which is not helpful when QL is launched from the web browser). Reinstalling Firefox seriously helped it not crash all day Friday, but on Saturday it started again and early Sunday night I installed Windows 7 with Adam’s help. It’s actually not too bad and has been completely stable, so maybe it was just WinXP and not bad hardware after all. I should probably RMA the motherboard just to be safe, but laziness will probably prevail.
All in all, it was a great time, I’m glad everyone could come down again. Glad Dan finally made it down after 6+ years of trying. I tried to balance out sleeping and playing, tried to not get dragged into drama and all that that comes with less sleep. I think this year was an overall really good year. It was a record setting year for Quakecon in terms of attendance, it seemed well-organized this year with twitter and google calendar updates, and I hope we can do it again next year! Thanks for coming everyone!
Check out more pics in the Quakecon ‘09 Gallery
Posted by
eclipse on 08/20/2009 at 12:51 AM
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Sunday, July 12, 2009
The AppleTV Experiment Continued
It’s no secret that the AppleTV, just a pet project by Apple, has some drawbacks. It’s got some pretty unimpressive hardware specs, it’s not compatible with a lot of file formats, and the little remote can be a pain to use. Fortunately, I’ve spent the last few weeks tweaking and hacking the system to make it quite usable and powerful. The Playstation 3 is still around obviously for games, bluray, and DVD discs, but in every other area, we’ve switched over to the AppleTV and it’s been great. I bought the AppleTV because I knew it had potential, and it was pretty cheap. Sure, a mac mini can do anything the AppleTV can do without much of the hacking, but it still doesn’t play Bluray and it costs at least twice as much. So how did I overcome the AppleTV’s shortcomings and just how awesome is it?
The first step in the AppleTV’s new life was to create the USB Patchstick and boot the AppleTV up with it. This installs several useful tools, such as XBox Media Center, Boxee, and SSH (dropbear). I already went over XBMC and Boxee in the last post, but it was extremely helpful for the patchstick to install SSH for me, as being able to access the AppleTV’s command line paved the way for the rest of the “upgrades”.
With XMBC, I could now play all the video files on my computer like I did before with the PS3. But I figured I have 40gb of wasted space sitting here on the AppleTV if all I’m going to do is stream video. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some TV eps or movies available to be played without having my desktop powered on all the time? Sure, at this point is was possible to copy files to the AppleTV’s hard drive with the scp or ftp command, but that’s not exactly user-friendly, or fast. I should install Samba service! There is a nice walkthrough here, which is pretty much what I did. It still needed some work with the config file but after a night of messing with it I was able to finally connect to the AppleTV’s hard drive, easily drag and drop a file into its Movies folder, and watch it without needing my desktop anymore. It’s pretty cool to have it just working by itself now…
But it didn’t stay that way for long. Now, the AppleTV isn’t really like a desktop computer that gets turned off or put to sleep when you’re done. It’s more like a server, which stays on all the time. The only way to turn it off (other than the console), is to unplug it. If this thing is going to be on all the time, eating my power, shouldn’t it be doing something? Enter rtorrent. rtorrent is an awesome unix torrent downloading program that uses little system resources and is really simple to use. You set it up to monitor a folder, and whenever it sees a new torrent file there it will start to download. When it’s done it will delete the torrent file and move the downloaded video to your Movies directory for you. This way it just downloads for me all the time until shows are ready and they just pop up ready and waiting for me when they complete. And with the easy-to-use samba service, Alison or I can just drop a torrent file into the AppleTV’s folder and forget about it until it’s ready.
And for a few days the AppleTV was set in its ways, but isn’t it so much work to download and look for torrent files yourself? Why do all that when the computer can do it for you! I knew I was so close now to having a Tivo-like setup. How nice would it be to come home after work and find new episodes of your shows waiting for you? Ludicrous, I know! For this I turned to rssdler. Rssdler can scan an rss feed and look for whatever Regular Expression guidelines you give it. It’s a pretty nifty thing, but it’s a python script and so I had to figure out how to install python first. Getting rssdler to work took the longest time of anything I did to the AppleTV, about an entire week of messing with it. Python didn’t give me too much trouble, but the rssdler wouldn’t work and I still don’t remember exactly why, but it was essentially due to a space character in one of the files. Grrrr unix… Also had lots of permission issues and it sure doesn’t like to be run as root. Rssdler works when it wants to. I still have to check up on it a lot these days..
One of the biggest gripes I had with the new system was that damn little white remote. It doesn’t have a lot of features, and I lose it all the time. I carry it around the apartment for no reason and forget where I leave it. Then it’s hard to find because it’s so small. Plus, 3 remotes now for the system? I stumbled upon a solution in the MacRumors forums. A universal remote by Logitech, the Harmony 550. Unlike most shitty universal remotes where one or two buttons might work, this remote plugs into your computer and downloads all the instructions off the internets from Logitech. The remote actually does change the way you watch your TV. I can press the LCD Button “Watch TV” and it’ll turn on the TV and the stereo, set the stereo to Aux, switch to the right TV inputs, and even go to your favorite channel. Press “AppleTV” and it’ll do the same, switching to the AppleTV input. It even turns off unnecessary equipment. Now we are back to one remote and it’s even easier than before to use. The harmony retails around $90-120, but I got it refurbished off Amazon for $55. I totally recommend the Harmony series universal remote to anyone.
Now the AppleTV is great at downloading shows and stuff for me, but all these videos are taking up room on the puny 40gb internal hard drive! It would be great to just be able to plug an external drive into the USB port on the AppleTV, but since that would actually be useful, Apple says no. But I got another idea. My Airport Extreme wireless base station has a USB port for sharing printers and external hard drives over the network. Acting as a little NAS server, it was fairly simple to plug in an external USB SATA drive into the wireless station. I got a 1.5 TB Hard Disk from Fry’s and started moving all the video over to it. It’s great because now all the files are available to all computers on the network, including the TV without my computer needing to be on. View the TV network diagram.
With the Harmony remote making the experience so much easier, the external drive storing everything and anything, and rssdler turning the AppleTV into a Tivo, I am definately happy I got it. It’s a lot easier to use than the PS3, much quieter, and more flexible. But I’m still not done yet! What’s on the horizon for the little overworked, underpaid 1GHz HTPC? Well since it’s always on, I’ve written a little cron job (and installed cron) that updates my site with my home ip address. With this I will be able to log in remotely (say during an overnight at a hotel) and maybe start a download, get around crappy hotel wireless plans by tunneling through SSH, remote start my desktop, etc…who knows.. Also planning on trying wtorrent, which gives a web client to rtorrent which would make it easier to see the status of current downloads. And lastly, it would be nice to have the option to download straight to the external hard drive for some of those larger files. I’m always thinking of more I can do with it, which is awesome. I knew it had lots of potential!
Posted by
eclipse on 07/12/2009 at 10:08 PM
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