Friggin' Legit

So it’s been approximately ages since I’ve done anything in this space, so I figured I’d quickly summarize my last two months with a picture.

(Numbers are roughly clockwise)

1) My torn-apart Eee PC 901. A while back, I broke the LCD by using it as a carrying handle, a use it neither was designed for nor deserved. So I ordered a replacement and assumed I’d be able to install it myself. This was a good assumption; expecting the shipper to send precisely the right model was not. All-in-all, the pins didn’t match up and the backlight didn’t work. Ordering the right part soon.

2) Machine of Death. A great book that I’ve been reading. I think it might be the first actual hold-it-in-your-hands paper book I’ve bought for my own personal reading enjoyment in years.

3) 3D glasses. I was on an Amazon shopping spree and figured why not.

4) My newly repaired Macbook Pro. The turdbiscuits at the Apple Store finally believed me that the issue was the same one I told them it was all along, namely that the Wi-Fi card was Wi-Fried, and repaired the slut of a laptop. So far, so good, but I’ve renamed it “Morgan”.

5) Playstation 2 and Persona 4. I picked up a used PS2 and a bunch of games for dirt cheap over the holidays and have really been enjoying it. Persona 4 is the one game I’ve spent the most time on, over 20 hours according to my save file but many more hours were played but lost to death. It’s really quite fun and I’m looking forward to playing more of it.

6) Magic: The Gathering deck. Yes, I’ve gotten into Magic. I have a few friends with whom I play a couple times a week and currently have 3 decks. Hopefully, I will be able to refrain from converting my entire life savings into trading card form.

7) My DVD copy of The Social Network. The local Blockbuster is shutting down and are in the process of liquidating their DVD inventory, so everything is on sale for, again, dirt cheap. I picked up the special edition of what I consider to be 2010′s best film for a delicious $8.

Otherwise, most of my time has been spent on game development and school. I made another Oceanspirit Dennis game and am currently working on two other unrelated, non-OSD game projects. I also might be working with a certain someone on a certain something that may or may not certainly be a book.

Let’s have some structure:

1. Video games: I recently beat Mass Effect, and let me say that it is definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played. It gives COD4 a run for its money as my favorite Xbox game. Sure, it has a lot of flaws (annoying inventory system, the MAKO vehicle, Unreal engine 3), but it more than makes up for them with an incredible story, truly lovable characters, the best dialog system I’ve ever encountered, and more than tolerable combat. Go buy it now. Other games I’ve been playing recently: Left 4 Dead 2, Saints Row 2, Spider-Man 2, and Modern Warfare 2 (see a pattern?). All of them are really good, but none of them are quite as epic as Mass Effect. I’m planning on getting the collector’s edition (EDIT: For the sequel in January, that is), which is something I’ve never done.
2. Computer problems: If you’ve read my twitter in the past two weeks or heard my screams of anguish (audible radius: 2000 km), you’ll no doubt know that my computer is friggin’ screwed up. I have nearly exhausted my options for fixing it, but I don’t think it’s too late yet. After some preparation, I plan to back up all my essential stuff twice, including app licenses, and do a complete format and reinstall. I’m probably going to end up doing this for both my Mac and Windows partition, so I’m going to use this opportunity to upgrade to Windows 7 and increase the size of my Boot Camp partition. I honestly don’t know why I’m upgrading, since the last 3 times I’ve upgraded my computers I’ve wrought nothing but sorrows.
3. Christmas: I hate Christmas music. I like Christmas, but I hate the music more than anything. Other things I hate more than anything include the cold, rain, final exams, and media whores. Why I’m in Memphis during the winter and why I still have yahoo.com bookmarked is beyond me. But once again breaking my own rule of never announcing anything until it’s done, I have plans for literally 9 different thing for my holiday break. Instead of breaking my rule outright, I’ll just bend it a little by giving the first letter of each: M, C, A, K, F, T, P, S, and B. Guess away.

Well, it’s that time of year again. No, wait, it isn’t.

So it turns out MacHeist is doing a “nanoBundle” which, short story short, is a half-dozen odd Mac apps for $0, i.e., free.  There’s some good stuff in it, like WriteRoom and Twitterrific. There’s some details about unlocks and some stuff on Facebook to get another app or two, but the big deal is that it’s free.

In the realm of not free crap, some pretty stellar-looking games are coming out this Christmas season. I’ve got Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2 pre-ordered, and the demo of L4D2 is friggin’ uh-maze-ing. I’ve also been getting back into the swing of PC gaming, TF2, L4D1, and my second play-through of HL2, not to mention copious amounts of fun in Gmod. My MBP handles these games all pretty dandily, HL2 gets 60fps+ on absolute maximum settings. My main issue right now, though, is a lack of hard drive space on my Bootcamp partition. I’d like to give it another 25-30GB from my Mac side, and I’ve heard murmurs that such a feat can be done with GParted. I’ve used the live USB with my Eee with eventual success. While I’d prefer not having to backup and restore, I might be willing to do it with Windows XP, maybe as a transition to 7. But I’m not at all interested in wiping and restoring OS X. This is something I’ll have to research, being a potentially fatal operation.

At work, I’ve started creating an iPhone app for my rapper boss and am looking at getting into iPhone development as a “serious hobby.” It could fit into some entrepreneurial ideas I have for the future involving videos for university courses, too. Now the virtual iPhone that comes with the SDK certainly works, but I imagine it would be much nicer doing the testing on an actual device. No doubt it would also be friggin’ sweet for mobile browsing, games, utilities, and more or less anything I could imagine. But, daaaamn, a data plan is expensive! Not to mention the charges I’d undoubtably rack up by going download-crazy on the app store. I have a phone. I have an iPod. Do I need an iPhone?

Condawg says no, an iPod Touch would do. I initially brushed off the suggestion as impractical because the Touch didn’t offer enough improvements to replace both my phone and iPod. I’m starting to think it still might be an option, but I’m unsure. Clearly, I’d prefer an iPhone, but would it be an investment or an indulgence? Before I bought one, I’d need to know that I could at least partially cover the costs from app or work income. So before I make the purchase, I’ll want to be more fluent in app design and Objective-C.

Or I could blow all my money on a plane ticket to New Zealand to get some dandy books.

In other news, Triumph of the Nerds is now for sale on ebay for $20! Check it out here.

So I was frolicking through the interwebs when I found this story on Microsoft’s deep discounts on Windows 7 upgrades for students. People with an .edu email address, like myself, are able to buy Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade for $30 US, a suspiciously close price point to Snow Leopard’s.

And while it is only available for students, the actual OS does not appear to be any different than the full version, and can be used to upgrade either Vista or XP. While the article speculates that the intent of this discount is either to net Mac/Linux users or, more likely, to get current PC users to upgrade, I think that it is actually a move to combat piracy. I haven’t done extensive research, but of the students at my school, the ones who have torrented Windows is roughly “a buttload.” When Microsoft gives these piracy-prone students the option to upgrade legitimately for a price that, in the long run, might as well be free, they might entice a good percent to avoid either the risks involved in illicit file-shareing or the ethical dilemma of stealing.

My personal dilemma is actually whether I want to bother with upgrading at all. I have XP installed on a relatively small Boot Camp partition (46 GB) and use it mainly for gaming and engineering programs. I would like to know if 7 did a similar thing to OS X 10.6 in saving disk usage. Also, to upgrade from XP to 7, I’d have to do a full backup, wipe, install, restore. Do I really want to trade the hassle of installing and the disk space for a small performance boost and interface changes that I probably won’t like anyway? I’ll have to think on this one, but I might still end up buying 7 while this offer still lasts and maybe installing it down the line.

Read full story on Windows 7 Student pricing.

Or read it on Macrumors.

You might remember a story I posted waaaaaay back about the Mac text editor TextMate and how I intended to buy it and was looking for a coupon. Recently, I decided to email the company that develops TextMate about their intentions to do a promotion.

Someone from MacroMates got back with me, saying, “(we are) currently quite happy with our sales so I wouldn’t expect to see us do another coupon code for a while.” So that’s the answer to that. Anyone who’s looking for a promo code would probably be better off going ahead and buying it. Trust me, it’s worth every penny.

In other news, referring to your own posts as “stories” is incredibly, incredibly pretentious.

Here’s a video I did highlighting my top 6 favorite new Snow Leopard features, aside from, you know, the under-the-hood stuff.

HEY! Do you enjoy documentaries? Do you enjoy documentaries about the early days of the personal computer? Do you like said films that feature interviews with luminaries such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Balmer, and several other important people? Do you enjoy watching these sort of documentaries in VHS format? Do you know why I’m asking all these questions?

Man, I’ve just hyped this up so much even I can hardly believe that everything I just said is completely true about what I’m selling! This ain’t no Craigslist.

That’s right! You, yes, YOU!, could be the proud owner of the 3 VHS Collector’s Box Set of the public television documentary, Triumph of the Nerds. Cue the pictures!

Triumph of the Nerds!

And now from this angle!

And now this one!

Holy crap another angle oh my goodness oh my goodness!

And if that didn't convince you...

I haven’t set a price yet but some googling suggests maybe around $20 US or something? Not sure about shipping yet either, but we can work something out. The tapes are in great quality, not perfect, but it’s from 1996, okay? If you’re interested, email me at my name (drew) at my domain (ddq5.com).

UPDATE: It’s now for sale on ebay.

I have a Macbook Pro.  I have VMware Fusion. I have Windows XP.

I want to play PC games. I don’t want a PC. I’d rather stay on the legal side of things with my copy of Windows. I don’t want to waste too much hard drive space.

First off, I’m still not convinced that switching to Boot Camp only is the best idea. I’d loose the quick launch ability of Fusion, but in return, I’d get vastly improved speed. For the most part, Fusion’s speed is sufficient for the engineering programs I use for school and for 10-year-old point and click adventure games, but clearly not enough for recent full 3D games.

Sure, I have an Xbox for that and there are some nice games for Mac, but then again, there’s always those where the PC version is the only practical option or a better deal. So what I’ve been thinking about is using a cloning utility to back up my XP virtual machine to my external hard drive and somehow doing something from there. As you could probably guess, I haven’t thought it through that much, it’s more of a little “what if” thing. So any help would be… helpful.

If you’re curious, some of the PC games I’m interested in are the Valve Pack, Deus Ex, Thief, etc.

More dang crap freakin heck! The hard disk on Olan, my Macbook Pro, as they say it in the industry, totally crapped out on me! I was minding my own business, watching some videos on YouTube when all of a sudden, my HD makes some weird noises and my entire system freezes up! Long story short, I couldn’t fix it and now Olan’s at the apple store. At least I’ve been keeping regular backups. I also like to think that my computer committed harakiri because I was watching an Aerosmith video. Now before you say anything, Wikipedia led me there. While looking up some stuff about Lost, I found out that the dude who plays Sawyer had a cameo in their video for Cryin’ but apparently my computer didn’t like that idea.

In other news, I friggin ordered my friggin Xbox 360! Friggin yes! I am quite happy, except, really, I’m not. My computer problems as well as finals have succeeded in dragging me down to a more or less neutral state. In short, I have become comfortably numb.