Ranting Kenya

Just read this on an ARS Technica preview…

…You’ll be inside a space ship, and then briefly outside it. Thrilling stuff. Sadly, he doesn’t make it out alive.

That’s a possibility for the ending of the game, but not the only one. You need to survive this game as Shepard to play the third one… but it’s not going to be easy.

A possibility for ending the game?!?! Awesome. One thing about the first game (and basically all games), whether you go the “good” route or the “bad” one, you come out ahead anyway. Pissing off the wrong dude and him just flat out ending your game? That’s pretty awesome.

The game will also be awesome since it’s going to be darker. Makes me think of The Empire Strikes Back. Totally my favorite of the 6 Star Wars films. This game is going to rock.

Mass Effect 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Halo ODST

Halo Reach

Crysis 2

Crackdown 2

Alan Wake

This is one AMAZING trailer. If the game lives up to be half as good as it, we’re all in for a treat.

The day the iPhone was released, things changed for cell phones. Smartphone awareness skyrocketed. I have seen more new blackberry users since the iPhone was released than any other phone. Perhaps all old Razr users…

Since then, in the consumer’s eyes, no other phone touches it. The G1 was released with google’s Android OS, and the Blackberry storm was heavily hyped, but neither can hold a candle to the popularity of Apple’s shiniest product.

So why would anybody think the Palm Pre has a chance? Well in my opinion, it has the best features of the iPhone, G1, and a typical Blackberry all rolled into one.

A wicked looking/performing OS

Though the iPhone is physically a nice phone, the real gem of the device is the OS. It looks nice, it’s easy to use (it is an Apple product), and has lots of great features. Install the apps you want, jailbreak it if necessary, bring google maps to the masses etc.
Palm will up the ante in the OS space. Evidently a much lighter OS, it is capable of running many processes in the background. To many this doesn’t seem necessary, but it will make a huge different to users, and developers. The Web OS is also designed for a touchscreen device, not just patched in like some other phone’s OS.

A truly open SDK for the app store

Hopefully we won’t be seeing any more Tweets from Trent Reznor chastizing corporations regarding their contradictory policies regarding app/music ratings. The Web OS SDK promises to be open, and that Palm’s role won’t be to screen applications, only to make sure security issues are plugged.

Haptic feedback done right

What’s the best way to implement haptic feedback in a touchscreen device? Not a clickable touchscreen (talk about a half baked solution, I can’t feel the buttons before I press them), not a vibration function, but an actual physical keyboard.

So to review, the Palm Pre should be an excellent device since it combines the best features of the iPhone’s (touchscreen and a well built OS), the openness of the G1 (open marketplace for apps with little to no interference from Palm), and the single best feature of the Blackberry (an actual keyboard).

Sounds like a winner to me.

I’m really looking forward to this game. It’s kinda making me think I should re-visit the original on my other Xbox and have a couple different saves to play off of.

Here’s the latest video:

And here’s the initial teaser:

I am so excited. I’m still playing COD4 probably 6-10 hours a week. Can barely wait for November 10, 2009.

Chris Coyier of css-tricks.com posted a nice screencast of how to use SimplePie. SimplePie allows you to pull in pretty much any RSS feed from another website and post that info on your site in regular HTML.

I’ve been playing around with the options and abilities this last weekend and I feel it’s the easiest way to get some RSS content onto a website. I know SimpleXML is supposed to be really simple, and perhaps my limited understanding of PHP classes has held me back, but I’ve never gotten SimpleXML to work for me in under 5 minutes. SimplePie literally works about as fast as you can type 20 short lines of code. It’s practically fool proof.

I certainly recommend checking SimplePie out.

I had this bizarre issue for the last month or so. One day, I could no longer stream anything to either of my two Xbox 360s from Windows Media Center. All that would happen is instead of the actual playback, I would just get a black screen for any live or recorded tv.

I googled the net quite a bit, searched through various user forums, re-installed the extender a number of times, called Xbox technical support (pointless and frustrating), and nearly re-installed Vista.

Before I did that however, I did post in a couple forums my problem. And what do you know, I got response that worked.

Here’s the thread: http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?p=887638#post887638

Here’s the fix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259/en-us

Turns out the solution was simple. Just reset the Winsock. Even though the auto-check showed no problems, and I could see all ten of the entries listed, I did the manual reset anyway. It worked.

Thanks to BadLag of the Digital Home Forums for the help.

So I finally got the speakers I’ve been drooling over for a couple years now. Nice black finish, top notch in every respect. All the positive reviews I’ve read about these speakers have been totally accurate. These things are pure quality.

The only thing I’d add to the comments and reviews that I don’t recall reading is that at low volume levels, you probably won’t notice a vast difference between these and some other relatively good computer speakers. But if you like to turn up the music a bit, these clearly stand apart from the others.

I recently upgraded my computer’s main hard drive. I didn’t want to just add more storage on a separate drive since much of my storage is taken up by Vista Media Center recordings. My music and videos are on a separate drive already. I just wanted a huge main drive.

So in the end, I’ve moved from a 250GB drive to a 1TB drive. Now cloning everything over wasn’t as easy as I had hoped, but it wasn’t too bad either. I thought I’d post a little bit about what I did and, which products I used to hopefully streamline someone else’s experience.

So let me list the stuff I used:

• SATA Source Drive (250GB Seagate Barracuda)
• SATA Destination Drive (1TB Western Digital Black)
• Windows Disk Management
• GParted
• Easeus Disk Copy
• InfraRecorder

Here’s the order of what I did:

1. Added new drive physically in computer, changed nothing on original. With SATA drive you don’t even have to configure a jumper or anything. Just find an empty bay and plug in the power and data cables.
2. Booted computer (Vista Home Premium in my case, though all of this would be the same on XP), and opened up the disk management tool.
3. Activated the new hard drive.
4. Downloaded both Easeus Disk Copy and GParted iso files, and burned them to CDs with InfraRecorder.
5. Booted from the Easeus Disk Copy disk I just created. Copied the whole drive sector by sector to the new disk, existing paritions and all.
6. Once Easeus is done copies, you have identical partitions on your new hard drive. There will also be the remainder of the free space on the new larger drive unallocated.
7. Rebooted the computer with the GParted disk is the drive. Once GParted is up and ready to go, I select the main parition on the new drive and choose the “grow” option. I drag that partition to fill the rest of that “unallocated space”.
8. Once that was done, I shut down the computer, disconnected the old drive, I swapped the data cables (not sure if this is necessary or not), and rebooted again.
9. When windows is starting back up, it’ll want to run some disk checks. I let them finish, and the computer rebooted normally.

And that’s it. Doesn’t sound like it takes very long, but the copying, formating, and growing of partitions each took over an hour on my machine, which is pretty powerful.

All in all, I’m pretty happy since I don’t have to hunt down all that software all over again and re-do all my personal settings.