Month: August 2007

Led On

I got a virus alert when I went to start a game tonight, which led me to do a quick Google search. It seemed to be a false positive, but I wanted to be sure, which led to burning a Linux rescue disk so I could do an offline scan with a different program. The rescue disk was having trouble detecting the hard drive, which led me to wonder why I had put it on the non-standard tertiary IDE port on the motherboard, which led to me cracking open the case. Looking at the wiring mess led me to an “Oh yeah, that was why…” realization, which led me to wonder if I could do any better, and after finding new batteries for my maglite, moving the drive around, and some recabling, it’s now back on the primary IDE interface. Which led to problems with the boot order when it was powered back up, but that was easily fixed and I can boot off the rescue disk and do the virus scan now.

Which led me to wonder why I didn’t just buy the 360 version of the game…

Oooh, Shiny…

I was thinking of upgrading to a DS Lite for a while now, and Picross DS pulled me out of a stretch of neglecting my old one, so I picked up this bundle today. It’s a pretty good deal at only $20 more than the regular DS for both Brain Age 2 and a carrying case. The store threw in a free copy of Monster Trucks DS too, which I’m sure is a terrible abomination that they would have charged me more not to take.

The red is a fairly dark metallic crimson which complements the black nicely, and otherwise it’s a regular old DS Lite. I’m a bit wary of the controls at the moment, as it seems like I have to push up and down a lot harder before they register, but maybe I just have to get used to them.

Brain Age 2 is garbage, and I’m just saying that because after the first test it immediately told me my brain age is 80. Let’s just say that “scissors” is the new “blue”. Really, it’s exactly like the original, just with a different set of tests and some more new sudoku puzzles. The tests seem to be a bit harder too, with things like being trickier with concealing information (in one it asks a series of addition problems, but covers up one of the digits and reuses it in the next problem, so you have to remember what it was), making you play musical sequences, and more memorization (e.g., a grid of 25 numbers).

The case is a bit unusual in that it just wraps around the two flat sides, and there are a few bands to hold the DS in place. That makes putting it in the case take a bit more effort, but it looks really classy, at least.

That Didn’t Take Long

It’s only a little over three months after building my new systems, including the heavily-upgraded MythTV box, and it’s already at 97% full on the video recording partition. Yikes!

Fortunately it’s just because I’ve been careless, and I can free up a lot of space, I just have to get around to working on it. There’s some backup data I was temporarily keeping on there that can be removed now, which would free up around 180 gigs. I can still try to use LVM to join it with another unused partition (the ‘extra’ space on the unexpectedly-larger refurb drive I got that couldn’t be added to the RAID set), which would add another 250 gigs. I can start transcoding shows into MPEG-4 now that there’s a more powerful processor in there and it won’t take all day to do so, which would halve the space used by recordings.

Or I could get around to actually watching these shows. I think I’m about 13 episodes behind on Lost now…