Month: January 2008

Just Make Sure They’re Clean Ones

I’m kind of glad that I got the standalone Rock Band game and not the full set, given how much trouble a lot of people seem to be having with the reliability of the new guitar and especially the drums. On a lot of sets, rapid drum rolls aren’t properly detected and miss a lot of notes, and the pedal snaps in half a bit too easily.

People are inventive though, and have come up with a lot of quick, homebrew mods to try and make the drums more reliable. One of the best so far doesn’t even need you to break the drum set open; you just need a bunch of…socks?

Spying On…Myself

DD-WRT has served well as the firmware on my wireless router, giving me a few more useful features and stability that the default firmware was lacking in. So I got rid of it.

Instead I’m running Tomato on it now. Why?

1) Partly because I still have occasional trouble with the wireless dropping out for a while. It could be interference, but setting the channel number seems to clear it up even if I set it back to the same channel, so it might be a problem with the wireless drivers, too. Using a different firmware will let me see if it continues to occur there, at least.

2) And also because Tomato has one feature that DD-WRT doesn’t: bandwidth monitoring. Not that I’m running into any limits or anything yet, but I’m curious as to just how much I’m using up, and Tomato will track it in a variety of different ways: real-time, and totals on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Otherwise, they both have pretty much all the same features that I need, so switching over wasn’t too painful. The only stumbling point was getting it to mount a Samba share for storing the bandwidth monitor history, and that was just because I’d forgotten to add the new user I created for it via ‘smbpasswd’.

I’ve Had Better Kool-Aid

Another big Apple Event has come and gone, and in turn:

MacBook Air: Meh. Not for me, since I’m fine with the form factor and weight of my iBook as it is, and I’m more interested in having better performance and functionality. I don’t actively hate it though, since it doesn’t really replace the other notebooks, so we’re not being ‘forced’ to upgrade to it.

iTunes Movie Rental: Irrelevant right now as it won’t be available here for a while yet. It looks like pricing will be about the same as the XBox Live Marketplace, so it’ll come down to a battle between which has the better library of titles. I also don’t have an easy way to stream iTunes to a TV right now, but that might be resolved by the time it’s ready here, though there’s an implication that HD rentals are only available through the AppleTV, and I’m not buying one just for that.

iPhone updates: Looks nice, but I’m still not a cell phone person.

Time Capsule: Now this is actually interesting. One of the things that really annoys me about my MythTV setup is that it runs on a really large, noisy tower PC right now. If I could replace that with say, a Mac Mini as the server, stacked on a Time Capsule acting as the storage, and using a USB capture card instead, it would be a lot smaller and quieter… And then I hear my wallet go “OW!”

Otherwise, I’m still holding out for a MacBook Pro update, which should be due sometime soon.

Thanks, Norton

I had an odd problem after rebooting one of my work computers yesterday. When I went to log in, it said that it couldn’t load the local profile, that it could be lost or corrupt, and created a temporary profile for me to log into instead.

All of my usual files were there in my profile directory, so it wasn’t because I’d lost some critical files. I rebooted a couple of times in case it was a temporary thing, but it continued to happen. I also booted into safe mode and could log in just fine there, so the files weren’t corrupt either. After poking around the logs a bit, the cause of the error seemed to be that the profile files were in use when it went to try and load them. A bit of googling revealed that this is a common problem when using migrated profiles, but that wasn’t the case here.

But, then I realized that a virus scan was being kicked off when the system booted, since one hadn’t been run in a while, and one of the first sets of directories it scans is…the user profiles. Symantec AV was probably scanning my profile directories at the time I was trying to log in and causing sharing conflicts on the files.

After rebooting again, I waited five minutes before trying to log in, and everything worked fine once more.

Ding Dong, The Disc Is Dead

With the news that Warner Bros. is dropping its support for HD-DVD and producing Blu-Ray discs exclusively from now on, the HD format war is pretty much over and Blu-Ray is the winner. The only major HD-DVD supporter left is Universal, and it’s unlikely they’re going to want to stay on a clearly losing side.

It’s actually a good thing that one side is finally gaining a dominant upper hand, since otherwise it was poised to be another VHS-vs-Beta war all over again, and the confusion would have kept people away.

The larger war is still only half-won though, as Blu-Ray still has to convince people to choose it instead of, well, plain DVD. People already get tons of extras and what they think is a decent-looking picture with DVDs, so is the higher resolution alone going to sway them into buying new players and more expensive discs…

(Maybe I won’t regret getting a PS3 after all.)