The New Computer, Quake 4 on AMD64

So I got video card #2 yesterday. This time it’s an eVGA (nVidia GeForce 6800GT) from newegg. I thought I could save some money by getting the video card from ebay, but the MSI one I got turned out to be fried (nasty snow & artifacts constantly all over the screen). Ebay/Paypal buyer protection to the rescue, though! I filed a complaint, and I just need to pay to ship the card back to the guy (who does NOT communicate to me), put the tracking number into a web page, and I get my refund. So not all is lost…

This machine seriously hauls ass. Everything is snappy as ever, and games run amazingly well. That means 1280×1024 at the highest details running solid well over 60fps with the latest games. I don’t mean to brag, but that just feels good. :)

I had some trouble getting Quake 4 to run on Ubuntu 64. Apparently Quake 4 depends on the 32bit version of libsdl. Since all my system libraries are compiled to 64bit binaries, Quake 4 simply complained that it couldn’t find the libsdl shared library. It turns out, that the fix is to put the 32bit libsdl (which I found in my Neverwinter Nights installation) in my quake4’s lib directory and prepend ”./lib” to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH exported in the launcher shell script.

I don’t usually like to attain software by dishonest means, but I just had to try this one out. You can bet I’ll be acquiring this title come this holiday season.

OMG I Just Bought a Bunch of Computer

So it’s about time for Adam to upgrade his PC, so in anticipation of Christmas cash, he spends a bunch of hard-earned dough to buy some computer. Here’s what we got:

• Aspire Black/Silver Micro ATX Case is the shuttle pc sized case that will probably end up ON the desk and looking badass next to my black speakers/lcd/kbd.
• Foxconn NF4K8MC-EKRS motherboard with cpu-matching 1 GHz front-side bus and nforce4 chipset.
• Athlon 64 3500+ is the 64 bit beauty with the Venice core running at 2.2 GHz.
• I needed a new video card to go in the PCI-Express slot of the new motherboard, so I decided not to beat around the bush and just splurge on a MSI GeForce 6800GT (256M) which will be sickly fast.

I’m probably stupid. It’s way more than I need. But it will be small and will run Quake 4 real good. >=]

Update: Oh yeah, if anyone wants to buy my old stuff, let me know.

• Real nice Antec tower case w/Aspire PSU and case fans
• Asus mobo with all the modern features
• Athlon XP 2800+ Barton CPU (512k L2 cache!)
• GeForce FX 5600 128M

$450 or best offer. Ask me about it.

Update: I’ve found a buyer.

This Week in Tech

Podcasts have recently become more popular. Now that iTunes supports podcast downloading (basic usage—no torrents) podcasts have come to the masses. TWiT is apparently #2 on the iTunes podcast roster! If you don’t know, it’s Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, and many others from the TechTV crew. It’s quite a nice show if you’re one who enjoyed their appearances on TechTV’s The Screen Savers and Call for Help.

I like listening to these shows with dnb in the background. Shit, I’ll listen to dnb whenver possible! Anyway, as I was playing some tunes alongside the podcast, I decided to fire up Audacity and add my last released set at lower volume to the podcast. I’m not going to post it, but if for some reason you’re actually interested, msg me on aim.

Oh, and my other favorite podcast is LugRadio.

Logitech v500 Mouse & UltraX Keyboard

First of all, happy July 4^th, everybody! (even non-Americans have a 4^th of July.) I hope everyone is enjoying good time spent with family and friends.

I just got a couple interesting input devices from Logitech, and I wanted to take a moment to tell you all how cool they are.

First is the relatively new Logitech v500 wireless optical mouse intended for use with a notebook. This thing is quite small, but still manages to feel nice in my hand thanks to some quite impressive engineering. An easy-to-release latch on the bottom of the mouse releases the chassis. The bottom side of the mouse comes up to fit better into the palm of your hand. This also exposes the slot hidden in the now-exposed surface to store the micro receiver. It also has a 4-way scroll pad (not a wheel!) making this one badass little mouse.

The other big selling point for me is the new technology. This is one of the first mice to incorporate a scroll pad like this one. It’s also at least one of the first to use 2.4 GHz wireless technology to provide super-low latency transmissions and a completely reworked all-terrain optical engine. The two of these things together mean that this mouse will be very quick and error free on about any surface you can think of for up to 30 meters!

Now for the bad news. I didn’t even realize this until I got the mouse, but it doesn’t have the ability to send a signal for a middle click. I guess the pad is designed only to allow the swiping motions to signify scrolling, and can’t distinguish a simple tap. This is annoying, but using xorg’s emulate3buttons (both buttons at the same time for 3rd mouse click) isn’t as annoying as I thought it would be. I thought it was odd, though, that I read a couple reviews and nothing I read hinted the fact that this mouse is missing a third button as though it wasn’t even a consideration.

Anyway, this mouse is otherwise perfect. I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for a sleek and tiny mouse to use with their laptop, doesn’t mind the lack of middle mouse button, and has the moolah. The SRP is about $70, but I found mine on Newegg for $53.

The keyboard I just picked up is a IBM-Compatible keyboards. I actually stole this keyboard idea from my friend Dan who picked it up a few months ago. Having proper, full-sized keys along with the familiar layout make it very comfortable to type on. The media keys up top are few, but few is more than enough for me. Also, with this wrist rest I use, the keyboard ends up being a bit too low when my hands come over the rest because this keyboard is so thin. So, I’ve put a couple jewel cases under it to elevate it a bit. This is an okay temporary solution, though the keyboard does tend to drift around a bit.

Skype as voIP Solution

I’ve tried Ventrilo (only for windows) and TeamSpeak (the advanced interface and actually having to connect to a particular server make it a bit tricky for newbies.) They’re both nice, but Skype seems even nicer.

Skype is a company that provides their client software for free, and without any malware even! This will allow you to connect with other users who have the Skype client software on their computer for free! The added bonus of this system is, if you want to drop some scrilla, you can call out to PSTN lines ($0.017 /min in US and a few other places), get your own phone number and take incoming phone calls (from PSTN), and/or use a voicemail service.

Anyway, the client application is very clean and easy to use. I would recommend it to anyone who needs the voIP services, or just wants to experiment with some cool things to do with your new fast wireless T1 connection you’ve got even though you live out in the middle of nowhere. Oh wait, that’s me. Nevermind…

Skype Me! I’m threadphone.

Secure Delete

So I’m selling off my old laptop to someone who found my listing on AllMSU, and so I decided to do a proper secure delete. After some quick research I found Secure Delete from The Hacker’s Choice. They’re some very flexible tools to delete files/partitions/etc so they can never be recovered. What I ended up doing in this case, though, is wiping the entire partiton clean off while booted from a Knoppix CD. This article shows how to use the “shred” tool.

# shred -n 2 -z -v /dev/hda1

Which will overwrite every bit on the drive with random (or otherwise generated) 1’s and 0’s bits for TWO passes before going back over again on a THIRD pass to make everything 0 again. Needless to say, this is taking quite some time…

Paranoia? Perhaps… but any security savvy person would say it is generally good practice (that many still do not follow).

Wireless in Class

MSU has this wireless thing that is in “beta” where you log in with your msunet id before you access the internet through the wireless. It’s only offered in some of the buildings around campus right now like the business building that I’m in right now listening to my most uninteresting class—marketing. Anyway, I just felt like posting so I could say: (1) I’m trying to organize to have Scottfro come to my dorm room for a dnbradio broadcast some time next week, and (2) I just bought a bunch of IBM :)

New Dell Inspiron 700m

So I just got my new laptop the other day. It’s sooo sweet. This small & light Inspiron 700m has a Pentium M 725 1.6 GHz (faster than it sounds when compared to regular P4s), 512M ram, 40G hdd, cdrw/dvd combo drive, integrated intel 2200 wireless, 8 cell (~5 hr) battery, and 12.1” WXGA (1280×768) screen. After seeing the bundled winxp home start up with all its preinstalled systray/desktop icons, I immediately plopped in the Ubuntu Hoary CD and began peeling off the “powered by windoze” sticker. Ubuntu seems to be working quite nicely with the laptop as mostly everything was automatically configured. I did have to set it up to run this patch on bootup that somehow fixes my video driver so I actually get the right resolution. But as I read in some reviews, the glassy screen is very nice indeed.

Oh, and I’m too lazy to take a bunch of pictures of it, so I’ll just rely on other people.

Update: Wow this was so cool I had to post it. gtkwifi allows me to configure my wireless card for different networks with the convenience of a gnome panel applet. I even discovered 4 different wireless networks from my dorm room!

The Scary Future of DRM

I’ve been reading startling stories about DRM, or Digital Rights Management, for quite some time now, but it hasn’t been until recently that the major PC makers (Dell, HP, IBM) started putting these TC chips into new computers. TC stands for Treacherous Computing, or as the imposing companies like to call “Trusted Computing.” This could be the seed to a much larger ploy the Corporations have to control consumers and take away their rights. I just read This very interesting BBC article that explains the current state of affairs much better than I’m going to here. A quote from the article that I must put here:

Ho man they nailed it there, didn’t they…

Lite-On Optical Drives Flawed

I guess they’re not as flawless as I thought. Just the other night, my good friend (who also owns the same DVD burner as me) let me know that he resolved a freezing/skipping issue on burned discs that I’ve also been encounting sparatically by flashing his ROM in his drive, upgrading it to SOHW-1633S. I didn’t even recognize the problem because it doesn’t cause all DVD’s to skip. Here’s the broken, IE-only website: Lite-On Firmware Upgrades.

Wow, that really would have sucked if I had actually burned those 150+ DVD’s already…. sigh

UPDATE: Actually, many/most of the dics I had burned seem to play back fine. Only a couple that I can think of actually skipped with ogle (froze, never to return) and mplayer (froze for some seconds, then skipped ahead a bit and resumed) on my mythtv box, and at least one of them seemed to play back fine on my suitemate’s set-top DVD player.