Kevin's Musings

I was skeptical, but, I went ahead and picked up Metroid Prime: Hunters for the Nintendo DS. Hunters is a First Person Shooter (FPS), which typically have had horrible control on handheld devices. I knew Hunters used the touch screen in much the same way PC FPS’s use a mouse, but, I was still very skeptical. I am now about two levels into the game and while control can be a touch (pun intended) awkward, it really does work. It takes a little time to learn, but, control is almost as good as using the keyboard / mouse and almost/maybe better than using the analog sticks. So, if you are a Metroid fan and have a DS this is a must play.

My only real complaint with the game is the same complaint I have with many console games… and on the DS the problem is amplified. Most console games (the Metroid games included) don’t let you “save anywhere”. While Hunters does seem to have frequent checkpoints, it doesn’t save until you return back to your ship. While you can just close the DS to hibernate the device and come right back to your game, if you wanted to play Tetris for a while before you go back and finish the current Hunters level, you will have to start back where you saved last. New Super Mario Brothers had the exact same problem.

I had a hard drive crash tonight, doh! Luckily, all the critical data (and most of the non-critical data) was backed up. It is a couple months out of warranty — one of the Seagate drives that was made a few months before they changed from one years to five year warranties. Oh well.

New pictures up on my Flickr… Nathan’s Graduation and our Washington DC Trip.

I still have the hard drive that I installed Vista on and may play with it some more, but, I looked at some speculative prices for Vista Home Enhanced edition and people are thinking it will be something like $500. That is ridiculous! There is no way I am paying M$ anywhere near $500 for a new OS. The OEM version of MCE 2005 can be bought for $110, which is still steep, but, almost understandable. For $500 I can buy an entire PC – if I want the fancy graphics and stuff I can buy a Mac Mini for not much more. I am sure $500 is not what it will cost, but…

Anyway, I switched my media PC back to MythTV and I do really like it. Since I am transcoding everything, I just cranked up the MPEG-2 encoding form the TV Tuners and stuff looks nicer than before.  Since MCE doesn’t support transcoding of any kind, that I am aware of, this is good enough (at least for now). Sure, MCE is a LOT flashier looking, but…

Speaking of flashy looking, I looked at the MC360 theme for XBMC and WOW they have done a snazzy job. It looks GREAT. Make sure you are running a modern version of XBMC (preferably T3CH, in my opinion) and install MC360 — it looks and works great.

Microsoft made Windows Vista Beta 2 available for free download a week or two ago. I downloaded it then (and got the key) but didn’t try it. Tonight I installed it on a spare hard drive on my PVR/Media computer to see how it compares to MythTV, SageTV, etc. Vista was easy to install, took about 45 minutes with very little intervention. That machine is only connected via component video out to my HDTV which didn’t seem to throw it for too much of a loop. I had to manually install the drivers for the integrated sound (I had to use the XP drivers, which worked just fine). Also, for video playback, I had to install the nVidia drivers — which were beta drivers specifically for Vista. Other than these two drivers, everything seems to work pretty much “out of the box”.

The Vista interface seems nice, some neat visual touches. Stuff is reorganized but generally seems easy to find. Vista’s Media Center had no problems with my two WinTV PVR-250 cards but I cannot get the IR remote that comes with the PVR-250 to work, I will probably have to get a MCE remote control or get out my USB IR transceiver and program my Harmony to be like a MCE remote (this is probably what I will try first). Hopefully the drivers for my USB IR transceiver will work under Vista.

My impressions of Vista MCE are largely favorable. One crash so far, no big deal. MCE has a nice, clean interface and seems easy to use with most all of the options one would want.

This device, MediaMan HVX-3500, looks really neat.

We spend a nice weekend doing touristy stuff in our nation’s capital. We had a great time, had a great visit with our son and his girlfriend. We toured the capitol, walked the mall, ate some good food, saw the White House, did the International Spy Museum, did the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, visited the national monument and Jefferson memorial late at night, did a two hour tour on Segway’s from Segs in the City, which was a blast. To get between NYC and DC we took Amtrak, which was a really great way to travel to DC. It was a great weekend. Tons of pictures on Flickr to follow soon.

My desktop machine, on Tax day (back in Mid-April), decided to exhale its magic smoke. It was at a very inopportune moment — we had just finished doing our taxes but had not yet printed them. At the time I narrowed the problem down to “not the hard drives” and put them in another, somewhat slower box I had that I wasn’t currently using (a good reason to keep older systems around). Luckily, the drives booted up without any problems, we finished the taxes and all was well. The system ran a bit more slowly, but, good enough.

About 2 weeks ago I decided to troubleshoot the dead system. I put things back together, and, what do you know, it came up without any complaints. I chalked this up to “maybe a fan got stopped and things had just overheated”? Maybe the “smoke” wasn’t the magic kind but some other variety? So, I used the system for a couple weeks without any problems until I went to put in a new wireless card. I shut down the system, installed the new card… and it wouldn’t boot. Nothing I tried would make it even display the POST (power on self test) or even display the video card info that shows before the POST. I tried a different power supply, re-seating everything. I tried pretty much everything.

So, I ordered a new CPU (Athlon 3500+), Motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939), and Power Supply. The installation of the new parts was quick and easy and everything seems to be working splendidly. I plan to try to move the processor to my MythTV box… if it works on that board, that system will gain a nice speed bump (from an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ to a 3200+), or, I may just learn that the problem was that the CPU died (which I doubt, I think the problem was probably the motherboard).

I finished New Super Mario Brothers, well, sort of…. To “finish” the game you have to kill Bowser in the 8th world, but, you don’t have to visit every world, etc. I completed most of the stages of 6 of the 8 world. Now, I just need to go back and collect all (most?) of the big gold coins, finish all the other stages and the two other worlds. Now that I have “finished” the game I can definitely say this game was a ton of fun and there is still more fun to bad had. A darn near perfect side scrolling platformer. If you are a Mario fan (or just a platformer plan) and have a DS (or a DS Lite!) you must get this game.

At the Nintendo Midnight event last night we also picked up Tetris DS which we are really enjoying. All the new play modes and multilayer modes are a lot of fun. If you enjoy Tetris this is probably the quintessential version.

Most of our weekend has been pretty relaxed… I’m battling a sore throat, which is a drag, but, we did make it out yesterday to see An Inconvenient Truth and to stand in line for the Nintendo midnight launch of the DS Lite at Nintendo World in Rockefeller Plaza. I highly recommend that everybody go see An Inconvenient Truth.
We got to Nintendo World at about 8pm there were something like 32 people in front of us. By about 11pm there were about 45 people in front of us. This is to be expected — people saving places for friends – a tad annoying, but, to be expected. There was a DJ was from a local hip hop (?) station. They were doing a bunch of trivia questions and such (starting with NintenDogs but later mostly Zelda questions) giving away swag from the radio station. It was too bad they didn’t have any Nintendo stuff to give away. Nintendo did provide free pizza and water, which was a really nice touch.

Nintendo didn’t start letting people into the store to purchase units until about 12:20am (people were starting to get antsy by 11:55pm). After they finally started letting people in, it went pretty smoothly.

The only complaints I had were (1) I’d like to know why they couldn’t actually let people in to buy units until 12:20am and (2) security really should have been watching the line better. Four people tried to, at the last minute, cut into line near us. Two of the four were completely stopped, I think, but two middle aged ladies did manage to make it into line a couple groups behind us. I notified security and a manager who acted like they would do something. I didn’t wait long enough to find out of they did something, but, I can hope. One can hope there is a special level of hell for line jumpers like this.

Anyway, I got my DS Lite, my old DS sold on Ebay just a few days ago and I got what I wanted for it (for the most part). I really like the DS Lite. The event was fun. We will probably consider doing it again for the Wii, if there is such a gathering. Probably have to arrive earlier for the Wii 🙂

I did my first Northeast dive — we drove out to Dutch Springs in Bethlehem, PA. Dutch Springs is a big quarry dive spot. The water was pretty cold (55 on the surface, about 45 at depth), but, it was a DUI drysuit demo weekend, so, the water temperature wasn’t really an issue. The dive went smoothly for me, but, one of the guys I was diving with had a heck of a time…

There were four of us diving together, one “instructor” and three people who were all at various stages of newness to drysuit diving (I have a few drysuit dives under my belt, so I was relatively comfortable with it). I had a feeling from the start that one of the divers was going to have problems — he was slow to get in the water and only had about half of a tank of air, but, we were planning a short dive so the instructor decided this would be OK. Although the instructor outlined his plan for the dive, the problem diver had troubles sticking to the plan from almost the very beginning (frequently swimming in the wrong direction). Finally, we made it down to the sunken ship and the problem diver’s tank came free from his BC and was floating above him. The instructor noticed this quickly and helped the diver reattach the tank. Shortly after the floating tank incident, the instructor asked the diver how much air he had left only to discover the diver only had 120psi of air left in his tank — one normally surfaces with 500psi (or more). So, I got to witness somebody sharing their alternate air source in a situation other than just training. During the dive it seems almost everything that could have gone wrong for this diver did, but, to both his and the instructor’s credit, they both held it together and ended the dive in a “controlled” manner. Kudos to the instructor. I feel the major issue of the dive could have been avoided if he had not been allowed to enter the water with the short air supply, but, it really should have been enough air for the dive (I suspect the floating tank incident caused him to rapidly use his air supply). Anyway, all the divers that entered the water returned, so, it was ultimately fine.
Sadly, I only got to do one dive that day, but, I plan to return later this summer to do a couple days of diving.