RTFM

Quick & Dirty Tip:

It’s maddening to get a game and not know how to play it.

Doubly maddening if there isn’t even a manual handy. This is especially true for old legacy games, which is about all we can afford to get sometimes.

Well, I found something to solve this problem online. Just go to Replacementdocs: The Original Web Archive of Game Manuals. It’s a godsend for absentminded dorks like me!

As they say on the home page:

– Have you ever rented a game that came with no instructions?
- Have you ever bought a used game and found out later that the package you received didn’t come with an essential map or answers to copy protection questions required to play the game?
- Have you ever bought a re-released game and then realized that they only included an Installation Guide, no game instructions at all?
- Has your wife (or husband!) ever just thrown out all your game manuals because they thought “you didn’t need them anymore”?

This site is the answer to our problems.

As Borat would say (or maybe not, since he’s being sued for plagiarizing this saying at the moment), Wowoweewah!

 

Tech support ng bayan

Excerpts from a recent exchange of e-mails with a co-worker:

Him: How do I transfer the file to my Treo? Thanks.
Me: Just double click the files after unzipping them.
Him: Hi again. How do I unzip the file?

I had to walk over to his office to do it for him. Sigh.

There are upsides to being a geek, like the ability to get around MIS’s network restrictions and the capacity to troubleshoot a malfunctioning computer or printer without having to wait a couple of days for MIS’s tech support guy to visit your office. And, of course, there are downsides. The worst of which is that way too many people feel entitled to run to you for tech support.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been called to an aunt’s house in New Manila to troubleshoot a misbehaving program on her iMac G4. To another uncle’s house in Alabang to set up his Linksys WiFi router. And I have a pending trip to Sta. Rosa, Laguna to do the same thing for another uncle. I’m tempted to just forward Bernie’s number to that particular uncle.

It’s not that I mind sharing what I know or helping people. Most of the time I feel good when I’m able to teach someone how to do something more with his computer, but I get really ticked when (1) they call before they RTFM, and (2) they don’t first ask if I’m busy.

But such is a geek’s life, I guess.

Original photo by annpatt

 

“I am no longer infected…”

On a ride home I was telling my brother about a good friend of mine who had recently bought a Macbook on his trip to the States. A lifelong Windows user, my friend was just starting out on the Mac platform and he was consulting me now and then about his transitioning concerns. One of his concerns was that after using his Macbook for a couple of weeks, he still didn’t have a proper anti-virus program and he was starting to get worried for his safety, so to speak. What was a good anti-virus program to get?

I told my friend Vince that you can easily get any number of excellent anti-virus programs for Macs – excellent because they do their job well; it’s either that, or they have nothing much to do for Macs because there aren’t any real threats worth protecting them from anyway. No rush, Vince. Haven’t seen actual Mac malware since …since never. Well, at least in the OS X era.

I told him I’d been using Macs for years, and was yet to encounter an honest-to-goodness virus. Honest to God and cross my heart. This, even with having my Mac online virtually 24-7 on broadband, gleefully downloading everything in sight, opening emailed attachments with impunity, and generally being wide open to the public via ethernet, wifi and bluetooth all this time. No viruses. Period.

My brother chimes in with his argument that there are no viruses for Macs because Mac users are in the miniscule minority, and virus authors feel the segment is hardly worth the effort. It isn’t because the platform is bullet-proof, or at least of tougher hide than your usual run-of-the-mill Windows machine.

I’m not too sure; I might invite some amount of flaming here – but having a target market (literally a target of the bullseye kind) composed of influential creative types like artists, editors, designers, writers, filmmakers, celebrities and a vast array of “elitist” types should be extremely attractive to malware freaks, for the very reason that attacks in that market would get them the most amount of mileage, as compared to targeting the regular joes. Doesn’t that make some kind of twisted sense?

I’m not a programmer so I can’t in all honesty speak of OS X’s mylar hide, or if it really does have one; my brother could very well be right that the kooks don’t care about infecting Mac users with Unix-flavored malware. But the point of it is, despite all that sturm und drang about virii for the Mac, the simple fact is there aren’t any worth writing home about. Or more to the point, getting anti-virus software for.

I have anti-virus solutions on my Mac. I’m not that blissfully ignorant. But truth be told, I never really use them, and actually forget to until a topic like this comes up. I run a checker maybe once every year, even if they get automatically updated periodically. So after this recent conversation with my bro, I fired up the Mac version of Sophos to check my Powerbook. Just to be sure.

It took over three hours to thoroughly scan my system. Over 400,000 files.

Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip. After being spread-eagled on the internet unprotected nearly 24-7 for years, still. No. Viruses.

Sophos did return nine errors. Two of them were corrupted files, and the rest were encrypted ones, four of them from Microsoft Office. But the system was clean, for whatever reason, whether it be invulnerability or belittlement. Which is the important thing at the end of the day.

This situation won’t last of course. I will wake up one day soon to see my Mac infected to the gills (and I feel that day is not long in coming because Macs are getting more market share by the day), but for now everything is peaceful. Which is more than I can say for other platforms, which seem to be proud that they’re constantly the target of virus writers because of their popularity, and spend too much of their time protecting themselves and being constantly vigilant – instead of just being productive.

(Trivia game: a big wet kiss on the PWiT for the one who can tell us who originally uttered the line that makes up the post title.)

 

MacDreamy

I’ve been evaluating Microsoft Vista, and aside from the other important productive aspects of the operating system, I was pleasantly intrigued by the video-based wallpaper used at the live demo by Jojo Ayson at the business launch at the Shang Makati last Feb.1. In the demo in the ballroom, the big video screen show a pleasantly babbling brook underlying the icons, windows and toolbars of Vista. Nice, refreshing, peaceful and thoroughly CPU-hogging I supposed, but I wanted to it try out for myself.

Back at the batcave, the evaluation copy of Vista I had on the Toshiba Qosmio G30 didn’t seem to have Dreamscene, which is what they called it over at Redmond. I clicked high and low and it simply wasn’t there. A quick check on the net told me it was still in beta; I didn’t know if it was in the shipping copies but since I didn’t have one I couldn’t tell. (If you’re one of the few who have the official retail version, chime in and tell us if it’s there please; I’m not about to plunk down 20K just to find out.)

What I did find out was that there were standalone beta installer packages on the net. Naughty me, I downloaded a copy and loaded it up, but it didn’t take, which served me right. What I did get though were the small WMVs of the video files for Dreamscene included in the package – two of them at least: no babbling brook, but there was the green grass and blue sky with rolling clouds, and the aurora borealis wallpaper.

Ching! A bright light blinked on in my head.

Would these work on my Mac?

It’s not in the Mac OS X box, but there’s been something like it available as shareware since last year – a shareware app called DesktopMagik, from stupidFish Programming. I was fortunate enough to download a free registered copy last year as part of the MacAppADay Promo, and hardly used it since trying it out. Among other things, it lets you put video on your desktop as wallpaper (yeah, there are lotsa others for the Mac and the PC that do the same thing, but who can pass up a free app?)

So I used Quicktime to convert the WMV file to MOV (by way of the wonderfully free Flip4Mac codec that lets Quicktime use WMV files), then imported it into DesktopMagik.

Worked like a charm. My Mac looks like it’s running Vista (sort of like a frog with two heads). Now I have beautiful rolling clouds on a blue sky, casting shadows on a verdant field of grass as they float serenely overhead. Nice, refreshing, peaceful – and CPU-hogging too. A consistent 25% according to my process viewer.

Mac or PC, you can’t win ‘em all.

 

Q-Tipper

I don’t know what your habits are, but I can’t stand a dirty laptop. I’m not even someone you could call pathologically neat—some days, my working desk looks like a pigsty in a war zone—but something about unkempt laptops gets my goat.

You know what I mean (don’t tell me: you probably have one): it’s the laptop you never wiped since three days after you bought it, so that the wristrest has begun to darken where the wrists never rest; beneath the keys on the keyboard is a chipmunk’s winter trove of peanuts, Chippy, kornik, and Chocnut, aside from enough hairballs to upholster a small sofa. The E, S, T, and M keys are shiny—touching the rest could give you some viral infection. The screen’s buried behind a coat of infernal grime.

OK, OK, so some days my own PowerBook might look like that, too. That’s when I take a break and assemble my clean-up gear: an old sando (or that ratty T-shirt from college you couldn’t bear to part with until your sister used it to wipe dog poo from the floor); a little water (plain tap water, nothing ammoniac); some masking tape; and a Q-Tip or two.

The sando and water (very slightly damp) are for the screen and the exterior (a regular, circular wiping motion does it); the masking tape is for that granary under and between the keys; and the Q-Tips are for the keys, the corners of the trackpad, and other hard-to-get-at places that could use a little scrubbing.

By the way, I don’t use silicone skins or screen protectors or any such prophylactics. I like the sensual feel of the bare keys at my fingertips (and you arguably can’t find a better one than the aluminum PowerBook’s keyboard—one more reason I haven’t “upgraded” to a MacBook).

When I’m done detailing my G4, it’s almost like I’m looking at a new Mac altogether; it’s almost like I just bought a new machine—for the price of a Q-Tip. So if you ever get that urge to buy something smart and shiny, try cleaning up your old gear, and save the money for a new sando and a sack of peanuts.

 

GoDaddy Superbowl 2007 Commercial

Lots of people hated it, but I liked it.

I liked it mainly for the fact that a few peeps, who I admire their work, were in it. In the TV version of the this GoDaddy commercial, which I have included with this post, you’ll see Alex Albrecth and Kevin Rose of Digg, the Teutul’s from the awesome show American Chopper, Indie Race League driver Danica Patrick and WWE Diva Candice Michelle. Cali Lewis of Geek Brief fame is also in the commercial but she wasn’t in any of the footage used onthe final TV version. Watch and enjoy.

 

 

Vistado

Full disclosure first. I’m a Mac user, happy with my Powerbook and OS X. It’s not to say I know squat about Windows. I started with it before most of you were born. I can assemble a PC, and I used to hack into the registry with cheerful abandon.

That said, I’m not setting out to deliberately bash Microsoft despite what bogs11 might claim. In fact, I’m trying desperately to give it a chance. I’m willing to give it every opportunity to, if not outright impress me, let it show me that the five years of development accounted for something, that it was worth the wait.

I don’t have an answer yet. The jury is still out on Windows Vista. But I can tell you now, it doesn’t look good.

I’m just getting my feet wet, and in the next few weeks I mean to be submerged in deep Vista doodoo. I intend to not just wade, but to dive in, breath held, and swim its depths, taking big muscular strokes, arms and legs flailing mightily with gusto. But as things go this early in the game, it doesn’t bode well for Vista, gentle reader. Much as I am trying so hard to like it, it’s making things difficult for me from the get-go. I might likely drown, but I’m game.

Yesterday we installed a fresh, shrink-wrapped evaluation copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition on a Toshiba Qosmio G30 laptop.

If you haven’t heard of the G30 yet, you will. It’s the Incredible Hulk of laptops. Words fail me, so I’ll just quote Engadget’s Paul Miller:

Seeing how HD DVD burners are still quite a new idea for the desktop set, you can imagine our delight at discovering Toshiba’s new Qosmio G30 laptop, which sports the elusive drive within its portable frame. Well, almost portable. At 10.6 pounds, we’re not sure any mortal lap — not to mention tray table — could support this thing, but we really expected nothing less the first time around. The 17-inch display rocks it True HD style at 1920 x 1200, plus if you get bored with your selection of HD DVDs, there’s always the analog and digital TV tuners to keep you entertained. Other specs on the G30/97A include a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 processor, 1GB of RAM, dual 160GB HDDs, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics with 256MB of RAM, and just about every kind of connectivity you could think of — USB 2.0, Firewire, PCMCIA, ExpressCard/54, multi-card reader, 802.11a/b/g, gigabit Ethernet, modem, VGA, S-video, S/PDIF and HDMI.

It also costs US$3320, or in Tagalog, about P169,000. With the kind indulgence of my fellow PWiTs, a little plugging: We’ll have the full hands-on review in the March issue of Mobile Philippines, so we’ll save the comments for then. Besides, this post is about the Vista experience, not the laptop we put it on.

But we will say this – after installation and tweaking, you can run a Vista feature that rates the new host computer’s suitability and capability to run the OS. It has a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the most suitable.

The Vista-ready Toshiba Qosmio G30, that beautiful monster of technological excess so completely and thoroughly shameless that, right out of the box, it uses dual 100GB hard disks in a raid configuration and happens to be the world’s first laptop with an HD-DVD writer in it, that wonderful hunk of 21st century laptopology rated a …1.

Vista generously supplies you with details about why your hardware would be rated that way. Two of the four reasons it cited were pretty interesting. It blames three device drivers that were causing Windows to start slow – all three of which were device drivers from Microsoft itself. The other telling detail cited was that visual performance was less than optimal because of low memory. The G30 uses an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 with 256MB of RAM; for laptops, there are few better at the moment.

If a P169K Toshiba Qosmio G30 rated a 1, I shudder to think what an under-P50K Vista-ready laptop would score. What’re us mortals with modest hardware and shallow pockets to do? Vista Ultimate itself alone costs nearly P20K.

It took us five hours to install the Vista DVD on the G30. It tanked halfway through the first two tries (an hour lost each time), and then three hours for the whole thing to complete, along with a dizzying sequence of restarts. Most of the built-in features of the G30 refused to run afterwards, including the biometeric fingerprint reader, the webcam, the power management software and several others, despite scouring the net for driver updates over and over.

Right after installation the desktop looked as blocky and garish as an Andy Warhol Tomato Soup limited print – Vista didn’t have drivers for the G30’s NVidia display hardware, and any tweaking Kiven and I did couldn’t improve the look. We had a nightmare searching for the correct driver – spent a couple of hours looking for and downloading the proper one. The first versions we got were supposed to work, but it kept telling us it had to abort the installation because it couldn’t find compatible hardware in the system to update. Arghhh.

Finally we managed to download the right one.

Aero looked beautiful indeed, bright and shiny like a newly minted P10 coin. So I went straight for the killer feature that everyone who gets Vista wants to try out first – Flip 3D, the window browsing function that draws rapturous oohs and ahhs from everyone who’s never used a Mac. Just hold down the Windows key and hit Tab. Boom. Then hit tab-tab-tab-tab. It’s like flicking through a stack of pretty postcards. So is this worth getting that beefier new video card? At least that translucency thing is cool-looking.

We haven’t given it the full workout yet, but Vista does seem more secure (it had better be – it asks for permission to do nearly everything – “You attempted to press the spacebar. Windows is in protected mode. Allow?” Joke, but you get the idea). Hibernation is still a bummer though. It only survives the trauma of waking up three out of five times, often resulting in a crash-dump-and-reboot.

Like I said, it don’t look too good. So far. A full exhaustive review will come out in our mags sometime in the future. In the meantime we’ll keep at it, and give you updates about our experiences when we can.

 

That’s it. Blu-Ray will win.

Recently, C|Net’s David Carnoy drew a lot of flak for predicting that Blu-Ray will beat the pants out of HD-DVD and that HD-DVD will have to shut down by year’s end. After drawing lots of fire, he just posted the defense for his claims here.

But there’s something else that’s in the air. Something that David and all the format-war-watchers should keep an eye on, and which may be a more reliable harbinger of things to come. Namely, the stuff that are actually selling in the high-def bestsellers lists of both formats.

And if you take a peek at the current bestsellers, you’ll see one huge difference that may mean the eventual win of Blu-Ray.

First, here’s the current top ten sellers for HD-DVD.

Top 10 HD-DVD Bestsellers (c/o DVD Empire.com)

1. Eagles: Farewell 1 Tour
2. Hollywoodland
3. Half Baked
4. Chicago/ Earth, Wind and Fire: Live
5. Toto: Live in Amsterdam
6. HDScape Exotic Saltwater Aquarium
7. James Taylor: Musicares Person of the Year Tribute
8. Pat Methany Group: The Way Up
9. Heart: Alive in Seattle
10. Casino

Now take a look at the top ten for Blu-Ray disc sales:

Top 10 Blu-Ray Bestsellers (c/o DVD Empire.com)

1. The Guardian
2. Flyboys
3. Open Season
4. Crank
5. Alien vs. Predator
6. Superman Returns
7. Saw III
8. Legends of Jazz with Ramsey Lewis
9. Pearl Harbor
10. The Last Samurai

Do you see the difference? Holy Hannibals, the HD-DVD bestsellers are a bunch of musicfests for the forty-something-and-up geriatric crowd. Where are the good movies? The only recent movie here is Hollywoodland… and it was a box office dud. In fact, just recently this list also included Poseidon. Argh. You can detect a sense of foreboding in the air when its number nine topseller is an act that seems happy to still be alive.

By contrast, Blu-Ray bestsellers seem to point to a younger, more mainstream crowd. Heck, Ashton Kutcher is number one here. And then there’s the visually dazzling Flyboys, the over-the-top Crank, and man, the lovely The Last Samurai. Even Superman Returns is here (no matter what you think of it, it’s still a visual treat that you’d want to see in a home theater). This is a healthy list, with a number of recent box-office winners. This is a list that says “We’re young, we love movies, and we love them newfangled machines! Bring ‘em on!”

In short, if the best discs that HD-DVD can come up with include a saltwater aquarium, then the format is doomed. Sorry to say this, but the Sony consortium has the winners right now. More important, they have the younger, and therefore potentially larger, market.

And when stuff like Spider-Man and Star Wars (and Casino Royale, which pal David is waiting for with bated breath) come out, then, in the words of Hudson in Aliens (another movie that will only come out on Blu-Ray), it’s “Game over man. Game over!”

 

I need complete silence……

I usually find commercials of any sort irritating, but that’s cause most commercials being shown nowadays seem to be made by a bunch of monkeys wearing adult diapers. However, there are a few commercials that are worth watching, and when said commercial is tech related, it gets extra brownie points from me. Take this commercial from computer retailer CDW, it just brings a smile to my face whenever I watch it. What has this got to do with this post’s title? Watch the commercial to find out.

 

Fan of fans

Quick Accessory Rave:

Gary’s post about plans to work outside his comfort zone reminds me that its something I’ve already been doing for the longest time. I love it, but it has some side effects I don’t like too much. Like temperature probs.

I tend to work in odd places with my Powerbook, with the end result being the Mac tends to heat up some, especially if the coffee shop has less than artic ventilation. I sometimes get so wrapped up writing I tend not to notice that the Mac is getting warmer and warmer until I hear the cooling fan kick on. It gets as hot as 60 degrees centigrade before the fan starts to spin, afterwards hovering around as high as 58 or so even with the internal ventilation.

Fellow PWiT frugal traveler gave me a cooling device some time ago that has three fans that suck up the heat from the underside of the Mac and blows out the back, and at the same time lifts the butt of the Powerbook off the table for better air circulation. I used to ignore these things at the cyber malls, considering them to be nothing more than exploitware. I am now hereby eating my words, with a generous dash of habanero sauce.

The cooling device takes its power from a free USB port. Its effect is dramatic – in five minutes the temp drops from 62 to 48! So it draws air out, raises the back end of the laptop for better circulation – and triples as a USB hub, adding four new ports to the mix as atonement for taking up one.

I’m now a big fan of these fan things. Wish I had them ever since. My only problem is I can never remember to bring it with me. Everyone with a laptop should have one of these.

Coolness. Literally.