Finished NaNoWriMo after several stretches of getting behind in word count, but sorta sprinting to catch up. Then did 5,000 words the last day as a kind of tip of the hat.
Doing 1,667 words at day for 30 days didn't seem too much of a challenge. I started amateur journalistic tendencies in Junior High, so putting words in a row has been automatic for years now.
Still, it's hard to imagine getting together several of my friends who may or may not be working part time or not at all, attempting to get one post per week from them, and slap 'em up on a communal wiki/forum/etc in the semi-public webspace.
I can run these scenarios in my fiction all I like, but try and bundle my connections into an opinion hub or a writing site, hell nobody gets along on frakking facespace, why would they bother slapping even a link a week up on a communal place?
I can't keep from imagining our own private subnet, bbs on the web-ternet, whatever. Several friends have done their own version of the same over the years. I remember them testing dial-up bbs setups over the landlines in the dorms, before Halo and Quake when it was Doom blowing minds.
Finally got wireless printing working in the house. Stupid little details kept me from getting it going before. Read up on it today in spite of a monster headache and finally got the pages to spit out from across the room. These days we take the feeling of triumph wherever it comes from.
Whether it's writing 5-7k words in a day, and few in-between the longer ones, 55k words in a month, or finally getting the danged thing to print the way it's supposed to.
Finished the first Jack Reacher novel, obtained the second. Reading the first posthumous Michael Crichton novel, and after the involved and convoluted plot of the former, a different kind of gritty realism amuses in the Crichton title Pirate Latitudes.
It's been amusing reading commentary about him being a right-wing tool for having written a novel ostensibly 'against' global warming. I read that one, too, and fail to have seen overwhelming evidence it was positioned any particular way on the issue.
Looking forward to Tron Legacy, confused by disney's refusal to reissue the original movie on dvd before the sequel comes out. That's just stupid, the special brand known as corporate dumbth. Nothing would've kept them from giving it a "Tron Legacy collectable slipcover" or something with updated graphics, the frakking n00bs.
Also in December comes the new double-album from "Ryan Adams and the Cardinals" who from what I understand/understood actually preferred to just be called "The Cardinals" and they call the new album "III/IV", which by virtue of the players on it alone should kick all kinds of ass.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
playing hooky from nanowrimo
Like most of life's lessons, the moments I'm dwelling on up in my brainbox today are best examined and learned from with plenty of perspective.
I remember writing my own ham-handed amateur's bridge piece between Weezer's Pinkerton album and Kevin Smith's film Chasing Amy, which hit my life right around the time a couple of close friends came out as gay or bi, and I found myself just a boring old straight person.
Not narrow enough to find dykes unattractive, but unmoved by the prospect of dick even when I didn't have to look far for a male who constantly threw softball come-ons my direction.
So here I am today reading one person's ultra personal dissection of Chasing Amy over here:
http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/11/15/jay-silent-bob-live/
and then a history of Pinkerton over here:
http://www.altpress.com/features/entry/this_is_beginning_to_hurt_a_woefully_incomplete_oral_history_of_weezers_pin/
and it all leaves me wanting to dig out the last few copies of that poem I wrote back then and burn them in a pile in the backyard.
Then I'll go write something BETTER...
I remember writing my own ham-handed amateur's bridge piece between Weezer's Pinkerton album and Kevin Smith's film Chasing Amy, which hit my life right around the time a couple of close friends came out as gay or bi, and I found myself just a boring old straight person.
Not narrow enough to find dykes unattractive, but unmoved by the prospect of dick even when I didn't have to look far for a male who constantly threw softball come-ons my direction.
So here I am today reading one person's ultra personal dissection of Chasing Amy over here:
http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/11/15/jay-silent-bob-live/
and then a history of Pinkerton over here:
http://www.altpress.com/features/entry/this_is_beginning_to_hurt_a_woefully_incomplete_oral_history_of_weezers_pin/
and it all leaves me wanting to dig out the last few copies of that poem I wrote back then and burn them in a pile in the backyard.
Then I'll go write something BETTER...
Monday, November 1, 2010
I like tea, you're ruining it...
I bit into a bright wonderful orange up in my headspace listening to 89.3 the Current, MPR’s populist station. Itself an I.O.U. for the promise of once-great Rev105 Revolution Radio station in Minneapolis, the Current played me a great song.
Conventional Wisdom, by Built to Spill
I love the soaring, swirling guitar on this track. Everything else I was doing when it came on just stopped happening, and I rode the groove like a rollercoaster. Afterward I sought out the who and what, knowing it sounded vaguely familiar but not who it was. I ended up later that afternoon buying it on itunes. The rest of that story isn’t as important. The song’s title is a catchphrase.
Privately, up in my brainbox, I pride myself on seeing ahead of the curve. Whenever possible, I try to see what’s coming, stay informed, sniff the dirt, get the gist, read voraciously, and earn myself a feel for who’s worth their weight and who should do a lot more thinking before they speak.
I watched the last presidential election with sharp memories of the hopeless haze left after the previous two. Then myself along with the rest of the masses felt a fresh splash of water on our faces when something else happened this time.
Setting aside for a moment the frothing furor of the tea party racists and how egregiously John McCain failed his first Presidential decision when he couldn’t find someone more awe inspiring than him, and chose a flake of a spokesmodel from Alaska as his running mate when Barack Obama chose Joe Biden. I utterly disdain Biden’s association with the deep pockets of the old money running the old media machinery, but I can see what Bill Clinton meant when he said a candidate’s first Presidential Decision is picking a running mate. And Biden is a home run, certainly compared to the failed bunt of Sarah, plain and dumb.
I believe that the conventional wisdom being sold this midterm election cycle is clearly slanted to most people, regardless of where they stand. I’ve been stunned to have my feelings about the AP honed to a point this cycle, when I watched them cover democrats tepidly when they opposed Bush, but are covering every single race this year as if the opposition gets top billing every single time. Everywhere I look, the old guard seem to have lost their way, are predicting massive defeat of democrats in this midterm.
I haven’t believed it and I won’t. Doesn’t really matter what happens tomorrow night. I’m confident that there will be a serious revision of the power and solidarity of the opposition party in this country. Their media outlets will fail to cover it, the rest of the confused, jittery chatterbox of cable news, cowardly corporate networks, and puffy chested self-important fishwrappers.
If the best this widdle tea potty can muster is Sharon Angle, Carl Paladino, and Christine O’Donnell, failed businesspeople with more money than brains like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, incredulity is the only rational reaction. The most enlightened person on the GOP side of the spectrum is Jon McCain’s daughter Meghan, from this irrational liberal’s point of view. Thank Goddess we’re not feeding her to the machine that churns out these generic, soundbite spewing bobbleheads.
I see a lot of bright young stars on the democrat side of things. Jersey, New Orleans, New York all have fascinating candidates and people already elected and serving. Al Franken makes me proud every time I hear him, honestly he’s a far better prepared politician, astute speaker and writer than he ever was as an SNL-type improv-ish comedian.
The numbers have been clear all along the way, and I doubt that things will change much beyond what fivethirtyeight predicts. Republican governors may see some gains, but senate and house aren’t gonna change nearly as much as people wish to think they will. The change comes from the movement, the President, and the rest of the democratic groundswell that promises to fix what 8 years of Bush did. Bush’s wars, Bush’s deficit made from a democratic surplus.
America can do better, together, than we do under Republican Presidents. This is established fact among everybody at the bottom, struggling to get by, and the Union members who are just beginning to break above the poverty line by becoming skilled workers. We The People know these things. Them With All the Money, they pay to convince anybody otherwise. This is how it’s been. But everything changes. Projected gains this year for the party opposing the President will be far slimmer than the blowhards want you to think.
The difference between the tea pawty and the party of hope and change is centrally that you want your country back, but you want it without us, any way you can get it. We’re taking America forward, and we’re taking you with us, in spite of these embarassing and uninformed digressions you take us on.
Conventional Wisdom, by Built to Spill
I love the soaring, swirling guitar on this track. Everything else I was doing when it came on just stopped happening, and I rode the groove like a rollercoaster. Afterward I sought out the who and what, knowing it sounded vaguely familiar but not who it was. I ended up later that afternoon buying it on itunes. The rest of that story isn’t as important. The song’s title is a catchphrase.
Privately, up in my brainbox, I pride myself on seeing ahead of the curve. Whenever possible, I try to see what’s coming, stay informed, sniff the dirt, get the gist, read voraciously, and earn myself a feel for who’s worth their weight and who should do a lot more thinking before they speak.
I watched the last presidential election with sharp memories of the hopeless haze left after the previous two. Then myself along with the rest of the masses felt a fresh splash of water on our faces when something else happened this time.
Setting aside for a moment the frothing furor of the tea party racists and how egregiously John McCain failed his first Presidential decision when he couldn’t find someone more awe inspiring than him, and chose a flake of a spokesmodel from Alaska as his running mate when Barack Obama chose Joe Biden. I utterly disdain Biden’s association with the deep pockets of the old money running the old media machinery, but I can see what Bill Clinton meant when he said a candidate’s first Presidential Decision is picking a running mate. And Biden is a home run, certainly compared to the failed bunt of Sarah, plain and dumb.
I believe that the conventional wisdom being sold this midterm election cycle is clearly slanted to most people, regardless of where they stand. I’ve been stunned to have my feelings about the AP honed to a point this cycle, when I watched them cover democrats tepidly when they opposed Bush, but are covering every single race this year as if the opposition gets top billing every single time. Everywhere I look, the old guard seem to have lost their way, are predicting massive defeat of democrats in this midterm.
I haven’t believed it and I won’t. Doesn’t really matter what happens tomorrow night. I’m confident that there will be a serious revision of the power and solidarity of the opposition party in this country. Their media outlets will fail to cover it, the rest of the confused, jittery chatterbox of cable news, cowardly corporate networks, and puffy chested self-important fishwrappers.
If the best this widdle tea potty can muster is Sharon Angle, Carl Paladino, and Christine O’Donnell, failed businesspeople with more money than brains like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, incredulity is the only rational reaction. The most enlightened person on the GOP side of the spectrum is Jon McCain’s daughter Meghan, from this irrational liberal’s point of view. Thank Goddess we’re not feeding her to the machine that churns out these generic, soundbite spewing bobbleheads.
I see a lot of bright young stars on the democrat side of things. Jersey, New Orleans, New York all have fascinating candidates and people already elected and serving. Al Franken makes me proud every time I hear him, honestly he’s a far better prepared politician, astute speaker and writer than he ever was as an SNL-type improv-ish comedian.
The numbers have been clear all along the way, and I doubt that things will change much beyond what fivethirtyeight predicts. Republican governors may see some gains, but senate and house aren’t gonna change nearly as much as people wish to think they will. The change comes from the movement, the President, and the rest of the democratic groundswell that promises to fix what 8 years of Bush did. Bush’s wars, Bush’s deficit made from a democratic surplus.
America can do better, together, than we do under Republican Presidents. This is established fact among everybody at the bottom, struggling to get by, and the Union members who are just beginning to break above the poverty line by becoming skilled workers. We The People know these things. Them With All the Money, they pay to convince anybody otherwise. This is how it’s been. But everything changes. Projected gains this year for the party opposing the President will be far slimmer than the blowhards want you to think.
The difference between the tea pawty and the party of hope and change is centrally that you want your country back, but you want it without us, any way you can get it. We’re taking America forward, and we’re taking you with us, in spite of these embarassing and uninformed digressions you take us on.
Friday, October 15, 2010
tucked into shadows, my blowfish collapses
Some of the more esoterically minded souls I've had the pleasure of debate and discussion with have suggested to me that the human mind is vast. The mind, the soul each dwelling in their own abstract plane where either can be several times the size of the person's actual physical body. (If so, mine just blowfish-ed up, blew its stack and posted, now I'm shrinking back down to normal size.)
I've always treated these ideas as cute extensions of the god complex most humans must flirt with, giving us the promise of something beyond this life - however mundane or godlike - to make up for the questions this existence forces to the center of your consciousness. Fun to play with like chess pieces, these ideas are, but offer little comfort in the harshest moments of your life.
What makes this post more than just another episode of talk soup, brain babble gone rudderless? An additional experience to throw on the heap; finally finding myself unable to stop posting a clear, lucid thought with my fellow forum-goers. Pointing out something nobody else has said. Standing up for something just before running away to hide from the inevitable fallout for having done so. Sigh.
I've done this little act on several different bands/artists fora and mailing lists over the last 15 years.
•A rant how "poop loggy logg" sucks on a Prince mailing list - motivated by the fact that my dorm was ablaze with shitty synth-centric gangster rap all year long.
•Get in a flame war about Courtney Love on a Tori Amos mailing list.
•Defy the Zappa-ites on a Ween message board.
•Admit you're not utterly obsessive about the Replacements on a Soul Asylum board.
This sort of reflection doesn't come as any surprise. Sometimes there's no fallout because you're genuinely understood. But what do we remember? The understanding or the big flameout trollfest?
I suppose if you can have that many years in a row doing anything, you're bound to notice changes - if not in thyself then in the circumstances surrounding you and the rest of the audience.
The online experience has changed a good deal. How many of the born-with-a-cellphone generation can remember before wireless internet? Having to get up and GO to the computer lab? Dorms without ANY internet? In spite of all these immense advances in convenience, it seems that the vibes rolling off the rabble here online are just as chaotic and selfish as they have ever been.
Didn't William effing Shakespeare serve as the first example of multiplexed-at-once writing? Wasn't he trying to play a grandiose story for his regular theater-going patrons up in their box seats, while at the same exact moment playing goofy clowning jester tactics for the unwashed rabble at ground level?
I learned to wish to be invisible, want to tuck myself into the shadows to escape the shitty attitudes of the disinterested and unintelligent - just to survive high school, and it's no real surprise that the experience left lasting effects.
Dan Savage began an anti-bullying campaign for gay, bi, and gender-confused youth, to let them know in no uncertain terms that "It Gets Better." I sincerely thank the man for saving the kids of today that would've been my friends back in the day. I can't help but wonder if there'll ever be any such words of encouragement for the rest of the crowd that gets the same shite and doesn't even have the obvious to "blame" it on. When you're getting picked on because your classmates are the ones with the defects, the bigotry, the fear-of-different behind their gleeful cruelty.
The only holes I can poke in It getting Better are that people are selfish, rude, boorish dicks everyday in all walks of life, from the Bank to the Butcher Shop. High school is a place where it's sort of implicit that we're still incubating, unfinished works of personhood. Mistakes still feel hugely embarassing there, but it's understood that everybody's gonna have at least one while they're there.
How much whingeing from the Ben Glecks of the world are we gonna have to put up with if nobody in any high school ever learns that their fellows are harsh, cruel, selfish dickheads and that a thick skin is all we ever have to defend ourselves? If nobody ever learns to thicken and toughen up before leaving high school, America is about to be overrun with whiners. (As if She weren't already...)
Did I ever make it from thin-skinned target-for-abuse to thicker-skinned non-whiner?? /lol
I've always treated these ideas as cute extensions of the god complex most humans must flirt with, giving us the promise of something beyond this life - however mundane or godlike - to make up for the questions this existence forces to the center of your consciousness. Fun to play with like chess pieces, these ideas are, but offer little comfort in the harshest moments of your life.
What makes this post more than just another episode of talk soup, brain babble gone rudderless? An additional experience to throw on the heap; finally finding myself unable to stop posting a clear, lucid thought with my fellow forum-goers. Pointing out something nobody else has said. Standing up for something just before running away to hide from the inevitable fallout for having done so. Sigh.
I've done this little act on several different bands/artists fora and mailing lists over the last 15 years.
•A rant how "poop loggy logg" sucks on a Prince mailing list - motivated by the fact that my dorm was ablaze with shitty synth-centric gangster rap all year long.
•Get in a flame war about Courtney Love on a Tori Amos mailing list.
•Defy the Zappa-ites on a Ween message board.
•Admit you're not utterly obsessive about the Replacements on a Soul Asylum board.
This sort of reflection doesn't come as any surprise. Sometimes there's no fallout because you're genuinely understood. But what do we remember? The understanding or the big flameout trollfest?
I suppose if you can have that many years in a row doing anything, you're bound to notice changes - if not in thyself then in the circumstances surrounding you and the rest of the audience.
The online experience has changed a good deal. How many of the born-with-a-cellphone generation can remember before wireless internet? Having to get up and GO to the computer lab? Dorms without ANY internet? In spite of all these immense advances in convenience, it seems that the vibes rolling off the rabble here online are just as chaotic and selfish as they have ever been.
Didn't William effing Shakespeare serve as the first example of multiplexed-at-once writing? Wasn't he trying to play a grandiose story for his regular theater-going patrons up in their box seats, while at the same exact moment playing goofy clowning jester tactics for the unwashed rabble at ground level?
I learned to wish to be invisible, want to tuck myself into the shadows to escape the shitty attitudes of the disinterested and unintelligent - just to survive high school, and it's no real surprise that the experience left lasting effects.
Dan Savage began an anti-bullying campaign for gay, bi, and gender-confused youth, to let them know in no uncertain terms that "It Gets Better." I sincerely thank the man for saving the kids of today that would've been my friends back in the day. I can't help but wonder if there'll ever be any such words of encouragement for the rest of the crowd that gets the same shite and doesn't even have the obvious to "blame" it on. When you're getting picked on because your classmates are the ones with the defects, the bigotry, the fear-of-different behind their gleeful cruelty.
The only holes I can poke in It getting Better are that people are selfish, rude, boorish dicks everyday in all walks of life, from the Bank to the Butcher Shop. High school is a place where it's sort of implicit that we're still incubating, unfinished works of personhood. Mistakes still feel hugely embarassing there, but it's understood that everybody's gonna have at least one while they're there.
How much whingeing from the Ben Glecks of the world are we gonna have to put up with if nobody in any high school ever learns that their fellows are harsh, cruel, selfish dickheads and that a thick skin is all we ever have to defend ourselves? If nobody ever learns to thicken and toughen up before leaving high school, America is about to be overrun with whiners. (As if She weren't already...)
Did I ever make it from thin-skinned target-for-abuse to thicker-skinned non-whiner?? /lol
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
gr8 xbox softmod of 2010: chapter 6
Today’s word is hotswap, kids. What is hotswapping? Aside from some sex joke I could poorly attempt to make, it’s changing hard drives in a device when the power is on, either to the drive, or the system. In this case, stonewalled by my mobo’s draconian bios freezing all hdds attached by default, it would seem, I’m onward to using either Auto-installer, or something I’ve seen around but never had to rely on before called Frosty’s Xbox Rescue disc.
Supposedly any other power source will do, but you boot up the xbox with the stock drive, load the disc, then swap the IDE ribbon connector from the stock hd to the new one you wish to lock.
Seems for a good section of the populace xboxHDM quickly became useless, since bios settings would ‘freeze’ the drive and deny HDM any hope of locking it. HDM didn’t suck completely, I don’t know if I need to clone anything. I believe this hd is prepared and ready to fly. The only thing it lacks is the elusive detail of being LOCKED.
I’m about to forego the pc altogether, go the hotswapping method, boot the thing up with the stock drive, detach the dvdrom connector, have the new upgrade hd nearby with the usb housing powering it, then connect the dvdrom’s ide ribbon to the new hd.
Currently making progress here. I ditched the pc and decided to try the hotswap method with Chimp’s Tool. This is an on-xbox post-softmod app. it’s analogous to Ghost for the pc in that it clones the original stock hd to the new one you intend to use after upgrading. The rub here is that it doesn’t get hung up on the hp pc bios that kept referring to this drive as frozen.
!!! I actually did it! I just saw the little white macrohard logo appear at the bottom of the boot screen ON MY bigger HD!!
Hotswapping with the powered usb enclosure worked. Chimp cloned me a hd. Now to go see if it’s all allocated and check the other details. But it might be time to put the screws back in and start moving into this new box.
Ripping Serious Sam II, will go to Buffy next. This rocks!
Maybe the dvdrom still needs a cleaning. It didn’t read buffy, but we’ve ripped serious sam ii, and it’s 3/4 the way thru counterstrike right now. Thinking that if I installed Chimp on the old xbox, I could just clone up from there. Of course copying everything would take some time, but if I dumped everything except the saves, it’d go faster. But considering the Chimp’s ease of use, I could/might be able to clone my first xbox’s current hd to an even bigger one.
The process should go roughly similar to this. Softmod to load the apps, run the apps, then hotswap the target hd with the dvdrom cable and the usb housing, blammo, it’s done. This box’s dvdrom ripped Serious Sam II but choked on counterstrike, buffy, and tork. I think I’ll need to clean it. If that doesn’t work, I can clone the other HD to this one, or find another way to repair or recondition it.
I knew the dvdrom was dirty or something. I copied over a game and some Futurama, but then I decided to at least see how the dvd looked inside. It’s a samsung replacement drive from what I can see. I watched a few yt videos for reference, one that just cleaned the upper surfaces of the lens and the drive. I didn’t get at the underside and the lower mirror, but I did wipe the dust from the gears and rails, alcohol + qtipped the lens, disc hub, and surrounding housing.
I also blew out the rest of the inside of the xbox, under the dvdrom and hdd trays. I’ve now taken the thing apart down to the mobo, both drives out. And after cleaning it up, I reattached the housing and connected both trays, both drives, reattached the lid, and plugged it back in.
Now it’s reading 5.71mb per second, somewhere around 2x as fast as it went before. It read Buffy on the first try and is now ripping it. I’ll keep going. But at last I’m grinding away on my own mod from the bottom up. And bing, Buffy’s done. Counterstrike reads almost as fast.
Philips VAD6011 is the model in there. It wasn’t even all that dirty when I opened it. I wiped a big wad of dust off the innermost rail that the lens assembly slides back n forth on. Dabbed at the lens with rubbing alcohol, around it and such, but most of the dust in the unit I blew off with the spray duster outside.
Now that the dvdrom is playing ball, plugging along at 3.3 MB/sec or better, I’ve ripped the first games I grabbed from the shelf, Buffy, Tork, Beyond Good & Evil and Half Life 2. I want to see how much I can fit in what I have before I go off the deep end and try to buy any massive hard drives for this thing. There’s another patch that needs to be installed or enabled before anything above 160gb can be used. But I’ve partitioned correctly and made F partition 65+gb out of a 74.5 once C and E drives had each taken a bite.
According to what I’ve been reading this morning, the xbox can usually handle cloning through a IDE>SATA converter. This is important b/c nobody makes IDE drives anymore, and they’re either used, refurbed, or really expensive. I think they max out at 750gb and then usually only over $100.
I did a little comparative searching and I could have a 160gb IDE drive that the xbox compatibility list has several users verify it locks properly, from newegg refurbed total price shipped $35. Including an adapter I could probably have a 500-750gb SATA for the same price. These be the shifting sands of supported standards and the prices they sell for.
Supposedly any other power source will do, but you boot up the xbox with the stock drive, load the disc, then swap the IDE ribbon connector from the stock hd to the new one you wish to lock.
Seems for a good section of the populace xboxHDM quickly became useless, since bios settings would ‘freeze’ the drive and deny HDM any hope of locking it. HDM didn’t suck completely, I don’t know if I need to clone anything. I believe this hd is prepared and ready to fly. The only thing it lacks is the elusive detail of being LOCKED.
I’m about to forego the pc altogether, go the hotswapping method, boot the thing up with the stock drive, detach the dvdrom connector, have the new upgrade hd nearby with the usb housing powering it, then connect the dvdrom’s ide ribbon to the new hd.
Currently making progress here. I ditched the pc and decided to try the hotswap method with Chimp’s Tool. This is an on-xbox post-softmod app. it’s analogous to Ghost for the pc in that it clones the original stock hd to the new one you intend to use after upgrading. The rub here is that it doesn’t get hung up on the hp pc bios that kept referring to this drive as frozen.
!!! I actually did it! I just saw the little white macrohard logo appear at the bottom of the boot screen ON MY bigger HD!!
Hotswapping with the powered usb enclosure worked. Chimp cloned me a hd. Now to go see if it’s all allocated and check the other details. But it might be time to put the screws back in and start moving into this new box.
Ripping Serious Sam II, will go to Buffy next. This rocks!
Maybe the dvdrom still needs a cleaning. It didn’t read buffy, but we’ve ripped serious sam ii, and it’s 3/4 the way thru counterstrike right now. Thinking that if I installed Chimp on the old xbox, I could just clone up from there. Of course copying everything would take some time, but if I dumped everything except the saves, it’d go faster. But considering the Chimp’s ease of use, I could/might be able to clone my first xbox’s current hd to an even bigger one.
The process should go roughly similar to this. Softmod to load the apps, run the apps, then hotswap the target hd with the dvdrom cable and the usb housing, blammo, it’s done. This box’s dvdrom ripped Serious Sam II but choked on counterstrike, buffy, and tork. I think I’ll need to clean it. If that doesn’t work, I can clone the other HD to this one, or find another way to repair or recondition it.
I knew the dvdrom was dirty or something. I copied over a game and some Futurama, but then I decided to at least see how the dvd looked inside. It’s a samsung replacement drive from what I can see. I watched a few yt videos for reference, one that just cleaned the upper surfaces of the lens and the drive. I didn’t get at the underside and the lower mirror, but I did wipe the dust from the gears and rails, alcohol + qtipped the lens, disc hub, and surrounding housing.
I also blew out the rest of the inside of the xbox, under the dvdrom and hdd trays. I’ve now taken the thing apart down to the mobo, both drives out. And after cleaning it up, I reattached the housing and connected both trays, both drives, reattached the lid, and plugged it back in.
Now it’s reading 5.71mb per second, somewhere around 2x as fast as it went before. It read Buffy on the first try and is now ripping it. I’ll keep going. But at last I’m grinding away on my own mod from the bottom up. And bing, Buffy’s done. Counterstrike reads almost as fast.
Philips VAD6011 is the model in there. It wasn’t even all that dirty when I opened it. I wiped a big wad of dust off the innermost rail that the lens assembly slides back n forth on. Dabbed at the lens with rubbing alcohol, around it and such, but most of the dust in the unit I blew off with the spray duster outside.
Now that the dvdrom is playing ball, plugging along at 3.3 MB/sec or better, I’ve ripped the first games I grabbed from the shelf, Buffy, Tork, Beyond Good & Evil and Half Life 2. I want to see how much I can fit in what I have before I go off the deep end and try to buy any massive hard drives for this thing. There’s another patch that needs to be installed or enabled before anything above 160gb can be used. But I’ve partitioned correctly and made F partition 65+gb out of a 74.5 once C and E drives had each taken a bite.
According to what I’ve been reading this morning, the xbox can usually handle cloning through a IDE>SATA converter. This is important b/c nobody makes IDE drives anymore, and they’re either used, refurbed, or really expensive. I think they max out at 750gb and then usually only over $100.
I did a little comparative searching and I could have a 160gb IDE drive that the xbox compatibility list has several users verify it locks properly, from newegg refurbed total price shipped $35. Including an adapter I could probably have a 500-750gb SATA for the same price. These be the shifting sands of supported standards and the prices they sell for.
gr8 xbox softmod of 2010: chapter 5
More hours tick by as I learn how to do this during the doing of it. Having already been through all the steps and paid attention would’ve paid off by this point. But the only time I saw it done wasn't a teaching atmosphere, and I've regretted that since.
But that experience resulted in my first xbmc box, the softmodded and hard-drive upgraded xbox that's become a ubiquitous part of our entertainment center here in the casa. That particular install/instance of the video-playing swiss-army-knife that is xbmc/mplayer seems to be the ghost I'm chasing throughout this current project.
That box lets me copy stuff from the hdd to the usb sticks I have. Didn’t seem to choke on mac os formatted stuff, but preferred fat 16/32 format. Of course some sticks just don't work at all, but I didn't think that would vary from unit to unit. Duh...
Tonight I’ve been butting my head on the fact that the new softmodded xbox, even when booted to familiar xbmc territory and using the file browser I’m familiar with - wouldn’t let me copy to any of ‘em. None of my various usb sticks...??
I could dump the backups of the appropriate stuff on the FATX formatted usb stick that the xbox liked, but nothing else can read that. not even the win2k box, sadly to say.
I used my old standby long-ass blue ethernet cable to attach the xbox to the base station from across the room, but no luck. That dam cable should be crocheted into its own noose for all the trouble its caused me. I grabbed the whole stack of the xbox with controller on top, both sitting on top of the workhorse commie monitor. I moved them, replugged them in their new place within the length of the shorter ethernet cable, and blammo, it works right away and lets me ftp.
So I’ve got the backup folder dumping over ftp to the mac here in the background. I have to guess that I have the appropriate backups for the HDM creation, and then should be able to continue this bizarre circus of fail.
According to the xboxHDM howto, putting these ftp leeched files from the original xbox hd in the right folders, running the cmd line script will then generate an iso I can burn on cdr and use to lock the hd in the pc before tossing it in the xbox, which will then act kinda zombified and anticlimactic. It’ll be like it is now, just booting off the bigger hd with the barest essential dashboard on it.
Then I go through the installs from auto installer and get the basic apps and emus on the new bigger hd, and proceed to add all the shit that made my first softmodded xbmc box so much fun. If I can swing it, too, post project here, this may become my new core xbox, and maybe I can keep it on the network.
The win2k beast roars, buzzes and shudders back to life. about to load the usb stick, try to shuffle the necessary HDM stuff to the right folders before running the script to generate that iso. 7 minutes to go time on that score at usb1.1 speeds.
Back on the usb stick now is a finished iso to burn to cdr that should, hopefully, be a working xboxHDM for this hdd. I ftp’d the dam files myself. if the script worked and the files copied ok, first from the xbox over ftp to the mac, then from the mac to the fat32 usb stick, from that to the peecee where it underwent the ISOage.
Here we go a burning now. after all, it may take 5 minutes to copy an 190mb iso at usb1, but at usb2 it’s already done.
First stab, hdm booted once I could get a drive to let me put it in...after seeing the “no operating system” prompt (since I’ve completely bypassed the boot drive), I rebooted with the disk loaded, it booted from the dvdrom, loaded the linux live and hung on the lack of ethernet, just as it’s doing this 2nd boot.
First try I had the hard drive on the wrong channel. now it’s master and not a slave. and a few minutes, a few more ‘type yes’ instances and it’s building a c-drive on the hd. It already partitioned and formatted the f drive. c is where xbox keeps its brains. Gets to the part where it’s supposed to lock the dam hdd.
I remember T tossing it in my old amd box ceej built and having it boot, lock, and him being stunned/amazed that it worked like click bam and he didn’t have to wrestle with it. I think I’ve come these years later to understand why he was so surprised that day when it just worked, bam, locked the drive.
My HP box, another thrift store find, refuses to lock this drive. Says it’s frozen. The faqs, tuts, howtos and internet forums say to try and find a bios setting that lets me turn off “auto-detect” and then it should be seen as not frozen. I spent a half an hour flipping every toggle in the bios between reboots - but to no avail.
For future reference, keeping an old PC keyboard around is a good idea since the newfangled USB ones won’t work to trigger fkeys for bios settings during boot.
But there’s an xbox here that I thought was b0rked last week. I got it home that day, powered up and connected, the drive spit out a copy of segaGT/jsrf as I’ve already stated, looked like a used hockey puck on the bottom. I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t boot. But I popped in a nearly-perfect original pressing of Serious Sam II and it still wouldn’t go. I surrendered to the moment and resigned myself to solving the issue later.
I read about it a lot, slept, recovered. Then the day came when I tried it again, and blammo, it fired up MechAssault without fail on the first try? Is this the same box as before that wouldn’t boot? Seems so. I followed the faqs and tuts and hustled the ‘Install Linux’ file over, softmodded it.
Installed a load of apps and emulators compared to my initial experience with xmbc and the evolution dashboard. If an 8gb hd didn’t feel like half a phone-booth with a fat guy in it...I might be more drawn into investigating it. But my enthusiasm to explore the new install has waned. I don’t have the outcome I expected to achieve, mainly because of the box I bought to replace my old pc when its mobo went bork.
But that experience resulted in my first xbmc box, the softmodded and hard-drive upgraded xbox that's become a ubiquitous part of our entertainment center here in the casa. That particular install/instance of the video-playing swiss-army-knife that is xbmc/mplayer seems to be the ghost I'm chasing throughout this current project.
That box lets me copy stuff from the hdd to the usb sticks I have. Didn’t seem to choke on mac os formatted stuff, but preferred fat 16/32 format. Of course some sticks just don't work at all, but I didn't think that would vary from unit to unit. Duh...
Tonight I’ve been butting my head on the fact that the new softmodded xbox, even when booted to familiar xbmc territory and using the file browser I’m familiar with - wouldn’t let me copy to any of ‘em. None of my various usb sticks...??
I could dump the backups of the appropriate stuff on the FATX formatted usb stick that the xbox liked, but nothing else can read that. not even the win2k box, sadly to say.
I used my old standby long-ass blue ethernet cable to attach the xbox to the base station from across the room, but no luck. That dam cable should be crocheted into its own noose for all the trouble its caused me. I grabbed the whole stack of the xbox with controller on top, both sitting on top of the workhorse commie monitor. I moved them, replugged them in their new place within the length of the shorter ethernet cable, and blammo, it works right away and lets me ftp.
So I’ve got the backup folder dumping over ftp to the mac here in the background. I have to guess that I have the appropriate backups for the HDM creation, and then should be able to continue this bizarre circus of fail.
According to the xboxHDM howto, putting these ftp leeched files from the original xbox hd in the right folders, running the cmd line script will then generate an iso I can burn on cdr and use to lock the hd in the pc before tossing it in the xbox, which will then act kinda zombified and anticlimactic. It’ll be like it is now, just booting off the bigger hd with the barest essential dashboard on it.
Then I go through the installs from auto installer and get the basic apps and emus on the new bigger hd, and proceed to add all the shit that made my first softmodded xbmc box so much fun. If I can swing it, too, post project here, this may become my new core xbox, and maybe I can keep it on the network.
The win2k beast roars, buzzes and shudders back to life. about to load the usb stick, try to shuffle the necessary HDM stuff to the right folders before running the script to generate that iso. 7 minutes to go time on that score at usb1.1 speeds.
Back on the usb stick now is a finished iso to burn to cdr that should, hopefully, be a working xboxHDM for this hdd. I ftp’d the dam files myself. if the script worked and the files copied ok, first from the xbox over ftp to the mac, then from the mac to the fat32 usb stick, from that to the peecee where it underwent the ISOage.
Here we go a burning now. after all, it may take 5 minutes to copy an 190mb iso at usb1, but at usb2 it’s already done.
First stab, hdm booted once I could get a drive to let me put it in...after seeing the “no operating system” prompt (since I’ve completely bypassed the boot drive), I rebooted with the disk loaded, it booted from the dvdrom, loaded the linux live and hung on the lack of ethernet, just as it’s doing this 2nd boot.
First try I had the hard drive on the wrong channel. now it’s master and not a slave. and a few minutes, a few more ‘type yes’ instances and it’s building a c-drive on the hd. It already partitioned and formatted the f drive. c is where xbox keeps its brains. Gets to the part where it’s supposed to lock the dam hdd.
I remember T tossing it in my old amd box ceej built and having it boot, lock, and him being stunned/amazed that it worked like click bam and he didn’t have to wrestle with it. I think I’ve come these years later to understand why he was so surprised that day when it just worked, bam, locked the drive.
My HP box, another thrift store find, refuses to lock this drive. Says it’s frozen. The faqs, tuts, howtos and internet forums say to try and find a bios setting that lets me turn off “auto-detect” and then it should be seen as not frozen. I spent a half an hour flipping every toggle in the bios between reboots - but to no avail.
For future reference, keeping an old PC keyboard around is a good idea since the newfangled USB ones won’t work to trigger fkeys for bios settings during boot.
But there’s an xbox here that I thought was b0rked last week. I got it home that day, powered up and connected, the drive spit out a copy of segaGT/jsrf as I’ve already stated, looked like a used hockey puck on the bottom. I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t boot. But I popped in a nearly-perfect original pressing of Serious Sam II and it still wouldn’t go. I surrendered to the moment and resigned myself to solving the issue later.
I read about it a lot, slept, recovered. Then the day came when I tried it again, and blammo, it fired up MechAssault without fail on the first try? Is this the same box as before that wouldn’t boot? Seems so. I followed the faqs and tuts and hustled the ‘Install Linux’ file over, softmodded it.
Installed a load of apps and emulators compared to my initial experience with xmbc and the evolution dashboard. If an 8gb hd didn’t feel like half a phone-booth with a fat guy in it...I might be more drawn into investigating it. But my enthusiasm to explore the new install has waned. I don’t have the outcome I expected to achieve, mainly because of the box I bought to replace my old pc when its mobo went bork.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
the gr8 xbox softmod of 2010: chapter 4
another day...maybe more brain power. Who knows? Attempting to take a process that stretched across several days and chop it into roughly 750-1100 words per entry is a little more challenging than I thought it would be heading into it, but oh well.
Cracked the case, removed the lid, uncoupled the ribbon cable, found that the hdd tray was strapped down by its power cable. So I d/c the power cable, unwrapped it from its snaky path around the tray, removed the tray, unscrewed the drive, replaced it in the tray with the new one, then reversed the process.
I even put the screws back in, overly confident that AID 4.52 would know just what to do. I had the thought as I was doing it that it wasn’t done, probably wouldn’t work, and I was screwing it down tight just to have to undo it later.
Of course I turned out to be right, the thing booted to a series of error codes. First the disc couldn’t be read, then the dashboard could not be found, then the game wouldn’t boot. Some suggested that overcoming the missing dash could/might be fixed by installing it from a disc with xb live on it, since that usually updated the dash for xbl. But no luck.
Next on the list, set back but undeterred, will be loading the drive into one of the 2 spare bays in the peecee, running this XboxHDM and either copying over the necessary backups, creating the CDR iso of them for the appropriate moment, or merely locking the damn drive so I can get a game to install a dash on it.
I imagine a future blog post about “xbox modder’s toolbox 2010” where I’ve stumbled through the process years after most of the people already made the mistakes and perfected the process. So I’ve had to develop some sense of what’s too old to be useful and what’s new enough to be relevant - all over again in a new subcommunity or forum of users. This time things seem to circle around xbins and xbox-scene. With the wii it was wiihacks and gbatemp where most of the serious help came from.
I think I spent more time doing recon in the ninty forums since I found the users less boorish and concerned with typical American excessisms like fake plastic tits, beer and fatball. Xbox users tend more toward that since they’re in the emptyvee/Nascar bracket where the marketing was concentrated. Years later there seems to be a much more jackass-fratboy common denominator among the xbox 360 / xbox live crowd. Judged -if nothing else- by the profanity and heavy-handed homophobic rhetorical gist of their XBLA in-game videos posted here, there and everywhere. /digress
I envision this task's toolbox would have 3 main parts. The exploit, the auto-installer, and the hard-drive-maker.
I’ve just hit the 3rd step there. XboxHDM should prepare the new hdd so that once I’ve done the hardware part of physically installing it, it’ll boot up and recognize it, unlock it with the same key that’s on the drive it shipped with, also sitting there in the eeprom flash that's part of the customised xboxHDM disc I get to burn.
In fact, recalling the first xbox I ever had softmodded, my old cow-orker gave me a disc and said “never lose this” that says “XBOX HDM” in bright green highlighter on it. So I have the backup of the original drive that thing came with, despite having left the actual hdd itself with that guy the day he did the mod.
I did the diligence here, the software I have just isn’t prepared to work with the way I did it. I actually have the C drive backup, the dashboard backup, and the eeprom.bin all on my usb stick, just waiting to be tagged into this process.
I just have to back up and do it by the numbers since I don’t yet have the skills to make it up as I go along.
Cracked the case, removed the lid, uncoupled the ribbon cable, found that the hdd tray was strapped down by its power cable. So I d/c the power cable, unwrapped it from its snaky path around the tray, removed the tray, unscrewed the drive, replaced it in the tray with the new one, then reversed the process.
I even put the screws back in, overly confident that AID 4.52 would know just what to do. I had the thought as I was doing it that it wasn’t done, probably wouldn’t work, and I was screwing it down tight just to have to undo it later.
Of course I turned out to be right, the thing booted to a series of error codes. First the disc couldn’t be read, then the dashboard could not be found, then the game wouldn’t boot. Some suggested that overcoming the missing dash could/might be fixed by installing it from a disc with xb live on it, since that usually updated the dash for xbl. But no luck.
Next on the list, set back but undeterred, will be loading the drive into one of the 2 spare bays in the peecee, running this XboxHDM and either copying over the necessary backups, creating the CDR iso of them for the appropriate moment, or merely locking the damn drive so I can get a game to install a dash on it.
I imagine a future blog post about “xbox modder’s toolbox 2010” where I’ve stumbled through the process years after most of the people already made the mistakes and perfected the process. So I’ve had to develop some sense of what’s too old to be useful and what’s new enough to be relevant - all over again in a new subcommunity or forum of users. This time things seem to circle around xbins and xbox-scene. With the wii it was wiihacks and gbatemp where most of the serious help came from.
I think I spent more time doing recon in the ninty forums since I found the users less boorish and concerned with typical American excessisms like fake plastic tits, beer and fatball. Xbox users tend more toward that since they’re in the emptyvee/Nascar bracket where the marketing was concentrated. Years later there seems to be a much more jackass-fratboy common denominator among the xbox 360 / xbox live crowd. Judged -if nothing else- by the profanity and heavy-handed homophobic rhetorical gist of their XBLA in-game videos posted here, there and everywhere. /digress
I envision this task's toolbox would have 3 main parts. The exploit, the auto-installer, and the hard-drive-maker.
I’ve just hit the 3rd step there. XboxHDM should prepare the new hdd so that once I’ve done the hardware part of physically installing it, it’ll boot up and recognize it, unlock it with the same key that’s on the drive it shipped with, also sitting there in the eeprom flash that's part of the customised xboxHDM disc I get to burn.
In fact, recalling the first xbox I ever had softmodded, my old cow-orker gave me a disc and said “never lose this” that says “XBOX HDM” in bright green highlighter on it. So I have the backup of the original drive that thing came with, despite having left the actual hdd itself with that guy the day he did the mod.
I did the diligence here, the software I have just isn’t prepared to work with the way I did it. I actually have the C drive backup, the dashboard backup, and the eeprom.bin all on my usb stick, just waiting to be tagged into this process.
I just have to back up and do it by the numbers since I don’t yet have the skills to make it up as I go along.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
gr8 xbox softmod of 2010: chapter 3
here we go. hustled ISO over to ext usb hd. burned with disk utility. appeared to work ok. put it in the xbox, orange light. mild wait to see it load. now the music’s playing and it’s time to roll. the bounced burn is grinding away on that stock hdd and filling it with emulators, apps, scripts, and probably tons of shit I’d delete.
I winced when I saw a folder in the scripts portion of the hierarchy entitled “football”, entirely unable to imagine it referring to anything but the Great American Abomination that isn’t soccer, yet also is far from futbol.
I’ve loaded a couple videos, but it seems like this would be really easy. I don’t know if I can just chuck in the new hdd and roll from there, as the vids suggest AID can do, but older tuts and texts and howtos seem to be divided on.
I can set the jumpers the same. I just don’t know if I need the eeprom.bin or the backup of the original C drive, the HDM or whatever, to clone onto the new hdd. Unless AID has streamlined that also, which this evening’s forum reading, searching, skimming and stumbling would suggest.
It seems there used to be a lot of surgical single-file modding and re-FTPing back to the xbox required in the earlier days of the softmod culture. Now AID has streamlined a lot of that, and I get the idea that I could just chuck the new hdd in there and roll with it, be prompted for whatever’s necessary...
I know this saga is approaching miniseries length at this point, having burned at least 90 minutes and perhaps over 2 hrs on the peecee portion of this awkward fumbling attempt. Surreal64_XXX box art thumbnails are streaming by with anonymous alphanumeric strings for filenames, buzzing past in a blur.
Do I press onward, attempting to get the bigger hdd noticed, formatted, modded, installed?
Or do I put off what has become inevitable, the maxtor that’s clearly supported and lockable as per the xbox hard drive compatibility list at http://xboxdrives.x-pec.com/?p=list&v_modelnum=4K080H4
I have a smattering of somewhat organized rom-gathering binges I’ve gone on over the years, and a small pinch of very early console rom collections I first leeched wayback in my very first days of having a higher-than-dialup speed connection to ye olde internette.
Funny, now I see zsnexbox skins at 720 and 1080 that I know for a fact I’ll never use. If Auto Installer Deluxe were something I understood better, or it had further customizable install options, I’d opt out of that sorta shit, but meh.
I’m still actually floored that the thing booted MechAssault. The mod went according to the plan...I booted into xbmc since I’m used to it and wanted a file browser. Now I’m gonna copy the backup and the eeprom to the memory stick.
I don’t know if I can get anything else to read it, but the 512mb stick I have lets me copy it, claims its FATX formatted. So I’ll have another source of the backup and eeprom aside from the original hdd when I move the new one into the xbox. I’ll have it on this dam stick. Will AID let me copy it back if needed? Is that the question, or just senseless worry?
Ok. the C drive backup and the eeprom backups are on the fatx formatted 512mb stick. The one it seemed to like for that sorta thing. I might tinker around a little with the current hd, but I’d hope I could swap it back in if the other one flakes on me and won’t install or some such shit.
After all, if it asks for backups of C and eeprom, AND if it will recognize the usb stick in that condition, then I can provide it. That’s the big boogeyman everyone seems to be so afraid of. I did the same due diligence when modding my wii. I made damn sure I backed up the original NAND before I got all moddy with it, so that according to most of the FAQs and howtos, I could recover from 99% of brickish behavior if I had a NAND backup.
Similar rules apply here. Now onto the case cracking.
I winced when I saw a folder in the scripts portion of the hierarchy entitled “football”, entirely unable to imagine it referring to anything but the Great American Abomination that isn’t soccer, yet also is far from futbol.
I’ve loaded a couple videos, but it seems like this would be really easy. I don’t know if I can just chuck in the new hdd and roll from there, as the vids suggest AID can do, but older tuts and texts and howtos seem to be divided on.
I can set the jumpers the same. I just don’t know if I need the eeprom.bin or the backup of the original C drive, the HDM or whatever, to clone onto the new hdd. Unless AID has streamlined that also, which this evening’s forum reading, searching, skimming and stumbling would suggest.
It seems there used to be a lot of surgical single-file modding and re-FTPing back to the xbox required in the earlier days of the softmod culture. Now AID has streamlined a lot of that, and I get the idea that I could just chuck the new hdd in there and roll with it, be prompted for whatever’s necessary...
I know this saga is approaching miniseries length at this point, having burned at least 90 minutes and perhaps over 2 hrs on the peecee portion of this awkward fumbling attempt. Surreal64_XXX box art thumbnails are streaming by with anonymous alphanumeric strings for filenames, buzzing past in a blur.
Do I press onward, attempting to get the bigger hdd noticed, formatted, modded, installed?
Or do I put off what has become inevitable, the maxtor that’s clearly supported and lockable as per the xbox hard drive compatibility list at http://xboxdrives.x-pec.com/?p=list&v_modelnum=4K080H4
I have a smattering of somewhat organized rom-gathering binges I’ve gone on over the years, and a small pinch of very early console rom collections I first leeched wayback in my very first days of having a higher-than-dialup speed connection to ye olde internette.
Funny, now I see zsnexbox skins at 720 and 1080 that I know for a fact I’ll never use. If Auto Installer Deluxe were something I understood better, or it had further customizable install options, I’d opt out of that sorta shit, but meh.
I’m still actually floored that the thing booted MechAssault. The mod went according to the plan...I booted into xbmc since I’m used to it and wanted a file browser. Now I’m gonna copy the backup and the eeprom to the memory stick.
I don’t know if I can get anything else to read it, but the 512mb stick I have lets me copy it, claims its FATX formatted. So I’ll have another source of the backup and eeprom aside from the original hdd when I move the new one into the xbox. I’ll have it on this dam stick. Will AID let me copy it back if needed? Is that the question, or just senseless worry?
Ok. the C drive backup and the eeprom backups are on the fatx formatted 512mb stick. The one it seemed to like for that sorta thing. I might tinker around a little with the current hd, but I’d hope I could swap it back in if the other one flakes on me and won’t install or some such shit.
After all, if it asks for backups of C and eeprom, AND if it will recognize the usb stick in that condition, then I can provide it. That’s the big boogeyman everyone seems to be so afraid of. I did the same due diligence when modding my wii. I made damn sure I backed up the original NAND before I got all moddy with it, so that according to most of the FAQs and howtos, I could recover from 99% of brickish behavior if I had a NAND backup.
Similar rules apply here. Now onto the case cracking.
gr8 xbox softmod of 2010: chapter 2
the process continues. Erring on the side of caution this time means I’ve committed myself to dumping near 2gb of auto installer deluxe on the peecee. if I wired it into the network, provided I had a reliable cable long enough, it might go faster, but the wireless maxxed out at 250kb and I killed it when attempting to leech the file from the internet. even with our connection, the halfassed almost broken antenna on this wireless card couldn’t do better.
I’m at 24 minutes and counting downward before I can dump the last 2 roughly 95mb pieces from a 2nd usb stick. after dumping the pieces, I uncompress them, follow the tut for modifying Auto Installer Deluxe, tweak it as necessary... rom packs don’t bother me, they can be added later. I moved the recently modded xbox and old commie workhorse monitor off the desk and set up the dam peecee. Of course nothing I did with the usb hard drives would work. Not the 74gb maxtor 4k080h4 formatted as it was, not once I tried to reformat it with the mac to FAT/MSDOS.
I went to computer management in win2k, signed and reformatted the drive. I probably missed a step or some shit, b/c once I’d done that and it appeared a viable blank drive in win2k, I ejected it and plugged it into the mac mini’s usb hub. Nope. It sees it, but won’t let me write to it. Read only? Wtf? What did I do to make it like that?
Not being able to read the dam thing under windoze made me reformat it WITH windoze, hoping it would shuttle back n forth better like that. Nope. Mac wouldn’t write to it. So I forget that plan, went to usb sticks, and forget that the dam HP pc, this fellow thrift store find.
according to system properties its an AMD athlon with 512mb of RAM. I think it has another 60 or 70 gb hd in there. The floppy’s probably still connected, it buzzes every once in a while. It had a hp cdrw in there when I got it, I dropped in another thrift store salvaged dvdrom drive. I think it’s the one that had a copy of Friday in it the day I brought it home.
6 minutes. Hopefully the process will accelerate a good bit after this bottleneck has been passed. Tweak AID, find out how to dump the finished version back to the damn burner and burn it.
a few go-rounds with AID patcher and I’ve got an ISO small enough to fit back on the usb stick from whence it came when it was still lowly rar files. 25 minutes from now I can copy the damn thing at an actual civilized speed for usb, burn the ISO with disk utility ... if it will let me.
Then...nah. I need more coffee to have that much momentum. I’m still stuck on the now. Getting the dam peecee to function should not take this frakking long. I really need a win box for the basics like this shit, but with usb2 and a dvd burner and something approaching real world features.
maybe someday...
I’m at 24 minutes and counting downward before I can dump the last 2 roughly 95mb pieces from a 2nd usb stick. after dumping the pieces, I uncompress them, follow the tut for modifying Auto Installer Deluxe, tweak it as necessary... rom packs don’t bother me, they can be added later. I moved the recently modded xbox and old commie workhorse monitor off the desk and set up the dam peecee. Of course nothing I did with the usb hard drives would work. Not the 74gb maxtor 4k080h4 formatted as it was, not once I tried to reformat it with the mac to FAT/MSDOS.
I went to computer management in win2k, signed and reformatted the drive. I probably missed a step or some shit, b/c once I’d done that and it appeared a viable blank drive in win2k, I ejected it and plugged it into the mac mini’s usb hub. Nope. It sees it, but won’t let me write to it. Read only? Wtf? What did I do to make it like that?
Not being able to read the dam thing under windoze made me reformat it WITH windoze, hoping it would shuttle back n forth better like that. Nope. Mac wouldn’t write to it. So I forget that plan, went to usb sticks, and forget that the dam HP pc, this fellow thrift store find.
according to system properties its an AMD athlon with 512mb of RAM. I think it has another 60 or 70 gb hd in there. The floppy’s probably still connected, it buzzes every once in a while. It had a hp cdrw in there when I got it, I dropped in another thrift store salvaged dvdrom drive. I think it’s the one that had a copy of Friday in it the day I brought it home.
6 minutes. Hopefully the process will accelerate a good bit after this bottleneck has been passed. Tweak AID, find out how to dump the finished version back to the damn burner and burn it.
a few go-rounds with AID patcher and I’ve got an ISO small enough to fit back on the usb stick from whence it came when it was still lowly rar files. 25 minutes from now I can copy the damn thing at an actual civilized speed for usb, burn the ISO with disk utility ... if it will let me.
Then...nah. I need more coffee to have that much momentum. I’m still stuck on the now. Getting the dam peecee to function should not take this frakking long. I really need a win box for the basics like this shit, but with usb2 and a dvd burner and something approaching real world features.
maybe someday...
Friday, September 10, 2010
the gr8 xbox softmod of 2010: prequel thru chapter 1
This will be a curmudgeon's journal of a process. My noobiness may show, be warned.
Working with a thrift store purchased xbox game system,
a memory card (necessary files put on card by l33t p4l),
and a copy of the game necessary for the exploit.
The story before my present attempt is littered with reading how-tos, viewing yt vids, and forming a greatest-hits of the effective practices I learn among them all.
I scored my first xbox cheap to play just the very few games on the console that interested me. I got a job at a tech company and a cow-orker did an upgrade of that unit with the only hard drive I could lay my hands on, a 30gb.
I've outgrown that and have a 74.5gb in a usb housing that system profiler lists as IDE. The idea is that running through the relatively familiar territory of softmodding the existing drive would lead to upgrading it to the 74.
Then press on with auto installer deluxe and begin slapping stuff on it.
Could it really be that simple? Do I even have the correct bit to open the frakking case? Will the hdd play nice?
Can I even get the dvdrom to read Mech Assault?
tune in tomorrow...
[update]
the thrift store xbox came with a dvd remote but no receiving dongle, 2 s-type controllers, the short breakaway end of a third s-type controller cable, power and video cables and the console itself.
I got it home a few weeks ago, connected and powered it up and found a really scuffed up Sega GT/JSRF disk in it. I sulked at the time b/c it didn't boot that and wouldn't boot Serious Sam II either. I had a full plate of other chores and tasks at the time, so I tabled the console for future tinkerage.
Flash forward a few weeks and my mate is pulling a long shift at work, so I've steeled myself to this adventure. I've gained several years worth of use from the first softmodded xbox I learned on.
Macrohard's idea of what the xbox is for is quaintly limited. I like being able to use xbmc as a pseudo-tivo and media center at least as often as I use this console for playing games. And the games I usually play are old platformers, emulated classics, or homebrew from the community of independent and hobby developers.
There's a Xbox Resurrection project floating around various parts of the internet. People who want to make the absolute most out of a modded xbox have come together to make it like a living, playable video game museum. Complete with box art, videos of trailers or commercials, and how-tos.
Expanding upon the concepts of the auto-installers, Resurrection seems to create a home node of a video-gamers library of congress, and the concept will surely go upwards and onwards from its somewhat humble beginnings on this hardware.
Tonights activities included learning how simple and subtle some things can be. I tried to copy a gamesave from an xbox memory card to the hard drive inside, only to discover I barely knew anything about navigating a stock ms dashboard. Took me almost half an hour to figure out the simple right arrow selected the gamesave itself, not the card it was on.
MechAssault (proper version obtained several years ago)
+
memory card with appropriate krayzie linux installer files
+
finally knowing how to copy the gamesave to the HD
=
modded xbox with backed up eeprom.bin and alternate dashboard.
now onward to backing up the original HDD, cloning (or whatever) that to the new HDD, and using AID to format the new HDD.
Working with a thrift store purchased xbox game system,
a memory card (necessary files put on card by l33t p4l),
and a copy of the game necessary for the exploit.
The story before my present attempt is littered with reading how-tos, viewing yt vids, and forming a greatest-hits of the effective practices I learn among them all.
I scored my first xbox cheap to play just the very few games on the console that interested me. I got a job at a tech company and a cow-orker did an upgrade of that unit with the only hard drive I could lay my hands on, a 30gb.
I've outgrown that and have a 74.5gb in a usb housing that system profiler lists as IDE. The idea is that running through the relatively familiar territory of softmodding the existing drive would lead to upgrading it to the 74.
Then press on with auto installer deluxe and begin slapping stuff on it.
Could it really be that simple? Do I even have the correct bit to open the frakking case? Will the hdd play nice?
Can I even get the dvdrom to read Mech Assault?
tune in tomorrow...
[update]
the thrift store xbox came with a dvd remote but no receiving dongle, 2 s-type controllers, the short breakaway end of a third s-type controller cable, power and video cables and the console itself.
I got it home a few weeks ago, connected and powered it up and found a really scuffed up Sega GT/JSRF disk in it. I sulked at the time b/c it didn't boot that and wouldn't boot Serious Sam II either. I had a full plate of other chores and tasks at the time, so I tabled the console for future tinkerage.
Flash forward a few weeks and my mate is pulling a long shift at work, so I've steeled myself to this adventure. I've gained several years worth of use from the first softmodded xbox I learned on.
Macrohard's idea of what the xbox is for is quaintly limited. I like being able to use xbmc as a pseudo-tivo and media center at least as often as I use this console for playing games. And the games I usually play are old platformers, emulated classics, or homebrew from the community of independent and hobby developers.
There's a Xbox Resurrection project floating around various parts of the internet. People who want to make the absolute most out of a modded xbox have come together to make it like a living, playable video game museum. Complete with box art, videos of trailers or commercials, and how-tos.
Expanding upon the concepts of the auto-installers, Resurrection seems to create a home node of a video-gamers library of congress, and the concept will surely go upwards and onwards from its somewhat humble beginnings on this hardware.
Tonights activities included learning how simple and subtle some things can be. I tried to copy a gamesave from an xbox memory card to the hard drive inside, only to discover I barely knew anything about navigating a stock ms dashboard. Took me almost half an hour to figure out the simple right arrow selected the gamesave itself, not the card it was on.
MechAssault (proper version obtained several years ago)
+
memory card with appropriate krayzie linux installer files
+
finally knowing how to copy the gamesave to the HD
=
modded xbox with backed up eeprom.bin and alternate dashboard.
now onward to backing up the original HDD, cloning (or whatever) that to the new HDD, and using AID to format the new HDD.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
when it rains it leaks
With the right push, one of these tracks could be a single. But after two albums of holding my interest, the band has dropped an album of meh upon us.
What band? Does it matter? The cycle's the same.
Some performers travel relentlessly, honing tracks live until they're polished gems for a proper album. Some can get away with their fanbase sharing these works as they progress.
We know what happens when bands have open taping policies. Ani DiFranco, Dave Matthews Band, Mike Doughty, Phish, Grateful Dead, Rage Against the Machine...there are artists and bands at all levels who embrace the obvious benefit of an engaged fanbase.
Where commerce begins to fuck art is when a band or artist scrapes the dregs from the bottom of their brains, the last and least inspired pieces of art, or unpolished, untested, virginal music. Sometimes wisely, artists learn to edit themselves, hold back until something feels like it's ready.
Then there's the times when something else happens. The public was all ready for a familiar set of songs from DMB back in the day, but instead of what at-the-time were referred to as 'the Lillywhite sessions', the band released something else. Better or worse? Didn't matter...wasn't the right songs at the right time.
I fear the recent trend of keeping the music far under wraps from the fanbase until it's been paraded in front of journalists and posers. These so-called professionals then trickle their reviews out with uninformed opinions that mislead the fanbase, usually far more knowledgable than the reviewer anyway.
The disrespect paid by whoring the music for the capitalist scam before sharing it with the devoted can never be underestimated. It's causing a frothing furor in a forum or two presently, and I've seen favoritism play itself out in other communities.
People watching can be amusing, can be devastating, can be nauseating. Today's been a little of all 3, at least so far. This time the music has yet to make itself matter to me, make me feel anything for it. It's just boring, but there's always the chance it will grow on me.
But this story's not even halfway over just yet...
What band? Does it matter? The cycle's the same.
Some performers travel relentlessly, honing tracks live until they're polished gems for a proper album. Some can get away with their fanbase sharing these works as they progress.
We know what happens when bands have open taping policies. Ani DiFranco, Dave Matthews Band, Mike Doughty, Phish, Grateful Dead, Rage Against the Machine...there are artists and bands at all levels who embrace the obvious benefit of an engaged fanbase.
Where commerce begins to fuck art is when a band or artist scrapes the dregs from the bottom of their brains, the last and least inspired pieces of art, or unpolished, untested, virginal music. Sometimes wisely, artists learn to edit themselves, hold back until something feels like it's ready.
Then there's the times when something else happens. The public was all ready for a familiar set of songs from DMB back in the day, but instead of what at-the-time were referred to as 'the Lillywhite sessions', the band released something else. Better or worse? Didn't matter...wasn't the right songs at the right time.
I fear the recent trend of keeping the music far under wraps from the fanbase until it's been paraded in front of journalists and posers. These so-called professionals then trickle their reviews out with uninformed opinions that mislead the fanbase, usually far more knowledgable than the reviewer anyway.
The disrespect paid by whoring the music for the capitalist scam before sharing it with the devoted can never be underestimated. It's causing a frothing furor in a forum or two presently, and I've seen favoritism play itself out in other communities.
People watching can be amusing, can be devastating, can be nauseating. Today's been a little of all 3, at least so far. This time the music has yet to make itself matter to me, make me feel anything for it. It's just boring, but there's always the chance it will grow on me.
But this story's not even halfway over just yet...
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
mudhead returns
I started giving myself an internal mic-delay more than a year ago. Tried to keep spewing daily into text files, but filter what got posted. Most people refer to this as rational editing, others as unrealistic to the blogger/journal-keeping ethic.
I've had a trying summer with minor health problems unworthy of further mention, aside from the fact that I finally multiplexed my blogs and then the juggernaut of posting that I'd primed in the earlier year began sputtering out. I slept a lot, I took my meds, I whined and pissed and moaned. I forgot to eat, I drank a lot of coffee and gatorade.
I did some sporatic freelance work with vigor, had an out of town visitor.
I dunno if it's the sudafed, which despite needing and being doctor-advised to take them every 4 hours, still requires my ID to be swiped whenever I purchase more.
But...the sudafed might've had something to do with it. I know it gives me the blurry head.
But I beat New Super Mario Bros Wii, which is different than NSMB for the DS and shouldn't really be...maybe someday there'll be a direct port of the DS version for the wii itself. But knowing nintendo, probably not.
I beat Super Mario Galaxy, the first one...at least beat the middle. Getting all the stars in a mario title is tougher than the gold / platinum bolt crusade in Ratchet and Clank.
I keep watching, hoping the ps3 keeps getting cheaper. I imagine them dropping the price from $299 to $249 for the holidays. I can't imagine it being less than $269. Used ones keep turning up for anywhere from $175-200 on the low end.
I whine here b/c I thought I had licked this damn sinus infection and now it's gone into my -presently deaf- right ear. dammit.
I'll close the window, turn up the heat, and flick on the wii.
Kevin Smith deserves a Special Internet Achivement award for the smodcast alone. Then the Smodcastle, AFAIK the world's first podcasting theater.
Aside from a consistently quality experience, funny miscellany...the multiplexing he's done hasn't watered it down. I've even got a somewhat derivative idea of my own thanks to Brother Kevin.
if I can clear up this damn head on my shoulders, I've gotta get my ass down to helLA and catch a live smod, dammit.
I've had a trying summer with minor health problems unworthy of further mention, aside from the fact that I finally multiplexed my blogs and then the juggernaut of posting that I'd primed in the earlier year began sputtering out. I slept a lot, I took my meds, I whined and pissed and moaned. I forgot to eat, I drank a lot of coffee and gatorade.
I did some sporatic freelance work with vigor, had an out of town visitor.
I dunno if it's the sudafed, which despite needing and being doctor-advised to take them every 4 hours, still requires my ID to be swiped whenever I purchase more.
But...the sudafed might've had something to do with it. I know it gives me the blurry head.
But I beat New Super Mario Bros Wii, which is different than NSMB for the DS and shouldn't really be...maybe someday there'll be a direct port of the DS version for the wii itself. But knowing nintendo, probably not.
I beat Super Mario Galaxy, the first one...at least beat the middle. Getting all the stars in a mario title is tougher than the gold / platinum bolt crusade in Ratchet and Clank.
I keep watching, hoping the ps3 keeps getting cheaper. I imagine them dropping the price from $299 to $249 for the holidays. I can't imagine it being less than $269. Used ones keep turning up for anywhere from $175-200 on the low end.
I whine here b/c I thought I had licked this damn sinus infection and now it's gone into my -presently deaf- right ear. dammit.
I'll close the window, turn up the heat, and flick on the wii.
Kevin Smith deserves a Special Internet Achivement award for the smodcast alone. Then the Smodcastle, AFAIK the world's first podcasting theater.
Aside from a consistently quality experience, funny miscellany...the multiplexing he's done hasn't watered it down. I've even got a somewhat derivative idea of my own thanks to Brother Kevin.
if I can clear up this damn head on my shoulders, I've gotta get my ass down to helLA and catch a live smod, dammit.
Friday, July 16, 2010
nintendo stop wasting my time!
I actually bought NSMB for the wii.
I'm just insulted by the game on a regular basis. There's no save point where I need one, so I've spent the last few months staggering over and over again through the 2nd World. I've beaten every one of these levels, and any decent emulator would let me save where it makes sense, not where the designers decided to waste my time.
Every time I die, usually caused by some snot-nosed insult of a gap placed right where the designers engineered me to HAVE to land...they waste seconds of my time on their demon face deathmask animation AND then the absurd delay at the map screen before letting me pick up where I left off, at the last bullshit death the game built into itself.
I enjoyed NSMB for the ds. I wanted a direct port, or at least the option to play a direct port of that. Instead we have a seriously fucked up affair with multiplayer grafted onto the platforming experience like frankenstein's monster.
I appreciate Mario platformers with skill required, like SMW. NSMBw isn't NSMB. It's NSMB with 10-20x the cheap deaths and bullshit tricks to keep you wasting time in the death-penalty loop.
Weak.
I'm just insulted by the game on a regular basis. There's no save point where I need one, so I've spent the last few months staggering over and over again through the 2nd World. I've beaten every one of these levels, and any decent emulator would let me save where it makes sense, not where the designers decided to waste my time.
Every time I die, usually caused by some snot-nosed insult of a gap placed right where the designers engineered me to HAVE to land...they waste seconds of my time on their demon face deathmask animation AND then the absurd delay at the map screen before letting me pick up where I left off, at the last bullshit death the game built into itself.
I enjoyed NSMB for the ds. I wanted a direct port, or at least the option to play a direct port of that. Instead we have a seriously fucked up affair with multiplayer grafted onto the platforming experience like frankenstein's monster.
I appreciate Mario platformers with skill required, like SMW. NSMBw isn't NSMB. It's NSMB with 10-20x the cheap deaths and bullshit tricks to keep you wasting time in the death-penalty loop.
Weak.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
bitching about bejeweled (among other stuf)
"going dark for a while." Love how they say that on 24. aka torture-porn or the jack bauer power hour, depending on the favorite references of your surrounding crowd.
Then again maybe I've been dark for a few weeks already, if this and nearby blogs are any indication. Dumping rough compositions, blog posts, reviews and other musings into text files between binges of consuming the very same stuff I usually reflect upon.
Multiplexing myself worked okay far as the sites go, I just need an in-home espresso machine and two or three clones, then each of them could take a different theme blog and run with it.
I lol'd to see a blogger writing month. I don't think there'd be any actual content in my posts if I posted everyday, unless I was reviewing a particular site, book, record, movie...
I've been churning the gears, tumbling over the inspirations and scraps of notes, feeling vital now that the temperatures I associate with summertime have come to our semi-coastal current city. Caffeine and temps above 72 get me up and about. Vacuuming the floor and the rugs, doing the dishes.
In fact last night I built a small speaker stand out of salvaged wood, probably an old futon frame, found near the dumpster a few weeks ago. But that's another lame story undeserving of a post itself until properly perfected, probably painted matte black.
---
I continue to be frustrated with the devolution of Bejeweled Blitz on facebook, what began as a truly skillful pursuit limited to a mere minute each game. Now it's a resource hog...not that in previous incarnations it ran even on a G4...but now it makes an intel mac whine.
Either my brand new mouse with brand new batteries is glitchy only when playing this game, or they've engineered all playability out of it entirely in the process of diverting users to chasing their 'coins.'
The same path that led Zynga to irrelevance, the tired purchasing of virtual credits with real money. Same tired capitalist model isn't gonna take root without resemblances to gambling, but the clueless chumps keep trying the same broken wheel in search of a smoother ride.
I once upon a time could lose 20 minutes at a crack playing Bejeweled Blitz, but now it's a chore getting through five minutes in a row. The pointer moves the wrong block, moves the right block but the wrong direction, or fails to notice its proper position entirely.
It would seem that in order to compensate for the performance issues, the flash app has been allowed to become more and more resource-intensive. Doesn't matter what browser, either. Mac os 10.5.x (whatever the current patches and updates are) on an intel mac with 2gb ram seems to perform similarly, as one might expect from a plugin, agnostic of browser.
I haven't honestly trotted out Opera, but Firefox, Chrome and Safari, all of which I updated to their recentest versions, including the goddamn adopey trash plugin itself, all hammer the processor and spin up the fan from the 1500rpm range to 2400-2600.
Weak...
Then again maybe I've been dark for a few weeks already, if this and nearby blogs are any indication. Dumping rough compositions, blog posts, reviews and other musings into text files between binges of consuming the very same stuff I usually reflect upon.
Multiplexing myself worked okay far as the sites go, I just need an in-home espresso machine and two or three clones, then each of them could take a different theme blog and run with it.
I lol'd to see a blogger writing month. I don't think there'd be any actual content in my posts if I posted everyday, unless I was reviewing a particular site, book, record, movie...
I've been churning the gears, tumbling over the inspirations and scraps of notes, feeling vital now that the temperatures I associate with summertime have come to our semi-coastal current city. Caffeine and temps above 72 get me up and about. Vacuuming the floor and the rugs, doing the dishes.
In fact last night I built a small speaker stand out of salvaged wood, probably an old futon frame, found near the dumpster a few weeks ago. But that's another lame story undeserving of a post itself until properly perfected, probably painted matte black.
---
I continue to be frustrated with the devolution of Bejeweled Blitz on facebook, what began as a truly skillful pursuit limited to a mere minute each game. Now it's a resource hog...not that in previous incarnations it ran even on a G4...but now it makes an intel mac whine.
Either my brand new mouse with brand new batteries is glitchy only when playing this game, or they've engineered all playability out of it entirely in the process of diverting users to chasing their 'coins.'
The same path that led Zynga to irrelevance, the tired purchasing of virtual credits with real money. Same tired capitalist model isn't gonna take root without resemblances to gambling, but the clueless chumps keep trying the same broken wheel in search of a smoother ride.
I once upon a time could lose 20 minutes at a crack playing Bejeweled Blitz, but now it's a chore getting through five minutes in a row. The pointer moves the wrong block, moves the right block but the wrong direction, or fails to notice its proper position entirely.
It would seem that in order to compensate for the performance issues, the flash app has been allowed to become more and more resource-intensive. Doesn't matter what browser, either. Mac os 10.5.x (whatever the current patches and updates are) on an intel mac with 2gb ram seems to perform similarly, as one might expect from a plugin, agnostic of browser.
I haven't honestly trotted out Opera, but Firefox, Chrome and Safari, all of which I updated to their recentest versions, including the goddamn adopey trash plugin itself, all hammer the processor and spin up the fan from the 1500rpm range to 2400-2600.
Weak...
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
swatted down to bounce higher
I'm limping in here after getting swatted down in a forum.
I posted about some guys I know in a couple different indie bands. Next poster listened, didn't like, said so. The wind is out of my sails somewhat.
Not really much, just enough to be reminded that there are people who criticize the sunset, and then those of us who either watch it or we don't and then we move on.
If their music works for their fans, their crowds, themselves...what else is there?
There's constructive criticism, never a bad thing, delivered by someone with personal involvement, invested in the outcome.
Then there's just lame-ass spitballing, shit talking and posturing.
If you don't play an instrument and don't sing, don't write...where the fuck you get off telling someone else their style is wack?
Critic is just a fancy-ass word for hater.
I think I just graduated from the realm where haters can fuck with me.
See you when you get there...
I posted about some guys I know in a couple different indie bands. Next poster listened, didn't like, said so. The wind is out of my sails somewhat.
Not really much, just enough to be reminded that there are people who criticize the sunset, and then those of us who either watch it or we don't and then we move on.
If their music works for their fans, their crowds, themselves...what else is there?
There's constructive criticism, never a bad thing, delivered by someone with personal involvement, invested in the outcome.
Then there's just lame-ass spitballing, shit talking and posturing.
If you don't play an instrument and don't sing, don't write...where the fuck you get off telling someone else their style is wack?
Critic is just a fancy-ass word for hater.
I think I just graduated from the realm where haters can fuck with me.
See you when you get there...
Saturday, May 29, 2010
an unheard plea; etc processing thanks
Here we are again Memorial Day and everyone's stirred up their patriotic feathers, tripping and stumbling over themselves to thank veterans in the most ostentatious, visible way possible.
I really wish we could finally come to some sort of across-the-board agreement in America that we all support the troops. We all have differences with the government.
My hackles get riled up when some ignorant person spouts off that any veteran "gave" me my freedoms. I just wanna ask if they read the same history books and founding documents I did!?!?
I stop these misled people and speak: "say it with me now:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I usually then - if and whenever necessary - ask "what part of 'by their creator' means any veteran who isn't my parent created me??"
It would really be great if we could just grow the hell up and get over the fair-weather patriots and the chest-thumping misled pride of the 'white' man. Whitey did plenty of foul deeds in his day and will reap what he sowed, not the least of which being eventual minority status.
I love my country, I love the land and the water and the sky. I don't trust the government, but they're a damnsite better than the corporations and the moneyaddicts.
I get an ever-increasing bad taste in the back of my mind whenever the boorish overly proud ignoramuses pretend that any sort of dumbed-down redneck lowest common wrasslin'-loving denominator is patriotic. Being dumb is anti-American, and as much as you'd like to hide from this fact, it is ESPECIALLY so if you are being dumb while caucasian.
Digression aside, have a good weekend!
I stand up in salutation of our veterans and the choices they made. I get choked up looking at the flag and thinking about the people who had every right I do to be here living this free life and died instead.
I personally choose to remember everyone who has died in my family, on Memorial Day. I think everybody pretty much does. When I was a kid it was a weekend to make sure that someone in the family had been up to the cemetary and brushed the leaves and grass back and away from the headstones of my grandparents, great aunts and uncles.
That's what all this is for. Thank a veteran for their service, NOT for giving you what your creator did. Perhaps for fighting to protect our way of life, then...
But remember whoever you've lost. That's what it's about. Spend time with everyone else, look back, look forward. Maybe light some fireworks, do some fishing, cook outside.
I really wish we could finally come to some sort of across-the-board agreement in America that we all support the troops. We all have differences with the government.
My hackles get riled up when some ignorant person spouts off that any veteran "gave" me my freedoms. I just wanna ask if they read the same history books and founding documents I did!?!?
I stop these misled people and speak: "say it with me now:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I usually then - if and whenever necessary - ask "what part of 'by their creator' means any veteran who isn't my parent created me??"
It would really be great if we could just grow the hell up and get over the fair-weather patriots and the chest-thumping misled pride of the 'white' man. Whitey did plenty of foul deeds in his day and will reap what he sowed, not the least of which being eventual minority status.
I love my country, I love the land and the water and the sky. I don't trust the government, but they're a damnsite better than the corporations and the moneyaddicts.
I get an ever-increasing bad taste in the back of my mind whenever the boorish overly proud ignoramuses pretend that any sort of dumbed-down redneck lowest common wrasslin'-loving denominator is patriotic. Being dumb is anti-American, and as much as you'd like to hide from this fact, it is ESPECIALLY so if you are being dumb while caucasian.
Digression aside, have a good weekend!
I stand up in salutation of our veterans and the choices they made. I get choked up looking at the flag and thinking about the people who had every right I do to be here living this free life and died instead.
I personally choose to remember everyone who has died in my family, on Memorial Day. I think everybody pretty much does. When I was a kid it was a weekend to make sure that someone in the family had been up to the cemetary and brushed the leaves and grass back and away from the headstones of my grandparents, great aunts and uncles.
That's what all this is for. Thank a veteran for their service, NOT for giving you what your creator did. Perhaps for fighting to protect our way of life, then...
But remember whoever you've lost. That's what it's about. Spend time with everyone else, look back, look forward. Maybe light some fireworks, do some fishing, cook outside.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
trolls and grief
I think I'm molting. Facebook is a coat I used to wear that feels weird now, and might end up in a box of stuff I'd donate to the goodwill.
Had a friend once who deleted her myspace every other week or so. Seemed she liked the "game" of making the page more than having or keeping one. I've considered dropping my facebook page entirely, or backing off to just IRL friends and family ONLY.
My experience with facebook has been less and less worthwhile, more worrying and regularly annoying. I've watched friends jump ship from myspace for lesser reasons.
I regularly get inundated by their suggestion-bot and added a bunch of "friends" who attended the same hi skool as I did. I just dumped the mafiawars app, despite having joined a "group" a few months ago and having tricked out my character.
I climbed past level 500 and mastered the 2x leveling every 24 hours "trick" that most of the wikis and howtos seem to think they invented. Anybody with a grasp of basic math can sort out how quickly those games are apt to get boring. Most people just don't bother thinking that far ahead about much of anything.
I don't think I've ever spent that long playing an RPG. And for all the opinion otherwise, it's just a stat-building RPG with an extensive PR budget. And millions of apathetic sheep toiling away, grinding down their code for them, chasing absurd phantoms.
I got an invite to join a group praying for the death of the President from a foreign "daily player" of MW. I replied that I thought he/she should be ashamed for the suggestion, and then un-friended them. I also quit MW on the spot, deleted all my "friends" who'd been added to pad the mafia size.
I'm not sure how I ever let this many potential-leaks into my friend list to begin with. I guess for a while I drank the kool aid even tho I knew better. I had friends IRL who played the damn thing and I felt obligated to stick around. Even had a measly few moments of actual teamwork vibes over the months I played.
Anyway, I dumped the fake friends, I dumped the app/game, I deleted all the groups related to such tripe, and cleared my account of that sporge and garbage.
I still seemed to have a troll in my midst. I'd post something about how the tea party is wack as fuck and some wiseass would reply with a limbaugh-ism. So I deleted his wiseassery and him too. I'm king wiseass of my shitty little mountain. Cross me at thy peril.
Had a friend once who deleted her myspace every other week or so. Seemed she liked the "game" of making the page more than having or keeping one. I've considered dropping my facebook page entirely, or backing off to just IRL friends and family ONLY.
My experience with facebook has been less and less worthwhile, more worrying and regularly annoying. I've watched friends jump ship from myspace for lesser reasons.
I regularly get inundated by their suggestion-bot and added a bunch of "friends" who attended the same hi skool as I did. I just dumped the mafiawars app, despite having joined a "group" a few months ago and having tricked out my character.
I climbed past level 500 and mastered the 2x leveling every 24 hours "trick" that most of the wikis and howtos seem to think they invented. Anybody with a grasp of basic math can sort out how quickly those games are apt to get boring. Most people just don't bother thinking that far ahead about much of anything.
I don't think I've ever spent that long playing an RPG. And for all the opinion otherwise, it's just a stat-building RPG with an extensive PR budget. And millions of apathetic sheep toiling away, grinding down their code for them, chasing absurd phantoms.
I got an invite to join a group praying for the death of the President from a foreign "daily player" of MW. I replied that I thought he/she should be ashamed for the suggestion, and then un-friended them. I also quit MW on the spot, deleted all my "friends" who'd been added to pad the mafia size.
I'm not sure how I ever let this many potential-leaks into my friend list to begin with. I guess for a while I drank the kool aid even tho I knew better. I had friends IRL who played the damn thing and I felt obligated to stick around. Even had a measly few moments of actual teamwork vibes over the months I played.
Anyway, I dumped the fake friends, I dumped the app/game, I deleted all the groups related to such tripe, and cleared my account of that sporge and garbage.
I still seemed to have a troll in my midst. I'd post something about how the tea party is wack as fuck and some wiseass would reply with a limbaugh-ism. So I deleted his wiseassery and him too. I'm king wiseass of my shitty little mountain. Cross me at thy peril.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
the myth of anonymity
I love how the most recent Bill Maher overtime perpetuates the myth of anonymity online.
Sure, there are degrees of anonymity available online. But anywhere with anything approaching a forum or a community, the anonymity is forfeit in direct proportion to any benefit reaped.
As we wring content and purpose from the online experience, aside from the distanced, methodical view of the researcher, we give up our anonymity to get anything, to get anywhere.
I resent the ongoing perception of the uninformed that participation in anything online is by default anonymous. More and more that is not the case, as anyone with an inkling of interest in digital forensics and networking can attest.
In times of declining anonymity, it's more important than ever that those of us with the conviction to defend our tools and our rights express the truth.
And that is, simply put, that the myth of anonymity is being perpetuated by the uninformed or willfully ignorant, and toward dubious ends, at best.
Being invisible, or even somewhat anonymous, necessitates an ever-increasing and vigilant effort. Has anybody sent you a link to the new "internet phone book" that attempts to link your address, name, social networking websites, and email addresses?
Is the myth of anonymity being perpetuated to lure the young and dumb into actions online that allow them to be singled out for reprogramming or eventual imprisonment? I know I sound a tad more Art Bell than Alex Jones here, but bear me out.
In practical terms, anonymity is dead. Every packet sent on the net has to know where its effing going, and that means your ip address, probably your individual device's mac address, and info on what browser or app you're connecting with, is part of that process.
The lengths one would need to go to in order to remain truly untraceably anonymous for any amount of time would require resources out of the grasp of most common folk. That is to say nothing of the logistics involved or the skills needed to perform most tasks one might desire to perform under such circumstances.
Most of the cyber attacks and viruses people gasp over at the water cooler are script kiddies and exploits. I think anybody who knows enough about this world and how the various parts of it really work, knows how difficult it can be to do anything big or important, even when working with the right people who could conceivably achieve a given goal.
Many of the best tools available for attempting true anonymity online are plagued with bugs and nefarious individuals who consider themselves "white hats" sabotaging the networks in the name of their unicorn gods.
I may have run my yap and babbled my coffee-addled brains out here, but I daresay I'm onto something. You can pick a username to hide behind, a sock puppet, a throwaway account, but everything's traceable someway somehow. Only fools dare imagine that the real world is gonna treat them otherwise for long.
Sure, there are degrees of anonymity available online. But anywhere with anything approaching a forum or a community, the anonymity is forfeit in direct proportion to any benefit reaped.
As we wring content and purpose from the online experience, aside from the distanced, methodical view of the researcher, we give up our anonymity to get anything, to get anywhere.
I resent the ongoing perception of the uninformed that participation in anything online is by default anonymous. More and more that is not the case, as anyone with an inkling of interest in digital forensics and networking can attest.
In times of declining anonymity, it's more important than ever that those of us with the conviction to defend our tools and our rights express the truth.
And that is, simply put, that the myth of anonymity is being perpetuated by the uninformed or willfully ignorant, and toward dubious ends, at best.
Being invisible, or even somewhat anonymous, necessitates an ever-increasing and vigilant effort. Has anybody sent you a link to the new "internet phone book" that attempts to link your address, name, social networking websites, and email addresses?
Is the myth of anonymity being perpetuated to lure the young and dumb into actions online that allow them to be singled out for reprogramming or eventual imprisonment? I know I sound a tad more Art Bell than Alex Jones here, but bear me out.
In practical terms, anonymity is dead. Every packet sent on the net has to know where its effing going, and that means your ip address, probably your individual device's mac address, and info on what browser or app you're connecting with, is part of that process.
The lengths one would need to go to in order to remain truly untraceably anonymous for any amount of time would require resources out of the grasp of most common folk. That is to say nothing of the logistics involved or the skills needed to perform most tasks one might desire to perform under such circumstances.
Most of the cyber attacks and viruses people gasp over at the water cooler are script kiddies and exploits. I think anybody who knows enough about this world and how the various parts of it really work, knows how difficult it can be to do anything big or important, even when working with the right people who could conceivably achieve a given goal.
Many of the best tools available for attempting true anonymity online are plagued with bugs and nefarious individuals who consider themselves "white hats" sabotaging the networks in the name of their unicorn gods.
I may have run my yap and babbled my coffee-addled brains out here, but I daresay I'm onto something. You can pick a username to hide behind, a sock puppet, a throwaway account, but everything's traceable someway somehow. Only fools dare imagine that the real world is gonna treat them otherwise for long.
Friday, March 19, 2010
another friday I'm not sure I deserve
Here I am seething about something, not wanting to rant at anybody in my physical meatspace, long since having exhausted my friends' ability or readiness to listen, and I turn to the net-as-dumping-ground.
Which is to say Welcome! Here is your unfriendly curmudgeon on his virtual soapbox wedged between the millions of others, each with their own megaphone even if they really don't have anything to add.
I know exactly why news of Sean Hannity's "charity" being a front for him to live like a total plastic movie star on donated money makes me MAD! Because my brother, over there up to his nuts in the sand of someone else's desert, is a true believer in Sean Hannity and how much He loves America.
Doesn't matter if I myself or hundreds of thousands of Americans can see through Sean, Glen, or the whole foxnoise brigade...they're still stomping their boot on my brother's face and he's essentially kissing them for it by continuing to tune in and listen.
Maybe this is one of those things about which it is proper to be mad. Righteous indignation generated by utterly disgusting displays of hypocritical behavior? Probably a just reaction, despite the fact that I'm left seething and Sean is rich and happy - like the politicians he claims to rail against. Insulated by his millions. Fat fucker.
In other news, California is kicking my ass. I don't know why but my head is a bucket of snot, or perhaps auditioning for the role of an as-yet untapped maple tree. I think it's allergies. The air quality rating has been moderate to high for tree pollen.
We're situated mere feet from one of the "nature preserves" throughout town. Which is to say that it's land they couldn't otherwise profit from, and "turned back over to The People."
I bet that the view of actual trees and not another apartment three feet from my window, which made me wanna live here to begin with, is now tormenting me invisibly with tree pollen. Thus my head is a swelled up balloon and I am mostly deaf, in addition to the 20/10 rating for my sinuses.
But enough, as they say, of the organ recital. Where and what has dear blogger been up to of late?
I've just about snagged myself a Wii to play with. More on that as it pans out.
Which is to say Welcome! Here is your unfriendly curmudgeon on his virtual soapbox wedged between the millions of others, each with their own megaphone even if they really don't have anything to add.
I know exactly why news of Sean Hannity's "charity" being a front for him to live like a total plastic movie star on donated money makes me MAD! Because my brother, over there up to his nuts in the sand of someone else's desert, is a true believer in Sean Hannity and how much He loves America.
Doesn't matter if I myself or hundreds of thousands of Americans can see through Sean, Glen, or the whole foxnoise brigade...they're still stomping their boot on my brother's face and he's essentially kissing them for it by continuing to tune in and listen.
Maybe this is one of those things about which it is proper to be mad. Righteous indignation generated by utterly disgusting displays of hypocritical behavior? Probably a just reaction, despite the fact that I'm left seething and Sean is rich and happy - like the politicians he claims to rail against. Insulated by his millions. Fat fucker.
In other news, California is kicking my ass. I don't know why but my head is a bucket of snot, or perhaps auditioning for the role of an as-yet untapped maple tree. I think it's allergies. The air quality rating has been moderate to high for tree pollen.
We're situated mere feet from one of the "nature preserves" throughout town. Which is to say that it's land they couldn't otherwise profit from, and "turned back over to The People."
I bet that the view of actual trees and not another apartment three feet from my window, which made me wanna live here to begin with, is now tormenting me invisibly with tree pollen. Thus my head is a swelled up balloon and I am mostly deaf, in addition to the 20/10 rating for my sinuses.
But enough, as they say, of the organ recital. Where and what has dear blogger been up to of late?
I've just about snagged myself a Wii to play with. More on that as it pans out.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
a shadowy tea time of grumbles and epithets
So in November I "wrote" a "novel" and in December I conquered some Mario titles I hadn't yet seen through. January brought the scanning project back, and I drifted toward writing and tabled the scanning, with a touch of seasonal flu or cold, in Feb thusfar.
There aren't any words to do justice to the creakings and groanings of the mind. As we get older, the body begins to throw up signs of the impending end. I'm fairly sure nobody ever warned me that my body would develop a claritin dependency before 40.
A miasma of radio waves, high fructose corn syrup, industrial waste added to the drinking water, and laws against anything interesting - fiercely protecting the stupid, ignorant, helpless, all encouraging the laziest lowest denominator to get more inert.
I've noticed the gradual slide into insignifigance I'm making. I just don't know if I care anymore. Plastic teenage tragedies pumped onto the culture by republitard networks gushing bad production values and overspending on underwhelming talent...
I think I'm just fine turning into grumpy old bastard and constantly whittling down the amount of attention I waste on the newest latest greatest bullshit some asshole is selling today.
I usually wait till full seasons of my chosen few shows are available and then barrel through them in short order, miniseries style bursts.
I was raised by women who couldn't be satisfied with mere television, but had to supplement their boredom with reading a novel still facing the screen, or working word search and crossword puzzles at the same time.
I still recall Grandma's daytime schedule revolving around what she was gonna watch while she did it. Morning news talk and variety shows gave way to game shows, which turned to soaps and stories over the 10-noon block. More game shows in the afternoon before they ceased the tyranny and let me watch cartoons.
I can't get my head around the popularity of massive games like World of Warcraft or similar things. I may spend three minutes clicking buttons in mafiaspace every other day or so, but I can't understand RPG players. Reality moves at a slow enough clip as it is, why bother superimposing another layer over it that moves at its own arcane pace?
RTS games appeal a little. The starcraft variant of warcraft back inna day was somewhat amusing. I just can't get my head around a lot of the newest shit. I haven't even been interested. Sports games are for idiots, just like most sports.
I like actual futbol, rugby, MMA fights, and real sports with real stakes performed by real actual people. Fuck nascar, fuck the NFL, and fuck all million-earning assholes who play any "sport" known to man. Money ain't shit.
Parkour and skateboarding are honest sports compared to fucking golf and driving in a circle. Rally racing is a sport compared to drag racing - which is driving in a straight fucking line...probably the only thing stupider than nascar this side of a tractor pull.
I like demolition derbies tho. So I'm not dogging on all redneck American pasttimes. I have a low tolerance for dumb whatever the color or flavor, but I'm not prejudiced. I don't care what color you are or where you come from. If you're trying not to be stupid, you're okay by me.
I was struck stupid the other day out dining in an establishment with too many big flat screen teevees. Literally like one per booth. And they hand out the remotes to the customers, so this guy further from the screen than we were seated, cranked the volume up to 11 for nascar.
So all throughout my midafternoon breakfast I was subjected to the sounds of zooming rednecks in stupid formation trying to out-circle each other. Narrated by jimbob the toothless wonder and jethro the slack-jawed announcer in perpetual yawling drawl. Talking about how heroic and dedicated these fucks were for driving in circles.
This is not what we evolved for. Wasting fuel, practicing a futile and obviously mundane effort, labelled up like the corporate whores you are. Surrounded by masses gathered in big salivating mobs who swill beer and hope for a firey crash. All the while breathing high-performance fuel exhaust and rubber dust?
Does any other nation have this kind of rampant stupidity as a celebrated pastime?
(Press three to jab the author in his fleshy pink belly with a broken beer bottle,
press four to tell him he listens to too much george carlin and patton oswalt and needs to getta life. Press six to send him a nascar beer cozy.)
There aren't any words to do justice to the creakings and groanings of the mind. As we get older, the body begins to throw up signs of the impending end. I'm fairly sure nobody ever warned me that my body would develop a claritin dependency before 40.
A miasma of radio waves, high fructose corn syrup, industrial waste added to the drinking water, and laws against anything interesting - fiercely protecting the stupid, ignorant, helpless, all encouraging the laziest lowest denominator to get more inert.
I've noticed the gradual slide into insignifigance I'm making. I just don't know if I care anymore. Plastic teenage tragedies pumped onto the culture by republitard networks gushing bad production values and overspending on underwhelming talent...
I think I'm just fine turning into grumpy old bastard and constantly whittling down the amount of attention I waste on the newest latest greatest bullshit some asshole is selling today.
I usually wait till full seasons of my chosen few shows are available and then barrel through them in short order, miniseries style bursts.
I was raised by women who couldn't be satisfied with mere television, but had to supplement their boredom with reading a novel still facing the screen, or working word search and crossword puzzles at the same time.
I still recall Grandma's daytime schedule revolving around what she was gonna watch while she did it. Morning news talk and variety shows gave way to game shows, which turned to soaps and stories over the 10-noon block. More game shows in the afternoon before they ceased the tyranny and let me watch cartoons.
I can't get my head around the popularity of massive games like World of Warcraft or similar things. I may spend three minutes clicking buttons in mafiaspace every other day or so, but I can't understand RPG players. Reality moves at a slow enough clip as it is, why bother superimposing another layer over it that moves at its own arcane pace?
RTS games appeal a little. The starcraft variant of warcraft back inna day was somewhat amusing. I just can't get my head around a lot of the newest shit. I haven't even been interested. Sports games are for idiots, just like most sports.
I like actual futbol, rugby, MMA fights, and real sports with real stakes performed by real actual people. Fuck nascar, fuck the NFL, and fuck all million-earning assholes who play any "sport" known to man. Money ain't shit.
Parkour and skateboarding are honest sports compared to fucking golf and driving in a circle. Rally racing is a sport compared to drag racing - which is driving in a straight fucking line...probably the only thing stupider than nascar this side of a tractor pull.
I like demolition derbies tho. So I'm not dogging on all redneck American pasttimes. I have a low tolerance for dumb whatever the color or flavor, but I'm not prejudiced. I don't care what color you are or where you come from. If you're trying not to be stupid, you're okay by me.
I was struck stupid the other day out dining in an establishment with too many big flat screen teevees. Literally like one per booth. And they hand out the remotes to the customers, so this guy further from the screen than we were seated, cranked the volume up to 11 for nascar.
So all throughout my midafternoon breakfast I was subjected to the sounds of zooming rednecks in stupid formation trying to out-circle each other. Narrated by jimbob the toothless wonder and jethro the slack-jawed announcer in perpetual yawling drawl. Talking about how heroic and dedicated these fucks were for driving in circles.
This is not what we evolved for. Wasting fuel, practicing a futile and obviously mundane effort, labelled up like the corporate whores you are. Surrounded by masses gathered in big salivating mobs who swill beer and hope for a firey crash. All the while breathing high-performance fuel exhaust and rubber dust?
Does any other nation have this kind of rampant stupidity as a celebrated pastime?
(Press three to jab the author in his fleshy pink belly with a broken beer bottle,
press four to tell him he listens to too much george carlin and patton oswalt and needs to getta life. Press six to send him a nascar beer cozy.)
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
plodding along in my young old age
I could've sworn it was just a few weeks ago I heard about CDs. Obviously employing some hyperbole here, but groove with me on it...
I was still quite happy with the improvement of cassettes over records and 8-tracks, honestly. Tapes you could record...create with. Capture your own voice, snippets of the teevee, or your little brother scratching with your Sesame Street records.
I read storybooks, told jokes, and made my brothers laugh on those old tapes. They're in a box around here somewhere. You'd think I'd wanna listen to them, but any time I do the voices sound alien - like someone and somebody else. So I rarely listen to them anymore.
But there came a day when Grandma started to be reluctant to let me use her tape recorder. I chalked it up to the random moody nature of these adult things, and went back to watching Woody Woodpecker on the black and white teevee at the foot of her bed. And no cookies, either, or I'd spoil my dinner. :P
About two weeks later was my birthday, which for a kid of that single-digit-age was months away. But I got my very own tape recorder for my birthday. Which I then proceeded to wear out, leave running as I fell asleep, or push my fingers into when it was running without a tape in it. Mom and dad always wondered why we had to get it repaired so often. Yeah...we're all stupid sometimes...at least most of mine was back then, eh?
I've never been well-off monetarily. I've worked and earned and bought things that were on sale, spent wisely. I've never been able to afford the newest, latest, greatest tech. I usually have to wait till all the gaudy, stupid, classless people with the money and none of the brains buy, break, wear out, and replace the new shit.
So here we are in some year they all claim is 1020. ...oh, wait...2010. (Oops/same diff.) I have a collection of slightly outdated tech that serves me decently. A few key pieces are almost new, just a year or two old. But I still feel proud of my 3G ipod and my phat old pre-lite nintendo ds.
I have a digital camera, but it damn sure doesn't fit in my pocket. It shoots RAW and has other features I wanted, but it doesn't do HD video or anything. I got it cheap off craigslist. My spare digital cam, the one that does fit in my pocket...it's from savers and the battery has to be taken out after every shot or it drains quickly.
I found myself finally lusting after the Wii when I've seen all the "homebrew" independent software filling the gaps in the "legitimate" usefulness of the console. I couldn't really care less about it, despite the obvious lure of the actual Mario title Super Mario Galaxy.
So many false Mario games have come out in the last 7 years. These Mario Party things, the Smash Brothers BS...I've never understood those. Like taking Mario's face and slapping it on a ton of things. I have owned many nintendo titles. But the only ones worth keeping were the ones with actual Mario doing actual Super things. Not golf, not dancing, not board games, and not Rf'nPGs.
RPGs interest me about as much as steampunk. Like a cheerleader with a 40-year-old antique calculator keypad where her face is supposed to be.
New SMB for Wii took the game I enjoyed so much on that little tiny DS screen and lets it breathe on a bigger screen. Pretty much at the same time, nintendo announced a bigger handheld for those of us who could hardly play anything on their existing millions of kiddie devices. Our hands, fingers, thumbs and arms are not compatible with the twee itty bitty size of these things for long...no how.
It's worth mentioning that the most fun I had with the DS were doing two things. Playing NSMB until I got sick of holding the tiny system up to my face, and scratching samples with protein-ds.
I want a Wii. I've wanted to check it out since I played exactly ONE swing of golf during a micro-break at a relentlessly-aggressive media company's call center one day over two years ago. That's the sum total of experience I have with the concept, controls, any of it first-hand.
I use my xbox every other day or so, but couldn't care less about the 330 or whatever it is they're calling the new one. Linux and open-source hackers and freedom fighters created the useful part of the xbox for me, Xbox Media Center. I can't say enough good things about it, and if you've ever used it, you wouldn't be able to stop gushing about it either.
Seeing this level of functionality being achieved in fits and starts on the wii is inspiring me to want to pony up the loot and fetch me one. I'm not prepared to spend more than I have to. So maybe $120-150 for the console, all connections, at least one controller and one game. *shrug*
That's assuming I can find the deal, the pieces all look in good enough shape, and it's after April. I'm not in any hurry. I might be able to do tons of tricks with my xbox but I still can't get the damn thing to play N64 games.
I've seen the emulation for the 64 improving. Since the xbox thwarts my attempts and I have a couple of usb controllers, I'm gonna give mupen64 a try under an operating system or two. Last I tried to emu the 64 on the mac, the controller wouldn't map the sticks, just the buttons. Either the controller's borked or the mac's just an asshole!?!
I came over here - well-caffeinated as one might by this point assume - after seeing evidence in the chatter here and there that ye olde apple nee computer finally dropped their long-awaited "tablet" device.
I watched the video. I love how condescendingly they proclaim that it's "affordable" at five hundred fucking dollars. Maybe if I'm one of the artists whose music you use as bed under the video. I'm sure Ben fucking Folds gets a free iPad. I could - you know - actually use one. He's undoubtedly already got either an iphone or a widescreen kickass imac and laptop.
The world spins out of control and wobbles on its axis. These sorts of minor injustices bear my bleeding brain to spew them out here in the land of digitally volatile futuretext, where any old emp or rogue pulse can wipe them from the collective consciousness just like *that*?
I watch the carnage unfolding from Haiti. The statistics claim that anyone left in the rubble is dead. But they keep pulling live people out after 15 days. I can't imagine the horror of making it this far, perhaps even able to hear the rescuers but unable to make a sound...and having them pass you by because a statistician told them to!?!?
And all the aid workers getting hammered down there. Haiti wasn't a wealthy nation before. I hesitate to even think it...but how many of these hungry mouths, these homeless people were homeless and hungry before the quake? How many of them didn't have anyone even in their own neighborhood noticing their plight 90 days ago?
I digress...but with good cause.
I came here to whine about how the ipad might go on my list of wanted items. But not for the obvious reasons. No...for painfully few of those.
I'm not a cellphone user. I have one, but only a basic model that does just what it needs to, and charges me the least amount of loot to do it.
I once had aspirations of being a techological gadget man, up on the times and buying every new thing. I have long since abandoned such expensive foolishness. And I'm not even old enough to have any grey hairs, I just got wise.
If I had an ipad, I'd basically playtest it, see where it wobbled, where I could poke at the underpinnings, and what I could do with it to amuse myself that perhaps no one intended. I'd play games, I'd run apps, I'd learn a lot of what my friends and family have been getting from their iphones for years already.
I'd catch up and I'd run loops out ahead of many of the people using these things now. Or at least I'd try.
I'm still amused at recent news that someone busted the outermost ring of the onion that is no doubt the security features of the sony/fony pee-ess 3. I have been calling for the fall of sony for a long time. Their minidiscs were an abomination before logic and reason and the company's folly has only grown since.
I'd love to play the newest Ratchet and Clank games, but on my terms, NOT theirs. So the console can take a big leap until the price of admission is no greater than it would've been to buy another game for my PS2. I saw no need to upgrade, and won't pay to be forced to do it.
So that's it. I'm a cellphone noob, hate microsoft and fony, not so hot on apple's bloated app issues and phone phetish, want a wii, would gladly playtest and rigorously use an ipad - but it'll be at least a year and probably three before I could/would pay for the privilege.
(But go ahead, let commence the consumeristic stampede of blind sheep and early adopters. Don't let me stop you from blazing the path, stomping down the bugs, and selling me your used 1G ipad for $120 about 18-24 months from now!)
I was still quite happy with the improvement of cassettes over records and 8-tracks, honestly. Tapes you could record...create with. Capture your own voice, snippets of the teevee, or your little brother scratching with your Sesame Street records.
I read storybooks, told jokes, and made my brothers laugh on those old tapes. They're in a box around here somewhere. You'd think I'd wanna listen to them, but any time I do the voices sound alien - like someone and somebody else. So I rarely listen to them anymore.
But there came a day when Grandma started to be reluctant to let me use her tape recorder. I chalked it up to the random moody nature of these adult things, and went back to watching Woody Woodpecker on the black and white teevee at the foot of her bed. And no cookies, either, or I'd spoil my dinner. :P
About two weeks later was my birthday, which for a kid of that single-digit-age was months away. But I got my very own tape recorder for my birthday. Which I then proceeded to wear out, leave running as I fell asleep, or push my fingers into when it was running without a tape in it. Mom and dad always wondered why we had to get it repaired so often. Yeah...we're all stupid sometimes...at least most of mine was back then, eh?
I've never been well-off monetarily. I've worked and earned and bought things that were on sale, spent wisely. I've never been able to afford the newest, latest, greatest tech. I usually have to wait till all the gaudy, stupid, classless people with the money and none of the brains buy, break, wear out, and replace the new shit.
So here we are in some year they all claim is 1020. ...oh, wait...2010. (Oops/same diff.) I have a collection of slightly outdated tech that serves me decently. A few key pieces are almost new, just a year or two old. But I still feel proud of my 3G ipod and my phat old pre-lite nintendo ds.
I have a digital camera, but it damn sure doesn't fit in my pocket. It shoots RAW and has other features I wanted, but it doesn't do HD video or anything. I got it cheap off craigslist. My spare digital cam, the one that does fit in my pocket...it's from savers and the battery has to be taken out after every shot or it drains quickly.
I found myself finally lusting after the Wii when I've seen all the "homebrew" independent software filling the gaps in the "legitimate" usefulness of the console. I couldn't really care less about it, despite the obvious lure of the actual Mario title Super Mario Galaxy.
So many false Mario games have come out in the last 7 years. These Mario Party things, the Smash Brothers BS...I've never understood those. Like taking Mario's face and slapping it on a ton of things. I have owned many nintendo titles. But the only ones worth keeping were the ones with actual Mario doing actual Super things. Not golf, not dancing, not board games, and not Rf'nPGs.
RPGs interest me about as much as steampunk. Like a cheerleader with a 40-year-old antique calculator keypad where her face is supposed to be.
New SMB for Wii took the game I enjoyed so much on that little tiny DS screen and lets it breathe on a bigger screen. Pretty much at the same time, nintendo announced a bigger handheld for those of us who could hardly play anything on their existing millions of kiddie devices. Our hands, fingers, thumbs and arms are not compatible with the twee itty bitty size of these things for long...no how.
It's worth mentioning that the most fun I had with the DS were doing two things. Playing NSMB until I got sick of holding the tiny system up to my face, and scratching samples with protein-ds.
I want a Wii. I've wanted to check it out since I played exactly ONE swing of golf during a micro-break at a relentlessly-aggressive media company's call center one day over two years ago. That's the sum total of experience I have with the concept, controls, any of it first-hand.
I use my xbox every other day or so, but couldn't care less about the 330 or whatever it is they're calling the new one. Linux and open-source hackers and freedom fighters created the useful part of the xbox for me, Xbox Media Center. I can't say enough good things about it, and if you've ever used it, you wouldn't be able to stop gushing about it either.
Seeing this level of functionality being achieved in fits and starts on the wii is inspiring me to want to pony up the loot and fetch me one. I'm not prepared to spend more than I have to. So maybe $120-150 for the console, all connections, at least one controller and one game. *shrug*
That's assuming I can find the deal, the pieces all look in good enough shape, and it's after April. I'm not in any hurry. I might be able to do tons of tricks with my xbox but I still can't get the damn thing to play N64 games.
I've seen the emulation for the 64 improving. Since the xbox thwarts my attempts and I have a couple of usb controllers, I'm gonna give mupen64 a try under an operating system or two. Last I tried to emu the 64 on the mac, the controller wouldn't map the sticks, just the buttons. Either the controller's borked or the mac's just an asshole!?!
I came over here - well-caffeinated as one might by this point assume - after seeing evidence in the chatter here and there that ye olde apple nee computer finally dropped their long-awaited "tablet" device.
I watched the video. I love how condescendingly they proclaim that it's "affordable" at five hundred fucking dollars. Maybe if I'm one of the artists whose music you use as bed under the video. I'm sure Ben fucking Folds gets a free iPad. I could - you know - actually use one. He's undoubtedly already got either an iphone or a widescreen kickass imac and laptop.
The world spins out of control and wobbles on its axis. These sorts of minor injustices bear my bleeding brain to spew them out here in the land of digitally volatile futuretext, where any old emp or rogue pulse can wipe them from the collective consciousness just like *that*?
I watch the carnage unfolding from Haiti. The statistics claim that anyone left in the rubble is dead. But they keep pulling live people out after 15 days. I can't imagine the horror of making it this far, perhaps even able to hear the rescuers but unable to make a sound...and having them pass you by because a statistician told them to!?!?
And all the aid workers getting hammered down there. Haiti wasn't a wealthy nation before. I hesitate to even think it...but how many of these hungry mouths, these homeless people were homeless and hungry before the quake? How many of them didn't have anyone even in their own neighborhood noticing their plight 90 days ago?
I digress...but with good cause.
I came here to whine about how the ipad might go on my list of wanted items. But not for the obvious reasons. No...for painfully few of those.
I'm not a cellphone user. I have one, but only a basic model that does just what it needs to, and charges me the least amount of loot to do it.
I once had aspirations of being a techological gadget man, up on the times and buying every new thing. I have long since abandoned such expensive foolishness. And I'm not even old enough to have any grey hairs, I just got wise.
If I had an ipad, I'd basically playtest it, see where it wobbled, where I could poke at the underpinnings, and what I could do with it to amuse myself that perhaps no one intended. I'd play games, I'd run apps, I'd learn a lot of what my friends and family have been getting from their iphones for years already.
I'd catch up and I'd run loops out ahead of many of the people using these things now. Or at least I'd try.
I'm still amused at recent news that someone busted the outermost ring of the onion that is no doubt the security features of the sony/fony pee-ess 3. I have been calling for the fall of sony for a long time. Their minidiscs were an abomination before logic and reason and the company's folly has only grown since.
I'd love to play the newest Ratchet and Clank games, but on my terms, NOT theirs. So the console can take a big leap until the price of admission is no greater than it would've been to buy another game for my PS2. I saw no need to upgrade, and won't pay to be forced to do it.
So that's it. I'm a cellphone noob, hate microsoft and fony, not so hot on apple's bloated app issues and phone phetish, want a wii, would gladly playtest and rigorously use an ipad - but it'll be at least a year and probably three before I could/would pay for the privilege.
(But go ahead, let commence the consumeristic stampede of blind sheep and early adopters. Don't let me stop you from blazing the path, stomping down the bugs, and selling me your used 1G ipad for $120 about 18-24 months from now!)
Friday, January 15, 2010
progress and awe
So I just did something I've noticed my mac is good for.
As I'll do from time to time with longer political, scientific, and research articles, I copy/pasted the text to a doc in my word processor. Then I had the computer voice read it to me.
I've already set the voice to read at the speed I prefer to keep up with. I think I could twiddle the Services menu to read it directly from the browser, but haven't bothered search-or-researching that just yet.
I re-absorbed the content of my latest blog entries here and elsewhere in the span of about 8 minutes. 1700 words here, 800 there...etc and I'm refreshed and ready to reflect on the last few days.
The process for scanning old slides has been repaired and functions onward.
I am on a mission to preserve the historical visual record of the family whut I come. Attempting to get their help identifying all these faces and places in these images. Before any more of the elders who'd remember these details pass through the veil where it's far harder to hear their answers.
I envision, goofily like a teenager drunk in the world of too much futuristic tech, mapping my Grandparents house with the images I'm finding of it, making it into a quake map or a qtvr file.
Normally I placate myself with strong coffee and some mental filler like teevee or cartoons while I scan images. It usually involves the monkey-like persistence to a pattern of:
insert slide
press preview
wait
crop to image
press scan
wait
press save
type filename
hit enter
wait
close file
and repeat till hard drive is full.
I usually keep myself aware of the tech available for these projects. I'm just not aware of anything in even remotely the same ballpark of monetary investment that can do the same thing.
I believe there are bulk slide scanners out there in excess of five hundred bucks, and steadily upward from there.
If I found a deal for the target photo lab or someone else to do the whole mess - several hundred and perhaps more than 2000 slides, for anything approaching what I'd drop on one of these devices...I'd seriously consider it.
But the fact remains that I'm using a monitor whose housing is crumbling, a $14.99 powermac that I got at the goodwill on half price day. I scored a film scanner better than the one I got trained on at work 7 years ago for a Jackson from a guy on craigslist just over a year ago. Add to that a couple of spare zip drives, a handful of disks I've been using since college, and a 512mb usb stick.
Flickr and facebook to share with the family, amuse my friends. The offline photo-organizing app Picasa pwns iphoto; but I narrowly prefer Flickr's website over G's picasa-web.
All it took was reformatting the laptop, thanking Goddess that I have a firewire dvd drive that it'll boot from, and putting 10.4 on it like all the tuts and howtos said would work. (Tip of the hat to lowendmac!)
Now the grind comes down to the 90 minute chunk of time it takes to scan up a full hard-drive of tiffs that are 1.x inch wide and 2700 dpi. Then editing them, backing them up, etc. Then 20+ minutes of hustling files from powermac to ibook to usb stick. Comes down to 10 minutes per scan, roughly.
Normally I'd watch Rachel Maddow or Amy Goodman process the day's affairs. Even Jon Stewart is always amusing. But the carnage in Haiti swells to take up all the news, sucks all the air out of the room. My heart goes out to those who suffer as it always should.
I'm just left swatted away like an overly intelligent fly, an unwitting sheep, when all the pathos of the zombie media converges. And the eye of that great storm causes a reporter, some dimwitted human-shaped robot that runs on money, interviews someone still being rescued from the rubble. Still being pinned under concrete, still writhing in pain.
Lest anyone ask what's wrong with this world...it's always waiting right there on the news. For some idiot reporter to do something just like this, and cause everyone with two brain cells to rub together to collectively facepalm for all of humanity and the dim prospects of her future.
As I'll do from time to time with longer political, scientific, and research articles, I copy/pasted the text to a doc in my word processor. Then I had the computer voice read it to me.
I've already set the voice to read at the speed I prefer to keep up with. I think I could twiddle the Services menu to read it directly from the browser, but haven't bothered search-or-researching that just yet.
I re-absorbed the content of my latest blog entries here and elsewhere in the span of about 8 minutes. 1700 words here, 800 there...etc and I'm refreshed and ready to reflect on the last few days.
The process for scanning old slides has been repaired and functions onward.
I am on a mission to preserve the historical visual record of the family whut I come. Attempting to get their help identifying all these faces and places in these images. Before any more of the elders who'd remember these details pass through the veil where it's far harder to hear their answers.
I envision, goofily like a teenager drunk in the world of too much futuristic tech, mapping my Grandparents house with the images I'm finding of it, making it into a quake map or a qtvr file.
Normally I placate myself with strong coffee and some mental filler like teevee or cartoons while I scan images. It usually involves the monkey-like persistence to a pattern of:
insert slide
press preview
wait
crop to image
press scan
wait
press save
type filename
hit enter
wait
close file
and repeat till hard drive is full.
I usually keep myself aware of the tech available for these projects. I'm just not aware of anything in even remotely the same ballpark of monetary investment that can do the same thing.
I believe there are bulk slide scanners out there in excess of five hundred bucks, and steadily upward from there.
If I found a deal for the target photo lab or someone else to do the whole mess - several hundred and perhaps more than 2000 slides, for anything approaching what I'd drop on one of these devices...I'd seriously consider it.
But the fact remains that I'm using a monitor whose housing is crumbling, a $14.99 powermac that I got at the goodwill on half price day. I scored a film scanner better than the one I got trained on at work 7 years ago for a Jackson from a guy on craigslist just over a year ago. Add to that a couple of spare zip drives, a handful of disks I've been using since college, and a 512mb usb stick.
Flickr and facebook to share with the family, amuse my friends. The offline photo-organizing app Picasa pwns iphoto; but I narrowly prefer Flickr's website over G's picasa-web.
All it took was reformatting the laptop, thanking Goddess that I have a firewire dvd drive that it'll boot from, and putting 10.4 on it like all the tuts and howtos said would work. (Tip of the hat to lowendmac!)
Now the grind comes down to the 90 minute chunk of time it takes to scan up a full hard-drive of tiffs that are 1.x inch wide and 2700 dpi. Then editing them, backing them up, etc. Then 20+ minutes of hustling files from powermac to ibook to usb stick. Comes down to 10 minutes per scan, roughly.
Normally I'd watch Rachel Maddow or Amy Goodman process the day's affairs. Even Jon Stewart is always amusing. But the carnage in Haiti swells to take up all the news, sucks all the air out of the room. My heart goes out to those who suffer as it always should.
I'm just left swatted away like an overly intelligent fly, an unwitting sheep, when all the pathos of the zombie media converges. And the eye of that great storm causes a reporter, some dimwitted human-shaped robot that runs on money, interviews someone still being rescued from the rubble. Still being pinned under concrete, still writhing in pain.
Lest anyone ask what's wrong with this world...it's always waiting right there on the news. For some idiot reporter to do something just like this, and cause everyone with two brain cells to rub together to collectively facepalm for all of humanity and the dim prospects of her future.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
crumbling tech in the time of empty pockets
this post failed to be posted at facebook, 1011pm 6 january 2010
I blogged much whinge-ing about my sorry state of affairs last night. I tried to import the blog, but facebook said 'no.' I could've copy/pasted it, but I've decided to re-write it instead.
Tonight I'm on a different trip, thanks to some reflective passages in books from Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs.
Rather than hating on what doesn't work anymore, I'm appreciating what I got that still functions. I don't intend to go on a horn-tooting solo, but I am thankful to all that is for letting me have any tools that haven't failed.
At the top of the list of what's working as intended: the open source miracle that is XBMC - that I've been using to defeat old NES/SNES games in emulators and watch cartoons, movies, and other stuff on in the meantime...
Any whiner knows it's easiest to describe what hasn't been working -
so here's what I've been burning brainwaves puzzling out during the past 24 hours:
Last night I assembled the - literally - crumbling system of old mac-ness, sourced from goodwill parts and craigslist bargains. The monitor is still held together with tape (clear, because by that point in packing-up-to-move I'd exhausted all supply of duct tape) and hope.
I remember rolling the beige plastic in my arms, turning the tape around and around the shape of it, confused and disbelieving my eyes and ears, but witnessing it’s housing crumble for no reason. I simply taped it up and put it on a bare bookshelf near the rest of the growing stack of piles in our garage - waiting for the moving truck in the chill minnesotan springtime weather.
The monitor sits on top of the cpu housing. Too bad it's from before zip drives were standard on macs. For that brief time in which they were, anyway...
This model has just a floppy slot and a 2x cdrom. The cpu, one of apple's first powerpc chips, hums along at a blazing 100 mhz. I bet I could up the ram, tho.
I know in one of the half dozen boxes of electronic flotsam in the closet, I have a small assortment of mac ram sticks. I pondered seeking them out, since I'm no longer in a clime where they'd be useful for scraping thick ice off car windows, and seeing if I could improve the speed of 2700 dpi slide scans with more dam ram.
No...the treachery didn't lie in the usual suspects this time. I hustled the scanned untitled, numerically sequential tiff files from the paltry little 3/4 gb hard drive to zip disks via scsi.
Then from the clear blue usb zip to my main desktop mac. But oh...oops. Yeah, every website and reference you can check will tell you usb zip drives are supposed to be supported without drivers in mac os x.
What they don't tell you is that 100mb zip disks and drives are dinosaurs no one even tries to sell anymore. They float through thrift stores at pennies on the dollar. And plugging in your usb 100mb zip drive will get you nothing.
Maybe if you reboot with it connected to the usb port, and turned ON...it might auto-detect it like it claims it already does/will. But I didn't have time for that.
With the mini out as a place to shuttle my untitled 20-30 mb tiff files to...I fetched out my old ibook, dusted her off, and got to work.
See I also would've hustled this - still admittedly rather sweet looking "toilet-seat" aka "hello kitty purse" ibook. But the airport card - the old pre-extreme airport card that became rare when apple stopped making it...it causes the keyboard to bow upwards.
So you can have either a wireless laptop, or a keyboard that functions. Not both. So the value of it plummets for the average noob. Add to this that before I even had a wireless card for it, back in the day when I just attached a blue ethernet cable I kept across the back of my desk...it had already started to lose function in its cd drive.
I found myself able to get the pics on to the ibook's 9gb hard drive. It's just that every attempt since then has resulted in varying levels of frustration. And I've tried many different things only a geek might appreciate.
First I tried my 1gb poker chip usb stick. Every try it told me the disk was full. The ibook's sure isn't, and the usb stick isn't either. I ejected it, reinserted it...tried again. It'd start the 2nd time, but get 2 mb into the transfer and fail...beachballing to eternity.
I'd let it sit for a few minutes, confirming we were borked, and then restart, withdrawing the usb stick after the chime/bong sound.
After the first usb stick, I tried 2 others. Same effects completely.
This caused me to try running disk utility and repair permissions. I did so, it appeared to find some nominal permissions errors on internet plug-ins used for streaming video. I'd never be surprised to find that adobe nee macromedia flash is a virus. I've often said it is one.
After the repair permissions came up clean and green, I rebooted and tried again. No usb. Same thing.
I tried connecting my 40gb ipod. No. It refused to mount it, despite it being activated for 'disk use', without starting itunes. Then of course, since it's an old ass laptop with 10.3 on it, itunes went beachbally and got borked.
So I had to wait a bit, confirm my suspicions of borkitude, and reboot again.
Nothing's let me mount the disk portion of my ipod on the clamshell ibook.
I tried to connect my firewire dvd burner. It saw it, recognized the model, read a disc and told me the dye identifier code and speed designation. As soon as I tried to burn, it failed and went beachball spinny again.
I wouldn't be so bummed if I hadn't been practicing too aggressively with my file-move protocol. I've already deleted the original files from the itty bitty power mac 7500 hard drive. They exist, of course, and could be 'un-deleted'. But they're all moved over to the ibook.
Short of uploading them to the internet, you know, if the files will even do *that*, I am perplexed. I wonder if the I/O controller is damaged. If I could wrangle out the hard drive, put it in a new firewire enclosure, and mount it...it might be okay.
I'm left with the three options:
a) undelete the files from the source drive and move them to something less unstable than my old useless ibook. then break it down into parts and hustle them b-tches on ebay and use the profits to buy a wii, a big NAS drive, or a new monitor.
b) configure closed network to allow ibook net access, and bitterly-sardonically laugh as the files fail to upload from the dead old b-stard of an ibook.
c) hustle files back from ibook on usb zip disks and onto something else that might read them. including but not limited to: the old zombie mac desktop tower that may or may not boot, and the final possibility - the heretofore untread ground of the wife's laptop.
Whenever I get done slamming my head against the wall, I'll let you know if I find anything that works.
I blogged much whinge-ing about my sorry state of affairs last night. I tried to import the blog, but facebook said 'no.' I could've copy/pasted it, but I've decided to re-write it instead.
Tonight I'm on a different trip, thanks to some reflective passages in books from Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs.
Rather than hating on what doesn't work anymore, I'm appreciating what I got that still functions. I don't intend to go on a horn-tooting solo, but I am thankful to all that is for letting me have any tools that haven't failed.
At the top of the list of what's working as intended: the open source miracle that is XBMC - that I've been using to defeat old NES/SNES games in emulators and watch cartoons, movies, and other stuff on in the meantime...
Any whiner knows it's easiest to describe what hasn't been working -
so here's what I've been burning brainwaves puzzling out during the past 24 hours:
Last night I assembled the - literally - crumbling system of old mac-ness, sourced from goodwill parts and craigslist bargains. The monitor is still held together with tape (clear, because by that point in packing-up-to-move I'd exhausted all supply of duct tape) and hope.
I remember rolling the beige plastic in my arms, turning the tape around and around the shape of it, confused and disbelieving my eyes and ears, but witnessing it’s housing crumble for no reason. I simply taped it up and put it on a bare bookshelf near the rest of the growing stack of piles in our garage - waiting for the moving truck in the chill minnesotan springtime weather.
The monitor sits on top of the cpu housing. Too bad it's from before zip drives were standard on macs. For that brief time in which they were, anyway...
This model has just a floppy slot and a 2x cdrom. The cpu, one of apple's first powerpc chips, hums along at a blazing 100 mhz. I bet I could up the ram, tho.
I know in one of the half dozen boxes of electronic flotsam in the closet, I have a small assortment of mac ram sticks. I pondered seeking them out, since I'm no longer in a clime where they'd be useful for scraping thick ice off car windows, and seeing if I could improve the speed of 2700 dpi slide scans with more dam ram.
No...the treachery didn't lie in the usual suspects this time. I hustled the scanned untitled, numerically sequential tiff files from the paltry little 3/4 gb hard drive to zip disks via scsi.
Then from the clear blue usb zip to my main desktop mac. But oh...oops. Yeah, every website and reference you can check will tell you usb zip drives are supposed to be supported without drivers in mac os x.
What they don't tell you is that 100mb zip disks and drives are dinosaurs no one even tries to sell anymore. They float through thrift stores at pennies on the dollar. And plugging in your usb 100mb zip drive will get you nothing.
Maybe if you reboot with it connected to the usb port, and turned ON...it might auto-detect it like it claims it already does/will. But I didn't have time for that.
With the mini out as a place to shuttle my untitled 20-30 mb tiff files to...I fetched out my old ibook, dusted her off, and got to work.
See I also would've hustled this - still admittedly rather sweet looking "toilet-seat" aka "hello kitty purse" ibook. But the airport card - the old pre-extreme airport card that became rare when apple stopped making it...it causes the keyboard to bow upwards.
So you can have either a wireless laptop, or a keyboard that functions. Not both. So the value of it plummets for the average noob. Add to this that before I even had a wireless card for it, back in the day when I just attached a blue ethernet cable I kept across the back of my desk...it had already started to lose function in its cd drive.
I found myself able to get the pics on to the ibook's 9gb hard drive. It's just that every attempt since then has resulted in varying levels of frustration. And I've tried many different things only a geek might appreciate.
First I tried my 1gb poker chip usb stick. Every try it told me the disk was full. The ibook's sure isn't, and the usb stick isn't either. I ejected it, reinserted it...tried again. It'd start the 2nd time, but get 2 mb into the transfer and fail...beachballing to eternity.
I'd let it sit for a few minutes, confirming we were borked, and then restart, withdrawing the usb stick after the chime/bong sound.
After the first usb stick, I tried 2 others. Same effects completely.
This caused me to try running disk utility and repair permissions. I did so, it appeared to find some nominal permissions errors on internet plug-ins used for streaming video. I'd never be surprised to find that adobe nee macromedia flash is a virus. I've often said it is one.
After the repair permissions came up clean and green, I rebooted and tried again. No usb. Same thing.
I tried connecting my 40gb ipod. No. It refused to mount it, despite it being activated for 'disk use', without starting itunes. Then of course, since it's an old ass laptop with 10.3 on it, itunes went beachbally and got borked.
So I had to wait a bit, confirm my suspicions of borkitude, and reboot again.
Nothing's let me mount the disk portion of my ipod on the clamshell ibook.
I tried to connect my firewire dvd burner. It saw it, recognized the model, read a disc and told me the dye identifier code and speed designation. As soon as I tried to burn, it failed and went beachball spinny again.
I wouldn't be so bummed if I hadn't been practicing too aggressively with my file-move protocol. I've already deleted the original files from the itty bitty power mac 7500 hard drive. They exist, of course, and could be 'un-deleted'. But they're all moved over to the ibook.
Short of uploading them to the internet, you know, if the files will even do *that*, I am perplexed. I wonder if the I/O controller is damaged. If I could wrangle out the hard drive, put it in a new firewire enclosure, and mount it...it might be okay.
I'm left with the three options:
a) undelete the files from the source drive and move them to something less unstable than my old useless ibook. then break it down into parts and hustle them b-tches on ebay and use the profits to buy a wii, a big NAS drive, or a new monitor.
b) configure closed network to allow ibook net access, and bitterly-sardonically laugh as the files fail to upload from the dead old b-stard of an ibook.
c) hustle files back from ibook on usb zip disks and onto something else that might read them. including but not limited to: the old zombie mac desktop tower that may or may not boot, and the final possibility - the heretofore untread ground of the wife's laptop.
Whenever I get done slamming my head against the wall, I'll let you know if I find anything that works.
punished, tarnished, bitter & mean
I began this evening with a surge of productivity. Perhaps even a little excitement.
I reassembled the crumbling ancient system that works with my ancient slide scanner.
I scanned till I filled up the quaint little 750mb HD in there. I then rebooted with the zip drive on the scsi connector, and filled up my zip disks with the scanned pics.
Connecting the usb zip drive I have to my mac mini did nothing. So I grabbed a really old ibook and dumped the pics on there.
Of course this seemed to be the tipping point. Laid out like a trap, the ibook let me connect the usb zip and dump a whole bunch of tiffs on it.
Trying to get them back off it, via any other means but the zips that put them there, remains the challenge these several hours later.
I appreciated the warm soulful voice of Paul Mooney as I sat here before the fire and scanned pics of my grandparents vacationing in my new home state.
Now I sit here in the dark, shaking my angry monkey fist at the inane pathetic ridiculousness of technology.
Every time I try to copy the files off the ibook, it gets 2 mb into a copy and then blammo - beachball of spinning rainbow doom. Nothing recovers from that.
I can't copy off to a usb stick, I can't copy off to the firewire ipods, I can't hook up the firewire burner and burn a damn CDR...
...and all this despite having run disk utility twice and getting a clean green bill of health.
Now I write these words of ire as my crappy old second-hand monitor keeps winking and wiggling at the edges...blinking and shooting occasional paranoia-inducing lines of static.
I'd post this to FML but I didn't even come here to wallow or share...just bitch.
I could've been posting corrected pics of slides my family hasn't seen in 7-10 years.
Instead I'm wishing I could sell a kidney or a testicle so I could buy a decent monitor
and a damn slide scanner that can do more than 3 every 10 minutes,
which uses a connectivity standard designed since 1986.
I'm gonna go smoke a cigarette and try to keep from smashing my head in the door.
I reassembled the crumbling ancient system that works with my ancient slide scanner.
I scanned till I filled up the quaint little 750mb HD in there. I then rebooted with the zip drive on the scsi connector, and filled up my zip disks with the scanned pics.
Connecting the usb zip drive I have to my mac mini did nothing. So I grabbed a really old ibook and dumped the pics on there.
Of course this seemed to be the tipping point. Laid out like a trap, the ibook let me connect the usb zip and dump a whole bunch of tiffs on it.
Trying to get them back off it, via any other means but the zips that put them there, remains the challenge these several hours later.
I appreciated the warm soulful voice of Paul Mooney as I sat here before the fire and scanned pics of my grandparents vacationing in my new home state.
Now I sit here in the dark, shaking my angry monkey fist at the inane pathetic ridiculousness of technology.
Every time I try to copy the files off the ibook, it gets 2 mb into a copy and then blammo - beachball of spinning rainbow doom. Nothing recovers from that.
I can't copy off to a usb stick, I can't copy off to the firewire ipods, I can't hook up the firewire burner and burn a damn CDR...
...and all this despite having run disk utility twice and getting a clean green bill of health.
Now I write these words of ire as my crappy old second-hand monitor keeps winking and wiggling at the edges...blinking and shooting occasional paranoia-inducing lines of static.
I'd post this to FML but I didn't even come here to wallow or share...just bitch.
I could've been posting corrected pics of slides my family hasn't seen in 7-10 years.
Instead I'm wishing I could sell a kidney or a testicle so I could buy a decent monitor
and a damn slide scanner that can do more than 3 every 10 minutes,
which uses a connectivity standard designed since 1986.
I'm gonna go smoke a cigarette and try to keep from smashing my head in the door.
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