Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

One of the largest flaws with console gaming is the difficulty of getting a good experience in a FPS type game. One of my favorite PC games is System Shock II. SSII is an RPG with an FPS interface. Having an interface that can move the view port on the monitor as well as you can move your head is imperitive when trying to locate the source of the creepy sound that means impending doom. (Those monkeys still freak me out.)

This just isn’t something you can get with a console. One of the best FPS for consoles was Golden Eye for the N64. What made this game work for the console was that most of the in game missions allowed you to shoot the baddies from distances and locations where they couldn’t see you. The only time quick manuevers were required was when you were really bad at the game. Granted, this wasn’t as true in multi-player, but auto-aim took care of the greater problem.

I picked up Metroid Prime Hunters expecting a similar auto-aim type interface hack. The original metroid prime for the Game Cube basically cycled you through the available targets. This being the first real DS game that I’ve played, I was amazed with the graphics from the start. I hadn’t realized how far hand-held consoles had progressed. I was also pretty impressed with the 3D feel. Granted, this shouldn’t have been so surprising, but I haven’t really been paying attention to the handheld market.

But despite how much I liked the graphics, I absolutely hated the game. It was horrible and nearly impossible to get around. Aiming was counter intuitive, jumping was a pain. The button controls didn’t make any sense. I was about the count this as $35 down the toilet when I decided to read the instruction manual. In there, it mentioned that you could use the stylus to aim Samus.

At first, I went through some strange contortions to get the device and the stylus in my two hands comfortably. I still haven’t managed to find a position that doesn’t require curling up on couch for extended playablilty. But nonetheless, I persevered. And then, like sun clearing the morning fog, it hit me. In my hand, I had the first sensible control interface for an FPS on a console. I could move around and look at things freely and independently. Plus it was completely intuitive. I just had to move the stylus towards the thing I wanted to shoot at.

Instead of being a waste of $35, Metroid Prime Hunters has been an extremely fun game to play. This isn’t to say the stylus approach is perfect. The double-tap to jump thing flakes out on occasion (normally over a pit of death), but it’s a lot better than having to hit a button escape to look around. I like the fact that Nintendo is trying to push the boundries of what can be done with a gaming console. It’s the first time since the light-gun that a company has tried something new with the genera.

However, all of this is moot unless the games themselves are fun. So far I’m 50% through this one and still enjoying it. That’s the best test of all.

It’s been all over the internet that the Nintendo Wii launch date has been announced for Nov. 19 with a launch price of $250. The launch price includes the sports game heavily showcased at E3.
This wasn’t the slam-dunk, I need to get in line at Best Buy type announcement that I was hoping for. I expected the Wii to be at the traditional $200 price point. Of course, the dollar is relatively weaker, the console is more advanced, the competitors expect you to take out a mortgage, and it comes with a game, so I guess it isn’t too absured a price point.
However, this wasn’t the only strange thing about the announcement. In a somewhat surprising move, Nintendo is releasing first in the North American market. Generally, we across the pond have to wait a while before we get our goodies. Plus, the date itself is weird. Nintendo decided to pick the date two days after the PS3 launch.
After a summer featuring extremely good PR-buzz for Nintendo, I’m having a hard time trying to figure out what Nintendo’s trying to accomplish with the latest release. Are they hoping that parents will arrive at the store hoping to buy a PS3, but then buy 2 Wii’s instead?
Regardless, I’m still going to get one, sooner rather than later. However, I don’t think you’ll find me standing in any lines that Sunday morning.

I’ve been on a bit of a quest to find a decent, PDA-sized internet device. I think I’m on this quest because I used to use the Palm Pilot a lot. Then Wi-Fi became ubiquitous and all the things the Palm is good at (tasks, calendars, contacts, and notes) slowly migrated to online services. Hence, I couldn’t update my Palm without jumping through a lot of hoops and the Palm started to suffer from bit-rot.

Or the quest could be driven by the innate geek desire to spend money on neat, but somewhat useless technology. I’m not really sure what the real reason is.

Regardless of the purpose, the goal remains the same. The early front-runner was the Nokia 770. Nokia has branded the 770 as an “Internet Tablet” which means that it does all the internet things that I want. It comes out of the box with an email client, IM, VOIP, and Opera. Since it runs linux (more specifically the maemo platform, what comes in the box is somewhat irrelevant since you’re just a community website away from getting a ton more apps.

However, the Nokia sufferes from some serious drawbacks. It’s $370, availability has been iffy, and it’s underpowered compared to it’s competitors at the price range. This lead me to consider the Palm TX. This device is cheaper and has a more powerful processor than the Nokia. Like the Nokia, there is a version of Opera available for it as well. But it too has some serious drawbacks. The first is Palm OS 5 is not multithreaded. Which means that you won’t be able to listen to Internet Radio and browse the web at the same time. The next is the darth of decent open source software. Instant messaging clients for the palm appear to be proprietary only. A platform without Gaim is not a platform I’d like to know.

Since this pretty much rounds out all non-windows pocket based devices out there (I want to surf the web, not reboot), my money will stay in the bank. For now.

There are some pretty interesting things on the horizon. Sony has announced the Mylo which has most of the things the Nokia does, plus an actual keyboard.

Archos, the guys that make really expensive MP3 players, have announced an
MP3 playing, video-ripping, Wi-Fi enabled device. It too looks like it will do everything I want, comes with Opera (notice a trend) and has the added bonus of replacing my Creative Nomad Zen. However, since it’s from the guys that make really expensive MP3 players, it might end up costing more than a new laptop.

The most interesting alternative is (surprise, surprise) Opera for the DS. This option could cost as little as $50, will get me the most important thing (the web browser) and will fit in my new favorite portable device. Unfortunately, there is no English version as of now (the expected EU release is Oct, 6) and no apparent plans for a US release. However, since the DS isn’t region coded, it may become a simple manner of paying a little more to get it from an importer.

So while the current terrain is pretty bleak on the front, the future looks very exciting. I look forward to the day when I blog without the PC.

Finally finished the moderate overhaul that I started when things at Vocalocity started to go sour. I got rid of a few of my major pet peeves on this site, such as the dated-looking and poorly transparent-ized graphics. I’m not saying that the new ones are great, but there are a lot fewer artifacts. I also updated the favicon and all smaller images. I also took care of a strange Opera bug with the photo gallery that placed an extra pixel between some elements. I also added a drop shadow to the image on the blog.

However, since I don’t have a windows box, I have no idea what this site looks like in IE. Some things are garunteed to look aweful, such as the transparencies since I’m using PNG. Other things might be plain broken. If you see anything let me know.

Hopefully, with the site tweaks out of the way, I can get cracking on the software again.

A few weeks ago I blogged about the difficulties I faced in upgrading the two Linksys WRT54G’s on my network to the DD-WRT firmware. The goals were pretty simple. The DD-WRT is just a much better interface for that box. However, for some crazy reason that I simply couldn’t figure out, one DD-WRT worked fine, but two didn’t.

My solution at the time was to reflash the original firmware on one of the routers.

However, one of the lines for the instructions for vx works killer stayed in my memory and resurfaced rather randomly a few weeks later. To quote point 2:

Download [vxworks_killer_g_v06.zip] and extract, OR create a custom firmware image with your MAC address embedded in it. See the ‘Changing your MAC address’ section below for more information.

Hrm… Why would I need to create a custom image with new MAC’s? Well maybe because the originals got replaced as part of the upgrade. I’m sure that having identical MAC’s on a network would cause all sorts of crazy problems just like I was experiencing.

I pulled the AP back out of the ceiling, booted up Windows and reflashed the box with the DD-WRT image. Lo and behold, the MAC address for all ports were identical. From then on, it was a simple matter of telneting to the device (old school!) and running some commands.

To figure out what addresses I needed to edit, I had to enter:
nvram show
to find out what values I needed to change.

Once I figured that out, I could set the parameters by using something like the following:
nvram set et0macaddr=00:90:4d:83:00:01

To commit the changes, I had to enter:
nvram commit

After a reboot, the system came up with a new mac address and co-existed happily with the other AP on the network.

The final step was the bump the Tx power and attach the new antennas for a nicely boosted wireless range.

Astute readers will note that I’ve updated the look of the blog a little bit. Most of the changes involve the right side bar. I’ve added a picture from the gallery as well as change the colors around to fit the theme of this site a lot more. One of these days, I’ll break out the bright day-glow colors to give the site more of a Web 2.0 feel. However, that’s probably some time in coming.

Another change is that there are a lot more albums in the photo gallery (both public and private). So if I’ve promised you pictures, look there .

And for the 1 person that might be reading this blog because of the technology, I’ll get back to that with the next post.