Why I won't be buying PC computer games

Big City Games - Official Site - FIM Speedway Grand Prix

Minimum System Requirements

Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP
Pentium III 500 MHz or equivalent
128 MB RAM
500 MB Hard Disk Space
DirectX compatible Graphics Card with 16 MB RAM
DirectX Compatible Sound Card
DirectX 8.1 or Higher
4x CD-ROM
56k Modem for Internet play

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The 7 yo and I are racing around the hardware store. He catches site of a pile of cheapo games, and at $5 a shot I weaken and grab this one.

Lesson #1: The cost of purchase is not related to the cost of ownership.

Go to blackboard and write 1000 times.

Without looking I assumed this was some discarded game from the 1990s. Something that old has a ghost of chance of running on the kids Win98 game machine or my the family Win2K box. (I don't let those stability destroying suckers onto my personal XP work machine.) Wrong. It's vintage 2003. Those "minimum requirements" are laughable.

I sort of got it running -- if one had extreme patience. A 20 minute install copied 350MB or so of data to my drive. The first time I tried it on the Win98 machine it promptly exceptioned with a "chrome ....dll error". I located a 1999 update to the old video card and it installed. Didn't show parts of the interface dialog boxes though -- probably some missing video functionality.

The next install was on a vintage 2000-2001 machine running Win2K. In theory it well exceeded the minimum specs -- after I updated DirectX from 5 to 9c. In practice the video didn't show (I suspect it needed a more recent version of Windows Media Player -- although that wasn't in the minimum requirement list). The game ran like molasses -- I suspect it really needs a fairly high end modern 3D graphics card (I'd set the display options to pretty minimal).

Finally I uninstalled and gave up.

Beyond RELEARNING lesson #1 for the THOUSANDTH time, this experience inspired a new conviction. NO MORE PC GAMES. I'm not willing to invest in the PC hardware to run them -- in particular I'm not willing to upgrade my hardware every 1-2 years.

I'll be educational software that's cross-platform (Mac/PC) IFF I know I can trust the recommended hardware specs. Otherwise I'll get a dedicated game box and keep the game stuff away from the PCs.

iView MediaPro 2.6 - converts iPhoto libraries?

iView MediaPro Weblog » New Release: iView MediaPro 2.6 (Windows, Mac)

New 'Getting Started' dialog includes option to convert iPhoto libraries as well as links to online learning resources.

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Here's what the manual says:

Mac: In the Getting Started dialog, check Import iPhoto Library. MediaPro will automatically find the iPhoto library for the active operating system user, launch iPhoto in the background and import all original photos into a new catalog. This feature only works with versions 2 and 4 of iPhoto.

The new catalog contains references to your photo files that are still inside the iPhoto library folders. If you wish to move these files out of the iPhoto library, you can select all the images in the catalog and select Transfer to Folder in the Action menu. Choose Move files, reset paths, delete orginals. This will move your original images to a folder of your choice, sets the paths to the new location and delete the images from your iPhoto library.

To free up additional hard drive space, you could delete all the proxy images (thumbnails) created by iPhoto. To do this, simply trash the iPhoto Library folder from the Pictures folder. Or you could leave them where they are and have media in both iPhoto and iView MediaPro.

The new MediaPro catalog will also containsyour iPhoto albums as MediaPro Catalog Sets (in the Organize Panel). Your catalog also contains any metadata (such as EXIF digital camera data, comments or keywords) that were assigned to your images in iPhoto. The chart above details how iPhoto annotations map to iView MediaPro annotation fields.

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Sounds very interesting. It leaves iPhoto pictures in place to start with, so it's easy to experiment with. This is a big deal, until now iPhoto has been a one way street. Since iView MediaPro runs on Windows too, it's potentially a way to move iPhoto content to Windows.

Update: I imported a 900 image iPhoto Library. It took an hour or so, but it did a nice job. I think one loses image sequence from albums. Also many images which I'd rotated now were malrotated. I think this may be related to a bug with Image Capture -- it duplicates the EXIF orientation tag and creates conflicting values there.

This is indeed very interesting. I may allow me to have a single view into ALL of my iPhoto Libraries for example.

OS X 10.1 and Firewire Drive Mount/Sleep Issues? Results with my VST and Oxford 911 Drives:

OS X 10.1 and Firewire Drive Mount/Sleep Issues? Results with my VST and Oxford 911 Drives:

I have seen zero problems mounting my portable VST 12GB drive (firmware v56) and my AC powered Oxford911 bridge based case kit drive with onboard IDE formatted IBM 75GXP 60GB drive (the one used in my review and build guide posted here on the Firewire articles page.) used with my G4/500 DP system running 10.1. No problems with them after waking from sleep either. (I repeated these tests over half a dozen times.) The drives were still mounted and usable.

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So 3 years ago on a very early version of OS X firewire worked better?

Cooking For Engineers

Cooking For Engineers

Recipes for geeks.

SPOD/beachball shutdowns on OS X

macosxhints - How to cleanly shut down when things go wrong

1. reboot
2. Kill coredservicesd
3. shutdown then reboot

Canon releases iP6000D and iP8500 PIXMA printers in the US

Canon USA Consumer Products - Printers

Figures. I gave up 2 days ago and ordered the IP4000. Now the iP6000D, iP5000, iP4000R and iP8500 are out. The iP6000D replaces the i960. It's a "six" (five really) color system. The ip8500 it's an "eight" (seven really) color system.

The product naming and sequencing is very confusing.

I think the iP6000D may be a "pure" photo printer, whereas the iP4000, iP4000R and iP5000 clearly print both photos and documents. The iP4000R has integrated 802.11G support, the iP5000 is faster than the rest. The best photos in this $140-$200 group come from the iP6000D. For our family purposes the iP4000 may suffice.

The iP8500 is in a different category. It exceeds the photo printing of the iP6000D while still doing document printing; and it's faster than the iP5000 for similar resolutions. It's also almost twice as much.

Maybe I won't return the iP4000 after all. It may be about right -- I can replace it with next October's models ...

Gmail runs on Apple xServe boxes?

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

Gmail, itself, runs on Apple xServe 1u boxes.

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Cute of Cringely to just toss that one out. Apple hasn't said anything about this. I think most folks assumed GMail ran on Intel/Linux boxes.