Every year or two, someone rediscovers that you can play the full original SimCity Classic over on simcity.com. Today, a writer at 1UP discovered this.
SimCity Classic Live was launched back in 1998, and supported Internet Explorer 3, IE4, and Netscape Navigator 4 (!). It runs as an ActiveX control and a Netscape Plugin. However, it requires a little Java applet for site security, so if you can't get it to run, make sure you have Java enabled.
I'm holding off on buying a Blu-Ray ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
or HD-DVD player, so I've decided to upgrade my current 480p component DVD player to an upscaling player. My Samsung DLP [samsung1080i, samsunghlr4667wservicemenu, samsunghlr4667w, samsungpronto, samsunghlr4667wsettings, exchangesamsung] looks superb with a 1080i HD signal, so I bought 3 upscaling players to compare their picture quality, and compare them to my current player as well as the DVD playback on the Xbox360. I set up all of the players side by side, and compared their performance using the following DVDs:
The three players I bought were the Oppo 970, the Oppo 971, and the Sony NS75H.
| DVD Player | Connection | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Panasonic XP-50 | Component | $299 (circa 2002, my current player) |
| Oppo DV-970HD |
HDMI | $149 |
| Oppo DV-971H |
DVI to HDMI adapter | $199 |
| Sony NS75H |
HDMI | $129 (HDMI cable not included) |
| Xbox360 |
Component | $399 |
All players had special features such as sharpness, noise reduction, etc, disabled.
The XP-50 is a benchmark DVD player, known for its excellent 480p output, as well as premium CD and DVD-Audio output (with an optional disabling of the video circuity). I've moved this to another room to serve as a dedicated audio player, but I still haven't found another player that could do such a great job of covering up compression flaws on most DVDs. The main reason I want to upgrade this player is to get better dark colors. Dark colors from this player tend to cause the Samsung DLP to dither, which I find distracting at my viewing distance of 6.5 feet.
The Oppo 970 was just released by Oppo, and it's a terrific DVD player. It is the first player I've used that gives a real sense of High Definition. No other player came close to the sharpness of the picture on the 970. This player looks outstanding at 1080i, with deep blacks and hardly any noticeable DLP dither. This player makes me feel like I've purchased a whole new collection of DVDs, as all of my existing disks look amazing. The only downside to this player is that it can reveal some subtle problems on DVDs that you may not have seen on an older player. On ATOC, for example, you can see some compression blocks on the floor of Palpatine's office in chapter 4, if you look closely.
The Oppo 971 is supposed to be Oppo's flagship player, and it is very nice. But compared to the 970, it could use an update. At 1080i, there was a noticeable judder in the picture, so I had to test it at 720p. But even at 720p, although the picture looked quite good, it didn't look that much sharper than the component 480p output of my XP-50, and it still has some dark color dithering. It also added some purple motion artifacts to black scenes, such as the spaceflight of the Naboo ship in chapter 3 of ATOC. Judging by the wildly high review scores for this player, I suspect it was created for, and tested with, CRT-based HD monitors. For my DLP, the 970 is a much better match.
The Sony NS75H is a surprisingly good player, with several picture quality enhancement features. However, most of them over-softened the picture, which is already a tad soft, even at 1080i. The Sony remote seemed really unintuitive, but people with universal remotes like the Logitech Harmony won't care. If I had a Sony monitor, I would likely get this player, as it has nice blacks with little dithering, but not quite the sharpness of the Oppo 970.
For DVD viewing, Microsoft really blew it with the Xbox360. The 480p component output is some of the sharpest I've seen, but with the power of this machine, why no upscaling or HDMI? To make us buy the HD-DVD add-on coming this fall? Even then, I doubt I'll watch movies on this machine, as the fan and drive noise is horrendous.
All in all, I would be happy using any of these players (if the Xbox was in a sealed enclosure). But I'm keeping the Oppo 970 as my primary player, as its upscaling performance can't be beat.
Awesome. Last week, I saw parody of the "my kid is an honor student" bumper sticker. On a car in Hayward, I saw a bumper sticker that read, "My gamer fragged your honor student."
With a house on the northern slope of a hill, I need to pressure wash my siding and decks annually. Of course, I haven't actually done this in five years, so I have plenty of pressure washing to do. Rather than rent a washer for several days, I decided to buy one.
It only took a little research to decide that I should buy a gas-powered model instead of electric, as even the smallest gas models are more powerful than the typical electric washer. http://www.pressurewashersdirect.com/ has a lot of good buying information, but their recommended models are frequently sold out. The cheapest recommended models are in the $250-$300 price range, and use either Honda or Briggs & Stratton engines.
Out of pure luck I stumbled upon a Briggs and Stratton 2050 PSI Clean Shot Pressure Washer on amazon.com for $199, with an instant $25-off coupon. For $175, that is an excellent deal for a gas-powered pressure washer, so I bought it.
At 2050 PSI plus 2.0 GPM water flow, you can send a stream of water so powerful that it will cut a piece of weathered 1×4 redwood clean in two (as I almost did). You need to dial back the sprayer to make sure it won't destroy the wood. Sturdy shoes, long pants, earplugs, eye goggles, and a dust mask are mandatory when using this thing.
So far, I've used the Briggs washer to blast away several years of gray mildew and weathering from a 265 sq/ft deck. Not including the time to remove everything from the deck and spray down some Superdeck no-bleach cleaning solution, the whole pressure washing process took me about two and a half hours plus about a half gallon of gas. Not bad at all, and now the deck has a natural wood finish that is (almost) ready for some new stain.
In the future, I'll consider buying a more powerful washer so I can clean the decks with a wider spray setting, but for now, this is a perfect budget pressure washer.
Version 9 of the best web browser on earth, Opera, is available for download. Download it. Use it. You'll never use another browser again.
After using and developing for Internet Explorer and Netscape for years, as well as using Mozilla, FireFox, Konqueror, dillo, and the IE 7 Beta, there is simply no comparison to the speed, stability, compatibility, security, and polish in Opera. Opera is top quality software for all platforms.
Why haven't you downloaded Opera yet?
For some reason, it never occurred to me that the perfect way to store a set of scanned documents is in a PDF file. As a card-carrying nerd, bitmaps (TIFFs) of scanned pages always worked well enough. But when my non-technical attorney stuffed a bunch of papers in a machine scanner and emailed me a nicely completed PDF file, I realized what a great solution this is. No file format issues, easy to email, easy to print, and easy to bundle multiple pages. And best of all, easy to do in Linux.
If you have a scanner properly configured in Linux, just use the scanimage app to grab pages from the scanner in the native .pnm file format.
scanimage --resolution 150 --mode grayscale > page1.pnm
Then, just use the ImageMajick tools to convert the scanned pages to a PDF file.
convert *.pnm scannedstuff.pdf
It couldn't be easier. For more variants of this tip, along with some sample scanning scripts, check out this blog entry: http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archives/2006/01/26/scanning-to-pdf-in-linux/
If you never got a chance to read the official 9/11 Commission Report, this week you'll have a chance to read it from a whole new viewpoint. Illustrators Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon have published a graphical adaptation of the 9/11 Report . Slate is publishing a chapter a day on their web site, and from what I've read so far, the results are at once gripping, heartbreaking, and impressive.
Graphic novels are rapidly gaining in popularity in the US. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation , with the support from the original 9/11 commission members, will likely turn a lot of heads and bring more awareness to the power and effectiveness of this medium.
I've been using Ameritrade as my online broker since 1997 (ah, the good old dot-com days). It has always been rock solid and reliable for me, as well as very affordable. This year, Ameritrade merged with TD Waterhouse, and after reading horror stories from people who suffered through the HarrisDirect / E*Trade merger, I was nervous that the classic, reliable Ameritrade would be destroyed or swallowed by an inferior broker system.
In fact, the new TD Ameritrade is as good as it was before, and in some cases even better. The web site is nearly unchanged, and is as sleek and fast as ever. But now trade data is available for download to Quicken on the day of the trade, rather than the next business day. New research tools are gradually coming online (I love the S&P Star Ratings list), and best of all, the trading fee for stocks has dropped by a couple of bucks.
Bravo to TD Ameritrade for the smooth transition. I hate to think of what would have happened if Ameritrade merged with E*Trade instead (as was considered last year).
Say, isn't it interesting that a company named "TD Ameritrade" is actually half-Canadian?
For a brief few weeks, I was using uShare to serve music files from my Linux box to my OmniFi DMS-1 [omnifiaudia4, omnifigroup] media player via UPnP [libupnp, ushareupnp]. When I got my Xbox360 [xbox360firstplay, xbox360dvdplayer, xbox360ad], I noticed that the latest version of uShare added support for the 360, so I upgraded. The new version of uShare required libupnp 1.3, so I had go through the hassle of building both it and uShare. And of course, after everything finally compiled and installed, nothing worked. The Xbox360 did not see the uShare server, and the OmniFi could no longer see it either. I've tried time and again to get it to work, with no positive results. So I gave up and tried GMediaServer.
GMediaServer is the official GNU UPnP media server. It is apparently included in some distros now, and available via apt for Debian. Naturally, this won't work for my old Linux box, so I had to build it myself. There were numerous errors, but I was able to fix them all. Here's what I had to do:
#include <upnp.h> and #include <upnptools.h> to read #include <upnp/upnp.h> and #include <upnp/upnptools.h>src/webserver.c so that len = min… reads len = MIN… (capitalize MIN)#include <upnp/ithread.h> to src/metadata.c (I slipped it in after line 40)src/gmediaserver.h (after the includes)
#ifndef IF_NAMESIZE
# ifdef IFNAMSIZ
# define IF_NAMESIZE IFNAMSIZ
# else
# define IF_NAMESIZE 16
# endif
#endif
After making all of the changes and successfully building the app, it works! The OmniFi sees it and plays music fine. Alas, the 360 doesn't see it, but it looks like there is some active code work happening on the 360 front. I'm in no hurry with the 360 anyway, as that thing is so noisy I would never leave it on when I'm listening to music.
Wow, I thought blocked email was the only problem I had with the McAfee VirusScan 11, but there are a few other kinks they need to work out. I decided to revert to VirusScan 10 for a few reasons:
Thanks to some clever folks on the McAfee support forums, I found that I could download and reinstall VirusScan 10 by using the UK McAfee site at http://uk.mcafee.com. Why the UK site is easier to use than the US site is beyond me.
VirusScan 10 is a very well done security app, and I'm grateful that Comcast offers this software for free. I can only hope that McAfee figures that out, and brings VirusScan 11 back to a manageable state.
I hate Windows Explorer. Back on Windows 3.1, Microsoft included a serviceable GUI clone of the legendary DOS file manager, Norton Commander. But with the advent of Windows 95, the simple, customizable, two-column File Manager was ditched in favor of Mac-style folder windows. This sucks for a myriad of reasons, and maybe one day I'll write a 5000 word essay on the subject. Suffice to say, I've been eager to find a better file manager.
And I found it.
As I'm not the only computer operator seeking a file manager that actually helps me manage files, there are many Explorer substitutes available. Most of them are descendants of the Norton Commander (NC) and open-source clone Midnight Commander (MC) design, which I love, and I tried a ton of them. The best of the lot, by a long shot, is Servant Salamander.
Servant Salamander is a fast Win32-native app that is instantly usable and easy to configure. It uses a mere 8MB of RAM, and has none of the flashy UI and embedded web browser garbage that pollutes so many modern Windows apps. All of the key bindings you would expect from NC and MC are in place, plus a bunch that should have been there to begin with. Forget the mouse, as you can run the entire app from the keyboard. Need to view a file? Press F3. Need to copy it? Press F5. View another drive? Alt-F1. Etc. And once you launch the Servant, you'll never need to open Explorer again.
If you want to try (and buy!) Servant Salamander, download the latest version 2.5 release with the file-viewer add-on. And welcome yourself back to the days of happy computing.
As a Comcast subscriber, I can use McAfee virus scanning and security products for free. This is a great idea from Comcast, and I appreciate having the usually reliable McAfee software. It sure beats the clunky and intrusive Norton security software.
This week, the McAfee tray app began pestering me about a major upgrade. Yesterday, I installed the free upgrade (VirusScan 11), and everything went smoothly.
Except that I stopped receiving email.
I use Outlook to access my email via POP3, rather than IMAP, because Outlook's IMAP support stinks. I emailed my email host provider to see if they were having issues, and they mentioned that they had several calls from people who had just upgraded McAfee. It appears that the upgraded McAfee VirusScan 11 decided to block all of our incoming POP3 email.
Fortunately, my mail provider handles virus scanning already, so I opened the new McAfee security manager app and disabled the email virus scanning option. And whaddya know, I started receiving email again.
I hate to complain about free software, but… how annoying.
