I always seem to update my blog in bursts. So, while I suggest that no one get hasty and expect large posts the next couple days, I thought I would mention a little something to keep me from feeling totally neglectful.

I bought a HP 2133 ("Mini-note") to play with, the middle configuration with SuSE, to be exact. So that should be exciting. Won’t be here for another couple weeks, though. :( The plan is to use it as essentially a quick companion for work and such, with enough of a desktop environment to get work done and/or SSH into my various sites of interest. The MacBook is still around, too, for any hypothetical bigger or more involved tasks. Not that the HP 2133 is a toy, but a lot of it is about playing around and being a bit less tied to my desktop.

Looking forward to when it gets here, since it would seem that it will also become a minor task to get everything supported in Gentoo… looks like I get to contribute to another page on the Gentoo wiki.

KDE4 needs to improve. Sooner, please. My KDE3 install is feeling a bit behind, but 4 still has random bugs/issues (I can’t find the option to have the mouse wheel scroll through the desktop, automatic file preview in the open dialogs seems to be gone, Konsole performance blows, KWin exhibits random “that window doesn’t exist despite appearing in the taskbar” or “this window will always be on top, deal with it” bugs, so on and so forth.

I know it’s still in its infancy, but man, I need something new.

I’m installing GNOME. (What have I become?)

Also, I think I may buy an XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT. The improvement over the 7900GT is supposed to be obvious. Maybe I can finally go back to a non-choppy Oblivion.

It’s time for changes, or something.

… and in other news, other stuff rocks.

I bought another hard drive that I’m not quite sure what I’ll use it all for so that I could install Windows XP (so that I could install The Orange Box, which I also bought today). The hardware install was easy breezy, but XP was a nightmare.

The SP2 install disc couldn’t speak AHCI. Okay, fair enough. Switch the disk controller to IDE and get Windows going long enough to install the SATA drivers and switch back. No problem.

Noting, of course, that Windows cannot understand not being the first disk in the computer when it boots, leading to necessary GRUB hacks to keep things from getting confused.

Install otherwise goes well, I spend the time to get all the software and drivers updated, except for one small snafu: the Intel drivers for my disk controller won’t install. After some googling, it turns out that they’ll only install if they see SATA hardware. An annoying catch-22 when you need to use IDE mode to even get the OS installed.

I struggled with that for a bit before finding a helpful post about essentially bootstrapping the driver via a registry hack long enough to let Intel think everything is fine and install the driver proper. And that pretty much saved my install.

So stupid, to hear those claims that Windows is an easier install, and whatnot, when annoying shit like this still happens. I was, literally, running my hard drives in a degraded mode because Windows/Intel can’t — through normal channels — get the necessary drivers installed. And, come to think of it, I wonder if Aaron’s computer is suffering from the same fate, because I don’t remember having to dig into this stuff at all for his install.

It’s days like this that I love open source and easy (if time-consuming) installs.

Yes, I’m back on the net in full (yes, I was gone for a while). My hardware for the desktop came two weeks ago, but I spent most of the first week diagnosing a bad memory module and most of the second week waiting for the replacement to arrive. But here I am now, faster than ever. The critical goodies:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 overclocked to 3.0 GHz
• GeIL 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT (okay, I’ve had this for a while)

And add to that a couple disks and your standard DVD-RW burner and sound card, plug them into massive Logitech speakers and a widescreen monitor, and there’s my new box. Very exciting.

One of the things I want to try to get running, finally, for a change, is either Daggerfall or TIE Fighter. I haven’t looked too much into this renewed effort to get them running, so if anyone out there has experience getting them to work via something in x86_64 Linux, please let me know.

Also, just because I’d noted it elsewhere and was a little interested in the statistics, I calculated my last.fm contribution (results of course skewed by the “who do I tag as this track’s artist?” vs. “who is the world tagging as this track’s artist?” effect):

1. 久石譲 (Joe Hisaishi) — 7,111 of 1,959,578 — 0.36%
2. 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki) — 4,785 of 7,065,223 — 0.06%
3. 菅野よう子 (Yoko Kanno) — 4,064 of 5,104,007 — 0.07%
4. Apocalyptica — 3,189 of 7,102,324 — 0.04%
5. Vienna Teng — 2,469 of 830,580 — 0.29%
6. Yo-Yo Ma — 1,560 of 761,039 — 0.20%
7. 植松伸夫 (Nobuo Uematsu) — 1,309 of 8,496,818 — 0.01%
8. Tool — 1,146 of 23,762,753 — 0.00%
9. 溝口肇 (Hajime Mizoguchi) — 1,103 of 87,274 — 1.26%
10. Queensrÿche — 1,037 of 1,903,280 — 0.54%

… and Hajime Mizoguchi is likely misleadingly high; a lot of his work on the Escaflowne soundtracks is probably improperly tagged as belonging to Yoko Kanno. Just to put things in perspective, Shrubey (who cheats by never stopping his player) has 6.2819% of Yasunori Mitsuda. Other interesting ones:

13. The Minibosses — 901 of 284,471 — 0.31%
16. Rie fu — 621 of 493,063 — 0.12%
19. Dale North — 522 of 61,124 — 0.85%
29. The Ray Hamilton Orchestra — 357 of 449 — 79.5%
232. Gail Parker — 27 of 126 — 21%

For a long while I was consistently in Joe Hisaishi’s top five for the week, but that has fallen by the wayside as of late. Still, 64,284 scrobbles ain’t bad.

… definitely going to get a new case. Installed the new PSU (quieter, reliably starts when I press the power button) and DVD-RW (also quieter, actually reads discs), and the case has annoyed me for the last time.

I’ve been spending the past couple days doing two things: updating the installs on my various boxes, and gaming (well, okay, there was work too).

The big update is that I finally bothered to bring the MythTV network up to speed here, meaning I’m finally pulling from Schedules Direct for the TV listings, meaning MythTV is actually recording shows again. Very exciting, in a “hooray ‘normalcy’” kind of way. At least they dropped the cost from $15/3 months to $15/6 months. Next up on that front is getting Samba running on that box so that the lowly Windows slaves can get/put files. Although I would really like to get more of the network wired…

Gaming-wise, some marathon sessions of Arkham Horror were played on Friday; one was barely a win, another took hours upon hours but resulted in our greatest score yet. Some pictures are in the gallery. Also, my canned adventure campaign started yesterday. Dubbed “Expedition to Undermountainweb Pits” (until Peter comes up with a better name), it starts out as quite the PC devourer. The party spent a fair amount of time running and avoiding danger, but they’re on their way to getting through the first part of Undermountain, and gaining a couple levels in the process. I’m quite pleased by everyone’s intelligent play, for the most part. They’re certainly going to need to keep that up.

Finally, I’ve been bouncing around getting a new desktop for a while; it’s starting to show its age, and unfortunately

• AMD has been sucking lately, with no real return in sight
• the hardware has almost no upgrade path (AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, DDR1)

so I’m really only looking at a replacement of the big hardware bits. But, just because I’m dragging my feet on the hardware a bit, I’ve decided to split the upgrade into phases.

The first, which is already in progress, is to get a better speaker system with more balls (and also something a bit better shielded so that I’m not picking up christian rock, up here on the second floor), a new DVD-RW drive as my current one is at best failing, and a new power supply to replace the one the dog tripped over the cord for at a LAN party, making its ability to power the system on very spotty. To fill those needs, I went with the Logitech Z-5500, a LITEON DVD-RW, and a Thermaltake W0106RU.

Phase two, however, is gigantic; new motherboard, (almost certainly Intel) processor, and DDR2 memory. I don’t think new hard drives are in order, but it may happen anyway; in any event, I’ll need to make room for a Windows XP install for gaming, and reinstall Gentoo (new processor arch and everything). A new case may come too, as my current one is varying levels of frustrating. Phase three is a new video card, pure and simple.

So that’s my technology roadmap. In the pipe dream realm is convincing everyone I talk to on the tubes to switch to an XMPP-compliant IM network. A real Jabber service would be nice (such as *coughcough* my own), but even Google Talk would be better than the hodge podge of featureless, crippled, and closed IM services we use now.

The Atari 2600... the Apple II... the Nintendo Famicom/NES... 6502 4 lyfe holmez.