December 2005 Archives

Over Christmas I finally got a chance to play an Xbox 360 that was properly configured with giant HDTV, wireless controllers, good sound, and a few semi-tipsy friends to scream twitch-reflex color commentary. The best game by far was Geometry Wars. It's a simulated vector-graphics game with some modern GPU effects that costs only $4 over Xbox Live, and as Eric said, it looks like someone coded it up over the long Thanksgiving weekend. You could port this game to a graphing calculator and it would be just as playable. The spirit of Eugene Jarvis lives! (Sorry, Eugene, I know you're still alive.)

Here are some products/utilities/hacks I'd like to see this year. I've searched for them on Google, but I either didn't find anything or decided that what I found was too complicated.

• A daemon Tivo. It runs in the background on a PC with a PCI TV tuner card. All it does it record programs listed in an XML file and encodes them as MPEG-4s in AVI containers. No weird containers (MythTV NUV), no attempt at a frontend, no nothing. Just new stuff to watch appearing every day in a directory on my fileserver, and all I have to do is open them in Media Player Classic.
• An ISO generator that takes one or more AVIs or DVD ISOs and spits out a bootable Knoppix ISO that plays the videos when you stick the DVD in any PC. Think of it as a virtual DVD player that you can throw away when you're done.
• A utility that lets you plug a PCI card (I think it's called an "FXO" card) into your home server, then your phone line into your the card, and it emails you MP3s of the messages people leave for you. Asterisk was about 800 times too complicated for this simple answering-machine replacement.
• A video Squeezebox. Please don't make me get an MCE box.

Bruce Schneier got it right. If you're OK with George Bush spying on Americans because the war on terror gives him the power to ignore the law and the U.S. Constitution, then you had better be especially OK with President Michael Moore spying on you, too. (President Michael Moore?!?! Sure, that sounds silly. But in 1950, would you have bet on Ronald Reagan for President? In 1985, would you have bet on Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California? How about Cher's husband in 1977 as a U.S. Congressman?)

The war on terror ain't ending. At least, I'm not planning on attending the victory party when they throw one, not unless security is REALLY tight. So when Michael Moore is President, the war on terror will still be in effect, and President Moore will cite President Bush as precedent for his continuing power to ignore the law, the Constitution, the Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court, as long as he thinks he's making our country safer from our government's enemies.

This isn't about politics. It's not about whether you support President Bush. It's about whether you believe the law and the U.S. Constitution should apply to every American, including the American government.

Step 1. Create a new file called stdafx.cpp.
Step 2. In that file, add one line: #include <stdafx.h>
Step 3. Debug for many, many hours.
Step 4. Change stdafx.cpp to this: #include "stdafx.h". Note that the compiler now stops assuming you meant the stdafx.h buried deep inside the MFC source.
Step 5. Go home and have a drink.

If you want to cancel your XM Radio subscription, don't bother going to their website. You can't cancel from the site; they make you wait on the phone and ask permission from a real person.

And don't try calling the number that the site lists for cancellation requests. After 10 minutes on hold, they'll tell you the department you called can't process cancellations.

No, instead, just call (800) 998-7900 to cancel XM Radio. That's the unpublished number that you get only after jumping through all the hoops. You still have to wait on hold for 10 more minutes, of course, and then listen to a script monkey try to talk you out of it.

Some reasons for canceling:

• Their website doesn't support Mozilla Firefox -- inexcusable for a product that's still in the early-adopter stage.
• (Slightly circular reasoning) As I described above, XM follows the cell-phone carrier mentality of making it as painful as possible for their customers to perform costly actions, such as canceling their service. Don't support companies that have attitudes like this!
• The real reason I canceled: In December they replaced my favorite station, Luna, with Nashville Christmas. Good grief.

Why is it that adding a five-dollar Bluetooth chip to a $40 keyboard boosts the price to $75?

Sure, there are software costs, beyond just the silicon, to adding Bluetooth support to a device. But I still think this is the wireless version of "cable economics." Go to your local big-box retailer and try to find any cable at all selling for less than $20. It doesn't matter if the cable cost ten cents to manufacture; the fact is that you're using it to connect two devices that each cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, so chances are you can afford to pay the premium.