HOME

October 13, 2009

Geeking Out About Color

I call this: computers — Posted by KP @ 2:29 pm

I’ve been kind of obsessed with color since I started web design.

Picking the colors for the new site was a huge mental undertaking, and I think I’ve got something I’m kinda happy with for now. Let me introduce you to my colors:

#FF4F03 This is the primary color used on the site. Let’s just say I have the hex code memorized. It’s the link color, and the navbar and most orange things are based off of it in some way. That picture of the tech table on the front page is tinted with this color. It’s kind of everywhere.
                           #F02311 This red is used very sparingly, on the line that divides the main content from the sidebar, and as the text shadow and underline for the H3 headings. The most interesting thing about this color is that on colourlovers.com it has been named as “Sex on the Floor”.
#FB8400 This orange carried over from the old site, kind of by accident. I had finished the site but was still unhappy with the colors I chose for the H2 heading. When I was updating the blog colors it looked so much better than what I was about to replace it with that I kept it.
#666666 I like grays a lot. I also like grays that have hex codes that are easy to remember. You will see this is a pattern. This is my default medium gray, it’s also used on the H1 headings.
#333333 This is my favorite gray. It was used a lot on the old site. All the “black” text on the site is actually this color.
#4D4D4D This one is my 2nd-favorite gray. It’s around here and there, mostly for text. It’s most prominent as the H3 heading (with that “Sex on the Floor” color as text shadow).
#F6F6F6 This was a new one for me. It’s only used on the front page for the box that I call “topfeatures.” That box used to be a darker color but when I used the orange mentioned above for the headings it looked muddy, so I needed something that was not quite white but would allow the headings to pop.

As I mentioned, I use ColourLovers.com to find new interesting color combinations and to play with palettes. It’s a cool site.


May 30, 2009

Razer Mamba Review

I call this: computers,gaming,pc — Posted by KP @ 3:50 pm

side1My birthday present to myself was the brand new Razer Mamba wireless mouse.  How new?  Well actually I don’t know, because last I heard it was supposed to come out on May 18, and then on like May 3rd I went to the website to see about preordering it, and there it was, “in stock.”  I feel like Razer sends me a promotional email on pretty much a daily basis about some headphones or keyboard or some crap, and yet they never actually bothered to advertise via email or on the front page of their website that pretty much their biggest product release ever was now available for purchase?  Razer mice aren’t always carried in stores, but I did find it on Amazon, which is where I purchased it, since I have an Amazon credit card and some gift certificates to spend on it.

First of all it should be said that the mouse costs $129.  If you can’t see the value of spending that much on a mouse, you can stop reading now if you like, or continue reading for fun if you want, but I understand there are only a certain percentage of people for whom this product is intended.  Those are probably the same people who have a keyboard worth $129, a joystick worth $129, and a set of rudder pedals worth $129.  At that point, why should the mouse — the primary way to interact with most games — be given any less attention?

The big deal about this mouse is that it’s the first time that Razer has released a wireless mouse.  Being the dedicated gaming hardware company that they are, they didn’t believe any wireless mouse could stand up to the needs of serious gaming, so they simply chose not to make one until they thought they could do it right.  So it was with much fanfare that they announced some months back that they thought they had finally come up with something worth doing.

Despite the enormous potential for it to be a disaster, I decided that my lifestyle which will have kept me away from all the comforts of home gaming (big monitor, joystick, pedals, TrackIR, surround sound) for basically a full year deserves to be treated to the finest of the one peripheral I actually get to bring with me — the mouse.  My current mouse of choice was the Razer Deathadder, which is a wired mouse in basically the same shape as the Mamba.  In addition to being wireless, the Mamba also offers two additional buttons, placed kind of strangely in the upper-left corner of the left mouse button.  They’re primarily intended to adjust sensitivity on the fly, but can be configured for anything.

One of the coolest things about the Mamba is that it can convert pretty much instantly from wireless to wired mode and back.  The transmitter has a dock built into it that the mouse can rest on when it’s not being used, and it charges over USB.   If you’re using the mouse and start to run low on the battery, or simply want the reliable performance of a wired mouse, you can pop the cable out of the transmitter and plug it directly into the mouse, and voila! you have a wired mouse.  The delay is only the time it takes for Windows to recognize a mouse being unplugged and then plugged in.  I have found that sometimes it seems to take a little longer for the connection to become stable when switching to wireless, but it’s still about 30 seconds.  I wouldn’t recommend doing it in the middle of a firefight, but it’s easy to do during a quick break from action.

Here are a couple shots that illustrate how the cable is removed:
topwire1

topwireless1
On the underside of the mouse are a few buttons. The latch on the upper-right is the release for the USB cable. On the lower right is the pairing button. I don’t find it generally necessary, but there’s one on the mouse, and one on the transmitter — I guess for when they get confused, or perhaps on a new install. And on the left side is the power switch for the mouse — it’s turned on for wireless mode, and off when charging or when wired.
bottomwire1bottomwireless1

The two little gold dots are the charging connectors.  The mouse docks on the transmitter, kind of like a pedestal, like so:

charging1Of course if you’d rather play than stare at your beautiful mouse, you can just use it wired, and it will charge as you continue playing.

Mamba vs. Deathadder
As you can see in the photos, they are really pretty much the same size. The changes are very subtle, and from what I can tell, all seem to be good adjustments.
img_2761img_2763

I’ve found the adjustment from the Deathadder to be pretty seamless.  The Mamba is a bit heavier because of the battery, but the teflon feet are much smoother, so I don’t notice the weight.  I’m also not the kind of gamer who really has to lift the mouse that often, so it’s not a big thing for me.  Another small difference is in the area of the side buttons.  The buttons themselves have a thin layer of rubber on them, which feels nice, and there is a more generous rubber area below the buttons, which makes it a nice comfortable place to rest your thumb when you don’t want to hit the buttons accidentally.  There’s also a very slight lip towards the back of the mouse which gives a little more grip and control in the thumb area, especially if you need to lift the mouse a lot.  The cord, should you choose to use it, is woven, not rubber like the Deathadder.  A lot of people prefer that because it moves a little more freely.

Aesthetics
Any gaming gear strives to be both functional and sexy.  The Mamba has the standard blue LED style going.  Some people think blue is too cliché, but I don’t mind since it happens to match the lighting on my keyboard and joystick.  The Mamba has less lighting than the Deathadder — just two narrow strips of blue on the mousewheel.  However, the charger/transmitter has blue lighting on the bottom, and around the button on the front of it.

Another good thing is that like most of Razer’s mice, the settings are saved on the mouse itself so when you plug it in on another computer your keymapping and sensitivity settings travel with you.  I believe that requires the drivers to be installed on each machine.  That’s fine with me, since I primarily need it when switching between my home computer and laptop, it’s nice to know that any changes I make to the settings will be up to date when I switch machines.

Rant On
One thing I absolutely hate about Razer is their driver software.  They packaged this thing like it came right out of the dark side of Cupertino (the packaging would take up a post more complex than this one — feel free to google, I’m sure you’ll find lots of unboxing videos and photos).  I swear, I have never seen a product packaged this well from Apple.  And yet their software is absolute crap.  Look at this mess:

mambaNot only is it ugly, I don’t know what shenanigans they have to do to make the edges do that, but whatever it is is totally non-standard and refuses to pop up when I alt-tab out of a game.  Like it can’t overlay against a 3D game or something.  If they had just made it a regular damn window it would be fine!   There’s a lot of shenanigans going on in their software.  Like why is it when I plug in my Deathadder on my Mac, before choosing an OS, it goes backwards? The X axis is reversed! See most fancy mice, when you plug them in to an unknown computer, the computer’s like, “Oh, that’s a mouse.”  And then you install the driver and the computer’s like, “Wow, that’s a really fancy mouse!”  Well with most Razer mice I’ve owned, you plug it in, and the computer’s like “WTF is that?”  And then it does the hardware detection thing, and slowly gets the idea, and the mouse starts working, and then you install the drivers and it starts working well.   But right out of the box, it’s not actually a mouse.  And that pisses me off.  Every time they release a new product I hope they’ll change all this crap and stop acting like, “Hey look at this cool interface we coded in our dorm room — it has jagged edges,” and act like the professional purveyors of pwnage they otherwise present themselves to be.  Whoever designed the packaging for the Mamba needs to bitchslap whoever designs their GUI, and get them on the same page.  Rant off.

Summary
Overall I’m very happy with it. It hasn’t changed my life, but even as a wired mouse it’s a step up from the Deathadder. When gaming I like to have the mouse directly in front of the keyboard, but the wire usually gets in the way when I need to type. This is the biggest change I’ve noticed in usability from being wireless –I only need to worry about where the mouse is, not what the cord is dragging over.


July 2, 2007

My Pokemans – Let Me Show You Them

I call this: gaming — Posted by KP @ 10:56 pm

Somebody help me, I just bought a Pokemon game today.

It started a few weeks ago during a performance of Singin’ in the Rain. One of our followspot operators, Nick, is a fellow lover of the Nintendo DS, and he had told me he had just purchased a Pokemon game. While I have a general knowledge of what Pokemon are, I had never actually played one of the games.

Over the course of the next few performances, I would sometimes hear exclamations from Nick on headset like, “Yes!! My Pokemon evolved!” We have several gamers on the crew, and our off-topic conversations on headset sometimes revolve around games we’re playing. So occasionally I would ask a question about exactly how the game worked. One day he had his DS with him down on the ground, and I watched a little bit of the gameplay and asked more questions. Having gotten bored of Animal Crossing for a while, I decided this might be something I should check out. He warned me that it would consume my life, but that would be nothing new. It couldn’t possibly be more demanding than Animal Crossing, which punishes you for not playing often enough. I asked exactly which version he had, which was Diamond. I had heard of it, and had a general idea that it was one of the newer titles.

So today I stopped into the local GameStop while waiting for my laundry, and they happened to have a used copy. It started out slow with all the setup of the story and training-type exercises, but yeah, it’s kind of addictive so far.


June 20, 2007

The Macbook Pro and Windows

I call this: computers,gaming,mac,pc — Posted by KP @ 9:19 pm

One of the reasons I was originally excited about Apple’s switch to Intel processors was the prospect of running Windows at a reasonable speed on my Mac. I have always owned Virtual PC as long as I’ve been a Mac user, just because every now and then I’d find something that absolutely couldn’t be done without a PC (not your everyday tasks, but things like flashing a hacked ROM onto my cell phone). The one thing I use Windows for on a regular basis is gaming. I have a gaming PC (which I swear one of these days I’ll actually make a post about), but since my primary computer has to be a laptop because of my job, and a Mac because of my sanity, the prospect of taking my games with me was previously an impossibility.

When I first switched to Mac I tried to like the games, but the selection is limited to only the few most popular PC games, and they usually aren’t released until long after PC users have tired of them and moved on to something better. I knew this going in, but what distressed me even more as I came to own more Mac games, is that the few ported PC games there are are usually terrible ports. They’re buggy, they’re slow, and in general don’t play as well as the PC version. And from what I can tell, the developers don’t care, because there’s no competition (it was basically Aspyr and Macsoft), and so few people playing the games that it really doesn’t matter. If the same problems existed in PC games there would be a patch out immediately. So I quickly got tired of throwing my money away on such crap and decided I would be better off building a PC and having access to all the games I wanted, I just couldn’t play when away from home.

Having a Mac laptop running Windows fast enough to play games is something I’ve been looking forward to as long as we’ve known about Apple’s switch to Intel. So now that I finally have one, I’ve been catching up on all the options available and playing around with it. I knew that Boot Camp was the best method for running games, because it addresses the actual computer and all its resources, but I knew I’d also want virtualization software so that I could quickly access Windows while getting actual work done. Parallels was the first to come out with a solution, and I didn’t really become aware of VMWare’s Fusion until I began seriously researching this after buying the MBP.

I was stupid when packing for the summer and didn’t bring my Windows XP install disk from home, even though it was obvious I’d be getting a MBP at some point over the summer and would need this to install Windows with Boot Camp. I did have Virtual PC running on my Powerbook, and was happy to find out that VPC disk images can be easily converted to run on Parallels. So that’s how I first tried Windows on the MBP, running my old VPC image. It was certainly fast enough to feel like a real computer, not like the slow-motion experience of running VPC.

About a week later, I had my XP disk and some games from home sent up to me, and installed XP under Boot Camp. The install software will guide you through the process of partitioning your hard drive to make a partition for Windows. Thankfully, you can do this without erasing the whole drive. Here you have a couple choices to make. First, the size of your partitions. I picked 20GB for Windows, as I don’t really want to take too much space away from OS X, but I think 20GB will be enough to install a decent amount of games, which is all the XP partition will really need to hold.

The other decision is one I wasn’t expecting: you have to decide if you want the partition formatted in FAT32 or NTFS. I know from my Windows experience that NTFS is better for XP because it allows more advanced security features like encryption, and in general is better for stability. However, the installer warns that NTFS is not good if you want your Mac OS to be able to read the files in the Windows partition. This concerned me, since I wasn’t really sure what they meant by that. Much Googling was done before I proceeded. I still don’t fully get it, but what I found pointed to NTFS as the better choice. Apparently it works much better in Parallels as well, which is the main way I intend to share files between the two partitions. I assumed that the incompatibility was that I could not directly open files on the Windows partition by clicking on the volume in the Finder and navigating like I would any other disk. Well it turns out that you can access files on the disk, but it’s read-only. So to move files from OS X to Windows I need to drag them into Parallels.

By the way, you will wind up with the Windows partition visible as a volume in the Finder. At first I found this kind of annoying because I don’t really want that partition anywhere in my life if I’m not actively using it, but it’s growing on me. The biggest realization I had about the Boot Camp method is that when I back up my hard drive, backing up my OS X volume does not back up Windows. If I were using a Parallels virtual disk, one backup would cover everything because the Windows content would just be a file within my OS X files. Now I have to do two separate backups, so I partitioned my backup drive the same way, with a 20GB partition to back up the Windows volume. Part of me doesn’t give a damn what happens to the Windows partition and some game files, but I guess it can’t hurt to back it up once in a while.

I used my product key for a copy of Windows that I no longer use, and it activated and all was well. Using the driver CD that Boot Camp has you burn, I installed the drivers for the MBP with no problems, and all my hardware seemed to be working, and I was on my Airport network quickly. As Steve Jobs said in his WWDC keynote, when Leopard comes out it will have Boot Camp included and the drivers will be on the install CD so you won’t have to burn one yourself. As long as you’ve got a blank CD hanging around, it’s no big deal to use the current method.

So with everything in Boot Camp looking good, I rebooted in OS X.
You can set one OS or the other to be booted into automatically by setting the Startup Disk in OS X System Prefs, or hold Option when you start the computer to choose which one to use.

Now I went back to Parallels and got rid of my VPC version of Windows. Unfortunately Parallels will not detect the Boot Camp partition and give you the option to import it unless you have no other virtual PCs. So I just deleted the one I had been playing with, and it saw the Boot Camp partition and loaded it up.

There are two major obstacles to using a Boot Camp partition with Parallels, as far as I’ve discovered:
1. When you close Parallels you must shut down the virtual computer. You can’t save the state and return right back where you were the next time you start Parallels. This is to prevent you from screwing everything up by trying to access the files from Boot Camp while they are suspended in Parallels. I wish there was a better way around this so that if you primarily use Parallels you don’t have to always wait for the computer to start up and shut down, but I guess the only option would be to never close Parallels. Anyway, Windows doesn’t take all that long to start, so it hasn’t been that bad. VPC used to take twice as long just to restore from a saved state.

2. Activation. As you probably know, Windows has all sorts of annoying ways to make sure that it’s as difficult as possible for you to use the operating system you paid for. One of the things it does to treat all users like criminals is to look at your system specs and deactivate itself if the specs change too much. On a “real” computer this could mean upgrading RAM, changing your hard drive, video card, processor, motherboard. I’m not sure exactly what it looks at, but if you like to upgrade your hardware you’ll run into this problem. On the Mac this is pretty much unavoidable. When I installed Windows in Boot Camp, it sees itself installed on a machine with 4GB of RAM and a Nvidia something-or-other video card. When Parallels loads the same installation, it uses a virtual machine which tells Windows that it’s running on hardware of lesser specs than my real hardware (because some of my resources still need to be used to run OS X). So it sees a machine with 1GB of RAM, a Parallels Video Driver, and a virtual hard drive, and it thinks (not unexpectedly) that it’s installed on a different computer. So it freaks out and demands to be activated within 3 days or it will stop working. When you go to the website it directs you to, it gives you lots of reasons this might have happened, like maybe you bought the computer used and the guy you bought it from was using a pirated copy of Windows. Not one example assumes you actually are trying to use a legitimate copy of Windows in a manner allowed under the EULA, and that the activation feature is simply wasting your time.

So I called the 800 number they give, which of course directed me to India. I explained that I was using XP on a Mac and that because I was using Boot Camp and Parallels the activation software saw it as two different computers and was asking for another activation code. I was given no argument from the nice lady, she simply asked if I bought the OS at retail or if it came with a computer, and I said it was a retail copy. Then she gave me a code to put into the activation window, and it happily accepted it. When I got back into Boot Camp, it once again popped up the activation warning, and I was about to lose it. But when I picked the option to activate over the internet, it did its business and obviously got an answer it was happy with, because it activated. Since then I’ve not heard a peep from the activation app. I was pleased to find that the Microsoft rep did not give me any grief for being a Mac user or act like what I wanted to do with my copy of Windows was wrong or strange. I’ve heard others say the same as well, so I applaud MS for at least making that part of this ridiculous process easy.

I tried Parallels first because I was more familiar with it as the first virtualization program available for Intel Macs. In trying to find out the advantages and disadvantages between Parallels and VMWare, I realized that both programs are so new and developing so rapidly that anything I read was pretty much obsolete because the two apps have been constantly one-upping each other with each release. In fact while I was trying them out over the course of the first week I owned my MBP, both released pretty significant updates. I tried Parallels first and found it just felt a little more comfortable, so when my trials were running out and I had to make a decision, I went with Parallels, but I expect over the coming months the two will go back and forth with who’s got the newest exciting feature.

Once I got everything installed nicely I began installing some games. One problem I found early on was with Sid Meier’s Pirates, which relies quite a bit on the numeric keypad for its controls. Of course laptops don’t have full keypads, but the usual method is to hold the function key to turn a section of the regular keyboard into the numeric keypad. While this function was working in Windows, it wouldn’t work for me in the game, but I came across something called Input Remapper, which has more advanced keyboard drivers for Boot Camp, including the keypad, brightness and volume buttons, and more. Removing the Apple keyboard driver and installing Input Remapper solved my problems.

One more tip: by default Boot Camp’s partition will appear in OS X named “Untitled,” which is not a particularly attractive name for something you’ll probably be looking at in your Finder a lot. You can rename it, but you have to do it in Windows. Right-clicking on the C: drive in My Computer will bring up the option to rename it. After that it will display that name in the Finder as well.


June 13, 2007

The Highest Purpose for Theatrical Projections

I call this: gaming,mac,summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 9:10 pm


I had a few minutes tonight as we were doing the pre-show, and we had our first round of NES gaming on our lovely projection screen. We didn’t have a chance to do much, as most people were actually engaged in important work, or were about to be, but it was nice to try it out. I played a little bit of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, showed how much I suck at Spy Hunter, and just a tiny bit of Bionic Commando to show the young’uns a cool game that they may not have heard of, before moving on to the greatest game ever made, Super Mario Bros. 3.

Here’s a short video clip of Angela trying out SMB3. And yes, the sound is being run over the house system.

Here’s the (messy) setup in the booth:

The controller is something I picked up last year. It’s an actual NES controller that has been rewired for USB by RetroZone. The Emulator I use on the Mac is Nestopia, which is freeware, but does not support joysticks without a shareware add-on, which is $30. For only $20 you can get USB Overdrive, which is an all-purpose driver for tons of USB devices. You can assign buttons to do just about anything, and have different profiles for individual apps, so I could have my NES controller assigned as a really cool iTunes remote in that app without screwing ups its functions in Nestopia. Not that I would ever need it to do that, but now that I’ve come up with that example, I think it just may have to be.

Getting the game on the projector is simple. Just drag the window off your main screen to the side that leads to the projector’s screen (see here for details on setting up the projector). It was necessary for me to resize the window a bit to get it all on the screen.


March 22, 2007

My Life with Computers

I call this: computers,mac,pc — Posted by KP @ 4:31 pm

So I mentioned I was a dork. The story begins when I was in first grade (circa 1987), and my teacher, Mrs. Sylvan, told my mother about a camp for gifted kids at C.W. Post College on Long Island. This camp operated in the summer and on Saturdays during the school year. I attended it from the age of 8 until just before I started high school. I learned many, many dorky things from some wonderful teachers.

One of my favorite subjects was computer programming. We learned to program in BASIC, most of which I have now forgotten. But my parents were really cool and for my 9th birthday, they bought a computer from my computer programming teacher, which he loaded up with all the software we used in class, as well as some fun games and other interesting programs. So then I was able to work and tinker on my own.

In 1993, I started high school and was given a new computer which was my first experience with Windows. It also had a CD-ROM drive, which was basically useful only for playing Myst. When I got a job at 16, I had some disposable income and freedom to roam around NYC checking out CompUSA and other computer stores, and I started buying and installing upgraded parts for my Packard Bell piece of crap. When I went to college I bought a Dell, which served me well.

However, when I graduated, I knew I would need a laptop. This is where the trouble starts. At this time (around 2000), the laptop that I purchased came with WindowsME. Let’s just say that after using it for less than six months, I had decided that at the next possible opportunity I was getting a new computer, and it was going to be a Mac. I had never actually owned a Mac, and barely used one in the last decade, but I knew whatever it was it was not going to run Windows. Eventually WindowsXP came out, and solved most of my problems, but by that point it was too late. The release and continued existence of WindowsME despite all its huge flaws, as well as some fishy stuff included with a Media Player update, proved to me that I no longer wanted Microsoft in control of my computing experience.

So when I unexpectedly came into some money, I bought a Mac. It was a big adjustment at first, but once I got used to the differences in terminology and where to find various settings, I started to like it. I will admit I had always been one of those PC power users who thought Macs were for stupid people who wanted the computer to do everything for them. I found it was quite the opposite. Yes, my parents can operate Macs — that is an amazing feat that the whole Apple team should be proud of — but I also can get it to do pretty much whatever I want as a power user, either natively or with 3rd-party software. I came to realize that there’s no shame in having a computer that makes things easy, as long as you can still do everything you want. I don’t think I can ever go back to using a PC for day-to-day work and play.

So I identify myself as a Mac user, but I’m also a gamer, and those two things are not always compatible. I tried to be a Mac gamer when I first switched, but I find that the developers that do the conversions for Mac consistently turn out buggy games that do not play as well as their PC counterparts. Not to mention that you only get to choose from the few most mainstream games, and six months to a year later than everybody else.

So it became obvious that I needed a gaming PC, and my 5-year-old laptop was not cutting it. I started looking into Alienware and other gaming PC manufacturers, but I was on a budget and wanted the ability to buy exactly what I wanted for each part of the machine, to spend my money on what was most important to me, and not buy a single thing I didn’t need. That’s when I realized I would have to build it myself. I thought that was pretty cool, since I had always enjoyed upgrading parts myself, but I had never attempted to build a PC from scratch. So I did a lot of research (being a Mac user, I hadn’t even been following things like what the latest processors were). I will leave the specs and all that stuff for another post, but what resulted was a high-mid-range gaming PC, that two years later still does what I need it to do, with only a slightly newer video card when the original one up-and-died.

I also have been a Palm user for about six years, and I currently have a Treo 650. I think Palm is completely dead and has been for at least two years, but I have so much invested in software right now, and I need something that can function with the flexibility of a small computer, and I would prefer not to use Windows. This is why I’m very curious about the iPhone, but also very worried about reports that it will not support 3rd-party software. That doesn’t make it a very “smart” phone. I hope that will change.

So that’s my very long story of my background and interests in the world of technology.


« Newer Posts