Rorschach.net

Here’s a demo video of a group of D&D-ers playing a game on one of those touch screen MS Surface thingies. This is more impressive to me than the expensive custom made gaming tables.

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.

I spent the majority of my weekend and a good chunk of the end of the week working on home tech things.

• Ditched Time Warner Cable for ATT. Spent most of the day digging into the internal wiring of the house. Couldn’t find the drop for the phone line since I haven’t had a land line in over 6 years. Eventually figured out the wiring and connected. I’ve got a single gateway plugged into the phone line. The TV reciever/DVR is just a box connected over Ethernet to the gateway. 802.11g is built into the gateway so it takes the place of a wireless router as well. Xbox connects direct to the gateway and the rest of the house is on wireless.
• I’m very pleased with the Internet connection. I get ~10Mb/s downloads on speed test sites even in high traffic times. Streamed a movie in HD over the Netflix Xbox service with no changes in quality.
• Finally got some HD channels. My TiVo series 2 isn’t compatible with the service so I’m relying on the provided DVR. I’m gonna miss my TiVo.
• It was time to upgrade the wireless bridge in the office. D-Link has a nice 4 port bridge that can also act as an access point. Something wasn’t working right with DHCP over the bridge so I changed the two desktops to static IPs and everything is fine. Switched from WEP to WPA and was finally able to enable the Xbox as a media center extender.
• Cleaned out about 3 cubic feet of dust and grime from the PCs. My wife likes a clean desk so they go under, hoovering up all the fur and dirt. Wife’s PC had a cable blocking the fan for the video card. No wonder it was dying after less than a hour of use.
• I’d been getting disk errors on my secondardy 500GB drive for about a week. I noticed as I was testing after the cleaning that there’s a faint grinding noise coming from the drive. My drives are mounted vertically, moving that drive to horizontal stopped the noise.
• Went to Fry’s and bought a Seagate 1.5TB SATA drive for $120. That’s $0.08 per gigabyte! 7200rpm and a 30 meg cache so it’s got some throughput. Transferred all the data from the dying drive to the new one (about 300GB) and set up the same drive letter so no links are lost. Even with formatting I’ve got over a terabyte free.

To do list:

• Wife’s PC is still suffering the occasional hard lock. Nothing heat related and no traces in the event log. Virus scans and HijackThis come up empty.
• Bedroom TVs are still on Time Warner. Need to configure the gateway to push a TV signal over the co-ax connector. Cancel TWC before the next billing cycle if ATT keeps performing well.
• Shut down the TiVo and return the TWC reciever. In other words re-cable the living room entertainment center.

Here’s four videos providing an introduction to the hardware, interface and software of the phone I’m looking to acquire. I wish they’d announce the availability or lack thereof for my carrier. If this isn’t coming to Sprint I’ll probably get a Palm Pre.

This is pretty huge. Billboard has the details on the outsourcing of Rock Band tracks to any music copyright holders called Rock Band Network. In the next two months a service will be starting up that allows bands, studios, and labels to get their tracks into Rock Band without having to wait for the programmers at Harmonix to get you onto the schedule. Right now you get up to 10 tracks a week (every week since RB1 came out which means over 700 tracks!) but with RBN it could potentially go up to hundreds.

The copyright holders can take it all the way through the process if they’re willing to do some programming and become “certified” in creating RB note highways. If not you can outsource it to a certified community group and only worry about the music not the game. Quality Assurance of the track is done in a community as well, then once it’s approved it on the RBN marketplace for anywhere from $0.50 to $3. You get your cut of every download.

Looks great for indie bands but it also allows studios and labels to fast track their music into the game. Sub-Pop has committed to getting all their popular music from the last two years onto RBN.

So by the end of August we could be seeing an explosion of music in Rock Band, like iTunes or Amazon Music amounts and varieties of tracks. I can’t wait.

I love to see the ways technology democratizes the ability to create. A busker out on the street with an amp and a suitcase full of footpedals hooked to digital loopers and synths can create a live performace that sounds a lot like high-end studio work. Beautiful.

Dub FX ‘Love Someone’ from Ben Dowden on Vimeo.

I’ve been using a single cell phone for voice communications for over seven years now. There’s one number to get me talking to you so the coordination of multiple phone numbers provided by Google Voice wasn’t that desirable. But I am a technology junkie so about a year ago I signed up with GrandCentral (which got bought by the Goog) anyway and promptly forgot about it.

Recently I’ve been using my Google Voice number as a “dump” account. Kind of like an alternate email address. I use it for signing up for white papers and mailing lists and handing it out to vendors. Two days ago I finally got a hit.

My cell phone rang early in the day with an out of state number I didn’t recognize. I answered it (I always answer my cell unless very busy) and was greeted with a voice telling me I have a call from “Blahblah Vendor” and I could press “1″ to take the call, “2″ to send it to voicemail, or “3″ to send to voicemail and listen in. So I pressed “2″ and hung up.

He didn’t leave a message (which would have been another cool test of the voice to text features) so I labelled his number as “Blahblah Vendor” put the contact in the Vendor category (i.e. straight to voicemail) and went on with my life. If it’s a vendor that I use I’ll put it in the Partner category that rings my work phone during business hours.

Yesterday I got a note on my door at home saying they couldn’t deliver a fruit basket. I pretty much guessed it was spam, but hey I like fruit, so I called out from my Google Voice number. It linked my cell to the number that was left but on their end the caller ID shows my GV number so the spammers (yeah no fruit for me) are more than welcome to call me back, although they’re in the Vendor category already.

The last thing is the ability to allow calls without giving out my number. Here’s a widget that will ask you for your number and will connect you to my cell without knowing my cell number or even my Google number. Give it a try if you feel like messing around.

All in all I’m pleased with the services. Unfortunately Google Voice isn’t accepting any new users for now, but when it does, I can recommend it for pretty much anyone. As long as you don’t care that Google knows every call that you make.

The movie is called Downfall and over the past year or so there’s been plenty of funny subtitle alterations from getting banned from Xbox Live to Hillary’s last days. This time it’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminding us all that those funny videos are exactly what the media companies don’t want you to be able to do.

Here’s a great short story about time travel from Desmond Warzel

11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?