that geeky dude

So, having gotten annoyed at Apple because of the iPod encryption schema locking out alternate operating systems without a hack, I did the next worst thing.

I got a Zune. What’s that I hear? Clamoring of “oh my god, you bought a Microsoft product? Are you crazy?” — Well… yes. However, hear me out…

I played around with one of the first generation Zunes when they came out in a store, and immediately dismissed the user interface. However, after buying an iPod and only having the scroll wheel and one button for an interface, I came to rethink that decision. It’s not an easy interface to navigate in the car (my car has an aux-input jack for media players), nor is it forgiving of “fat finger syndrome”, which affects me because I have “huge monkey hands” according to my friends.

So, at Circuit City this week, I played around with a second generation Zune, and was impressed by the UI changes, and the button sensitivity. Also, it has two dedicated buttons, one for “Play/Pause” and the other for “Back” — the four direction rocker button is also touch sensitive and is a “click ok”, but it’s more forgiving of fat fingers. Not to mention that the Song/Artist/Album/Genre browser is… well, not so much better, as it is more intuitive than the iPod. There’s no need to keep hitting “Menu” to go back, since it’s all part of the main “Music” menu.

My current gripes about the Zune are that there’s no equalizer, and that it’s not viewable or usable on anything other than Windows. Other than that, it’s a much better player than the iPod.

No time to write a real post (I’ve got two in my drafts, but haven’t had time to go over them), but I thought I’d toss a few things out here :

First, news about the Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Update has hit Joystiq, and all of you Tversity and Winamp Remote users rejoice, for Mpeg4 Part 2 (aka: DivX and Xvid) will be supported natively! Hurray for not having to sacrifice CPU cycles on the desktop for transcoding to WMV7/8/9 for video playback on the xbox 360.

Second, I purchased a new monitor. More specifically, I bought Samsung SyncMaster 245BW 24″ LCD Monitor. It’s a very, very nice monitor. Running at 1920×1200 gives me a decadent amount of screen real estate, and World of Warcraft looks absolutely stunning. It’s even let me clean up my interface a bit more. Granted, finding 1920×1200 wallpaper isn’t exactly the easiest of tasks, but after resubscribing to Digital Blasphemy for a year, that need is taken care of. However, I now remember one of the reasons I prefer D-Sub/VGA over DVI for most things, and that’s the complete lack of an “auto adjust” feature over DVI. I’m having to hand calibrate the brightness/contrast settings, and I haven’t quite gotten them down pat yet.

More to come later when the work day slows down a bit.

So, I decided to install a Jabber server on epiphany, and made it registerable.

Basically, you can install a jabber client of choice (I prefer Pidgin with the Off-The-Record plugin.

Just use jabber.atlgeek.com as your server and you can register accounts. Rad.

So yeah, I got the bug to finally try out The Burning Crusade. Keep in mind, I’ve been clean of WoW for almost a year now, maybe a little more, so I’m pretty far behind on the curve as these things go.

I picked up a copy of the expansion and a new video card for the machine (remember HP desktop I bought? Onboard video not so good for games), a GeForce 8500GT, which installed pretty painlessly, given that it’s an OEM machine. Thank whatever god exists that they included a PCI-E 16x slot.

I dug up my old install discs, and proceeded to do the installation shuffle, except I noticed it was going painfully, painfully slow on Vista. The install of the base game took almost two hours. I decided to forgo the disc swapping dance with the expansion, and just copied all four cd’s to the same folder on my desktop, and ran the installer, going to bed after I finished with the interactive parts of it. When I woke up, it was at a piddling little 60% done…I killed the install and figured I’d have to do something I’ve been meaning to do about a week after I got this machine… install Windows XP on it.

I harvested the license key from my Dell laptop (happily running as a Hackintosh, more on that later…), plugged up my old 36gb Raptor drive, and installed XP on that. I had already acquired XP compatible drivers for all the hardware from HP support for the inevitable format, but being unable to quickly install a game sort of irked me.

Once I got Windows installed and configured, I proceeded with the installation again, this time with lots more success. The game installed in less than twenty minutes, the expansion installed in record time (since it was already on the hard drive) and I had already downloaded patches to get me up to date from various mirrors I found on WoWWiki. I went to Blizzard’s site and signed up for the “Free 10 day trial of the Burning Crusade” for returning players, and logged in my level 60 Warlock.

The expansion is definitely fun. I pretty much blew out this entire week playing it. I even moved my character to Ysera to join David, Geoff and Jen.