that geeky dude

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.

So last week, Google started rolling out IMAP support for GMail accounts. I’m happy to say they didn’t leave those of us who use Google Apps for their email out in the cold.

After a week of obsessively checking my settings page for “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” (rather than just POP), I finally found the option today, and promptly enabled it. I installed my favorite IMAP mail client from the *NIX world (Claws-Mail), but found out that the Windows port was compiled without IMAP support (sadface!), so until I get around to recompiling it, I’m going to be using Thunderbird, which has been my standby email client for years.

The folder layout is standard, with your labels showing up as folders in the client window, along with a special “Gmail” subfolder, where your various standard GMail folders reside (All Mail, Starred, etc). It didn’t take long to download a few thousand email headers spread through my various labels.

Another quick tip for Google Apps users - they now support email aliases where they didn’t before, which makes me happy.

Every since I got a 360, I’d been looking for ways to stream media from my PC to the 360. The HP came with Vista Home Premium, but the 360’s media center extender function doesn’t work with Xvid or DivX video, preferring Microsoft’s WMV codec (which you can’t find anything popular in)

I had been using TVersity to stream media, since it shows up in the UPnP browser for the 360, but the quality loss is evident, with major artifacting evident in action scenes or scenes with a lot of movement, not to mention that it’s a resource hog and you can’t do anything on the computer while it’s transcoding.

Well, a couple of days ago WinAmp bugged me to upgrade to the latest version, and when I went to the about page, I saw something about Winamp Remote, which ostensibly would allow you to share your music and movies over the network, including to your Wii, PS3 or 360, and over the internets. I couldn’t resist and had to try it, even though I’ve never enjoyed upgrading Winamp (anyone remember Winamp 3 and how fast Nullsoft backpedaled on it?)

Well, I have to say I’m impressed. After adding my Music and Video folders to the Winamp Remote systray applet and giving it sufficient time to wander through my library reading the metadata (10,000+ MP3s and a couple hundred Xvid/Divx/WMV videos), I turned on the 360, disconnected from TVersity, and connected to Winamp Remote. I saw a better organized selection of folders than TVersity offered, along with thumbnails for the videos, typically the first or second frame of the video, which isn’t helpful on a lot of TV shows since it’s fading in, but for movies it was fine.

I picked a video pretty much at random to play (not really, it was the first episode of ESPN’s coverage of the $50k HORSE tournament at the World Series of Poker), and was amazed at how fast the streaming started compared to TVersity. I was also pleasantly surprised to note that Winamp Remote apparently lets you fast-forward and rewind the streaming video, whereas TVersity can’t do that until it’s done transcoding (basically you can’t ff/rw on the first view, but you can all subsequent views) — Also, the videos started off at full screen, rather than being little widescreen video boxes surrounded by black screen.

Granted, I probably could have done some manual tweaking to the TVersity settings, but as evidenced by my purchase of an HP desktop versus building my own, I’ve gotten lazy in my ‘old age’ and would rather not have to fiddle with settings and the like to get it to look the way I want it to.

Five stars for Winamp Remote’s media streaming.

So, I’ve been playing a personal little game the last few years where I watch a TV show and if there’s a guest star that I recognize from something I have to guess who it is.

Time to share that game with you, gentle readers!

This week on Supernatural, there was one of these guest stars. He was the hunter who was looking for good ol’ Sam and Dean. Name the guest star and who he was in. First one to guess right wins a prize.

Note to my LJ syndicated readers: You must comment on the main blog to be eligible. Also, I’m not sure why LiveJournal has been fracking up the feed. I’m working on that.