moving parts of the kasper clan

Last in our series of “when will that Jason kid shut up?!?” is this short, little ditty wherein I extol the wonders of an ancient Linux file server in my basement with a 250GB drive, my shiny (SHINY!!!) new PS3, my PSP, and the nifty little Open Source project of MediaTomb.

Being out of the “being able to spend mad money on Geek toys” for a while (having a family will do that to ya), I was ill-prepared for this new-fangled UPnP thing. As I was setting up my (DANGED AWESOME!!!) PS3, I breezed by the UPnP settings (I don’t need no steenking directions!) with nary a second glance. However, after reading up on the PS3’s media streaming abilities a bit, I downloaded MediaTomb, installed it and configured it (took an hour, max, maybe), and before you know it, Bob’s your uncle and my PS3 was able to stream all of the movies, photos, and music that I’ve been keeping on my ancient Linux file server in the basement. SWEET MAMA!

To make things even just that little extra bit cooler, Sony’s Remote Play allows my and my wife’s PSPs to connect to the PS3 and stream movies, photos, and music anywhere in the house through the PS3.  Now that just plain rocks! I mean, 4GB memory stick modules can hold a decent amount of stuff, but to be able to have 250GB of movies, photos, and music accessible from the PSP in your pocket is just darned cool!

Now all we hafta do is get UPnP client-ness into VideoLAN so I can finally be free of supporting iTunes on my darling bride’s Powerbook….

Warning: a brain dump followeth:

Blockbuster has sweetened their deal by allowing in-store trade-ins of online-rented movies. This, to me, blows NetFlix out of the water, since NetFlix does not yet have a brick-and-mortar presence anywhere (?). And, because we signed up with Blockbuster a while ago, we still get to keep our 2 free movie-or-game rental coupons per month too. Pretty cool! As a result, we’ve been watching tons of movies as of late, including the Indiana Jones trilogy (forgot how good they were!!).

I’ve been a busy little beaver over the last few weeks, OSS-code-wise, anyway. Adriaan and I have whipped kpilot into shape proper-like, it seems. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time twice now and merged our codeyard.net svn repository into kde’s svn (it’s in kdepim-3.5.5+ branch now, but will be merged into branches/KDE/3.5/kdepim before 3.5.6 is release, iirc) using this spiffy little shell fu that I created for the purpose of merging code from one svn repository into another. Also, Sune from the debian packaging team has been a tremendous help in motivating us to get the critical data loss bugs fixed and backported (that’s my pain) into kde’s svn. It’s been really refreshing and fun hacking on kpilot again. I’m reaching a point, though, where we either need to architect kpilot to be more like opensync or I bite the bullet and start helping kdepim use opensync working towards kde4. That’s assuming my current time-to-spend-on-OSS holds up, which is a big assumption. Ohh–also, bbroeksema has helped bring cmake into kpilot, and I must say that I REALLY like it. Adriaan and I have pitched in and we now have a fully-functional build system (bye bye AAP) that I can fully grok. I’ve even written a custom configure script that helps bridge the gap. Sweet! Oh, and if you’re a kpilot user who cares about malconduit (syncing with Avantgo) or docconduit (creating palm docs), your help is required. Since none of the current kpilot maintainers/developers use these conduits, and there’s a decent amount of bit-rot in them, they are going to be disabled for the next release of kpilot/kde, unless you step up and help us with them. Help, please?

Thanksgiving was really, really fun. I need to put up some of our latest pics, but we had a wonderful time just staying home with our little family. I cannot tell you how stress-free our holidays are, not having to pack up and hobble off to a not-short list of relatives’ homes every holiday. Although it was a completely unintentional side-effect of moving cross-country, I really think that this is how it should be. For the first time ever, we have been able to establish our own traditions and have some really neat bonding time as a family that you just miss out on rushing to various relatives’ houses. Plus, my wifey is a really great cook and I get to cut turkey, so it’s enjoyable all around. =:)

Work goeth on. It’s looking to be a stressful year ahead of me with my current employer, and I’m not so sure how I feel about it at this point, other than to hang on for the ride and see what God provides

My darling bride allowed me to play The Matrix - Path of Neo for a few days (and I really appreciate it hon! =:)). I can honestly say that it’s a dissapointing game. First, the graphics are very poor and at least on my “last-year’s-model” Xbox, the characters and artwork are choppy, blocky, and bad. Second, the combat system is horrible. For the most part, you get through the game pressing “Y” repeatedly. Call me an old-school fogey, but coming from a Street Fighter and Killer Instinct background where you have learnable, predictable, more-than-one-button-mashing combos, the fights in this game are really sad. And the camera system is absolutely atrocious. I’ve noticed that there are several games that follow this model–where you are allowed to change your camera perspective, but you don’t have complete control since as soon as you start to move, the game takes over your camera again. Yuck! Make me puke on my jammies! Learn from Splinter Cell, folks, please.

Music-wise, I’ve been really taken by Skillet’s new CD (Comatose), Orbital’s Blue Album, Everything But The Girl, Aaron Shust (Anything Worth Saying is excellent!!), and most recently (don’t laugh) Dean Martin’s Baby It’s Cold Outside duet that played a really cute scene in Will Farrell’s Elf movie.

We’ve had our good friends The Wallers come up and visit us recently, and our family had a wonderful time with them. Sarah was gracious enough to stay with us for almost 2 weeks and we had an absolute ball. I was able to be “one of the girls” a little bit, which I really, really miss from our Bible Quiz days. *sniffle* I also was reminded of how cool my son is, and how much he is like me, with all of his Lego Star Wars 2 kung fu. =:)

And my beautiful daughter, A (name withheld to protect the innocent), is really into her NeoPets thing. What impresses me the most, though, is that she’s walking herself through some basic HTML tutorials and writing some content for her NeoPets pages. Cool!! The hacker spirit lives on in my children, vahoo!! =:) She is an amazingly talented, artistic hacker, though, and I need to start working with her on web designs so she can get exposed to that early on as a modern art form.

Laptop wise, I’ve bounced from Kubuntu Dapper to SUSE 10.1 to Fedora Core 6 to Kubuntu Edgy and back to Fedora Core 6 again for my powerbook. I’m settling on FC6 for the time being. Unfortunately, NONE of these distros work acceptably with my powerbook and NetworkManager. My goal was to be able to use NetworkManager solely as I do on my x86 SUSE 10.1 laptop at work, which is why I kept bouncing between distros. But since none of them do, and I really like what the Fedora boys have done with Core 6, and my powerbook runs pretty darned stable with it, I’ll keep using it. Oh–one thing I still need to figure out is how to get the keyboard backlighting working with FC6. I had it working with SUSE 10.1-ppc, iirc, and it does not work out of the box with FC6.

Lastly, I’ve been using vortexhost.com as my web hosting solution for the last 2 years. They have been really, really stable and been a good home for a good price (250 megs for $55/year). However, my little family has outgrown 250 megs and now I need to figure out what to do in the next 2 weeks. I’ve been looking around at some of the bigger-space-for-slightly-more-money players and some of the hosts I’m looking at are:

I’ve researched them at webhostingjury.com and webhostingtalk.com, and from what it looks like, hostgator would be the best in terms of decent price, decent disk space, good customer service, and good reputation. However, I’m really hesitant to fork over $83.40 for 1 year of web hosting. Yeah, I know, it’s only $30 more than I was spending before, but still… $83.40 is a decent chunk of change for a personal/family web site. So I’ve been looking at Google’s accounts for domains stuff and I might poke into it a little more, but still, I need to so something because we’re out of space right now and my contract with vortexhost.com is up in 2 weeks.

One thing I’d like to look at as part of this adventure is using Google as a spam filter. I use spamassassin with some custom training fu right now, but it still lets spam through every once in a while. And I really want to be able to provide my kiddos with some web space so they can have some room to play and learn. So, all in all, I still don’t know what I’m going to do. One side of my brain is saying that I could host our domain on a PC at the house, but I’ve already been down that road and it’s just painful (especially considering that my always-on box at home is a PII-200 laptop with zero disk space) and I’d like to not have to deal with that headache again. And I want something rock-solid and reliable for our e-mail solution, which is why GMail would be nice. The downside to GMail, though, and this is probably the ONLY reason I’m not going to use them yet is that they don’t support IMAP. *sigh* Any helpful suggestions, solutions, watch-out-fors, etc., would be greatly appreciated.

Okay, well, I think that touches every category I have defined, so with that (and the fact that it’s midnight, *grrr*), I guess I’ll hit the “publish” button and call it a night. G’night, Gracie…

When I won my PSP from a raffle at LinuxWorld, I honestly didn’t think that highly of it. In fact, my first thought was “I wonder if Linux would run on this.” It’s not worth it, IIRC, but what’s truly surprised me is the coolness of the PSP. It has built-in WIFI, which is pretty slicque on its own, but this makes it a truly portable online multiplayer gaming platform (think Xbox Live, but small enough to carry everywhere you go). Forget about the built-in web browser, by the way, really–it is horrible!!

So, the first game that I bought (and felt really stupid doing, thinking that I’d just wasted $35 on a used game for a console that I’d never really use that much) was SOCOM, Fireteam Bravo. I bought it because it looked a little bit like Splinter Cell, which I have an absolute blast playing on the Xbox. Well, anyway, it’s not quite like Splinter Cell, but SOCOM is a pretty decent little you-against-the-computer game anyway.

What I didn’t know until I happened to be discussing it with a guy at work (the “nanofire” in the title) was that it is actually an online multi-player game on the PSP. This changes everything! It’s actually a WHOLE lot of fun to play against other people wirelessly from wherever you feel like it.

Of course, I am not all that good with it yet and don’t have tremendously great ambitions of getting all that great with it (… major time investment, anyone?…), but it is very fun to play when the mood strikes me and time allows.

Oh, and the title… the only guy I know who plays it (nanofire–the guy from my work) happened to get a VERY lucky shot in on me last night with an RPG and felt obliged to send me an e-mail this morning with that text in it. It was funny enough to post about. =;)

Here’s an interesting e-mail exchange between me and the Ubisoft folks in regards to their amazing new game, Splinter Cell, Chaos Theory…

Customer (Jason Kasper) - 06/06/2005 01:04 PM
Hi there.  I would very much like to buy Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, but I don’t want my children to have to listen to all of the swearing.  Is there a code or patch or preference that I can use to turn off the swearing or talking?

Thank you!

Response (GREG) - 06/06/2005 04:16 PM
Jason, unfortunately there is no profanity filter in this game.  This is not a childrens game.  Even if you remove the language, you are still shooting people…

LOL. I don’t know why I find this funny, but I do. I suppose that I’d made an unconscious decision at some point that there’s a line of acceptability for games for my children to be able to enjoy with me, and that games which involve fighting (Street Fighter, Star Wars ROTS), shooting, hunting, and stealth (Mech Assault, Splinter Cell, Halo, Star Wars Republic Commando) are okay, but games which have swearing/vulgarity/profanity are not. Now, this might seem like a contradiction but I’m not sure it is.

Case in point: I have played for hours and hours with my kids, working through Splinter Cell, and we have a blast together. So I bought Splinter Cell, Chaos Theory expecting to have fun with my kids again as we play through the game. The game itself is absolutely amazing (you can finally play split-screen co-op mode!), but apparently Ubisoft felt that they needed to add more realism to the game by having more realistic cursing and vulgarity. I REALLY wish they hadn’t.

I guess it comes down to this…. I am fully able to explain to my children that there are amazing, brave, real-life people in our country that are specially trained to protect us and they have to do some of the things that are in the game (stealth, killing, break/enter). But I cannot stand letting them hear the kind of vulgarity, swearing, and threatening language that Ubisoft has put into this last Splinter Cell game. I protect them from being exposed to that from movies, and I will continue to protect them from being exposed to that from games as well. Will they ever be exposed to it? Yeah, unfortunately, they will. But that’s far different than ushering it into my living room and helping to feed it into their minds now.

So, Ubisoft, I have returned your $45 game, and you won’t be making that money back from me as long as you insist on adding this kind of language to your games.

I’ve posted some new pictures from my latest mod. Thanks to John from modeverything.com, I’ve successfully modded a PS1 Series H DualShock controller for the brains of my second-player arcade stick controller.

It was REALLY tight soldering, and I don’t claim to have done it well. In retrospect, I should have probably tinned the contact points on the PCB before I started, but the space was so tiny that I didn’t think I could.

Anyway, now both arcade controllers have PS1 DualShock controllers for their internal circuit boards, and both work perfectly well with the PC games (PSX->USB Radio Shack converter) and the Xbox (Dreambox PSX->Xbox converter from LikSang.com).

Whee!!

So, I’ve done a bunch of research and question-asking and reading and cursing and gamestopping and some more reading and some more question-asking, etc. When I originally built my custom arcade sticks, I used the PCB’s from old PSX digital-only controllers, since they were the easiest to hack and solder. These worked really well for me (in combination with some PSX-to-USB converters I got from Radio Shack for $10) with PC games. Both Linux and Windows see the arcade sticks as regular joystick devices and they work perfectly fine with M.A.M.E. and the TOTALLY cool Killer Instinct emulator.

Anyway, as I’ve blogged much about before, along came the Xbox and Street Fighter Anniversary Collection into my life and with it my hopes that I could use my arcade sticks with it. And, as I’ve blogged much about before, this dream was smashed to oblivion due to the Dreambox converters that I bought from LikSang being unable to work with non-analog PSX controllers.

So I modded a new controller a few nights ago (Gamestop is wonderful!) and replaced the digital PCB for my arcade stick with it. I used SpiffyShoes PSX A-series controller hack which lets you do a completely no-solder hack on a A-series dual-shock PS1 controller. I only had some spare CAT-5 lying around to use for the wire, and it was REALLY painfully slow and frustrating trying to use its 24-gauge twisted-pair wires to plug into the ribbon terminal. I’m not completely happy with it, as it looks a bit unstable, not having the wires actually secured to the terminal in any way, and I’m not sure if I want to leave it as it is or replace it with a soldered PS1 H-series PCB, but at the very least, I hooked it up to SFAC through my Dreambox converter and it works perfectly.

Here are some pictures of my mod (not pretty on the inside, I admit it), including the closeup of the no-solder PCB board. I’m worried that the wires are going to come out one of these days soon.

But for now, I’m happy being able to use the little bugger on Xbox live. =:)

Happy gaming….

I’ve finally broken down and purchased an Xbox. Circuit City had it combined with the DVD playback kit ($30 value) for $149.99, which seemed to be a good enough deal to fork over the money. I must say… it is REALLY nice. Microsoft has done an exceptional job at building, marketing, and “convincing” game-makers to adopt the wee beastie. The UI of the machine is very well thought-out, intuitive, and smooth.

I’ve ordered some PS2->Xbox converters from liksang.com so that I can use my custom-built arcade controllers with the xbox.

I’ve purchased 3 games for the xbox thus far: splinter cell (the first one), the two towers, and capcom versus snk.

And, I’ve had tons of fun with the xbox and my family thus far. Lynn and the kiddos have spent literally hours watching me play through splinter cell, even though Lynn and Ash and Jason complain that it makes them nauseous. =:) And the kids are just itching for me to let them play the two towers. And we’ve probably sunk a good couple of hours into playing capcom vs. snk.

See? Good clean fun.

Oh–also, I’ve taken back the $45 crappy GeForce MX 4000 video card to Media Play, and was all set to spend another $150 or so on a video card, but have decided to wait. As it is, I’m thinking that I can just insist that if there are games the kiddos want to buy and play, they will have to buy and play them on/for the Xbox. This is all well and good until the kids (or me) find a game (Enter the Matrix, for example) that is only for (or cheaper for) the PC. Then I’ll have to agonize over which card to get again.

But for the time being, I’m pretty impressed with the Xbox. And it’s not like I have tons of time to sink into playing games anyway. =:)

Woot, baybee!! It was a good weekend, this. And, to top it off, I played halo for an hour and 20 minutes tonight, and I feel absolutely fine!! I played upstairs, in the dining room this time, and I think that’s what made the difference. It’s in the middle of an open room, with a couple of flickering candles around the room, and lots to keep my brain from getting confused, I think.

But the coolest part is that I actually captured the flag a couple of times tonight!! =:) Came in second place even! =:) WOOT! I’m quite the newbie at this tho, so my “strategy” was limited to the smash-and-grab variety. It was quite the adrenaline rush, tho! =:)

I’m just stoked I’m not sick!! =:)

*we now return you to your regularly-scheduled program*

phew. it’s all about learning…. wow. this is the sickest I think I’ve felt yet. I probably pushed myself too hard tonight. I played for 2 solid hours this evening, much to the delight of my kiddos. my little bride was tired and shagged out and spent the evening relaxing/snoozing. =:) *hi honey!* =:) I played online for a good hour, I think. I placed last (like the newb that I am) in the 2 CTF (capture the flag) games that I was in. And I placed 5th out of 7 in every man for himself (what is the proper name for this one?). yay for the newb!!! =:)

Erm, so anyway, now I feel quite ill.

BUT…

several things learned have I this evening.

[thing one] microsoft has placed some goofy copy protection on the halo CD that I just spent $27 for. it apparently uses SafeDisc 2.9, the existence of which I was not aware until this afternoon. oh–why is this important to me? because I want to make a backup copy of it. in fact, I want to use ONLY that backup copy–leaving my $27 CD at home, safely away from evil scratches, smudges, and breakages. so, I’ve discovered a nifty little program from Winblows called “Alcohol 120%”, which did a very nice job of ripping my offensive SafeDisc-laden halo CD to an ISO. I tried twice to use Alcohol to burn it to a CD-R, but no luck was mine, so I burned the ISO with Nero and it worked wonderfully! =:)

[thing two] based on some of the Army research I read (or was it the slashdot posts?), I tried a couple of different things today, playing halo. first, I played upstairs on the dining room table. it’s in the center of the room, as opposed to right next to the wall as my bedroom desk sits. I think this might have made a pretty big difference, as I think that my peripheral vision was able to look past the laptop screen and see the depth of the room, to balance my brain out. also, I think this room is brighter than the bedroom where I typically play. I think these factors helped me be able to play for as long as I did this time.

[thing three] (well, thing two, part 2) I also tried (this is going to sound silly, I know) playing with a towel draped over my head onto the top of the laptop screen. the post that I read (I think on slashdot) mentioned that someone who suffered from simulator sickness had tried this with some measure of success. much to the amusement of my eldest daughter, I tried this for 10 minute intervals here and there–either until the towel kept falling off my noodle, or until the towel sagged in the middle enough to annoy me. what I noticed, though, was 2 things…. first, doing this ridiculous maneuver kept my head still. it forced me to concentrate on holding my head in one spot and not reacting to the game by ducking/raising my head, lowering my eyes, etc. so maybe that helped. secondly, being a towel-head kept all of my vision focused solely on the laptop’s LCD screen, blocking out all peripheral (and possibly conflicting/confusing) vision. I suppose I shall have to test this towel procedure again, using tape or something to keep the towel from sagging. the kids will love this, I’m sure.

and finally…. a post on slashdot that give me a slight glimmer of hope…

You *can* train yourself out of this. The UK RAF does this for pilots over a matter of months: its worst for navigators because they do the reverse of what we’re speaking about: they look at a motionless screen while being subjected to motion. The USAF actually sends their vomiting pilots to the RAf to be debugged on this one…

of course… everyone knows that you can believe everything you read on slashdot….

as for me, I tried setting our 2 cheapo old computers at home up to run Halo–just to see if maybe using a different computer/hardware/CRT would help, but the one is a P3-600 (too slow, methinks) and uses an NVidia card, and the other one uses an embedded S3 cheapo card (and worse yet–that computer doesn’t even have an extra AGP slot!!). And after installing halo on each of them, they both come up and say something along the lines of “your computer has funky, horrible hardware, and we know that bad things will happen if we even let you try to play halo with it, so we won’t”.

well, something like that. and my only option at that point is “exit”.

so, the only computer I have to play halo on is my laptop… an IBM A31 with an ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]. *shrug*

anyway, I finally got into a half-full room online and played capture the flag for the first time… and… let’s just say… I think I was killed at least twice a minute for the 10 minutes I was there. =:) it was pretty funny–and embarassing. heh.