Kindle 2

Just got my Kindle 2 today! Check below for unboxing pix.

Everything’s positive so far. The device is solid, the e-ink display is amazingly crisp and even the text-to-speech is pretty good. The Kindle store is great and I’ve already downloaded a lot of free chapters. Also the official Amazon faux-leather cover is surprisingly useful.

I’m using calibre and Stanza as my e-book manager & viewer respectively.

The only small gripe is the US-only power adapter. Luckily I can charge over USB and the device itself only consumes power when Whispernet is on or I turn the page.

The 20$ refund from Amazon wasn’t too bad either.

The rise and fall of Dell

This blog has been silent for a while. But no longer!

Customer support stories are always predictably full of irritation and annoyance: let me tell you mine.

So, I admit, I got caught up in the netbook craze. It just seems so cool to just chill in bed or on the couch with a light 300€, 10 inch laptop. Checking e-mail, updating twitter, watching some ripped tv-shows (personal usage only of course). So when at the end of April, Dell had a promotion on it’s Mini 10, I jumped at the chance to own one. After all, I had heard great things about it on Buzz Out Loud and ironically Macbreak Weekly. So ahead I went and ordered one.

Less than a week later, my Mini is delivered and I get to tinkering. First annoyance: despite expressly checking off the Norton Security box when ordering, I still find a 30-day trial on this thing. No biggie, easily gotten rid of. After installing a few apps (CCleaner, VLC, Firefox, etc) and going through Windows update I put the thing on standby. Less than an hour later I come back to it, wake it up and up pops a bluescreen. Again, BSODs on Windows XP when coming out of Standby sometimes just happen. It’s an older OS that isn’t as crash-poof as Vista or 7. Reboot: no result. After rebooting a dozen times, in and out of safemode, I pop up the diagnostics and get a bunch of disc errors. Seems like a call to Dell support was in order.

This support call went really well, and soon I was calling the delivery company to pick up my Dell for repair. Problem is, repair and transport are in Germany, and nobody on call that day spoke Dutch. Instead I’m forced to explain my situation in English  to a barely bilingual person. I get my things in order and the following week they send me my RMA-box and pick it up again.

I wait a day, a week and another week. Finally I call customer service, where they assure me that the delays have been adressed and my Mini should arrive next week. As of today that week has just officially ended: no netbook.

Naturally, I call again. The customer service guy says he has no new information for me and gives me the direct number of the repair company (outsourcing: always a bad sign). I call in, where in the two week interval they seem to have learned Dutch. After waiting for 5 minutes I’m told to hang up while they sort out my case, after which they’ll call me back. Rather surprisingly, I got the call only 10 minutes later where I’m told that the  blame lies with Dell. Apparently repair has been requesting parts for Mini’s since May 18th, but Dell has of yet refused or been unable to provide them. I was told that I was not alone and that I probably would get my netbook in two weeks, enough time to get the replacement parts, install them, and send me the machine.

As off now I’m continuing the waiting game.

If I had known how long this was going to take, I would have cracked the machine (in the process voiding my warranty) and installed the hard drive myself. Instead, I trusted someone else (Dell) to fix my problem for me, which was the big mistake. Never let someone else do what you know you can do yourself.

As of now Dell is on my Sh*tlist, joining the likes of Sony, ECI and PerfectSystems. Never again will I buy anything off them anymore. No more laptops, no desktops, nada. They have officially lost a customer.

iPhone = Cool

Love or hate the iPhone or MGMT, you’ve got to admit this is pretty fricking cool.

The Day(s) The Drive Stood still.

This post is just going to be a highly subjective spur-of-the-moment type rant, so bear with me here. I’m writing this here because I need an outlet for my frustration. My frustration with Windows and Microsoft. While I may in the past have been known to be somewhat of a Microsoft fanboy and Apple basher (not true: I own an iPhone and I love it), I’m not afraid to call them out when stuff goes wrong, as it did yesterday.

You see for months now I have been using a 320 GB (Neil Poulton Designed) Lacie external HDD in conjunction with my Xbox 360, in order to play back the many tv-shows and netcasts I’ve downloaded and ripped throughout the years. Alas 320 GB is becoming rather average in today’s world. But hey, storage is cheap, so I went out and bought another Lacie Drive, this time of the 1 Terabyte variety. I love these drives and currently own 3 of them. They’re quiet, well-designed and they blend in with their surroundings. Happy as can be with my new purchase, I plug it in to my 360 and … nothing happens. The 360 wouldn’t recognise it. I tried everything, from swapping power adapters and data cables to rebooting the console. Nothing. No change. As you might imagine I was a bit miffed at this. I just spent around 100€ on a new drive only to discover it doesn’t work.

Fifteen minutes and a lot of Googling later I come to the realisation that Xbox 360 does not support the NTFS filesystem which my new drive had formatted to by default. Even though for the life of me I could not understand this (why Macs can read NTFS and an Xbox, which is made by Microsoft, can’t is beyond me), I kept my cool and went to disk management to reformat the drive as FAT32. To my chagrin I discover that Window Vista no longer includes FAT32 in it’s drive management settings. It can only format to NTFS or the incompatible exFAT. A bit more googling and I discovered that FAT32 formatting was still possible in Vista (even surpassing the arbitrary limit of 32 GB) by using the command line. After that I left my computer running overnight (formatting a 1 TB drive takes a while you know).

This morning I wake up and discover that after having spent the night churning along Windows apparently cannot format the drive because the assigned volume is too large. Not a good way to start the day. The fact that Vista doesn’t notify you of this at the start of the formatting proces is just preposterous. This is typical Microsoft stupidity. This is the side of Microsoft everyone hates. I finally had to use a free utility called Fat32Formatter (which is a true godsend) to finally make my drive usable.

But you know what was the final insult ? If I had just hooked it up to a Mac, I never would have had these troubles. It saddens me when for once Apple’s attack ads ring true. “It just works”. Well apparently in this case it would have.

I have become more and more disillusioned with Microsoft since the whole Vista debacle and the crappyness that is Games For Windows Live. You’ve got one chance to redeem yourself Microsoft: Windows 7 better be damn good.

The Rise Of Clippy

Brilliant stuff.

Rip It Up!

I’ve long searched for a way to easily rip my DVD’s to hard drive. The challenge has always been to find a decent balance between format, file size, compatibility and image quality. From AutoGK to DVD Decrypter, I’ve tried them all and finally think I’ve found the magic combination. In fact, I know I have, judging from the 586 episodes of tv-shows that I’ve ripped to drive and that play beautifully on my Xbox 360 and HDTV.

The key lies in the combined efforts of two programs: DVD43 and Handbrake.

DVD43 is like a free version of AnyDVD. Sure, it’s no longer being updated so you might have some issues with more recent forms of copy protection. It also doesn’t support HD (not that I know of anyway) but hey, it’s free so how can you hate it? DVD43 is essential in breaking through the layer of copy protection present on most commercial DVD’s (although you’d be surprised how many actually don’t have any form of copy protection at all).

Once you’ve got DVD43, you’ll need Handbrake, a free program originally coded for the Mac that has recently recieved a very decent Windows GUI. Handbrake does the actual ripping and it’s here where you’ll do most of the tinkering with settings. I’ve presented below my favorite presets. These were reached after a good two days of testing with a variety of DVD’s. A good tip when testing out your settings is to only rip a small chapter of the tv-show or movie. This saves a lot of time and allows you to quickly swap between different presets.

In general I rip to a MP4 file. This plays great on my Xbox 360, in iTunes, VLC, Media Player Classic, etc. I’d advise turning on Large File Size only when ripping movies. I don’t own a 5G iPod and don’t want to post it on the web, so I’ll just leave those unchecked

I generally like to set the resolution manually: 768*576 for 4:3 shows and 1024*576 for 16:9 shows. If you’d rather let Handbrake handle resolution and aspect ratio, just set this option to Strict.

I always pick H.264. I believe it is the jack of all trades of current video formats. I also like to set the bitrate manually. For tv-shows I default to 2000 kbps. Movies vary based on the original bitrate at which the movie was encoded. A quick Google Search will be sufficient in finding that out. Once again, if you don’t want to do this yourself, just set the quality slider to anything around 70% and you’ll be fine. The higher the bitrate, the bigger the file size and the longer the encoding. I always enable 2-pass encoding and turn off turbo first pass. I let Handbrake take it’s time and let it fully analyse the DVD before encoding it. If you want to have faster encodings, I’d turn on the turbo option but keep 2-pass encoding. I personally do notice a difference in quality between just one and two passes.

All other options I leave untouched. Audio defaults to AAC 160kbps Dolby Pro Logic II. You can usually set audio tracks to auto unless you want a specific track to be embedded in the ripped file. I also generally don’t rip with subtitles but if you want, you can. Be warned however that the subtitles will be permanently embedded in the file. Once the DVD is ripped I import it into iTunes, and use that to edit things like episode name, number, season, etc. The final result is a file that looks great on an HDTV especially with HDMI upscaling helping along.

I know ripping DVD’s is still a bit of a legal gray zone, but as long as you don’t post it to torrent sites, you should be fine. Also, even with fast multicore computers, ripping will always take a while. Be patient, once the media has been freed from it’s optical prison, you’ll be more than happy.

Waaaaagh!!

Relic Entertainment recently released the beta of Dawn Of War 2, the wildly anticipated sequel to Dawn of War to those who purchased the Soulstorm expansion. As a huge fan of the original game, it’s expansions and recently Warhammer 40000 in general, how could I not check it out ? If you’re keen to check it out yourself but don’t own Soulstorm, don’t worry: Relic intends to open up the beta to everyone on the 28th of January.

One thing that I’ve been asking myself ever since Relic announced DOW 2 is how much of the original DOW-style gameplay would remain and how much of Company Of Heroes (Relic’s other hit franchise) would seep in. Well, quite a lot as it turns out. The traditional DOW gameplay is largely gone. The days of charging across the battlefield with a hundred heavily armed and armoured space marines backed by a small army of dreadnoughts and landspeeders are over. DOW2 puts a lot more emphasis on small squads of well specialised soldiers, even more so than COH did. You also have more options for squad customisation. Base building is (mostly) gone. Occasionally you’ll get to deploy a turret or a rally point but that’s about it. You have one central stronghold that produces all units, researches all technologies and if you lose it, it’s game over. The Tyrannids, DOW2’s new race, are really cool and bizarre. They’re very Zerg like (although technically Blizzard copied Warhammer and not the other way around). They utilise burrowing techniques, sneak attacks, poison and psychic powers and have some very nasty advanced units.

Graphically the game is stunning. The Essence 2.0 engine is a marvel, the terrain looks great and the detail on the units is even higher than in Company Of Heroes. The physics system is still there, making sure that debris flies around realistically. The unit animations, the much lauded feature of the original Dawn Of War still look great with added detail and better movements. The sound departement has also been well catered too. Unit sounds are great, the explosions sound realistic. The heavy bolter guns sound a bit like German MG42’s, but you can hardly blame Relic for that now can you ?

Despite all these changes, it still feels like a really solid game. Relic seems to have merged the gameplay of DOW with COH while staying faithful to the Warhammer 40000 universe. The multiplayer options will please a lot of people and I personally can’t wait for the full singleplayer campaign, which seems to carry on from Dark Crusade with captain Davian Thule, scarred by the Necron Lord of Kronus, in a central role. I’m a bit miffed that neither the Tau or Chaos Space Marines make an appearance, but if I know Relic, they already have several expansions in the pipeline.

If you loved Dawn Of War, Company of Heroes or you’re a Warhammer fanatic, you owe it to yourself to check this beta out. It features online play as well as skirmish against AI’s on 2 and 6 player maps. As I mentioned, Soulstorm owners can get it now (through Steam), others will have to wait until the 28th while the full game should be out on PC on February 19 (North America) and February 20 (EU)

The Waaaaagh!! is coming people, don’t miss it.

Here’s Johnny!

After a good two months of RL interfering, I can finally get back to blogging. A lot of things have happened since my last blogpost: Obama got inaugurated, UGO took over 1UP and canned EGM, the Windows 7 Beta launched, Palm announced the Pre and almost every major technology company (apart from Apple and Google) is suffering from losses and layoffs.

This post is like pre-show rundown: I’ll briefly touch on some things that I’ll discuss on the blog in the next week or two.

I’ve downloaded and purchased a couple of games of XBLA that I haven’t really gotten into yet (Maw, Kingdom For Keflings, etc.). I bought a lot of books and am working my way through them. Goodreads has been a great way to create an online virtual bookshelf to keep track of things. I’ve got a lot of movies to watch both in theaters and on DVD, some that are long overdue, so expect a lot of that soon.

I’ve also started to rip my dvd-collection onto harddrive so I can watch it on my TV via XBOX 360. I’d like to share my programs, methods and settings about that in the future.

So lot of things and soon. Can’t wait!

Games For Windows = Poop

My experience with GFW LIVE has been in a word: awful. I know Microsoft has been criticised a lot on this subject. Games For Windows was supposed to herald a great PC gaming revolution and dissapointed both consumers and press upon it’s release. There was the issue of paid Gold subscriptions on PC and the mostly unfulfilled promise of crossplatform play. Microsoft has responded by revamping the service, and releasing a desktop client. I myself had zero experience with the online part of the service but had already suffered through problems with the game “The Witcher” which despite GFW certifaction, was a buggy unstable mess. I soon encountered the many problems of the LIVE end of the service when I started playing Fallout 3 and GTA IV for PC.

The Fallout 3 experience wasn’t even that bad. GFW LIVE just didn’t work. Everytime I tried downloading my LIVE profile, I got the same meaningless error message. I spent some time trying to resolve this issue, turning off firewalls, checking out port settings. I eventually gave up since lack of a LIVE connection didn’t impact the game that much. Sure I’d miss out on achievements but at least I could play the game.

GTA IV however is where things completely fell apart. Take out GTA IV’s inherent issues (the unoptimized engine, the fact that you have to login to two services and authenticate your game with a third before you can even begin playing) and you still have one major problem. You see, if GFW Live isn’t enabled you can’t save your game. Let me say that again: you CAN’T SAVE YOUR GAME ! Who made this incredibly idiotic decision ? So just because LIVE doesn’t work, my gameplay experience is crippled? Bad choice Microsoft.

I was thus forced to make a new offline LIVE profile to even get the game running. Meanwhile I spent hours checking out routers settings, firewall settings, etc in order to resolve this issue. I finally stumbled on a solution at the wonderful Steam forums, which I will reproduce here.

1. Open an elevated command prompt (Start Orb > type cmd in the start search box and press ctrl+shift+enter)
2. Type ‘netsh winsock reset’
3. Reboot your PC.
4. Open an elevated command prompt
5. Type ‘netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt’
6. Reboot your PC.
7. Start the game, sign into Live.

Imagine if you’re a run of the mill gamer, who might not have any great amount of technical knowledge. You will never figure this out. You’ll end up hating the game, not because of the game itself but because of the poorly thought out services upon which the game relies. The example of GTA IV represents everything that is wrong with PC gaming today. Here we have a case where stringent DRM is combined with high system requirements and where the  game’s online services are sub par. 

Lucky for Rockstar and Microsoft that GTA IV is such a damn good game, even if it’s flaws are accentuated on the PC version.

Bethesda VS EA

You know it’s funny. This blogpost was originally going to be a rant on the crappyness of Red Alert 3 and an ode to Fallout 3 and suddenly we have a case of role-reversal. How did that happen? Read on…

I bought Fallout 3 and RA3 within two days of each other. I started with Fallout 3, took a break to get a taste of RA3, was horrified, went back to Fallout 3, got dissapointed, went back to RA3 and had a blast. I know, no one was more surprised than myself. But I think I’ve got it figured out.

You see RA3 never tries to be revolutionary. It is what it is: a very decent, well-oiled RTS with corny cutscenes, over the top units, decent graphics and a potent multiplayer aspect. Fallout 3 on the other hand (like any Bethesda game in the last couple of years) tries to be a vast open world shooter/RPG with killer graphics and a gripping storyline and just fails.

Fallout 3 seems great on the outset, but just like Oblivion, the more time you spend with it, the more you discover lots of tiny flaws that just keep you from playing more.

To name but a few: the engine (Gamebryo) hasn’t gotten any stabler, the voice-cast, while expanded, is still way to limited (Bethesda should take a page out of Bioware’s book), quest progression is buggy, the NPC AI more than often sends random characters into the wild and usually to their deaths, the conversation system is archaic and often assumes you did something in the game that in actuality you skipped, etc, etc. Anyone of these on their own wouldn’t be a problem, but put them all together and you’ve got issues.

That being said, this isn’t a bad game. The story is decent, there are a few genuinely cool moments (blowing up Megaton anyone ?) and the music and in-game radio stations are great. The few notable voice actors (Liam Neeson and Malcom McDowel) deliver their lines well and the item system and Pip-Boy interface just work. This game has also gotten me excited about playing Fallout 1 & 2 via GOG.com in the future. I like the setting, the atmosphere, the ambiance.

Red Alert 3 is a completely different beast. Sure it has it’s flaws: the cutscenes (particularly those in the Allied campaign) are cheesy and just bad, the game has gone as far from the C&C franchise and storyline as it possible can, it rehashes quite a bit from previous Red Alert titles and the graphics, while decent, don’t blow you out of the water. The toll this game takes on your pc is also way too big for the graphics you get in return. It doesn’t look all that different from C&C 3, but while I can run Tiberium Wars at max settings, RA3 forces me to turn a couple of things down.

Yet you forgive all that when you get into the actual game. The co-op, even when playing with an AI, really works quite well, the units are a lot of fun (King Oni’s rule) and the support powers and superweapons are just plain cool. How often can you send a squadron of aircraft kamikaze-style into an enemy factory, or how amazing is dropping a satellite on enemy troops?

I guess what I’m trying to say, is that these are two very different games, with very different goals and made for very different players. Neither is bad but both have their flaws. It’s up to you to decide which ones you’ll forgive.