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  • lowmagnet 14:18 on 2009/09/26 Permalink  

    What I am playing 

    I’m currently playing Crysis for the first time. Holy. Fucking. Shit. This game is awesome. It’s still barely playable on a i7-920 with a GTX 295 card, but still. Wow. It plays well too. I thought it was eye-candy heavy — and it kinda is — but the gameplay is also solid. Except for the tank part. I’d rather do that part on foot, it was that terrible. The inside of the Core was beautiful, floating in zero G environment, avoiding the tough-as-nails alien blob people. Getting disorientated and turned around at every flick of the mouse. Very good stuff. Even on easy this game is hard to play. I kinda blame my keyboard for this because I’m constantly missing keys due to its flatness. I’ll need to upgrade soon.

    Fallout 3 in SLI looks great, and plays rather well. Everything is still brownish green though, can’t be helped. Well I’ve installed mods for it before (realistic light mods) that help, but meh. The whole game seems quite compute-limited. I hope the folks at Havok port to OpenCL.

    Batman Arkham Asylum is great. 2560×1600 at 77 fps when I put my 8800 GT in the second PCI-E slot and enable PhysX on it. Unfortunately, some clod decided that cut scenes should be done on pre-render, whether hardware can support it or not. The result? Not so good on PC. On PS3, it’s rendered in 1080p, so there is no change in quality. The steam version (free with nVidia purchase) looks muddy when switching over. Could have saved a lot of disk space by doing it in-game. There’s a bunch of places where they do the renders in-game, and it looks great. Killer Croc at the beginning is one such place. All of the textures are in memory, so I don’t see why only half the scenes are pre-rendered. Probably cutting corners to meet a quarterly sales deadline. Shame, really.

     

  • lowmagnet 08:46 on 2009/09/15 Permalink  

    This. 

    i7-920, 1200W, GTX 295

    i7-920, 1200W, GTX 295

     

  • lowmagnet 19:33 on 2009/08/26 Permalink  

    Friday 

    Apple releases snow leopards and BMW gives more detail of their Vision EfficientDynamics concept.

     

  • lowmagnet 08:31 on 2009/08/26 Permalink  

    Gavin Tracey 

    My nephew, Gavin Tracey:

    cutie pie

    cutie pie

     

  • lowmagnet 08:00 on 2009/08/24 Permalink  

    I am an uncle 

    Last night, my sister Heidi delivered a bouncing baby boy, Gavin. He is my first nephew. Congratulations to her and my brother in law, Tyler.

     

  • lowmagnet 19:41 on 2009/08/19 Permalink  

    Mint budgeting 

    I don’t like Mint’s new ‘budgeting’ tools. If you have something that occurs twice annually it’s really not too easy to budget for it using their tool.

    First mint assumes that if you paid 188 for home insurance that it’s 32 a month for home insurance. That’s based on Mint’s faulty assumptions of how often bills come due and attempts at intelligence.

    First, Mint looks backward six months instead of 13 to find the last similar payment to a similar payee it seems. Then it compounds the error if it finds none and tries to divide the amount of a lump-sum payment to payee by dividing the value of said lump sum by 6. This is a number completely unsupported by any sort of fact.

    It reminds me of the alerts on my iPhone that this month I spent 500 on mortgage, and that I usually spend 300. No, I spent around 800 on mortgage, and I fairly consistently spend 800 on mortgage. Again, faulty logic.

    Car insurance I may pay 400 every 6 months, so I tell Mint I want to budget 400 every six months. so I tell mint 400 and every 6 months. My last was in August (this month, of course) and it turns the first number (400 a month, wtf? Some people do pay their bill when it comes due to avoid $6/mo fees from their insurer) into 66 a month which is good so far. I guess you have to put it in ‘rollover’ budget to collect the money till it hits 400 at 6 months and then you actually accrue the cost on your books.

    But my problem with the whole mess is this: what is the point? I could get my budget down to one top level category at a time like “household” which includes mortgage or rent, home insurance if paid individually, maintenance fees, etc. but I don’t really see the point in going through the effort because that’s basically in an umbrella I’d rather call “fixed costs”.

    Except you can’t combine all of your fixed costs because they are in different categories at the top level and MINT WON’T LET YOU DO THAT. You can click little pluses next to sub-categories, but you can’t combine them.

    Food and dining is nice, but I want to be able to separate lunches from dinners out. I want to separate groceries for eating in at the office versus groceries for home. I don’t care how much my mortgage is each month and if I “Nail” that budget (make it red because I’m at the spending limit) because THAT’S NOT WHAT BUDGETS ARE FOR ARGH.

    In fact this budgeting paradigm is so pointless. You have fixed costs (which you can negotiate down) and you have variable costs which you can adjust habits to bring down. Budgeting is a way of keeping the latter down because you can’t really help the former.

    However, I’d like to “budget for” future events, like my next tax bill on my car, my next insurance bill for same car, my annual condo policy premium, etc. I don’t want these charges “pantsing” me. For this, I have to rely on other tools and Mint falls down.

     

  • lowmagnet 21:49 on 2009/08/15 Permalink  

    Messing around with blinkies 

    I created this little contraption today. I was messing around with addressing pins in the Arduino GUI when I decided that I wanted to make a CPU monitor. I took a trip to Shackville and picked up 8x White 25mA 3.3V LEDs, and set them up to pull off of pins for their bread.

    I then wrote a few void functions to rapidly slam the register down with the appropriate ones and zeros, and what we have as a result is a 8-segment, constantly-lit (using persistence of vision) display of system load.

    Bright LEDs x 8

    Bright LEDs x 8

    Here we are at about 50-ish percent of my CPUs. (2/4 CPUs lit up)

    The project lit up

    The project lit up

    If anyone is interested in the source code for either the perl ‘vomiting’ script or the sketch, let me know.

     

  • lowmagnet 17:36 on 2009/08/12 Permalink  

    Finished reading Atlas Shrugged… 

    Yes, including the tl;dr speech of John Galt. At least I’ll be distracted less now, wanting to get back to the book. I’m reading a much drier non-fiction book, also by Ayn Rand called “Capitalism”. I’ll probably read the Fountainhead shortly, but that depends on how things go with this book and whether pre-calc hits the ground running or not.

     

  • lowmagnet 16:52 on 2009/08/05 Permalink  

    TV-B-Gone 

    My first Adafruit project, a TV-B-Gone. Pic later. I did make a video:

    Cordi meowed a lot. Note to self: feed cat, then make video.

     

  • lowmagnet 19:42 on 2009/08/02 Permalink  

    Would you kindly? 

    I’m playing through Bioshock again. I forgot how good this game is, and I’m playing it at 1080p. I’d push it to 2560×1600, but I don’t think my system would like me very much if I did.

    I forgot about how beautiful the environments are too. Man  oh man is the Unreal engine pretty. It reminds me of playing the original Unreal and seeing a reflction in a game for the first time. It helps that I’m running Vista x64 with DX10, I suppose.

    The scare moments are still great fun. Like in the dentist’s office when you’re looking at a desk and you turn around and there’s a thuggish splicer waiting for you. good stuff.

     

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