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sheeplass and I went down to the Willamette Valley in Oregon for a wine-tasting tour & to see the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, home of the Spruce Goose. It was a fun little weekend trip. The wine tasting tour focused mainly on Pinot Noir -- as that's what's primarily grown in the Willamette Valley -- so while there were certainly some good things we didn't discover any new favorites (Pinot Noir isn't a favorite for either of us.) The Spruce Goose is... very large, being the size of a 747 only made of wood. It looks even bigger than it is, since the wings stick straight out rather than being sloped back like most modern aircraft; it towers over everything in the entire museum, which looks to have been built around it.
We also had a very interesting dinner at The Joel Palmer House, a restaurant specializing in wild mushrooms. There were various mushrooms in everything served, including dessert (candy cap mushrooms taste amazingly like maple syrup.) There was wild mushroom soup, a savory wild mushroom tart, scallops over mushroom pasta, pork tenderloin with chanterelles, and various other mushroomy goodness. I recommend it highly if you really like mushrooms -- and advise you to go elsewhere if you don't. :-)
This last weekend, I spent a lot of time hacking my classic Xbox. The old Xbox (i.e. not the 360 that's currently sold) is a great platform for all sorts of things; it's very cheap (easily under $50 on eBay), has 720p HDTV output (component only, no HDMI), has an Ethernet port and Internet capabilities, and is a well-understood system, being 8 years old at this point. Now, Microsoft designed it so that you can't do anything with it but play Xbox games and watch DVDs; however, it's old enough that many holes have been found in the security. You can (using a PC) craft saved game files for Mechassault, Splinter Cell, or a variety of other games with known bugs that will allow you to rewrite the boot sequence of the Xbox to start up something other than Microsoft's Xbox software.
I have mine set up to start a dashboard called UnleashX, which is a rudimentary app with two major functions -- a menu for running programs off the Xbox's hard disk, and an FTP server so that you can read and write the Xbox's hard disk from a PC. It's this last feature which lets you install whatever you want on the Xbox.
Currently I have three things installed on mine -- one is XBMC, the same media center software we use on our media center PC, which is far better than any commercial media-center device I've found. This lets us play all our TV, movies, etc. over the network (from the 2.25 TB NAS upstairs) and is why we haven't actually bothered to hook up cable. The second is a copy of SNES9x X, which is a Super Nintendo emulator, along with a few dozen games. Sure, they never made Super Mario Brothers for the Xbox, but I can play it anyway. For people likesheeplass and I who grew up as nerds, we like having access to all the games of our youth. (There are also emulators for basically every game system up to the PlayStation available; the SNES one is just the only one I've installed. Systems after the PlayStation are too powerful for the little classic Xbox to emulate; I'd need to run those on a real PC.) And finally, I have a copy of StepMania 4.0, which is an open-source version of Dance Dance Revolution. This was actually the hardest thing to get; while it's open-source, the license agreement for the XDK (the app that allows you to build Xbox applications from source) forbids distributing binaries, and so I couldn't find a binary copy of it from any of the usual places. (Technically XBMC and SNES 9x X have the same legal issues, but they're more popular and haven't been updated in a long time, so copies are pretty widely distributed.) I easily found binaries of StepMania 3.9, but it tended to crash my Xbox; after much searching, I finally found binaries on a site in Brazil written entirely in Portuguese. So I downloaded those, replaced the localization files with ones from an English copy of the PC version of StepMania 4.0, and stuck that on the Xbox. This worked.
As time goes on, I get more and more fond of open platforms. There's just so much fun stuff you can do with all this hardware when you're able to run arbitrary code on it. The device I've turned my Xbox into now has capabilities that no device sold has -- you can't buy a machine that works as a networked media center and plays games for a dozen old consoles and combines the features of half a dozen arcade games into one game. Nobody sells that, partially because of licensing issues and partially because of the admittedly niche demand for it. The licensing issues are frustrating, because it's not like Nintendo or Sega are making any money off of SNES and Genesis games anymore -- they haven't been for sale for a decade.
I really like my iPhone, but the closed nature of the platform sucks. There are so many good applications that can't run because Apple doesn't approve of them, and when you buy an iPhone, you own the hardware but Apple owns all the software on it and you're not allowed to mess with it. Plus, iTunes is one of the worst applications ever (is there any software as terrible as the software Apple writes for Windows?) and is hostile to any variation on its normal usage patterns. (Want to store your music on one computer but sync it to your phone on another? Too bad. Want to move your music library? No, you get to rebuild a new one. Want to use a file format other than the ones the iTunes Music Store uses? Sorry, not supported.) Even when you can get it to do something unusual, it struggles against you every step of the way, and it also just doesn't work very well (iTunes running causes all power management functions on the computer to fail, for instance.)
On the bright side, I've discovered that the latest version of MediaMonkey will successfully sync with an iPhone 3GS with the latest firmware, so I don't have to use iTunes for anything anymore. It does require iTunes to be installed (it hooks some of its DLLs), but you don't have to have any part of it running. The one drawback is that whenever Apple updates the iPhone firmware, you have to wait for MediaMonkey to update (to hack around whatever new protection Apple has added) before upgrading your phone firmware.
While I'm not much interested in having a Verizon Droid myself (call me when Android 3.0 comes out; they're making good progress), I'm very happy about their ad campaign. They're promoting openness as a feature, thus calling attention to Apple's restrictive practices. If customers actually demand open platforms, companies will provide them. However, it's very difficult to balance openness with a consistent, usable user interface -- and right now there's a lot more demand for the latter than the former. People like me are willing to put up with the usability issues of things like Linux in order to have a system that does precisely what we want; most people are not. The trick is to make a system that's very usable for mainline scenarios while not shutting people out of the ability to hack the platform if they want to. However, that trick costs time and money, and so unless customers are asking for it, companies aren't going to provide it.
On a mostly unrelated note, this weekend I finally completed Dragon Age: Origins. BioWare's record remains unbroken -- like Blizzard, they have never made a bad game. It was a true old-school RPG in the tradition of the Baldur's Gate games, with difficult tactical combat and a complex story with choices that matter. This said, it was still a story-based RPG, not a sandbox game like Morrowind, Oblivion, or Fallout 3 -- while they keep railroading to a minimum, you can't choose to ignore the plot and become a bandit or something. You're a Heroic Gray Warden whether you want to be or not (though you can be a pretty ruthless and nasty one if you want to be.) The game was really a perfect example of its type -- if you like this sort of game, you'll love DA:O, and if you don't, you won't. I have another post in me about the lore of the game, but I'm going to make that one separately from this one as it's going to be very uninteresting to people who haven't played it. :-) I'm very much looking forward to BioWare's next games -- Mass Effect 2 in February, then Star Wars: The Old Republic (an MMO) later in 2010.
Returning to the topic of open platforms for a moment, though I bought Dragon Age: Origins, I actually still (weeks later) can't play the copy I bought. There's some kind of issue with their copy protection/digital rights management system affecting my account; in my legitimate copy of the game, I can't load any saved games without getting an error of "This saved game contains premium content for which you do not have a license." Their tech support has been totally useless, sending me irrelevant boilerplate responses without investigating the problem. Luckily, I was able to download a cracked pirate copy off the Internet in a couple of hours, only two days after the game came out, which installed easily and without issue and doesn't have any of these problems. What's wrong with this picture? When will game companies realize that copy protection inconveniences legitimate users while pirates never even encounter it, since the pirate copies come with it all stripped out anyway?
sheeplass and I went down to the Willamette Valley in Oregon for a wine-tasting tour & to see the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, home of the Spruce Goose. It was a fun little weekend trip. The wine tasting tour focused mainly on Pinot Noir -- as that's what's primarily grown in the Willamette Valley -- so while there were certainly some good things we didn't discover any new favorites (Pinot Noir isn't a favorite for either of us.) The Spruce Goose is... very large, being the size of a 747 only made of wood. It looks even bigger than it is, since the wings stick straight out rather than being sloped back like most modern aircraft; it towers over everything in the entire museum, which looks to have been built around it.We also had a very interesting dinner at The Joel Palmer House, a restaurant specializing in wild mushrooms. There were various mushrooms in everything served, including dessert (candy cap mushrooms taste amazingly like maple syrup.) There was wild mushroom soup, a savory wild mushroom tart, scallops over mushroom pasta, pork tenderloin with chanterelles, and various other mushroomy goodness. I recommend it highly if you really like mushrooms -- and advise you to go elsewhere if you don't. :-)
This last weekend, I spent a lot of time hacking my classic Xbox. The old Xbox (i.e. not the 360 that's currently sold) is a great platform for all sorts of things; it's very cheap (easily under $50 on eBay), has 720p HDTV output (component only, no HDMI), has an Ethernet port and Internet capabilities, and is a well-understood system, being 8 years old at this point. Now, Microsoft designed it so that you can't do anything with it but play Xbox games and watch DVDs; however, it's old enough that many holes have been found in the security. You can (using a PC) craft saved game files for Mechassault, Splinter Cell, or a variety of other games with known bugs that will allow you to rewrite the boot sequence of the Xbox to start up something other than Microsoft's Xbox software.
I have mine set up to start a dashboard called UnleashX, which is a rudimentary app with two major functions -- a menu for running programs off the Xbox's hard disk, and an FTP server so that you can read and write the Xbox's hard disk from a PC. It's this last feature which lets you install whatever you want on the Xbox.
Currently I have three things installed on mine -- one is XBMC, the same media center software we use on our media center PC, which is far better than any commercial media-center device I've found. This lets us play all our TV, movies, etc. over the network (from the 2.25 TB NAS upstairs) and is why we haven't actually bothered to hook up cable. The second is a copy of SNES9x X, which is a Super Nintendo emulator, along with a few dozen games. Sure, they never made Super Mario Brothers for the Xbox, but I can play it anyway. For people like
sheeplass and I who grew up as nerds, we like having access to all the games of our youth. (There are also emulators for basically every game system up to the PlayStation available; the SNES one is just the only one I've installed. Systems after the PlayStation are too powerful for the little classic Xbox to emulate; I'd need to run those on a real PC.) And finally, I have a copy of StepMania 4.0, which is an open-source version of Dance Dance Revolution. This was actually the hardest thing to get; while it's open-source, the license agreement for the XDK (the app that allows you to build Xbox applications from source) forbids distributing binaries, and so I couldn't find a binary copy of it from any of the usual places. (Technically XBMC and SNES 9x X have the same legal issues, but they're more popular and haven't been updated in a long time, so copies are pretty widely distributed.) I easily found binaries of StepMania 3.9, but it tended to crash my Xbox; after much searching, I finally found binaries on a site in Brazil written entirely in Portuguese. So I downloaded those, replaced the localization files with ones from an English copy of the PC version of StepMania 4.0, and stuck that on the Xbox. This worked.As time goes on, I get more and more fond of open platforms. There's just so much fun stuff you can do with all this hardware when you're able to run arbitrary code on it. The device I've turned my Xbox into now has capabilities that no device sold has -- you can't buy a machine that works as a networked media center and plays games for a dozen old consoles and combines the features of half a dozen arcade games into one game. Nobody sells that, partially because of licensing issues and partially because of the admittedly niche demand for it. The licensing issues are frustrating, because it's not like Nintendo or Sega are making any money off of SNES and Genesis games anymore -- they haven't been for sale for a decade.
I really like my iPhone, but the closed nature of the platform sucks. There are so many good applications that can't run because Apple doesn't approve of them, and when you buy an iPhone, you own the hardware but Apple owns all the software on it and you're not allowed to mess with it. Plus, iTunes is one of the worst applications ever (is there any software as terrible as the software Apple writes for Windows?) and is hostile to any variation on its normal usage patterns. (Want to store your music on one computer but sync it to your phone on another? Too bad. Want to move your music library? No, you get to rebuild a new one. Want to use a file format other than the ones the iTunes Music Store uses? Sorry, not supported.) Even when you can get it to do something unusual, it struggles against you every step of the way, and it also just doesn't work very well (iTunes running causes all power management functions on the computer to fail, for instance.)
On the bright side, I've discovered that the latest version of MediaMonkey will successfully sync with an iPhone 3GS with the latest firmware, so I don't have to use iTunes for anything anymore. It does require iTunes to be installed (it hooks some of its DLLs), but you don't have to have any part of it running. The one drawback is that whenever Apple updates the iPhone firmware, you have to wait for MediaMonkey to update (to hack around whatever new protection Apple has added) before upgrading your phone firmware.
While I'm not much interested in having a Verizon Droid myself (call me when Android 3.0 comes out; they're making good progress), I'm very happy about their ad campaign. They're promoting openness as a feature, thus calling attention to Apple's restrictive practices. If customers actually demand open platforms, companies will provide them. However, it's very difficult to balance openness with a consistent, usable user interface -- and right now there's a lot more demand for the latter than the former. People like me are willing to put up with the usability issues of things like Linux in order to have a system that does precisely what we want; most people are not. The trick is to make a system that's very usable for mainline scenarios while not shutting people out of the ability to hack the platform if they want to. However, that trick costs time and money, and so unless customers are asking for it, companies aren't going to provide it.
On a mostly unrelated note, this weekend I finally completed Dragon Age: Origins. BioWare's record remains unbroken -- like Blizzard, they have never made a bad game. It was a true old-school RPG in the tradition of the Baldur's Gate games, with difficult tactical combat and a complex story with choices that matter. This said, it was still a story-based RPG, not a sandbox game like Morrowind, Oblivion, or Fallout 3 -- while they keep railroading to a minimum, you can't choose to ignore the plot and become a bandit or something. You're a Heroic Gray Warden whether you want to be or not (though you can be a pretty ruthless and nasty one if you want to be.) The game was really a perfect example of its type -- if you like this sort of game, you'll love DA:O, and if you don't, you won't. I have another post in me about the lore of the game, but I'm going to make that one separately from this one as it's going to be very uninteresting to people who haven't played it. :-) I'm very much looking forward to BioWare's next games -- Mass Effect 2 in February, then Star Wars: The Old Republic (an MMO) later in 2010.
Returning to the topic of open platforms for a moment, though I bought Dragon Age: Origins, I actually still (weeks later) can't play the copy I bought. There's some kind of issue with their copy protection/digital rights management system affecting my account; in my legitimate copy of the game, I can't load any saved games without getting an error of "This saved game contains premium content for which you do not have a license." Their tech support has been totally useless, sending me irrelevant boilerplate responses without investigating the problem. Luckily, I was able to download a cracked pirate copy off the Internet in a couple of hours, only two days after the game came out, which installed easily and without issue and doesn't have any of these problems. What's wrong with this picture? When will game companies realize that copy protection inconveniences legitimate users while pirates never even encounter it, since the pirate copies come with it all stripped out anyway?
