Archive for the ‘ 2012 ’ Category

A Day for Stalemates

Author: JoshMiller

Jan 4

So it’s nearing the end of my Vacation Week.  I’ve done quite a bit this week, Tina isn’t feeling too great, so I essentially did nothing “productive” today.  Productive being relatively speaking.

I did finish up Starcraft II.  The game is alright, though the ending is pretty meh.  I kind of hate how none of the choices you make during the game really affect anything plot wise.  Also, Blizzard seems to think the Betrayal of Kerrigan by Mensk is like the greatest piece of storytelling ever because the whole Starcraft universe seems to revolve around this moment.

I’m not planning to do a review or anything, not here, I have a blog for that.  I really should decide what I want to do with Lameazoid.  On one hand, I am tired of writing about video games.  I could use a “Brand reboot” which I sort of tried with ReadySetGeek.  RSG isn’t a failure or anything, it just… isn’t all that different.  I still like the idea fo doing themed monthly PDF Zines, an idea I’ve been kicking for ages, but why?  Why, in an age when that style of distribution is dying.

But then, when have I ever given a shit about how receptive anyone is to my ideas and projects.  I pretty much just do all of this online crap because I enjoy it, when I stop enjoying it, it just doesn’t get done.

Anyway, I’m not going to bitch about all that.   I’m also tired of complaining about my lack of desire to work on all of my old projects anymore.

Back on Starcraft, while I used to play Starcraft 1 online quite a bit, I’ve only played one competitive match so far against my son.  He reminded me why I never bother playing against people, I am not a competitive person.  It’s not that I am incapable, it’s more than, I don’t care about “winning”, for the most part.  SC2 is just one example of this.  We played, 1v1, both of us Terrans.  I built a little base, build a little defense by my chokepoint entrance (I know my son well enough that I know he doesn’t know crap about how to “Flank”.  I started expanding a bit, then he shows up with some marines and tanks. 

He pretty much wipes out most of my main base, though I lifted off my buildings making his Tanks useless.  I then proceeded to focus on building some quick air, the idea being “He’s going for tanks, I can crush him with a hand full of air units”.  I flanked around with my air, noticing though that he had several of the large Thor Walkers wandering his base already.  I flanked around back like I prefer to do, crush the SCV force and cripple him, but his Thors killed my air.

Fifteen or twenty minute later, he wiped me out.

Which brings up another point about my play style in a lot of games.  I don’t care about winning much, but I don’t like to lose, and I won’t surrender.  My son was complaining from the other room that I wouldn’t “just surrender already”.

Nope, I kept running my SCVs and Command Centers around the map trying to rebuild in the obscure corners.  I’d rather push it out as long as possible or into a stalemate before I surrender.

I’m reminded of a most hilarious Star Wars CCG match I played in college.  A buddy of mine who also played kept bragging about how strong his imperial army was and how many Star Destroyers he had.  I hadn’t played in years but I took out my cards and built a deck.  I didn’t build a deck to kill Star Destroyers, I build a deck centered around Jawas.  I don’t recall the card combo, but essentially, when my Jawas were killed, they would go to a special discard pile, then, each turn, I could pull them back out and redeploy them.  I had essentially created an infinite loop of unkillable Jawas.  I had no effective means of dealing damage to his forces, but he had no effective means of dealing damage to me, since the rules essentially required he kill my Jawas before me, and the Jawa presence prevented a “Force Drain” attack on my (the player’s) life.

Something to that effect. 

This match lasted a while and I think eventually we ended up just going off to do something else.

A stalemate.

I had a similar experience with Magic the Gathering once.  My force had been crippled and the other two players were going at each other while I laid out land after land.  Eventually I drew a card which dealt X damage to all players and monsters, where X is the number of lands.   I wiped out everyone and everything, including myself.

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Filed under: 2012, Hobbies, Personal Life | Tagged as: , , , , ,

Edited versus UnEdited Music

Author: JoshMiller

Dec 27

I came across this interesting article about Google Play’s new Match service.  It seems that when matching your library, Google Play will substitute the edited version of a song in place of an explicit version.  Now, my guess, would be that the service simply can’t easily distinguish between edited and not edited.  It can’t really match based on TD3 tags or file names, since those are easily manipulated.  You could easily create a bunch of blank files, give them data of real songs, and then try to match them for free music.

The effective way to "match" a song in a sort of general description would be…

Google has a library of master tracks that have been hashed into some sort of searchable string of data.  Say, they convert the wave elements into a bunch of long strings of numbers.  To match, it takes each track you own, then samples a partial section of it, say, 30 seconds, then converts it using the same algorithm as it’s master tracks, then compares this result across it’s master list.

For speed it doesn’t compare the entire track.  If it has a close match, it returns the master track as the Matched file in your library.  Even a live version of a track would have a different hashed out data value, since it will have background noise such as cheering, and may have a slightly hollower "live" track.  Explicit versus censored, would likely fall within some "margin of error" however, since they would essentially be identical, minus a word here or there. 

This margin of error is necessary tot he algorithm since say, you had a track ripped from a CD with a scratch, there would possibly be a short glitch in an otherwise perfect MP3.  That sort of thing.

Basically, it’s a side effect of the scan process, not an explicit censorship by Google.

What’s kind of lame, and this has been my complain on Amazon, where I buy all of my music, for a while.  why not give me BOTH versions of the track.  If there is an explicit version available, give me the option to choose which one I want.  I have mistakenly bought the edited version of albums on Amazon before, which irritates me to no end, but I also would love to have access tot he edited music so I can let my kids listen to tracks they enjoy.

There is zero reason this is even an issue.  It would be a simple matter to link the two otherwise identical tracks on a file/license level.

Hell, even better, if the track itself could know the difference.  It’s definitely a feature that needs to be in whatever file format eventually replaces MP3 (if any).  Allow the user (or parents) to turn on the filter, and the tracks all just play the edited version automatically.  Turn off the filter, and the normal version plays, in the same file.  I hear that some BluRay discs have this option built in for movies and it would be an easy flag to build into future file formats.

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Filed under: 2012, Copyright and You, Music | Tagged as: , , , ,

Scattered Furniture

Author: JoshMiller

Dec 12

So, I didn’t start documenting this initially and I wish I had.  I frequent quite a wide variety of resale and second hand shops over a pretty wide area.  I noticed something totally bizarre and I wish I knew the whole story, because I’m sure there is one.

To some extent, it starts with this small dresser, which belongs to my sister in law.  It’s an off white gold trimmed dresser, nothing super special.  We took it into the local ship to sell.

The thing is, this shop already has three other pieces of the "set".  There are three additional, matching pieces of furniture, same off white color, same gold trim, same style, none of the four pieces the same piece.

So we’re up to four.

IMAG1732

The fourth is a tiered shelf unit, which I didn’t see when I got around to taking these photos, so it may have sold.  If I catch it again, I’ll be sure to add it.

I later found, in this same shop, a fifth item of the set.

I should probably add that my sister in law, who owns the original piece, is not originally from anywhere near where I live.

Later, while Tina was at a craft show, 30-40 miles away, at the shop hosting the sale, I found three more pieces of this set.  Up to EIGHT.

IMAG1592

Here is a Ninth piece that I found in another room in the same building.

As I mentioned, I didn’t even start documenting this until I started noticing the trend.  I have seen at least 2-3 more pieces of this same set at 2-3 other second hand shops, all 30+ miles away from the nearest other sighting…

… and they are all different items…

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Filed under: 2012, Local News, Photography | Tagged as: , , ,

Letting Go of Local… Sort Of…

Author: JoshMiller

Dec 11

So, baby steps here… Baby steps…

I am more and more making a concerted effort to move myself "to the cloud".  Or more accurately, I’m trying really hard to destroy the death grip that I have on a crapload of "legacy files" and the death grip these files have on me.

Admittedly, I am somewhat inspired by Paul Thurrott and his similar push.  It is something I have wanted to do for a while, and something that needs to be done.  At this point, I operate on three devices, I have family that use two more, I plan to get a Tablet in the near future that will raise this number by one.  I have peripheral family that are getting more online, or in my in law’s case, recently getting a PC for the first time ever.

The point is, I need my data to be more easily accessible and less tied to me and my house.  I talked a bit about one step on this last time, with Carbonite versus Skydrive.  Carbonite is nice, it’s just not super accessible or friendly.  With Skydrive, I can share my photos easily with my parents or my inlaws or whomever I want, yet still keep them private.

I’ve been taking photos since 2006 for the family, I’m halfway through 2006 uploading them.  The hurdle on this starts up soon however as the file size quite literally explodes in 2010 when I got my Pentax K7, the average yearly size has been 2-4Gb, from 2012-2012, it’s 15+Gb.

Which is part of the letting go process.  It’s not as bad in 2012 because I adjusted the settings on my camera to not be quite so huge.  Sure, taking 4000+ by 3000+ photos is great, but do I really need that much resolution?  Sure, occasionally it’s great, but for the most part, 2000-2500 is a good max resolution (on the long side).  Hell anything I take for Tina’s Etsy/Ebay/Facebook has to be shrunk down anyway because at least one of those services only supports 1500 max resolution.

So I’ve been downsizing a lot of these old photos, which significantly reduces the drive space foot print.

I’m also doing something else, something a bit more extreme.  In cases of "non critical" items, I’m flat out deleting the local copies.  I have a folder of photos, taken on my phone, for the Figure of the Day blog that I no longer run.  These photos are also "archived" on Lameazoid.com, so there’s that.  None of them are spectacular, so if I lost them somehow, I am not really out anything.  So I’m putting them up into the Cloud, and deleting the local copy.

It’s not a huge space savings, but when I do this a lot, it adds up.  I’m doing this with a lot of my toy photos.  It’s sort of like… testing the water.  A lot of these are scrub shots anyway where I picked one to crop and use out of 4 or 5, and the "good" ones are on Flickr anyway.  Even if I lost the copies on Flickr and Skydrive, I still own the toy.  On a side note, I’m actually also deleting a lot of the scrub copies and uncropped originals.

The point is, why do I need these?  What am I going to do with these?  If for some reason I really need a "better" iteration than the cropped and adjusted copy I’m using on the blog/Flickr, I can just take a new, better photo.  Keeping this does me no good. 

It’s just… digital baggage. 

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Filed under: 2012, Internet and the Cloud, Photography, Technology | Tagged as: , , , ,

Rethinking my Backup Solution

Author: JoshMiller

Oct 25

Several years ago, I had a hard drive crap out on me.  I’ve become kind of a Ninja when it comes to data recovery but sometimes there is just nothing that can be done.

I lost some files.  Irritatingly, the hardest hit area was my “personal files” archive of things I have personally created from the past… forever.  Stuff that was somewhat irreplaceable, of course.  It couldn’t have just crushed my Steam Directory or something i could easily download.  Even more irritating is I managed to recover files from the ruins, but they were often corrupted phantom files.  I still come across files I thought I had that no longer load or work.

My wife was, of course, kind of miffed about losing photos.  We had some extra copies of some of them in her Creative Memories photo program, so i could at least recover some of the lost files from that repository, but there were some losses.

So around that time, I signed up for a Carbonite subscription.  Also, no, this is not a Carbonite commercial, kind of the opposite actually.  It took forever but I got all my files uploaded and $60 a year isn’t awful for “peace of mind”.

This was not perfect however.  I have what is best classified as “A shitload” of data.  I did pick and choose a bit, I can redownload some files, or reinstall some programs, but I think when all was said and done I was pushing something like 500 gigs up to Carbonite.  Hey, it’s Unlimited storage so I may as well go nuts.  I did priorities this however.  I added the Photos folder, let it finish, then added more, that sort of thing.

Having all of these files means they are spread out over multiple drives in my computer.  This works fine, Carbonite only rejects network drives (and maybe USB drives).  Originally I had a 1 TB drive split into 3 drive partitions of equal size.  Eventually I outgrew this storage and added a 2 TB drive for a total of 3 TB of storage.  This was where my first problem came in with Carbonite.

I anticipated issues here.  I planned out and took precautions to help alleviate these issues.  My three partitions were E:, F:, and G:.  I disabled Carbonite, stopped it from loading on boot, then installed the new drive.  I split the new drive in half, and merged the old drive back into one volume, copied files around, and assigned the proper drive letters.

Since no one likely managed to follow that, the end result, to the system was, three 333GB drives, E, F, and G; transformed into 3 1TB drives, E, F, and G.  The files were returned to the original corresponding drive paths.  This should have been completely transparent to the computer.  I think it took like a week to shuffle things around.

Restart Carbonite, hook it back up.  Something went wrong.  Essentially, the end result was, I had to completely start my backup anew.  I’m not even real sure what happened to my old data, but now I had to upload hundreds of GB of data again.

It’s probably worth mentioning the second issue I’ve had with Carbonite.  By default, it’s set to run full bore at all times.  This lags not only the internet connection but the machine itself.  It can be scheduled to run only at night and not at all, or as a trickle during the day.  The point is, uploading hundreds of gigs, only during 6 hours in the middle of the night, is a LOOONG process.

Then there is the third issue.  The backup never seems to finish.  I think it’s kind of crapping all over the PC’s multiple user accounts but whatever the case, the backup never seems to finish.  There is always something like 20 gig which never seems to upload, at least on my PC.  It doesn’t help that it only runs when I have my account logged in, and this is a machine that I don’t really use since I built my own machine for my office.

So I’m rethinking this solution.

I really don’t have much that NEEDS to be backed up.  There is a pile of text that I’ve created, blog posts, articles, reviews, code snippets, a handful of photoshopped graphics.  I have my collection of Family photos (which is in fact huge), I have my MP3 collection, I have some video files.

The MP3 solution is done.  I have uploaded all of my MP3s to Google music.  I am not sure I can redownload these, but in a crisis situation, I can at least play through Google Music, which isn’t awful.  I CAN redownload all of my Amazon purchased music.

For my documents, I’ve been slowly adding them to my Google Docs account.  This has an added benefit of making them universally accessible and easily searchable.  I may create a repository of shared documents eventually.

Video is tricky.  Video is huge.  My family videos aren’t too large but I’ve done some freelance video projects that I’ve sold to others and I keep backups of that data.  This solution is a bit more physical, I simply keep copies of the DVDs handy.  If all else fails, I can rip my copy of the DVD and burn fresh copies if someone wants to order an older video.  I probably will never need that 15 gig video file of raw footage, but I like keeping it around.

The most critical item is probably the Photos.  Tina likes them, they are the core of our family memories.  I started adding them to Flickr as a backup but more and more I fear Yahoo may kill Flickr, not necessarily purposefully but possibly simply through attrition.

So I’ve also been trying to use Skydrive as a backup tool.  Microsoft finally gave us a decent interface for using Skydrive and I’ve got 25 gigs at my disposal.  This is actually a problem in my case.  My photo storage, which is family photos from 2005 onward when I first met with my wife Tina, is something like 3 times that amount of space.  I am pretty sure the majority of that is from recent years after I started using the DSLR but it still creates a problem. 

The question is, do I shrink these photos down and reduce the quality?  I think some of it may be HD videos, which I’ll probably just leave to chance.

I actually am considering simply moving my Carbonite money over to paying for Skydrive storage.  Then there is my growing distrust of The Cloud.  Services which get killed or fail.  What happens when the internet is down.  how about when the crushing grip of bandwidth caps makes larger file manipulation infeasible.

This also doesn’t mesh with my desire to make a fresh Linux push wither.  I have not tested it but I’m not sure I can use Skydrive with Ubuntu.

At this point, I’m going to stick with this plan, though I’ll probably do Skydrive AND Flickr.  On the other hand, I’m considering just buying a fireproof safe and shoving an external drive inside of it.

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Filed under: 2012, Internet and the Cloud, Introspective | Tagged as: , , , ,
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