These days, I coexist with the internet as a kind of hybrid organism, my creeping tendrils simultaneously invading multiple domains. My belated acquisition of a smartphone has only strengthened this relationship. It's not so much about actually "being online" constantly, but about having the freedom to access the information regardless of my current physical and temporal location.

Another big strength of our increasingly connected world is being able to maintain contact with people around the world. As a kid I used to write letters to my friends and participated in penpal services to meet people in other parts of the world and talked to a few select friends on the phone. The internet lessens the effect of meatspace restrictions like distance and time, allowing me to both make and maintain friendships where doing so would otherwise have been unlikely.

Where this goes awry is with people who are particularly disinclined to use modern means of communication (I'm looking at you, high school friends). When people don't instant message (be it through AIM, GChat, or Facebook), or even regularly check their email, what remains? Letters are ineffective as people frequently move from place to place, and even with the correct address things mysteriously fail to arrive. There's the telephone, but calling someone takes actual time and planning – a block has to be set aside to have a conversation, whereas a chat can be impulsive and even asynchronous, as both people go about their day doing other things. As a result, as much as I would like to have a more active friendship, I end up being a mere observer of their Facebook updates, pausing every so often to click "like."

You may remember the great social purge from a while ago, where I deleted everybody from my Facebook friends list and slowly added them back, sorting them into groups as I went. It was my attempt to wrest a more granular control over my digital connections than Facebook seemed ready to allow. I recently got invited to Google+, where sorting these various connections has been elevated to a central role (with a drag and drop interface!), rather than being bolted onto a sub menu of options.

For many, such sorting seems to be about keeping others from seeing certain updates amid the constant refrain of privacy. While I believe privacy is important, I personally try not to put anything online that I'm not comfortable with the rest of the internet seeing. Rather, when I sort friends into groups it is to keep others' updates from reaching me. My ideal situation, as of yet unrealized on both Facebook and Google+, is to generate a pre-distilled feed of information from only the connections I value the most, relegating the rest of the chaff to a bin I can attend to or ignore at my leisure. ]]> http://mistypedurl.com/2011/07/a-connected-life/feed/ 0 http://mistypedurl.com/2011/03/another-htpc-build/ http://mistypedurl.com/2011/03/another-htpc-build/#comments Sat, 26 Mar 2011 03:18:20 +0000 SteelWolf http://mistypedurl.com/2011/03/another-htpc-build/ I spent the first couple of evenings this week putting together a new home theater PC for our friend, classmate, and neighbor. I wanted to give her enough power to smoothly play 1080p content on her TV, while leaving some headroom for upgrades down the line (and space for extra internal HDDs). All the parts together came in a decent amount under $500, but shipping and tax (Newegg has a base in CA, so we have to pay our hefty 9% sales tax on purchases) pushed it over.

I went with an AMD CPU because right now, you can get some great power at a low cost compared to Intel’s offerings. At the high end, Intel really seems to dominate (especially if you like overclocking), but for budget systems AMD’s value is hard to beat. The Gigabyte motherboard has integrated ATI graphics and can output both video and audio through HDMI, which is perfect for this application. It’s also an easy way to upgrade the system if it becomes necessary – just drop in a video card.

Antec makes some great cases, and the Three Hundred is a straightforward one and I like the upward-facing exhaust fan. It also leaves a lot of space for terabyte HDDs, which fill up alarmingly fast when you start collecting HD content. While I personally dont’ tend to be a big fan of collecting physical media, my friend has Blu-Ray discs so we added a player. The system is running Windows 7 x64, and, like Tess (formerly Zoe), has a user account that can load XBMC instead of the Explorer shell.

Here are the specs:

• AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor
• 4 GB DDR3 RAM
• 500W PSU (allowing for later addition of a video card or HDDs)
• Gigabyte motherboard with integrated graphics and multichannel audio output, as well as SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0.
• 500 GB HDD with space for many more.

I’m super-excited about Dragon Age 2, Bioware’s latest RPG.  One thing that always comes up when a new RPG is released however, is whether or not the gameplay has been “dumbed down.” The idea is that hardcore RPG-players want a high level of customization so they can fine-tune their character’s development, while the wider audience just wants to get to the game and run through it. Is one way better?

I have friends who love being able to mess with the numbers that power an RPG world. Finding the ideal combination of powers and bonuses to maximize output is a big part of what makes the game fun for them. I think, though, that the “stats” component exists to allow players to develop a character, not to play a spreadsheet.

Tabletop RPGs are fun largely because of the social component, the group imagination and camaraderie that coalesces around the adventure. The stats and dice rolls are there to provide a framework, a kind of physics that keep the world intact. This, also, is what keeps people playing MMOs like World of Warcraft – it’s not necessarily because the game itself is so spectacular, but because of the friends with whom the game is shared. RPG video games should strive to enable this as much as possible, even in single-player games. RPGs are unique in that they allow players to develop their own character who can go on to shape their world.

This doesn’t necessarily mean stripping out as much customization as possible. As arcane as working with numbers and modifiers may appear to some, they’re what allows the player to mold the game to their will. They’re essentially choices, not the obvious world-altering ones the game’s story sets up for the player, but the little everyday ones that make a person who they are. I think it would be interesting to build a game that is capable of dynamically responding to how it is played, constantly changing form around the player. In the absence of such an engine, we have stats – overly “streamlining” them can actually make the game less immersive.

Dragon Age 2 seems to have tried to streamline the storytelling and gameplay while maintaining the same system of stats and skills from the original game. From what I’ve seen, I think they’ve managed to improve the way the game functions without stripping out the customizability (a major criticism of Bioware’s previous sequel, Mass Effect 2). Bioware has done a lot to explore what RPGs are capable of being, and it seems like DA2 is another step in the right direction.

A lot of the usual tropes are trotted out for this one, but it gets old explaining how copying is not theft and downloads do not directly equal lost sales. Instead I’d like to focus on the fact that whether or not people download this unfinished copy of the game is essentially irrelevant – for Crytek, for their publisher EA, and for PC gaming.

What has been leaked isn’t the final copy of the game, but an unfinished version that takes a bit of fiddling to get working right. Didn’t something similar happen a few years ago? Oh, that’s right, back in 2009 there was that unfinished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Here’s the spoiler: Despite being panned by critics, the movie went on to do incredibly well at the box office. The leak certainly didn’t hurt sales, and may have actually helped build excitement. In the gaming world, the same thing happened in 2003 with Half-Life 2, which was leaked not a month and half but a full six months before release and went on to sell 12 million copies.

There’s this ridiculous idea that leaked copies of things mean something different than full final versions – I don’t get it. There are cams of movies, music leaks, DVD screeners, and every so often an in-progress beta of a PC game. These leaks are extremely low-quality compared to what is going to be available hours after release, when uploaders have access to better source material. Are the low download numbers of this game the result of the frothing rants from the likes of Destructoid’s Jim Sterling, or just because it’s a lot of effort to go through to only play the first part of the game? I’d bet on the latter. Thus, there’s not much point in getting upset – even if the leak hadn’t happened, there will be a copy, and a higher-quality copy at that, available for free on release day. If anything, the leak builds excitement for the game as people wait for the real thing.

I also continue to see support for the idea that leaks and downloading somehow justifies developers abandoning the PC for consoles or using invasive DRM schemes. Clearly, in their haste to blame “pirates,” the content industry’s favorite scapegoat, these people are abandoning all logic. I suppose they are thinking “Well, if the game is just going to be downloaded instead of purchased, we might as well not release it at all.”

This, despite the fact that Crytek and EA make tons of money from games, including PC games (they planned for a PC release, after all). This, despite the fact that if you don’t release it, you’re essentially guaranteeing that you’ll make no income – something Jim Sterling’s fails to realize when calling for EA to “pull the PC version of Crysis 2 right now.” It’s the same business model put in place by the idiots in the band Brandt Morain, who refuse to sell CDs of their music (and aren’t even popular enough to show up in a quick torrent search). This, despite  the fact that DRM has yet to protect anything. This, despite the fact that every console has already been hacked, with perfect versions of popular games available free for the downloading right now.

If Crytek and EA objectively add up their pennies and find out that sales aren’t enough to justify development for the PC, that’s their business decision. But it’s not because of the imagined boogeyman of “piracy”, since plenty of other studios are doing fine releasing primarily for computer and without cumbersome DRM schemes – even though their games also shared free online.

Then there’s the whole aspect of “supporting the studio” by buying and not downloading their game, as though one can’t do both, or wait for a while until the price decreases. It’s almost as ridiculous as buying a commercially produced music album from a retail store to “support the artist.” If creators are really interested in getting direct support from fans, why not just set up a donate link on their websites? This way, fans who actually want to support the people creating what they enjoy can do so regardless of how they choose to obtain the finished product. There could even be a whole series of incentives to donate based around the game world or the process of creating new games rather than simply the game itself. If you want the physical copy of the game (or CD, or whatever), by all means. But you shouldn’t have to purchase something you don’t want or need from a corporate middleman because that is the only way to support the creator.

There isn’t going to be a social backlash against filesharing, no matter how much the content industry and their blogosphere supporters want it to be so. When a perfect copy of something can be made available online and shared directly between fans at no cost, it makes good economic sense to participate. Leaks, rips, and copies are going to be available whether one likes it or not – and it’s okay. Successful game studios will be the ones who give their fans ways of providing financial support that continue to work in that environment – not flying off the handle because filesharing exists.

Ever since I started using Last.fm, I’ve been looking for similar services for other forms of media I intake. Goodreads was an excellent find, providing a lot of similar features geared toward books. It’s fun to integrate “what I’m doing” type lists into my website, but more than that the two services have generated some interesting data on what I like the most. They’ve also led me to new artists and authors I’ve enjoyed, primarily by allowing me to see what my friends have been up to.

I’d been casually looking for a similar service applied to movies. My friend found Flixter a few years back, but the site design was too much like MySpace (think garish multicolor backgrounds). Recently, I noticed XBMC had a plugin for a service called trakt.tv that scrobbles the movies and TV shows you watch in XBMC to the site, Last.fm style.

It’s still in the early stages, so there aren’t a lot of integrations to other services, and you can only add watched items manually or through XBMC. However, I’ve been pleased with it so far: The site is very simple, listing what you’ve watched and enploying a binary love/hate rating system. While it would be a lot more useful to a wider audience if it could submit from non-XBMC players, it’s certainly the best service of its kind I’ve seen so far with a lot of potential.

My friend Jeff first introduced me to Scott Pilgrim when we were still in Maryland. Jerks that we are, we moved before the movie came out. It seemed like a good film to invite my fellow first year MD/PhD students to come see with me, but it turned out they were in Canada, Japan, and Thailand, or in other words not California. “It’s okay,” I thought, “we’ll try again when the DVD comes out.”

That was November, and this week we got the delinquents (and a few others) together and finally made it happen.  I don’t know if everybody connected with the movie’s geek cultural humor, but I think they enjoyed themselves regardless.

Scott Pilgrim is a movie that does a good job bridging mediums. It stylistically incorporates the effects, comments, and abrupt transitions that made the comic book so quirky and unique. The fight scenes and integration of comic book-style sound effects into the live action were particular highlights. They also included Knives’ “Chau down” line, one of my favorites in the whole series.

In addition to the myriad video game references, the environment of the movie has a lot of neat little nods to the plot, one of the most obvious of which is the appearance of numbers as Scott fights his way through the evil exes. The first time I saw the movie I didn’t think to start looking for them until I saw the giant four in the club where he fights the fourth ex. The second time I remembered to start looking for them at three (Todd has a three on his shirt, is in a three-piece band, violated vegan code three times), and this time I started at two (Lucas Lee has two Ls making up his logo, there’s a two on the car and trailer, he has the help of stunt doubles) so I still haven’t seen anything for one. I also haven’t noticed anything for seven, but I may just not be counting fast enough.

While it has nothing to do with the movie, thanks to our friend Matt, our party featured ice cubes shaped like brains. This is now on the must-have list for the ice tray category of my geek kitchen collection, along with pi symbols and Lego bricks. Of course, when I have the money to stock up on stuff like this I’ll probably also have a fridge that can make its own ice. These are the problems I must face.

Setting up XBMC
I decided to go with XBMC (release 10, Dharma), the dominant player for homebrew HTPC setups – and for good reason. It’s got a slick interface that it pads with data and images retrieved from fan-curated databases of movies and TV shows. While you can use a live installation to run it without an operating system, I opted to install it on Windows 7 so I could easily transfer files to the computer over my network. While you can access a full-featured administrator account on the computer, I set up the computer to automatically boot into a special XBMC account that has XBMC replacing the normal Explorer shell. The visual part of Windows doesn’t load at all unless explorer.exe is explicitly run, and I don’t even have to use additional software – just the Group Policy Editor in Windows (the link has step-by-step instructions for doing this yourself).

Customization
I decided to use the popular Aeon65 skin instead of the default Confluence, largely because of the gorgeous horizontal menu configurations. I have a wireless keyboard functioning as an advanced remote (and for working with the computer when necessary), but my phone is quickly becoming my primary remote, with the official XBMC remote app controlling my setup over WiFi from anywhere in the house. The official instructions for setting this up were a bit out of date; this tutorial has updated steps and screenshots using newer versions of everything. I also made sure I set up Zoe to get a static IP address from the router so my phone would always know where to look for her.

XBMC in action
I went through and took a few screenshots of my setup in action. Thus far XBMC has been superb at picking out the correct information and images for my TV shows and movies, with a bit less robust results for music. I’m able to do a slick visual browse through my various media types, with icons in the bottom for the format, studio, and resolution. I can also get detailed info on the film or show, including cast members (you can also search your media by actor or studio). Fanart and posters help make everything look visually pleasing and well put-together, and the best part is that it does all this automatically – none of the time-consuming curation I’ve grown accustomed to with my iTunes music library. There are a few outstanding issues: I’m like to get movies in a series with unique names (i.e. Harry Potter) to appear sequentially instead of alphabetically, I want to see it correctly remove musical artists only featured in compilation albums from the browsing list, and I want to see if there’s a way to get all the album art I’ve painstakingly added to my iTunes library into the XBMC database (or find a database with more artwork than Last.fm). All in all I’ve been quite impressed with how this has worked out, and while it took a bit of learning, it’s made viewing media at my house much cooler and easier to use. Now I just need a surround sound system, and maybe a bigger screen…

First class passengers, however, don’t have to worry about storing their things, since they already have reserved space. So why would they want to board first? They get on the plane, and have to sit while the entire rest of the plane shuffles by, bumping into the seats and swinging gigantic bags around. Meanwhile, flight attendants attempting to serve them drinks have to do so around the line of other passengers.In addition to the awkwardness, the first class passengers have to spend more time sitting aboard the plane, and while the seats are more comfortable than in coach, is somebody really in that much of a hurry to get to them?

The boarding first seems like a holdover from a time when flying on a plane was more of a luxury event, rather than a utilitarian way of traveling from point A to point B. In today’s world, I think it would make the most sense for the first class passengers to board last, swooping aboard after all the lower-class passengers have finished bumbling around and the plane is actually ready to get underway. Then, they get to exit the plane first, minimizing the time they have to spend waiting around for other people to figure out what they’re doing.

Rapid switch to a new plane-related anecdote: You know how the flight attendants ask you to turn off all your electronic devices? There are usually two categories: The ones that just read the script and tell you to turn off all your devices, and the ones that try to list out some examples but are clearly in unfamiliar territory, and start saying anything they’ve mentally categorized as “tech.” Something like, “Please turn off all your iPods, ear buds, tablet pads, cell phones, Blackberries, blueberries, Xboxes, turn it all off.”

We recently had one announcement from the latter category, but we also had one where she said, quickly and confidently, something to the effect of “Please turn off all electronic devices, so if you’re playing Angry Birds, Tetris, or electronic Sudoku right now, you’ll need to stop until we get in the air.” Naturally, I happened to be playing Angry Birds at that exact moment. What do you think the chances are she has an iPhone?

Over Christmas I underwent a kind of internet fast. It wasn’t exactly self-imposed or rigidly enforced, it just kind of happened because I was away from my computer, Rachel commandeers the laptop to be her e-reader, and my phone is from before phones really figured out how to access the internet in a useful manner. As a result, I didn’t check much of Facebook, or send any tweets, or IM anybody.

I don’t know if I was any less distracted. I read a good bit, fixed things around the house, and texted folks to figure out when we were seeing each other. Coming back to it, though, I don’t think I missed too much. That being said, there are some things that I think are important to be able to keep up with, like important email (thanks, Priority Inbox!) and being contactable, which is why I’m pretty excited about my new Droid 2 phone. The challenge, of course, is going to be appropriately filtering “all of the internet” so that I’m able to get to what I need. I’ve had my previous phone since 2006, and needless to say a lot has changed about phones since then.

I’m a bit overwhelmed by all the possible connectivity. Too often I get on the computer to do something and wind up not doing that task at all while time flies by, and I don’t want the same thing to happen with my phone. Over the holiday that didn’t happen, largely because I wasn’t getting on in the first place. I’m not sure if I really learned anything, except perhaps that I need more robust filtering schemes to keep myself focused on what I intend to do. Unfortuantely, I can say that about pretty much every aspect of my life, so perhaps tackling this problem is my goal for the year.