Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I fooled around with dualboxing on Windows some months ago and found the whole thing a little too clunky to be worth the effort. But with the Recruit-A-Friend programme running and the ease of soloing most <60 content with a paladin I figured I’d take another look.

This is a good article on how to dualbox using a Mac. The voice control stuff is hopeless — I can’t get it to recognise “define a keyboard command”, let alone actually create any! — but the Warcrack client differentiates between numeric keypad keys and the regular set of number keys, so it’s quite practical to tell your slave character to use the keypad, which gives you ten frequent-use macros to work with.

This is more than enough for the “solo an instance with a high-level character and have a lowbie follow for loot and quests” scheme, and also for the “have a higher-level healer follow and throw the odd heal” scenario too.

Hell, it’s probably enough for “have my 70 mage follow my 70 paladin and chuck out arcane missiles as needed”. Provided you can get your basic set of actions in to the ten keys, it should be golden.

Running the primary character in windowed+maximized mode you can use Spaces to quickly switch between client sessions. I turned down all the graphic knobs and turned off the sound effects on the slave client to minimize resource use.

The question, I guess, is whether I think this is worth shelling out for a full second set of WoW keys (base, TBC, WotLK) plus the price of transferring the L70 paladin to the second account. Maybe not right now, but it bears consideration…

Popularity: 20% [?]

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Reading about the excitement in Sydney over the canning of the NW Metro plans, I can’t help but think “welcome to Melbourne guys!”.

We have a similar public transport problem here with chronic underinvestment over the past 50-odd years, huge tracts of low-density housing development in the outer suburbs with little or no public transport, and what we do have is slow, crowded, and unreliable.

It’s not a Labor thing here, at least, because the Liberals failed just as dismally at investing in public transport when they were running the shop.

It seems that WA is the only state that takes metro transport seriously, and who knows where that’s going to go with the Liberals in power now?

Popularity: 20% [?]

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realos# zfs snapshot zones/bashful@prepatch
realos# zlogin bashful
bashful# yum update
[... waah, patches stuffed it up! ...]
bashful# exit
realos# zoneadm -z bashful halt
realos# zfs rollback zones/bashful@prepatch
realos# zoneadm -z bashful boot
[... yay! ...]


On the downside, it’s pretty ancient CentOS as Sun’s Linux kernel emulation is 2.4.x. But it’s still cool and means not having to install native Linux (or, gods protect us, Windows) to run NetApp DFM on that pretty! shiny! massively overspecced! x64 box.

Popularity: 30% [?]

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OS X 10.5.5 appears to have fixed the video problems with Warcrack. I hear it’s also improved performance in other games. Long time coming.

My one substantive complaint about the Nokia E71: the numeric keys aren’t sufficiently distinct. There’s a subtle colour difference and there’s the little nub on ‘5′, but I’d be happier with an arrangement more like the Treo Pro.

The other complaint about the E71 is that Symbian simply isn’t as spiffy as the iPhone interface, but the trade-off is that it’s also a much more featureful device. I don’t think I’d be willing to give up the SIP client for the pretty.

Can’t believe Google have explicitly disallowed VOIP clients on Android. So pleased Nokia/Symbian didn’t bow to that sort of stupid with S60. Wild uneducated guess: the European telcos don’t care about it, so it’s only the American platforms that get crippled like this.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Tags: Mac, Phone, Tech // 3 Comments »

Looks like the SIP is better than I have previously claimed. Incoming SIP calls are indeed appearing just like any others.

The problem I’m having seems to be with calls within the same VOIP service, and it’s probably going to turn out to be a firewall config issue.

On a quick call this morning there was a bit of breakup, but that was most likely due to interference on the 802.11g connection the phone is using. That sort of thing may simply be unavoidable, though a newer (better?) wireless AP might help — still using an early-gen Linksys WRT54G.

Now looking for a screen zoom tool that doesn’t come bundled with Mobile Speak and which doesn’t cost a small fortune either. Not that I’ve looked very hard so far.

Am noticing that the keyboard really is vastly superior to entering messages via a regular numeric pad. I can bash out a literate message pretty quickly without needing my glasses on to do it.

The interface does rather lack polish compared to Apple’s efforts, but it does work pretty well. Overall, if you’re looking for something that does OK with text but don’t need Exchange support, I’d say go for this. If you need Exchange support, my understanding is that this is still very much a “first generation” attempt at that, so you’re probably better off with a Blackberry. The Bold looks purty.

Popularity: 48% [?]

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Got it this morning, so this is not what you’d call a complete review.

Nice build quality. Getting the back cover off was a bit of a trial, not sure if that’s because I’ve got big fingers or because it’s meant to be difficult, but it’s not something you do often.

The keyboard is pretty decent. I’ve not used a QWERTY phone before so can’t compare it with the competition. But it’s hugely more efficient for text entry than a simple numeric pad. Takes some getting used to though as the keys are necessarily quite small.

The screen is very pretty, but a lot of the text is fairly small even with the font setting set to “large”. I’m not sure if anything at all pay any attention to that setting. On the bright side it’ll read out incoming messages, though bizarrely that option isn’t available for stuff in your sent folder.

I chucked a demo copy of Mobile Speak on it but frankly that’s more irritating than squinting.

My one real complaint is with the SIP support, which was one of the factors that made me decide to get a Series 60 phone. Outgoing calls seem to be OK — though I’ve had some trouble there too — but incomings are particularly irritating. The handset doesn’t seem to reliably stay registered so it misses calls, and even when it receives them they aren’t treated like normal calls: you can’t answer simply by pressing the call-answer button, and they don’t appear in the call logs.

This is a bit of a bummer as I’d been hoping to use this as a “one handset to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them”. Turns out not so much.

Popularity: 38% [?]

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I realised this morning that there is no particular reason to keep what had been running as the “house server” powered up any more: the data it had has been moved to the mirrored disks on the iMac, and moving the web proxy across is a doddle.

So now the only machine on in the house is the iMac, and that’s sleeping when not in use. It’s odd but satisfying to not have the hum of computers around all the time — I’ve been wanting to consolidate everything on one machine for years and it’s now finally been done.

Popularity: 33% [?]

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• It’s wonderful to have a decent screen-zoom tool that works properly with pretty much everything;
• The huge screen is taking some getting used-to, mostly because it means I no longer have to be so hunched over to comfortably use the system.  Where I can increase font sizes I do, and where I can’t I use the screen zoom.  Will do wonders for my posture once I get used to it;
• Firewire on the cheap external enclosure I bought is a bit of a dud, so I’ve had to hook that up via USB2 instead.  But that’s adequate for a Time Machine disk.  The real data is going on a mirrored pair of 1TB disks hooked up via Firewire;
• Full-screen Flash video runs smoothly.  That had been a small concern, as it’s pretty lousy under Linux and had been so on the old G5 iMac too;
• Having watched a few things with iView, if I didn’t already have a larger TV and a TiVo I think I could probably be happy enough using this for whatever TV-viewing I wanted to do.  A very viable option in a small flat;
• Warcrack runs beautifully, as it ought.  Portal runs quite nicely under Crossover, the other things I wanted to fiddle with (Bioshock, Mass Effect) don’t, but it was a doddle to set up XP under Boot Camp, so worst case there’s always that option;
• MacTheRipper seems to have disappeared from the net.  The “official” site is still there but the download mirrors appear to be dead.  Oh well;
• Really not enough USB ports!

Popularity: 40% [?]

Tags: Mac // 2 Comments »

The Dell tech showed up this morning to get the DVD out of the laptop drive. This particular model has no manual eject. He showed up when he said he would and did a good job, so I’m pretty happy with that aspect of the experience.

The drive itself was clearly a kung-fu master as it snapped the disk in half.

I now have an external USB2/Firewire 5.25″ enclosure into which I have whacked a spare (tray loading!) DVD-RW unit so this particular problem shouldn’t recur.

The iMac (now named ladybird) also arrived this morning. Lovely lovely bit of kit. The only slight hitch is that with the fonts cranked up as large as I want there isn’t quite enough room for, say, a web browser and a chat window on a single virtual desktop. On the other hand, damn big fonts!

Popularity: 37% [?]

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Today’s great joy is discovering that:

1. a rental DVD got stuck in the drive on my laptop; and
2. there’s no hardware “emergency” eject.

All optical ejections on the Dell XPS M1530 are done in software.  Older Apple units used to have a pin-push hole so you could trigger an eject, but not this machine, nor it turns out after a bit of reading, current Apple machines.

The drive does not believe it has any media, and seems to be too smart for its own good: if it doesn’t think there’s anything in there, it ignores soft-ejects!

Getting the thing out of the drive would seem to require a service call.  I’ve lodged a case, fortunately I’ve got the at-home support so with any luck they’ll arrange to have someone come out in the next few days to open the machine up and extract the disk.

Longer-term, I’ve ordered a 5.25″ USB2 enclosure and I’ll stick a spare tray-loading DVD-RW drive in that.  Will use it with the iMac too, no point risking further irritation from this sort of crap.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Tags: Random // 2 Comments »