May Contain Nuts

Sadly, I don’t have quite the readership of Ursula Vernon, who tends to get unfathomable quantities of feedback when she asks questions far more obscure than the one I’m about to, but hopefully someone on MystBlogs will be able to point me in the right direction here…

I’m thinking about looking for a new printer soon, because the printer/scanner/copier we’ve got right now (an Epson CX-7400) sucks down ink like a cocaine addict in a sugar factory (or something), and tends to get its heads clogged at more frequent intervals than I would prefer (granted I’d prefer “never”, but I’ll take what I can get on the reliability front).

There are a few requirements for a new printer:

1. It needs to be able to print photographic prints with a reasonable degree of quality.
2. It needs to have large enough ink reserves that I’m not buying new cartridges every month at $12 a pop.
3. It needs to play nicely with Macs and PCs (this is largely a given, but as some animals are more equal than others, so do some printers play more nicely cross-platform than others… a Bonjour-compatible one would be ideal).
4. It would preferably be a multi-function printer, because we don’t have a lot of room for a printer and a scanner (or worse, a printer and a printer/scanner, since getting rid of the scanner in the CX-7400 in favor of a dedicated device seems unlikely).
5. For the purposes of this discussion, price is not necessarily an object, but keeping it below $300 would be nice, because then I’ll be able to afford it before the end of the world.

I have, in the past, had bad experiences with Canon printers just falling apart after a year or two, because Canon hadn’t evidently mastered the concept of selling an affordable, functional printer that runs forever but kills you with ink costs the same way that Epson has, but if that has changed, by all means point it out to me. I’m also hesitant to go with Epson again at the moment because of the aforementioned ink-sucking tendencies of our current printer, but if the higher-end models are less susceptible to this, again, please let me know.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to buy a laser printer for the day-to-day document printing, and save the color printing for an inkjet… if you think such a split-responsibility setup is a good idea, what would you recommend in the way of laser printers, and would you still suggest replacing the current inkjet all-in-one?

It’s time for another one of my stream-of-consciousness “here’s what’s on my mind while I’m at work” posts.  Feel free to insert your own “and now, for something completely different”s between paragraphs.  The people responsible for sacking those responsible for these subtitles have been sacked.

Costco is a cool place to get movie tickets, apparently.  $15 for 2 adult tickets at Regal, which is better than even the matinee ticket prices… and like $5 cheaper than the evening prices.  There will be serious Prince Caspianage today, followed by even more serious Indiana Jonesing next week.  On that note, we also got the new box set of the Indiana Jones trilogy Wednesday.  Willie?  Still twice as annoying as I remember her being (Osc was ready to shoot her during the first scene at the Obi Wan bar [which amused her to no end] in Shang Hai).

It’s gonna be the future soon.

Apple is apparently expanding on their original patent application for location-based content delivery.  I think I mentioned back when they signed that deal with Starbucks that being able to get on-demand location-aware content delivered to you in places outside the coffee shop would be seriously awesome… ordering movie tickets without waiting in line, buying a soundtrack from a theater’s “now showing” custom wi-fi music store, getting maps of malls or airports… the list goes on.  The iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile internet devices are quickly approaching and even surpassing the absolute utility of concepts like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Seriously, Star Trek’s got nothing on this stuff.  Meanwhile, Microsoft’s taking the map angle in a different, more public direction (I think the smart whiteboard application is more useful then 4×6-foot interactive maps, personally).  Did I mention it’s gonna be the future soon?

By the way, I have serious respect for anyone who can sing and play an instrument at the same time with any degree of capability, because I simply fail at being coordinated enough to manage that.

Recently I gave up on the money management app I got in the MacHeist bundle, Cha-Ching, and ported the last month or so’s worth of financial stuff into another app called MoneyWell.  It’s a very different application from Cha-Ching, but it seems to have much better support, is a lot more stable, and makes it possible to really granularly control our spending, which is a really good thing.  It’s amazing what you discover when you actually sit down and plan out all of your finances in a really serious way, and with all of that information in mind, we can make better decisions about how to spend the money we make in the future.

Jonathan Coulton makes any work day better.  I blame linking to “Future Soon” for getting me started listening to him today.

I’m very seriously considering getting a refurbished AirPort Extreme so that we can get the Wii and our Touches hooked back up to the internet at home, because we’ve run out of unlocked networks elsewhere in the apartment complex to piggy-back off of, and I have a very serious need to play LostWinds.  I need to play it very seriously, in fact.

On a related note, I listed my G5 on Craigslist last night.  Hopefully I’ll be able to sell it in short order, but if not, I may need to look into alternatives (still thinking that the local reseller, Mac Odyssey, wouldn’t be a bad way to go if not for the 30% they take for finding a buyer and managing the sale).  I’m hoping to get enough for the G5 and the display combined to cover the cost of a refurbished iMac at $1599, with maybe a little left over for the AirPort Extreme.

So, as the rumors predicted, Apple has revved the iMac with some marginal processor, FSB, and RAM  speed improvements.  As a result, the brand new system I was looking at now comes with 2 GB of RAM standard, and has the option of being upgraded to a GeForce 8800 GS video card with 512 MB of RAM.  Total cost: $1949 + tax (with upgraded card… vanilla is still the same $1799 it was yesterday).

At the same time, these spec bumps have triggered a price drop on the now-last-gen iMacs that I was also eyeing.  The refurbished top-of-the-line 24″ system I was looking at last week has dropped from $1799 to $1599, with the added benefit of having a quad core processor over the newer one’s dual-core of the same speed (dunno how useful that is, but it sounds cool), a larger hard drive (500GB vs. 320GB), and the same 2GB of RAM standard.  It’s also got the same Radeon 2600 Pro card as the newer model’s base configuration.

Initially, I was torn over which system to get… new hotness is always better, but such is always the case, and if you wait for what you want to be cheap enough to buy, it’s not the new hotness anymore.  Given that I’m moving from a dual 2.3 GHz PowerPC G5 system with a gig of RAM, as opposed to fretting over a minor spec bump from an older Intel-based iMac, the improvements to performance will be considerable regardless of which system I buy, and the older one is still just as awesome as it was last week, only now it’s $200 cheaper.  So, I’ve officially decided to get a refurbished 24″ 2.8 Core 2 Extreme iMac.  Hooray!

Now, paying for it is the tricky part.  Obviously, I don’t have the means to go throwing what is effectively a month and a half’s pay at a new system.  However, I am looking into selling the G5 as a means to paying for the new system.  Based on estimates I got a few months ago from a local reseller (Mac Odyssey), I could expect to get as much as $1799 for the G5.  That’s completely insane!  $1799 for a 3-year-old system that’s been deprecated by Apple moving to a new processor architecture!  And these suckers are apparently in huge demand!  The mind boggles.  Anyway, I’ve also decided to sell my trusty, somewhat dusty, high-tech electronic light pen input device 23″ Cinema Display, since I don’t have room on my desk for two monitors (awesome as that would be), and since it’ll still fetch a pretty decent price (I’ve seen people asking as much as $650 for them on Craigslist) that I can put toward making sure I can cover taxes on the new machine.

Despite Mac Odyssey wanting to take a 30% cut of the sale for actually finding a buyer and handling the transaction, I’m still inclined to try and sell my G5 through them.  Putting my primary system and monitor out for purchase on Craigslist for a combined cost of over $2000 kind of makes me nervous.  I know the chances of getting screwed are relatively low if I handle things right, but I don’t want to risk someone managing to get my G5 without actually paying me for it first, because then I’d be effing screwed.  With Mac Odyssey offering to handle not only the financial end, but also finding a buyer in the first place, I could probably expect to have a much faster turn-around time on the sale, and have my new computer in-hand within days, rather than weeks, of getting started with the proceedings.

I had mentioned last week that I wanted to go visit the local branch of Mac Odyssey and discuss options and what I would be expected to do prior to giving them my G5 for sale, but I discovered that the location closest to me was closed recently.  I may make a trek tonight over to the Coeur d’Alene location and chat with them about what they can do for me.  I want to make this happen relatively soon, because the refurbished last-gen iMacs are only going to be available for a limited period of time, and the G5’s resale value is only going to get worse.  I’m just somewhat hesitant to get rid of my G5.  It’s been a trustworthy machine (heh, almost said “little machine”) for the past 3 years, and it’s almost like ditching a friend or giving away a pet, stupid as that sounds.  It’s also fairly mind-boggling that I can actually sell my older computer for more than it costs to buy a new one.  Granted, it’s a more high-end system than the iMac was, and Apple systems retain their resale value for stupid lengths of time, but still, having a $2500 system retain about 67% of its resale value over 3 years is just completely nuts, and I keep expecting to have this end up being some eleborate prank that leaves me without a computer.  Mainly, I’m so amazed by this because my family has a tendency to use computers until they can’t even be given away anymore.  My dad is still rockin’ the P2 400 that we bought to replace the family’s old 486 DX2 system about a decade ago for crying out loud.

I can’t do anything just yet, because I’ve got some stuff to take care of for the Mysterium committee that would best be kept safe from the upheaval of computer trade-ins, but once that’s out of the way (hopefully this week),  I should be free and clear to sell my old system.  Now I just need to come up with a name for the new iMac… (this may explain why I have attachment problems… I name my electronics.)

So I’ve been thinking, which is never really a good thing, because it tends to result in novel-length blog posts for you to have to wade through…

Anyway, I’ve been pondering an upgrade to my PowerMac G5 for some time now.  Now, while I could easily shove a couple more gigs of RAM into the G5 and get at least another year out of it, I feel like the more effective upgrade would be to box the old girl and trade it in for some new hotness, given the increasing atmosphere of Intel-targeted development in the Mac community (and the no doubt impending EOL-ing of OS X’s support for the PowerPC line).  Most of the productivity software devs are still releasing UniBi apps, but the gaming scene is definitely moving to Intel on the quick-fast.  So, trade-ins it is then.

Initially, I was drooling over the new Mac Pros and their utterly absurd base specs.  I even priced one out versus an Alienware box, and with the exact same specs, the Mac Pro came out cheaper.  However, I think it can easily be argued that a Mac Pro has more power behind it than I’ll likely ever need, and the upgradability isn’t really a huge deal for me, because frankly, I’ve never upgraded the G5 beyond cramming an extra 512 megs of RAM into the thing the day I bought it almost 3 years ago (cruising on a gig of RAM is cool, but quickly becoming inadequate).  The deciding factor against just going out and throwing my G5 up on eBay, Craigslist, or the local Mac reseller’s trade-in program for a new Mac Pro has been price.  Even discounting the percentage cut that the reseller would take for handling the transaction and finding a buyer for me, I’d still only be walking away with $1700 or $1800 by using Craigslist or eBay, which is considerably short of a new Mac Pro at $2299.  If I took it to the reseller, I’d see even less of that.

Recently, I’ve started looking at getting an iMac instead.  I don’t really deal with the sort of projects that require a behemoth of a machine like the Mac Pro… mostly I deal with Pages, iPhoto, and some light design / touch-up work in Photoshop.  Plus, it gives me the opportunity to sell my 23″ Cinema Display along with the G5 for some bonus cash to put towards the new system.  Seeing as how they still sell them new for $900 (refurbs are $500), I imagine I could get at least $300 out of selling it on top of the asking price for the G5.  The only consideration for me at this point is one of desktop worthiness, since the desk I have may not be ideally suited for an all-in-one machine (such are the perils of buying furniture that fits your needs at the time, I know…).  I really don’t see many downsides to getting an iMac over a Mac Pro though… it’s a simple matter of fact and technology that anything I buy is going to be leagues better than the G5, even if it is a dual 2.3 GHz machine.  Plus, a 24″ iMac recoups the loss of my Cinema Display plus some, and still obviously bests the crappy-ass Dell boxes we bought last year.  Finally, as I said, I just don’t need 4-8 cores worth of Xeon muscle for what I do with my computer.

Running on the assumption that I could sell the G5 for $1799 (which, if I go through the reseller, nets me $1199 back), and also running on the assumption that I could sell the Cinema Display for $300 (which gets me $210 back through the reseller), I could pick up a refurbished current-gen 24″ dual-core iMac for about $100 out of pocket (plus tax).  If I sold everything myself, I could get a new dual-core iMac and actually make money on the deal, or even get a refurbed quad-core machine and still come out about $40 ahead.  The challenge would be making sure I had everything on the G5 backed up to either the external hard drive or the Dell doubling as a crappy-ass media center / crappy-ass gaming console before wiping the drive and re-installing Leopard (which, incidentally, I might be able to charge a little more for, though I’ll be sad to lose the cool little box it came in).  Pretty much everything I’d need to take with me lives in my user folder, though, so that shouldn’t be a terribly huge issue.

I’m contemplating heading down to the reseller tonight and having a conversation with them about anything special they can do for me that might sweeten the deal with them handling the transaction for me.  There’s also the rumor that there’s new iMac spec bumps due next week, so I may even be able to get in on the ground floor of a brand new Mac for a bit cheaper by buying a show unit if that ends up being the case.  I’m inclined to go through them in any case, since it feels a bit safer than selling the thing through Craigslist (which I infinitely prefer over eBay, especially since we recently threw out the monstrous box the G5 came in), even if they do take a fairly steep 30% comission fee.

The final advantage to having an Intel Mac, of course, is the ability to run Windows on it, which would be great with VMWare or Parallels so that I don’t have to bounce between machines or try using RDC to do 3D modeling work for games and sundry the way I do now (which honestly hinders productivity).  Since I’ve already got a copy of XP Pro that’s no longer in use after giving Oscy’s old PC to her dad (at least, I think we kept the disc…), I don’t even have to worry about spending money on a Windows lisence, I can just get VMWare or Parallels and rock out.

Evidently someone else thought the memory necklace from Revelation was a cool idea.  Now it just needs a faulty clasp and a 10-year-old girl in jeopardy to go with it

Quickly posting from work before I head home…

I’m looking into getting a media center station set up in our apartment, built around a 32″ LCD HDTV, a Mac Mini, and an Airport Extreme network (plus the requisite gaming console(s) arrayed around the bottom of the thing), and have a question or two for the readership at Myst Blogs:

I know the Mini doesn’t support HDMI or component out, unlike its little brother in media center-related crime, the AppleTV. As such, I’d need to hook the system up to the TV via a DVI-to-HDMI connection (there’s no DVI-in on the TV we’re looking at) in order to make it work. My question is: I know HDMI is designed to carry video and audio signals, so would I be able to properly hook up the Mini through HDMI and still get sound through a secondary input, or am I out of luck? I realize this may be something that’s fairly TV-specific, but having a starting point for interrogating the folks at Costco would be nice ;).

I wish I could set up an AppleTV, because it’s a bit less network-intensive, and would likely integrate well into any sort of rumored movie rental service from iTunes, but it’s just not quite what I need on the hardware side; I don’t want to have to buy a DVD player to put under the AppleTV, and a Mini comes with that plus a virtually identical version of Front Row and an Apple Remote, plus a decent hard drive for media mirroring and easier-to-implement support for extended codec playback utilities like Perian (I know you can install Perian on the AppleTV, it’s just a pain in the ass ;)).

Hopefully MacWorld won’t see the discontinuation of the Mini, or will see an AppleTV with a DVD player built-in (I’ll accept the techie solution to installing Perian if I could just have an optical drive!). If AppleTV gets exclusive access to any mystical rental service (which I doubt), I’ll be in an even deeper quandary, but for now, I just want to know if I can jack in a Mac Mini without losing audio or having to buy external speakers for my unit.

Anyone?

For the second time in as many months, we’ve got a package coming from Dell. Before people come at me with pitchforks, let me explain…

It has become increasingly obvious over the past few months that Ash’s computer is on its last leg, and even that leg is getting pretty damn wobbly. The fans all make horrible screeching noises at random intervals, the whole system is well over 3 years old and it’s definitely showing it, and I’m beginning to suspect that Ash emits some sort of EM field that destroys hard drives (this is but one of the reasons I keep my computer as far on the opposite side of the “office region” of the apartment as possible ;)). We’ve done as much as we can to keep the old box alive, giving it more RAM and a faster, slightly more modern AMD processor from the XP line, but age, abuse (from her and me, the previous owner), and the toll of being dragged cross-country in the dead of winter seem to have taken their toll on it (that, and it’s managed to acquire a performance-eating virus or two at some point). As a result, it’s become clear that there’s no way Ash is going to be able to keep the system going for the length of time required to save up for the kick-ass laptop she wants as her primary computer.

To that end, we trolled the depths of Dell’s outlet store again, looking for a cheap box she can wipe Vista off of and drop XP onto the second it gets plugged in. Since it’s pretty much a given that any computer on the market these days is already a head (if not heads and shoulders) above the performance and capabilities of her old box, we’re none too broken up about replacing it with something that can best be described as having “average” performance by today’s standards. So, by Monday there will be a second silver-gray Dell box sitting in our apartment, a fat clone of the slim case model I’m using for MAX and Uru. Since Ash doesn’t play many high-end games (I think the most advanced thing we’ve subjected a computer to so far is Portal), the integrated GeForce 61150 will do just fine, and runs Uru just as well if not better than the dedicated 5600 in her old box. Pile in the standard gig of RAM and a faster, dual-core system, and you’ve got yourself a nice (if not completely respectable) rig for the moderate usage Ash tends to subject her computers to (quite possibly the most intensive thing she tends to do is run Firefox with about 70+ tabs open at any given time… I think even that will give Photoshop a run for its money).

I continue to feel some incredible sense of wrongness bringing another PC into what has grown to be a rather universally pro-Mac apartment (even if there’s no way Ash would use one without Boot Camp at the ready), but buying something like an iMac is just beyond our financial limits at this point, a Mac Mini doesn’t seem to be worth it for what you get (specifically in terms of the graphics chipset), and Ash is holding out for a MacBook Pro anyway, so dropping a ton of money on a desktop machine she plans on replacing as soon as possible doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So, taking into consideration that we wanted to get a decently-spec’d system for as little money as humanly possible, it’s hard to go wrong with up an up to 50% discount on previously-”loved” hardware at the Dell outlet store online.

It occurs to me that I’ve been rather a bit more talkative than usual of late.

Anyway, an update, a personal bit, and some rumination to follow.

Firstly, on the promised subject of DPWR, I’m hard at work getting the upgraded version of the site hammered out, finalized, skinned, and integrated into IPB 2.3. The forums are complete, as are the Gallery and the Archive. The links system has been totally overhauled, and will need to have all of its information re-entered from scratch, but there’s a lot of cruft in there that doesn’t work anymore anyway, and a lot of new stuff to add, so I look at it as a way to make the whole thing better overall. The Community page just needs a couple of tweaks, and will ultimately prove to be FAR more useful than the current landing pad with two links on it that I’ve been using for the past 3 years. I’ve taken to syndicating a few of the community’s RSS feeds, such as the feeds for Explorer Exchange and the Jalak Registry, as well as MystBlogs, UruBlogs, and the CCQDB. Community-related news items from the main page are also re-printed here, along with a calendar, an online list, and access to the Member List.

Slightly less far along is the actual home page, but that’s mainly because it’s still missing some minor News integration and the whole gamut of Library integration. Once the Library is wrapped up, I’ll be tying that in, and everything will be complete. There’s already some better integration than there used to be, with better Archive integration befitting of the new Archive component, separate news feeds for Community/Cavern news and general game-, GameTap-, and Cyan-related news, and a new listing of the last 4 images to be posted in the Gallery.

The Golden KI, the Library, and the News segments are the only things that still require considerable amounts of effort. The Golden KI is largely complete, but it’s my intention to overhaul the rather arcane voting system and manual contest switch-overs that are currently in place, and replace them with poll-based voting in the forum itself, as well as an automated task to switch the contest over, handle topic/poll creation for each round, and announce a winner after each round is over.

The Library will be largely unchanged, because it doesn’t seem to be lacking much beyond a search feature, and I’m still looking into how difficult that would be to actually implement. The layout will be updated to reflect the new site design (don’t worry, it’s nothing drastic like previous revisions… this is more of a refinement). It’s still in the early-ish stages of development, but it should move fairly quickly once I dig in. My goal is to have the Library complete by Wednesday night.

The News bit is going to require a little bit more work, because I want to democratize it a bit more than it currently is. The new version of the News section will allow anyone with an account to post a news article or event announcement. Regular member accounts will require staff approval of their entries to prevent spam, while certain groups, like TCT, who have a history of posting solid material, will be able to post without the approval restriction. As with the Library, I’d love to have a search feature for this section of the site, but it depends on how feasible it ends up being; both the News and the Library both draw their data from Invision Power Board’s forum database, so the permissions restrictions and such that go along with that need to be worked around in order to get search working outside of the forum itself. Development of News should be completed by Thursday or Friday at the latest. Ideally, this will all be wrapped up before my new computer gets here, so I can give it my undivided attention when it does. I fully expect to have the new DPWR online before October 1st (of this year, just to be overly-specific).

Moving on to a completely different topic, today I started “Phase 1″ of my eventual data storage and backup solution. My current solution is pretty much “hope the drive doesn’t crash before late October”, though I’m hoping to move well beyond that soon. I was doing some browsing earlier today and noticed that Best Buy was selling the new revisions of Western Digital’s MyBook line at $50 off, so I went ahead and sprung for a 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for all of $140 after tax. This will eventually become my Time Machine back-up drive, but for now it’s serving as an extended storage drive for my Mac, because I’ve been running desperately low on storage space for the past while now. I’ve already moved my iPhoto library over, and am in the process of moving my iTunes library over as well, for a combined storage savings of about 80 gigs.

When Leopard comes out, I will be getting a copy along with an additional internal hard drive (probably also 500 GB), which will become the new extended storage drive. I’ll be backing up all of my data to this drive, and then doing a fresh installation of OS X on my primary disk, just to make sure all of the cruft and haxies and random crap I’ve installed but no longer use is cleaned up for before I start using the new OS. Once I have Leopard installed, I’ll copy what needs copying back over to the primary drive, and then set up the MyBook drive as the Time Machine backup target. So, I’ll have 820 gigs of storage backed up on a 500 gig drive. Perhaps not an optimal solution, but one which can be extended as time goes on as need be.

Despite my ruminations on getting an iPod Touch earlier this month, I have yet to get one because it’s still a bit tough to justify spending $400 on a music player at the moment. However, circumstances have conspired to make it possible for me to spend a considerable amount of effort developing games on my G5. This, of course, requires me to have access to a computer running Windows that is also capable of running 3DS MAX. At present, there are three systems in this house, and the only one fitting that bill is my wife’s PC, which pretty much rules it out as a work machine for me.

So, with a heaping helping of “thank you sir, may I have another?”, I trudged my aging refurbished Dell laptop over to the aging refurbished Dell online store to look at the offerings. I feel very bad about doing this, because I’m looking at systems I’m likely to outgrow in a relatively short time span, and on top of that, I’m looking at PCs (rather than Intel-based Macs), and on top of that, I’m looking at Dells. However, I simply don’t have the time to spend saving up enough money to buy a decent Mac (or even a Mac mini, even a refurbished one), and the sole purpose of this machine is to run MAX anyway, so getting a Mac for the purpose of booting it exclusively into Windows seems a bit stupid.

Ultimately, I settled on a rather nice dual-core AMD 64 at 2GHz with a gig of RAM, and integrated GeForce 6150, and Vista Home Premium (because I enjoy torture, but not enough to subject myself to Home Basic) for $229, which is almost as cheap as a new license of Vista Home Premium at retail. Crazy. It’s hardly the most awesome machine on the market, to be sure, but it’s still light-years ahead of my laptop (whose display driver crashes when I try using MAX for more than 10 minutes), and even ahead of the 4-year-old PC my wife has, to a certain extent. I wanted to get a model with 2 gigs of RAM, but they weren’t going for less than $349, and I couldn’t justify spending even that much right now. It’s sad, I know, but we’re trying to pay off debt and save money at the same time, so it’s a little rough at times, and the truck’s coming up on some expensive required maintenance.

I’m happy I’ll be getting a system I can run MAX on uninterrupted and unhindered, but it also irks me that I’ve delved into the dark underworld of bargain-basement PCs again - and refurbished bargain basement PCs at that. Still, Dell’s sort of the lesser of three equally evil evils by way of familiarity (at least my laptop hasn’t experienced that many issues in its 4 year lifespan, which is far more than can be said for the two Gateways my aunts subjected themselves to, regrettably at my recommendation), and it’s also the best deal I could find on a baseline system, so I jumped at it. It’s not like I need a graphics powerhouse to do realtime game asset creation, after all.

My thoughts on the new workflow are as follows:

• Everything needs to be stored on the Mac hard drive for Unity to be able to open it and include it in the project. Any new files or other updates are automatically detected and imported on the fly. It’s pretty flippin’ sweet.
• Unity will be running on the G5 for obvious reasons. All final scene assembly and scripting will be done on the G5.
• 3DS MAX will be running on the Dell. I’d like to Remote Desktop into the Dell so I can run everything on the same screen with no switching, but it depends on how well the speed works out. All files will be saved over the network to the G5 for Unity to import.
• Photoshop will be running on the G, and again, all assets will be saved to Unity’s project directory for ease of use. I can bop between MAX on the PC and Photoshop on the Mac really quickly if RDC works out, and again, MAX will be drawing and stuffing everything from/to the Unity project folder on the Mac, so running PS on the Mac is a nice way to save PC resources.

The Dell is on 5-day shipping, so hopefully next weekend I can get the whole mess up and running, and get everything squared away for some content development next weekend (or at least, a workflow demonstration should Oscy’s parents make it up for a visit). In the meantime, I should probably wrap up development on DPWR and get it upgraded, or I may never actually see the light of day again.

I’ve had a number of thoughts floating around in my head for a while, and I’ve decided that rather than spam MystBlogs’ feed with what may end up being a dozen little blurbles, I’ll just lump them into one big stream-of-consciousness thing here.

First, on a note that’s related to my previous two blog entries, I continue to be impressed with the Unity3D engine and related development environment. It feels a lot like the descriptions of Plasma that have been coming out of Cyan for the past 6 years, it’s incredibly easy to just mess around with, it’s pretty well-documented, and I can leverage my existing JavaScript knowledge (not expertise, but knowledge ;)) against scripting actions for games, because Unity’s scripting environment is C#/JS. Perhaps the biggest testament to the engine’s ease-of-use is the fact that in 3 days, I’ve already managed to prototype a pretty good deal of Labyrinth’s mechanics. Scripting is done, as I noted before, with JavaScript (or C#, if one is so inclined), and scripts are attached to objects in the engine. Any public variables (for anything from integers to other object references) can be assigned dynamically by typing in numbers (for integers) or drag-and-dropping objects onto the relevant field in the script’s inspector (for enabling script-based control of an object).

It just continues to boggle my mind that in the space of 3 days (counting from Friday night to Monday night; unfortunately I’ve been busy the past couple of days and haven’t gotten much more done) I’ve managed to enable mouse-based control of the Labyrinth board, enable physics-based movement of the marble on the board, create a game timer, a re-spawn control should you fall through a hole in the board, and define win regions using the engine’s built-in physics-based collider/trigger system (see? more and more Plasma-like all the time. Now about those doors… ;)). Still on my to-do list before the end of the week is the development of placeholder “power-up” objects in MAX (really, just some spheres or cubes… the great thing about Unity is I can re-save a more advanced model later and after an asset refresh, any already-used instance of that object will be automatically updated with the new data) and the scripting necessary to control them. I’ll probably put most of the scripting on the marble itself, since that’ll be an easier, more centralized way of maintaining the entire gameplay system than having a dozen little scripts scattered all over the place. I also want to do some research into how to load a new level after you complete the current one, but that’ll come a bit later I think. I’ve got 20 days left, and lots of work to do, but I think it can be done. I may not hit 30-35 different game boards by the end, but I’ll probably be able to come damn close… board-making is a piece of cake, really.

On a game-related note, Oscy and I have been playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary together after downloading it from GameTap. We haven’t finished it yet, but I have to say that so far I’ve been pretty darn impressed. Admittedly, some of the twitchier and more prolonged jump/climb/jump/shimmy/swing/shimmy/jump/climb/climb/climb/jump/fall/die/repeat portions can get a bit tedious, but it’s a really fun game with some pretty clever puzzles, and I’m glad I succumbed to the hype train that GameTap has been conducting and played it. My last experience with Tomb Raider was in 2000 when my (much older) cousin let me poke around in the original Tomb Raider’s Croft Manor section while my mom, my brother, and I stayed at my great-aunt’s house in Florida on a trip to Kennedy Space Center, so Anniversary has been quite interesting to me (I’m still trying to figure out whether they built Croft Manor off of a real British manor for the games, or whether they built a wicked-sweet set for the movies).

Also, Sam & Max Season 2! w00t!

Continuing on the subject of gaming and Macs, Oscy and I had the pleasure of attending Urupalooza a couple of weekends ago. We managed to drag R-chan along with us, and she in turn decided to basically kidnap a friend of hers (Scott) from Gas Powered Games, and together we roamed around Seattle on Sunday. Part of our excursions took us to a local mall, because I was rather adamant about taking the opportunity to visit one of Seattle’s three Apple Retail stores, since Spokane has none. By the way, the one in the Alderwood Mall (in Lynwood) is really cramped compared to the one in Kenwood, Ohio. While I was there I managed to dink around with the new aluminum keyboard (I like… sure beats the hell out of the white one I’ve got; the keys are better suited to my style of typing) and mess with an iPhone for the second time in two days (Brian Fioca has one, it is sweet).

Somewhat tangentially, I picked up iLife ‘08 (planning on getting iWork ‘08 soon), and have spent a considerable amount of time re-reorganizing my photo library around the “events paradigm”. This, coupled with the recent acquisition of a full-fledged .Mac account (well, a full-fledged .Mac sub-account, because my brother can’t follow directions on not using the Family Pack activation key himself *grumble*), has resulted in Urupalooza photos being posted online in a shiny .Mac Web Gallery for all to see. So go see :).

Anyway, R-chan – as anyone who was at Mysterium 2006 likely knows – is the proud owner of a light green new-model VW Beetle (with the license plate “MT DEW”, of course). Because the alternative would have involved trying to cram the three of us into the cab of my (very small) S-10 pickup truck, we also hijacked her car for the trip. R-chan’s car is the only Beetle I’ve ever been in, and it’s quite nice. I actually made the off-hand comment on the way to Seattle that the Beetle was probably the closest thing to an Apple-branded car out there. Amusingly enough, on the way back R-chan started playing a CD, and I discovered that her CD player was located in the trunk. This is largely because it’s an after-market add-on developed by VW because the Beetle didn’t originally have a CD player option. Oddly enough, this served to cement my impression that it was basically the Macintosh of cars, because as much as I do like Apple’s products, they tend to have this one weird thing that totally throws you for a loop. Y’know, like the old one-button mice, the non-optical, un-cleanable ball in the Mighty Mouse scroll nipple, the fact that the Dashboard’s implementation doesn’t exactly match the definition of the actual English word, the fact that you can’t sync notes between the iPhone and your computer, or that the USB 2.0 ports on the aluminum keyboard apparently only have enough power to do stuff like charge iPods when attached to an aluminum iMac… these are all “CD player in the trunk” sort of oddities that, while not complete obstructions to usability, do kind of make you wonder what they were thinking.

And now Apple and VW are supposedly making a car together. If the CD player ends up in the trunk, I will laugh myself silly.

Also, Apple is likely going to be announcing new iPods on my birthday. Or at least something Apple-related. Best. Present. Ever. Now I just need money and an easily-accessible Apple Retail store, because I don’t think I’ll be able to wait for shipping if it’s as good as I think it’ll be (and no, Seattle is not “easily accessible” from Spokane). My 1st Gen mini is in desperate need of replacingment. I’m also thinking about seeing if the local authorized reseller has any aluminum keyboards available… if not, I may have to order one. As I mentioned, I really like the feel of the thing, and once I adjusted to the slightly wider-than-normal key spacing, I was typing at my regular speed (as a test, I banged out the intro to Myst in TextEdit… yes, I am a nerd).

On a (nerd-)related note, I correctly identified a font from a sample printout today. Granted it was Courier, which was easy for me to catch because the printout looked identical to a Notepad printout, and Notepad’s default font is Courier, but still… nerd-dom, here I come (or here I am… not sure).

Next week is my birthday, and it’s weird thinking that I’m already going to be 23. What doesn’t help is when people on dA post journals about getting glasses and turning 17 and how they feel really old all of a sudden. I seem to have started shouting “get off my lawn!” a lot at these types, and I can’t help but think that it’s hurting more than helping ;). Next week is also our second wedding anniversary (I can’t figure out a not-stupid-sounding way of making “Oscy and I” possessive), so whee :D. In two weeks we’ll also have been living on our own in Spokane for 9 months, so there’s something of a marginally-impressive milestone.

My braindump seems to be petering out now, so I’ll just go ahead and wrap this up for now, and hopefully be more coherent on a day when I’ve had more sleep and less brain overloading at work.