Author: Tom Kern

Problems that are nice to have….

So my mind has been stuck in a I.T. kind of world for the last couple of months or so, which is really sad considering what I do for a living (I work in I.T. for those of you coming in off the Google random link boat). I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing so upgrades at home to the old infrastructure, the last time I really overhauled the the desktop/laptop setup was 2007 which resulted in one shiny Santa Rosa MacBookPro and a hastily built Core2Duo desktop. Both computers have served me well for the last couple of years. As always though at about the three years mark I start to bump up to the upper limits of their capabilities… And when I say bump into the upper limits of their capabilities I’m really talking about games. I know shocker…

Ok so lets talk about the gaming situation first. I have a Xbox which may or may not red ring of death on me at any given time (for the sake of argument lets assume that my xbox is stable) In the grand pantheon of my gaming I tend to go with first person type games (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Half Life, Battlefield, etc) on the PC I will play them on the xbox but if given the choice 9 times out of 10 I will buy them on the PC (the one time being Call of Duty:Modern Warfare2 and I gotta admit I kind of regret that decision). I always play real time strategy games on the PC (Sins of a solar empire) (I have others but I barely play them so they don’t count). So what games to I tend to play on xbox, more of the long form RPG games and platformer type games. Games that could do well on a PC but I choose to play them on my xbox because if I didn’t I would use my for 2 hours a week on Friday nights (outside of football season) for sci-fi and lets be honest all of those shows are on the internet anyway.

OK with the game front my desktop has a solid year left in it (it’s never to early to start thinking about the next major overhaul) so lets focus on the laptop side of the house. I use as Mac as my primary laptop and I have been beyond pleased with it, I consider the Mac my primary computer for all things that involve web publishing (this blog), photos, music etc…. you know all of the stereotypical Mac type things. I do occasionally play games on my Mac but I tend to choose the desktop PC for two reasons. First it’s a desktop so it has a full sized keyboard for my fat sausage like fingers, second at the end of the day it’s a laptop. I will game on a laptop, but lets be honest given the choice almost everyone is going to go with the bigger screen and keyboard every time. I larger issue with my Mac is I’ve taken it as far as I can in terms of memory and storage. Which shouldn’t be a problem, if I weren’t using VMware for some personal projects that clearly come in the category of “because I can”. I could setup vmware on my desktop too, but that’s just not good for a PC primarily used for gaming.

I know I have a rough life.

So really what I’m looking for is the new Mac book pro’s to see what they have for memory and video cards and take it from there. My guess is they won’t have less then 8GB since that’s where the current models are at and start the transition to a laptop centric life (i.e. the current desktop is the last of it’s kind in my life). The eventual plan is to have a non gaming based “server-esque” computer that could be used as a secondary computer if the need arises, but it’s primary function would be to serve as a media server and test system.

Honestly I’m already about 60% of the way there already… what do you think about the name “Starkiller” for the next mac book? (just for some reference, here is the inspiration for the current mac book pro’s name “Aluminum Falcon“)

Phoenix….

And I’m not talking about the city here.

So one of the things about the “modern” internet is it’s insistence on moving to more of a “cloud” based set up. I’m about to go on a old man (at 31) rant here that will basically be “Get off my lawn you damn kids” If you don’t feel like reading the comments of a lone person as they go into what they think is a structured argument against the cloud stop reading…. otherwise you have be warned and you are not allowed to complain.

Ok so while I appreciate this whole cloud thing, I also fully understand that the data that is up there because someone (most likely) me put it up there. Now in some cases the cloud isn’t so bad… pictures for instance photography has gone almost completely digital and pretty much anyone can do really nice pictures with nothing more then a mid-range SLR and some editing software. Hell with the CCD setups in some of these cell phones who needs a point and shoot.

Other things while not practical make sense… off site backup for insistence I recently signed up for carbonite for my MAC since you know it has those photos of my grandmother that mean alot to me and if anything happened to them pissed would not begin to describe my general attitude. So a few photos is no big deal…. My home folder on my MAC is ~115GB between documents, photos, music, videos, and virtual machines. If you take away the virtual machines and about 30GB of various applications and temp data you are left with ~82GB of either my purchased or generated content. It took the better part of a week and half to upload all of this information. While that part I don’t have a issue with it would have been just as easy to make a copy of my data on a portable hard drive and mail it to my parents and say “Put this in the gun safe and hope I never have to ask you for it” But I don’t because when it comes right down to it I’m lazy and if I can have a daemon run in the background and upload stuff to the internet I’m going to do that rather then wander down to FedEx and hope my parents don’t lose a portable hard drive.

Lord knows they can barely keep track of a super Nintendo left out in plain sight 10 years go.

And then there are the parts that I really should be doing on the cloud but insist on doing them on a application on my computer because that is where I’ve always done them. Of course by this I mean email. Now while I do appreciate the advances that Google has brought to email and that I can hook up to a Google email service either through pop3 or imap accessing email on a client sucks! No I don’t want to use a browser window that gives me easy on line access to everything in my every growing mail box… I want to use Outlook damit because it’s what I use at work and it does what I need it to do well! I want to read my email and reply with either a Ctrl-R or a Ctrl-shift-R and send with a Ctrl-enter I don’t want to use what ever new thing that Google has come up with I want to use the same keyboard commands I’ve been using since 1995… you know when the only way to get a pretty gui interface was to buy a MAC!

Basically I want to do my email through a text only client on a telnet/ssh session using pine.

End of Line.

One more time….

This is the third attempt at writing something this morning… the first one got derailed by a shiny object… the second got derailed by a Google search on how to mount and extract apk files from a Android img file.

Anywhoo it’s December which means it’s almost chilly, it also means that it’s been 10 years since I started writing in what would become this blog. It’s kind of interesting to me on multiple levels on how this whole thing evolved. It started with a version of Front Page or MS Word that I would upload to Geo-cities. From there it evolved into a blogger address (which really marked the first part of normal web routine to move completely to the internet) and the blogger address evolved into this after I became unhappy with how Google was ignoring blog-spot.

I haven’t logged into blog-spot in forever I wonder if it’s any better?

/NewFireFoxTab

/Login

Hmmmm mostly the same, though it does have ad-sense and Google analytic integration now so that’s kinda cool. To bad I do this as a hobby and not a living.

I miss the “old web” long form communication of blogs (for those of us who still do the personal blog thing). Almost all of the social media sites have devolved into the shiny objects websites… pretty soon it’s going to be very little social and alot of very directed advertising. At the same time thought starting to see parity between desktop web applications and mobile applications is very cool. I knew the world was changing when I loaded the WordPress App for Android and I it was basically a full feature client on a 3.7 inch screen.

So here is to another 10 years of blogging… who knows what the world will bring.

I’m sure it will be something wonderful

Creative snooze button….

So it’s been a while since I’ve written anything…. so hopefully this little tidbit will answer your burning question yes I’m still alive.

Honestly there hasn’t been alot to talk about in a forum such as this when I have 4 readers and 3 of them live within two miles of me and the 4th visiting before heading to the East coast was the highlight of October.

Which is to say that we have truly been there done that with what is going on.

To that end however I do miss the somewhat public pieces parts of this little old blog and it’s a nice hobby so I’m more then happy to keep it going.

If I were to be writing about the things going on that I wish to publish I would probably be writing about the following….

– Conundrums of games available on PC vs Xbox… they look better on the PC, but I have 6.1 surround sound and a 51 inch HD tv hooked up to the Xbox.

– The merits of dropping to a ipad as a portable computing solution

– The merits of dropping a desktop PC out of my life entirely and becoming a one computer house hold… and by one computer I mean a mac book pro.

– The merits of keeping a desktop pc and dropping the laptop to purely a backup computing device and a iPad as a primary mobile computing device

– The merits of taking only a phone and watching cars turn left for the weekend

– The merits of maybe just maybe expanding the beer operation

These are the things I would probably talk about, each having their own merits and stuff.

Also pie would be a big topic too.