Geek Swagger.
Archive for March, 2008
Bring in St. Patty’s the right way.
Mar 11th
It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of the . I'm also a big fan of the franchise. The one thing I don't really like though, is the generally over-priced song packs that are released as downloadable content for the Guitar Hero games. It seems for the most part the songs come out in packs of 3, one of which I really want and the other two I don't care as much about, for around 500 Microsoft Points ($6.25US to us sane people who actually pay for things with real money). I could write a whole post about how I wish Microsoft would abandon the points format but that's been done a thousand times so I won't.
Anyways, this is a happy post because if there's anyone reading this who is also a fan of the Dropkick Murphys and Guitar Hero (3 in particular) I have good news for you! There are going to be 3 new tracks released in time for St. Patrick's Day from Dropkick's latest album and guess what? They're free.
When I heard this news I had just finished reading a post about another song pack that I was looking at, which included a song from the Deftones' latest album which I was interested in, so I was so happy to see that another one of my favorite bands was getting treatment and the content would be free. Perfect timing too! Well then, what's the catch? Three free songs from a great band, but the songs must be the worst from the album or something, right? Well it depends on your opinion I guess, but most Dropkick Murphys fans can agree that is one of the highlights of the album and it will also be one of the trio. Next up comes another one of my favorite songs from the album called which is a re-imagining of a classic Irish folk song. Finally the three pack is finished up with the first song on the album, Here I would have preferred to see because it's in my top 3 favorite songs from the album including the other two I already mentioned, but hey it's free and beggars can't be choosers. Besides, "Famous for Nothing" is still a great song and I'm just splitting hairs here.
So get out there and download it when the new pack hits to show your support for free content from a good band! Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day!
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My new mouse and keyboard
Mar 6th
So a couple weeks ago my desktop mouse at the time, a , decided it wanted to break on me. Specifically, the left mouse button decided it wanted to break. This is the second Microsoft mouse (both were wireless) whose left mouse buttons broke, and it's probably just from overuse but I decided I was going to give Logitech a shot this time around. I also had a wireless Microsoft keyboard that was a layover from a set I had gotten a long time ago (the set that included the first mouse whose left click broke) and so I figured it was time for a new keyboard as well.
I originally looked at mouse and keyboard combos for convenience's sake, but I found that generally either the mouse in the set was really nice and the keyboard was kind of a throwaway or the keyboard in the set was really nice and the mouse was a throwaway. As a result I decided to get a separate keyboard and mouse. My desktop machine is also my PC gaming rig so I needed a precise wireless mouse, and I was looking for a comfortable keyboard. Now I have both of these needs met.
For the mouse portion of my combo I went ahead and purchased a . The mouse looks kind of janky (and without anything in the picture for a size comparison it can also come off as huge) but now that I have it I have to say it's probably the most comfortable mouse I've ever used. It's also the first laser mouse I've used, up to this point I've been using optical, and so I'm pleased with the precision. It also has a charger so I don't have to worry about swapping out batteries, plus it has a nice free-spin scroll wheel that lets me scroll through documents and pages in Firefox really fast. It also includes a button that does instant search, so for example I can highlight some text in a document or on a website and press the button and I immediately get Google results for whatever the text might be. It has a second scroll wheel on the left hand side where my thumb rests that is really more of a rocker that can be used to quickly switch between applications in Windows (alt+tab or Vista's application scroll view). Aside from that there's the relatively standard forward and back buttons. All of the buttons on the mouse can be configured though to do different tasks if you'd like, but I have kept mine all as default so far.
The keyboard I chose was the , which promised to enhance typing as a result of the wave design which is apparently more comfortable. I don't know about all that jazz, it's definitely comfortable but to be honest I can use pretty much any keyboard and feel comfortable typing. It does have a ton of programmable function keys though, as well as keys to control your music player of choice (for me, on my desktop machine anyways, that would be ). Another nice thing about the Wave is the feeling of the keys when you press them. It almost feels like you're using one of those old-school , it just has the same sort of tactile response when you're typing. The bad thing about those older IBM keyboards though was that they were pretty loud, but thankfully the Wave is fairly silent. It's at least quieter than my old keyboard.
Overall I'm pleased with both purchases. I really needed an input-device overhaul and when I received both the keyboard and the mouse I was excited to unhook the temporary corded combo I was using in the meantime. I bought the MX Revolution and Wave from Tiger Direct because they had a special where I could get $20 off plus another $30 in mail-in rebates, so I ended up getting both the keyboard and mouse for about the same price as the mouse costs alone. The worst part about the MX Revolution is that it's expensive, you can usually find it for around $65.00. After rebates and everything my MX Revolution with the Wave keyboard only ended up costing me $69.99 which is a pretty good deal I think.
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How to make wallpaper
Mar 4th
Last week I found out about a freeware application called , and since then I think I've changed my Mac's wallpaper 10 different times. If you haven't heard of Oxidizer, it's an open source application that, so far, is only available for Mac OS X. What Oxidizer does is randomly generate fractal images that you can then go in and distort, modify, or combine with other fractal images to make a cool picture. You can then export your image to pretty much any image format you can think of (jpg, png, bmp, tiff), and modify its aspect ratio or size. Therefore, I can set it to the size of my desktop resolution and bingo, new background.
Just to go into this a little bit further what happens is when I launch Oxidizer I can have the application render a whole bunch of fractals for me randomly. From there I can look at the ones I like and pull them into an image editor. Once the fractals are in the editor I can "breed" them, which basically means I can combine one or more fractal. Next using the 'mutate' button in the editor I can have the image transformed giving it a different pattern with the same basic color scheme and so on. Also if I want to I can set a different background color for the image (the default is black but just like in Photoshop you can pull up a color picker to choose whatever color you'd like) and export it.
I'm going to go ahead and post a few of the ones I've made, keep in mind these are the first wallpapers I've made and they're all set for my Macbook's resolution (1280 x 800). All that being said I just wanted to display some examples of what you can create with Oxidizer. I made all of the images in under 10 minutes or so and I have absolutely no artistic talent so you can see that it's fairly easy to use. The program really does do all of the work, all you have to do is hit some buttons.
Here are a couple samples:
So those are five images that I've created so far. My current background? Well I'm switching between the 3rd and 5th image for now. Anyways, I just wanted to share my thoughts about Oxidizer since I've had some fun playing with it in the past week.
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