In December 2002 I splurged and bought my first DVD burner: a Sony DRX-500UL. I paid $430 for the external unit, which burned DVDs at a whopping 2X (30 minutes per disc). At the time, a war of formats was brewing between DVD-R (DVD “minus” R) and DVD+R (DVD “plus” R). The Sony was one of the first I found that could burn discs in either format, so even though it was a bit more expensive than some other drives on the market, I was covered no matter which format ultimately prevailed.
On March 20, 2003, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop bag in my car overnight. When I woke up the next morning, the window had been broken out of my car and my laptop bag, including my brand new $430 DVD burner, was gone. Home owner’s insurance wouldn’t cover the loss because the car was parked in the driveway, and because we only had liability insurance at the time, I was simply out the money.
I waited three years to replace it with the drive you see pictured above: a Sony DRX-820UL. Like the previous drive this one was able to burn both plus and minus discs, but it could also burn dual-layer discs, and was also much faster. It was also just as expensive as the previous drive; maybe even a little bit more.
For many years, that DVD drive was my primary burner. It was external and USB, so it frequently got shared between systems. This became important later as I began purchasing laptops that no longer came with a DVD drive, but I hadn’t quite given up on physical media. Trust me when I say I got my money’s worth out of this workhorse.
Sometime around 2010, the drive stopped working. It wouldn’t recognize DVDs, and got to the point where the tray wouldn’t open. In a moment of frustration I threw the thing across the room, breaking off the door and cracking the case. Somehow, this fixed the problem. From there on out the thing looked like a piece of garbage, but still performed like a tank.
I was cleaning my computer room last week and ran across my old friend in the back of a closet. I plugged it in, but time got the best of it. The gears that open and close the tray appear to be gummed, and even once I forced a disc inside, it would no longer read it. With piles of other drives laying around, all smaller, lighter, and faster than this one, I decided it was time to part with my old friend. For the second time in its life it got thrown across the room — this time, for good.
I’ve scanned in 99% of my old photographs, but every now and then I run across one that slipped through the cracks. This is one of those.
I’ve told this story before, but right around the year 2000, a co-worker of mine and I attended a local auction for a computer store that was going out of business. At the auction there were large cardboard boxes full of computer keyboards. The opening bid was crazy — something like $20 per box. My friend Don and I chuckled at the price and stopped paying attention. The auctioneer tried restarting the auction at ten dollars per box. Then five. Then, a dollar.
When bidding got down to 50 cents per box, I decided to bid on one. No one else bid and I won (or lost, depending on your point of view). What I didn’t realize was that the auctioneer had changed the auction to a “times the money” format, meaning I had just purchased thirteen cardboard boxes full of monitors for a total of $6.50.
Without a dolly at our disposal, Don and I searched the parking lot and appropriated a shopping cart. The two of us spent the next hour carting keyboards from the store out to Don’s extended-length van. In the end there were something like 350 keyboards, although once I had tossed out all the ones with missing keys and unknown connectors, the number was closer to 300. At some point we called Susan, who arrived just in time to cram the remaining keyboards into the trunk and passenger seat of her car.
The keyboards were all relocated to my garage. They were stacked down the right hand side up against the wall. The stack was roughly four-foot tall and ran the entire length of the garage.
I sold one keyboard to a co-worker for $10, turning an instant profit. I pulled out a few heavy-duty old-school IBM keyboards from the collection, which were heavy and loud and my favorites, and used them for a few years. I tried giving keyboards away to everybody I knew. After everyone I knew was sick of hearing about or seeing keyboards, Susan and I hauled them over to my dad’s house and set them out in a giant pile for big trash pickup.
For another year or so, occasionally we would find a random key from a keyboard in the garage or in Susan’s car.
To provide the music for my niece’s wedding, I used a program called DJ Mix Pro. It’s not a well known program, but it’s really good at what it does (and really affordable), so I thought I would mention it.
Talented disc jockeys are able to take two songs, match their speed (measured in Beats Per Minute, or BPM), and seamlessly fade from one song to the next. It is an art that requires skill, talent, and a good ear.
DJ Mix Pro simulates this skill and performs it automatically by using its own patented “Beatlocking Technology.” After adding your mp3 collection to DJ Mix Pro’s library, the software automatically determines each song’s BPM. Based on that information, you can group songs with similar BPM together, and the software does the rest.
By default, DJ Mix Pro loads the next track when the current track has 20 seconds left. When the current track has 15 seconds left, the second track will begin to play and the software will automatically adjust the speed of the second track to match the first one. It will then cross fade the two songs, lowering the volume of the ending song while raising the volume of the second one. The end result is a continual stream of music with no dead air between tracks — perfect for a wedding reception!
Once you add your songs to your playlist, you can sort them by dragging them up and down in the playlist. For my niece’s wedding, I spent 10 minutes getting the songs into the order I wanted, and then saved the playlist. When it was time for the party I simply double-clicked on the playlist, and it started playing. I didn’t have to touch a thing.
One thing I like is you can mess with options, song orders, and beatlock settings for hours, or you can literally drop and drag a bunch of mp3s into the program, click “shuffle,” press “play” and walk away. You can literally be up and running with crossfading songs and beatlocking in 30 seconds.
The free/demo version of the software has a few limitations. It only performs beatlocking on twenty songs, and you cannot export your final mixes to .WAV. Fortunately, the registered version is only $20, and your license key will be emailed to you immediately upon PayPal purchase.
The DJ Mix Pro website looks like it was designed in 1995 using Notepad. The website suggests you save your license key file “to floppy” and suggests that users have at least 32 Mb of RAM. Despite apparently being frozen in time, the software does a good job at what it does. Playing mp3s on your computer is never a substitute for a real life DJ, but if you’re wanting to play some music for a party and “set it and forget it,” DJ Mix Pro will do the job.
Like most of you, I spent several hours this weekend bringing an old dead DOS computer back to life.
(Wait. You guys didn’t do that this weekend, too? Man, you missed OUT!)
I bought this old desktop machine years ago at a thrift store for (I think) five bucks. The last time I used it was to transfer my old Commodore 64 diskettes to D64 disk images using an original X1541 cable. According to this blog entry, that was ten years ago.
Ten years of sitting hasn’t been good for the machine. The hard drive spun up, but spins more loudly than I remembered. Also, the machine wouldn’t pass POST or display any video at all.
I forgot that this was the machine that had the dead on-board floppy drive controller, which explained why that card was installed. There was also a network card still in the machine. Based on its previous task there was no soundcard in the machine, so I dug around out in the garage until I found one.
While I was swapping things in and out, I decided to pull the 5 1/4″ floppy drive (which was also working once I put the FDD controller in) and replaced it with a CD-ROM drive. I’m not 100% set on this decision, and I wish this case had slots for both. Currently I have very little software on 5 1/4″ floppies, and if I do I can copy the data over to a 3 1/2″ floppy using my FC5025 and a USB 3.5″ floppy drive, or simply copy the floppies over to the machine via the network and use the SUBST command to run them. I do have several DOS CD-ROM programs I want to run, so that’s why I went with the CD-ROM drive for now.
After that, I still couldn’t get the machine to fire up. I think what finally fixed it was re-seating the RAM.
Once the computer was up and running, I copied Rogue over to it and played a quick game. Rogue is my “go to” DOS game. It doesn’t have sound and doesn’t require a joystick or a mouse, so it’s a quick one to fire up for testing purposes. The game ran, I played it for a few minutes, and was quickly bashed to death by an Orc on level 8. Stupid Orcs.
The machine dual boots between Windows 98 and DOS.
TO DO list for later this week:
– Configure networking (both in DOS and Windows 98)
– Tweak config.sys/autoexec.bat (free up RAM)
– Track down soundcard drivers
– Install USB card; get USB working in DOS (for software transfers)
– Install modem?
This week’s release of the latest Mortal Kombat game (MK X) caused me to reflect on my own memories of the Mortal Kombat franchise.
I don’t actually remember the first time I saw Mortal Kombat in an arcade, which is a terrible way to start an article about my memories of Mortal Kombat.
I do however remember the launch of Mortal Kombat on home video game systems, which took place in September of 1993. I didn’t own any modern consoles at the time (I was a PC guy and a retro console gamer), but I remember seeing magazine ads and television commercials everywhere. Since I didn’t have any of those consoles, I didn’t get to play Mortal Kombat until 1994, when it was released for DOS.
The first time I actually saw Mortal Kombat running on a video game console was at the hacker conference Hohocon on New Year’s Eve, 1994. At the front of the room, connected to an overhead projector, was a Super Nintendo with a console copier connected to it. Console copiers were devices that allowed people to dump programs stored on video game cartridges (ROMs) to floppy disks and play them back without needing the cartridge. Because 16-bit cartridges often held more information than the average 1.44 floppy disk, the games often spanned two or three floppy disks. In between presenters, a couple of guys loaded up a copy of Mortal Kombat on a Super Nintendo using a console copier and proceeded to brutally smash one another until the next presenter took the stage. Within a couple of months, I had acquired a Super Nintendo, a console copier, and a copy of Mortal Kombat.
I just checked my old, old archives. The first Mortal Kombat for DOS came on three 1.44 MB floppy disks. Mortal Kombat II, the sequel that shipped in early 1995, came on eight. Mortal Kombat III, with the digital (CD) music removed, spanned fifteen floppies.
MK X for the PlayStation 4 takes up 33.5 GB. Fortunately it’s available to download, as that would take up 24,676 floppy disks. Don’t copy that floppy — you’ll throw your back out.
Along with MKII and MKIII, Mortal Kombat (the movie!) also debuted in 1995. I’ve always felt like that movie got a bad rap. It’s silly, yes, with lots of in references to the games. If you want to see a terrible movie, watch the sequel sometime. Oof.
One of the most controversial aspects of Mortal Kombat was its fatalities. After winning a battle and quickly punching in a series of joystick directions and buttons, players could perform gory fatalities like punching people’s heads off or electrocuting them. Performing fatalities required knowledge, timing, and a lot of quarters. Most gamers thought they were funny. Most parents didn’t. Nintendo certainly didn’t.
About ten years ago my sister hooked me up with a guy getting rid of a broken Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet. The cabinet turned out to be a (poorly) converted Atari Black Widow cabinet with a bad power supply and monitor. After adjusting the power supply and swapping out the monitor, I did get the machine up and running.
It’s funny to think of Mortal Kombat 4 as “one of the newer ones,” but that’s when the series made the initial jump from 2D to 3D. That was 18 years ago, in 1997. Along with the arcade version, MK4 made its way to the Nintendo 64, the original PlayStation, and Windows. Somewhere around that time, I lost interest in the series. Unfortunately that means I don’t have a lot to say about all the versions of Mortal Kombat since then. I played one or two of them on the PlayStation and XBox before shelving them once again. I did think the MK vs DC fighting game was unique, and I ended up picking it up from some bargain bin eventually.
To say Mortal Kombat has come a long way in 20 years is quite the understatement. We went from 2D digitized sprites beating each other up to the following clip from MK X, which I almost hesitated to post. Pixels are pixels I guess, but the light-hearted spirit of the early games seems to be totally gone.
I didn’t have a phone line in the first apartment I lived in, which cut my BBS/modeming habit when I moved in drastically down from “many hours a day” to “nothing” very quickly. In regards to computers, it was a transitional time for me. When I first moved into that apartment, my primary computer was a Commodore 64. When I moved out of the apartment and in with Susan I bought my first PC, a 386/25 PC that my friend Josh helped me assemble.
The minute I moved in with Susan and got that PC I plugged it into the phone line and pretty much monopolized it around the clock. When that became a problem, we purchased a second phone line. When I set up my own BBS, we added a third. That’s true. We had three phone lines in a mobile home. Two of them were used exclusively by computers and sometimes I used the third, too. I spent a lot of time connecting to people and things electronically (still do).
One of the big differences between the Commodore and PC worlds was that there weren’t a lot of good shareware software titles for the Commodore 64 (and for the most part, the free stuff sucked). The PC was different though. It was the era of “shareware” — try before you buy software. Most shareware titles included a few levels you could play for free with the option of buying the full version to get all the levels. This worked great for me because I was getting new games every day. I’d play the shareware versions of these games and long before I tired of playing them the next shareware game would come along and off I’d go. One of the gifts of ADD is that you’re never in the same place for long.
Doom (the original) was released on December 10, 1993 — 21 years ago, today. Computer bulletin boards didn’t operate at the speed of light like the internet does today and I’m sure it took a while for Doom to make its way across phone lines to the BBSes in Oklahoma that I called. Weeks or months, likely, but it did eventually arrive and I did eventually play it. And I was amazed.
I tend to think about first person shooters (FPS) in the following eras: there was Wolfenstein 3D, which was a game, and then there was Doom, which was a franchise. Then there was Quake, and everything else since then has been a rip off of Quake. That’s my opinion. It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of the FPS genre, partially because they give me motion sickness headaches, and partially because they all have that “been there, done that” feeling.
Around that time my friend Josh had introduced me to Laplink, a piece of software that allowed you to copy files between PCs through the use of a Laplink cable. As it turned out and as I learned at Best Buy, you could also use those same cables to connect two computers for the purpose of playing games. And that’s what we did for months. Every night after the doors closed, someone would connect the two fastest display computers via a Laplink cable, load Doom up on them, and blast away at one another until everyone else was done restocking shelves and vacuuming.
They say Doom sold over a million copies, which is an amazing number considering that most people (including myself) just played the free shareware version. I never bought Doom, but when everything in the world got released on CD-ROM in the mid-90s, I picked this up out of a bargain bin:
This CD is not special. There were a million collections of WADs (custom Doom levels), skins, graphics, sounds, maps… you name it. These were created by people all over the country (world?) and then loaded to BBSes. Every now and then some company would download them, organize them, and release them on CD. Each CD included the shareware version of Doom so that you could play all of these things. Doom was much more than just a game. It was an infrastructure that let you create your own games.
When I think back to those old ID games, I tend to think of Wolfenstein 3D as single-player, Doom as introducing player-vs-player, Doom 2 as introducing LAN (local area network) gaming, and Quake as introducing internet gaming. That’s not technically correct, but that’s how I mentally sort those games out.
In the summer of 1995, I think, I held a computer gathering in the guest area at our trailer park. Several of my friends brought their computers and, using a stack of old 10 megabit network cards and hubs, we wired them all together and played Doom, Doom II, and a bunch of other games.
The one thing that will always stick with me in regards to Doom was that feeling of “I’ve been here before” you got after playing the game for so long. In 2D games you might recognize a level you had previously encountered, but in FPS, I got the feeling that I had been to that physical place before. It was a weird feeling, to think of video game levels as real places.
So, happy birthday to Doom. Now that you’re finally 21, let’s go get a drink and talk about being Knee Deep in Hell while everyone else watches this video.
I had heard of the website Bundle-in-a-Box before, but never really looked into it until one of my friends Robb Sherwin had one of his games added to a bundle. What Bundle-in-a-Box does is group several games together and allow their customers to pay whatever price they think the bundle is worth. The games are downloadable and DRM-free so you can install them wherever and to whatever you want.
This week’s bundle contains five games and the minimum price you can pay is $2, which works out to be 40 cents per game. If you go crazy and pay more than the average price (which is currently $5.85), you get four additional games for a total of nine in all. $5.85 for 9 games is 65 cents per game, big spender.
This is the part where I talk about what you else in this world you could get for 40 cents instead of a game. McDonald’s now charges 25 cents for additional tiny plastic cups of McNugget dipping sauce, so with 40 cents in your pocket, you could buy one additional container of sweet and sour sauce there. For 40 cents you couldn’t afford the cheapest item on Taco Bell’s menu, a “cheesy roll-up,” which is a tortilla with some melted cheese inside it that costs 79 cents. At the mall, a single gumball from the gumball machine costs fifty cents, so you couldn’t buy one of those either. The cost of a single stamp is 46 cents now, so with only 40 cents to your name you couldn’t buy enough postage to mail a latter to your next door neighbor. I suppose on iTunes you could buy 40% of a single song. I’m not sure they pro-rate them that way, but you get the idea.
One of the downfalls of digital distribution, be it games or music or movies or books, is that many consumers think digital goods should cost less than their physical counterparts. And I agree, to an extent. When I first added my book Commodork (which retails for $15 in paperback) to the Amazon digital bookstore, the initial price Amazon suggested was $9.99 which I was told by potential consumers was too high. I almost immediately lowered the price to $4.99, which I was also told was too high. Currently you can buy DRM-free PDF copies of my books Commodork and Invading Spaces for $2.99 each from my website. Each of those books represents a year’s worth of work. I wrote Commodork by waking up early and writing, staying up late and writing, and writing on weekends. For a year. If you figure I worked on Commodork 10 hours a week for an entire year, at $2.99 that means I earned a whopping .006 (six one-thousandths) cents per hour. Robb Sherwin told me last night he spent 2 1/2 years working on Necrotic Drift, his game in this week’s Bundle in a Box. A game which, again, you can own for 40 cents.
For Christmas, my son and I each got a new game for the PlayStation 3 (Call of Duty and Need for Speed). The total price of these two games combined with tax was $130. The cost for 5 games here is a minimum of $2. I won’t lie; I paid the whopping $6 to get 9 games. That’s more than “cheesy roll-up” money, but it barely covers the price of a combo meal.
Bundle-in-a-Box takes PayPal, Google Checkout, and credit cards. When I bought my Bundle it took about 8 seconds to pay and then I received the e-mail containing the download information about 4 seconds later. It will take you much less time to buy these games than it will take you to read anything I’ve ever written. Ever.
This week’s bundle contains an RPG, puzzle games, a couple of graphical adventure games, and of course my friend Robb’s text adventure. Won’t you consider buying a bundle of 40 cent games this week?
I began experiencing intermittent internet problems the first week we moved into our new home (a little over a year ago). I’d be chugging along, reading Facebook or watching a movie online, and suddenly everything would stop. I tried all the easy things like changing wireless channels, moving my router, and resetting/rebooting everything, but nothing seemed to help. To make matters worse we were only experiencing the problem a couple of times a day, which made tracking down the issue even more difficult.
I figured out the problem one day while watching a movie in the living room on Netflix with the kids. While Susan was preparing dinner in the kitchen, the movie stopped playing. Just as I was getting ready to start my normal troubleshooting routine, the microwave “dinged” and the movie started. I didn’t put two and two together until she began microwaving something else. When the microwave turned back on the movie stopped again — and when the microwave dinged again, the movie started playing again. I have repeated this multiple times and have now positively confirmed that when the microwave is on, the wireless internet is off.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what to do about it.
I have a Linksys E2000. Without loading a custom firmware onto it, I can’t boost the signal. I can’t move it from the upstairs room it’s in, and I can’t really move the microwave. I guess the best solution right now is to find something else to do while Susan’s using the microwave.
I think the most disturbing part of this post is that our microwave is probably cooking our brains.
This was part of a larger blog post that took a different direction so I split this little tidbit out. Did you know you can fix many scratched CDs with white toothpaste? I’ve tried it out of desperation a couple of times with success both times. Not only does the toothpaste fix scratches, it also prevents them from getting cavities in the future.
A few years ago when I decided to build my first data storage RAID for the house, I didn’t have enough room in my server’s case to add four additional hard drives … so I went out to the garage, pulled one of my old computer cases off the shelf, and added four hard drives to it. I then bought some 3′ SATA cables, ran them out the back of my server and into the back of this tower to the drives, created a software RAID5, and began filling it with movies and music. I give you … Mr. Moonpie.
As you can see in the side here through the Plexiglas, there’s not much inside: four 2TB SATA hard drives, a power supply, a CD-Rom drive that doesn’t even work, and a few fans to move the hot air around.
Technology changes quickly. A few years ago they introduced much smaller external RAID solutions, and last year, they dropped the price on some of them. Last week from TigerDirect I ended up purchasing another StarTech external RAID cube. Now I have two of them, both stuffed with 4 2TB drives running RAID5.
Setting up one of these containers is a quick no-brainer. After removing the drives from the big yellow tower, all I had to do was attach these tiny handles to the front of each drive (screws included) to assist in removing the drives in the future.
With the handles attached, the drives slide into the new enclosure and lock into place.
As you can see, the new enclosure is much, much smaller than the old giant banana one. It has a variable-speed fan included, to keep air circulating. It supports firewire, USB, and eSATA connections. I’m running eSATA and hardware RAID5 and the drives are performing just as fast as they were before.
Before I started this project, all of my virtual machines (including the one that runs robohara.com) were sitting in the big yellow box. They’re temporarily being hosted on a different drive until the new RAID5 formats; then I’ll migrate them back over and be fully back in business.
These are the inside projects I tackle when it’s 110 degrees outside.
The Adventures of Rob, Susan, Mason and Morgan O'Hara
