A Mind Lost
Anything and everything.
Bad Nintendo… bad!
While performing my morning ritual of slugging back a coffee, enjoying a cigar and checking Slashdot on my phone (I smoke outside), I read a post entitled “The FSF’s Campaign Against the Nintendo 3DS“, which links to an article on Defective by Design “Brick Nintendo before they brick you!”
The short of it is that Nintendo is out of their gourd. They claim, via their End-User License agreement for the 3DS, to possess a license for everything you do with the device! This includes any user-information entered into the device, as well as any pictures taken with it.
Needless to say, this is ridiculous. The only way to express just how ridiculous this is to a big company is by not purchasing their offal. It’s hard when you have kids that “just gotta have it”, I know, but my household will no longer support Nintendo and their wankery – here we have a ton of their products ranging from the NES, SNES, N64 and GameCube (no Wii, the XBOX360 won that war), to several original mono and colour GameBoys, a pair of GameBoy Advance SPs, and no less than three DS handhelds (one original, two Lites)!
The too long, didn’t read version (tl;dr) is simply this:
Boycott Nintendo, the license for the 3DS is bullshit!
(That’s Penn & Teller, they host hosted a show called Bullshit!)
Game of Thrones
So I’ve been watching the HBO adaptation of G. R. R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones”, and I have to say that, 3 episodes in I am really impressed! I love the books, and started re-reading them a little while back (almost done with “A Feast for Crows”) in anticipation of “A Dance with Dragons” (two months to go!), and having a tv series to watch is just gravy on the ice cream cake that is A Song of Ice and Fire.
Although there are some deviations from the book, all-in-all it seems fairly accurate. More importantly, the series retains the feel of the novels, at least for me. Much can be forgiven when it “just feels right”. The raised ages of just about all the more youthful characters is a bit irksome, but with the sex, nudity and profanity it was to be expected.
As far as casting goes, nothing is amiss thus far aside from a few small things. Robert Baratheon’s not nearly fat enough, and Ser Ilyn Payne seems altogether too short from how I imagined him. Jon Snow and Robb Stark look a little too old, as do Daenerys and Viserys.
The only other niggling detail is the Lannister twins. Jaime and Cersei just aren’t quite twinnish enough, and while the actors portraying them are certainly handsome and beautiful, respectively, they least match the mental image I had of them. I think it’s something wrong with their hair; where’s the golden curls?
Stealing the show, however, is my absolute favourite character of the series: Tyrion Lannister, the Imp. While the actor portraying him, Peter Dinklage, isn’t nearly as deformed as I pictured Tyrion, he has thus far not disappointed me one bit. In fact as I watch the show I look forward to his appearances with great anticipation. I just love the character so much, and I doff my cap to Mr. Dinklage… dude’s just awesome, from the voice and accent to the body language, he has nailed Tyrion in a way that I didn’t think would be possible. The Wikipedia page mentions several quotes of people suggesting he get an Emmy for this role, and I’d wholeheartedly agree if I didn’t think all the awards (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Dopey, Sleepy, and all the others) were little more than popularity contests.
The series has already been picked up for a second season, which is great news and brings me some small joy in the wake of Stargate: Universe‘s cancellation, and the upcoming ending of both Supernatural and Smallville.
It’s also pretty cool to see Sean Bean again. I am not familiar with his work before and beyond The Lord of the Rings, but really did like his portrayal of Boromir. And then there’s Jason Momoa, aka Ronon from Stargate: Atlantis, as Khal Drogo; he pulls of the stoic look perfectly for the character. The makeup’s a bit much, though. Makes him look like a nancy boy.
So Long, Sarah Jane
Read about this a few days back – Elisabeth Sladen passed away on April 19th at the age of 65. I’m still a bit shocked, she was still so young! Sarah Jane Smith was my most favourite companion of the original series, without a doubt, and her comeback in the revived series quite literally brought a tear to my eye.
She dearly will be missed.
Winning
Is Sheen a comedic genius or a whacked out cracker?
schmoyoho:
theparodyfactor1:
For the lulz.
There’s a ton of mash-ups and music “videos” on YouTube, but imho these two are the best by far.
Borderlands General Protection Fault
I’m usually long-winded about my trials and tribulations with software, but I’ll endeavour to be brief here.
Steam had Borderlands GOTY Edition on sale for about $8.00 US today, which includes the game and all four downloadable content packs. I already own the game and the first two DLC, having purchased their DVD releases.
Since it was already installed, I let Steam download a little bit, paused it, and copied the previously installed data over to the Steam install location. Like NWN2, it switched to “Suspended” after it downloaded whatever was missing/invalid. A little bit of jockeying files back and forth, with no clue which files might have broken things, and it finally showed as Ready to Play.
After the trouble I had with NWN2 where, between Steam sessions, the game would inexplicably think it had more to download, I performed a backup of the data, deleted the local content, and reinstalled from said backup. The game was ready to play.
Launching, I received a “Stopped Unexpectedly” error from Windows, followed by another messagebox:
While this screenshot is not from my error, as I foolishly didn’t think to take one until after I had resolved the problem, the error is identical. Of course, the path to the executable is wrong, but for our purposes that doesn’t matter.
Googling for a solution turned up quite a few hits, but no answers. I tried running the borderlands.exe straight from it’s installed location and received another error complaining that physxcudart_20.dll and (after clicking ok) cudart32_30_9.dll couldn’t be found.
cuda is part of nVidia’s PhysX runtime software. While I have PhysX installed thanks to the nVidia display drivers, Borderlands wasn’t able to find it.
Long story short, reinstalling PhysX from the standalone installer available from nVidia fixed the problem. I have a feeling that I may have broken it myself by removing PhysX’s installed location from my PATH environment variable at some point, although I didn’t try that out before reinstalling the software.
I’ll also note that in spite of uninstalling the DVD copy of Borderlands, there was a lot of cruft left over in the registry. I just F3’d my way through a search for “2k ” (from 2k Games) and deleted them all.
As an aside, I really cannot stand the practice of some software modifying the global PATH environment variable. We’re not running DOS any more; thanks to the Windows registry there’s no longer any reason to require modifying the path. A process can change it’s search path for shared libraries at startup via SetDllDirectory, and a registry key exists under “HKLM\SOFTWARE\AGEIA Technologies” that points to the Engine subdirectory of the PhysX install path.
Leave my PATH alone!
Neverwinter Nights 2 Stuttering from Mouse Movement
My eldest son has been bugging me lately looking for a new game to play. Having picked up another copy of Neverwinter Nights 2 through Steam, and finally managing to get it to work, I tossed him my disc copy of NWN2 and its first expansion “Mask of the Betrayer”.
A few days ago he complained that the game was running very poorly after I had tinkered with the graphics settings. I didn’t set anything over the capabilities of the graphics card, in fact I set them rather low for what the card is capable of.
Read more of this post
Steam(ing pile)
While waiting for the Lord of the Rings Online servers to come back up this morning, I figured I’d fire up Steam and see if there were any decent deals on. Since I’m a cheap bugger, I usually check the <$10.00 section, occasionally they have some nice games in their digital bargain bin. Two items caught my eye, Neverwinter Nights 2 Platinum and the Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money DLC.
Adding these to my cart, I proceeded to the checkout. After filling in all my information and clicking submit, I was greeted with a message telling me that my credit card company had declined the transaction (I didn’t think to grab a screenshot of the pretty message, even after trying 5 times). Needless to say I know there’s nothing wrong with my credit; I am nowhere near my limit or the card’s expiry date. I’ve also made purchases through Steam before, so I know that it can work. The question is why isn’t it?
R.I.P. Brigadier
I just found out that Nicholas Courtney, the beloved Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of Doctor Who, passed away February 22nd at 81 years of age.
I’m late by nearly a month, but unfortunately I find the news these days to be so utterly disheartening and depressing that the only news outlet I pay any attention to with regularity is Slashdot (surprisingly they failed to make any mention of Courtney’s passing).
One of my favourite characters going all the way back to the Pertwee era (I missed most of Troughton’s (and Hartnell’s) run, and thanks to the BBC’s shortsightedness will probably never see most of them), his passing is a sad thing indeed for fans the world around.
A Who Fan
“You don’t score much poon, when you’re a fan of Doctor Who.” I’m not quite the obsessed fan as the gent in this vid, but I have considered building a small scale TARDIS.
Bye bye Blue Screen
A while back I wrote about reinstalling Windows due to my inability to track down the cause of frequent OS crashes. About a week ago, they started up again. Coincidentally, I had also just gotten back in to playing The Lord of the Rings Online again (I’ve been playing off and on since the open beta back in ’07; that lifetime membership has more than paid for itself).
The error, PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, is pretty common and pretty vague. Simply put, it means that something tried to access a region of memory that it shouldn’t have (an over simplification, to be sure). To figure out what was really going on I turned to Microsoft’s Debugging Tools for Windows. I’ve never been particularly good at debugging; unfortunately I fell in to the bad habit of brute-force debugging when I was learning how to program (lots of printf’s scattered throughout my program, removed or ignored via preprocessor macros once things were working properly).
A Mind Lost 
You must be logged in to post a comment.