John Gatt's Babblings

jDome - The Next Generation of Vapourware

john@tkarena.com — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:28:20 GMT

Earlier on this year, I covered the benefits of widescreen vs pan and scan gaming. The most interesting thing about widescreen gaming is the field of view it provides. This guy, John Nilsson, is trying to take that field of view one step further wit the use of larger resolutions projected onto a dome. jDome is his new invention which has been patented but is till in prototype stage. Although this guy doesn’t make a great video presenter I do find the product, the jDome, to be kinda interesting, although it may be more of a novelty than a practical application. The room required to set this up is a lot more than most people would have available in their average lounge room or study.

The idea is fairly simple. If you’ve ever stood behind a projector screen you would have noticed that the image shines through the screen and is mirrored on the other side. If your projector has the ability to mirror the image, kind of like a rear projection TV, then you’re able to project onto a dome type screen, sit inside and have the game displayed around you. There are a couple of downfalls I can see – without proper ingame support, things like the HUD (heads up display) will be oddly positioned in the bottom section. Obviously, games like World of Warcraft, which he mentions on the site, are not cut out for jDome, since they are not from the 1^st person point of view. FPS games on the other hand are.

I suppose a better idea might be to make a semi-circle display, or even a curved rectangle. But a complete dome falls short due to the bottom never being displayed correctly in games. Even if you consider flight sims, the cockpit instruments would be skewed when projected at the bottom of the dome. And also, to get the proper positioning, the cockpit controls would be under where you’re keyboard’s meant to be, if you go by the positioning he uses in his demo video.

I have a feeling this is vapourware – but it’s interesting to see none the less.

The Joys of Auto-Defragmenting

john@tkarena.com — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:01:15 GMT

So, you get up on Monday morning and the first thing you want to do is get stuck into work, complete the benchmarking you started on Friday and move on. It doesn’t quite work that way with Windows Vista. As I loaded up the Crysis benchmark, I noticed a whole heap of hard drive activity and then I remember that Vista likes to automatically defragment hard drives. You watch the RAM usage go through the roof and benchmarks end up no where near where they were when Vista wasn’t trying to fragment your hard drive at the same time. Little features like this are great for the average user. And I know there is a way to disable it but you’d think it would be a standard option, with easy access to turn on and off. On the other hand, ensuring that a hard drive I properly defragmented before benchmarking, is always a good idea. So rather than continuing on with the last tests I need to do with this particular video card, I’m defragmenting hard drives and typing out this blog.

Cheap Graphics Cards

john@tkarena.com — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:43:47 GMT

I got into an conversation earlier on in the week with some guys I was gaming with about the hardware they are using. I am really surprised how many were using sub-$100 graphics cards in their gaming systems. One particular guild member was quite proud of her new $60 graphics card and how much it had dramatically improved her gaming experience in WoW.

I really suppose that, being in the industry, I have been spoilt by having access to the latest and greatest graphics cards. The reality really kind of struck me this week, as I am testing budget graphics cards that are priced between $50-80. It surprised me how much these cards are actually capable of and how good games can look at low settings. Developers use tricks and techniques and they are improving them all the time. This has mainly happened due to them having no choice if they want good looking games on consoles. Most console GPUs are not much more powerful than a sub-$100 graphics card. But if you get a Playstation 3 and a high definition TV with a new release game, it’s pleasantly surprising how great the quality of the graphics looks. Maybe consoles have done something positive for PC games after all?!

Grand Theft Auto 4

john@tkarena.com — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:05:28 GMT

Grand Theft Auto 4 hits the shop shelves today (locally). I can’t say that I was surprised to see lines going outside the local EB shop. What did surprise me though, was the amount of mothers that had been convinced to g down and pick up a copy of the latest game for their kids, while their kids were at school. I heard the attendant behind the counter ask several of the mothers what their kids ages are. One that I overhead said she had an eight and a nine year old and not to worry because they’ve been dying to have this game for ages and all their friends will have it. Even though this latest episode in the series is rated MA, the pure hype behind it is almost making it a requirement for any cool console lovin’ kid at school to have it.

The hype is not being generated by kids but by adults in the media. I too appreciate the concept of the game and have enjoyed several episodes on my laptop while travelling. Do I think it’s appropriate for kids? No way. But what do you do? Game consoles are really targeted at kids or kids at heart – people who want to escape, guys who don’t want to grow up, like myself. Big boys want to play big boys games. How do you tell young kids that no, they can’t play that game? I personally have no trouble enforcing these types of rules in my household, but obviously a lot of other people either 1) don’t know what is they are getting for their kid or 2) don’t care or 3) know, do care but give in to the pressure.

Consoles have moved beyond being the gaming system f the household to become a DVD/media centre as well. Adults are a major focus in marketing efforts. I’ve been anti-console for quite some time but even I am seriously considering getting a console, not only for the games that you can’t get on PC, but also the extra features, both interactive Internet features, BD Live style features and even for the communication tools.

Moving Day

john@tkarena.com — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:57:36 GMT

You all might have wondered why blogs and content have been a bit slow over the last several weeks. To be honest, what I’ve been doing hasn’t been really interesting on the IT side of things. It’s been productive for the future of the site, but do you all really want to hear about me getting acid burns on my feet while cleaning the concrete floor of our new studio? Didn’t think so.

Anyway, we’ve totally converted what was a two car garage into a studio which will allow us to do regular videos for the site. Also, I’m thinking about podcasts, if we can get the context right. While I’ve been scrubbing floors and walls I’ve taken the opportunity to listen to a lot of different tech-related podcasts. I must admit, some of the content is pretty good. Unfortunately, the way in which they are recorded isn’t. I think I’ve found one podcast that didn’t make my ears bleed from time to time due to incorrect volume levels and strange background noises, due to lag corrupting chat recordings. It doesn’t matter how great the content is, if it’s not recorded properly using quality audio devices, it won’t be on my subscriber list.

So we’re just about to unplug some of the PCs and move them into the new office area. I’m going to patch the network together for the time being and I would like to also investigate how good the N standard of wireless networking really is while I’m setting it up. I might find that I don’t need to fully cable the whole office.

The new office/studio will give me the ability to work on more than one or two projects at the same time. Testing can be extremely time consuming and also time wasting if you have to sit around for one test bed to do its thing. The area that we’ve been working in has proven to be quite unproductive as far as video production is concerned. It was wasn’t big enough once you have studio lights in there and all the camera equipment to make a semi-quality vlog. Not to mention having to pull everything apart to make it all happen.

Probably one of the best moves we’ve made in the new studio is to invest in about 3000 lumens of lightings, permanently fixed to the ceiling. We’ll see how it goes in the coming weeks. I’ve got lots of cool peripherals and video cards to have a look at as well, which I’ll show you in my vlog. We might even turn on the lighting and turn on the camera and see how it all looks today!

The Joys of Vista Service Pack 1

john@tkarena.com — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:24:09 GMT

I woke up this morning and I thought the first thing I’ll do is update both my work PCs to Windows Vista Service pack 1 (SP1). For those of you who missed it, Windows Vista SP1 was released on March 18th. I have been a beta tester for Microsoft for many years now and I have been impressed with Vista SP1 on my notebook. I must say I was surprised when they released SP1 to manufacturers and didn’t allow the people who have been beta testing it and providing feedback to update properly at that time. Actually that’s not quite true, they allowed premium paying beta testers to upgrade. Any other beta testers were made to wait until SP 1 was made available to the public.

So anyway, the first PC I thought I’d install it on was the gaming PC, the bat. It has Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit installed on it, with all previous updates done. I downloaded Windows SP 1, ran the program and received an error, telling me that I was using the wrong language pack. Wait, hang on a second, I am using an English copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. Upon searching Microsoft FAQs, I discovered that if you have any other language packs installed, you need to uninstall them before you install SP1, because SP1 only supports English, German, Japanese, French and Spanish.

I had installed all of the language packs previously because of a bloody pop-up that kept telling me that updates were available, because all of the different language packs were considered to be updates. I could have turned off the notification or disabled it for those particular packs, but at the time, I saw no harm in installing them. Plus, from time to time, I do like to access websites published in different languages, and translate them. So I installed all of the 35 language packs available.

When Vista SP1 said I needed to uninstall the unsupported language packs, I went to Control Panel > Features and Programs and … there were no language packs there. No problems > check installed updates. When I looked through the list of all installed updates, guess what? No language packs. Now I know I installed the language packs through Windows Updates. It would make perfect sense that if you install any Microsoft Updates using Microsoft Updates that they would be listed under installed Microsoft Updates, wouldn’t it?!

So, I went back to the FAQs, dumbfounded about not being able to find where the list of language packs is. Turns out it in Clocks, Language, and Region. If you click on Change Display language, it’s there that it gives you an install and uninstall language option. This was not always the case. The language packs were definitely in the add/remove programs section at one stage during the initial months of Vista and also right after I first installed them.

Microsoft in their infinite wisdom found this new home for them, which requires even an experienced computer user to go through their FAQs to find out where they’re hidden. So, I clicked the remove languages button, ticked all the languages that I didn’t want, clicked next and waited. About ten minutes later, the computer re-booted. When I went back into the languages section, it informed me that I had successfully uninstalled one language. The other thirty language packs did not uninstall. I tried it a couple of more times and each time found that only one language pack uninstalled at a time. And it takes a long time to remove each language pack. No problems, I thought, I’ll keep uninstalling all of them one by one and go and work on my laptop – maybe write up a blog about the experience.

I downloaded SP1 on the laptop and went to install it. It came up with an error message telling me that I already have SP1. I do have SP1 beta, which I installed on January 28th. You would think that Microsoft’s install program would be smart enough to detect that it’s not the final version and then update it appropriately. But no. No problems, I uninstalled the beta SP1. This time around, it was in the logical place and the Add/Remove option was available in the Programs and Features section of Control Panel. 45 minutes later, it’s still uninstalling and I’m typing this blog out on one of the only PCs left in the labs that’s not been out of action this morning – it’s running XP.

Non-techie Friends

john@tkarena.com — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:45:23 GMT

I always find it entertaining when friends try to get technical and blunder. Yesterday we had a friend trying to describe her new ADSL modem she got. She wanted to set it up in her house and really had no idea how to do it. When describing it, she referred to it as having “whiffy”. It took us a couple of seconds to realize that what he was trying to say was that it had Wi-Fi. J She called it “whiffy”, like what you might call an old pair of socks that are in need of a wash!

Then we explained to her that she needed a dongle and even showed her one. And for the life of me, I could not explain to her how it was connecting to the modem without a wire. It had no aerial, so it didn’t make sense to her that it was sending and receiving stuff wirelessly.

Another friend yesterday was trying to setup her digital set top box. And even a simple thing like cabling AV equipment into the back confused the living daylights out of her. She had to get a switch as her TV only had one set of AV connectors. She was able to get the set top box to transmit a signal through the switch to the TV but the DVD only played the sound. She was convince that she needed another cable from the switch to the televisions and it took her a little while to realize that what she needed was a cable from the DVD player to the switch which she had not connected. She really didn’t understand it.

I could spend days talking about times when even techie friends said funny things in relation to technology. I’m sure you’ve all got similar stories to tell.

Bit-tech: Babbling About Misinterpreting the Enthusiast

john@tkarena.com — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:52:05 GMT

There is an interesting and entertaining article over at Bit-tech about the way in which the industry is currently miss-representing enthusiasts or enthusiast products. The main thrust of the article is about chipsets and motherboards.

After spending many years in the industry and seeing both sides, I can understand his interpretation of the state of play. I also get the impression that he kind of came into the game at about the half way point as he doesn’t touch on any of the older hard-core stuff from the dawn of the enthusiast case mod building days. He seems to blame the manufacturers for wanting to produce everything as enthusiast products and goes into BIOS and voltages available to the average user.

Unfortunately, it’s not the manufacturers that have forced the products this way, it’s the enthusiast media that have done this. I’ve seen it time and time again for years – if these options aren’t available, then no matter how stable the board is or how many great features it has, it just won’t get the thumbs up from an enthusiast website. The countless motherboard round-ups that would praise or condemn a board over 1% performance variance, was just crazy. And there’s no difference now because, let’s face it, motherboards are not the processor, they’re not the graphics card, they are the interface between them. Technology has got to the stage now where there is really not a lot of room for improvement. They are communicating with the devices extremely efficiently. On the AMD side there is not even a memory controller available to tweak anymore as it’s built into the CPU. And in the dawn of the “enthusiast” revolution, memory performance and memory controllers were the major difference between chipsets.

Although I might not agree with his analysis, it is an entertaining read.

The Extra Day Filler blog.

john@tkarena.com — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:27:35 GMT

Friday 29th February 2008 is kind of an extra day, so I thought I'd fill it in with some of the stuff I have let out over the last few months and use this extra day to re-evaluate the way in which I blog.

Every couple of days, Fiona asks me, what are you blogging about today. I think about it for a minute, realize that I am still working on the same stuff that I was working on a couple of days ago and then end up not blogging. But yet, every time a friend comes around, I find I have plenty to talk about. So do I blog on just IT stuff, or do I blog about all sorts of things that I'm doing?

Is it possible that some of the other things in my life, might be of interest to readers who visit tech sites? Hell yeah. So why don't I blog about it?

Well this is my blog to change all my future blogs. I have been so hung up on finding something ingenious to say about a topic in the tech industry that I have neglected all of the other exciting things that have happened in my life since we launched this site - some things that could even be classified as remotely techy!

So we launched tkArena back on January 7th. I was sitting in a hotel room at the Excalibur hotel in Vegas at the time. I had spent the week earning blisters on my feet as I tried to cover as much of CES as possible. One of the really cool things I got to see at CES that was kind of tech-related but it wasn't, was a giant Bumblebee on Dolby Digital's stand. As I've had a few of my geeky friends ask for a copy of the photo when I've shown it to them, I thought I'd post a copy of it here.

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After going to CES, I spent the weekend 4 wheel driving with a good friend in Texas where we were not only privileged enough to do some amazing things in a H2 but we also managed to push it to its limits and kill it! There's nothing like getting out of a 4 wheel drive and finding bits of the diff on the side of the car to confirm how dead it actually was. 4 wheel driving is something that's been an interest of mine for several years now and although I don't get to do it as often as I'd like, I always enjoy pushing technology and machinery to its limits in the great outdoors.

After going out to some fabulous restaurants and getting some incriminating photos of exhausted business partners falling asleep in bars, I headed out to Detroit to visit some family. While I was in Detroit I was lucky enough to visit the motor show there. And if the automotive industry tickles your fancy, I've got some photos that will blow you away! Now at CES, I got photos of bumble bee in his full glory, transformed state. In Detroit I had the pleasure of seeing the disguised version of bumblebee, a very sexy yellow Comoro.

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We went to the motor show on the very first morning that it opened, which was kind of lucky for us because it was extremely cold, around 0F and not many people bothered to make the trek out there first thing. So I was able to get lots of clear photos without all the background traffic of attendees. One thing I did notice was the amount of hybrid cars being showcased. Humvee, Jeep, GM, Ford - they all had one or more forms of hybrid cars. Rather than just talk about it, let's have a look at some.

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This concept Chevy Vault has a rechargable electric battery and an onboard raneg extending gas generator. After drivning for 40 miles the car would switch to gas, ethanol or biodiesal fuel. Not only is this a green type car but unlike most of the other concept cars at the show, this baby actually looks tough. You can tell it's related to the transformer bumblebee.

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This Hx Hummer was very cool looking. Aside from the fact that it's a hybrid, I don't have much more info on it.

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There's nothing like getting a nice shot of the rear end! The Hx is more along the size of a Jeep than a Humvee - even smaller than the H3. It looks like Humer are going for the light 4WD this time around.

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No idea what Suzuki were thinking when they designed this utility vehicle. This funky looking green thing is a hybrid designed for council workers. It even includes light saber looking flash lights as door handles.

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Just for your desktop pleasure, here's some photos of the sexy looking speed racer car. I must admit that this gorgeous looking retro car looks a lot better in real life than it did in any cartoon. Check out more info about the movie here: http://speedracerthemovie.warnerbros.com/

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The guys who designed this amphibious vehicle were on something really funky. Apart from an amusement park, where do they really think this thing would be used. I mean, just watch some old James Bond movies if you want to know how to make a sexy amphibious car.

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Jeep may have been giving the attendees of the motor show the wrong impressions of the 4 door Jeep Wrangler's capabilities. They don't need to pretend that they can drive it up a 180 degree angle to sll me on this baby. I think i might have to trade in the old Cherokee.

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This is a new concept Jeep Renagade - a hybrid deisel/electric. The propulsion system combines a 40-mile lithium ion battery and a BLUETEC diesel engine providing 110 miles to the gallon.

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The two seater Renegade is really designed for the 4 wheel drie crusing enthusiast and fun activities like going dune bugging. It kind of reminds me of a buggy out of a cartoon I used to watch as a kid.

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The Shelby needs no introduction, especially if you're a Knight Rider fan, you'll know this is the shell for the new kit. I definitely developed a new appreciation for the Shelby Cobra after seeing it in the pilot episode of Knight Rider.

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The Bullet is a concept car from Ford based on a Ford GT. I'm not an expert on it, but I'm sure there'll be guys in our forums that will be able to tell us all about it.

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The A BAT from Toyota is only in here because of it's name. It's a hybrid truck but i could some uber-tech geek going out and buying this truck simply because he had an old motherboard that he used to be able to overclock with that had a similar name.

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I have to thank my cousin Rachel and her father Johnny for spending the day with me at the Detroit motor show and dragging themselves out in the freezing weather.

These last two photos were taken on the booths at their respective car dealers and uploaded to the net at a later date - a really good idea from the dealers as it gave them a lot of personal information about anybody who had their photo taken a you had to fill out an essay to get a hold of it.

So after finishing up a freezing week in Detroit, I had to head back to Melbourne to a horrid dry heat, to enjoy sweating on a daily basis. The first thing I did was to get back into some of the benchmarking on dual vs quad core stuff. I hit a couple of hick-ups with faulty hardware. It took some fiddling around to figure out what the problem was. It turned out to be more than one thing, which is always a headache. Not only did I have another motherboard that didn't support the new CPU (which has apparently been fixed now) but I had a power supply that was not compatible with particular video cards! What the? That's right, I'd plug in a GeForce 880 GTX Ultra and have no problems. I'd plug in a GeForce8800 GTX and the system would run like a dog. It wasn't until I uninstalled Windows Vista and installed Windows XP 64 that I got the low-power message from the GTX graphics card. Then I realized that it was actually a problem with the power supply. I mean why would a PSU have no problem with a high-end card and not with a card that's just one step down in the same series of graphics cards?! The cards were even from the same manufacturer. I don't know, but changing the PSU solved all the issues and now, finally, I've been happily benchmarking for the last week or so.

Following user demands, we are doing some of the so-called real-world benchmarking which involves some re-thinking about the way I test things. Due to cheats in drivers and actual benchmarks themselves over the years, it's almost impossible to get accurate results from them to compare hardware. At the same time, I don't just want to exactly copy the testing methodology that other sites use. We have to do what's best for our readers and what makes the most sense to me. Developing benchmarking methods for the first time is a hell of a lot more time consuming than I originally thought. And after spending a few days doing real-world benchmarks, I have definitely come to appreciate the time and effort the guys over at HardOcp put into testing for their articles. It is definitely a lot more time consuming than hitting a time demo batch file and walking away to do something else.

I even got told off (kind of told off) by Fiona when she was asking what I had been doing the next day, as I had been playing games all afternoon the day before. Although you need to play through all the game fully at least once, during testing I found that I am playing certain levels several times to find the sweat spot. In Crysis, I found a section towards the end of the game when you take a gunner position in a H2 Humvee (luckily the diff doesn't break in two) and defend the convoy on the way down a hill as the NPC is driving, giving you a guarantee of a very similar type of scenario during every benchmark. The other section of the game is the end-scene with the end couple of bosses. Lots of explosions going off on the aircraft carriers desk etc. Admittedly the first time I played through that end section of the game, it was a bit of a let-down cause just as it was getting exciting, it was also getting a lot more demanding on my PC and I had to pause the game and back off some of the settings to continue. I've set the highest possible settings for this level and gone back and tested the other level s using the same settings, recording all of the information using fraps. The question I keep asking myself, is how far do I go with the amount of games I test? Do I need to test five first person shooters or is one or two sufficient? I want to try and over most genres for fps, RTS, MMOG etc since they all have different requirements, but I might stick to a maximum of four or five games overall. There's no use testing something on high end hardware that doesn't even scratch the surface of its capabilities. Commenting that Half Life plays on max settings smoothly all the time is sufficient.

The other thing that has been happening in my life outside of work, is that I've somehow been roped into assisting the archery club that I'm involved with, with their website endeavors. If it wasn't for a listing on a local council's website, I would never have found the club and they've already had a couple of people try and build a website for them. Website building is not something I do or have attempted for many years. It's definitely not my expertise but their requirements are extremely simple. I was even thinking of using something like Google Site Builder which I found out about at a Google seminar that I went to in Sydney last week. We have already covered some of the core Google applications that are available to the general publish but there are a lot more of them that I never knew about. Google Apps is a business tool that allows an organization to consistently use the same applications for all their communication needs. Like the group of us there at the Google seminar, you might think you are already using Google Apps, but you're not. Google Apps if far more than just Google's list of applications, it's actually a complete package put together by Google which includes the majority of their applications but also has features like domain name linking etc, ie. you can have mail@tkarena.com using Google mail and have member's sign up for a tkarena mail account using their software (ie. gmail) but with your corporate or website name. Google calendar allows you to organize meetings and conference calls across the world in different time zones and Google docs allows you to store and work on documents from different sides of the world. All of these applications are bundled under one domain name login interface. There are free versions and corporate levels versions that cost about $50 per year per user. These style of application is definitely going to pave the way for smaller PCs and mobile units and the storage requirements for a mobile office will actually decrease as everything is being stored online and broadband is becoming broader across the world. I can download 350MB files in a couple of minutes now on our ADSL2 connection. And even wireless technology around the home allows us to stream videos anywhere.

So, that's basically where I'm at at the moment. I hope the ye candy in this blog made up for my babbling's.

I’m a type of hands on guy

john@tkarena.com — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:07:48 GMT

I get asked a lot about what hardware I use in my gaming rig, what I recommend for upgrades and even what’s the best keyboard, mouse etc. Now yes I test a lot of stuff, but the only way to really get to know something is to use it full time.

I love the people I come across that are still using XP, telling me how bad Vista is and when I tell them I use Vista on my main work PC (notebook) and my gaming PC, they kinda get thrown back and ask why? We have the whole industry telling us how it sux and XP is better because it’s faster and simpler. The funny thing is I remember people saying the same thing about Windows XP vs 2K. Does the whole industry forget the Infinite Loop or NV Loop/BSOD error? I spent months working on that problem with gamers back in 2002. That very article got hundreds of thousands hits. I got emails for Microsoft, graphics chip manufactures and game developers about it. XP was so bad with 3d graphics you had to be mad to use it and most of us were!

XP was slower than 2K, had all sorts of driver problems and was horrid for games, but we all still went out and installed it. XP didn’t come of age until XP service pack 2.

It didn’t start there, the same thing happened with Windows 98 when it come out. OMG it was slower than Windows 95! It had all sorts of driver problems and lots of your old games didn’t work on it. And you know what? I also remember the lines to get windows 95. The mad rush on that August night to get an OS that was so over-bloated with extra graphics hogwash that most people who got it had to upgrade just to run a screensaver on it. Long live windows 3.1 right?

Now yes Vista is slow at the start as it organizes your hard drive. I would say it takes about 2 weeks of use for Vista to settle in, get all its updates and drivers sorted, before you get a nice experience, but the gold is there at the end of the rainbow. Vista does sort itself out. We have Service pack 1 now that I’m using on this notebook and it fixes a lot of the bugs and quirks. You get a very nice interface to work with and you get DX10. I could not see myself going back to XP.

As to the hardware I use. For my gaming rig it is.

Intel Core2 6700 @ 2.67ghz
4 Gb DDR2
Geforce 8800 GTX ultra
On a MSI P6Ni Nforce 650i
2x Samsung 22” widescreen LCDs.

All my peripherals are Logitech: G15 keyboard, G7 mouse, Logitech Mic, Joystick etc. My desk looks like an add for Logitech. My case is an Altech server case that I moded myself. We have a video coming up on the case mod this week. I recommend what I use. If it's not good enough for me or I haven’t spent a lot of time with it, I find it hard to have an opinion on it. I’m a type of hands on guy.