John Gatt's Babblings

So, the show’s over

john@tkarena.com — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:56:04 GMT

Computex this year was kind of interesting and annoying all-in-one. Having to navigate around the new venue was a bit of a pain. And to be honest, the benefit the new venue provided did not outweigh the disadvantage of it being so far away from the other areas. I didn’t even get a chance to go through some of the other halls filled with gadgets and gizmos – something I have don every year for the last eight years – all because of the time I had to wastes travelling to and from Nangang.

The main themes that I could see at the show this year were one of the two things – green computing and multimedia Blu-ray playback.

On the green computing side, I saw everything from PCs that are power efficient when they are turned off (!!!) right through to power supplies that had bling bling lighting to ensure that people noticed that they were “green” !!!.

One of the trendiest things I saw was a neat looking GPU fan from SPARKLE that rotated to adjust airflow not only across the video card but across the case. Another cool thing was from Albatron: a large LCD that had a multi-touch interface via infra-red lighting that goes across it.

It’s hard finding things in this industry that are actually new. Intel were copying stuff that VIA released last year by showing off Atom-based mini-notes that look like VIA NanoBooks. AMD were jumping on the Blu-ray media centre band wagon and also had a couple of small notebooks. It seems this year that everybody thought small notebooks are the new big. We’re definitely all sick and tired of carrying around heavyweight notebooks and let’s face it, who really has any time on the road to game. Super-powered notebooks aren’t necessary, unless like, me, you have to do video editing every night in your hotel room.

Although I dread having to carry around my notebook, or should I call it, desktop replacement PC, it does do the job sufficiently. Many manufactures I spoke to last week were surprised at how quickly I was getting videos online. I think we did a reasonable job in covering the general feel of the show. I would like to do more in-depth coverage next year but it takes man-power. I had to cut some of my days at the show short in order to edit videos. I was usually editing until about midnight and then I’d upload them slowly overnight, only to have to get up early in the morning to shoot more footage.

Due to technical difficulties, not all of the videos turned out how I wanted them to. I even lost one or two of them because of audio problems and/or poor camera work. Trying to do it solo isn’t that easy! Two things I have learnt: a good directional microphone is important. I did take a directional microphone with me, it was a cheap one and will have to be updated before my next trip since it was the reason at least one video was a right-off. The second important thing when using a hand-held camera is getting a camera with a wide angle on it. I was able to pick up a wide angle lens in Duty Free on my way back. I will be able to get closer, crisper images on my next trip.

A sneak peek in at VIA

john@tkarena.com — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:01:44 GMT

So, night one of Computex 2008. I spent all night last night flying and got lots of use out of my ipod and OQO. I found that trying to listen to some of the tech podcasts you can get from iTunes on the flight would make me nod off. But the shorter ones, like the one from Extreme Tech, were just the right length to keep me interested. Some of the gaming ones were just a waste of space on my iPod. It's amazing what people podcast about. I hate the ones that start off talking about something interesting, then wander off in some crazy direction that has nothing to do with what the podcast was meant to be about.

After the long flight it was great (not) to find that my room was not ready and I had to kill an hour and a half waiting for it to be set up!

After freshening up and downloading some 2000+ spam emails I headed off to the Gigabyte party at the Tavern. I stopped in to pick up some old friends from VIA that where busy setting up their booth at the TICC building. Bringing my camera along paid off as I got some of the first sneak peeks of what VIA is showing off this year!

All the mini-notes on VIA's booth are amazing, really pathing the way for small light portable computing. There is something for everyone, from the OQOv2 right up to a 13.5" HP - all boasting VIA CPUs. It's great to see someone like HP getting behind the mini-note. The HP 2133 7" Mini-Note sure is something I'm dying to get my hands on, and for about $500 it's going to be easy to do so. It's just the right size and weight for on the road writing/surfing, and even some simple games if you need to kill some time. Today I'll be getting my feet sore looking around the showto see. I'll see what juicy news I can get you all ...

Check out this pink VIA NanoBook - not my style, but some Barbie fan-girls might actually like doing their homework on it!

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.