n3rd.org

I got myself a new cell phone! Yay for me! And I shall share my joy with you whether you like it or not. So shut up and listen.

The contract with my cell phone provider recently expired so seized the opportunity to pretend I needed a new phone. I made a short list of what I wanted (namely WiFi, GPS, Symbian and a good, replaceable battery) and what wasn’t all that important (multimedia capabilities, camera and touchscreen) and the list of possible candidates quickly became very short.

I was fairly excited about the Blackberry Storm when it was announced last September. Of course now we know that it didn’t really live up to all the expectations it initially raised, but even if it had done so, not having WiFi would still be an absolute no-go. The iPhone is a great piece of engineering, but the battery isn’t replaceable and I don’t agree with the overall concept Apple is pursuing with its App Store. The Android-powered phones (all two of them) are somewhat clunky and in my opinion not quite mature enough yet.

I’ll only comment on a few things instead of boring you with a lengthy in-depth review, there are plenty of them out there already, and I agree with them for the most part (take a look at All About Symbian, Mobile Tech Review or Engadget Mobile). But truth be told, who really sold it to me was Joel Spolsky – I trust that man :-)

Synchronization

I manage all my contacts and appointments using Zimbra, so seamless synchronization was mandatory. Turns out that Nokia’s Mail for Exchange does exactly that. Just enter the URL and your login credentials and you’re all set, no need to manually synchronize with your PC.
There’s also RoadSync which is more powerful but puts a 50$ deep dent in your pocket. If I ever switch to Exchange I might take another look at it. Until then, Mail For Exchange is just fine.

Battery

Now that’s a big one. I just hate having to recharge my cell phone every other day. The E71 easily lasts four or more days, and that’s including some semi-serious WiFi usage. Plus the battery is replaceable which is great. You can get a new one for as low as 20€, should need be.

Keyboard

As you can see in the picture, the E71 features a full QWERTY-keyboard which rather small keys. I was very skeptic as to how tedious typing on it would be. Turns out, it really is a breeze once you’ve gotten used to it. The positioning of the ‘ü’ is somewhat awkward but that’s no biggie. I was very pleasantly surprised.

WiFi & Web

Unfortunately, the way the E71 handles WiFi connections isn’t terribly smart and you have to manually select the appropriate access point for each program each and every time you want to connect to the Internet. If, however, you can bring yourself to shelling out 10€ you can get Psiloc Connect which will take care of all of that hassle.
The device comes with its own browser but I didn’t even look at it given that Opera Mobile is indisputably the weapon of choice here. I have to admit that surfing with the iPhone is a lot more fun due to its touchscreen (and larger display). So if that’s a primary concern for you then you should probably go with the iPhone. I, however, am not planning on spending too much time on the web. All I usually do is look something up on Wikipedia, post on Facebook or read news. For that the navigating with the keyboard is perfectly fine.

All in all, the E71 is a truly great phone. The only thing one could complain about is the mediocre camera and possibly its multimedia capabilities (or lack thereof). Then again, it’s a business phone. And a good one at that.

Everyone loves driving. Some even to the point where they slow down in front of a green light just to prolong this joyous activity. Or maybe they are simply retarded and don’t know how to operate a motor vehicle properly.
Either way, for those who don’t own a car – or one that only goes a measly 220 km/h – racing simulations are a good way to vent their road rage. Alternatively you can shoot people in the mouth but since this blog is rated G let’s forget about the brain splattering for now and stick with the fucking cars. I welcome you to join me on a brief tour through the last 20 year of video gaming to see how far we’ve come.

1988: Grand Prix Circuit
Simple but neat – 2D all the way. Its sister game The Cycles: International Grand Prix Racing incorporated hills and was thus 2½D, so to speak. Those were the first two racing games I remember playing, though I guess I did play something earlier on the C64 my dad used to bring home form work over the holidays.

1989: Indianapolis 500
The infamous Indy 500 was one of the first 3D racing games (for the PC anyway). It featured plain, untextured and unshaded polygon-based graphics, that’s oldschool right there. I think we were running it in CGA on our old 80286 so it didn’t even look as fancy as it does in this picture. Reminds me of LHX Attack Chopper which I used to play with my brother. Those were the days.

1991: Formula One Grad Prix
I got Formula One Grand Prix sort of by accident because the game I really wanted was sold out (I can’t for the life of me remember what it was). Lucky me, because the critically acclaimed F1GP was in many respects a milestone. There hadn’t really been much improvement in the polygon department. Everything is a little more detailed but textures or shading were still largely absent.

1994: The Need For Speed
Having never actually played this game I am not going to comment too much on it. But as you can see, textures (albeit coarse) were commonplace by then, so we were finally getting somewhere. Everything still looks somewhat clunky, though. And yeah, from what I gather it is called The Need For Speed.

1997: Need For Speed II SE
Oh yeah, baby. My friends and I used to play NFS2SE for hours on end, round after round. With the rise of 3D hardware acceleration things like reflections and weather effects finally became a reality. On one particular track your windshield got plastered with bugs. Boy was that cool.

2002: Collin McRae 3
Never played this one either. But the era of hardware T&L had long begun and you can see that photorealism finally seems to be within reach, the cars are already there for the most part. People actually look like people (in a racing game!), high resolution textures, the works. Now we’re talking.

2005: Need For Speed: Most Wanted
My roomie is hooked on NFS:MW and despite its age it look fairly good. I would say we have gotten to the point where the environment is realistic enough not to constantly remind you that you’re in a lousy video game.

2008: Need For Speed: Undercover
As I’ve mentioned a few days ago, NFS:UC is my current guilty pleasure. While I can’t really pinpoint any major graphical improvements over Andrew’s NFS:MW, the overall impression is slightly better. I dare say that we have definitely reached a level of realism where under “racing conditions” you wouldn’t even notice any more details. In that regard racing games are unique and differ from say RPGs or first person shooters in that you don’t have time to actually inspect textures and such, simply because you move too fast and your attention is needed on the road.

2011: ?
What’s next? As far as pure graphics is concerned, I believe we are asymptotically approaching photorealism. Any major increase in computational power (read: better GPUs) will only marginally improve the visual appearance. There will be no more big leaps such as going from 2D to 3D or adding real-time reflections. Even resolution-wise we are pretty much at the limits, HD or beyond should suffice for quite some time. Then again, predictions like that pretty much always turned out to be wrong.
The money is in the details. Imagine realistically behaving gravel and sand, smoke or falling leaves vortexing around your car like they do a wind tunnel (particle systems, anyone?). Think about what could be done with more advanced AI, non-scripted autonomously interacting NPCs are just the start. Pedestrians diving for cover when you bomb down the promenade or other drivers flipping you off or throwing their Bud Light at you after you thwart them, buildings collapsing when you hit a supporting wall, fires spreading realistically… Now that would make driving fun again. There is plenty of room for improvement but you probably won’t see it from just looking at the screenshots any more.

I for one am not holding my breath for anything groundbreaking. Things progress slowly and sometimes they even move backwards: where the hell did my rear view mirror and my horn go in NFS:UC, for christ’s sake? It will probably be quite some time before we see any real improvements that truly go beyond simple cosmetics.

Disclaimer: The first three images were taken from Wikipedia, the rest from MobyGames. Most were scaled down to fit nicely on the page (check the MobyGames logo’s size).

It’s been a while since I got my new computer and so far I am really happy with it. It runs rock solid and is plenty fast for everything that I’m using it for. But what I’m most impressed with is not its speed, it’s how clean and organized its interior looks. My old PC was a bloody mess:

Power cables all over the place and there isn’t really a whole lot you can do about it. So much for air flow. Now with the new one it’s a totally different story due to three main reasons:

• SATA
  Fewer and much thinner cables. In terms of connectors IDE was a god damn nightmare.
• Cable Management
  The case has several very helpful features that help keeping the clutter to a minimum. Most of the cables are stashed away nicely behind the motherboard tray.
• Modular PSU
  This is just fantastic. Simply remove all the power cables that you don’t need and you don’t even have to bother with them in the first place. Totally worth the extra couple bucks.

There’s admittedly a little less hardware in it (one HDD and DVD drive instead of two), but that wouldn’t have changed much. Compared to my old PC the new one is the Martha Stewart of computers, behold:

Another thing that surprised me a little was how huge everything has gotten. Take a look at the graphics card or the CPU heatsink, it’s easily twice the size of its predecessor. On the upside the fan runs at less then 1000 rpm at barely makes any noise at all, even if the processor operates under full load for hours. I was a little worried that the graphics card would be a little too noisy under “office conditions”, but it’s hardly noticeable. All in all it’s a really silent machine for the punch that it packs. Makes me a happy camper :)

Here’s something stupid: using my Rumblepad doesn’t keep my monitors from going into standby. Playing old PlayStation games on ePSXe actually required me to move the mouse or hit the keyboard every so often which started to seriously piss me off after a while. A way to solve this once and for all was needed!

Manually disabling and re-enabling standby was for obvious reasons not an option, I had to find a way to automate this. Windows’ power management supports different Power Schemes, so the idea was to just switch to a different one while ePSXe was running.

The first thing thing that needed to be done was to create a new profile with my desired settings, i.e with the monitors’ standby set to Never. Apparently that can’t be done using the GUI (at least under XP, my 2003 Server has that feature), but a little research lead me to powercfg which does the job, albeit via the command line:

> powercfg /create "NoMonitorStandby"

That profile can then be edited with the standard GUI or you can do that from the console as well while you’re at it:

> powercfg /change "NoMonitorStandby" /monitor-timeout-dc 0

You can of course just skip this whole part and use the provided Always On scheme if that works for you.

Once that’s taken care of, keeping the monitor from going into standby is simply a matter of switching to a different power profile, running the program, and then switching back using a batch file:

> powercfg /setactive "NoMonitorStandby"
> epsxe.exe
> powercfg /setactive "Home/Office Desk"

Unfortunately, powercfg requires elevated privileges. In other words: the above script won’t work if you’re logged on with a restricted account (which you should be). There’s probably a Group Policy that handles this, but since the program I wanted to run required Administrator privileges anyway I didn’t bother looking into it. I’m just a lazy fucker like that.

Anyway, as it turns out you can’t use your trusted old runas to start a batch file with elevated privileges (and I assume there is a good reason for this). But not to worry, CPAU is your friend. It’s a tiny, simple runas replacement that even allows you to pass the password along to the command line so you don’t have to type it in every time. It goes without saying that this should not be done in our case since we’re using the Administrator account. Storing a plain text password in an unencrypted text file is a bad idea™.

Assuming our profile-switcher is called epsxe.bat, all you have to do now is call CPAU with the appropriate parameters:

> cpau -u Administrator -ex epsxe.bat -wait -profile

The -profile option is crucial: if it is omitted the user profile is not loaded and the system won’t find our shiny new power scheme.

There are of course many other ways to go about this, the Windows Scripting Host comes to mind (and there are probably third party applications that can do the job as well). But I wanted something simple and lightweight, so that’s what I went with.

By the way, does anyone know if it is possible to set independent standby timeouts for different monitors and/or graphic adapters?