Author Archives: Brad

TiVo, DirecTV to release new Satellite HD DVR in 2009

Posted by Brad

I’ve been waiting for this news for a long time.  As a TiVO subscriber since 2003, I have loved the service since day 1.  We currently have 3 TiVos around the house and could not live without them.  The annoying thing is now with HD, TiVo only supports cable card.  If you subscribe to satellite, you are out of luck from TiVo.

Since we have an HD TV, a new HD receiver and up-to-date dish from DirecTV, and subscribe to the HD package, it would be nice to be able to watch TV in HD and at least be able to pause/rewind/etc. live TV.  It is to the point that I started looking at DirecTV’s HD DVR receiver as an option;  of course I was afraid it would not be as easy to use or feature rich as TiVo (some of the online posts I have read confirm this fear).  Luckily, this news saved me from potentially making a mistake and switching to an inferior DVR.

The only bad news to this is that it will be about another year before this product is on the market.  But at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel.  I only hope this product has all of the current features standalone TiVo’s have (from what comments I read concerning this story, it sounded like the older DirecTV TiVo DVRs were not as good as the standalone TiVo products).

Anyway, check TiVo’s offical press release for more information.

Firefox 3 on U3

Posted by Brad

I had been looking for Firefox 3 availability for my U3 drive, but all I kept seeing was Firefox 2.  However, while using Firefox on my U3 drive yesterday, I received a notice to upgrade to Firefox 3.  I said yes and the download and installation went flawlessly.  So this is one way to get Firefox 3 on a U3 drive until someone releases this version for download to U3.

Peer to Peer Networks & Firewalls

Posted by Brad

I finished up a job this week for a company which has a peer-to-peer network which lost their Internet connection after someone jacked with their DSL modem while trying to install a wireless router.  They had a Zoom DSL modem/router with DHCP enabled.  I could not get this router or an identical one working even after talking with Zoom tech support.  The company requested a new modem from AT&T, but began having network issues in the meantime.  All the computers on this network use some kind of commercial firewall – either McAfee, Norton, or AVG.  All three of these products wreaked havok with me changing routers and such.  I had to end up assigning static IPs to each computer and going on many computers’ firewalls to either trust the network and/or specific IP addresses.  So if you run into trouble with a peer-to-peer network not seeing computers, check the firewall settings and make sure the firewall trusts the network and possibly specific IPs if there are still connection issues.

Robocopy and Windows 2000

Posted by Brad

I ran into my first problem installing Robocopy today when I tried to install it on a Windows 2000 Server.  When I tried to install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools, I received the message “This product requires Windows XP or a later version to have been installed.”  Since I was tight for time, I settled for Robocopy 1.7 (which came with the Windows NT 4 Resource Kit), which was the only version I found on the Internet for straight download after 20 – 30 minutes of searching.  It functioned similarly to the version I have been using (XP010) but some of the switches I use were not present like /copy and /zb and /log.  But it was enough to get my client’s backup working for now (I had setup the ArcServe which came with her Rev 70 drive, but the jobs kept crashing and it was too complicated for the client to really use).

Later, my employee Marvin found a nice blurb somewhere which looks to solve our problem and which I tested on a Windows 2000 Pro VM.  If you download rktools.exe, you can use WinZip or a similar program to extract the files from the compressed executable;  you then end up with 3 files: rktools.msi, rktools_p.cab, and rktools_s.cab.  The important file here is rktools.msi.  What you do next is open a command line session, go to the folder where you extracted rktools.msi, and type the following command: msiexec /a rktools.msi.  You will be prompted for a folder to which to perform an administrative install.  Essentially, this decompresses all of the files in the msi file to the folders in which they would normally be placed (or that’s what it appears to do).  Under Progam Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools in whatever folder you installed the msi files, you will find Robocopy.exe (amongst other files).  I went to a command line and the command executed without a problem.  Looks like I can just copy the executable file to the Server and update my batch file with additional switches and I’ll be good to go.  And now I don’t have to install the entire Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools to computers just to get the one file I need.

Games for PC and Mac

Posted by Brad

Besides Blizzard, there aren’t many companies not only making games for both PC and Mac, but also releasing them on the same media.  It is so nice to buy a Blizzard game and be able to install it on either a PC or a Mac.  With my recent moves to more Mac computers, I even had to install WOW on my Mac Book Pro so my son could play while we were on a trip over the summer.  The only other companies that I’ve seen release games like this are ones that make casual games.  Some recent ones I’ve seen are Diner Dash and the soon to be hit Spore (Creature Creator in this case).

What irks me about this lack of dual game media is that I have many games that have Mac versions, but I’m certainly not going to repurchase those games just to play them on the Mac.  With the popularity of the Mac rising, maybe companies that release Mac versions of their games could follow in Blizzard’s footsteps.  It would certain cut down on packaging and media costs to have both versions in one box on the same media.

At the very least it would be nice if the companies could offer the alternate version at a discounted rate.  For example, my son likes this game called Pocket Tanks (I believe it’s a new take on the old basic game where two people take turns firing at each other from different sides of the screen while blocked by some obstruction.  In fact my good buddy Chris used to go bananas (no pun intended) over the Gorilla Basic game that came with Windows in the mid-1990’s).  Anyway, since I recently gave my son my old MacBook, I’ve been trying to find some Mac games for him to play.  Well, the company that makes Pocket Tanks (BlitWise) sent me an email about Mac versions of their games.  Naturally, I inquired about potential discounts since I already owned the PC version of Pocket Tanks and they were nice enough to oblige.  Maybe other companies could offer rebates or some way to sell their games at a discount if you already own the game on a different platform.

Maybe this is all a pipe dream since game companies seem more interested in making console versions of their games than Mac versions, but a guy can always hope.

RIP CGW/GFW

Posted by Brad

This is apparently old news (it was announced back in April 2008), but somehow I missed it.  The reason I found out about it is that a suddenly received 2 issues of PC Gamer in the mail the other day.  One issue came with a letter explaining what I guessed: Games for Windows magazine was no longer publishing and my subscription had been switched to PC Gamer.

This was not unexpected as GFW (the rebranded Computer Gaming World magazine) had been going downhill for a while.  I started reading CGW back in the early 90’s, subscribing since the mid-90’s.  Back then, an issue could be 200, 300, or once even 400 pages thick with reviews, hints, and game coverage.  Obviously, Internet coverage has been eating into print magazine coverage for the last several years, but I still really liked the magazine because it was made up of mature, older, hard-core gamers.

I tried PC Gamer several years ago, but I did not like what I saw as the opposite of CGW: young, immature writers who did not present what I was looking for in a game magazine, namely good coverage of games with good writing, not immature dribble.  Fortunately, this trend seems to have changed at PC Gamer.  I have been reading the September and October issues and find them well-written and to the point.  The staff seems to be a respectable lot, consisting of Kristen Salvatore as EIC (a former editor at CGW) and Logan Decker as Senior Editor (a former editor at Maximum PC, another favorite magazine of mine) as well some other writers who I have enjoyed reading so far.  I am very pleased with this situation and plan on continuing my subscription.

In summary, I’m sorry to see CGW/GFW go (you can still find the editors at 1up.com), but I am excited to continue reading a good gaming magazine (especially since I think PC Gamer is the last U.S. print PC gaming magazine in publication at this time).

Robocopy

Posted by Brad

I’m over 2 months late with this, but that’s given me time to put Robocopy into production use.  I have found that it’s everything I’d hoped it would be.  First, let me say my suspicions about Iomega Backup were right – it is a piece.  For whatever reason, the installations I did and checked on months to years later were not backing everything up.  This is unacceptable in a business environment.  So I’ve switched my clients to Robocopy where needed and am in the process of switching my offices.

In order to use Robocopy (unless you have Windows Vista in which it is included) you need to download and install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit Tools (rktools.exe).  After this, robocopy will be available from the command line.  I have found frontends for using Robocopy, but instead of using them, I examined them and learned some good switches to use with Robocopy.  The default command I use is robocopy source destination /copy:dat /e /zb /v.  If you want a log of the copy, add /log:logfile.txt to your command where logfile.txt is the destination and filename for your log file.

Some gotchas I found while playing around with Robocopy include the source and destination.  I guess I was used to copy or xcopy where you specify something like “c:\data\*.*”  With Robocopy, you would use c:\data, no final backslash or wildcard needed.  Also, don’t forget to inclose long filenames (e.g., c:\program files)  in quotation marks.

The great thing about Robocopy is it’s a synchronization tool: if the file(s) it is copying are the same, it does not recopy them, only the files that have changed.  So there is no need to format your backup disk everytime before backup or use a /y to  autoanswer a choice to overwrite a file.

If you are looking for a new way to backup, check out Robocopy.  It’s fast, it can be used in a batch file and with the task scheduler, and it just plain works.

Stupid Vista Tricks

Posted by Brad

Or, how to turn on or find things in Vista that Microsoft decided did not need to be available by default.

Ever since I started using Windows Vista, it has bothered me that the representation in the system tray of two computers, one for upload and one for download, did not light up to show activity like they had since Windows 95.  Low and behold, last night I right-clicked the stupid icon and saw the option in the menu “turn on activity animation.”  I proceeded to turn on activity animation and there were my missing lights.  Now why would this not be the default selection?

Since the clock appeared in the lower right corner of the system tray in Windows 95, you’ve always double-clicked the clock to bring up the window that allows you to change the time & date.  Double-clicking the clock in Vista does nothing; single-clicking brings up a window where you can make an additional click on “Change date and time settings…” which brings up another windows where you can click a button that says “Change date and time…” which brings up another window where you can actually change the date and time!  Does it somehow make it easier in Vista to make people go through three steps to change the date and time instead of one step like previous versions of Windows allowed?

I was just reading a Windows Tips & Tricks email that talked about page file size.  John Savill points out that, though the old rule of thumb was the page file should be one and a half times your system memory, a better way now is to go by your  page file size – commit charge (peak) reading in Task Manager.  Unfortunately, Microsoft removed this reading in Windows Vista.  I had to download Sysinternals Process Explorer to learn this information.  But why was this information removed to begin with?

And finally, one of the best (read: worst) decisions by Microsoft in Vista – making the Run item unavailable by default on the Start Menu.  The Run item is one of the most useful features in Windows for novices and pros alike.  It makes it simple to run a program by just typing its name in a box.  But now you have to customize the Start Menu in Vista just to add it back in.  Do they think only a few super-nerds use this or something?

In an attempt to make Windows  as easy to use as the Mac (yeah, right), all Microsoft has done is waste everyone’s time by making them search for things and relearn the way they’ve done things for the past 12 years in Windows.  I mean, what was wrong with Add/Remove Programs?  Why when I right-click on the desktop does it say Personalize instead of Properties?  It’s no wonder why some people refuse to use Vista and stick with Windows XP.

GamersGate

Posted by Brad

I stumbled upon GamersGate.com over a year ago when my son wanted the full version of Mount & Blade.  The site is run by PC game maker Paradox Interactive, best known for their Europa Universalis series and related historical strategy games.  At the time, the site was mostly just Paradox games, but since has grown into a huge repository of downloadable PC games.

After creating an account, you can buy games and immediately download them through the GamersGate downloader software.  After downloading, the downloader software has an install button to click to install the game.  Even though you can always redownload games later (whenever you log into your account, you can see what games you have purchased), I like to make my own personal backup of software that I digitally download.  GamersGate makes this a tad difficult, but not impossible.  Apparently, they want you to always use their downloader to install the games because what they do is hide the setup.exe of the game by renaming it to launch.dat and putting it into a folder called ggdata under your downloaded game folder (you specify where to download the games in the downloader app).  The work around is this – run the game install from the downloader app; as soon as you get to the first screen of the setup routine, copy the downloaded game folder to a different location.  The game folder will have the actual setup.exe file as it has been reconstructed so you can run the game’s installation.  With this accomplished, you can then backup the game and install it whenever you like without the GamersGate downloader.

Other than the game setup hiccup, I have had no problems with any games purchased through GamerGate.  Check it out – you may find a game you like for a good price.