I got a few new toys on tuesday. You can probably guess what one of them was.
First, I got my first new console since the CD32; a PS3 with GTA4. Why a console with only 1.5 games worth having? Because that's what most of my friends have, and because I want it to not die in the first 5 minutes.
My opinion on GTA4 so far? Well, every review site that gave it a perfect 10, or 9.8, or whatever: they're *so* full of shit. This game has flaws, annoyances, glitches, lockups (apparantly related to network code) and misfeatures like any other. For instance, the phone is a cool way of interfacing with missions, but does Niko really have to pull it out in the middle of a firefight and make shooting impossible? Great, I just completed a mission, but now I need to escape the cops, and I can't even fucking run away or shoot back without aborting a bunch of dialog.
Not that it's a bad game; it's really, really good, but it's not the flawless orgasmic experience everyone says it is.
In addition to the PS3, I got a new monitor; a Dell 3008WFP, since my pair of NEC 2070NX's are getting pretty long in the tooth (nasty persistance issues; like, the tops of windows burning themselves into the top of the display), and I needed something to plug the PS3 into.
The good: it's huge, and got lots of pixels. The colours are good, it's got more inputs than a cheap hooker, it's got a scaler so whatever input you give it get scaled to the full size of the screen, and it's got plenty of controls for tweaking.
The bad: it's huge. Too huge. Why can't you get intermediate resolution displays that are a bit smaller? As soon as you drop down from 30" everything's 1920*1200 at best; half the number of pixels, even on a 27".
Second, it's bright; too bright. A brightness of 0 means "a bit too bright"; the default brightness of 50 means "DO NOT LOOK AT MONITOR WITH REMAINING EYEBALL"; who the fuck calibrates these things, Ra? You basically have to wait for the backlight to start to die so you can display a pure white display (like, say, most websites) without burning out your retina.
Third, and this is the worst; it's got nasty backlight bleeding. The whole lower right of this display basically can't display black unless you sit 4ft away; this is apparantly not an uncommon problem with these panels. I wonder if this is one of the reasons they currently have a 2 month lead time on new ones. Completely unacceptable for a monitor that retails at £1500.
Fourth, input switching is a chore; you get to switch between each one individually each time. There's "auto select", but it doesn't seem to do very much.
In retrospect, I think a pair of 24"'s might have been better. But not one of Dell's, which are all crappy PVA panels. Not that it isn't fun having 720p HDTV content playing in a corner at full resolution, with a maximum-usable-size web browser and a very large TV guide either side of it.
After reading the power of feeds on The Daily Mumble, I remembered I was gonna add feeds to FreshBSD.
So, there you are. No RSS yet, just Atom. Feeds inherit all items of your search, so if you want a feed of all FreeBSD RELENG_7 commits by sos which mention ata, now's your chance.
Hammer it, and I will, of course, brutally murder you. Or at least your packets.
I suppose I should do aagh.net next. Comments, too.
After years of using PenguiNet to SSH into my home server, and from there everywhere else, I've migrated most of my terminal use over to Terminator — which is about 700 lines of Python (plus, er, about half of Gnome). I still use PenguiNet, but it's mostly just a SSH tunnel for Terminator's X window.
My primary motivation? Fixed 6x13, in Unicode. PenguiNet can do one or the other, but not both, because the Windows .fon/.fnt formats can only handle up to 255 glyphs and nobody's managed to make a vector version of it that actually works properly. Oh, and every TTF/FT console font I've ever seen sucks donkey balls.
I don't really *need* Unicode, of course, good old iso-8859-1 suits most of my needs just fine, but there is something to be said for being able to copy something off a website using curly quotes and em-dashes, and having them actually paste properly elsewhere. Also, now I can actually see all that Russian and Chinese text spammers keep sending me. I feel almost worldly.
Also, for the most part, I find I prefer the tiling approach to PenguiNet's MDI; I often do open way more terms than I can actually display at once, but this often turns out to be a mistake, since I'm constantly losing the bloody things. I do look forward to being able to put groups of terms into tabs, though; there's already a branch (or two) for that, in fact.
A FreeBSD port is in the PR queue, and Ubuntu users can grab it out of Universe.
"The Prime Minister revealed his strong support for reclassifying cannabis as a "class B" rather than "class C" drug … Today's comments from the Prime Minister suggest he will push ahead with reclassification regardless of what the review concludes".
Typical fucking politician; who cares what smrt people who've actually researched something say, my opinion is more important, and deserves to be forced on everyone else.
Of course, it's all pandering to the electorate; the public are bombarded with constant media witterings about how cannabis causes people to become psychotic (sure; at about the same rate alcohol causes psychosis) and schizophrenic (an association made strongly with tobacco). I guess "New report finds cannabis less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco" isn't as exciting as "Cannabis ruined my son's life!!!".
Of course if alcohol ruining lives weren't so common I'm sure we'd have the media flooded with articles on that too. And tobacco, which pretty much directly kills 25% of the population, is somehow safe enough to simply tax heavily. Did I mention something like 80% of schizophrenics smoke?
So, fuck you Gordon Brown. Fuck you for putting your own opinions ahead of my own autonomy when it comes to consuming something that the facts clearly show as being less harmful than things you yourself consume. Fuck you for ignoring facts that might help you form policies which actually help society, instead of flailing around trying to appease Daily Mail readers.