Month: April 2005

Tech suggestions for a KVM switch?

I posted this to a local tech-chat list, but let me also throw it out to the wider blog world…
I just moved to a Belkin desktop video switch to switch between my
Thinkpad running Linux (my primary work machine), and my Windows XP box
(my game machine).
I’ve noticed an immediate signal degredaton – my monitor is not nearly
as clear as it was. The LCD to switch cable is about 3′, and the switch
to laptop cable is about 5′ long. I suspect these cables are he
culprit, and I’m going to order shorter VGA cables, but would like the
collective wisdom of TF to comment. Before I get new cables, is this a
good step?
Also, I’m noticing the Belkin is dropping keystrokes pretty regularly –
I can’t 100% pin this on the switch but it wasn’t happening before I put
the switch in. Has anyne else seen this?
I’d be willing to invest in a hig end vide switch (particularly one that
could take more than2 channels – this model i an F1DZ102T :
http://www.digitallyunique.com/i157737.html ) if I was guaranteed now
gettin video signal loss when everythng was hooked up.
Any help would be appreciated 🙂

Cedega isn’t there yet.

I’m a gamer. I admit it. I love gaming, I love playing games on the computer, I love getting into a good game for hours on end. Great escapism.
My most recent interest is playing Evil Genius, which I first played at Ubercon about a year ago. This isn’t a new game, and it’s not a darling of all the first person shooter Halo nuts. And there, alas, is it’s downfall in the eyes of the Transgaming folks.
By the way, dont’ get me wrong here. I value highly the work they have done bringing WineX to a commercial product. My problem is that I don’t think it’ll really work. The obstacles are too high to overcome, the number of games too many, and the number of ways Windows is an unstable moving target in application development terms makes their job (the concept of running Windows games on a Linux platform) unwinnable.
The games that get the attention are the darlings of the hard core gamers. We’re talking World of Warcraft, Doom3, Age of Empires, etc etc etc. These are what folks are playing NOW. Transgaming just does’nt have the manpower or resources to go back to games that are ‘yesterdays news’ or uninteresting.
I bought a Cedega license and will continue to support them, but I feel their mission is not going to be winnable. I’d even settle for useable, but even that failed me while trying to get Evil Genius and other games running.
So far, I’ve tried 5 different games. The only one that had a hint of maybe working was Warcraft 3, arguably one of the most successful games in the last 2 years. The others simple failed silently, or locked up entirely. Cedega’s ‘games database’ on their site is worthless, and their website is full of unreferenced information and incomplete details.
My advice is, if you want to run one particular game, and it’s in Cedega’s ‘supported games’ listing, you might get it running, go for it. If you want to use Cedega as a tool to let you run some of those games you’ve been missing from your Windows days, you’re SOL. Get a video switch, spend $150 on a older pentium box, and just run Windows on it. You’ll be a lot happier.

My first political bumper sticker.

I was cleaning out the back of my car today, preparing to install a new antenna and new dual band ham radio, when I came across a bumper sticker I had gotten SOMEWHERE, and never really got around to putting on the car.
I’m not a big fan of bumper stickers. They tend to look trashy. This one however is black with white lettering, and fit on the plastic fascia on my bumper, so in the future if I want to remove it, at the very worst I’d replace that piece of plastic.
I can’t find the graphic online for it, but here’s roughtly what it looks like. On the black car, it’s fine, and it really pushed my political “Yeah, this is EXACTLY what I think…” buttons, so I went ahead and put it on.

I like it.
Update – Rosa has the helpful hat today, and reminded me that those stickers came from her mom. Thanks Rosa’s Mom!

I can feel my mind going, Dave…

My Mom’s new Mini-Mac arrived last week, and this morning I set it up to test it out, get the updates onto it, and start transferring her files over to it.
“Well, maybe I’ll play around with it a little bit.”
Plugged into my nice 1280×1024 LCD monitor, running at 1.25gighz, 512meg, for $550.
Apple may have finally gotten it right.
But, putting Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast on there were low blows. *stretches after an hour of flying a dinosaur around*.
That wasn’t nice.