We've given up on PC games. This weekend, Sarah bought a copy of Oblivion, one of the games that inspired her upgrade to a newfangled Core 2 Duo system from Dell. Her new computer easily met the recommended system requirements, but neither patches nor updated drivers nor human sacrifices would let the game run for more than a few minutes at a ( Read more... )

Apple finally updated the iMac and the Mac mini. It's almost like a holiday. Surely I must have $1199 lying around somewhere. I hear the iPods are next.

If, like me, you have an attitude towards the iPhone that wavers between frustratingly unsated technolust and upright disdain of the hype and faddishness, you may also enjoy this instance of Will It Blend?.

Now that I've flown to Honolulu from Houston, I wonder how for long other flights will disappoint me. Even my trip from JFK to Edinburgh two summers ago didn't offer personal LCD screens, with remote controls allowing me to select from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Simpsons, Bugs Bunny and Friends, Wallace and Gromit, CSI, random ( Read more... )

Although my conversion to the church of Apple is not as complete as Gabe's in the last Penny Arcade strip, I too must admit to a change of heart. Once upon a time, like all devout PC gamers, I reviled Macs as useless trinkets for clueless old people, fatuous pretty boys, and perhaps graphic designers. Yet just the other day I was admiring how my ( Read more... )

Before today I thought I needed my laptop to enjoy pseudo-legal DivX files on my usual home theater equipment with any sort of convenience. Then I discovered in my bin-'o-computer-junk some AV cables just long enough to connect the desktop in my bedroom with the VCR in the living room, even though each machine lies on a wall opposite the shared ( Read more... )

Today was a fairly crappy day, literally. Every time I get in my car in the morning, the birds have abused my poor Emily some more. I need to stop parking beneath that fucking tree. I hate that tree. Stupid tree ( Read more... )

Well, the paper submission deadline came and went. My Thursday and Friday were actually very low key. It was too late really to run any new experiments, and Peter, Michael, and Satinder (Drs. Stone, Littman, and Singh?) handled all of the significant writing and integration. Actually, the ending felt somewhat anticlimactic. I think I would feel ( Read more... )

Argh. I picked up my graduation present laptop (HP Pavilion N5425) from Fedex yesterday. For a while the thing seemed to work fine. I let cdinwood set up "Christina" and "Dad" accounts in Windows XP, then we had some dinner while watching selected scenes from the Princess Bride DVD with mygrane. I think the thing crashed once during this period, but overall ( Read more... )

Urge to strangle... rising.... Today I bought a wireless PCI card so that I could stop having to wait for net access. The installation went pretty smoothly and before too long I was playing Unreal Tournament online again. Then my computer hung. In the next thirty minutes it proceeded to hang about ten more times. Tried to check the Linksys web ( Read more... )