Story Crossovers
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out
Amusing and entertaining as all get out.
The future of the PC
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out
You’ve got a Wii. You’ve got a 360 and are pining over the Kinect. What’s next? Your PC, that’s what. Imagine yourself working on documents in a real 3D space using only gestures and talking to the computer. Gone is the keyboard of today, and the mouse is just an afterthought in Steve Jobs’ mind. Tracking hardware like the motion sensor in the Wii and the XBox 360′s Kinect are just a couple samples of the very immature, but very realistic forward thinking that is coming to houses the world over.
Further enforcing my stance on this subject is the recent advances in tactile feedback using virtual UIs (User Interfaces) whereby motion tracking, ultrasonic waves and holograms come together to form a tactile feedback system for interaction. Further improving upon that technology will be the same stuff they’re using in the Wii and Kinect to make our computers interact with us more often. Do you remember the scene in the Matrix movies where they are interacting with the computer by using hand gestures? Very much a reality some day, and I think it’ll be sooner than most people expect.
Another exciting prospect of the mating of this technology will be the new advances in surround display technology. We’ll definitely be using computer monitors that can wrap around objects, and it’s very possible that our new living room television set will integrate these technologies, and at the very least, Kinect from another maker other than Microsoft to make it possible to perform many more tasks than we can do with the Kinect.
My prediction? 2011′s push for 3D will help drive widespread adoption of the Kinect in more than just XBox console sales. It may not come out during 2011, but we’ll sure see some technology that has been inspired, or is a direct result of the Kinect and the Wii motion sensor.
It’s an exciting time to be a geek.
Misdiagnosing Happens
Posted by Ben | Filed under FAIL, Geekin' Out
I finally got around to performing a critical backup on a system last night. Over 750GB needed to be backed up, and I couldn’t use normal means to back it up. I had to improvise. I ended up connecting a spare hard drive via USB (2.0!) and running the backup client that way. I didn’t want to stick around and see how long it was going to take, so I went to bed. I woke up this morning to a pleasant surprise – the backup finished just fine, and a quick file verification proved that the files were intact. Hooray for small miracles. I disconnected the drive and shut off the box that it was sitting in, labeled it and stuffed it away in my safe.
This morning, I was one
Fast forward to work this morning. I tried to log in remotely, thinking that today was going to be like any other day. Upon my attempt to log in, something was immediately clear – something was amiss. I know, how concise, but allow me to explain. In my morning ritual, I also open up my personal intranet page from work, and that took 2+ minutes to fully render. I also thought that the RDP was taking too long, as the desktop to the host wasn’t quite loaded after a similar amount of time. I diagnosed EVERYTHING I could think of. Ran a virus scan, ran a malware check, uninstalled the new Antivirus scanner and restarted the box. Nothing worked, everything was still very slow. Then I thought to check other web services that I use. They were all slow. Turns out, rebooting the pfsense box and the modem was all it needed.
So yes you mortal PC users out there, even us geeks sometimes over analyze things. *facepalm*
Angry Birds Failed Peace Treaty
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out
If you’ve got an iPhone or an Android phone, you’ve undoubtedly come across the zany game “Angry Birds” or at the very least caught wind of this hit. As for me, I downloaded the game to my Droid X a few weeks ago, and I find it amusing for the occasional distraction. As for others, I can’t keep the phone away from my other half, as she insists on playing the game just about any time I’m around her. The game premise is simple; you lob angry birds across the playable area using a slingshot that you drag back across the screen to aim at wooden, stone, glass, impassible (or any combination thereof) fortresses using angles and force multipliers (think Scorched Earth or Scorched 3D in the 2D perspective) to decimate the greedy pigs fortresses. Your goal is to utilize your army of angry birds – of which there are many types, from the basic hitter red, to the turbo mode yellow, and even black bomb crows - so that you may attempt to smash the greedy pigs to bits, thus causing the exposed pigs to explode in a puff of air and random numerals depicting a score count based on remaining birds. You are scored according to how many birds sacrificed themselves to the pigs’ fortresses, and any amount of destruction you inflict upon their bases, and anything else the game tosses in for a score bonus (rubber duckies, beach balls, dice, and so on.) I’m not sure as to the true nature of the pigs resulting explosions, but having heavy objects falling onto your heads or an angry bird smashing into you whilst it is going 90 MPH is sure to cause issues at some point I would imagine.
In any case, the game is obviously addicting as hell, and if you have either one of the supported platforms, you should seriously consider downloading it to your phone. Rumor has it that they are prepping a PC version that will be available on Steam at some point in the near future, so watch out Plants Vs. Zombies. As for the video, it is definitely NSFW, so if you take offense to foul language (pun intended, no really, I had that joke in mind the minute I started this entry) then you can read the entire article over on MSNBC, which has an embedded link of the video toward the bottom. Angry Birds @ MSN
The killer
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out, Random
Hey, whoever captioned this, Kirk wouldn’t ever call Picard by his first name. It would’ve been “Captain.” Sheesh.
With much hesitation…
Posted by Ben | Filed under Geekin' Out
I boldly present the re-launched Acute Geekitis. I had purchased the domain name once a couple of years ago, but was convinced that I couldn’t turn the site into anything. But now, with my desire to distance myself from another domain name that is too closely tied to a company that I respect greatly, I want to establish myself where no one else has. Some others have made obscure references to the term “Acute Geekitis” in the past, but I am confident that those entries are mere copies of my original idea, hatched back in 1999-2000. For all I know, they copied MY term. Who knows. I don’t really care, and I’m not going to spend the money on trademarking a phrase that for all intents is probably not going to have a high ROI.
So that being said, here’s what I’m working on lately. A new Windows 7 Media Center PC, updating my knowledge of Exchange 07 and Server 2008 R2, and working on attaining Geek Zen by doing as many things at once as I possibly can without being drunk or stoned, and without having incurred any bodily injury to others around me. As boring as that sounds, I do have respect for a few things.
I have set up an outline of what I want to do with this site, and I intend to update weekly, even if it’s not something that particularly makes sense or is only mildly interesting. That being said though, I hope it IS interesting else you wouldn’t be here reading my posts. Right? Whatever.