Monday, April 25, 2005

iPod Blues -- 10:17 pm CST, Update by The Master

My wife was awesome enough to get me an Apple iPod, and so far I have loved it. I use a passthrough stereo cable to hook it up to my line in at work, and I can listen to tunes and still hear voicemails and stuff through my PC.

I have one massive complaint, however. The shuffle function sucks. I get settled in at work around 8:00am, and I pretty much hit shuffle on the iPod at roughly the same time every day. And with some variation, I pretty much hear the same set of tracks every day. I think Apple needs to think through the shuffle function a bit. It might be time to introduce a better source of randomness than whatever they're using on the iPod (I'd guess the built-in clock). I'd propose setting up a 64 byte array of random values synched through iTUnes to some random number server, so we can get some true randomness in our shuffle playlist.

A.T. Hun comments: What, no /dev/urandom? PLZFIXOKBYE!!1!

The Master comments: Nope, no /dev/urandom, and I believe that would only be a marginal help, since there is no good source of true randomness on PCs either. We need a free source of random data bits, perferablly something that picks up radio interference off the sun or something. Winamp has exactly the same problem, and it's annoying after a while.

Now THAT'S a Home Theater -- 10:12 am CST, Update by The Master

All I can say is: wow. That home theater is completely insane.

Bleh -- 8:28 am CST, Update by The Master

I finally spent some time this weekend playing a few games. I fired up Doom 3: ROE and played for about an hour Saturday. I can say one thing for certain at this point in the game: Nerve is a lot more devious in their trap layout than id was. I'm sure this is due to the fact that Nerve was designing an add-on, but my Saturday session was viciously ended by a three-way slashing attack, and I was so mad I cussed out the game and quit. I dread restarting that section.

I also spent some time with Master of Orion 2 again this weekend (big shocker there). Playing this on my old Windows 2000 machine was very painful, since DirectX would bomb out after about 20 minutes or so and you'd have to restart in order to be able to read the screen. Windows XP has been much better for this, and does a much better job of emulating a DirectX 2 installation. If I ever make the Linux switch, this game will be a must-have for cedega.

I reinstalled Deus Ex and UT2K4 last week, along with Quakeworld. I've got a lot of gaming to do if I can ever find the time . . .

No Old News

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