GearWERKZ TechBlog

Ha. Pretty interesting. A coupe of weeks ago, I finally realized that the 32" TV in the game room has a VGA input port. So I am tapping this post out tonight on the HP EliteBook 2730P TabletPC while it is connected to the Westinghouse 32" LCD as a secondary display. (Yo can peep the setup via my TwitPic feed) Earlier tonight, I viewed a few minutes of Last Chance Harvey, a movie I have encoded on my NAS, sending it to the TV using VLC Media Player. I now have iTunes blaring out fom the TV's speakers while I write this entry (Finger Elven's "Sad Exchange", from the Daredevil Soundtrack). I'll be working with this setup for the remainder of the week (minus the two days of business travel I have scheduled). Since I'll be out of pocket for a couple of days, I've decided to get a little gaming in over the weekend.

Follow up:

There has been a crap-ton of Borderlands going on in the 'WERKz on my PS3. Both single-player and multi-player. My regular co-worker crew that plays two nights of the week has adopted it as a mainstay. I was extremely frustrated by the game at the outset, only dabbling in the multi-player with very little interest in the single-player campaign. Now I have come to find the game nearly as addictive as Civilization II was for me back in the day. I have not lost sleep over it like I used to with Civ2. Well, not much sleep. While the game drives me to nearly throw my controller at the screen at times, I find the RPG elements to be the hook under my skin. Leveling up, finding new weapons, sorting the rather robust inventory, and burning fools with my pet hawk is frequently too much fun for me to put down in a timely manner.

On the PC, I finished my final install of Windows 7 for the foreseeable future, that machine being the Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T. My final frustration with Ubuntu drove me to finally install the upgrade disc I had received free of charge from Acer that had been lying around for the better part of two months. While there are things about LINUX that I like, even love, the number of instances that there were hardware anomalies (the last being an inexplicable refusal to connect to my wireless network despite having existed on it for several months, even after several reboots and reconfigurations) and a lack of software to do a lot of the multi-media things that I like to do, I felt compelled to give up the cost. As I prepare to close on a house, move, and enter other more grown-up eras of my life, my time for my computer hobbying is too precious to lose productivity on the scale that my LINUX dabblings were causing. With no need for he LINUX partition on the Acer, it made sense to get on with the wipe of my Vista install and fix Windows 7 in place.

In my ongoing efforts to see just how much I can game on PCs that were not meant for it, I installed Ghost Recon (the original) on the Acer to see how it would do. It did fine; pretty much perfect. I was able to get in a few hours in the campaign over the weekend, and look forward to perhaps finally dedicating the time to complete it, as it is the only title installed on the Acer. A gaming rig that will allow me to play 6 hours of more on its battery power? Yes, please, thank you.

The plan for this week is to maybe get some time in Rogue Spear, another legacy game that I have installed on the HP 2730p. I'll have to figure out how to configure the game room to support playing on a PC attached to the 32" LCD and using a keyboard and mouse for my control scheme, but that will be half of the fun of pulling it off.

Oh, yeah, and I have been trying to train my addled brain with Speed Brain on the Palm Pre. It's not working yet, but one can hope.
- Vr/Zeuxidamas..>>