After getting my new laptop, I picked up a Linksys Wireless – G Notebook Adapter. Installation was a bit weird, since I'm not used to sticking a card into a computer while it's still running, but overall that went fine. Where I ran into trouble was getting it to communicate with my router. I tried using the software that came with the card, but it couldn't find my router. After a while, I just gave up and went to watch an epsiode of DL.TV. Coincidentally, the first thing they talked about was wireless routers. One of the hosts said something like “Don't you hate it when you reset a router and the person who was connected, can't connect and the person who wasn't connected, can”. Ding! *Lightbulb appears above Joe's head* So, I reset my router and everything worked fine, though it makes me think I should amp up the security on my router.

With that out of the way, this past weekend I hung out with Jenny and Gareth. We were planning on playing Warcraft II, but for some reason the game wouldn't let me access certain parts of the screen with my mouse. So we switched to AoE II and after a few false starts, got a good game in. Aside from the strange behavior with WC, my new laptop/wifi card combination worked flawlessly. So that was good to see.

Just for fun I did some benchmarking of my LAN/WLAN:

Theoretical numbers from this Wikipedia article.

Mb = megabits

MB = megabytes

Kb = kilobits

KB = kilobytes

8 Mb = 1 MB

802.11b

Maximum Speed: 11 Mb/sec [1.375 MB/sec]

Typical Speed: 6.5 Mb/sec [0.8125 MB/sec]

802.11g

Maximum Speed: 54 Mb/sec [6.75 MB/sec]

Typical Speed: 25 Mb/sec [3.125 MB/sec]

My Current Wireless Setup

Average Speed: 4.4 Mb/sec [0.55 MB/sec]

My Current Wired Setup

Average Speed: 70.6 Mb/s [8.825 MB/sec]

My Current Internet Connection

[This was tested using Speakeasy's Speed Test. The numbers represent the maximum speed measured during the test.]

Download Speed: 4.7 Mb/sec (601.8 KB/sec) [0.5875 MB/sec]

Upload Speed: 0.35 Mb/sec (44.5 KB/sec) [0.04375 MB/sec]

Even with this slow of an upload speed (which is pretty standard for broadband connections), in the past 146 days, I've managed to upload more than 202 GB of data.

I'm using a 802.11g card in my laptop, but my router is 802.11b. This wifi setup doesn't greatly affect the download speeds on my laptop (which makes sense), but moving large files from my pc to my laptop takes forever. Copying an episode of Mythbusters (~350MB) takes more than 10 minutes. At some point, I'm definitely going to have to replace my router, but I may hold off until I know what will be compatible with the Nintendo Wii. I kinda wish I could hold out for 802.11n, but it will probably be too expensive anyway.

802.11n

Maximum Speed: 540 Mb/sec [67.5 MB/sec]

Typical Speed: 200 Mb/sec [25 MB/sec]

I also did some tests of my ping to my clan's Day of Defeat: Source server, but did not notice any significant difference.

A little while back Microsoft released the source code to Mech Commander 2, now you can download it and the original for free: MechCommander.org

I've never played the games, but I like the “if it's free, take two” philosophy.

There are two parts of my life in which I am unrestrained in my use of vulgarities and obscenities. The milder of the two is when I am driving. In the other, I take it as a personal challenge to use hand gestures and vocal outbursts in new and more offensive ways. This time is, of course, when I am using my computer. Lately nothing has enraged me more while using my computer than iTunes. That is saying something as I do computer programming in my work, but it's true.

Now, I have to admit that for the average user who just wants to play music and doesn't care about wasting cycles, iTunes is great. It organizes your music conveniently, such that it's easy to search a database with days of music and if you're into podcasts the chapter-enabled aac files are great. But ask it to play a video, or even worse, pause in the middle of a video and it becomes some sort of devil spawn from the ninth circle of Hell. I'm not talking about some HD, heavily encoded video. No, I'm talking about stuff that's suppose to work on your video iPod. I have an Athlon XP 2500+ with a Gig of RAM, not a top of the line machine by any means, but capable of playing 720p h.264 video. iTunes for windows is so poorly coded that my computer will choke while trying to perform the simplest of operations (like the previously mentioned pausing) on a 320×240 video.

Well, rather than continue to generate new combinations of curse words and finger configurations, I decided to do something about it. I looked around for a while and the podcast receiver that I settled on was Juice. It's pretty straight forward, if a little clunky. There's one tab for managing your subscriptions, one tab for seeing and playing what you've downloaded and another tab for managing your downloads. The whole thing could be done much simpler on one tab with a few context sensitive menus, but oh well. The point is it works (and it's free). Juice gives you the option of using a couple of players or just using your windows defaults. This last option is convenient, since you can then set up different players for each file type.

The way I have it setup now, Winamp handles all of the audio files. I find it somewhat surprising that I've gone back to using winamp given that they were bought out by AOL, but they do maintain a Lite version of Winamp that is like the Winamp of the good old days. I don't know if they've changed it since the last time I downloaded it, but Winamp doesn't natively handle aac. The simple fix is this plugin from Free-Codecs.com. It allows you to play m4a files, like the ones generated when you rip to aac in iTunes and the ones used by most podcasts. The only real drawbacks of the plug-in are that you can't access the chapters and the embedded images don't show up.

On top of the issues mentioned so far, there is also a basic problem with using a separate program to download and orgranize your podcasts, which is that there isn't one program that is keeping track of your position in each of the podcasts. For Winamp there is a partial solution. The Time Restore and Autoplay plugin allows you to close Winamp in the middle of an audio file and have Winamp remember where you were when you load Winamp again. The problem with this is that if you play another file in Winamp in the mean time, it will forget where you were in the previous file. Even worse is that if you are playing a podcast, close Winamp and then try to play the same podcast from the button in Juice, it will forget where you were.

Video is a bit more complicated. Many of the video podcasts that I follow are encoded using the h.264 codec. Outside of Quicktime, the only options that I've found for playing h.264 video are VLC Media Player which handles the video from start to finish and ffdshow which just decodes the video and passes it on to whatever player you are using. VLC Media Player is probably the most efficiently coded video player I've seen, so much so that I can use it to play 720p h.264 video which I can't do with any other player. The only real problem with it is that the interface is not the greatest. In order to do anything while playing the video in fullscreen, you have to right click and search through the menu. This means that simple tasks like pausing or adjusting the volume take longer than they should. That's why most of the time I use Media Player Classic (the link will take you to the guliverkli Source Forge page where you can download Media Player Classic). With ffdshow as a backend, Media Player Classic can play most video, though on my machine it can't quite handle 720p h.264 video. I don't know if it's MPC or ffdshow that is coded inefficiently, but for the purpose of watching video podcasts, MPC/ffdshow does well enough. Media Player Classic allows you to simply click on the video to pause while in fullscreen mode, use the mouse wheel to adjust the volume and has a auto-hidden menu that appears when you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, features that all media players should have and make watching shows on a computer more enjoyable.

Obviously, the Juice/Winamp/VLC/MPC/ffdshow combination is not a perfect solution, but having video handled cleanly and efficiently far outweighs any of the gripes I've mentioned. Hopefully someone will come along and write a program to address all these issues, but until then I will deal with them. Now to find a music library program that isn't such a resource hog…

It's been a whole lot happier without her face around.

Lost in HD, not bad for a PIII 1GHz (of course it's not actually displaying HD on the TV screen, but that's not the point).

It's not a screamer by a long shot, but it gets the job done. And for my work it ought to be plenty.

Anyway, anybody up for a LAN party? Warcraft II or Age of Empires?

Or maybe even a Lost marathon?

Evil Avatar has some links up to videos of Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Half-life 2 Episode 2. This is the latest gameplay video of Portal: