I was switching some more of my netcasts (Screw Apple. I never really like the name podcasts, anyway.) over to RSSOwl and noticed a news item in the Gaming Steve feed. It talked about a game that I had never heard of. It's called MapleStory (IE required for some unknown reason) and is a MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) 2D side-scrolling action/adventure game.

It sounded like a neat idea so I tried it out. I had to jump through a few hoops to get started, but once I got in it was pretty fun. The biggest problem it has is the controls. Everything is mapped to keyboard buttons and it doesn't have any options for controllers. Playing like that is a pain in the neck (well, really hands), so I did some searching around and found JoyToKey.

JoyToKey lets you map controller buttons to keyboards buttons. It works wonderfully with MapleStory and I imagine the same with any game that only has keyboard controls.

I should warn you about a couple of things. First is that MapleStory tries to run some ad-scripts, but Norton seems to be blocking them. Second, it forces a certain resolution which forces me to change my monitor settings every time I play. Lastly the download for the game is over 400 MB (I got to max out my new 1 MB/s internet connection. Yeah!). If you like action RPG's, you might want to give it a try.

While I was looking for a way to use my controller with MapleStory I ran across a comment like “If your hands get cramped while playing MS why don't you just take a brake every hour” in response to someone else trying to find the same thing. I can't stand people like that. Just because you're willing to settle for less, doesn't mean that I am. And the thing is I've been hearing things like this all over the place:

“Who cares if it's only 720p, that's almost as good as 1080p”

No, it's not.

“Nobody really needs high-definition DVD's right now anyway”

Noone needs DVD, either. We're not talking about needs.

“I don't know why people care so much about 1080p, 1080i is almost as good.”

It's like someone saying to a kid in high school, “I don't know why you want to get a high school diploma, an elementary education is almost as good.”

Yeah, I don't need any of this stuff, but I want it. I want it because it is BETTER. And I don't want people telling me I shouldn't want it because they don't think it's that much better or whatever reason motivates this stupidity.

I realize all of this comes off as being rather selfish, but I don't mean it like that. My point is that I recognize certain things as being substantially better than others, I don't see anything wrong with wanting something better, and in the proper situation I don't see anything wrong with being willing to pay a premium for these better things. I simply don't understand why someone would make a comment like this unless it's because they are so jealous of others that they can't allow themselves to believe that something someone else has is better than what they have. But, even that doesn't fit all of the cases above. I don't get it.

Like in the generic sense? Do you like the idea of buying music by the pound? Then boy do I have the site for you: eMusic.

I signed up for a deal (at www.emusic.com/dltv) that gave me 50 free songs just for signing up. One of the things that's really nice about eMusic is that they don't have any DRM on the music files, so once you download the MP3's you can do whatever you want with them. Anyway, I didn't think there would be much I would want so I let Dad look at what they had. It turns out they have a good bit of Classical music. He definitely tweaked the system a bit by only downloading the longer songs and ended up with more than 7 and a half hours of music for free. I haven't cancelled my account yet so I don't know how much of a hassle that will be, but they did say that I could quit anytime.

I was uploading some new photos to the website tonight and just as I started I realized that I hadn't turned off my bittorrent client. This is usually a problem because I have my upload speed for Azureus set pretty close to what my upload limit was, but tonight it wasn't causing any problems, in fact, even with Azureus running the photos were uploading faster than usual. I was a bit confused so I ran Speakeasy's Speed Test. For download speed I got 9607 kbps and for upload I got 943 kbps. In megabytes per second that is 1.17 MB/s for download and 0.115 MB/s for upload. That's about twice what I got for those speeds when I did my previous test not that long ago. Needless to say, I'm a bit impressed.

Also, in the past several months I've noticed a speed increase in download speeds from servers that I use. I can't remember what the average speeds were in the past but I think they were around 100 to 200 KB/s and lately I've routinely been getting speeds around 500 KB/s. That was getting close to my download cap so I'm glad to see the speed boost.

Ctrl+Alt+Chicken is the cooking show I would make if I could make a cooking show. The hosts are Alex Albrecht, of Diggnation, and Heather Stewart. Neither of them really know how to cook so the usual problems and hilarity ensue when they try. I find it quite amusing, but if you're offend by things that are offensive then you might want to avoid it, especially the lab scenes.

You can subscribe to the podcast or download individual episodes at the url above. Recently I subscribed to a bunch of new podcasts, including ctrl+alt+chicken, and had a couple of problems with them in my podcast receiver (Juice). One was that I was using bittorrent feeds and the torrents were not uploading to other downloaders. It turns out that this may not have been a problem with Juice since no one else was downloading the show at the time, but I still like to know what's going on and have control of my uploads and downloads. The other problem was that like all podcasts, all the episodes were being downloaded, when I only wanted some of them. My solution was to load the podcast RSS feeds into my RSS reader (RSS Owl), then when I saw an episode that I wanted I would click on the torrent link and it would automatically download in my Bittorrent client (Azureus). That way I had full control over my torrents and only downloaded the episodes that I wanted.

I created a script that will automatically down-sample images to 500 width and convert them to grayscale:

FOR %%f IN (%*) DO “C:\Program Files\Irfanview\i_view32.exe” %%f /jpgq=85 /gray /resample=(500,0) /aspectratio /convert=”C:\Documents and Settings\Joe\Desktop\%%~n%f_web.jpg”

The script assumes that the Irfanview executable is at C:\Program Files\Irfanview\i_view32.exe and that the output directory is C:\Documents and Settings\Joe\Desktop\. You can change these in the obvious places in the script. Along with down-sampling and converting to grayscale the script appends _web to the filename and converts the image to a jpg with a quality factor of 85.

You can use the script by simply dragging and dropping all the files that you want to convert on top of the batch file or on a shortcut to the batch file. I've tested the script on my own computer and everything works fine. Though, you should test it on a test image first.

Download the script here (right-click and click “Save Link As…”)

You can get Irfanview here.