The mystic lore of technology, with ocassional digressions into games and cats
Published on April 8, 2010
Just to let everyone know, I’ve had some help in recovering the data from my old blog posts. A friend from work had software that had archived most of the posts automatically and he sent me a copy of the archive. And, another reader pointed out that I could retrieve anything else that may still be missing from Google cache. So, it should be possible to reconstruct all the articles.
That will take a bit of time, though.
Published on April 4, 2010
For those of you who have been reading my blog, I’ve got some bad news. Due to an error on my part, all the past articles and comments have been lost. For all intents and purposes, The Runes of Binaria is starting over with a blank slate.
The End of History continued »
Published on February 18, 2010
The fuzzy culprit at the scene of the crime.
Last May, I bought an XBox360. I enjoyed it a lot, until last night. I tried to turn it on and nothing happened. The power indicator didn’t come on. The familiar low hum of the hard drive was silent. Nothing.
It turns out I was one of the lucky ones. My problem was that my cat likes to crawl into the entertainment cabinet and lie on top of the XBox360, and he managed to kick loose the cable from the power supply.
Many others are not so lucky. There is a common problem with the XBox360 known as the Red Ring of Death, which basically means that your fancy $500 cutting-edge game console has turned into a very expensive brick.
The Red Ring of Death is a lot more serious.
I know two other Xbox360 owners. Both of their machines died within the first year of ownership. So out of this admittedly small sample size of three (myself and two others), 67% have had their XBox360 kick the bucket in the first year. Take that into consideration when you’re trying to decide which gaming console to buy.
Published on December 26, 2009
Merlin admires the 25-inch monitor on my new computer
I finally got a new computer last week (and only now am I posting it on my blog). No, it wasn’t a Christmas gift. It is a long, unhappy story that began when I tried to order a computer from Dell back in mid-October. The happy ending has arrived and here is a picture of my new computer as installed on my computer desk:
Note the enormous monitor. 
Incidentally, in this picture my computer desk is the neatest it is ever going to be.
Here are some details, for those who might be interested:
Morgana, being approximately invisible inside a large box.
It came in 3 boxes (one for the monitor, one for the computer itself, and a third for the uninterruptible power supply.
The cats, of course, were initially more excited by the boxes than by the computer. That changed once I started playing games on the big 25″ monitor and they had something at which to bat. Here’s a picture of Morgana enjoying the empty monitor box. Look carefully because she’s nigh invisible. Yes, she really is that cute.
Now, the 25″ monitor is huge, and a big improvement over my “old” 21″ LCD. It’s actually wide enough to open and edit two documents side by side. If only I had one of these at work. It’s also great for playing games, of course. But with this new computer, I’ve got something even better:
Flat-screen TVs: They're not just for console games
Now, if you are brimming with envy at my ability to play Civilization IV on a 52″ TV, or if you just want to set this sort of thing up for yourself, here’s how:
Then just run the cable along the baseboard from your PC to the TV, and up (or through) the wall to an unused HDMI input. Alternatively, if all your HDMI inputs are already used up (or you just don’t want the hassle of snaking another cable through the wall) you can get an HDMI switch for about $20.
HDMI cables are usually black. You might want to pick up a plastic cable track from your local hardware store so you can cover it up. You might win bonus points with your spouse if you paint the cable track to be the same color as the wall.
Published on November 19, 2009
If you were to set up a wireless network in your home, you would need to buy a wireless router. If you were to do that today, chances are the router would come pre-configured with some kind of password probably a nonsensical string of gobbledigook.
There’s a good reason for this. A few years ago (for example, when I bought my wireless router in 2004), wireless routers didn’t come with preconfigured passwords. Out of the box, a wireless router used to have no security at all. It would create what is called an “open access point,” meaning anyone strolling by with a laptop could just connect to your wireless network. Depending on where you live, having someone stroll by with a laptop could as rare as having an ivory billed woodpecker fly past your house, or as common as seeing someone talking on a cell phone. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so I happen to fall into the latter category.
The reason routers need to come with the passwords enabled by default is that approximately 99% of users never used to bother to turn them on. Things are better today, and here’s why.
I am taking a night class in computer networking because I really need to learn more about this stuff myself. What I found out is:
You might think when your computer sends data over Wi-Fi, it sends data straight to the access point. That would be incorrect. In fact the Wi-Fi card in your computer broadcasts data over a radio signal that can be picked up from anywhere nearby. But that’s not all! There’s more! If you actually read the above link about how Ethernet works, then you’d realize that all the data you send over Ethernet (or Wi-Fi) goes to all the other computers on the network. Each computer gets every piece (called a frame) of data and checks to see who is supposed to get it. If the data is intended for another computer, then the recipient throws it away.
In other words, a computer on an Ethernet or Wi-Fi network has to go out of its way not to eavesdrop on other members of the network. It is a pretty simple matter for an attacker to tell his/her computer not to go to the trouble, and just pick up everything.
Now, really sensitive data you send over the Internet is probably done using HTTPS, which is encrypted. Your bank account password and credit card numbers are probably safe. But there is still plenty of private stuff that could easily be picked up by the teenager next door. All your e-mail, for starters (incoming and outgoing). If you wouldn’t want the text of all your e-mail, and the contents of every Web site you visit, printed in the local newspaper, then Wi-Fi encryption is for you.
If you bought your wireless router after 2006 or so, relax. It probably came with encryption pre-configured (encryption is what the WEP or WAP password is for).
If your router is a few years old, you probably remember setting up the encryption for it. Or not. In that case you would be well-advised to find or download the user’s manual for your router and find out how to enable encryption. I would love to tell you exactly how to do that, but the fact is it depends a little on what brand of router you have and what version of Windows/MacOS/whatever you are using, and if I were to research all that I would expect to get paid for it and you wouldn’t get the information for free anyway.
But I’ll give you a hint: you can try the time-tested troubleshooting method professionals use. Start by going to http://192.168.1.1 (If you get prompted for a username and password, try guessing. If you guessed right, then that’s another problem right there– change the admin password for your router. And write it down, and keep it under your mattress or something).
If all you do is turn on basic encryption, then I’ve accomplished my goal of informing the public and I can pat myself on the back. However, I cannot yet bring myself to shut up about this subject, so by all means, read on.
Many wireless routers use WEP for encryption. That’s an acronym for “Wired Equivalent Privacy,” meaning it’s as hard to eavesdrop on as if the data were flowing through a wire instead of broadcast through the air. As if. WEP was OK for a couple of years but now there are well-known programs that can defeat it. It’s still a lot better than nothing, but I think a more appropriate expansion for the acronym today is “Weak Encryption Problem.”
WPA is better, so use it if you have a choice. But even WPA can be broken.
There is a basic principle at work here: no encryption is perfect and can last forever. Sooner or later, someone will figure out how to break it. This is not to say encryption isn’t worthwhile: it will keep out an inexperienced or opportunistic intruder, but not a real professional. Using encryption is analagous to locking the front door of your house. You definitely want to do it, in spite of the fact that a really determined intruder can just break a window, or chop through the door with a fire axe for that matter.
There is another basic principle that covers a lot of flaws in your encryption, though: not being seen.
What you can do — and I think this is pretty slick — is configure your router to not broadcast your network’s name. In fact, it won’t announce its presence at all.
If you live in a condo or apartment building, or take your laptop to a public place like a railway station or hotel, you’ll probably notice in your wireless network configuration that there are a lot of other wireless networks around. Probably a lot of them have names like “linksys” or “default.” Others have names like “Steve’s Network” or “Jones.” All of these network names are set up by the router’s configuration. The wireless router broadcasts this name, which is technically called an SSID. This makes it easy for people to find and connect to the network.
That’s great for a coffee shop or other public network, but not so great for your home. Quick question: do you want people outside your home to easily find and log on to your home network? I didn’t think so.
Rule #1: For heaven’s sake, don’t put your own name or other identifying information in your SSID. That gets broadcast to the world. If anyone happened to be looking to break into your network in particular, you’d be practically giving them directions. My network SSID is something like “g45J87nwQ”. I can tell it’s mine, but damn if anybody else can.
Rule #2: You don’t need to broadcast your SSID at all. A network that doesn’t broadcast its SSID can still be connected to — by people who already know the SSID. So you can do what I do: write down the SSID, stick it under a mattress or somewhere, and then don’t broadcast. Yes, it’s a bit less convenient to connect to the network (you have to find the paper and type in the SSID). But that’s the whole point.
Published on August 24, 2009
I’m going to let you in on a secret. Becoming a computer guru isn’t actually that hard. In fact it doesn’t even require a lot of brains. Here’s the secret:
This is a bit tongue-in-cheek of course, perhaps even a bit unkind, but it raises a serious point. Most people are perfectly capable of learning computer skills — even programming. At any age. Don’t be intimidated. Keep trying. Read the help, even if you don’t fully understand it. You’ll find that you have some small successes, and those lead to small insights, and before you know it, it will start to make sense.
Published on August 9, 2009
I have a D&D gaming group that meets infrequently (every three or four months) because the players live far apart. We experimented with playing online but I wasn’t really happy with the software we were using. So a few days ago, I searched for other electronic tools for tabletop gaming.
I found a great site at www.rpgvirtualtabletop.com that compares several different programs for online gaming. A “Virtual tabletop” is any software that is meant to do the job of a physical gaming table: providing a map display, “miniatures” (little icons you can move around to show where the characters and monsters are), a dice roller, and usually some kind of chat. If you’re interested in playing tabletop RPGs online, that site is a good starting point to see what’s available.
My new favorite game aid is called InitiatveTool, part of the RPTools suite. My D&D group has a large party (7 player characters plus an animal companion) and they often encounter groups of a dozen or more humanoids. Rolling initiative and sorting all the characters into initiative order can be quite a production. I used to do this by hand.
PCGen has a feature that will do this (on the GMGen tab) but PCGen is a serious memory hog and it gets seriously bogged down after loading that many characters and their opponents.
Enter InitiativeTool. It is much more lightweight than PCGen and does not run out of memory after loading all the combatants in the battle. It does quite a bit more than just keep track of initiative. As you can see from the screenshot, it also displays a character sheet for the character or monster whose turn it is.
InitiativeTool tracks initiative in the left pane and displays a character sheet in the right
InitiativeTool includes handy timers to keep track of events such as when a spell expires. I am quite impressed with it but I do have to mention two drawbacks to the tool. First, the RPTools developers have done their level best to hide any kind of documentation. Supposedly there are forums and a Wiki but I have not been able to find them. Second, data entry into InitiativeTool is a royal pain. The interface is a tree view of the data structure of the character and you have to expand and collapse each node in order to edit it. No fun for typing in 7 PCs and 20 orcs. I’m pleased to say, InitiativeTool ships with pre-loaded statistics for all the monsters in the 3.5 SRD, so you rarely have to type in the monsters; and there is a work-around to avoid typing the PCs as well, but it is not perfect.
If you want to give InitiativeTool a try, I recommend you use the stable version (1.0.b24 at the time of this writing). Anything more recent will probably have spiffy new features, but it’s hit and miss as to which of them will be working. I’ve tried it both ways — the stable version provides a better experience.
The best thing about InitiativeTool is that it can load data created by other tools. That way you do not have to use its tortuous data-entry interface. Recent versions of PCGen (5.14 and later) can export a character sheet to InitiativeTool format. Simply use File -> export -> To Text and choose the cryptically-named csheet_InitTool.rpgrp. This creates an output file that can then be read into InitiativeTool as a “group” of characters.
In a lot of ways, this offers the best of both worlds. PCGen is great for editing a character and checking all the arithmetic, but it can’t really handle more than two or three characters at a time. InitiativeTools is good for displaying many characters at a time but for creating and editing characters, it’s less powerful and a lot less convenient to use than PCGen.
My experience with this is that it works pretty well for the stable version of InitiativeTool. For some characters, there are some slight errors in the output file that cause InitiativeTool to fail to load it. For me, this had mostly to do with the location of the character portraits (stored in the “token” tag of the .rpgrp file). I was able to open the .rpgrp file with a text editor, hand-edit it to delete the offending “token” tags, and then the file loaded fine. So for the stable version of InitiativeTool, the feature has some inconveniences but it works. I tried loading the same (fixed) file into the latest unstable version, and it wouldn’t load at all. This is why I recommend against the unstable version.
It appears the RPTools team is also working on their own character editor called CharTool. I tried it but could not figure out how to make it produce output that can be loaded into InitiativeTool, and as I’ve said the RPTools documentation is missing in action. My guess is that CharTool is in the pretty early stages of development and its integration with InitiativeTool isn’t done yet.
I’ve created a new page on this blog for Electronic Game Aids. I’ll update that from time to time as I discover new software that I find useful.
Published on June 14, 2009
It’s been a bit over a month since I installed Windows 7 and on the outside chance there is anyone reading this blog, I thought I would give an update on my impressions.
Windows 7 is sluggish — at least on my machine (3.00 GHz Pentium with 1 GB RAM). My hardware is a couple of years old, I admit. Mostly I notice the sluggishness when I open a folder or the Control Panel and Windows takes 3-5 seconds to draw in the contents. Launching a program can take a while.
What I think this means is that Microsoft designed Windows 7 for a more powerful computer than I have. Here’s another reason not to upgrade: if you install Windows 7 on an existing computer, you may find that it runs like molasses. Better to wait until you want to buy a new computer anyway, and just get one with Windows 7 pre-installed.
Windows Vista is going to die a quick and well-deserved death. Without going into the details of what made Vista such an epic failure, let me say this: Windows versions are the opposite of Star Trek movies. Only the odd-numbered ones are good.
If you do happen to be in the market for a new PC, don’t buy one now. They’d spoil it by installing Vista. Wait 6 or 8 months and you can get Windows 7 instead.
I’ll write more details about what is good and bad with Windows 7 over the next several days/weeks. In a nutshell, it seems pretty good, but needs a powerful, new machine to run well.
Published on May 13, 2009
Mainly out of professional interest, I downloaded and installed a trial copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, which is now available to the general public.
Before you run out and install a copy yourself, heed my advice: do not try this at home! Microsoft is not releasing this software so regular users can get a free copy of Windows! They’re doing it so professional and expert users can try out the nearly-finished software and find and report bugs or other problems. In other words, this is a public test, not a sales promotion.
In fact, I would advise most people not to “upgrade” even when Windows 7 becomes available for sale. Installing a new operating system is neither fun nor enlightening, and it is almost certain to cause something about your computer to stop working. For most users, it’s smarter to just wait it’s time to buy a new computer, and then get one with Windows 7 pre-installed.
I should say a few words about the Windows 7 license agreement, because it contains some odious terms that undermine consumer rights. This has become typical of commercial software these days.
The first thing to note is that the evaluation copy of WIndows 7 will stop working after June, 2010. Anyone who has installed it will have to either buy a new copy and re-install it, or go back to their old operating system. This is perfectly fair; it’s an evaluation copy. It’s clearly announced in the license agreement. None the less, a number of people on slashdot seemed shocked and outraged that their “free” copy of Windows won’t last forever.
The expiration date isn’t the problem. The really odious thing in the license agreement is the activation clause. When you first install Windows 7, and at unspecified times after that, Windows 7 contacts Microsoft to make sure, as Microsoft puts it, “your copy of Windows is genuine.” That means they’re looking in a database to see if you’ve paid. If they ever get the impression your copy is not “genuine,” Microsoft has what amounts to a kill switch they can use to shut down your computer. If this is at all a chilling prospect, then don’t buy an iPhone.
Here’s an important point: the need for activation means Windows 7 will only work on one computer. Ever. You can’t install it on one machine and then later move it to another. Microsoft considers that “piracy” — even if you were to uninstall it from the first computer. I’m serious. So don’t pay money for Windows 7 except as part of a brand-new computer.
Installation of Windows 7 didn’t go smoothly for me. The first problem was that the installer gave me two options, to “upgrade” my current copy of Windows or “clean install” (which is horrible grammar, but it means writing over my current copy of Windows and erasing everything it knows about my computer and all my other software). So I tried “upgrade” to see how it would work. It didn’t.
The problem was that the “upgrade” only works if you are upgrading from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later. At the time, I had Windows 2000 installed. This is not a big deal, but the installer could easily have determined that and told me the hard truth: the only way I was getting Windows 7 onto my system was a clean installation. Instead it teased me and wasted my time by letting me think the upgrade was worth trying.
The truth is, I was emotionally prepared to blow away my old copy of Windows. What I was not prepared for was for the “clean install” to stop halfway through with a thoroughly unhelpful error message to the effect, “Windows 7 didn’t install properly. Please try again.” No mention of why.
I’ve got a news flash for ya. If a computer tries to do something, and it doesn’t work, and it tries again, there’s a darned good chance it won’t work again. So a better message would be,
Windows 7 didn’t install properly. We’re too lazy to figure out why or even give you a hint. Don’t even bother trying again until you solve this little mystery. Good luck.
It turns out, my hard drive was too full. The installer had helpfully backed up my old copy of Windows 2000 when I tried the upgrade earlier, and now there was not enough space for Windows 7. I figured this out by guessing. Microsoft didn’t put on a Web page information about how much disk space you actually need, as far as I can tell. They just sort of figured everyone has plenty of disk space.
See why I said, “don’t try this at home?”
To be continued…