Zune Review

So tonight I decided to try to copy a gig of new music to my zune.  It should be a big deal right?  Well it was.  First of all I connected it through a USB hub.  Big mistake.  It kept disconnecting/reconnecting contently.  Its 100% not the hub though.  I connect terabyte had drives, game controllers and other devices no problem.  Next I tried an extension cable which did the same thing as the hub.  Finally I got on my knees and plugged the damn thing in.  After that, the zune software launched and it started to sync despite the fact there was no space.  I told it to stop and it did; only to resume when I went to another page.  I finally managed to stop it, navigated to what I thought were some useless files to delete and right clicked and selected delete.  It said deleting song.  So I went downstairs, cooked some hotdogs, made a drink, came upstairs and it was still deleting the same goddamn song.  I give up.  It has went from clunky to virtually unusable.  One of these days I am going to go office space on the ****ing thing.  But before that I’m going to give them some negative press.

Review on Newegg:

Pros:

You can choose your own background.  It works with all headphones.  The headphones it comes with are amazing.

Cons:

I could write a 200 page book about everything you can’t do with this MP3 player, solely because M$ doesn’t want you to.  You can’t organize your music collection the way you want.  It takes hours to delete a song, if you can even find the song through its horrid software.  It syncs on its own regardless of if you tell it not to and regardless of whether or not its full.  If it is full, it doesn’t tell which files fail to sync.  It is incredibly difficult to turn off, or to confirm its off and not in. You can’t connect it to the computer through a USB hub.  THE UNIT DOES NOT COME WITH A WALL CHARGER! While it does work with the Xbox 360 (and no other device), it takes about 10X longer to start playing a song than a networked computer two floors down over wifi.  The sync cable is way too short and you can’t use USB extension cables.  The interface is clunky, and the control pad is hard to use, especially in the dark or when you aren’t looking.  I could go on forever but I’m out of space

Other thoughts:

Do yourself a favor and buy yourself the cheapest offbrand  MP3 player you can find.  Not only do those actually work, you can organize organize your music the way you want, not the M$ wants.  And most of them (unlike the zune) work as portable hard drives and some are even bootable.  It is unbelievable that M$ charges as much for these as an Ipod, and even more unbelievable that people are actually satisfied with their purchase!

The sad thing is, it is good hardware.  It has plenty of storage space, built in wifi (that does nothing in practice) and a decent screen.  Maybe someday M$ will hire somebody with more than a third grade education to program the interface and software for it.  Or let hackers port rockbox to it.  Until then, AVOID THIS LIKE THE DRM INFECTED OVERPRICED PIECE OF **** IT IS!!!!

Thumb / Flash drive through the washing machine

When I was sick a while ago my roomate lent me his blanket so that I could keep warm.  He requested yesterday that I wash it and return it to him, and so I did so, but somehow my thumb drive got mixed in with the load.  Luckily I discovered it before it hit the dryer.  It is a 4GB kingston datatraveller, worth probably around $30, so money isn’t the problem, the problem is what was on it: a 30+ hour project about 20 hours in worth 15% of my grade in one of my classes.  So, I searched yahoo answers for a solution, and the answers ranged from “your fucked” to let it sit in the sun for a week or two.  Having 36 hours until the project was due and around 12ish before I would have to start from scratch to finish after an all nighter, I didn’t have that kind of time.

So I set it in front of my space heater overnight.  A while after I woke up, after it had been sitting in the drying heat for 11 hours, I finally had the courage to plug it in.  The LED flashed as normal as soon as I plugged it in and it showed up in my computer.  I immediately copied my project and some other important stuff which copied fine.  Then I ran scandisk which didn’t detect a single error.  I don’t think I am going to trust it as the exclusive source for my important but unfinished files from here on out, but it appears to be working fine.  Still, mad props to kingston for making an electronic device that can survive the wash!

So there you have it folks, if your flash drive ends up in the washer,  there is a very good chance it might still work perfectly, just make sure that it is completely dry before you plug it back in, and a good way to dry it is to put it in front of a space heater for around 11 hours.

List of things M$ could do to make Zune not suck.

Yes, I hate my Zune. It would have been completely worth paying double for an ipod or zen or any other MP3 player really. 99.9% of the time I use my $7 512MB Sansa instead because it doesn’t require bloated software, works on any PC and OS, and allows you to organize by folders. If a $7 MP3 player can do it, why can’t a vastly more powerful and expensive Zune?

While the Zune has very capable hardware, the software support is the worst. You can only use the bloated featureless Zune software to do anything, and it does a poor job of it. Below is a list of improvements, many of which a programmer of average skill could add in a weekend.

-Add support for winamp, or at the very least M$’s own Windows Media Player.
-Add support for dragging and dropping files (including music and movies).
-Ability to use as a portable hard drive, even as a boot device.
-Add support for organizing by folders, not just by ID3 tags.
-Add support for organizing playlists.
-Improve performance with the Xbox 360 (it takes more than twice as long to pick a song than over the network).
-Add support for media streaming from a PC over wifi (preferably SMB, the 360’s method would be fine too)
-Do stuff with the internet (radio, media streaming from PC, store, etc.)
-Don’t automatically add DRM to everything that is sent via Wifi. Some of us create/have music that is not copy written or specifically states it is not to be DRMed.
-Add an option to adjust font size. The new firmware which I have not upgraded to looks awful.
-Add support for video codecs besides WMV and add support for lossless audio codecs like FLAC.
-Add support for your own Operating Systems! how about XP64 or Vista64?

And finally:
-Add a bug in the next firmware so that hackers can add the basic functionality that M$ refuses to add but is found in nearly every other MP3 player. Maybe they might actually sell some then aside from when they dumped them on Woot.

What good is a bag of money?

If someone offered to give you a million dollars a day and tell you that you only had one hour a day to enjoy it, would you go for it? It seems ludicrous to me. What is the point in having all of that money if you have no time to enjoy it? What’s even crazier is that this is how 90% of our society works. People like me get up at 6:00 in the morning, commute for two hours, work 8 hours straight then spend another two hours commuting home. By the time we are done eating dinner we only have an hour or two before we have to (try) to go to sleep and get up again to repeat. And as in the case tonight, if we try for 3 hours unsuccessfully to sleep, we get even more pissed off because we realize that what little free time we had is now gone and will never return. And we will still be dead tired all day tomorrow.

As you all know I recently bought a 37” monitor/HDTV which I love. It might as well be a 10” or a 72”, it wouldn’t matter since I don’t actually have time to USE it anymore. I have a Wii sitting here next to me with a nice looking modchip on top of it just begging to be installed and reviewed and I just don’t have the time or the energy. I haven’t even played the system normally yet. What kind of a life is this? I don’t even have time to even THINK about finding a girlfriend, let alone actually spending time with her. How do people ever get married nowadays?

I can see why they call this the daily grind. Get up work, sleep, repeat. The seasons become nothing more than a measure of how much sweat forms on your back as you walk to work from the train station. Before you know it, your 50 and balding, have a giant house that you don’t get to spend any time in and you wonder “where the hell did my life go?”

It wouldn’t even be as bad if you didn’t have to put effort into keeping up the façade all day. “How do you feel?” “I’m great, how about you?” “How do you like working here?” “It’s really awesome, I love it.” Every time I give one of these replies, it makes me hurl inside. But people aren’t asking because they care about you. They ask because it’s the modern slightly more personal version of “Nice weather today huh?” Give the people what they expect to hear. It keeps things simple and friendly, and one will be liked more. And I can do it. Go all day pretending like nothing is wrong and I’m doing swell, but unfortunately my body cannot. It desires to sleep past 6:00, yet stubbornly won’t let me go to sleep earlier than 1:00. The result is that today my boss told me that if I fall asleep in a meeting again, I am fired. But I can’t control that. I can’t tell my body that everything is great like the façade. It knows better. Due to the nature of the meetings I can’t walk around to wake up and I’m developing an immunity to caffeine. I told him about my 4 hour commute. His answer “Welcome to the working world.” Fuck the working world.

So why don’t I just quit? Why don’t I just end the grind, take what I’ve earned and actually enjoy my summer. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Ever since I was little, I wanted to work for the corporations. I saw how many of them step on the consumer (not the one I work for though, I would never work for one of them), and figured that if you could join their ranks, it would be awesome. I saw the money that people make at them, and was entranced by it. As a result I worked my ass off since middle school. Get the good grades so you can get into the best college. Work your ass off in college so that you might get the notice of a corporation, then grind till your dying. Was this what all that effort was for? High school and college dropouts have more fun than this. Still, I can’t bring myself to just throw it all away. This internship is a very important stepping stone in a potential future. If I want to work for any corporation, I must complete this internship successfully. I now know that I don’t, but I may not have a choice. It sucks that people with a plethora of well developed, in-demand skills can’t just work 25 hours a so a week and make ends meet. I will find a way. I must.

Or maybe I just had a really, really bad day, that as of 1:01 AM, won’t end.

Windows Mobile Hacking 101

For a while I thought I had gotten stuck with a portable Vista on my new smartphone.  You couldn’t change ANYTHING about the way that the phone worked.  You couldn’t add items to the start menu, or even reorder them.  You can’t change the startup/shutdown options or sound either.  Heck, you can’t even run third party apps.  It seemed really odd to me that you pay so much more for the Windows interface but its vastly inferior to Nokia’s self-made Symbian OS, or even Motorola’s 5 year old OS on my really old phone.

Well, three hours worth of research and I have finally completely unlocked the phone.  Its pretty cool now, and eventually I will get to customizing the home screen, which I can now finally do.  I can post up unlocking instructions if anyone cares as it should work on any nearly any smartphone.

I passed the drug test ok the second time and now I’m finally working at the job.  Seems pretty good, but 60 hours a week wears on you.  You pretty much end up jettisoning your life except for a few hours of FF3 DS on the train.

Oh and my phone now plays the Windows 95 startup sound when I turn it on.  How badass is THAT!?

37” of love

Last week, I sold my 27” LCD HDTV to a family member for $300.  I used the money to “upgrade” to a 37”.  37” is the biggest I have ever seen anyone with a single room get, as well as the biggest monitor I have seen.  Definitely a sight for poor eyes   Both the 360 and PC look great through it, and the three HD channels that my 30 year old antenna can pick up look great too.  Maybe I’ll look into this free to air satellite thingy.

I also managed to secure a wii.  Having friends at Circuit City helps I guess   I still had to get a voucher and wait three days though.  Can’t wait to mod it.

I got my grades: my first strait A semester in many years (with an A+ to boot).  Proof that casual smoking/drinking doesn’t impair ability.

It wasn’t a purely good news week though.  I wasted $40 on some of that detox crap from GNC for the drug test.  Specifically it was called QCARBO32.  Apparently it diluted my pee too much for the test to be useful, so now I have to retake it and I’m out $40 which wouldn’t be so bad except that the stuff made me sick.  I won’t get into the details, but my waste products were weird colors, frequent and unnaturally textured for around 2 days.  I guess we shall see if they honor their money back guarantee (UPDATE: they did).  Its sickening that I haven’t done anything in over 30 days and I still have to be in fear of loosing everything I have accomplished with this job.

$&#@*ing drug test

I am so sick of the “war on drugs” in this country.  It goes against the “freedom” that this country is founded on.  Its my body, my money, and my free time.  Why in the hell is it anybodies business whether or not smoking occurred [B]30 fucking days ago?[/B]  After getting a 97% on my last final, shouldn’t I be entitled to a smoke with some friends?  What about to relieve some of the pain from a pinched nerve?

Why are they wasting billions of taxpayer dollars arresting and harassing people for a victim-less crime?  Why are they spending MY tax dollars?  Why aren’t the police fighting real crime?  My bicycle was vandalized recently costing me $79 for a new one.  This is a minor issue not worthy of their time pursuing, but of course, some high schooler smoking a joint, or someone who is 20.9 years old enjoying a drink is.

Furthermore, drug tests are more or less created solely to measure smoking.  Ever other substance is undetectable after 3-4 days.  It doesn’t matter that it is significantly less harmful than alcohol or tobacco.  In fact, THC was found to cure cancer in lab rats, and hemp milk has more nutrients in a glass than a whole gallon of milk.  The fact that this prohibition was founded on racism, falsified medical studies and lobbyists from the nylon industry that wanted to knock out their primary competitor: hemp, is apparently irreverent.  Heck, George Washington grew hemp.

Thoughts on Vista #2

Well, I decided to build a new computer recently because my old one was kinda choppy on Phantasy Star Online and Frets on Fire when the gfx were turned all the way up, my two games of the moment, and I had some money to spare having landed a good paying job for the summer.  After building my monster of a computer, I was reluctant to load a 7 year old OS onto it.  I knew that I didn’t want to touch XP64 with a ten foot pole, but Vista seemed to be the next big thing, even with the bad things I heard below.

In fact most of them were not important.  The first thing I did was disable UAC and so the OS didn’t nag me much more than XP.  Then as it turns out, my new video card and TV do support bullshit DRM.  It also turns out that the controls while they are very scary, have not become active yet.  The access denied monster did show up however and denied me write access to “my documents”.  Pisses me off, but as a rule I don’t use those directory’s much since they are often the first to die in an OS crash.

Install went pretty smoothly.  Absolutely nothing loaded out of the box, I was able to connect to windows update and get all of the drivers.  Everything detected perfectly, and I was able to set up Aero.  Aero is every bit as sweet as you have heard, and with a high def video for my desktop, and a custom sidebar, it was sweet.  Then I decided to play Geometry wars with my 360 controller and it played a bit better than my 360.   I must say that that things were looking up for Vista!

After the novelty wore off and I learned all the fancy things it could do its quirks and (WTF, no “up” button in explorer), problems began to surface.  The network management in Vista is so convoluted and troublesome to use, you wonder what monkey got paid to design it, especially considering how fast and streamlined XPs is.  Advanced Text Services cannot be disabled and interfere with Phantasy Star making the keyboard unusable and the game unplayable.  Gamegaurd which the game (and many others) required was also prone to crashes.  Frets on Fire ran slower than it did on my old computer, and even Nvidia’s DX10 demo (which is lame!) ran slowly.  The media center (which I have always wanted) worked very poorly.  In the time it took to load the thumbnails of my videos, I could have browsed to the file via mouse and started watching.  Most of the videos wouldn’t even play, and my old kazaa lite codec pack didn’t work (nor did the newer Vista codec pack).  The 360 works as an extender, but it was a pain to set up, and you are very limited in what you can play.  I think the 360 does better with normal music/movie sharing.  Its certainly faster.  Finally I gave up and installed XP and all of the games played silky smooth with full filtering and antialiasing.

Though I kept the dual boot, the fact of the matter is that I will take functionality over eye candy anyday.  Vista is nothing more than a really really sweet skin for XP and somehow they managed to break support for so many things.  I do give it props for being more compatible than XP64 however.  Even though it seems odd to install a 7 year old operating system, Vista is not worth the hassle and money.  Having two stable, fully configured and fully functional OSs is nice though.  In case one fails, I always have a failsafe.

Early Thoughts on Vista

Everyone knows about the high system requirements to run Vista. Some might assume that it is the result of eye candy, but most of those effects can be done with add-ons to xp or beryl in Linux without such high power requirements. Yes, Vista supposedly handles a lot of back-end stuff more effectively (not more efficiently), but that doesn’t make up the difference. So what is causing the high system requirements?

My theory is that M$ wants to make windows the 4th gaming platform. By mandating that all Vista users have gaming PC’s, maybe they can convince grandpa to buy a new game since his computer supports it anyways. This strategy can also be seen in the new “games for windows” kiosks at many gamestops, the new game console syle game boxes, and with the compatibility of 360 controllers in Windows. They are also rolling out live for windows as well, hopefully they won’t use XNA to make a live arcade on PC where you would pay to play the kinds of games that were previously free via flash. Oddly enough, I have never seen any of this mentioned in connection with Vista and its high requirements.

Ironically Vista preforms worse in nearly all cases with gaming than XP does.

As for myself, I don’t have a single good reason to switch to Vista. True M$ is keeping DX10 from us XP users, but its not like my 3 year old FX5900 ultra supports it anyways. In fact my aging PC would have trouble running vista in general, though it has no problem running a 1.5 year old install of XP64, with a ton of other programs too. The biggest reason I am not excited to switch is the DRM. The built in DRM is downright scary. I’m not talking about the fact that they can now disable computers that they suspect to be pirated, though this is scary and has very scary ramifications for viruses, etc. I am talking about how they can disable high def output from my video card (which doesn’t support bullsh!t HDMI) to my recently purchased HDTV, (which also doesn’t support bullsh!t HDMI). I don’t like an OS that I [I]purchased[/I] telling me what I can’t do with the computer that I personally built.

Speaking of this, Vista goes overboard in restricting what you can and can’t do. Nothing pisses me off more than getting an “access denied” message on my own PC, and this happens very often on Vista. If I want to mess with system files I should be able to, I shouldn’t need to take control of the file (who controlled it before I did this?) first. And don’t get me started on the more than 6 “are you sure” prompts one gets when trying to run a program that installs from a rar file.

In conclusion, I’m glad I got a Xandros Linux dual-boot running. More and more people are seeing M$ becoming over confident in their monopoly and infringing on PC users rights, and people are beginning to not stand for it. If worst comes to worst, I won’t either.

Midi Hacking: use soundfonts with any soundcard

A bit of background: midi is a sound format used heavily prior to around 6 years ago when computers and storage became powerful enough to handle MP3 or OGG formats. The advantage to .mid files is that they were incredibly small. A 20 minutes song will often weigh in at less than 120kb. The way this was done is to store the instruments on the sound card, the result was that some sound cards sounded a whole lot better than others. Soundblaster cards introduced a format called soundfonts that allowed one to replace the instruments on the card through software. Until now, there were only a handful of third party solutions like wingroove and a yamaha softsynth to experience decent sounding midi on a cheap or integrated sound card.

My solution is to basically hack the directmusic driver.

If you run dxdiag and go to the directmusic tab, it says “general midi dls collection: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\gm.dls “. On an x64 system it will say “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\gm.dls” The dls file basically contains the samples for each midi instrument. What you need to do is replace that file with a better sounding dls file.

This introduces a problem in that there are no repositories of dls files. The solution to this is to download soundfonts instead and then convert them to dls version 1. SF2 soundfont files can be found in lots of locations all over the internet, googleing for sf2 midi is a good place to start.

Then use a program like awave studio (not free) or Extreme Sample Converter to convert the SF2 to a version 1 dls file and then use it to replace the gm.dls file. But wait, 3 seconds later the original file returns. This is due to windows file protection. For some reason M$ thought their incredibly poor midi file was worth protecting (along with freecell apparently). You can either google for an in-depth solution, or go to c:\windows\system32\dllcache and erase gm.dls from there. Of course, that file also has WFP on it. The easiest way to get rid of it is by using the recovery console on the windows disk, a boot disk like BartPE or Xandros Linux. Now when you replace the file in etc or drivers, windows will complain about an incompatible file but won’t be able to auto-replace it with their inferior one.

Enjoy great sounding midi on your cheap/integrated sound card! I have done this on windows xp64, as well as 32-bit XP.