Mega-ZBlog

Some updates to previous posts, and some new stuff.

I got my TV Tuner to work satisfactory under Vista using DScaler. It doesn’t directly support my $30 card, but one of the entries in its supported cards list is only a few models older than the card Windows Vista thinks I have… I guess it’s the same chipset. Anyways I crossed my fingers and tried it and it works fine.

My remote desktop failed on spring break… I figured out it was because my computer rebooted. To explain: OpenVPN does not support UAC, which means I have to run it elevated so it can update the routing tables otherwise the VPN doesn’t work; the VPN uses a subset of the addresses of my local network so I have to change the metric for the VPN to be lower than the local network so my traffic gets routed correctly. Anyways if I run it elevated I can’t have it autorun at startup, Vista won’t let you… which makes sense, since no one might be around to click the “Continue” button.

Anyways this means I have to update the routing tables by hand using a batch file in an Administrator Command Prompt. Of course, this shouldn’t affect incoming connection, right? The weird thing was, even though I was using TCP to connect to the VPN from the dorms, I was using UDP to connect from home, so for some reason that caused return packets to not get routed correctly, hence it looked like my comp wasn’t even on the network. Max (the guy who runs the VPN) suggested routing might be to blame, and sure enough, connecting to the VPN with TCP allowed me to connect to my computer and fix the routing tables.

The Wii is great fun. I have:

• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Wii Sports
• Wii Play
• Super Paper Mario

Twilight Princess is my favorite game, I’ve played it through twice already. Wii Sports is great with friends; Wii Play is a similar minigame collection but I’ve found it more fun alone than Wii Sports was… the minigames are more odd and wacky than Wii Sports’. Want to see your Mii’s abducted by aliens? In a Duck-Hunt-esque minigame, no less…

I haven’t had a chance to try it with friends yet.

Super Paper Mario was fun, it was a bit repetitive in the beginning but the levels have more variety as you go along… also the story is pretty good, and has an unexpected plot twist at the end. It’s worth it even if you have to struggle a bit through the game.

I just ordered a metric arseload of new stuff. My 16gb flash drive, which I am already starting to fill to the brim with ROMs and useful apps and virtual machines, and an SD card reader arrived today. Now I can transfer files to and from my Wii. Only problem now will be getting videos in the right format–shouldn’t be too hard–getting them to look good and yet not balloon in size–a bit harder–and justifying it since I’ll be watching them on the same screen anyways, at potentially lower quality. I have a TV tuner, remember? At any rate I can back up save games and channels now, maybe load some interesting ones from the internet. I wonder if anyone is hacking ’em?

Other stuff I ordered includes Pokémon Pearl, which seems to be the talk of IRC, a USB hub, which I hope comes soon because I had to plug one of my flash drives into USB1.1 to transfer files because I only had two ports open, and a 4gb SD card for my camera.  My existing 256mb card is more than enough for transferring Wii save games and channels, of course I’ll borrow it if I decide I want to watch movies on the Wii.

My internet went down for a full day, and I think ITS set a new record in the process, but I took the time to code up a storm. I made a .NET wrapper for Qemu which allows me to programmatically specify VM parameters and launch the VM, and kill it when I’m done. Not bad by itself, but I’m hoping to build a Virtual PC Console clone to manage my VMs. Right now I’m making a custom listbox like the one VPC uses to hole the list of Virtual Machines. I’m even gonna use Vista’s thumbnail API to preview the windows like VPC does… although VPC doesn’t use that API, and I’m too lazy to make something for XP so you guys’ll be stuck with blanks there. My only problem is I’m not sure I entirely understand all the parameters–what combinations aren’t allowed, which switches can be used multiple times, etc. Network is the hardest but I covered all the example syntax stuff so I think I’m good.

As a side note, Vista is slow. Especially in gaming. Explorer’s file copier is also unnecessarily slow… hopefully there’ll be a patch out soon (yeah right). At least there seems to be new nVidia drivers to fix the gaming slowness… haven’t had a chance to install those yet, since I don’t reboot often, and usually it’s because Vista BSoDs.