This season has been such a deep disappointment for me that the only thing I've got to look forward to is the release of the second and third episodes of Aika Zero. The second ep is supposed to be out on Tuesday, and I predict the first rip of the BD will hit the torrents by Wednesday evening. I won't be surprised if it's out by Tuesday evening (my time zone, PDT).

To some extent I think this about every season, but as I read what others have written about the shows they're watching, sometimes things appear to be better than I had thought, and I give them a try. But that hasn't happened this time. There hasn't been anything I've been even slightly interested in.

That isn't quite true. I did scan through the second episode of Heaven's Lost Property, but I wasn't tempted to watch it, and I'm not curious about anything else that happened in it.

My daily visits to Tokyo Toshokan have been limited to looking to see if SD&Taka have finally released another ep of DBK (ep 28 today) and counting down the days to the next ep of Aika Zero. It's lean times, folks, lean times.

I think I'm going to put in an order for DVDs tomorrow.  Things have been accumulating, and it's probably going to be the following:

Real Bout Highschool (DVDs 1-4) -- turns out that Samurai Girl Real Bout High School was released here under a different title, which is why I missed it. So this one's a guilt buy, in part.

DB 2nd boxed set

Dragonaut (first half)

Sergeant Frog (first part)

DBZ Bardock/Trunks BD

And either the BD release of Burst Angel or the BD release of Witchblade

And I might order the complete set of Jinki Extend

Not too much of it massively excites me. I think Sgt Frog might be fun. I watched a sample episode of it dubbed, and the dub sucked, but this release includes the original Japanese and it may be better.

As to the BD sets? I want to encourage a growing R1 market in BD anime releases, and the only way that's going to happen is if existing releases sell. Neither series really interests me much, but they should be fodder for top rotation pictures. Same thing for Jinki Extend. Stupid story, but lots of eye candy. (Which is also a pretty good description of Dragonaut, in fact.)

UPDATE: I've claimed victory over the weird screen rendering by Zoom Player a couple of times before, but this time for sure. Turns out the solution was to change from VMR 9 Windowless as the video renderer to EVR, whatever that means. At least for DVDs, anyway.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:21 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Tim Blair tells us that today is the International Day of Climate Action, where we're all supposed to be doing something to show our support for reduction of AGW.

Tim himself is celebrating by having a barbecue. Me, I think I'll take a nap. (Of course, I take a nap every day, so how would this be any different?) OK, I'll take two naps.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 02:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Just think: someone in China set up a factory to produce these.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 10:46 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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After I installed the CCCP, Zoom Player was able to play MKV's and DVDs, but the video looked crappy because it was doing a pixel resize instead of a smooth resize.

The solution? Zoom Player is using PowerDVD's renderer, even for MKV files. (Don't ask me.) PowerDVD 6 (the one I have installed) caused all kinds of "You know, this has problems with Win 7" errors, but it ran anyway, at least well enough for me to get into its configuration and to tell it to use hardware acceleration.

Once I did that, MKV playback with Zoom Player looks great again, nicely smooth.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 07:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Isn't this interesting? Under Vista, I was limited to no more than 4G of Readyboost memory. Win 7 allows me to use my entire 32G (i.e. 30.2G) SDHC chip. It shows as nearly completely full now in the explorer, just 5 megabytes of free space. I wonder what difference it'll make? Or whether it'll be perceptible?

DAMN Microsoft for "Automatic Update"! I've got it disabled. I've told Windows Home Server to ignore the fact that I have it disabled.

And every time I boot Procyon, both my computers pop error messages saying that Procyon has it disabled, and the popups don't go away automatically. Once I click them both to make them go away, Connector's icon turns green and I don't get told about it again.

But I shouldn't get told about it at all! I've told WHS I don't care about it.

There's an intermediate setting between "Go to Hell" and "Please fuck up my computer any time you feel like it" where it will phone home and say that there are updates available but not install them. Maybe that'll make this thing stop happening. But it's just trading one kind of itch for another, because it means I'll get popups every time Microsoft posts a new update.

UPDATE: Agent, my mail program, is working but every time I run it I have to say, "Yes, I really do want to let this program make changes to my HD" before it'll start. That's because it's running in XP SP3 compatibility mode, which I guess makes it automatically suspect as far as UAC is concerned.

I almost disabled User Access Control this morning, but thought better of it. There really should be a way for me to set the Agent icon to say, "Yeah, I really am sure about this one" and I vaguely recall that in Vista there was one because I never got prompted then. But I can't find anything like that in the properties popup for the icon I'm using. Running as administrator doesn't help. And currently it's set so that everybody in the universe has Full Permission.

I know there was some way of setting up specific UAC exceptions, but I don't remember what it was. And anyway, it might not be the same in Win 7.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 05:17 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Major relief -- I found where Agent used to store its data files, and copied them to where Agent now stores them, and the last two years of email is back again. Whew!

I still haven't figured out how to disable the touchpad, which is a pain. But I've got an idea how to go about it.

As to my issues with drivers, I've pretty much got those all straightened out.

UPDATE: I downloaded and installed Movie Maker, and now I'm installing Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft's new antivirus program.

UPDATE: Automatic Update got turned on by the installed. That's turned back off again. (Automatic Update is evil.)

UPDATE: Every time the backup runs, it ends with an error because the D partition is gone. I think the path of least resistance here is to rename the computer.

I considered using "Procyon Zwei". But I decided to go with "Procyon2". However, I'm not sure it'll work. WHS now shows Arcturus and Procyon2 and when I click the latter one it shows all the backups from before the name change. I wonder if it would help if I uninstalled Connect and reinstalled it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 10:57 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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I've long thought it interesting that 奇麗 kirei means both "beautiful" and "clean". It betrays an engineer's esthetic, because it seems to refer to the thing we call "elegance".

Here's what an explorer window looked like in Vista:

Here's what it looks like now in Win 7:

Ah, so much nicer. Look at all the cruft they added back in Vista, in a keep-up-with-the-Jones attempt to look more like a Mac. Look at all the background crap in the line that includes the word "organize", in order to make it look like it's plastic and like it's sticking out of the screen. Look at how each of the menus has both an icon and a text phrase. Ick. It's cluttered. It isn't clean.

The one I've got now may strike some as a throwback, and they'd be right. This is what windows looked like back in XP and Win2K, and ever since Microsoft changed them, I've wished they hadn't tried to fix something that wasn't broken. Anyway, it's back to not being broken.

If I wanted a Mac, I'd buy a Mac. Just because Apple is in love with screen flourish doesn't mean it's a good thing.

Same thing for the fullness indicator on the HD. They made that look like a jellybean, too. Now it's back to being a solid color, like it ought to be.

There's a lot less wasted space in the window header, too. The "name/type/total-size/free-space" line, which changes with context, is gone now and I never wanted it. The top part has a lot less blank space in it, and that's good.

The version I have now is clean, uncluttered. And that's what I want. Clean is beautiful.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 10:19 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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It's not a disaster, but it's kind of like getting a new pair of glasses: everything looks strange for a while. I've got some work to do, though.

One huge, huge cool thing: you can choose "Classic Windows" look for the UI, and go back to windows looking the way they did in XP. Which means, not like a Mac. Square corners. No weird ass icons. Man, it's like meeting a long lost friend that I'd thought had died.

One huge, huge bad thing: my shortcut area is gone on the task bar. Which means I'm crippled doing nearly anything.

UPDATE: Turns out it was called "quick launch". You enter that in the help, and the first entry that turns up is "What happened to the Quick Launch?"

The answer? We got rid of it. Use "pin program to task bar" instead. Except that "pin program to task bar" uses full sized icons, and I used to have about 35 programs in my quick launch.

UPDATE: Did Microsoft change the driver model again?

Few if any of the custom drivers came through. I'm currently using a generic display driver -- which nonetheless is able to choose a 1920*1200 mode, that being the native size of this LCD. But performance ain't great, and special features are nil. I tried running the performance analysis which shows up in the Games folder. It gave me scores of about 5.8 for CPU, RAM, and HD, and a flat 1.0 for graphics.

ASUS has a Hooray for Win7 web site, and it has a place to click to go download new drivers. But when I do that for the G2S (this computer model) it asks me for the target OS, and Win7 isn't listed for the G2S.

Fortunately, it is listed for the Xonar sound module, but the only driver is a beta. However, it works. And after I reinstalled the CCCP, I was able to play an MKV file using Zoom Player.

Meanwhile, I'm also using a generic mouse driver and there isn't any way to turn off the touchpad. So when I'm typing, or if I'm mousing, and not paying attention, suddenly the carat will zoom off because I've brushed the touch pad by mistake.

What I think I'm going to hope is that the Vista drivers will work, and I'm going to dig up the driver CD that came with the computer and try it.

UPDATE: Looks like I have to rely on NVidia for drivers. I've found one they say works with Vista and Win7, and works on my hardware (8600M GT) but the package is 115 megabytes so it's taking a while to download.

UPDATE: Actually, my biggest concern right now is Agent, my mail program. It's installed and running, but I've lost 2 years worth of mail, everything dating back to the last time I updated it to a new version. As part of that update they moved all the folders somewhere else and I don't know where so I can't dig them out of the backups.

UPDATE: Flash CS3 remembered my ID number, but didn't remember that I'd already set it up and registered it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 06:50 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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I'm going to leave the name of this category as "Vista" even though I won't be running Vista any longer.

The upgrade started 1720, and we'll see how long it takes. The very first thing it did was demand the right to phone home and download something, which turned out to only be about a megabyte. That was fast, but I bet that server at Microsoft is going to get hammered this weekend.

They keep telling me that PowerDVD 6 isn't going to work. That could be a probem, because I'm using PowerDVD 6's codecs in Zoom Player to play DVDs.

UPDATE: 1805, first reboot.

UPDATE: 1830, second reboot

UPDATE: 1900, third reboot. I think we may be on the home stretch.

UPDATE: 1915, fourth reboot. "Setting up for first use"

UPDATE: 1920, and the fifth and hopefully last restart. Total time, two hours.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 04:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The restore from Windows Home Server took about 20 minutes. The computer rebooted fine, but something got installed that needed a restart, and after that it came up perfectly. This was far more convenient than I expected it to be.

Before:

After:

UPDATE: The upgrade wizard says that if I try to install the 64-bit version of Win 7, I'll have to install all my apps again. Guess I'll stick with the 32-bit version.

Bummer.

UPDATE: In preparation for doing the Win 7 upgrade, I told Connector to do a backup. The backup program is tossing an error because the second partition I used to have isn't there any more.

I can tell it to ignore that error, but it seems as if there really should be a cleaner answer. I hope I don't have to rename the computer, even though I'm sure that would do it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 03:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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