If you don’t want your games to look like garbage on a display you need to run them in native resolution (in my case 1900×1200), otherwise there’s pixel interpolation or something that makes everything on screen look like it’s covered in goo. The problem is that my computer is so old that modern games don’t run well when using my external display under decent settings. I’ve gotten around this by using Window mode. It works ok, but I’d rather be fully immersed in the game, which would mean playing it full screen. I’ve chalked this up to just having an old computer that can’t run these kinds of games.

OR SO I THOUGHT!

Here’s the trick that worked for me. I needed to stop my laptop from driving both the internal and external displays at once and set it up just to use the external display. I used this hint to do so. I shut my lid to make the computer go to sleep, opened it back up, and only the external display is in use.

And my games run a lot better.

If you do the same proceed with caution. It didn’t work for some people in the comments who claimed it hosed their machines. Also, make sure you’ve hit this switch in Energy Saver preferences, otherwise you’ll never get good graphics performance.

Why not just close the lid? Because these games will make your computer hot, and heat dissipates through the keyboard. I don’t get a good feeling having a notebook closed like that when it needs to constantly cool down.

If you use Steam you should/could friend or follow me here.

I think that in the 21st century the most valued employees are going to be the ones who can communicate clearly and the ones can automate $work.¹

• Please Learn to Write

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• 50 Years Of Government Spending, In 1 Graph : Planet Money : NPR

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Most people in showbiz are either bitter that they aren’t huge stars or unhappy that they are. From the Starbucks barista to Oscar winners, almost everyone thinks that they’re getting a raw deal. Here’s my advice to them and to all of you: Quit.

• Better Off Dead | VICE

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Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit.  Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.

Until the easy money stopped.  When easy money stopped, buyers couldn’t sell. They couldn’t refinance.  First sales slowed, then prices started falling and then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices crashed. We know the rest of the story. We are still mired in the consequences.

Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different ?

• The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon « blog maverick

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“Mastered for iTunes” is only an indication that a hi-res master was supplied; it’s not a separate product. There will always be only one version of the song on iTunes at the same price as before. “Mastered for iTunes” doesn’t mean you get to charge more, or that iTunes charges you more. Everything is like it was before, you just supply a hi-res master so it sounds better.

Which would indicate that anybody using iTunes Match is getting the Mastered For iTunes version of tracks. Good news if you thought you’d have to repurchase all those Pink Floyd albums for the Mastered for iTunes magic.

Also on sound quality:

Speaking of the sound quality, iTunes is now using a completely new AAC encoder with a brand new algorithm and the sound quality it produces is stunning. It provides an excellent encode if you use a few common sense guidelines (more on this in a bit), and if you do, the result is almost impossible to hear (at least on the music we listened to). I mean, there we were, mastering engineers Eddy Schreyer, Gene Grimaldi plus myself, listening in this fantastic listening environment, and we literally couldn’t tell between the source and the encode most of the time.

Mastering engineers, people who do this professionally for a living, have trouble identifying a 24/96 studio master from a 16/44 AAC file. Meanwhile, read any of the comments on these types of articles and you’ll find comments from people who think they have golden ears and demand FLAC, high-resolution downloads.

Why? Because higher numbers are better. It’s science!

They did the math, but they didn’t use their ears.

• The Latest on “Mastered For iTunes”

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I’ve thought about the ethics of affiliate links. I use them from time-to-time here. I try to use them in an ethical way.

There are two ways I’ve seen affiliate links used.

1. Used to sincerely recommend a product.
2. Used much like placing AdSense all over your pages in the hopes that a reader will CLICK SOMETHING, ANYTHING!

I don’t mind #1 so much, because I feel like if you sincerely recommend a product then you deserve a small kickback for pointing other people towards that product. But I can’t stand when sites do #2 because it feels like a money-grab.

Amazon affiliate links, and by extension nearly all affiliate links, are even worse than AdSense because they’re undercover. You often won’t know if you’ve clicked an affiliate link until after you’ve landed on the page. That’s why Affiliate Me Not exists. Amazon’s affiliate program exists to generate links to Amazon, regardless of whether a product deserves attention or not.

Links don’t generate organically when used this way. The point is to generate the affiliate payout, not to write about a product or how it’s improved one’s life. In fact I’ve seen it used the exact opposite way—to link to a product that NOBODY should buy. Boing-Boing contributors have done this and it’s obnoxious because it feels like a trick in the same way AdSense blocks disguised like navigation bars feel like a trick. In this example the writer used the huge Boing-Boing readership to generate clicks on his affiliate link for a product he was making fun of.

I think that’s unethical.

Perhaps that could be resolved if Amazon gave a commission only on the product that affiliates link to. What Amazon currently does is reward any sale after the click to the affiliate. Why does the affiliate deserve a commission on product they didn’t even link to?

I’ve gotten (small. I think I total around $5 or $6 during my affiliate history) kickbacks from product purchases I didn’t even write about. I’ve used Amazon affiliate links on music and books, but somebody bought ink cartridges and a text book after clicking an affiliate link. I’ve never written about ink cartridges. I don’t deserve a commission on them.

I think Amazon knows this, but it doesn’t matter to them because their interest is to make as many purchases as possible happen through Amazon.com, and to do that they need to have a generous affiliate program that incentivizes publishers to use it whenever they can, no matter how scummy it feels.

…biting your tongue and keeping quiet on your true beliefs is a staple for politicians. But Obama was supposed to bring change to Washington, a new kind of candidate who didn’t deal with such cynicism and calculation. And, worse, the administration’s narrative has been that this was a change-of-heart for the president, something he came to believe after considering it heavily, and the views of his wife and daughters. Which makes this all the more cynical: they’re covering the president’s all-too-political opposition to gay marriage in the past, and sudden conversion now, with a story about how he just couldn’t keep that belief any more because he realized it’s wrong.

No. He believed it was wrong, and kept it anyway.

• Obama backed same-sex marriage in 1996 | TightWind

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Year: 1999
Label: 550 Music
Length: 40:20

My favorite Ben Folds Five album.

I was on a school trip in Toronto when I bought this. Ben Folds Five had been riding high on the hits from Whatever and Ever Amen. Classmates of mine had that album, but ignored Fear of Pop and The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner.

This holds my favorite BFF songs. I’ve always thought this was the darkest BFF album, and I don’t mean that just because of the album cover.

• On Spotify
• On iTunes
• On Amazon
• On Rdio

It’s clear that Microsoft doesn’t care about small downloadable titles anymore, when as a gaming platform, XBLA was originally one of the coolest reasons to own a Xbox in the first year. Remember Geometry Wars? Titles like that are being smothered out in favor of pushing multimedia apps like Netflix and Hulu, as well as Microsoft’s own array of useless music streaming services. When you have to navigate through a maze of distracting multimedia functions to find your game library, suddenly it starts to feel like you’re not playing a game console anymore.

• Microsoft’s Ulterior Motive | Games Are Evil: 360, PS3, & Wii Console Gaming Magazine

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