Oculus - ... developer / gamer

THX Gets Opinions on Newsweek.com

Oculus — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:51:39 -0700

This is cool. THX gets some real estate on the newsweek.com site regarding the Halo 3 Beta experience. Some good writing from Eric "rapture" Atkins and Midnight.

Wanna Know Much Money You've Spent on XBL Over the Years?

Oculus — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:12:23 -0700

How much money do you think you've spent over the years on Xbox Live.. Want to know? Registered with Gmail for your account? Paste this green string below into your your Gmail search bar, and hit 'Search Mail'.

xbox confirmation -"confirmation of change" -"purchased Two-month game trial"

Earth Like Planet Discovered

Oculus — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:18:38 -0700

We finally have started finding Earth-like planets outside our solar system. This is huge! Huge on so many fronts that I'll break it down for each one.

About a decade ago scientists started to find planets outside our own solar system. The news was incredible, but it was always dampened by the fact that we were only able to detect gaseous giants similar to and even much larger than Jupiter and Saturn. Scientists spent the following years improving their detection techniques and now claim to have found a planet, only slightly larger than Earth, and it may be rocky like Earth as well.

The kicker is that this planet is at the exact distance from it's red dwarf star to allow for water to be in liquid form. "closer to its star and the heat would vaporize any water; farther away and water would freeze". What's the big deal? Well, even in our own solar system, there is only one planet that meets these criteria, and your standing on it. Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, there's only the small sweet spot where life is likely to thrive.

Now for another bombshell, this planet orbits a star Gliese 581, which is approximately 20.5 light-years away... WHAT?! 20.5 light-years may sound like a lot, but considering our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter, this is just a short run down to the corner store. Not only that, but this is only one discovery of many more possible discoveries to come, we may be looking at quite a large number of Earth twins relatively nearby.

Remember Those Picture Based Adventure Games?

Oculus — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:41:08 -0700

Remember those picture based adventure games that simulated a 3d environment, only they were just 2d pictures that were loaded when you clicked on a certain part of the screen? I spent countless hours playing a couple of them and IGN has listed a top 10 of some of them here. I am sad they didn't include 'The Journeyman Project'. Looking at the dates I would have been 12-13 years old when playing that game... wow it doesn't seem that long ago. I can still remember some of the plot twists and scenes like it was yesterday. The version I played was the first version on the Mac that didn't have any of the performance updates the later versions got. So what that amounted to was clicking on a section of the screen (or keyboard, I can't remember which) and waiting about 8-10 seconds for the next image to be loaded so you can move. Still, the game was fantastic, and had a cool feeling to it.

The plot centered around time travel, or prevention thereof. It was in the same vein as Myst, except the puzzle aspect of the game was not as much of an influence. It was in the adventure genre, and had an excellent storyline to back it up.

Google Reader Sharing

Oculus — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 11:46:31 -0700

Since I've become a Google Reader convert, I've placed an added new rss feed on the site here. Oc's Picks is the feed that is from my 'shared' items I decide to share from Google Reader. It will most likely read a lot like other peoples 'recent diggs' feeds except the sources will obviously be gathered a bit differently. Here is the main blog feed from this site.

RSS, Choose Your Sources (updated)

Oculus — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:23:57 -0700

If you don't handpick your sources... someone else will. I've found Bloglines offers a great rss aggregator that is completely web based. I needed a web based solution because I'm always changing machines and checking my feeds from different computers throughout the day. A cool thing about bloglines is their community based feed sharing. Some feeds I would never have found had it not been for this feature.

UPDATE: And just like that.. I'm a Google Reader fan. After testing it out a little, I finally decided that Google Reader offers RSS aggregation that's a little more towards my preferences. I came in a little late to the whole RSS reading scene, as I was using just a couple of sites for news gathering.

Halo PC ... I like.

Oculus — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:15:00 -0700

Except for the kids with over a hundred ping who tell me to get off of their (supposed) server.

Trillian, Jabber, and Windows Firewall

Oculus — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:45:10 -0700

I'm now a Trillian user. All of the different chat clients I was using started to get complicated and I needed a clean solution. The upcoming chat functions in Xbox Live were not going to help the whole situation either so I decided to take the plunge and purchase Trillian pro for 25 bucks. The verdict is still out as to whether or not I'm a happy customer, but I'm liking it so far.

Google Chat (Jabber) was not working until I figured out that Windows Firewall for Vista was not telling me that it was blocking some of the Jabber ports. I initially tried to force port 5222, but nothing was working. Finally, I found that I needed to restart the firewall for the port changes to take effect. This isn't the first time I've had problems with Windows Firewall as it seems they've decided to make it 'easier' for us by not telling us when it blocks something. I didn't have this problem with some of the other firewalls I've used, namely Bitdefender's.

Another tip for Trillian first timers. You might feel the need to group your contacts by what medium they are connected to. I was having some initial problems with the grouping until I found a little menu called 'hide empty groups' that kept me from seeing all of the newly created groups I made and drag and drop my contacts into them. Go to 'View' and uncheck 'hide empty groups'.

Late Halo PC Thoughts / Mouse Acceleration

Oculus — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:58:38 -0700

I finally bought a good enough PC to play games better than minesweeper, so I thought I'd pick up Halo PC since there's a few people I know who seem to be big fans. Along with that I downloaded Xfire and Ventrilo for my communication needs. Any review I can give of HPC will be extremely outdated and misinformed, but here's what I've experienced so far.

Halo Mouse Acceleration: Mouse sensitivity was originally way too high. I had it turned down to 1 in the settings menu, but it still felt way overboard. I found a way to turn the mouse acceleration to 0 by creating a Mouse.cfg file with the text "mouse_acceleration 0", putting that in my root halo directory and then putting the text "-exec Mouse.cfg" in the shortcut in the start menu. That seemed to help, however it could just be my imagination. I will settle for the screen name "OcuNewb" until I get better at the feel of it.

I've heard of people talking about

Vista Upgrade, iTunes, Bit Defender, and Aero

Oculus — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:26:35 -0700

How'd the Vista upgrade go? I can describe it in one word.. smooth. I installed Vista Ultimate as an Upgrade from XP, and had no hitches. Obviously there were a few drivers that needed to be upgraded to the Vista version. For example my XFX NVidia 8800 GTX video card, and my Razer Copperhead mouse drivers. But other than that, things went eerily well. Wait.. that wasn't supposed to happen. From what I've heard around the internet, my computer is supposed to whine and complain the whole way through, spitting out blue screens of death like used tobacco.... or... was all that hubub just a smear campaign driven by hardcore OS X, and Linux fans? Nah, couldn't be. Personally, I'm a fan of all flavors of OS's and think each has their strong points. The whole fanboy attitudes some people have baffle me.

Now, in the small amount of time I've used Vista so far, I actually liked it quite a bit. Feature #1 on my list is the new search bar embedded in