mandrake.net

I’ve been spending some time playing World of Warcraft again lately, which most of you know I spent quite a bit of time playing once upon a time. Doing some light raiding and such, and I decided that this time around I was going to actually write some addons, since I’m a hacker by nature. I bought some books on Lua and writing wow addons… and it turns out to be pretty damn easy. You can see from the gallery I’ve got a few pics of it, and I THINK I’ve just included one here

still a lot of work to go on it, but it is going pretty well so far. It shows some various statistics about the current fight (I’m a tank, so I care about damage being done to me) and various important debuffs on the tanks (used to determine when to taunt, etc).

As my collection now grows to 450+ movies, and 1700+ TV Episodes, I feel compelled to remark on a few of the things I’ve watched recently:

Arrested Development: Somehow I missed this show when it was originally on TV. That’s a shame, because this show was great. Loved it. Highly recommend it to everyone. I’m looking forward to the feature film coming out next year.

Hancock: This movie was doing so well for itself til it took a strange left-turn halfway through. Would have been amusing like the rest of the movie if it didn’t take itself so seriously at that point. Also, the ad thing at the end? WTF.

Miss March: How could I not want to watch a feature film by the people who brought us The Grapist. Unfortunately they left a couple of their cohorts behind and the movie seemed to suffer a little from it. Still pretty amusing, but I can see why this movie didn’t get very good reviews

War, Inc: The sequel-in-essence of Gross Pointe Blank. Very amusing, I enjoyed this quite a bit. It reminded me quite a bit of the book ‘The Futurist’ crossed with GBP.

Equilibrium: Was recommended this by a friend… Had a good start, and an amusing end, but I was relatively checked out during the movie.

I’ve watched a bunch more, but those were ones that were sticking out in my head…

Also, grats to my niece who just got married last weekend, it was a fantastic service and everyone seemed to have a great time I know I did!

Been out of town, went to Pittsburgh, went to Long Island, threw a nice 4th of July party, etc… Also been quite busy building up my media collection, I now have 409 movies ripped, and about 1400 tv shows, with still a big pile of dvds and hddvds to rip sitting on my floor / desk

Also, you can see from the pics on flickr that we started putting shelving up finally. still a lot of work to do on getting these shelves built, as they’re all custom to fit a bizarre corner of the room.

Pretty much done ripping all the blu-rays that I have now, they look pretty good on the appletv, too. Ripping a few more dvds that I found, still building up my collection. Starting to look pretty good, definitely time for me to start acquiring movies en masse again now that I can store them in a more permanent manner without having to leave them out.

Also, I was hoping to get the shelving up in the office this weekend, but I did not. Instead, we mounted a new door to the upstairs bedroom over the garage which goes to a deck that doesn’t exist right now, but will hopefully by summer. We did end up getting all the shelving cut (but not fitted yet) so at least 50% of the work on the shelves is done… I did arrange the office somewhat this weekend however, so it wasn’t a total wash finishing up the office…

Saw my friend Ben last night which was pretty cool – he lives up near New Hampshire so it was quite a trek for him to make it down to the house yesterday. We talked about projects and future projects and various things that have definitely got my brain spinning – I think there may be some free software coming out of some talking we had. Starting to get the itch to do a new project software-wise, so that’s probably good for everybody

In other news – I’m going to be out of town in Pittsburgh next weekend / early next week during YAPC so I will probably not do much on the house for another week or two, since I have to go to Long Island the following weekend.

Welcome to everybody coming to my site from lifehacker and gizmodo! As you can see from the stats I have jumped up a lot in at least my flickr traffic – and my website had quite a boost in traffic, too. Haven’t had this many people paying attention to me since I was releasing software every day. Maybe I should start again to merit this much attention

In other news – I got my first Blu Ray to rip properly, and now I have an HD rip of The Matrix that actually plays on my AppleTV… and looks good! And has 5.1 audio! In case anyone was wondering, the tools I used to get that accomplished: AnyDVD HD, tsMuxer, and Handbrake… it was a 3 stage process, but the end result is nice. I will probably be experimenting with quality to see at what point the appletv flips out, but the size of the rip at 5500 kbps @ 720p was about 6 gigs, which I think is reasonable, though quite a bit larger (50%) than the HD movies I’ve downloaded from the iTunes Music Store… Not that that is a bad thing. Now to repeat this process for the rest of my collection!

I’ve gotten quite a few emails and comments asking about my desk setup, so I added some specs to the flickr photo, which I’ll repeat here:

A little information about my setup:

1 8 core mac pro desktop (3 ghz) with 8 gigs of ram.

3 30″ Apple LCDs, mounted on humanscale mounts – each is individually adjustable.

1 12″ Wacom Cintiq tablet

Now for the other periphery in the shot :
1 Sharp Aquos 52″ LCD TV.
Hooked up to it are:
1 Xbox 360 Elite
1 Playstation 3
1 2 ghz Mac Mini w/ 2 gigs of ram

The TV is mounted using a Chief PDR Dual-Arm mount – it extends 200 lbs up to 3 feet away from the wall

then I also have my 2.6 ghz 15″ macbook pro (the new unibody ones) w/ 4 gigs of ram.

The desk the desktop is on is a biomorph multi desk – I like it because the whole thing ratchets up / down and can be configured to exactly the height / configuration that you want. The little side desk I picked up from a local unfinished furniture mart and will be stained to match when I get around to that.

My chair is a custom Theropod chair from Allseating that I had made for me. I love it, it leans back farther than any chair I’ve ever had, and gives me full lower back support considering the way I like to slouch when I sit, and my back hasn’t hurt since.

Soon to come: built-in shelving taking up the dead space next to the sides of the monitors / desk / etc, on both sides. the cubby my desk is in has about the same amount of space on either side. I will take more pictures once I get the shelving built and more of the room configured.

Behind me I have another desk with a couple computers on it, but that desk isn’t fully set up yet, nor does it have nearly the array of stuff on it that the main desk does – more pics to come as the whole office gets configured the way I want it.

We have recently inherited a stray cat who has been wandering up onto our porch, which is pretty interesting. He definitely looks like he must have a home somewhere, but he is too afraid of us to come say hello. Wonder if he’s lost? There ARE some houses nearby but not TOO close, maybe he wandered too far from home.

Had a BBQ and saw Quinn’s (the CEO) daughter for the first time in person – saw her on the phone a few times (all our calls are video at work). Also saw hank and dan and gus and a bunch of people I used to work in an office with all the time before I started working out here in the boonies out of my house. I miss being in an office with people sometimes, but I really love working out of my house, too.

Speaking of working out of the house, I love working out of my new office. I need to get it set up a little more still – I definitely want to build some built-in shelving – some on the sides of my displays and then some in the ‘dead space’ over near the entrance from the house with the stairs. Also I definitely need a couch in here. I want to figure out a nice looking way to mount my guitars on the wall, too.

I also made some progress with the bluray ripping machine. I was having some problems getting windows to recognize the usb keyboard + mouse that I had plugged into it. Apparently the windows usb hid driver went off the deep end. FUN! But, with the addition of a ps2 keyboard and mouse to my collection, all is right with the world. Now to install the drive, fix the drivers for the system, figure which of all this ram is the correct ram for the system, and configure software to start digitizing the last of my media.

As you can see from the pictures I finally moved into my office, or started to anyways. still have a little bit of tweaking to do, but I’ve got the main part set up… and now I’m sitting here rebuilding the computer that is ultimately going to rip blurays for me. just going to take some time. new desk setup however is freakin awesome. I love it.

Well – the office should be ‘done’ tomorrow – the bathroom mirror is hung now, the second coat of stain is down on the floor, the slate tile in the bathroom has seal on it, and everything is just starting to look done. I’m hoping to move in on like thursday or so, and the pics of my desk area should be pretty slick I think.

I finished all the regular dvd ripping over the weekend, now I’m up to 1.2 terabytes of stored media. Now that I have the media system kinda working I will not feel bad buying new media. I have a new bluray / hddvd combo player that I plan on ripping the rest of my media with, but I have not gotten around to actually getting it going yet. Was thinking I’d get to that over the weekend, but I didn’t. Definitely by this weekend, I think.

And one last thing – valgrind for OSX has made it into the trunk. With dtrace, valgrind, and Snow Leopard (10.6) – I think OS X has finally become a serious developer platform… Now if only we could do something about the shitty window manager! I know I’m picky having spent years writing my own custom setup in the past, but this is pretty terribad. I have some osx hacks I use to get something almost like sloppy focus, but it breaks a lot. One day maybe I’ll get around to replacing Finder I wonder how much work that would be.

Man… 1.1 terabytes of digitizing media later and still I’m not quite done yet. Still 1 more box to rip this weekend, followed by the blu-rays and hd-dvds I’ve collected. I got a SATA hddvd/bluray combo drive that I will hook up to a box this weekend and test that. 55 tv shows (604 total episodes), 245 movies down, who knows how many to go… Plus I have 4 seasons worth of tv still in the queue to get meta tags and enter the library. Fun stuff, but lots of work to go. Good news though, it all looks good on the AppleTV.

Speaking of television – I finally got the TV hung in the office. This mount is freakin’ sweet. I cannot sing enough praise about the quality of this mount, which now has my 52″ Sharp Aquos TV mounted a couple feet away from the wall. Once I get the desk put in place it will look pretty nice – but I still have to get another coat of stain and a coat of polyurethane on the floor before I can even think about moving the desk in there yet…  then I’m also gonna build some bookshelves into the wall next to the entrance.  Getting pretty close to completed though.

Also – this past Tuesday I got my copy of Infamous for the PS3… I know Penny Arcade didn’t like it as much as I do apparently, but I am really enjoying this game. I have been having a good time running around as a good guy, and I know I will have just as much fun running around as a bad guy when I get around to playing the game a second time. Prototype comes out in a couple weeks, which should be a very similar game I think, too. I gotta say infamous looks really good in 1080p glory. I think I ordered prototype for the x360, so we’ll see how that compares to the PS3/Infamous experience.