One of the few things I’m not liking about my new system is the CD/DVD drives. They’re LOUD. Incredibly loud.

So, inspired by Kevin Rose of “The ScreenSavers” I bought a copy of Alcohol 120%. This is CD/DVD copy software, make no mistake. But it also handles the creation of virtual drives.

So I can put a game in, rip an image of it, and mount that image as a virtual drive, which is of course silent, and also very very fast! Plus I can put the CDs away somewhere safe and sound.

There is one more piece to the puzzle, and that’s determining what kind of copy protection the CD uses. For that, I snagged a freeware program called ClonyXL.

For more info, go to the source and read Kevin’s article on the topic.

Its funny how I still feel guilty about doing this, even though I’m just ripping the games I own onto the hard drive I own in order to play them! (I’ve got enough friends in the business that I don’t pirate game software.)

There are probably cheaper ways to do this. I used to have a thing called Daemon-tools that set up the virtual drives, and used a trial copy of CloneCD to rip the images, but Alcohol 120% is a fairly complete all-in-one package, only costs $50 and has some nice convenience features, like multiple virtual drives and loading an image by double clicking it. There’s a 30 day trial version if you want to see for yourself.

I just got this all setup so don’t consider this a mini-review. I’ll have to see how it all works for a couple weeks before I pass judgement one way or the other.

So I must be getting old. A few months ago I bought a new pc and it came with Norton AntiVirus pre-installed. Not only did I leave it running, but I just decided to renew it since the free 3 month trial was up in March. The old me would’ve snorted at NAV and continued to live life on the edge…taking the ‘eyes and ears open to signs of trouble’ approach to fighting virii, rather than put up a sturdy (I hope) fence.

But now I’m old and tired, and the the $30 for a year’s protection sounded a lot more appealing than a weekend spent rebuilding my system because I slipped up and let one of the little varmints on to my system. (I should note that my PC is a gaming machine…I do my ‘real work’ on a Mac and I’m not so cavalier with that machine.)

All of which is totally tangential to the point I wanted to make. So I’m filling out the web based form to get my $29.95 yearly renewal to NAV, right? And I get to the screen where I enter my credit card and I noticed something. They give you the option to call up and give someone (presumably a warm body, but maybe a voice mail system) your credit card info over the phone, but they add a processing fee. I thought that was kind of odd…I mean isn’t customer support part of the cost of doing business? But what staggered me was when curiosity caused me to click on the link. The processing fee was $10!!! A $10 processing fee on a $30 item, just because you’re uncomfortable entering your credit card number into a web site…damn, that’s harsh. $2-$3 I guess I could understand, but $10 seemed really steep to me.

But then, I never call anyone if I can possible avoid it, so now I’m wondering if this is a common practice, or is Symantec just being brutal?

When I first started writing this blog, I never got any comments posted. I sorta got used to that idea and frankly, stopped checking.

But now I have two orders of business regarding comments.

First, for you folk who’ve taken the time to leave a comment, I’d like to say thank you, and to apologize for taking so long to acknowledge your efforts. It’s a real thrill to see that there are people reading the blog!

Second, you may have noticed a good bit of “spam” comments showing up. The damned spammers ruin everything they touch, don’t they? While I can go in by hand and delete them, its a bit time consuming with b2. The problem is that they don’t just show up on recent posts, but apparently they’re stuck in via some kind of script or something.

I could turn off comments altogether, but that’s kind of giving in to the spammers. I could require ‘registering’ to post a comment, but that really is asking a lot of a person. Someone must have a solution to this problem; I just need to do a bit of research.

If anyone reading this has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

And please accept my apologies for any offensive spam comments you might come across in this blog.

File Sharing’s New Face (free registration required) is a fairly interesting article about the guy who wrote BitTorrent, the “file swarming” software that’s the current rage. Apparently the fellow got hired by Valve to work on Steam.

The New York Times has an interesting article (free registration required) on DARPA’s Grand Challenge. This is a contest to build a vehicle that can autonomously traverse 200 miles of desert at an average speed of 20 mph. No pilot or remote control. The grand price is $1,000,000 US.

I’m wondering if my Lego Mindstorms qualify…

I used to be a linux fanboy wannabe, then Mac OS X came along and scratched all the itches that linux was supposed to scratch. But with the aging, not to mention hard disk-filling, of my TiBook I find I don’t “play” with the OS anymore. After going to OSCOM last week, I got all open source stoked again, so this past weekend I installed Red Hat 9 on one of my old machines.

So far, I’m really liking it. It’s almost too easy…I really didn’t have to do any geek tinkering to get it up and running. 🙂 And its really gorgeous, too. Of course, being new, I’m sure it isn’t stable enough to deploy in a serious computing environment, but for me its just a learning toy now.

Oh, and I found a great site to ask questions at: linuxquestions.org. They’re a distro-agnostic ‘help the newbies’ site, and so far have been very helpful indeed!

Here’s a laugh. ZDNet actually posted an article based on a survey done by Logitech, makers of cordless mice and keyboards, about desktop cord clutter. I mean, could anything be more self serving for Logitech? Anyway, setting aside the fact that its bad journalism, there are some fun factoids in here. Stuff like “Lay all desktop cords in the US end to end and they’d reach half-way to the moon.”

Desktop cords could reach halfway to the moon

I don’t usually bother talking about net virii and worms, but this one is so reprehensible that it bears mentioning. The I-Worm Coronex is being spread in an email with various subject lines referring to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). People are understandably concerned about this disease and so are more apt to fall for the attached virus and run the exe.

Pretty damned low, eh? Don’t let the scumbags get you. Practice safe computing!

Subject lines include:

• Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
• I need your help
• Virus Alert!
• Corona Virus
• deaths virus
• SEE ya
• SARS virus

Best Buy is evil.

I went to buy Spirited Away and wandered past the headphone display. Now, I have some cheapo headphones I use at work to try to block out the chaos, but after a while they hurt my ears and I have to take them off (they sorta hang on my ears..not buds, but no band either).

Well, to make a long story short, $50 later I walk out with a set of Sony MDR-V300 headphones. These come in a traditional format. Full ear cups, band goes over the top of my head, rather than the oh-so-trendy round the back thing that bugs the bejesus out of me.

And..oh my! These things are wonderful! I’m no audiophile so maybe the sound is shite, but it sure sounds better than my old ones. They’re also very comfortable and do a great job of blocking out the incessant nattering of my co-workers. Sound is crisp and very clear; listening to an old favorite live soundtrack (CSNY 4-Way Street) I’m hearing little details I never noticed before.

Here’s an Epinions review page to back me up a bit. They got 4 stars based on 12 reviews, and the lowest price they show is $35.

I’m groovin now!

David Rocci of isonews.com (here’s the original site and here’s a working copy) was convicting of 5 months in jail, 5 months home detention, 3 years probation and a $28,500 fine for selling mod chips for the XBox. He was found in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. (Read the full story here.)

It’s a sad day for freedom in the U.S. Essentially this fellow took a piece of circuit board, soldered on a few chips, and sold the resulting doohickey and now he’s in jail for it. Yes, I’m overly simplifying, but the fact is, he wasn’t arrested for copyright infringement or anything…just for making the device that allows end users to modify the hardware that they own. That’s just plain wrong.