Blog'n the night away...
Blog has ceased to be. It is no more.
I need to face facts. Nobody reads this site but me. That's fine. I'm good. At least maybe the spiders that crawl my site will get a few laughs. In the meantime, if you are interested in following me you can do so in the following places where I ACTUALLY update from time to time.
That's all folks!
The Price is Right!
While I was at it I also setup an SSL cert so the website is now fully encrypted. Not that there is any sensitive data here or anything.
Some small tweaks were made to the rending engine as well. Nothing major, just some cleanup and new ideas that I had.
New Website v4.0
I mainly did this redesign as an exercise in learning mobile and responsive design. Bootstrap makes it quite simple actually. Count me as a fan. I've also become fond of Font Awesome. This has replaced all my little .gif UI icons with a single font containing scalable icons. The end result being that they will look outstanding on HiDPI (read as high resolution or as Apple calls it Retina) screens.
Moonshine 2013
I did go ahead and perform some benchmarks. Check the table below for comparisons to the last few iterations of Moony.
| GeForce 6800 | GeForce 7800 GTX | GeForce 250 GTS | GeForce 560 GTX | GeForce 680 GTX | |
| 3DMark 01 | 17846 | 25121 | 29558 | 59037 | 61187 |
| 3DMark 03 | 10169 | 17986 | 32356 | 78232 | 105659 |
| 3DMark 05 | 3884 | 8788 | 12646 | 34955 | 35823 |
| 3DMark 06 | n/a | 4936 | 8385 | 26120 | 28030 |
| 3DMark 11 | n/a | n/a | n/a | 5089 | 9148 |
| 3DMark 13 | n/a | n/a | n/a | 3151 | 5960 |
As you can clearly see, the performance is near double in the 2011 benchmark. It completely blows away the 250 card. Not bad at all. I should mention that the 560 GTX benchmarks were taken on the new Core i5 mobo. Had I taken them on the older Core 2 Duo mobo, they would have been a bit lower. The 2013 version of 3DMark now has 3 benchmarks, but I only cared about the score from the high end Fire one.
Benchmarks are one thing, but what about current games? I'm happy to report that I can finally play Crysis at Ultra settings and get a playable framerate. Skyrim also plays fantastic with the high resolution texture packs loaded.
Windows 8, I've decided to skip this one. I played with the Beta a few months ago. I'm just not a fan of this new interface. While I'm sure it works great as a tablet interface, as a desktop paradigm it is a complete pain in the rumpus. There just is not enough new under the hood of Win8 to justify upgrading at this time. It does have a minor revision to DX11, and some other tweaks under the hood. The consensus across the webs is that this is shaping up to be another Vista.
Retro Den Re-Do
One of my longest to do projects was to re-do the back part of the basement that that I have dedicated for retro-gaming. For years it was simply a large black brown cabinet with doors that hid it from view. Problem with that cabinet is that it never had enough space to contain the multitude of gaming systems I own. That just would not do.
Inspired by a similar project that I pinned on my Pinterest board. I planned out a new design. It would be based around an Ikea red bookshelf that I would add legs, and a back to. I then added LED lighting to it for that extra bit of pizzazz.
The complicated part would be the wiring. This many systems connected to a single TV is quite a challenge. That challenge was answered by my trusty Pelican System Selector Pro. I modified the labels on it so they matched the actual systems in use.
I made a quick video tour you can check out here:
enter laxDRAGON.com
The story of laxDRAGON is fairly uninteresting, but I'll tell you about it any way. Come sit on my lap, a little to the left, that's better. I came up with with it during my early online days, predating internet access even. I created it as my login for America Online dial-up. Being a D&D fan, and the fact I lived in La Crosse, WI at the time. See, LaX was simply shorthand for said city. Easy enough. Over the years, and moving away to Minnesota, I needed to come up with a new story for this. I went with lax being lazy, or relaxed. I often imagine a sleeping fat dragon as my namesake. So there you go, now get the hell off my lap.
And NO, it does not mean, Laxative Dragon. You are so clever. Can you imagine that image... *shudder*.
Make Larry Come Again!
This screenshot is from Larry 7, in my mind, the best Larry to date.
Newman Arcade ver 2.0
It has been many years coming, but I have finally done it. I have upgraded my arcade emulation from the couch / tv based setup, to an actual upright arcade cabinet. Thanks to the fine folks at Rec Room Masters and their outstanding X-Tension arcade. Now I can play my classic arcade games the way they were meant to be played: standing as a bipedal humanoid should. Nerdgasm!
My cabinet is powered by a Zotac Z-box. This small low power (i.e. green) PC has plenty of enough juice for my 2d emulation needs. For controls, this is connected to my pre-existing X-Arcade Tankstick. The only thing missing was some additional buttons for exiting games and pausing them. For that, I picked up an I-PAC usb and some arcade quality buttons. It required some minor modding and drilling of the cabinet. But I find it turned out very well.
The side and marquee art was designed by Rec Room Masters. I went with their NES style design. I love the 80's feel of it.
Butt-Numb-Athon!
We have a new tradition here in the Newman Man Cave folks. The Butt-Numb-Athon. This team based non-olympic event is a true test for your gluteous maximus. To compete you must survive a 12 hour run of all three EXTENDED editions of The Lord of the Rings on Blu-Ray. Only breaking for food and bio breaks.
It was rough, but Kitten, Driod, Jeffster and I were able to complete this astonishing task.
Comcastic
Back when I had the house remodeled. I made the decision to drop Comcast. I installed a good antenna up in my attic, and even installed a signal booster for that antenna. I bought a Tivo Premiere to handle recording my HD shows from over the air. It worked well enough. Unfortunately, I live near an airport. It seems every time a jet would fly over, my signal would get all wonkey. I tried everything I could think of to remedy this. But, alas, it was not meant to be. It was nice saving more than $90 per month not having to fill Comcast's coffers. Today, the cable guy was back out here to get me all hooked up. After many issues getting a cable card to work in my Tivo, I am now officially a slave to Xfinity. Meh.
On the bright side, I am getting all the channels I really missed, Being a fan of Discovery, Food Network, and the Travel Channel, I had suffered without them. That, and being a Gopher Hockey fan, I needed my one sports fix, FSN (Fox Sports North).