I’ve recently become quite an addict of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the Xbox 360. It’s a first person, single player action RPG, and the graphics are incredible and the physics are good (a bit questionable at times) but not nearly as good as Halflife 2. In any case, the nerd community has become quite fond of “Machinima”, basically what is avatar acting, acting out scenes or construction elaborate stories using recorded audio and in-game engines like half-life, Halo, Oblivion, etc for the acting. Another trend is using these same 3 games’ engines to create videos that exploit the physics engines. You might remember an old video where some guys where using Halo 2 to create elaborate stunts using in-game vehicles, grenades, and interesting physics to launch vehicles and players through the air. I can’t find the original version, but a quick search on Google video reveals that everyone is doing this. Another, more recent one used Half-life 2, and a Machinima Mod called “Gary’s Mod, to create an enormous Rube Goldberg style “mousetrap.”

This new one uses Oblivion to create an enormous dominos setup. It is absolutely the nerdiest thing you’ll watch today, but the sheer volume of work here, and level of patience for this setup is staggering. This is truly insane.

[via waxy.]

I know I am prone to hyperbole, but this is seriously the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. Ever. Seriously.

Enjoy Phone Prank Call Gone Wrong on Save Manny.

Please don’t miss this.

I bought a MacBook Pro about three weeks ago.
I haven’t had any major issues with it (none close to what I’ve been reading, anyway), and I’ve been quite happy with it so far.
I’ve been reading a lot about the MacBook Pro and everyone’s complaints about heat/noise/etc., keeping a good eye on the developments.

I love my MacBook Pro. I love it. Like a father loves a son. Which is why I’m so sad to have to write what I’m about to write.
And please try to understand, son. I’m not mad. I just…disappointed.

And so it goes…
I had the wine issue. ‘Bandaided’ with QuietMBP.
I didn’t have the noise issue associated with screen brightness.
I did have a fan issue, but it didn’t get bad until yesterday.

I started to notice the fan ‘grinding’ like an electric razor from time to time when it would speed up. Then I noticed it more and more.
Downloaded and ran CoreDuoTemp to get a reading of 60 degrees C (That’s around 145F) at idle. I was shocked.
Being used to temperature readings of Pentium chips (where 60 – 80F is an acceptable range of idle temperatures), I panicked into a Google search. Many were reporting that Apple stated the temperature I was seeing on my machine was ‘within spec’. Another link (provided by the same post) lead to a page with a list of processors (all types) and their respective max operating tempertures before theoreticle burnout. The max for the Core Duo 2.0ghz chip is listed at 100C.
That’s right. Celcius. It blew me away. But what do I know.
So I wasn’t too worried.

I’d installed BootCamp and Windows XP to play some games to see how it would run. Half Life 2, Halo, and F.E.A.R. all ran flawlessly.
Although the settings in FEAR were set to Medium at 1152×854 (Or somewhere around there), the game looked and played beautifully.
That was last night.

Tonight, I decided to run FEAR again. This time, to play play.
So I booted into Windows normally, and started up the game. Loaded my saved game, and off I went. And off my fan went.

The fan went full blast. And kept going, and going, and going…
This thing wasn’t going to stop. Then the electric razor grinding started. Then it got louder, and louder, and louder. It woke my girlfriend up from a dead sleep. In a panic, I quit the game, told Windows to shut itself down, and waited.

The machine turned off, and the fan stopped dead. I shook off my initial shock, and pushed the power button. ‘Rrrrr…..RRRrrrrrr…..RRRRRrrrrrrr…..RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR’ went my fan. That was a rendition of my fan sounding like it was being held back by something. Coming into contact with some internals, perhaps? But it eventually gained speed to squeal once again.
Now the machine wouldn’t boot. White screen forever. I shut it down. Tried it again. Same result.

Girlfriend suggests that I let it cool off a bit. I agree, and thank her.
I take it outside on the back balcony, and place it on a safe spot for cooling off. Leave it out there for ten or so minutes. Cool to the touch. I sit it down at my dining room table, hold my breath, and push the power switch. Success.

I ran Boot Camp Assistant, and got rid of the Windows partition (BootCamp Assistant can create and delete the Windows partition, and resize the Mac partition without changing any data noticeably). Rebooted. The fan’s been operating as usual since the reboot, exhibiting the slightest of slow rattles.
I’ll run a few things to see if it resumes normal function, but as of right now, it looks like this poor thing’s going back home to the Apple store. Gonna have to trade him in for one of his quieter brothers.

Update:
The MacBook Pro (sans BootCamp and Windows XP) has been running very cleanly since the above incident.
To be a bit clearer on my situation, this occured after the Apple SMC Firmware update (which runs your fans at full speed for ten seconds or so, then quiets down). I also notice that the fan seems to be running much more efficiently. It used to kick in, run at full speed for a few seconds, then stop. Now it seems that it runs fairly steadily during normal use (have to listen very carefully to hear it), then speeds up a bit during hard core tasks (Photoshop, iMovie rendering, gaming, etc.). CoreDuoTemp records my temperatures as follows: Idle: 59C; dual processes running each side of the Dual Core at 100% for 10 minutes: 76C. Not terrible, according to the general mass. I’m not too keen on taking the machine apart to apply some Arctic. Not just yet.

And as for which MacBook to replace it with, if I can exchange it for a 17″ MacBook Pro (which isn’t as big as I first thought, and less expensive than my 15″), I’ll do that. But if not, the newer revisions of the 15″ (new logic board, better thermal paste job, etc.) will do just fine.
I’m almost content to leave it as is, and just get the AppleCare package, so if anything does go wrong, I won’t have to worry about it.
For now, it’s running very well.

Update II:
The fan’s been ‘grinding’ softly for a couple of days. Harshly at times when the CPU has a heavy load. Decided to give the Apple store a call.
Bought the MBP on May 1, 2006. It was May 23, 2006 (yesterday) when I called, 8 days after the official 14 day grace period of Apple’s return/exchange policy.
Spoke to a ‘Kat’ on the phone (very pleasant, and helpful). Told her about the issues: ‘I don’t mind the whining and the heat so much, but my fan sounds like an electric razor’. She put me on hold for a couple of minutes while she spoke to ‘Chris’, the manager, who decided that they’d ‘make an acception’ and exchange my MBP for a new one. ‘Bring it down’ she said. This took all of five minutes. Now all that’s left is physically going to the Apple store, dropping the ‘Kat’ and ‘Chris’ names, and getting this thing replaced. Well, that, and setting up the new machine to my specs once again. Which is pretty much a two-day job these days.
I’ve also made an audio recording of the fan freaking out (my phone has a recording feature – as do many others) so I have something to ‘play’ for them in the store, just incase I can’t get the Mac to freak out (which I almost definitely can by using the ‘yes >/dev/null’ command in the terminal – which runs a task that utilizes 90-100% of the CPU cycles to heat up the system so the fan will run).
I sure hope the new MBP doesn’t have any issues. I’ve heard of people having to exchange their computers multiple times. And some have reported that Apple employees have been giving them a hard time about the MBP’s issues. I’ll hopefully get a nice person. I don’t like mean people much.

Will Ferrell is one of the funniest guys on planet, yet he’s even FUNNIER when he’s fucking up. This video is hysterical. The first one kindof sucks, but be patient.

[via screenhead.]

The night I arrived in Cairo, I was tired, confused, and poorly prepared for the assault on my senses and sensibilities that would come in the following days. Waleed took me to Dwarves of the East, and I smoked my first (of many) sheesha. My second day was not quite as relaxing.

A whirlwind tour of Cairo in 3 days is not easy to accomplish. Not only is there more to see than can possibly be seen in such a short time, but between the traffic, liars, and scam artists, it’s pretty difficult to get around as a non-arabic speaking westerner. Of course everyone speaks English, but it’s basically used a litmus test for whether or not to try to find a way to rip you off. If you respond in Arabic, you get one set of a prices, in English, the prices start about 4 times what they should. My goal on day 2 was simple. Get to the Giza pyramids, by camel, and take a few pictures. I would have been happy to go home and watch Arabic TV after that if I had to.

My hotel was quite close to the pyramids, and payed quite bit extra for that luxury, and the view.

I met Sayeed, or “Homeboy” as he preferred to be called, while walking towards an area where I thought I’d be able to hire a camel. He talked me out of flying solo for the day, fast talking accented English, and encyclopedic knowledge of Cairo was hard to resist. His silver teeth added to his charm, and I fell for it. $5 US dollars for a 2 hour tour. We agreed it would start with the camel ride.

I’ll admit I Payed way to much for the camel tour, negotiated from 1000 EGP (Egyptian Pounds) to about 350. I found out later that about 15 or 20 EGP per hour is reasonable. It doesn’t matter much though, and the Egyptians know it, because 350 EGP = $60. Do I really care? Only my damaged ego cares, but not my wallet.

I got a guy, a friend of Sayeed’s, named Ahmed and his 10 year old sidekick Ali who led the camel along. The camel was an enormous 5 year old named Moses, who was very cooperative and very gentle with this beginner.

It turned out that Ahmed was something of an insider. My negotiated price of 350 EGP included all entry fees we might have to pay along the way, normally 40 EGP to get into the Giza desert area, 35 or 40 EGP to get into the Sphinx area. Ahmed found a great way to turn an extra prophet – just don’t pay any of the official entry fees. This meant that we, me, Moses, Ahmed, Ali, and a horse, walked miles out of the way, through a super-poor Bedouin village, and through the Sahara desert, to enter the fenced area surrounding the pyramids through a whole in the fence from the south. Most tourists come in from the east and have a straight shot into the Sphinx.

From the south, the view is spectacular, so Moses and I wound up with this great picture.

I wouldn’t have done it the regular way if it was free. My backroad tour was a thousand times better than the tourist sheep were getting. Not only did we avoid paying anyone anything extra, except for that one time the police demanded a bribe, but my lonely infiltration included a unique tour of some areas technically “off limits” to tourists. Just the way I like it.

I climbed the Pyramid of Khufu so high I thought I might not be able to get down. I am pretty scared of heights. Here I am jumping down rather quickly after the police came to chase us away. Ahmed barked something in Arabic at them, and they left alone after I came down. I don’t think I was supposed to climb, but Ahmed insisted it was fine. Ha.

The best part though was the series of tombs to the east side of the pyramids, barbed-wired off so tourists could not enter. Ahmed foiled the complex security system with one sandled foot on the lower barbed wire, and a deft hand on the upper. He spread the wires apart and instructed me, “Quickly, this way…” The tombs and dusty stone alleyways we found inside were extraordinary, and the pictures I got were great. Sometimes it’s nice not to follow the rules.

Next was the Sphinx, but of course, we approached from the side and Ahmed instructed me, “Do not pay to go inside. That is where the tourists go. You can get great pictures from outside. You have zoom.” He was a bit wrong. When I got up as close as I could without paying, the shots angles were bad and my zoom lens wasn’t helping. When I signaled to him that I would pay and go in, he ran up and told me to follow him. I did, right in through the barely guarded exit. When one guy attempted to stop us, Ahmed berated him in Arabic, and I was right inside. There were tons of tourists here, the first I had seen on the whole tour, and I was able to get some decent pictures.

When we finally got back to Ali and the horse and camel, we found this angry cop sitting on Moses. He asked form money from me but I refused to give it. I dismissed him in English, “I’m not paying you. You’re police!”

Ahmed did pay him, and he released the camel.

The whole tour took nearly 3 hours. I was about 12:30. I was sunburned, tired, chaffed, and smelly, but smiling ear to ear. I payed too much for the tour, then tipped to much, and then finally got back into the cab with Sayeed. The rest of the day was even more insane, but I’ll have to tell that story or two or three in another post tomorrow.

Sorry it took so long, but I just finally uploaded a whole load of Cairo photos. There are 66 there, ones that I thought were decent, from about 600 that I took. There are still a few more that might make it up soon. Enjoy these for now. I’ll try to tell a few stories about the trip and link to the right photos.

As usual, all the photos are poorly organized in my Flickr account.

You might remember when I told you about Tysen Ibele (twice), the 18 year old 3D animation genius. Well, he won a contest with the old spec ad he did for Sony electonics, and now Current TV is running the ad. I think that’s the first time a fan-created spec ad made it to TV. Brilliant. Current is doing some nice experimentation with user created content, and this is a nice next step. We’ll see how the companies do with letting go of the control of some of their ads…

[via kottke.]

BBC News 24 made an awesome mistake earlier this week. They planned to interview Guy Kewney, IT expert and editor of newswireless.net, about the recent decision in the court case of Apple Computer vs. Apple Music. While Guy waited in the greenroom, producers accidentally grabbed his cab driver who spoke very poor English, and who answered “Hello,” when they shouted out, “Guy Kewney?” from another room. They put a jacket on him and whisked him out onto live TV for Karen Bowerman to interview. He played along, which is the BEST part of the story, while the real Guy Kewney watched on a monitor in the greenroom. What you get as a result is 2 minutes of priceless on-air confusion, and a French cabbie having the time of his life. So good. TV news is so awful.

[via sally.]

I didn’t vote for him, and I still wouldn’t, but if Gore was more like this on the campaign trail, I would have considered it. Lately SNL has been getting a bit better, but this skit of Al Gore as President is fantastic.

[via tailrank.]

Sally,

Thanks for the volumes of advice. It was all perfect. But the best of it was your cryptic description of your favorite local Egyptian food:

i can’t remember the name of this dish but there are small shops dotted around cairo and it is all they serve. you can order a small, med or large bowl, it’s a mix of noodles, fried onions, tomato and it is cheap as chips. i guess they are the middle-eastern equivalent to a tokyo noodle bar or mexican taco stand. there’s sawdust on the floor, the servers don’t speak and they are full of men scoffing down a bowl in the middle of the day. (this is very vague and i’ll be amazed if you actually work out and find what i am talking about, but for years i dreamt of eating this stuff again – then again, i’m vegetarian so i get easily excited about anything veggie that tastes good.)

Well, I found it, thanks again to Waleed. It’s called “koshary” and it is exactly how you described. A bowl full of two different kinds of noodles, rice, lentils, fried onions, tomato sauce, and optional chick peas. It cost the equivalent of $.50. Ridiculous. Delicious. Enormous. Fantastic.

Thank you very much for this outstanding culinary advice.

For Kathlene, for Will, and most of all for myself, I made the Dwarves of the East cafe, the one I mentioned here, a top priority on the first night in Cairo. My fine host Waleed, brother of Mo, and all around gracious and patient host, made it a top priority as well. He didn’t know of the cafe, so he ingeniously called the local radio station asked if Cairo could help him find the place. The radio station thought it sounded interesting and aired the question. Calls started that morning, and in no time Waleed had the location. It was indeed, “my first stop in cairo.”

It’s a real place, owned and run by dwarves, but not exclusively. Some full sized people worked there as well. I ate a chicken shawarma (sandwich thing with chicken and humus) and smoked my first sheesha (water pipe) with apple and then cantaloupe tobacco. It’s also pretty legit. No tourists, only local neighborhood people enjoying sheesha and watching, I shit you not, Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero on the TV.

Here are the pictures to prove it all. This is me smoking sheesha with the greatest waitress of all time. NO English at all, and she couldn’t believe that I didn’t speak Arabic because I was able to understand almost everything she said to Waleed. She was great.

Here is me and Waleed with the other dwarf server. Funny guy. I think he had never seen a digital camera before. When the preview pict came up, he took the camera around and showed everybody in the restaurant.

First night in Cairo: success. Wait until you hear about the rest of the trip.

Sorry, no screenshot, but I just HAVE to call on all of you to start watching this daily videolog. I put it in the sidebar a few weeks back, but I thought I needed to make a bigger splash. Zefrank is a dude who’s been putting funny shit on video on the web for years. But his new daily video blog, called “the show” is just fantastic – smart, funny, childish, poopy humor, politics, duckies, totally intelligent retardation… It will not be long before this guy gets a TV deal or something.