Today we set the wayback machine to 1998; the very early days of 3D video games powered by dedicated 3D hardware…
The era of “3dfx” and a whole lot of voodoo.
This was the absolute best 3D card in ’98 – ran about $500, has 12 MEGS of ram, and a 90Mhz clock speed. This was in my EverQuest rig, which had a bleeding edge 300Mhz Pentium II, 128 MEGS of ram, and a very fancy SCSI-II drive subsystem.
I think at the time I was building this machine Windows 95 was the top PC OS – Win98 wouldn’t come out for a couple of months.
One of the nice things about this card is you didn’t have to set jumpers for hardware bus settings like IRQ. The drivers had evolved to a point where they could poll for the card and figure things out.
Good times.
Listening to "Standing on Higher Ground" by The Alan Parsons Project
I’ve had a few odd art requests from various acquaintances over the last week, and as they seem to be happy with them, I’ll post there here for posterity.
First was my HR director at work; he’s been working on a roleplaying game called “Athia” for like a decade now, and it has recently been published. He’s had all sorts of art made for the book, and last week asked if I could arrange a few of the banner images into a poster for him.
I said sure.
The way art usually works is that people don’t know what they want – they only know what they don’t want, once they see it of course. So, any time someone asks you to do a thing for them, be prepared to do it over and over and over and over.
To avoid this as much as possible I never really charge anyone for anything I do, because people tend to be a lot less picky when they feel bad for making you work for free. So I got away with only redoing the poster once… So far…
The first one was to-the-letter of what he asked for; “Organize the banners into a decent sized poster while making sure the banners are the central theme”. I explained that the banners were wide and narrow for his book, and due to this would be about 7″ wide and 3″ tall when printed without some trickery to make them bigger – but even then the aspect ratios were sort of set in stone… So he was looking at them being stacked artfully as the upper limit of what was available for free.
He agreed to this and sent me the site for where he would be getting the poster printed, with the 36″ x 24″ size and aspect highlighted.
And given the okay and the working dimensions, I did this:
The banner art was done by a different artist, I just did the background and the layout.
He was pretty happy with the layout, but the “Athia” world is apparently frozen tundra or something, so he asked if I could do the same layout but make it look ‘colder’…
The banner art was done by a different artist, I just did the background and the layout.
He was pretty happy with this one too – and then asked if he could get both done as 24″ x 18″… Which is a different aspect ratio and would require redoing everything – of course.
I explained this (along with the redoing everything part) and have not heard back on if he really wants me to do it…
Then on Friday someone I know in SecondLife, out of the blue, asked me if I could make a 3D model for them. How they found out I do 3D stuff I assume came from my roommate volunteering me – which happens on occasion.
The request was for a jukebox – specifically a late 60’s Wurlitzer “Americana II” – to hold a jukebox script that people can use to play music. He was kind enough to include a link to the machine in question at least.
So I set bout finding some old photos of the thing, along with a manual that had some rough dimensions, and banged this out in Blender…
This had to be done a couple of times to get the geometry complexity and physics down low enough to not be a problem for SL, and then I had to argue with SL’s weird implementation of emissive masking for the subtle lighting, but it eventually worked out.
The model, at 1:1 scale, fully textured with specular and bump-mapping, and with an LOD that makes it visible more than 5 meters away, weighs in at 5 P.E. Not bad.
And that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to for the last week – outside of work at least.
A long time ago, in the before-times of early 1994, I bought myself a laptop that would change everything…
The Apple Macintosh PowerBook 165c had come out in February 1993 and was the first laptop to have a 256 color display. It looked like nothing else on the market; it was simultaneously very 80’s and very 21st century – and was something of a dream machine for computer nerds.
I really, really wanted one… But they were about $3400 in 1993, or almost $7000 in today’s money.
In early ’94 I was using some generic 486DX-33 PC as my home computer and I had a Toshiba “Satellite” T1800 that I used when I was away from home – but what I really wanted was that PowerBook.
So, for my birthday in 1994 I managed to find a 165c for the low, low price of $2400 and after selling the Toshiba acquired it. It had 4 megs of ram, an 80meg SCSI HD, a 33Mhz 68030 CPU, and that amazing 8.9″ 640×400 color LCD all housed in a remarkably tiny box – and I was over the moon to have it!
And, as another testament to just how long Apple stuff will last – it looks a bit like this:
The 165c in all of its grey plastic and rainbow apple gloryMmmm – trackball. And two buttons! (a rarity for Apple products)
The 165c currently runs Apple’s System 7.1 from the built-in 80meg SCSI HD…
Back in the day I primarily used the 165c as a writing tool, so it had things like Office 3.0 and Norton Utilities on it. But I also had a few games on it, like the amazing pinball simulation “Crystal Caliburn”…
The 165c was the first Mac I personally owned (I’d used a Macintosh Plus for a year or so back in ’87, but it wasn’t mine), and it was a big part of my life-long appreciation of the brand and its “Think Different” moniker.
About a year after acquiring the 165c I picked up a PowerMac 8100/100 which was instrumental in my graphic design work at the time, and somewhat cemented my use of the Macintosh platform to this very day…
1993 68030 on the left, 2022 M1 Max on the right – and almost 30 years between them.
I’m old, so I’ve seen a lot of weather maps in my time…
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that weather maps seem to be experiencing ‘red shift’, but not in the cosmological connotation.
Back in “The Old Days” (TM), it wasn’t really hot outside until it got into the mid-to-high 80’s, and people didn’t really complain until it was in the 90’s. I mean, I can still hear my father’s routine “It’s over 90, that’s too damn hot!” every summer growing up.
And this was reflected in the color gradient maps of the day; if you saw yellow or orange in the area of your city, you knew it was going to be a 90+ degree scorcher.
But now, yellow/orange starts to appear in the mid 60s!?
I mean, according to this the green-ish tinted ‘comfortable’ end of the spectrum is 63 degrees, and apparently the world is on fire at 88…
Either people have gotten soft, or someone is playing with perception.
Compare the above Apple Weather map to one from NOAA:
On this map pretty much everything between 70 and 80 is green, or perceptually comfortable, and we see the yellow/orange appear in the 90 to 100 degree range – which seems less sensational to me.
I attempted to find old temperature maps on the Internet to compare against, but wasn’t too successful – they apparently have no historic value and are scrubbed from reality pretty quick. And most sites that offer historic data tend to generate maps using old data versus having old images – so that didn’t work either.
So, my personal jury is still out on this – but it certainly seems like there’s some marketing going on when it comes to the weather… Just like everything else I suppose.
Went out to top off the gas tank and get a few groceries today; it’s a pretty crazy world out there…
Firstly, I paid $5.20 a gallon for gas today – a new personal record!
I stopped the pump at 1 gallon to display the price – I actually used about 1.75 gallons this week.
The reason that’s a new personal record is I used to buy 100LL AVGas for racing, which was about $5 a gallon for someone without an airplane.
So, after a healthy fleecing at the pump I drove up the street to Walmart – mostly because it’s close to the house…
Walmart is still the most miserable place on Earth to do any shopping.
Today is pretty warm, about 95, and I tend to buy a lot of fresh produce and frozen items – so my goal was to get in, get out, and get home (about a mile away) in as rapid fashion as possible before everything wilted and thawed…
The place was packed, and I wound up parking at the bank in the parking lot as it was as close as I could get. And the store itself was full of zombie-like people wandering aimlessly through the isles; basically shopping via Brownian motion.
And the place was seriously low on stock too… I had to buy name-brand stuff because all of the cheaper store-brand versions of what I was after were sold out.
Anyway, to walk the grocery side of the place took about 45 minutes because of the traffic… I mean, why does someone stop in the middle of an isle and carefully examine a box of Hamburger Helper for ten minutes? Fortunately I know this happens on occasion, so I employ strategery to make sure my refrigerated and frozen goods stay cold by picking them up last.
My local grocery stores don’t really do cashier checkout anymore, and Walmart is no different. They have replaced all but three of the isles with “self checkout”… This was probably an amazing idea on paper, but half of the self checkout lanes at any time are broken in some fashion and the other half have a 100% chance of befuddling the octogenarian trying to use them.
Today, for example, I spotted an open self-checkout lane, walked over there, and unloaded my cart onto the belt – then saw the post-it stuck to the screen stating it was cash only… So I reloaded my cart and got into another line behind a family of 12, only to discover that the machine there was broken and they were just kinda hanging out.
30 minutes later I managed to get my groceries paid for and headed out.
Getting out of the parking lot was a bit like departing a concert, and it took another 15 minutes just to get onto the main road – and 3 minutes later I was unloading the car and throwing everything into the fridge in the hopes I caught it in time.
There’s a reason I got my groceries delivered for the last few years… But now with all of the gas surcharges and whatnot, I can get almost twice as much food for my hundred bucks by braving the masses; four whole bags instead of two…
I miss the good old days of 2019…
Listening to "Lovin' Every Minute of It" by Loverboy
On Thursday I had to drive across town to the dealership for the yearly oil change, tire rotation, lube and tune session – which is why I burned almost three gallons this week instead of the customary two.
The dealership was slightly concerned that I didn’t like the car, because I have driven a whopping 1800 miles since I bought it about a year ago… Even with everything being stupidly expensive, apparently people are still averaging a thousand miles a month.
Too rich for my blood.
I did manage to score a very rare and hard-to-acquire brag sheet for the new Z while I was there:
I was told by the sales guy that every dealership will get one or two of the new Z cars some time in late July – with no real choice on color, model, or spec because of the ever-present Supply Chain Issues that plague everything these days.
And because of this scarcity, the expected dealer markup will be $8-$10k – of course.
I still added my name to the list of a dozen or so people interested in one… But I doubt I’ll seriously consider anything until the NISMO version is released.
I spent some time chatting with the sales guy as it was a slow day and I had no where else to be until they finished with my car; I regaled him with tales of my 240Z, 280Z, 300ZX turbo, and 370Z Nismo and gave him a lot of pointers on the various platforms. He tried to talk me into buying a purple 2016 370Z they had on the lot – but I’m holding out for the new one.
And that was about it for the week; just continuing to put one foot in front of the other and hoping the shit-show abates eventually.
Back on March 25th I snapped a photo of this pump, where I paid $5 for one and a quarter gallons of gas.
Today it was $10 for two and a quarter gallons. $4.40 a gallon. And we haven’t even gotten to the summer price hikes yet – whee!
A friend of mine has a Tesla and loves to be wink-wink nudge-nudge smug about the current gas prices…
“Wow, over $4 a gallon – that has to suck.”
“Yeah, cost me $10 and 45 seconds to add a hundred miles of range to my car. Horrible.”
I’m so glad I traded the Murano for the Kicks when I did, because the Kicks is cheap to feed even with crazy gas prices because it’ll get close to 50mpg on the highway and is averaging 30 in-town even with all the stop and go.
Good timing on my part I guess.
Listening to "Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)" by The Alan Parsons Project
In my ongoing expose of all of the old Apple stuff I’ve acquired over the years, here’s my “PowerMac8,1” iMac G5.
The 2004 version of the 17 inch G5 iMac, running Ubuntu 16.04-PPC
Back in 2001/2002 I was teaching CompSci at Marianapolis Prep in northern Connecticut.
Among my duties as the CompSci teacher was bringing the school’s technology into the 21st century… I upgraded the school with this new Internet thing and a full suite of Mac-based stuff; including frame relay internet, bleeding edge campus-wide WiFi, Xserve machines, and about thirty Apple eMacs.
I came to really like the iMacs that the students were using and decided I’d get one some day…
After I started where I currently work, in 2004, I needed a PC for what I was doing there so I grudgingly sold my 17″ G4 laptop to pay for it. And a couple of months later, for Christmas 2004, I bought this iMac to have a Mac around.
This is the 1.8Ghz G5 (PPC970FX) and has 2Gigs of ram, a 160G HD, and an AGP 8x GeForce FX go5200 video card. It does 10/100 ethernet, 802.11 B/G wireless, bluetooth 1.1, and even has a 56k v.92 modem built in. And there’s also a DVD burner, which was pretty fancy in the early 2000’s.
All in all this was a pretty stellar bit of kit in late 2004.
These days the G5 runs Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS for PowerPC and is pretty much a conversation piece. But it’ll still get on the Internet and do basic Internet things – at 1.2Ghz Celeron M speeds. 🙂
