The Insomniac Coder

Image by Kimli via Flickr I am now convinced that Fallout: New Vegas is the buggiest “good” game that I have played in many years. It is simply terrible, which is worse because it is such a good game. Basically what we have here is a diamond in the rough that was shipped way before Quality Assurance was done properly. 99% of my problems with the game deal with buggy quest decision trees. For example, you do something, and not all of the decision paths open up, which breaks the quest. The other problem is that the companions logic is really screwed up, I spent the last 20 or so hours in my first play through with ED-E invisible. I was having the perk from having ED-E as a companion, but no protection, and I couldn’t dismiss it which screwed up my chances of completing the robotic dog quest. The worst part is that the game isn’t a turd. It is a really good game, but it is unbelievable that the game has been out for months, the first DLC is out and the game is still so buggy. This is...

Image via Wikipedia My migration from iPod/ iPhone land to Zune HD was pretty smooth: the software doesn’t care about where your media is, as long as it is in one of the media libraries. This means you are free to keep your music and videos in additional drives. This may not look like much, but think about what happens every time you switch machines: you spend a lot of time of the migration dealing with just your music and video which usually eat up a lot more space than all your other data combined. If your media is on external drives, then you keep your home folder size down to a more manageable size. This is one of the things that Apple fucks up. Apple allows you to leave your media as-is, or to let it organize the music. If you let it organize the music (big mistake) then it insists on using your home profile. It gives you the choice to override this folder, but then every time you do a minor update iTunes decides to forget that setting and tries to move everything to your h...

All the President's men: Obama enjoys 20-MAN motorcade and splashes $1.5m on Hawaiian holiday | Mail Online This is just silly. If you are the President of the United States, and you want to impress your childhood friends, why go through the trouble of flying down to meet them? Especially since the country is having a rough time lately, that's a lot of money! Here's how I would had done it: Find the next "VIP" government flight between Hawaii and DC that still had two seats left. Put the two guys on that flight, if anyone asks about them they are "under Presidential Orders." When they get to DC, pick them up in a Secret Service Yukon and drive them to either Blair House or the White House, where they'll stay as guests for a weekend or whatever. Plus they get to hang out with their buddy who happens to be the President of the United States. And all of this at very little cost to the taxpayer, since the VIP flights would had happened regardless, the fr...

This disturbing little toy has been sitting on my desk, staring at me whenever I sit down: It is about one inch tall, sort of a little plastic capsule with a metal bearing ball inside . If you throw it around, it rolls and tumbles in a creepy-yet comical way. PJ got a few for Christmas and showed no interest in them, and one of them eventually showed up at my desk. And I don’t know how it got there. Worse, according to the Internets, there’s hundreds of them out there. WHERE ARE THEY HIDING?

Image by Casul Media via Flickr The problem: We Xbox 360 gamers love to brag and share on our experiences playing the console, but there is simply no easy way to grab a screen capture or video. Some games have implemented this kind of feature and it is extremely popular. For example, Halo 3 let me record a game as pure telemetry, which kept the file size tiny, then use it to generate a video that I could edit for view angle (overkill). Forza 3 allows you to take captures with an in- game camera , and even allows exporting videos. Proposed solution: Implement changes to the Xbox 360 dashboard , that allows the user to: Hit the center button in the controller and quickly take a screen grab, which can be: saved to the Xbox 360 pictures library. sent to any of the members of the friends list. send it to the SkyDrive associated with the Live ID associated with the gamer tag . Optional: same functionality as #1, but as a video. same functionality as #1.2, but for other soc...

Image via Wikipedia My old piece of crap disposable Lexmark ($35 or so) died after about 5 or 6 cartridge pairs, and its demise matched the Christmas rush specials at Amazon. The end result was that Amazon was all too happy to ship to my door a Canon PIXMA MP495 wireless Printer/Scanner/Copier combo for $53, of which $3.95 was the upgrade to next-day for Amazon Prime . Last time I had shopped for a printer combo was only a couple years ago and it was hard to score one for less than $100, so either things are really rough for Canon or maybe I got too lucky with this particular Amazon sale. The printer was a pain in the ass to install. It boasts that it is fully compatible with Windows 7, yet its installer doesn’t understand the administrator permissions in Widows 7-64. I had to download everything, which meant half hour of finding each separate package needed, instead of letting me download one installer with everything needed for, say, Windows. It gets worse: the same CD had...