The Ignition Project

If you missed part 1, you should go back and read it, so you understand why I’m taking apart such an expensive monitor.

Before I cut the end of the cable off, I wanted to know what I was working with. Maybe the cable was simple to replace. Maybe it was something that I could easily find. By following this take-apart guide, you’ll see, the cable is really simple to remove. The Mac mini and Nintendo Wii are much more difficult to open up (though not really that hard).

But a word of warning: After I took apart the monitor, and saw how easy the cable was to replace, I tried to locate one on the Internet. Nobody sells one. So, I went to an Apple store. Evidently, even though the monitor is easy to service, they send the monitor back to China and have the underaged children with small hands refurbish my monitor and they send me another refurbished one. There is a $120-$200 cost for this. Unless, of course, you take it apart first, in which case the refurbishment charge is $800 (for those keeping score, that’s $300 more than I paid for it). Even though the monitor is not under warranty, taking it apart is one of the Seven Deadly Apple Sins. So, don’t do it if you’re in the same boat I am. Unless you have a cable already, in which case, let me know how you got it! :)

So, anyway, on with the guide.

I own a 20” aluminum Apple Cinema Display. When I bought it, it was the best 20” widescreen you could buy. It’s still quite awesome. Except, the DVI connector is permanently attached to the monitor. Which wouldn’t be a problem if you were a normal Apple user in that you have a studio and keep your stuff in mainly the same place.

Well. I’m not. I go to LAN parties. I move my monitor two or three times a month. Lots of stress on the DVI connector. Finally, the DVI cable gave out. And, it’s not under warranty anymore (I was two days late getting AppleCare). And unlike every other manufacturer of hardware I know of, they won’t sell end-users repair parts. And it’s not like I can just go to a parts store and order a part. I have to pay Apple however much money they want for labor and then however much it costs for the cable. Which probably will end up around $100. For a DVI cable. That costs $2.

So, what am I doing? I’m doing the absolute geekiest thing: I’m soldering the $2 (free) DVI cable on to the attached Apple DVI cable. But, I did take it apart. It’s extremely simple to get it apart and replace the cable. And I’m hoping David from Galaxy Hardware Publishers can find a cable for me, just in case my solder job fails.

I’ll post take-apart pictures and a take-apart guide in part 2.

Read this.

The Catastrophe!

I once assumed that everyone just “got it”, but after last night’s LAN party, I’m not too sure. So, I’m going to go over some of the semantics of LAN parties:

1. Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC). How could any club afford to get a computer for each member? That’s like, $800 a person. We can barely afford to keep the servers going, which brings me to #2:
2. If everyone else is on the game server, and you have problems getting on, there’s a 90% chance it’s your problem, and not the game server’s. The other 10% of the time is either the server needing an update that just came out or a configuration problem nobody else sees for some reason.
3. When you do have these problems, please ask the unpaid sysadmin nicely to help you. Do not insult his operating system choice, his dislike for Vista, and/or his choice of game mode if you intend on asking him to help you to get the game to run on your Vista machine.
4. OpenGL-based games like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Quake 3 Arena, and Unreal Tournament 2004 do not run well or at all in Vista due to the shoddy and/or nonexisting OpenGL support (at some point, NVIDIA and ATI added their own OpenGL layer, but hey, it still doesn’t always work, particularly when the game probes for 3dfx features).
5. If you don’t like the map or mode, tell us, don’t go play something else.
6. Give the unpaid sysadmin some respect. Use your brain. Read. Don’t be lazy. If the LAN organizers put up documentation, read it before asking how to do something.
7. Play the same game as everyone else! You can play on a public Internet server any other day of the week.

So anyway. Maybe people will understand this. And yes, I hate Vista. Not because it’s not Linux, not because it’s new, not because I can’t run it. Because every time I use it, something new and exciting pisses me off about it. It can be something simple and dumb, like the fact you can’t right click in (My) Computer and pick “Map Network Drive” (is “Add Network Location” the same thing?).

Also, and this is completely seperate from the rant, but widescreen in Q3/RTCW-based games is actually easy:

1. Bring up the console (~ key)
2. Type:

   seta r_customwidth "1680"
   seta r_customheight "1050"
   seta r_mode "-1"
   vid_restart
   

3. ENJOY!

I’ve been a fan of Firefox for a long time. But, the way I use it (leave it open for weeks, hundreds of tabs), it uses all of my memory. I’m serious - it will use 1GB of memory doing nothing other than sitting there due to the page caching feature.

So, I’m giving Opera a serious chance. I’ll let everyone know how that goes :)

So, I’ve finally decided to update the page with something. I’m using a Ruby on Rails powered blogging program called Typo. It’s quite awesome, I think.

About ignitionServer? It’s essentially dead, but it still works, and at some point, I will probably release 0.3.7… I need to rewrite it in a language that is supported on multiple platforms. It sucks coding when I don’t even use the platform my software runs on (I run Gentoo Linux).

And what have I been doing? I’ve been working for a company called Poseidon Imaging working on a framework called MacroDeck and an application on that framework called MacroDeck Places (for Facebook). You should check it out, because it is quite awesome.

Edit: All of the links up top should at least link to something, even if the stuff it links to isn’t much.

P.S. If you are an old regular, be sure and e-mail me and I will give you access to post articles.