Solo Technology

Fixed the Hitch in My Giddyup

Earlier today I decided it was time to re-subscribe to my old weakness, EverQuest, once again. I have upgraded my system since my last time around and was pretty excited to see how this new rig would fair against the stress that EQ can bring to bear.

Here’s the current Vista Experience thingy (click for full size):

It has gone up a bit since the first time I ran it due to a recent upgrade to the GeForce 8600GS that a co-worker gifted me. That little upgrade raised the graphics score from a 4.3 to 4.9 and Gaming Graphics from a 4.8 to a 5.3.

It didn’t take long to patch and then I eagerly logged into experience EQ with the best PC I’ve had in the (omg) eight years that I’ve been playing.

EverQuest box shot

Boy was I disappointed.

I had this horrible “lurch” or pause about every 5 seconds. Also, about every other mouse-click was ignored. I was seriously about ready to format and switch to XP but I decided to be a bit more methodical first…

After each change, I’d start up EQ and test.

Current video drivers? Check.
Turn off Aero. No diff.
Configure Antivirus to not do real-time scanning on the EQ directories. No change
Turn off Windows Sidebar. Nope.

I already had browsers and such shut down, but then I happened to glance at the tray and noticed my old/new pal Digsby running. “Oh ho!” thinks I as I kill Digsby and restart EQ.

Yup. That was it. Now she runs like buttah.

I’m not sure what the issue is as Digsby doesn’t seem to burn excess CPU cycles. But there’s definitely a conflict of some sort. Easily fixed though – I just need to remember to exit it before playing. Oh, and I must be fair and point out that my Digsby version is a beta.

As for Everquest? Boy, I dunno… I got pretty gung-ho into it this past Spring and spent days buying and selling gear in the bazaar to raise many hundreds of thousands of plats. I then spent those many hundreds of thousands of plats on buying the latest/greatest gear for my characters.

Well, that gear is now poopie and it looks like I can replace it with the latest buyable gear for under a hundred K. *sigh* The folks who call it “Ever-treadmill” might have the right idea.

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Digsby Beta – Lowered Resources

19.Aug.08 Leave a Comment

Did you try Digsby but drop it when you noticed memory usage in the 50 – 120MB range? I guess I can confess that is exactly what I did… I really liked using Digsby, but that footprint really began to bug me.

Good news: the latest beta seems to have dramatically reduced the memory consumption of this thing. In fact, the top two focuses for this release were memory consumption and performance – and it shows.

As a quick reminder, Digsby is a multi-protocol IM client that also has some nice features related to email notification/management and social networking. You might think of it is an odd cross between Pidgin and Twhirl.

I’ve been trying out the latest beta (r17003 as of this writing) today and am pleased with the stability and memory consumption so far. I’ve tried it on both an XP and a Vista machine and it seems to run equally well for both.

Definitely worth a look for the Windows users. Be sure to check the beta announcement post for more details on what’s changed (the memory section is inspirational)

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Randoming

17.Aug.08 Leave a Comment

Regarding VirtuaWin (last mention): I’m still using VirtuaWin daily on my XP laptop. This weekend I realized it works for Vista too so I now have it running on my home desktop as well.

This is the first time I’ve stuck with a virtual desktop product for windows for this long. With the addition of the modules I mentioned in my earlier article it “just works” for me.

More on Opera Mobile (last mention): I touched briefly on Opera Mobile the other day and, since then, I’ve used it quite a bit more.

This will sound stupidly obvious, but one of the things Opera Mobile does really well is handle mobile sites. Yeah yeah, I know… so does Pocket Internet (usually), but Opera really makes ‘em fast, usable and (dare I say?) even better looking.

Just go to settings –> Display and check the “Mobile View” checkbox to get into mobile mode a bit easier.

I still get too many “out of memory” errors on non-mobile sites though. Especially Gmail and Google Reader… but hey, it’s beta and it’s free so I’ll keep poking at it. When it works, it works very well.

Remember Logahead? I touched on this back in March of ‘06. A teenager wrote a new blog package and literally exploded onto the scene with a fair amount of press.

As near as I can tell, the original site is gone and a brief search didn’t turn up any evidence that the project is still alive. Guess I’m glad I didn’t switch as it appears to be a dead project now. A bit of a pity as he had some cool thoughts in the original release.

Speaking of new blog software, I see Habari is still alive and kicking though. May be time to have another look soon. It certainly has been quite a while since I last mentioned it.

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Skyfire and Opera Mobile Browsers

15.Aug.08 One Comment

Earlier this week I [finally] received a beta invite to try the skyfire browser beta. There are two betas going right now: one for Symbian and one for Windows Mobile. I’m trying the Windows Mobile variant on my HTC Mogul phone.

skyfire rocks video

Skyfire is an alternative mobile browser that does an incredible job displaying just about any website that I’ve tried – including the streaming video from NBC’s Olympic coverage. It leaves the default Pocket IE in the dust

It can even play videos from Hulu.com. The sound and video do get a bit out of sync though… but this could be an interesting way to watch videos/movies on my phone.

But wait, there’s more

As far as browsing goes, there are some nice touches. Launch a page and you’ll get a very condensed or high level overview of the page. Need to zoom in to actually see something? Just tap anywhere on the page and a “zoom box” is displayed. Tap in it or re-size and your next view will be of what was in the box but now full screen. Double-tapping an area is a short cut to zoom in on it.

Use the stylus to pan around the display to see what’s off the screen. Sounds a little kludgy, but it is very easy to adapt to. When ready to see the entire page just double-tap and you’ll zoom out.

I’m a bit fuzzy on how it all works, but it seems to have some server side processes going on. At a guess, it appears to render the page as a sort of image that is then sent to your mobile device. At least, that’s my guess about what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to be “pure” HTML, but there’s no “view source” option to see … and I’m too tired to try and figure out how to get a sniffer in front of this thing! (ooooh, but I could if I had it on my wifi network… hmm…).

I like it. A lot. I’ve yet to find a site that it can’t handle. Boy, that’s a pleasant change from pocket IE.

A bit about Opera Mobile (beta)

I need to spend a bit more time comparing and contrasting skyfire to the currently free beta of Opera Mobile 9.5 though. I think Opera might have some even nicer little touches as far as zooming and panning (and speed?), but it also has a disturbing habit of throwing “out of memory errors” – frequently – when running on my phone. Which would be why I haven’t mentioned it here yet.

Opera Mobile is a lot easier to tap links without having to zoom in on them for one big benefit. However, without Flash, there’s no love at the streaming video sites such as Hulu.

Perhaps more on both soon… certainly either option takes mobile browsing on the Windows Mobile platform to a completely new level!

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Google Talk Labs Edition

13.Aug.08 2 Comments

Are you a Google Talk user? Have you tried the latest “labs edition” version? Pretty cool, huh?
Hey, could I use four question marks in one paragraph?

In general, the new labs version is pretty slick – the calendar notifications with snooze option have, in particular, been quite popular at the office. Seriously, it rocks.