Category: news

While playing Battlefield 1942 with the guys, we always use some form of voice chat. We started off with the one that started it all, Roger Wilco. Since it was bought up my GameSpy, it's gone to crap. There's almost no development going on with it, and it's become stagnant. The sound quality is 'good enough', but poor when compared to others.
Next, Havoc had us try out Sidewinder GameVoice a product from Microsoft. Like RW (RogerWilco), it's free. The sound quality of it is much better than RW, but the only problem was that, being a MS product, there is only a Windows server for it. Most other voice chat servers run on Linux, BSD, as well as Windows. So we left it running on Havoc's box (when it was up).
Over Christmas break, my older brother told me about a program that his Dark Age of Camelot guild uses called Ventrilo. He said they use it because it is small, like RW, but has great sound-quality like SW. And it will run on Linux. So I gave it a shot, and it is quite impressive. The sound quality is superb and it uses very little memory compared to the others.

What about TeamSpeak? TeamSpeak sux. I've tried several of their servers but it always either won't start or just crashes out. So I ditched it long ago. Besides, I had heard that SW sounded better, and Ventrilo sounds even better than that. So why bother...

So check out Ventrilo next time you want to use voice-chat. It's free and easy to setup. The server name is neodux.com and cheese.neodux.com.

So, I'm on my way home from the SFA Observatory Tuesday night/Wednesday morning (whatever 12:20a is), heading south on Highway 59. I'm just inside Nacogdoches city limits, when this stupid breezy pulls out from a side road, blows thru a stop sign, across the highway and into my right lane. I hit the brakes to avoid plowing into the backend of her. The brakes squeal and I start to slide, I counter-steer to try to stay on the road, but going about 60mph its almost useless.
I nail a curb, get airborne for about 10 feet in my lovely little '96 Mazda Protegé. I dig into the ground about 6 inches when I come down, clip a telephone pole, which rips off my front passenger-side wheel, strut and axle.

The airbags came out as soon as I hit the curb, I don't recall ever seeing that pole I hit, and I was not injured (from what I can tell). I get out of my smoke-filled car to see her driving away!
Fortunatly this nice guy, Craig, chased after her to get her license plate. A couple of her friends from down the road came down to say that she had left their house and gave her name and address to the Nacogdoches Police. The police contacted the girl, got her insurance and informed her of what she had done. I am going to file with her insurance and let them know what a stupid, blind moron she is.

Rest in Peace little Protegé, we barely knew ye.

Almost every computer today is equipped with the TCP/IP networking protocol. (the chief communication standard in the world, due mainly to it being the essential Internet protocol). Basically, networking traffic of any sort is broken down to 1s and 0s, just as all data in a computer is. The 1s and 0s transmitted across the network connection is actually a series of minute high and low pulses of electricity. The recipient then "decodes", or demodulates, these high and low pulses as a 1 or a 0. (high or low).
One professor at Algoma University posed a question to his 4th year Computer Science students, can sound be used as a transmission medium?

The result was TCP/IP over Bongos drums.

    - Ricky Ricardo and Andy Kaufman would be proud.

This is my newest toy. It arrived this afternoon. Its quite impressive. Very fast for what it is, and the silence is quite nifty.
Its a fully-functional motherboard made by VIA. It sports a heat-sink for the CPU and chipset (no "loud" fans needed!), on-board video, PC133 memory access, one PCI slot, onboard network and onboard sound - all in 6.75" x 6.75"!!!

So what am I going to do with it? When I go off to school in the next week or so, I want to take Neodux with me, but I don't want to hear it. Enter the solid state reincarnation of neodux! I'm going to use the EPIA P5000 motherboard, my IDE-to-Compact Flash adapter (to boot off a CF card instead of those loud hard drives) and run from 512Mb of PC133 (later 1Gb). So, no moving parts!

update : Talk about quiet! Its almost eerie to not hear this thing in action. I found an awesome distro called SmoothWall. I am completely blown away. It works right from the get-go, quite secure, installs from a 21Mb ISO on CD, and fits nicely onto my 256Mb CF with room left over. Best part is, its all configurable from a web-interface. Really an amazing distro. I can't believe there hasn't been more buzz around it.
for more info on other miniITX projects, visit mini-itx.com.