AtomicInternet Archived News

Archived News starting from 02-15-2009 and earlier

Stavos somehow managed to convince our wives to attend the Star Trek Exhibition at the Detroit Science Center for vagina day. While it initially seemed like a dream come true, 5 minutes into the exhibit we were quickly shown what a huge mistake it was. We ranked the visit at only 10% of the Las Vegas Experience we had come to use as the ultimate ranking for Star Trek themed exhibits. Even a few songs in Rock Band afterwards were unable to lift our crushed nerd spirits.

I'm sure you've seen it, it's like a photo of a spider bite gone wrong. You're curiosity overpowers your disgust and you simply can't look away. I'm talking, of course, about the most annoying internet ad banner ever created. Apparently it gets a lot of clicks, as just about every news site I visit has it in the rotation. My personal curiosity ended after the first view, and now I'm left wondering why it is people have such a strong urge to click on two of the nastiest midsection photos I've ever seen. The plus side for me is I lose my appetite every time I see it, so even though I'm not supporting them financially, it is helping to shrink my midsection.

With record high temperatures for February during the last few days, a cold front was bound to stir up some air, and this morning it finally broke the 2005 wind record. Mind you, my weather station is the only true source of weather records in the metro detroit area, so this is a truly historical event. The last record was set when the original morlock inhabited my basement, I was deep into EVE online, and the economy still showed signs of life.

Max Recorded Wind:

34.9 MPH, 308° at 01:21 on 12 February

Looks like True Achievements found a way to more accurately rate an Xbox 360 gamers talent. Instead of taking the face value of an achievement, they determine how common a specific achievement is among all players who ranked in the game and reassign the points accordingly. This can only spell doom for my climbing Xbox 360 gamer score, which is clearly not based on skill. He cites the classic 5 minute Avatar achievements in the about us page which already has me nervous. I feel better after seeing a link to 1milliongamerscore.com in the profile of the top ranked gamer on that site. I now have proof someone more obsessed than I'll ever be exists, and knowing I'll never catch them helps ease the defeat.

With my gutters overflowing and spewing water onto my front porch (which subsequently freezes in winter) I decided it was time to call in professional help, after my initial gutter guard installation proved useless in the face of maple keys. 3 weeks ago I put down a $300 deposit on my $800 gutter upgrade and was starting to think they took my money and ran. Tonight I arrived home with gutter gunk spattered on the ground and my gutters repaired with aluminum gutter guard without a single visible footprint. If I wasn't able to review it on the Gnome Cam I'd have a tough time believing it wasn't magic. Only time will tell if the gutter ninjas succeeded where I failed in assuring proper roof water routing.

With Autorama less than a month away, and my Cougar stored with a full tank of gas, the strictly enforced requirement of 1/4 tank or less of gas in the vehicle during the show was becoming a problem. Rather than trying to burn off gas doing circles around Cobo in what is sure to be crappy weather, I decided to create a gas transfer device out of an old fuel pump, 10ft of hose, and a quick fuel line disconnect. Now all I have to do is disconnect the fuel filter and plug in my pump to get out the gas. After the initial hookup and having run the line to my pickup, it only took 30 minutes to drain my Cougar to 1/4 tank and almost completely fill my pickup. Handy not only for car shows, but also when the power is out and my generator runs out of gas, since the whole thing runs off my motorcycle battery. Yet another step complete in surviving the coming zombie apocalypse.

This is easily the best story of the year so far: Zombie Road Signs. I can only wish I was cool enough to hack roadside signs.

The Xbox 360 hard drive has 4 separate partitions: game cache/updates, system, xbox compatibility, and finally the one you actually store things to. This should help to explain why a formatted 20GB HDD only has ~ 18GB free. You can only directly modify the last partition, but today I learned a way to "clean up" the first partition. Why is this useful? Well beyond the obvious nerd satisfaction of having a clean partition, if a game update gets botched you can use the following key combination to start over, saving a call to support. It's also been reported to fix random freezes that may happen when loading games. If you're an achievement whore such as myself, you can use it to remove any updates that make getting the points more difficult. To perform the maintenance, highlight your hard drive under "Memory" in "System Settings." Then just press , , , , , , and confirm you want to wipe out your game cache (does NOT affect your savegames/content). It effectively wipes the partition clean, which means the next time you start a game it will more than likely prompt you to update (unless it's a game the developer didn't care enough to provide updates). I'm on the hunt for more hidden key combos now that I know they exist, it's like discovering the infamous Konami code in Contra all over again.

A brief love affair with Windows 7 ended after just days of trying out the beta. I took extensive screen shots of the updated Media Center screens focusing on the improvements which included obfuscating the channel you want to record a series on. Instead of selecting a specific channel, you can now only choose SD or HD preferred. While I can see this might be less confusing, the problem arises when you have 4 of the same channel. The guide tells me my satellite receiver is in fact providing an HD signal despite that being impossible over an s-video connection. The recorder then decides to record all shows via satellite and labels them HD. This wouldn't be so bad in itself, and after simply turning off the satellite versions of HD channels in the guide I removed the option entirely. However, my fully recognized dual HD tuners for some reason were interpreted as only one, preventing two shows to record simultaneously. After viewing an hour of blank screen that was supposed to be "Knight Rider" (satellite didn't support that channel) and missing "Lost" entirely it was time to switch back to Vista. My fear is these problems are not limited to the beta status, but a problem inherent with the new "simplified" version of media center.

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