I have been enjoying World of Warcraft, even despite the server blowup on Wednesday. I haven’t gotten to play since as I have been in South Carolina with Heather’s family, but tomorrow night it is back on…wolves and boar better run in fear 
I was playing on the 1GHz iMac, but that is a bit slow as I detailed in a previous post. I started playing on my Pentium 4 system and that is a little better. Basically it is always above 10fps and shoots as high as 20-40fps regularly at 800×600. I think much of it just feels smoother even if the fps aren’t blowing the iMac out of the water. The system specs are as follows:
1.6 GHz P4
1GB ECC RAM
32MB GeForce 2MX
I am considering getting a GeForce FX5500 with 256MB VRAM ($69) and then later a Samsung 710T LCD as my 19″ CRT is a bit flaky. I am trying to figure out how this would perform. Would it be able to drive the Samsung at 1280×1024 (its native resolution) with more of the detail settings on high?
Any thoughts?
Published on
November 13, 2004 in
Software.
Looks as if Gmail is finally starting to purge some of my trashed messages. A few days ago I had around 6800 e-mails in the trash dating back to the middle of July. Hardly the erased after 30 days scenario. Well, I now only have 4700 or so e-mails dating back to the middle of September. So, they are actually beginning to purge deleted e-mail, but I will say having a large trash can be nice for finding old threads which didn’t seem important at the time, but that do now…
Still, 4 months will Gmail and I still think it is the best mail program I have ever used. I would definitely pay for this, especially if they added some niceties like GPG support and IMAP access.
Let me know if you want an invite (Leave a comment)…
Published on
November 12, 2004 in
Gaming.
I am now playing the open beta of World of Warcraft. I originally didn’t like it, but I finally found that if I quit all my other apps, it would work pretty well. Only getting like 10-14 fps on my iMac G4, but that seems constant regardless of my resolution. It also crashed a lot to begin with. As it is behaving better now, I am finally getting the chance to play a bit and explore. I’m definitely enjoying it more. Only time will tell if it will be worth the $40 price plus a likely $15 monthly fee…
Still a fun diversion for the moment…
Published on
November 7, 2004 in
Software.
I am going nuts with my new Canopus ADVC-100. Not as in, it doesn’t work, more like, I love this thing 
I have ripped some SNL episodes and I have begun ripping the entire 5 seasons of the animated Spider-Man series from the mid-1990s (Unfortunately, I am still missing a few eps, but I think they should come on sometime soon). I have also burned a number of discs using iDVD, but I just wish it didn’t take so long on “Best Quality”.
On a side note, I noticed that the entire series of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is coming out on DVD. This is already on my wishlist and in my NetFlix queue. All I have to say is “Be Di Be Di Be Di”. If you don’t what I am referring to, you should be ashamed of yourself
Published on
November 3, 2004 in
A/V Gear.
I finally decided to buy an Analog to Digital converter to capture shows off of my DirecTiVo. I bought the Canopus ADVC-100. In the end it came down to the Dazzle DV Bridge or the Canopus and the Canopus unit just seemed to get the top marks, but I think either would have worked fine for me.
I probably won’t get it next week, but I have lots of things queued up to play with.