nerd.of.steel

With the recent news of the Dolphin Emulator going open source and adding support for some Wii games, I just had to try it out. Not wanting to download some illegal Wii ISO’s off the Internet, I have ordered a special DVD-ROM for my workstation to rip some of my Wii games to test them out.

In the meantime I have connected my old GameCube up and using the ISO Loader/GameCube Ripping Server was able to rip a copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Luigi’s Mansion and Animal Crossing. Below are some screenshots of them. Enjoy!

As for the computer these were tested on, I am running an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU at 2.4GHz a core, 4GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 3600 XT graphic card. On The Legend of Zelda, during the opening credits I was able to achieve speeds of about 15-74 FPS. It jumped around a fair bit. On Luigi’s Mansion the opening screen came in at a ridiculous 385FPS and then dropped down to 15-30FPS during the opening screens. Animal Crossing started up and on the bottom of the screen I could see a tiny 1 pixel sliver of game play but the rest of the screen was overlaid with a giant black box so you couldn’t see what was going on at all.

Unfortunately game play on both titles that did boot was non-existent and there was no sound on any of the games. In game FPS on Zelda never got above 15FPS so while you could play it was way too slow. For Luigi’s mansion only showed the onscreen text but rendered none of the game play elements so you couldn’t play it even if you wanted too.

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Luigi’s Mansion

Now that the Dolphin Emulator is open source hopefully GameCube games will actually become playable on it. As for Wii games, from what everyone is reporting if you’re lucky you can boot into a loading screen and the opening credits but at the moment that is all you can do since there is no way to emulate the Wii’s controller at the moment. Hopefully if all goes well some clever programmer out there will figure out a way to connect the Wii’s Bluetooth ‘wiimote’ to Dolphin.

Be on the lookout for more screenshots as I test more games!

Source: EmuTalk.net
Download: TehSkeen (x86 and x64)
SVN: Google Code

This weekend I went to see “I Am Legend” (which was totally awesome… just nowhere near as good as the book). After the movie was done I decided to take a quick tour around the mall here in downtown Portland (Pioneer Courthouse Square) and ran into an old co-worker or mine named John. Since we were both looking for gifts for our significant others, I suggested we team up and tackle the holiday traffic together as a unit. John still had no idea what to buy his wife and after a little back and fourth, we both decided that his girlfriend would enjoy an Apple iPhone and since John is a huge Apple fan we thought it wouldn’t hurt to pick him up an iPhone either.

While I have been a little hard on the iPhone in the past, deep down inside I am still a cell phone salesman and enjoy helping others find a phone that they will be happy with for the next few years and both John and his girlfriend are hardcore Apple fanboys/girls so it only made sense to talk him into buying not one iPhone, but two!

While we were talking to a sales person at the Apple store, like all salesman, he decided that he would try to get me to purchase one as well. I was more than nice with my refusals to wanting to purchase an iPhone or iPod and told the sales rep, I kid you not, seven times that I was not interested in either device. John and I both saw that the rep was getting visibly upset, as if it was pure blasphemes to not want to own an iPhone. Eventually he asked what type a phone I was using and when I pulled out my Motorola Q9h and I was pretty much verbally spanked for owning anything that would was made by such an evil corporation. What made matters worse was after the rep found out I owned a Microsoft Zune as well. After I showed it to him since he kept trying to engage me in a sale, he flat out told me that I was not welcome in the store and he did not want “my kind” disturbing his customers.

This is the first time in my life that I was thrown out of a store for owning products made by Microsoft! I mean, really?! Is this what the world has come down to when you cannot even help a friend get a Christmas gift because you prefer a different product? Am I going to have to start drinking from a segregated water fountain as well?!

Needless to say, once this was said to me John told the sales rep that he didn’t want to turn into one of “those people” and politely cancelled his order and we left.

I know I can’t really blame Apple for the actions of one employee, but you know what they say, “When in Rome”. This is why I will never recommend another Apple product to anyone I know ever again. Between this and those ridiculous smear campaign commercials, I have no idea why anyone would want to own an Apple product.

It's been a while since I posted about the latest and greatest news at RoccStar Accessories. I am in the process of designing and implementing a new blogging system for the store to keep our customers better informed. Since that new system isn't ready yet, I figured I would give away this extra Jabra BT2040 Bluetooth Headset here on NerdofSteel.com.

We figured with October being the month of free candy and costumes, we would give away our own little trick or treats! This headset will be given away to one of our lucky customers at RoccStar Accessories. All orders placed in the month of October qualify for one entry in the drawing. To make this contest even better, I'm throwing in a free shipping coupon code so you also get free shipping along with that entry! The following coupon code is to be used during checkout:

FREE SHIPPING CODE: 07c6f5c008

If you happen to win the headset and you do not own a Bluetooth device, we will happily issue you a gift certificate for that amount. Now on to the good stuff!

The Jabra BT2040 Bluetooth headset is probably the most convenient and affordable headset on the market. Jabra BT2040 never needs charging. It lets you talk for up to 660 minutes and will stay on standby for six months on just one battery. Automatic "sleep mode" saves power and automatic pairing with your phone.

Product Features

• Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR & eSCO for optimized sound quality
• Auto pairing at first time start-up
• Never needs charging - works on one AAAA (Quad A) size battery
• More than 480 minutes talk time on one battery
• Compatible with Bluetooth devices supporting the headset or hands-free profile
• 12 Month Limited Warranty

PRICE: $24.99 $19.99

VISIT STORE

So the misses and I have decided it was time to move into a bigger place as we have finally reached that stage, which I’m sure happens in every relationship, were you just accumulate to much stuff and start busting at the seems.

During the move, I will be offline. I should be back up and posting by Sunday evening (August 5th, 2007).

I was just watching episode 180 of DL.TV and they featured a hack that would allow you to disable the close tab button for individuals that accidentally close their Firefox browser tabs while they are clicking back and fourth between them.

If you have watched the episode, there is a much simpler way of recovering an accidentally closed tab than doing the whole "about:config" method. If you haven't watched the episode, the method involved typing "about:config" into the address bar and changing the numerical value for "browser.tabs.closeButtons" from 0 to 1 or 2 (2 disables the button all together).

Unfortunately, this hack doesn't help you recover already closed tabs, it just prevents you from closing tabs in the future. If for some reason you ever close a tab by mistake and you do not remember the URL of the site you were on (this happens to me all the time), you can easily recover the lost tab and session by pressing the following key combination:

CTRL+SHIFT+T

Not only will this bring the last closed tab back to your screen, it will place the tab in the same position it was in before you accidentally closed it and you can continue to press CTRL+SHIFT+T to bring up all of the tabs that you closed since you opened the browser. It's like the "CTRL+Z" command of tabbed browsing and without it, I would be lost. 

It should also be noted that you could theoretically use this feature to spy on someones browsing activity if they always leave their browser open, but that would be naughty and everyone would shake their finger at you in disappointment so don't do it! ;)

I have somehow managed to misplace a whole venti cup of Starbucks coffee. How I managed to misplace something so tasty (coffee in general, not Starbucks coffee) is a mystery all in its own. If anyone has seen my cup of Joe, please free to leave me a comment and let me know where I left it… you know, because no one actually views this blog besides people I know.

Here is an image of what Joe looked like the last time I saw him.

From now on, I’ll just tether my coffee to my arm like a bad parent in Disney world does to their child. :(

This weekend an interesting thing happened. I realized that my daughter would soon be old enough that she would one day soon want to hop online and browse the web. This realization has already started to come to fruition as my daughter is spending about a half hour a weekend playing around on the Barbie website.

Not wanting my little girl to accidentally run across something inappropriate I started researching ways to lock down our web browser. While my router comes equipped with the ability to blacklist any site my heart desires, doing so would be like punishing my fiancée and myself as the only way to turn that off would be to log into the router, change the settings and then change them back when we were done doing whatever we were doing. That whole process just seems cumbersome and annoying so I decided that I wanted something else that was less restricting to the adults in the household.

Today after browsing around LifeHacker, I stumbled upon Glubble. Glubble is a Firefox extension that allows you to whitelist which sites your Little Mr. and Misses are allowed to visit. This is all accomplished by a pretty nifty login system which requires the parent to set up two different accounts - one for the child and one for the parent. When your little one tries to view a site that is not an allowed site, the browser takes note of this and asks the parent/administrator if they would like to whitelist this site the next time that parent logs on to the browser.

As an extra bonus, when your little tyke logs on to their browser profile, they are greeted with a super friendly childlike browser skin to make the experience even more fun and kid friendly.

All in all, I dig it and I highly suggest any parent with younger children go check it out!

Download: Glubble
Source: LifeHacker

Alright, heres the deal. Someone was nice enough to give me a BETA invite to Joost a few weeks back and I would love to do the same for you guys. The only problem is, I only have a limited number of invites.

Instead of just giving them out randomly, I figured it would be best to make this entertaining. To win a invite just leave a comment to this post with a funny joke. Bad jokes will not be rewarded… unless there funny… but then they wouldn’t be bad. :)

If your joke can make me laugh, you got yourself an invite! Sound good? Cool! Let the chuckles begin!

Also, make sure to include your name and email address so I know where to send the invite too! Please try to keep the jokes clean as I would like to keep the site appropriate for nerds of all ages!

This weekend I bought myself a Microsoft Zune. It was the first big purchase that I have treated myself too since my old laptop died last October. I don’t really like to count my new laptop as a new purchase since I mostly use it for work and it was more like I needed to buy one instead of wanting to buy one. It was a pretty tough decision for me to choose between the Zune and other offerings out there. Everyone I know, and their grandmothers (seriously), seems to own some form of an iPod.

Almost four years since the release of Kokopelli, Kosheen has once again tackled the scene with there new album “Damage“. So far I have nothing but love for the new album so go and check it out!