First off, Happy St. Patrick’s Day.  Go forth and kill a snake.  Or drink a green beer.  Or … something!

Second off, sorry for the lack of updates lately.  I haven’t been feeling well.  I took my wife to the hospital for tests a while back and, of course, got sick.  (Because hospitals aren’t exactly places of congregation of the healthy.)  I got “well” in that I kicked the disease quickly enough.  But because I had to get some time-critical work done, I hadn’t been taking days off to rest, so it was just a struggle day-in, day-out, with weekends barely just giving me enough time to keep going.  I literally could pull myself together just enough for work.  I didn’t have enough left in me for blogging.  So anywhen, sometime in the future I’ll go through my notes and backdate posts, as I tend to do.  Now that I can take time to recover.

Third, the main point of this blog.  So I’ve been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky lately.  I recently-ish bought it on Steam for dirt cheap.  Even though I hate, detest, abhor Steam, and almost always make sure to buy the disk instead of the music, game, or movie because of rights issues, this one time I caved and “downloaded” the game.  From Steam no less.  I’m a hypocrite of convenience.  I hate myself.  But I’ll get over it.

Anyway, so I’ve been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky and enjoying it.  I think it might actually even rate as one of my favorite video games.  I wish I’d bought it sooner.  It’s a lot better than the first.  Not just in being more of a challenge, or in being able to do simple basic things like repair an item, but it just all plays / feels / works so much better.  I especially like the upgrades and the item maintenance.  (Even if I still don’t understand why you can’t do stupid things like permanently tack weld a scope to a Viper 5.)  Except for, you know, the bugs.  Those darn little things that forced me to restart the game because the main plot device broke and I was eternally stuck.  Nerf!  Oh well.

But so the thing is, just this weekend the darn game kept crashing.  Not even crashing out of the game, but in a weird in-game-ish stuck thing where it was like the underlying engine was still running, but the 3D graphics portion had crashed.  So there was no longer a user interface.  It just became a black screen with a mouse cursor.  That’s it.  Sometimes it’d be in the middle of playing.  Sometimes just in the menu trying to load a game or change 3D settings.  (Trying to debug the crashing.)  And sometimes even while the advertisement logo movies played while starting up the game!  It was absurd!

After much gnashing of teeth, trying offline mode in Steam, even trying to set the CD key in multi-player even though the single-player game doesn’t really use the CD key, I was going crazy.

Until I thought about it.  I’d just seen Windows do an update.  Could that somehow be it?

Yep!

I know, I know, I really should turn off the automatic updates because Microsoft does throw  out some real turds.  And this was one of them.

Update KB2670838 happens to update Windows 7 with some changes to Direct3D, DirectDraw, etc.  Yup.  Damn.  And sure enough, Microsoft “fixed” Direct 3D just enough to make S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky incredibly completely totally bonkers unstable.

Well nerds to that!

So I uninstalled Windows Update KB 2670838 and sure enough, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is nice and stable again.  Imagine that.

So if you still play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, I hope you find this blog because chances are, right now you’re not playing it because of this bug in Microsoft’s “fix” to whatever problems they thought they had.

Or, honestly, goodness how many other video games are crashing right now because of KB2670838.  Heck, programs in general.  Movie players.  Who knows what else uses those engines?  I don’t know what Microshaft is thinking about releasing that PoS, but that update was most definitely neither thoroughly tested nor kosher. 

So be warned!  If you play video games, pay close attention to how often things crash after you install KB 2670838.  You just may find yourself uninstalling that particular Microsoft update!

This Valentine’s Day let’s share the love with a little green.

Electric cars seem to have a few issues when it comes to traveling distances. Batteries just take too long to charge, and don’t hold as much juice as we’d like. Not even the great and mighty Tesla (the car company, not Nikola) has managed to solve that problem just yet.

However, chances are, sometime in your life you’ve seen (in real life, or on TV) an electric train, subway, trolley, bus, or other wheeled vehicle of some type that runs on electricity provided by a grid that it’s connected to. You know, that really tall hook thingy that grips those overhead wires? Or the dreaded train/subway rail that you’re not supposed to touch? It’s a common enough concept and makes sense in limited areas. In fact, it’s more energy efficient for a vehicle to grab its power as it travels than it is to lug around a big gas tank.

So why don’t electric cars use the same approach?

Well, all of those wires overhead everywhere could get awfully difficult to maintain for one. And if you used something lower to the ground, chances are some numbskull would electrocute him/her-self crossing a road.

Well, that is, unless you asked Tesla (Nikola, not the car company) to come up with a solution.  (Wardenclyffe Tower anyone?) Sadly, being dead, no one thought to ask Nikola Tesla how to power an electric car without plugging it into the road. So it took us an awfully long time for we mere mortals to think of this: We could always charge an electric car wirelessly as it drives.

Thanks to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science soon two electric busses will be able to travel along the road from Gumi station by recharging their batteries wirelessly from induction loops embedded in the road along the route. No zappy-zappy to humans. It’s effectively the same technology that lets some cellphones and even toothbrushes recharge wirelessly, only applied to moving vehicles.

And if you eat the cost to put this same kind of technology into urban areas, you could easily design a gridwork of roads where electric cars, busses, trolleys, etc. can recharge themselves as they drive. All without wires.

It could become a green-city utopia.

Even major highways, tollways, turnpikes, etc. where longer distance driving is done could be augmented with sections of induction charging to allow electric cars, that drive on the right roads, to eat up the miles indefinitely without ever needing to stop for a charge, which would make electric cars infinitely greener and more convenient than their gas-guzzling compatriots at that point. Imagine driving thousands of miles without ever having to stop for fuel even once.

In theory, it’s possible. And Korea is the one showing us how.

It being Christmas time, here’s a rant for ol’ Saint Nick to contemplate for next year’s deliveries. What do I want for Christmas? Not what you’re selling.

So it probably comes as no surprise that I happen to like Portal and Portal 2. (Especially given that last musical interlude.) I still enjoy playing these video games. I still chuckle. I still smile. I even still go to YouTube to listen to the end credit songs. Strangely, I think I actually prefer Portal to Portal 2 at that. (I could go into why, but that tangent isn’t particularly relevant to this rant.) I like them enough to still put up with Valve’s nasty evil Steam DRM server crap. And I hate DRM. (Not because I pirate. In fact, I don’t. But I do consume and I’m tired of being punished for doing the right thing.)

Recently I was playing Black Mesa, and it was kicking my asterisk. As First Person Shooters (FPS) are wont to do. It occurred to me that perhaps one person laden down with uncountable pounds of guns and ammo, wearing a power suit (I guess it must have a lot of pockets and attachment points) to protect me, still seems a little … ludicrous for taking on an army. With lots of guns. And even tanks. Not to mention the random aliens that just teleport in with their own special lightning bolts and insectoid homing projectiles and, well, you get the point.

I hope.

One person cannot an army equal, let alone take down.

Sure, I like a challenge. Who doesn’t?

But as I twitched and groaned, ever hopeful for the elusive headshot with my overly expensive gaming mouse on my not-exactly-underpriced home-build gaming PC, it occurred to me that perhaps the challenges that I keep getting aren’t the ones that actually make me happy. That they’re in fact just challenges that annoy me.

Okay, so it was actually my wife who sagely pointed that out, commenting on how it didn’t sound like I was having fun. To which she has commented upon before and no doubt will again. And for which I can only be thankful that she’s found her own games that do the same to her. Because while overcoming a challenge might not exactly be “fun”, it is at least rewarding in its own elusive way that keeps us gaming. Mostly. Usually. The industry hopes.

But again, it caused me to look back and really examine what I do legitimately enjoy. And what I don’t. And you know what? I’ve come to the conclusion that First Person Shooters just plain have too much shooting in them!

Wait. How can that be?

Let’s go back to Portal for a moment here. It’s the perfect example. Okay, technically, yes, you do shoot a gun. Kind of. Because the gun doesn’t actually damage anyone or anything. It makes portals. A half of a tunnel through space (but not time?) at a time.

(By the way, Valve, if you’re still thinking about Portal sequel concepts: time. Seriously. A portal gun that lets you travel forward and backward through time depending on the color of your side of the portal could make for some deliciously nasty timing puzzles.  And if you’re already bending space, what’s a little space-time?)

So my absolute favorite FPS only just barely qualifies as one, but it does, as it involves shooting one single gun, that doesn’t actually hurt anyone.

How can that possibly be?

Well, for starters, it’s a game where you actually get to think. It’s a game of constant puzzle, with just a little hand-eye coordination thrown in. As opposed to pretty much every other FPS ever made where they’re games of hand-eye coordination with a puzzle here and there, if you’re lucky, but even then those “puzzles” usually just amount to “find key A to open door A” and so forth. They’re typically just a matter of killing everyone and letting god sort it out, and maybe memorizing a map well if you play against humans enough. And if you’re lucky you’ll get a mini-game here or there to kill people in different ways to alleviate some of the boredom.

Described like that, is there any wonder why I still play Portal?

Is there any wonder why I’d rather find and pick up the hidden radio so that I can dance to the tune rather than get Uber Gun X and blow aliens into itty bitty bits?

Then there are the games like the Hitman series and the Assassin’s Creed series, where I’m rewarded for plotting, planning, and patience. Resource management (and resource discovery) are vitally important. I’m not just buried under a ton of guns and ammo with a mission to go forth and kill indiscriminately. I have to pick and choose my battles. Sometimes, if done right, I won’t even have any battles at all. Again, thought over blam blam blam.

Even fantasy FPS like Daggerfall, Morrowind, or Skyrim (and no, I refuse to mention Oblivious here because it’s just too awful to play) … and believe it or not, I do still play Daggerfall on DOSbox, and even still have the box with its shiny hologram … even these FPS I find myself more often than not playing some kind of stealthy character, because I prefer to examine and navigate carefully. I’m not a big fan of run-and-gun. I’m not playing for the slaughter. I’m playing for the puzzle. (Which is why Oblivious gets no honorable mention.) Okay, so in the end I’ll probably still kill lots of people and things and whatnots. But I do it with care and precision, on my own terms, in my own careful time, not wanton abandon and haste.

(And for those of you who say I got that wrong, that those are RPGs, not FPSs, maybe that argument could be made for Daggerfall and Morrowind where character skills mattered as much as the player’s ability to twitch well, where things like hitting and damage were randomized based on character skill, but they were only just barely RPGs even from the beginning. That was their point, to give you a first-person perspective in an action game instead of a turn-based board-type view. But especially ever since Bethesda threw RPG out the window with Oblivious, they’ve been at best a FPS with RPG-like elements.  Even the minigames, as cute as they are, bypass character skills in favor of twitch-tastic player skills. Skyrim has at least enough RPG-like elements to make it palatable again, but it ain’t no Daggerfall. And Arena? Well, it was their first, and that kind of shows. Not exactly their best work, but being their first, that’s understandable and expected. But not one that I want to keep playing, unlike Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Skyrim which I do still play.)

So long story … longer, I’ve decided that I’m actually not a great fan of the FPS genre. I am however a fan of a FPS sub-genre, that of First Person Non-Shooters, or FPNS.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll still play a FPS if it’s a good one. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are still in my list of things to play. (And I did download Black Mesa after all.) But you know what? I’m not into Gears of War. I’m not into Call of Duty. I’m not into Halo. Etc. There are an awful lot of FPS that I just don’t play. That I have absolutely no interest in playing. Because they’re all about shooting. The hook is to shoot. Whereas I play games where the hook is to think. I’ll branch out of that on occasion, but not much money goes into the direction of the stereotypical FPS. In fact I’ll choose a good racing game over a typical FPS.

In fact, that’s probably why I haven’t even considered buying Diablo III yet. Because that’s not a thinking-man’s game either. It’s just a hack-and-slash. It barely qualifies as an RPG to me. (If the outcome of an event is not based upon the skill of the character, not the player, then it is not an RPG.) In Diablo’s case it would be an action game with RPG-like elements.

I could go on and on about the flaws of various and sundry games, but that’s not the point of this rant. This rant is about the fact that my money goes to games that make me think while I have fun. Which is not exactly the same thing as games that make me think, period. Because that’s just work. And I get plenty of thinking too deeply at work. I have no desire to try to out-think a computer at chess. I want to play. And I want to play intelligently. I want to immerse in escapism without being bored to death. Preferably whilst having fun. To this end, comedy in games is a significantly beneficial factor and a great hook. Portal has it in spades. I find myself already missing a new game with GLaDOS. I even miss the cake, over-memed or (IMHO) not.

I also miss a good MechWarrior game. Not the later ones where you just pulled out Uber Mecha Alpha and blew everything up. The earlier ones where you actually had to collect and store mechs and parts to repair them with. That was my favorite part of BattleTech campaigns, was resource management and tailoring for the job. Again, thinking. Planning. Plotting. Enacting. I’d love a good MechWarrior game set in the periphery where you have very limited resources.

Did you know that well over two-thirds of my play-time in Ultima Underworld I and II (yes, I actually enjoyed UU) was spent not in actually “adventuring”, but in carrying items around to make “campsites” for myself, and to dispose of trash? Smoky the Bugbear says, “Clean up your dungeon!  Only you can prevent tripping hazards!” I’d stockpile tradegoods. Hoard gold by trading those trade goods. Create armories of unique weapons and items. Create spare rune bags for … absolutely no good reason. I cannot explain why I do these things, but that’s what I do. I even do it in regular FPS if I can. When Half-Life introduced physics to the FPS genre it ruined me. I’ll lug around medpacks one at a time to hoard them all in one corner … just in case.  You never know! I’ll lug all sorts of items around to areas that I’ll never be able to return to, just on the principle that it should be done. And don’t even get me started on the dangers of STALKER if you’re a hoarder. I am a video game hoarder. At times it comes in handy, but I do it because I like to think as much as I like to do. Some part of planning relaxes my brain.  And when the game ends and I’ve won, it’s typically with an over-abundance of uber-weapon ammo left unused. Because I might have needed it later. (And if I won, apparently I didn’t need it.  Which kind of makes you wonder about the difficulty level involved, huh?)

And if video game companies want my dollars, that’s where they can get mine, by making games that are as much (or more) about the thinking as they are about the doing. I want to see more FPNS games. I want to buy more FPNS video games. I want only as much action as necessary to support my puzzle-solving habit. I want hoarding. I want planning. I want slow careful action. I do not want to twitch nervously as I fend off Yet Another Army with more guns and ammo upon my person than any one human being could imaginably carry, let alone use while plowing through umpteen dozen soldiers.

I am consumer. Do you have anything that I want to consume? If not, I’ll just go back to enjoying the things that I’ve already paid for. My dollars go towards blowing my mind, not blowing someone’s head off.

(PS: Please forgive the gratuitous lack of grammatical italicizing of video game titles.  This is a rant and I’m frankly just not up to going back and fixing every last one of them  now that I’ve finished venting.)

Merry Christmas from InsanIT.net!

This has definitely been the year of high-powered miniaturization. We’ve got phone manufacturers promising us full 1080p in 5 inch screens. We’ve got full ARM-based PCs on a USB stick for $50 bucks or less (if you can find the right sale), running Android or Linux. (And how long before someone hacks Windows RT onto one?) We’ve even got 7 and 10 inch monitors running on a USB plug for laptops that need more real estate.

And yet…

But first, some background:

Not so many a year ago, when I was looking to build my latest PC, I said unto myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be neato-keen if I could actually have a little window unto my PC’s soul that would tell me handy things like, ‘Good morning, Arah,’ or warn me if my temps were getting too high, or even just tell me the time and if I had any new email come in?” There were so many things that potentially the Windows system tray / notification area should do for me … but doesn’t. For you see while many programs will do these things, you can’t see them if you’re running a game full-screen. (And who doesn’t play most games that way?) Yet gaming would be what would push my rig to overheating, if anything could. And that’s when Microsoft doesn’t try to get you to hide the dratted notification area to begin with. And if you have programs that use it properly, which most don’t. It’s an idea that failed in execution. But it’s not a bad idea. So I began a search for 5.25” CD-ROM bay type screens to bring it back in a much improved way.

Well, I did find some 5.25” bay screens, but they were all character-based. Who wants two lines of text? All at one set color at that. Talk about going back to the 1980s! What, am I supposed to write my programs for them in COBOL while we’re at it? Is this what people who turn their PCs into set top boxes and media PCs are supposed to use?

To say that it was lame and made little or no sense was an understatement of extreme proportions. Sure, it was better than nothing … but not by much.

So, failing to find any product of merit, I gave it up as a bad concept.

Well, this year, feeling in the mood to tune up my PC a bit, I re-examined the idea. I figured I’ve gotten myself a pretty snifty little Villiv S5 UMPC “laptop” years ago. I’ve upgraded my cell phone to a nice Nokia C6-01 touchscreen gizmo running Symbian Belle. We’ve got computing power in ridiculously small sizes and vibrant full-color nice resolution touchscreens to match. (Bringing us back to the introduction about high-powered miniaturization.) So surely, by now, someone has a decent 5.25” bay touchscreen device to make me smile, right? By now we practically have to be falling over brilliant little gizmos to fit that need, don’t we?

Err…

Well…

Not so much, no.

Seriously? Really?

That makes Arah sad.

I can pick up a relatively cheap (especially if used) “feature” phone designed around a touchscreen, with a full ARM processor, plenty enough RAM, and a USB port … all of the IT doo-dads needed to build such a 5.25” touchscreen monitor panel (and a crapload extra like 3G, wifi, micro SD storage, even FM radio, etc.) for easily less than a hundred bucks. Without the extra crap involved, a plain Jane 5.25” CD-ROM bay touchscreen monitor running off of USB should be able to be manufactured and sold brand new at a profit for like … $25 – $50 I recon. Done right, put an ARM-based PC in there as well to really snaz-up the capabilities of it to that of a stripped-down phone (or in other words a USB PC-on-a-stick with a touchscreen monitor built in) and it couldn’t possible retail for more than $150, available for less than $100 on sale.

Nope.

No one has done this.

Now, there are some improvements. Kind of. If you look hard enough you can at least find screens that are no longer character-based. They’re typically still monochrome. And they’ll have parts you just don’t want/need. Like an oversized volume knob. Or an IR with remote control. Because they’re meant for use in media center PCs. And they’ll come with a plethora of software you don’t want. (No, seriously. Why would you replace Microsoft’s fairly decent media software some third party crap? You’d have to make your software significantly improved to be worthwhile there.) It’s a lot of junk that you just don’t want in your trunk. And it’s still not a full-color screen, let alone a touchscreen. It still has a crappy resolution. And you’ll be lucky to even find a screen that isn’t a 4:3 aspect ratio. As if that makes any sense in a 5.25” bay. Heck, even 16:9 isn’t widescreen enough for a CD ROM bay.

Except for those few bigger devices that take up two bays. Oooh. Ahhh.

Meh.  Why would I need something that large just to tell me I have mail?  Or what temps I’ve got?

Still junk, really.

I don’t get it. I could just velcro my phone to the front of my PC and do infinitely better than any such device out there! And since my phone has wifi, I wouldn’t even need to devise a USB communication layer for it. Heck, I can get email notifications on my phone. It has a clock. I could easily set up a home screen to cover most of my needs right there. The Nokia Belle widget concept works pretty well for me.

Which isn’t such a bad idea. I might even end up doing that in the end. Out of desperation.

But it isn’t what I want!

What I _want_ is a 5.25” bay Linux (or Android) ARM-based PC-within-a-PC. I want it to have its own touchscreen, taking up most of the single bay with a vertical edge-to-edge design. (Horizontal can have spare space if needed.) It can use two 16:9 screens kludged together as one if needed, so long as it looks like one screen. I’d prefer AMOLED-based screens to save power. And the ARM processor really doesn’t need to be very powerful. Run it off of a USB cable for power and communication to my computer, preferably with a motherboard header connector instead of an external USB connector, because this is an internal part after all. And have it operate both as a standalone PC with its own OS and as a USB monitor. (The touchscreen monitor space should always be “on” to my computer, but a switch – be it hardware or software – flips the screen between showing the monitor space or the native pc-within-a-pc space.) So you can run “apps” tailored to the little bugger to do things without interfering with Windows in any way. They wouldn’t even consume PC processing power because they’d be running in the ARM core, not on the computer. And you can flip that to running a teeny-tiny extension monitor for Windows. (Or Mac. Or Linux. Etc.) That kind of flexibility should open up plenty of options and make it easy for folks to write their own applications for it to tailor it to their needs.

And throw in an all-format SD card reader or something if you have too much panel real estate left over. But it’s really not necessary. Just something infinitely more useful than an IR sensor for a keyboard that no one will use because they already have their own Bluetooth or wireless USB dongles plugged into USB slots or what have you.

Seriously. Why has no one made such a device? I can find all sorts of cheap and useless Android tablets up the asterisk! Why can’t I find one designed to fit into a 5.25” bay? It wouldn’t even need its own wired or wireless networking because it can leach that off of the USB connection. Nor does it need any battery, because it’s just a monitor. Let the driver signal it to turn off when Windows shuts down. Run the audio through the PC so that it doesn’t even need speakers. It’s a super-simplified device compared to a phone or a tablet.

Heck, you could even be really demented and make it an x86 Windows device on Atom if you wanted to. Now that would be a PC-within-a-PC! (And pretty silly if you actually had to have two licenses for Windows because of it.)

I was even thinking, you could do Siri-type voice commands from it pretty well too. You wouldn’t have to struggle against the processing power limitations of your tiny ARM core. You could pull an iOS trick, offload the real processing to something bigger. But instead of a server where they’ve cut your runtime too short to get the right answer, it’d be sent to your real computer through the USB cable and drivers, where it could run happily amok until it does what it’s supposed to do. (And would likely have to run on the PC at some point anyway because your Outlook calendar isn’t likely to be running on the pc-within-a-pc space.)

It would be the ultimate IT assistant.

A few years ago that kind of thinking would have been insane.  Who’d want to eat up CPU space like that?  But in today’s multicored world, no big deal.  We’ve got cores to spare.

And I suppose, for people who want it to be ridiculously sized, you could make a two-bay version.

(Or if you really wanted to mess with people’s minds, at some point you could make it an actual smart phone that docks horizontally into the 5.25” bay, for techies on the go. Worse yet would be that it could still be paired to the PC via wifi or 3G or 4G after being removed for remote desktop to the PC, making it possibly the only monitor in the world that could accidentally monitor itself in a quasi-useful way.)

I know. It’s a lot to ask for something so ridiculously simple. I’d build one myself if I had any idea how to. (It’s mostly the screen part that throws me. How do you even order just one or two AMOLED screens from a manufacturer? How do you even go about finding the right size? How do you control one? That’s the part that has me baffled. In theory it should be no big deal to take one of those computer-on-a-stick devices and toss a screen at its HDMI port, but in practice…)

And yes, if I Frankensteined one together myself, I would name it GLaDOS, and do my best to give it a matching voice assistance feature, Turing test antisocial AI and all. Hey, it’s at least a step up from being a potato. We’ve got testing to be done.

With a whole internal bay space available I could even see plenty of room (and need) for expansion modules. Fan controllers. Extra temperature monitoring sensors. Radiator reservoir with pump and flow rate monitor/controller. A webcam to monitor inside of your PC as it runs! Who knows what else people might want from it once they have it? Make the device generic enough and easy to program for, and even better to make the API layer open source, and you could end up with something that even Dell might find a use for in their PCs. It’d be awfully convenient to finally be able to control specific fanspeeds based on other specific temperature readings, perhaps throwing other new logic into the equations as well. Who knows all the neat things that you could do? As extras to an already great device!

And then make the version that you can duct-tape to a laptop (or build it in if you’re a manufacturer) so that you can see if you have email (or Facebook updates) from the outside of the laptop without having to open it to find out.

I get why the 4-inch monitor for a laptop is a Bad Idea. It’s too darn small to really be of use to anyone. I get why the 5 inch (or smaller) tablet is stupid. We have phones for that! They do everything that a tablet does, and then some. But this is a whole different ballgame. It’s for case modders. It’s for media PCs. It’s for geeks with greenbacks. For dorks with dosh. For nerds with … err … nickels. Well, you get the idea. It’s a niche product that no one has successfully mastered.

For someone who’s spending uber-bucks on a 27-inch extreme-definition monitor, what’s a hundie for a PC case widget that brings the system tray / notification area back to you in a meaningful way? People spend more than that on just a clock if it’s nice enough, and this is so much more, and something that you can customize to your needs.

If I had the money to just give up my day job I’d start my own company around gizmos like this. Well, that and super-cool PCs cases that are silent. But I don’t. And flirk-all if I can figure out how to get the parts from suppliers to make my own one-off prototype for this.

Besides, I’d rather consume than be consumed by. I can afford that. So drat-it, someone else make one so that I can consume it already! Buy buy buy! :p

And if someone doesn’t license a Portal-based personality core Siri-like assistant software for PCs (We’re in space.) … then I don’t know what this world is coming to. GLaDOS, Wheatly, that demented space-obsessed core, the cake recipe core, adventure core, fact core, who knows how much fun that could be to switch between them? (Or worse, have a group-mode where they’re all “assisting” you.)

Anyway, the point is, no one really seems to be taking IT gadgets seriously enough. We have the technology and parts to make all sorts of interesting things happen, but then we don’t make them. Grown-ups deserve good toys too. (Especially since we’re the ones with the money to buy them.)