TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Category: Hardware

  • Logitech G15 Keyboard Spill and Cleaning

    I managed to spill less than a mouthful of Coke on my fabulous Logitech G15 gaming keyboard yesterday. I immediately unplugged it to avoid electrical damage, but then I did exactly the wrong thing: I turned it over to try to drain the Coke out.

    It turns out my beloved keyboard has raised mounts on which each keycap sits, and while the initial spill couldn’t penetrate them, by turning it over, Coke went into the keycaps, then down the mounts when I turned it upright again.

    After the initial drying, all the keys worked fine, so I thought I had dodged the bullet. But later, as I was playing LOTRO, I noticed that the “I” key was hard to press and slow to come back up. Of course, “I” is inventory, so it is used all the time. Then I noticed, as I was chatting with my kinship members, the period key was even worse than the I key!

    This morning, I looked at all sorts of resources that involved taking the keyboard apart and removing the circuits and LEDs and such and putting some pieces in the dishwasher. While that sounded awful, I was resigning myself that I should at least take the darn thing apart and take a look.

    Then I saw a post that said the keycaps are easy to take off and quite robust and hard to damage. This is a change from the old days when my wife would spill her soup into her Apple Extended Keyboard and I really did have to take it apart to clean bits of carrot out of there.

    So I took a picture of it to make sure I put all the symbol keys back in the right places:

    and started prying a wedge of keys off between the Alt below the period up to the I key. I used a small flat screwdriver and it was pretty easy, though I was very careful.

    The area between the key posts was disgusting so I used slightly damp Q-Tips to clean the area. I also cleaned the inside of the key wells for the I and period keys using very little water. Once I was done, I put it back together and checked that all the keys popped up well again.

    I plugged it back in and it lit up and works:

    I am now using the keyboard to type this. The I key is back to about 95% of its old feel, but the period has been getting stickier as I type. Maybe it needs to come off yet again…………………….

  • Sony PS3 updates stink

    I haven’t written in a while because I’ve been very busy with work. I haven’t not been playing games, however. In fact, LOTRO has been taking my all my minuscule free time. But more on that later.

    This weekend, I decided I want to check out Assassins Creed Brotherhood, which I’ve had since about when it came out, but haven’t even put into the PS3. I fired up the old PS3 to play and discovered an update, even though I updated a week or two ago.

    As usual, this stupid update takes ten or fifteen minutes to download (even though I have a very fast cable connection, so surely Sony is throttling or underprovisioned) and then a few more minutes to install.

    These things never happen on the Xbox360. Updates there are quick and painless. Sony has taken more of a Windows approach (big download and reboot), but at least with Windows the download and much of the install can happen in the background.

    Clearly Sony doesn’t get it. We want to play games on the PS3, not have to maintain it, like we do our PCs. Sony makes updates tedious and punishes the user by preventing anything else from happening. C’mon, at least let us play space invaders while the download happens. Can’t the SPEs in the Cell processor do anything other than download? As usual, Sony hardware is great, but their software leaves a lot to be desired.

  • Got a Kinect

    I’ve been intrigued with the Kinect for the Xbox 360 since it was first announced. I’m less intrigued with it for games than I am for the technology. I think the games will mostly be Wii-style crap, but the technology is cool, as are the open source freenect drivers.

    It seems that Kinect units are as hard to get as Wii units were when they first came out. Apparently everyone has to have one for Christmas, so Amazon is out of them and all the slimy 3rd party sellers are reaming people with prices starting around $220 for a $150 item. Well today I walked into a Microsoft Store (very nice store and helpful sales guy, by the way) and got one right away. I even had a 20% off card, so it ended up being around $130 out the door, so a pretty good deal!

    I will plug it into the Xbox 360 this weekend, I hope, and will write about my experiences with it.

  • Pocket Legends

    Because my main gaming PC is still down for the count because of power supply problems, I started playing Pocket Legends on the iPad. This is a pretty interesting MMORPG that looks very good on iPad (and is playable on iPhone too). The user interface is very simple, with a tap to designate a target, a tap to commence attack, and other tap buttons to for special powers or attacks. Swiping sideways rotates the camera view (I would like to be able to reverse the direction, as it seems a bit unintuitive the way it is, but there doesn’t seems to be an option).

    I started as a warrior, which is usually the safe way to go. I had armor, a sword, and shield to start. After a few cakewalk solo training missions, the game puts you in a town where other players gather. Once you get a quest, you can transport to the start of the quest. The first quest started off really easy, but the difficulty level got brutal, as some very tough and fast zombies appeared. Luckily, other players are around to help thin the enemy, but they are all at different stages of the mission, so may have different goals, so player groups tend not to be coordinated. A few levels in, even though I had better gear, I was regularly being wiped by zombie hoards. I stopped there, so I don’t know if it gets better. I do know that I saw magic users doing huge damage and healing, so perhaps that would be a better way to go. I will have to revisit it.

    In short, if you are interested in an easy-to-pick-up MMORPG that looks good on iPad (and iPhone), try Pocket Legends. It’s free and really nifty.

    As an update, I just checked out PL on the iPhone. The same character is accessible there, since it’s in the cloud. Since the screen is so much smaller, navigation is done by a virtual joystick, but otherwise, chat and actions are available. Kinda cool, but I think I’ll stick to the iPad version and its larger screen size.

  • Lord of the Rings Online –> Atom + Ion = Not Good

    Because of my power supply troubles with my gaming machine, I decided to install LOTRO on my Atom+Ion nettop machine. While the machine is pretty wimpy with only a dual-core + Hyperthreading 1.6GHz Atom, the Ion GPU makes it able to play some games. It did okay on Sins of a Solar Empire when I tried it a few months ago. The install of LOTRO took forever because: a) the machine has a laptop hard drive, so is slow; and b) Norton kept deciding that the machine was idle and therefore is due for a virus scan, which slowed the installation even more! But it finally finished.

    I adjusted the video to be full-resolution on my 1920×1200 monitor, though I turned down the texture quality and other settings to not drive the machine to its knees. It didn’t help — no matter what I did at that resolution, the game looked good but was sluggish, taking perceptible time to respond to mouse movement and key presses. It made the game quite unpleasant. When I dropped the resolution to say 1280×1024, it was much more responsive, but looked like crap, which also made the game unpleasant.

    In short, no PC games until the power supply arrives. Time to find that Star Ocean disk for the PS3…

  • Power Supply Problems

    I’ve been having odd trouble for a while with my gaming PC. It’s a 2.67 GHz Core2Quad with 4GB RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 280. The odd thing was that sometimes, when I would turn it on, the power supply would make an extremely loud and scary BANG noise, usually followed by the machine’s power going off. Then the power would come back on and all would be well. This happened about once a month and didn’t seem to do any harm, but made me very nervous when turning the machine on. The power supply in question was a 650W model made by Antec, so it should have been great and never failed. I figured it was perhaps just a dust bunny arcing or something, but in any case, I knew that something eventually had to be done.

    I had another power supply in a machine I never use, so I thought I would liberate that and replace the Antec one. The replacement is a shiny chrome-plated blue LED 750 watt unit from some apparently off brand called HEC (I bought it because it was relatively inexpensive and seemed like a good deal). After unravelling a lot of spaghetti wiring, I got the old PS out and the new one in, and the machine booted up fine (I also took this opportunity to replace my old Sony DVD writer that grows rather attached to disks and won’t eject them if they’ve been in for more than a few minutes).

    I though all was well, but I was wrong. I started up Lord of the Rings Online and played for a bit when suddenly the screen went black. I saw the formerly green “got enough power” light on my GTX 280 was now red, so the video card shut down. I tried switching PCIe connectors and other things, but the PSU starts making noises when GPU-intensive programs run and the graphics card shuts down after a few minutes.

    So I guess that machine is out of commission for games until the new Corsair PSU I just ordered from Newegg arrives next week. Darn…