I had fun writing an article on new graphics technology as it affects games. That ran in the August issue of Maximum PC, and is online now at MaximumPC.com. The real bummer is that I had lots of cool screen shots, most of which the magazine ran. But the need to reduce size for both print and online makes them less effective. Still, I think DirectX 11 will have the biggest impact on PC gaming since DX8.

Also up on Maximum PC is a review of Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 network interface card for gamers. It’s an interesting product, in that it works as advertised, reducing lag and ping times… but most people won’t notice any benefit. I’d class it as a luxury product, maybe useful to the 0.5% of gamers who compete online, care about winning and have the insanely fast reflexes to notice the small differences.

More stuff after the jump.

Another Maximum PC review: the MSI R5870 Lightning. It’s one of the latest generation of factory overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards meant to be tweaked. I find these sorts of cards interesting as engineering exercises, but ultimately too expensive with too little performance gain for most users.

Over at PC World, I wrote an article on painless motherboard upgrades — how to upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. I’ve also written a number of laptop reviews, including the Micro Express NBL60, a surprisingly good unit from a manufacturer that doesn’t get a lot of buzz. Also at PC World is the Clevo X8100 gaming notebook. Alas, that’s an earlier model, and lacks the new GeForce GTX 480 mobile GPUs.

I also had some fun appearing on a couple of Tekzilla episodes with Patrick Norton. I appeared on Episode 147, where I talk about Puget Systems Serenity quiet gaming system. It’s a reasonably high performance box, but only generates around 20dBA even under load. Patrick and I also go back and forth on how you might mod your system to make it less noisy.

In addition, I got to do a bit on their fifth anniversary show, where I doff my PC hardware cap and put on my geeky photographer hat and talk a bit about Adobe’s Lightroom 3 release.

Last, but not least (and maybe the most fun), was making a guest appearance on Troy Goodfellow’s Three Moves Ahead, a podcast focusing on strategy gaming (mostly PC, but Troy also delves into board games occasionally, and his regulars –Rob Zacny, Julian Murdoch and others — also take on console and handheld strategy games. We talked about the impact technology has had on strategy games.

So that’s what’s been going on inside and outside the basement lab recently. Hope you find it as much fun to read, watch and hear as I had working on them.

We’ve had a Dish Vip622 DVR running for several years now. The 622 is an HD DVR, which can record standard definition and high definition content. The day after Christmas, we were watching a DVD when the audio was almost completely drowned out fan noise. Have you ever heard a PC graphics card when its fan spun up to full speed? That’s similar to what we were hearing.

I paused the Blu-ray player and discovered that the Dish Vip622’s fan was spinning at full speed. Using the Logitech Harmony One to switch to TV mode revealed… nothing. No picture, no audio, nada. The Vip622 had bit the big one.

I didn’t get around to calling Dish Network for several days, but once I did, they scheduled a tech to come in and check it out. The wait, surprisingly, was less than 48 hours. Like most service organizations, Dish doesn’t give a specific time for an appointment. Instead, you’re given a time window. In my case, Iw was too expect the tech between 8AM and 12 noon.

Imagine my surprise when the Dish van rolled up to our house at 8:05AM. When the tech arrived, he listened to my description of the symptoms and immediately went back to his van to get a replacement unit.

Dish apparently no longer carries ViP622’s, so instead the tech swapped in a ViP722k. Interestingly, you lose built-in over-the-air support with the 722k, but do gain another 100GB of hard drive capacity. It took about a half-hour to set it up and verify it was working. While he was setting it up, we talked, mostly about business and new gear. Business has been down somewhat – no real surprise given the recession – and most of his work has been satellite dish relocations as people have moved.

I signed some paperwork, and the tech left. The whole affair had taken less than an hour. After he left, I picked up the Harmony One and fired up the TV.

Nothing.

Actually, there was something: my Onkyo TX-SR875 receiver fired up and the Sony HDTV also powered on. But the Vip722 remained resolutely off.

I grabbed the Dish remote, and tried to turn on the ViP722. Sure enough, it turned on.

I realized that I probably needed to reprogram the Harmony One, which meant downloading the Logitech Harmony software, since I hadn’t programmed the remote since upgrading to Windows 7. Harmony remote are actually programmed via a web app running on a PC or Mac.

The process of programming a Harmony is somewhat cumbersome if you’re a sophisticated user, mainly because Logitech seems to want the whole affair to be idiot-proof. For example, once you start down a path (adding a device, for example), that’s all you can do. Despite this linear mode, you can still click on the tabs at the top of the screen to switch to other modes – you just can’t do anything until you actually press the “done” command.

Also, Logitech’s database of device controls is user-generated. I discovered that the control setup for the ViP722 was severely limited, at least compared to the 622. I actually needed to add a soft button so I could switch to DVR mode to manage or watch recorded shows.

Once the program was uploaded to the remote, I took it upstairs and fired up the TV.

You guessed it: once again, the TV turned on, the A/V receiver fired up, but the DVR stayed off.

It turns out that the 722k has multiple addresses for receiving either IR or UHF signals (the Dish Network remote can operate in either IR or UHF mode, if you have a multiroom setup.) The Harmony apparently sends out its IR signal over a different channel than the 722k’s default setting of IR channel 3. I had to reset the channel to IR channel 1. Dish actually maintains an online copy of the manual. Chapter 10 of the manual describes the process of changing the Dish IR receiver remote address.

Resetting the VIP722k Remote Receiver Address (from the manual)

Once that little chore was done, everything worked as it should.

This took more research than anyone just wanting to watch and record TV should have to perform. It’s as if the complexity of the PC universe is gradually encroaching on the world of consumer electronics. I suppose it’s the price we pay for more flexibility and programmability. But as PC interfaces become easier, the CE world seems to be adopting the worst of the old ways. Let’s hope this all improves over the second decade of the 21st century.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen something of a furor surround the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 . First came the news that the latest entry in the franchise would have no dedicated servers – which also meant no user generated maps and no mod tools. On top of that, it was revealed the multiplayer maps would be limited to 9 vs. 9.

The other thing that  happened to me last week was listening to latest Three Moves Ahead, the podcast produced and hosted by Troy Goodfellow of Flash of Steel, which was an interview with Chris Park, developer of the RTS AI Wars. It’s well worth a listen.

What struck me was the difference in attitude between Activision / Infinity Ward (developers of Modern Warfare 2) and Chris Park. AI Wars has gotten a lot of buzz, partly because it’s a somewhat different take on the RTS genre, but also because Park and his small team has been incredibly responsive to the AI Wars user community.

At first blush, this may simply sound like another Indie versus Big Publisher dichotomy – but it’s not that simple. Large game developers and associated publishers can also be tuned into their user communities. They may not be able to respond as quickly as a small developer with a single title, but they can still listen.

What’s more, I think, is that it’s also a return to an interesting argument I used to hear back in the heyday of the old Computer Gaming World.

Back then, the idea was that PC gaming – and, by extension, all video games – heralded a new era of interactive entertainment. It was believed back then that electronic gaming was something new, a move away from the passivity of couch potatoes being spoon fed their entertainment by the TV networks.

It turns out, of course, that the writers and editors of that era were working from a set of assumptions that proved incorrect over the longer term. The fight isn’t between interactivity and passivity. It’s between top-down paternalism and grass roots user involvement.

On the gaming front, you now have companies like Activision, taking a highly paternalistic attitude: it’s our game; we know what’s best, take it or leave it.

On the other side, you have developers and publisher who, to varying degrees, let the user get involved. It can be pretty low level stuff, like handing out development tools to the users, as we’ve seen recently with Borderlands, Dragon Age and the Unreal Developer’s Kit. It can go deeper than that, too. Stardock, for example, will get users involved in early betas, and even alphas of a game, as they’re doing with the upcoming strategy title Elemental to get user feedback during the critical stage before the game is feature complete and the design is frozen.

Neither approach offers any advantage in the quality of the game. I have every expectation that Modern Warfare 2 will be a very polished game that offers a great experience. There’s no doubt in my mind that Elemental will also be a great title.

On the other hand, today’s generation of web-driven users who are flocking to social games – which are often driven by the players themselves – signals what may become a sea-change in the overall behavior of the gaming audience. Players will start expecting more responsiveness and less paternalism from their gaming experience.

We’re actually seeing this battle play out in the larger field of new media. Rupert Murdoch, for example, threatens to block search engines like Google from offering search results from his publications. It’s old media, at its paternalistic worst. If articles from Murdoch’s publications never show up in search results, who will read them online? What will advertisers think of this?

How it will all shake out is anyone’s guess. Interactive media, whether it’s gaming or the Internet, is still very much an evolving animal. As the new generation of developers and users connect with each other, it will be increasingly difficult for the old generation to walk back that high level of interactivity and user involvement that’s expected today. The fight will be an interesting one to watch.

I almost never use any of these. I must wear the hubcap of shame.

These are undeniably useful devices. You can get content from your PC or network attached storage device into your living room. What type of hardware you use depends on what you want to accomplish. People who just want music around the home (and can drop a grand or more) will get Sonos gear. If they want to stream video from their PC to their HDTV, they might get a media center extender, whether it’s a Windows Media Center Extender, Apple TV, or other similar piece of hardware.

If you really want a repository for your audio CD and photo collection, or want to store all those ripped DVDs, then a home theater PC is a good bet. It’s pretty easy to build (or buy) a relatively quiet HTPC that can get the job done.

But I rarely use them.

There are a number of reasons for this, and I suspect I’m not alone.

First, I’m not a big consumer of media. Most of my music listening occurs when I’m driving around in my car, for example. I’ll watch TV recorded on the Dish DVR with the family on occasion. Sometimes I’ll pop a movie into the Sony BDP-S350. About the closest thing I get to using media center style feautures is when we use Netflix streaming on the Xbox 360. This is perhaps the single biggest reason. My entertainment comes from reading books (*gasp*), gaming (PC, board games and RPGs) and related activities.

Second, I’m lazy. The DVR just works. The Blu-ray player just works. I don’t need to boot a PC. I’ve also got all the standard devices (including the 360) programmed into the Harmony One remote.

Third, I’ve never settled on a device that does everything I want. For example, I’ve got a Logitech Squeezebox Duet. The Duet is a nice unit, but requires some piece of hardware — a PC or supported NAS drive — to be running SlimServer. Firing up the Xbox 360 as a Windows Media Center extender also means that my PC needs to be turned on. The plethora of competing formats and streaming methods still makes all this less straightforward than it needs to be.

I’ve tried Sonos gear. The Sonos stuff is slick — but Sonos doesn’t do Windows Media Lossless, which is how I rip most of my music collection.

So what happens is I set up the Squeezebox several times a year, whenever I host a party or barbecue, and fire up a playlist. That’s about the only time I use this gear in a practical way.

On the other hand, I frequently tinker with digital media adapters, HTPCs and related gear. I’m still fascinated by the concept of trying to get easy access to all media, all the time, anywhere in my house. But actually leaving something set up and living with it… not so much.