A song a week?

Creative Commons Logo

A friend of mine is planning to write 52 songs in a year.

It sounds extremely challenging but I love the first three. He’s releasing them under a copyleft license.

Go for it Rob!

House of the Dead: Overkill

Wii, Duck hunt (Light gun), 6/10

House of the dead screenshot

When you buy this game you know what you’re going to get. And you get it. And yes, they went overkill on everything, especially the gore and the clichés and the bad language. The story is entertaining if you like Shaun of the Dead.

I like the gun shop – it makes the game have a bit of variety when you can choose a different gun for the level.

My main bone to pick is that it is extremely difficult to calibrate the light gun. I was trying to calibrate the official AMS Hand Cannon through the in-game calibration settings. Why is it so hard? It was way off on the first million attempts. However after 30 mins of trying, I managed to get it spot-on. It was just a random success. So I suggest you patiently re-try and re-try until it just works (for reference, the TV was a Samsung UE40B7020W).

Halo ODST

XBox360,FPS,4/10Sep 2009
I loved the TV series called “Firefly” and always thought it’d make a good computer game, so it seems Christmas had come early – Mal (Nathan Fillion), the Firefly captain is in the latest Halo game together with Jane (Adam Baldwin), and Wash (Alan Tudyk). I found the trailer REALLY exciting:

It was a massive let down. I played co-operative mode and we seemed to be wandering dark gloomy streets the whole time. The story line is set as a prequel to Halo 3 so I was expecting a Spartan to show up at some point, perhaps even Master Chief, but no. It was really short too – I think half the total gameplay time was spent stuck looking for a object which turned out to be a broken rifle caught up in some overhead telephone wires.

By the way the “ODST” stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers – don’t you just hate non-obvious acronyms that aren’t clearly pointed out?

Making Linux friendly

We gave Fred (my father-in-law) a hand-me-down computer because his one is suffering from Windows rot and is unbearably slow. Our one comes with a catch… It has Ubuntu instead of Windows.

How do you make a Ubuntu computer easy to use?

  • Turn on Auto login
  • Remove all icons on the desktop, then add back “Internet” and links to “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, etc
  • Make sure there is only 1 Workspace
  • Music and Video player –> VLC. But change icon to something that makes more sense than a traffic cone!
  • Ipod software –> Banshee. But change icon to a ipod image
  • Trim unneeded software from the Applications menu (by uninstalling them)

Cybernetic Cypher


Cypher behind cat flap

We have a cool new cat accessory. It’s a battery powered microchip activated cat flap. It works extremely well and I like knowing that other cats can’t get in and eat Cypher’s food.

Cypher

Actually, you are wrong – The internet does need another cat picture.

Furnished Dining Room

We got some furniture for our Dining room. We now have a drinks cabinet :-) (and a table, sideboard and book shelves):

Before: DiningRoomBeforeSale
After: DiningRoomAfter

Although, it’s more of an office than a dining room now.

Frog Woes

pic of kermit the frog

The sight of a frog makes me feel sick so Kix found it funny that we had to edit a blog post that contained a real frog photo for a client of ours. Good phobia therapy? :-)

Introducing Butterfree

I have a new machine. He’s called “Butterfree”, he’s German and I rent him for £45 per month from http://www.hetzner.de/en:

butterfreee

  • Specs:
    • CPU: Intel i7-920 Quadcore incl. Hyper-Threading Technology.
    • RAM: 8 GB DDR3.
    • Disk: 2 x 750 GB SATA II (Software-RAID 1).
  • Features:
    • LAMP – Full root access.
    • 24h Reset service via Webinterface – I already had to use this once due to a typo I made in the firewall configuration!
    • 92 GBit Bandwidth
    • Unlimited Traffic Usage – but the connection speed is restricted to 10 MBit/s if more than 2000 GB/month are exceeded.

Finished First “for-pay” website

Screenshot_heidijoycegardens Our first site as freelancers is more-or-less finished. It should hopefully look clean and simple?