I didn’t play much single player but we found this game really fun in multiplayer mode, especially 4 player – you have to work together otherwise it’s chaos.
I liked the “bubble mode”, it’s like a get out of jail free but without making it feel like cheating.
If you can spot what I find annoying about the following screenshot of an advert I keep seeing whilst browsing around, then you are fabulously geeky (like me):
Google is trying to teach me to suck eggs. They obviously know what Operating system I’m using so I thought they would be clever enough to detect what browser I’m using and serve me something more targeted? What scares me more is that I suspect they are actually paying someone for me to see that advert.
Yes – I went outside bare foot in the snow. I saw the cat catch a Robin in the garden and rushed to the rescue. The nice thing about working from home is that you don’t need to wear any shoes.
For £30, in my opinion this is MUCH better than a iPod because it can play ogg vorbis files. I use it to listen to podcasts at the gym and it’s ideal – it remembers where you got to so you can easily listen to hour long files and the fast-forward is perfect. The clip on the back is the best feature – really handy for cliping to the exercise bike or the ergo handle.
It has 2GB internal memory and a card slot to increase the space if you need it. I have found a big flaw though – if you put too many large files in the memory it freezes when you unplug it from the computer with a message on the screen: “Refreshing your media.” – I have waited for hours for the message to go away but the only way to fix it is hold the power button down for several seconds until it turns off, then plug it back into the computer and remove some of the big files and see if it’s ok again when unplugged.
I need to remind myself that there’s no point whining about a shortfalling in a piece of software unless I can be sure the author is aware of it. To that effect, I filed a bug with the Chrome team: #31833. I also submitted a tiny patch for the Jodometer JQuery plugin.
I spend half my life with my hand glued to a mouse – so the best one on the market will offer a good return on investment. This one can track on glass (we have a glass coffee table), which demonstrates how accurate and precise it is. The sensitivity is flawless.
Wireless mice are good for cat owners because cats love pouncing on moving wires.
The one pain about this mouse is the battery life – it isn’t good. It seems to last about a month, tops. You have to remember to turn it off every time you stop using it which I find a headache – It would be good if it could turn off automatically when it has been stationary for a few minutes.
I recommend the new Ubuntu 9.10 release (Karmic Koala), it works well on a Sony VGN-AR51E.
Karmic Goods:
It includes a new piece of software called “Ubuntu One”:
Ubuntu One currently gives you 2GB of free cloud storage via a folder called “Ubuntu One” in your home directory or via a URL (https://one.ubuntu.com/).
The Desktop icons have been improved and now use a vector format (i.e. svg instead of png). I was able to use my own icons, created in inkscape, very easily.
Updated software. Firefox was updated from version 3.0.11 to 3.5 which is faster, supports the video and audio tags and has a private browsing mode. Geany was updated from version 0.17 to 0.18 which handles long filenames better in the Documents pane. Meld has been updated from version 1.2 to 1.3.0 which has better search functionality and no longer seems to lose it’s scroll synchronisation when the window loses focus. The kernel was updated from 2.6.28 to 2.6.31.
The headphone and microphone sockets now work. So does the DVD eject button on the laptop chassis. Only the 2 user programmable buttons and AV-mode keys still do nothing.
Karmic Bads:
Startup and shutdown seems slower! This is odd seeing as it uses newer startup software called Upstart that is supposed to be faster! I even installed Grub 2 via https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2 but it didn’t help.
At shutdown I sometimes get an error: “CIFS VFS: server not responding” which hangs the system sometimes for a while. This is because I have mounted Samba shares in /etc/fstab and when using Wireless, Ubuntu tries to unmount Samba shares after shutting down network services. The bug tracking number is #211631.
The webcam (MotionEye – Ricoh USB r5u870) didn’t work after the upgrade: /dev/video0 no longer existed!
Fixing the webcam:
The Sony VGN-AR51E laptop comes with a integrated Ricoh webcam. The webcam model number is 05ca:1839 as seen via:
> lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05ca:1839 Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]
Current kernel info:
> uname -a
Linux psyduck 2.6.31-16-generic #53-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 8 04:02:15 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Useful commands and logs that give info about the problem:
> dmesg | less (or less /var/log/kern.log)
[ 19.367070] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (05ca:1839)
[ 19.367573] uvcvideo: UVC non compliance - GET_DEF(PROBE) not supported. Enabling workaround.
[ 19.367786] uvcvideo: Failed to query (129) UVC probe control : -32 (exp. 26).
[ 19.367789] uvcvideo: Failed to initialize the device (-5).
[ 19.367824] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[ 19.367828] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)
The problem seems to be that the webcam drivers were not packaged for Ubuntu 9.10. In the previous version (Ubuntu 9.04) the webcam used the r5u870 V4L2 driver but it was deprecated and replaced in Karmic by a kernel module called R5U87x. R5U87x should be better because it is a set of userland tools that loads the firmware for all UVC compliant devices and makes them work with a more standard uvcvideo driver. Unfortunately, the R5U87x tools were not packaged in time for Karmic because the firmware images contained in the package didn’t have a suitable license to allow redistribution. i.e. the original working r5u870 driver was not packaged but nor was the newer R5U87x driver! This is all documented in Bug 120434.
Current (Dec/09) fix:
David Jarenkas has created r5u87x-loader (which doesn’t contain any non-free pieces) to load the webcam drivers. Add the following Personal Package Archives (PPA) to your sources list:
sudo emacs -nw /etc/apt/sources.list
add:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/r5u87x-loader/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/r5u87x-loader/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
Add necessary encryption keys needed for software download:
Test with a application such as Cheese (or gstreamer-properties or xawtv or skype).
In Skype, audio works but video still doesn’t until you add yourself to the “video” group (the file permissions of /dev/video* is group read and writtable for the “video” group):
sudo usermod -a -G video tom
Other tweaks:
The Ubuntu splash screen is nice but I prefer to see what the computer is doing. To turn off the splash screen do:
sudo emacs -nw /etc/default/grub
and change
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
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).
I had been waiting for years for a good computer game of Bloodbowl and this is everything I had hoped for. It is a beautifully faithful version of the board game – I’m very happy with the way it plays, the teams, the user interface, the AI, the league system. It helps speed up games that can take a lot longer on the board game. The only issue I have is with the loading speed – it takes a long while to load before each match. It is also pretty difficult to spot the players that have unique skills (although the same goes with the board game).
I get annoyed at the branding of these new “LED” TV’s – they are not fundamentally new technology, they are simply LCD screens lit up via LEDs.
However it’s branded, it is brilliant!
What’s Good?
It is so extremely vibrant and bright that it makes our Panasonic LCD look very dull.
It only uses <0.1 Watt while on stand-by. So efficient that there's not even a proper "off" button.
It “Powers up” really fast. There is a picture on the screen about 8 seconds after pressing the Power button on the remote.
It’s got a good resolution (1080p).
It’s thin (but, who cares unless you wall mount it?)
What’s bad?
There’s no HDMI button on the remote – to select HDMI 1 for example you need to press 5 buttons (Source, Down, Down, Down, Select). This is really annoying because I need to do it every time I turn the telly on.
Don’t bother connecting it to the Internet – it’s boringly slow and it can’t download firmware updates.
It’s not Wii friendly. It’s too thin for the Wii sensor bar to sit on top of the TV but it also can’t sit at the bottom of the TV because the black base is so shiny that it disperses the IR and makes it inaccurate.
The sound volume doesn’t have enough different levels towards the quiet level.
Our TV came with a free Blu-ray player (Samsung BDP1600XEU). I don’t recommend this player. Blu-ray movies often freeze and it takes ages to connect and disconnect with the TV. If you pause the movie and switch to watching TV for even a few seconds, when you come back, you’ll find the movie stopped and your position lost.
I used to have a neighbour who did photography as a hobby. It was really interesting seeing him set up little things to entice animals so he could get some photographs and I always found it amazing the creatures he could find in and around our houses.
There was one particular shot he had been trying to get for the last 2 years – and he finally did it:
XBox360,FPS,4/10 – Sep 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?
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)
