December 2009 – Something Odd!

First game of 2010?

In years gone by I used to worry about the first game I’d play in the new year. When I say “years gone by”, I really mean it. This was around the time when Ikari Warriors and Armalyte were only a few years old, and I was a teenager pounding out ASM code on a C64 keyboard with an Action Replay.

Time passed and the PC rose to become the dominant gaming platform and with it my interest in games waned. Sporadic bouts of play included almost all the ID games and the original Half Life but as I had to reboot into Windows it was never going to last. In recent times I became the owner of my first two games consoles. First a Nintendo Wii (gathering dust in the living room) and an Xbox 360 this year that awoke in me the dormant games playing interest that had been killed off a dozen years ago.

So, this year I’m once again pondering what game will become that first one. Will it be the obvious choice of Modern Warfare 2? Or perhaps a bit of COD 4? Maybe even Batman: Arkham Asylum?

No, I think the first game of the teenies (or whatever we’ll call ’em) will be Trials HD. A kick ass game I already wrote about and couldn’t stop playing even after hitting the restart button a few dozen times!

What about you?

My Christmas Day Adventure

Today was a Christmas Day my family won’t forget for a long time! We had a great time today, heard some amazing news, and then had a bit of an adventure on the way home. The weather has been pretty cold for the last while, the county was covered in a sheet of ice but this afternoon temperatures rose slightly which was great because we were due to visit family for Christmas dinner.

My brother Donal and his wife had ice problems this morning when their car slid out of his estate. Two hours later they got underway when the roads thawed out a bit. That had worried me because there’s a hill into our estate too.

After a great day with family, a delicious dinner made by my brother-in-law Chris and a visit to my own family we returned home, sharing the road with nervous drivers and reckless drivers. The journey home was uneventful but the hill into our estate proved to be troublesome. The road was covered in ice and slush and as we rounded the bend a car slid down backwards and eventually braked and turned back down. I tried to drive us up there too but the car only got so far before wheels started to spin, the car shuddered and we weren’t going forward any more. Kinda scary!

I had to turn back of course, we parked further up the road where I spotted a break in the ditch. In the freezing dark I managed to get up there, and to make what is turning into a long story shorter enlisted the help of our neighbours who were in the same boat. Between us we managed to get the essential bags out of the car, I carried Adam up the road, and we took a short cut through Rosy and Con’s house knocking a good 100m off our journey.

I used the light of my Nokia 5800 in video mode to light the way so I have a record of all that happened, even if it’s more audio than anything else! Must have a listen tomorrow.

Anyway, I’m glad to be home, safe and sound. We’ll get the car tomorrow. Thanks neighbours for your help. Nollaig Shona dhaoibh go leir!

Kontrol Freek FPS Freek review

The FPS Freek by Kontrol Freek is a small attachment for the Xbox 360 or PS3 controller that helps players aim more precisely in first person shooters or FPS games. There’s a Speed attachment too for racing games.

The FPS Freek snaps on to the top of the controller sticks so your thumbs have to physically move further to make the same in-game movement. This is supposed to help when you want to make small accurate movements, especially useful when aiming at a small distant figures in a shooter such as Modern Warfare 2. From the blurb on the product page,

The added analog stick length provides 40% more linear distance from full stop to stop. This gives you more leverage and increased precision without disturbing your natural gaming playing feel.

I’ve been using it for a week and while my gaming has improved a whole lot, it was improving any way because I was getting better with practice. I don’t think you’re going to see a dramatic improvement in your gaming by using the FPS Freek.
I tried increasing the sensitivity of the controller, thinking that the extra leverage of the thumbstick would help but it really didn’t, and I think it’s back at 3 in MW2 now. At that sensitivity I can aim fairly well. With a silenced Scar-H I was able to make a few kills at the other side of Highrise, but on the other hand, a distant crouched enemy-in-waiting in Estate shot me while I attempted to aim at him.

The FPS Freek is comfortable to use however. It probably has helped my gaming but it’s not the major leap you might think. Learning how to use a mouse and keyboard properly was better for my gaming than using this, but of course you can’t use a mouse and keyboard on the Xbox 360. All you PC gamers will know what I mean!

In the US it costs $10 but here in Ireland or over in the UK you have to buy it from Lime. I think it cost me the equivalent of US$29 including (for some reason) registered postage of about 7 Pounds Sterling. I had to sign for it when it was delivered. At that price it’s not great value for money, but at $10 it’s an impulse buy I could live with.

In theory the science is sound. The extra length of the stick will give you more travel and room to aim precisely but if you’re not a good gamer this won’t work miracles. If you panic when you’re confronted by an enemy on a map, you’ll still do that. If you don’t use a game’s maps to your advantage now, then buying this won’t magically make you immune to enemy fire. It may help you aim if you’re sniping. I’m still using the FPS Freek on my right thumbstick however, it’s comfortable.

Buy it only if you have $10 burning a hole in your PayPal account. Don’t buy it if you’re outside the US, it’s not worth it.

Just don’t expect miracles.

Just so you know I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, here’s a few glowing reviews:

Short video review of the FPS Freek

Impressive accuracy at custom sensitivity 7 in COD 4, but then this guy is hardly a newbie at the game!

Fill and span DVD archives with Discspan

I have a huge archive of photos. I shoot tens of thousands of photos every year. Storage requirements for all those photos was bad enough when I shot in Jpeg but then I switched to RAW and space usage jumped! Here’s what the last 3 years looks like:

169GB of data is a lot of stuff to store. Originally I had them all duplicated on two external drives but then I bought a 500GB internal drive for my laptop for speedier access. Unfortunately that drive simply wasn’t big enough. I need to convert some of my RAW files to Jpeg to save space. To preserve the original RAW files I want to archive them somewhere permanently. I have a DVD writer so that was an obvious choice.

Burning data to lots of DVDs is tiresome. You can use tar, zip or another archiver to split the data but then you have to run through all the DVDs to pick out a file to restore. I like having the files directly accessible but that means endless selecting files, making sure they’re as close to the DVD size as possible, burning them, moving on to the next bunch. In the bad old DOS days I had a program to fill floppy disks if you pointed it at a directory but I’ve spent years searching for a similar Linux script. Last week I found one.

Enter Discspan. My 2007 archive was already burned to DVD, and I wish I had this script while doing it. I’ve burned my 2008 archive with Discspan and it was a doddle. Point it at the right directory, feed it some details about the DVD drive and let it go. 26 DVDs later and my 2008 archive is safe on DVD!

The script scans the directory, figures out how many DVDs are required and it fills each DVD with data, spanning my digital archive over multiple DVDs.

Be aware when using it that you should let Linux detect the next blank DVD before pressing return. The first time I ran it the script bombed out when growisofs didn’t see media to write to. You also need to patch it because it doesn’t detect the right size of DVD+R’s but it’s a simple one-liner.

Another Linux project, Brasero promises to span disks too but it didn’t for me. It’s the default CD/DVD burner in Ubuntu now and it’s a shame this functionality is broken in it.

Hopefully Brasero will be fixed for the next release. I’d offer to help but my C/C++ is very rusty.

Modern Warfare (Reflex) on the Wii

I was shocked and amazed when I saw the boxes of Call of Duty Modern Warfare in the Wii section of Gamestop the other day so I went searching for reviews. Metacritic gave it it a reasonable 77, while the following two Youtube reviews rate it very highly. Graphics look awful, and aren’t a patch on the Xbox 360 or PS3 version but the Wii remote makes aiming easier and more precise.

I loved Call of Duty WAW on the Wii, I’m tempted to dust down the machine for this too…

Just added it to my Amazon Wishlist.

No more wireless, I've gone wirefull!

Everyone else goes wireless with radio waves buzzing through the air and I return to good old ethernet cables and a switch. Today a package came from Amazon containing the D-Link DHP-303/B Powerline 200Mbps and a 5 port switch (and an internal drive to replace the tiny one in my Dell laptop but that’s another story).

The D-Link Powerline product is actually two plugs that are inserted into your wall sockets and use the wires in your house to communicate. I was a little dubious about it working well but it’s been fine. One plug is downstairs by the DSL router, and the other is upstairs here in my office. They apparently talk at 200Mbps but I’d take that with a grain of salt. My computers talk at 100Mbps, as does the switch so I presume that’s the limiting speed. It’s plenty fast enough for my DSL but I’ll have to try a file transfer later.

For the last few years I used WiFi to bridge the gap between downstairs and upstairs but this works just as well, and file transfers between computers aren’t as dog slow as they were using wireless networking. Wifi was never as fast as it should have been, probably because the signal was weakened by:

Travelling through a wooden telephone desk in the hall
Travelling diagonally up the stairs
Going through an internal wall with a CD shelf behind it
and finally finding the antenna of my Linux laptop buried inside my desk

No chance eh? I once tried to force the connection to be 54Mbps but it failed half the time, the Xbox wouldn’t connect. It just didn’t work well. Oh, and sometimes, the cordless phone ringing downstairs knocked me offline! Didn’t matter what channel I was on.

Sheesh, I’m getting very old school. I changed back to Apache from Nginx last weekend, changed from P2 to a more traditional WordPress theme this morning, and then dumped wireless networking this afternoon. I hear vinyl records are making a come back.

I will plug in the wifi router again, for those moments when I want to work from the kitchen. Unless I get another D-Link powerline adaptor..

Sitewide Tags 0.4 for WordPress MU

If you use the Sitewide Tags plugin for WordPress MU you may have missed Ron’s announcement post about the new release.

This version is all Ron’s doing. He merged in features he has worked on over the past year. Check out his blog post for the full list of changes.

Oh yeah, I’m doing mini-merges of WordPress and MU code all the time. Update from trunk (svn link) if you want to try it out, and please report any bugs on trac! I love the new trash feature!

Cork Floods

A round up of a few videos and photos of the flooding in Cork last month.

Photo by David Hegarty

Panciostela drove from Victoria Cross up the Carrigrohane Straight to Windsor Motors and posted 3 videos along the way, shooting the flood in the Kingsley Hotel last. Any vehicles in the underground carpark there must have been completely destroyed.

Lots of photos on Flickr and pix.ie (floods around the country), there’s even a Submerged Cork Flickr Group. Brian Clayton posted some outstanding photos of the floods on his blog.Thanks to Margaret Jordan where I saw one of the videos above and prompted me to post this.Links: Will has blogged about the various fundraising activities for the people displaced and affected by the floods, West Cork Wash out!, Flood in Cork, North Main Street.I forgot to say, I was in town on Saturday and there was hardly any sign of the flood and the city was very busy.

Could this be the last huge WP into MU code merge?

Well, this might be one of the last times I do a huge WordPress MU merge! I’ve just finished merging the code from WordPress 2.9 beta 1 into WordPress MU trunk. No, I didn’t link to the actual merge changeset. That’s 2007 and huge! 🙂

Want to give it a go? Grab the zip file from here and install it on a test server. Do not, under any circumstances install it on your production server! Be aware that I haven’t tested most of the code yet so there may have been errors made during the merge.

We also need to work out a good way of adding the commentmeta table to each blog. If your MU site has more than a few dozen blogs you need to add this table before you upgrade. On WordPress.com, it took quite a long time to add that table to each of the millions of blogs there! It’s probably something that an external plugin should handle. It’ll have to be linked from the MU download page and hopefully talked about enough that nobody tries to upgrade without it. Ideas?

Oh, I’m testing out WordPress 2.9-beta-1 and changed theme here. I’m using a heavily modified version of P2. Love it so far. I’ve managed to hack it to do what I want. Noel did a great job with the theme.