Derek Mooney of “Mooney Goes Wild” on Radio 1 has a robin cam pointing at a nest in his utility room. It’s the usual webcam quality but it’s good enough that we were able to see the mother robin arrive and feed her chicks.
See the Mooneycam for links to this camera and a blue tit camera in Áras an Uachtaráin (where the Irish President lives). They also have a diary of sorts where Derek keeps a record of what’s happening.
First major session of Bad Company 2 on the Xbox in quite a while and it was a mixed bag. I was joined by Eddie, Gavin and another player I didn’t know, Cerebrus (I think?)
The team we were playing against were very good although they relied on snipers quite a lot in some games. When attacking they softened us up with mortar strikes and when available helicopters. I think we won one game and possibly lost 2? The games last so long it’s hard to tell.
On Nelson Bay we were attacking and I used the mortar strike to good effect, thankfully not launching a strike on any nearby trees. I took down the first Alpha building and the last Bravo building went down with a little help from my explosives. Only got one kill from the strikes, but destruction 2.0 netted me another 2 kills I think.
On Isla we thought we were doing well. They were held off for about 45 tickets. They barely made it on to the island. Then they changed tack, they were well organised launching flanking attacks around the back and sides and quickly taking both bases. Same story with the second base. We held them off for ages and they managed to flank us. When they set a bomb in Bravo a whole squad spawned on the soldier who was there. I don’t think they knew about the simple way to get the second Alpha. When we were attacking I got that with a few burst of fire! 🙂
While defending on Isla I got into the heli in the last base but we didn’t kill one single player and unfortunately our base was overrun in a matter of a minute or two. It was awful.
Tough games, but good to play with the guys on Xbox again!
Now that my stats have updated, I leveled to 12, my KDR went down 0.02, but Win/Loss ratio went up by 0.02 since the game earlier! That was a nice surprise! I’m reminded I got a Bronze star for the Saw, we also got best squad at least once and I unlocked the Carl Gustav, MP-412, high power tank optics and the Assault shotgun attachment. Oh yes, 2 kills for Destruction 2.0! Woo!
The PC version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 has a nice handy UI for switching teams but it’s possible to do the same on consoles too. I should have realised this myself but I read it on a comment on this post:
You can do it, press the Xbox guide button in the middle of the controller, find the guy on the opposite team on your recent players list, join session in progress. It’s not easy as sometimes the guy will have set his online status to appear offline, but it is possible.
The Playstation 3 has a “Recently Met” players list too so it should be possible to do it there too.
StoneFaceLock offers some tips and gameplay in this video from Battlefield Bad Company 2 on Laguna Presa. Good teamwork with his squadmate on the attack. He recommends assault and medic for two man squads, or possibly a recon but not with a sniper rifle.
Might be something for Dave and myself to think about for our next game!
Good news on the cable front! The Xbox 360 HDMI cable and Playstation 3 component cable arrived today!
Despite my misgivings after earlier testing I plugged the Xbox cable in first. The cable comes in two parts. A bog standard HDMI cable and a short “audio” cable with digital and phono connections.
Microsoft made it impossible to use the standard component cable with a HDMI cable because the connector on the Xbox side is so huge. This connector is thinner though. Profiteering?
Anyway, I plugged everything in, HDMI cable into the DVI-D converter and switched on. The screen looked dull like last time so I went fiddling with the colour controls. Instead of “Normal Preset sRGB” I jumped down to “user preset” and bumped up each of the green, blue and red channels and everything looked much better! A little more fiddling with the game brightness in Bad Company 2 and it looked perfect!
I even played a short game of Rush on Arica Harbour and kicked ass as an attacker. We lost eventually on the third base but I took Bravo on the second, and Alpha on the third! I think I was the highest scoring player on my team too! 🙂
The Playstation 3 component cables worked as advertised. I booted it up but didn’t play anything and all that distracting interference is gone! Woohoo!
Looks like the colour settings are saved per monitor input. When I switched to component or back to VGA it had bounced back to sRGB. Nice.
The only downside now is that the Xbox plays in 1920×1080 while the PS3 plays in 720p.
See that nice dip in the graph for this week? I started to preload the cache used by WP Super Cache last Sunday and it’s made a noticeable difference in the load on my server here. The big spike is the preloading process.
I’ve always discouraged users from preloading the cache (Askapache Crazy Cache will do this for any cache plugin), mainly because of the possible problems so many files will cause for hosting companies. If you have thousands of cache files, it’s going to take so much longer to recover from a disk crash.
On the other hand, Google will now be using speed as a metric for judging how “good” a website is. In the past this plugin ignored the pages visited by bots because the bots only visited each page once so caching a page after the fact was pointless. The page, all pages, have to be cached first before Google ever visits.
That’s what it looks like. Once you start preloading it launches a wp-cron job to fetch 100 posts, then schedules another job 10 seconds in the future to fetch another 100 posts until it finishes. It also disables garbage collection of old pages, but making comments or posts will still clear out the appropriate cached files.
It only caches single posts right now. It may not be worth caching archive or tag pages because many sites already tell bots to ignore those pages as the server is doing less work it will serve those archive pages more quickly anyway.
The preloading only works if you’re using the plugin in Supercache or “ON” mode. It’s still a work in progress but has worked fine here. As well as the preloader the development version of the plugin has:
It also has a number of bug fixes and other features added too.
I need testers though, so grab the development version from the download page. Install it and please leave feedback here or preferably on the support forum.
Get 400 MS points for Xbox Live when you download the Red Dead Redemption multiplayer free roam trailer. Well, if you’re one of the first 5,000 to do so. The promotion started yesterday and I just started my download a minute ago when I remembered. Hope I got in on time. (UK only, but come on, I’m just over the Irish Sea!)
More on this Joystiq post.
Hands up if you were a fan of 2000AD back in the day? It’s still going, maybe not so strong, these days. I picked up a copy a while back and it’s reduced to a what seems like a few pages of stories with adverts thrown in here and there. It reminded me why I rarely bought comics. I was too impatient to “wait until next week to find out the stunning conclusion to this week’s story!” Thankfully friends did buy it and I had more than a few copies of the comic myself when curiosity got the better of me.
As you may know I have an Amazon wishlist which is occasionally frequented by users of my plugins who very very occasionally will buy me something from it (and each and every gift is much appreciated!)
Anyway, I read with sadness that one of the artists behind the very successful Nemesis The Warlock series in 2000AD, John Hicklenton died a few weeks ago. I went searching and found The Complete Nemesis the Warlock: Bk. 1 and The Complete Nemesis the Warlock: Bk. 2 and promptly added both to the list in the hope that someone might buy it.
I was lucky! A few short weeks later the postman delivers Book 2 into my grubby hands and I have Daniel Jacobs to thank for it. Memories come flooding back as I soak in the art work. That story was just the craziest and grittiest thing I ever read. Only thing is now, I’ll have to find a copy of Book 1 somewhere or order it from Amazon myself!
In all seriousness, this post is in part made because of the death of a neighbour I’ve known all my life. I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time and it was a shock when I heard the news. He was a quiet man but always had a ready smile and had a great collection of capacitors, resistors and other electronics.
After his removal from the funeral home last week I spoke to a woman who was standing near my car. She asked who had died and I told her, to which she replied, “He worked for Dunlops didn’t he?”
Small world, but nice to be remembered.
My female HDMI to male DVI-D connector arrived this morning. I’m still waiting on the Xbox HDMI cable and the PS3 component cables. The seller must have felt guilty about charging me so much for shipping that he gave me 3 plugs!
I grabbed a HDMI cable from downstairs and plugged the Xbox 360 into it, and the other end into the DVI-D port on my Dell 2405 LCD monitor. It reset to 640×480 resolution first, but I quickly bumped that up to 1920×1080. Picture quality is ok but nothing to write home about. The screen is a little dark which I had read about on forums. Brightening the screen helped as did setting the brightness in Battlefield Bad Company 2 but it still looked rather dull. It’s impossible to change the contrast which would certainly have helped.
I fired up BC2, and lo and behold, the screen stayed in 1920×1080! I’ve attached a gallery of shots from the game below. Unfortunately the camera lies and brightened up the screen. The dashboard shot is more representative of what it looks like and that was darkened by 2 stops!
I tried the PS3 through the HDMI to DVI-D connector too, but all I got was a black screen with a slightly less black square in the middle. Thanks HDCP in action there. The PS3 won’t even show the desktop or games without it and of course my monitor doesn’t have it. I really need to just get a new one with a HDMI port don’t I? Any recommendations? It has to be used as a PC monitor too.
As a bonus, do you know who this character is? You’ll really be showing your retro credentials if you recognise him!
I added this 24 inch monitor to my Amazon wishlist. You never know, some kindly soul who uses my plugins may decide to treat me! 🙂