Tag Archives: irishblogs

The War Z: Devious criticism in an unfriendly forum

The War Z

When the developers of a game, The War Z in this case, are deleting all negative comments on the Steam forum you have to be clever to get your critical message across. (via)

I played The War Z briefly when Paul gave me a 2 day pass. It’s very like DayZ but monetised. You have multiple character slots and when one character dies you have to wait before using that character again. Apparently they’ve increased that wait from 1 hour to 4 hours except if you pay money to respawn instantly. This is after paying for the base game too! There may be issues with getting refunds too but in an interview the developers say you can get a refund from Steam. Not a great way to launch a new game.

The War Z is not for me. Running through empty scenery between locations, crawling around in the dirt avoiding zombies, watching out for other players gets boring very quickly. At least with DayZ I was able to play the excellent Arma II when I got bored of running away from zombies or dying of thirst after running across the map to attempt to meet up with friends.

TIL how to play minesweeper

minesweeper

I never bothered learning how to play Minesweeper. I remember seeing it in Windows 3.1 but I thought it was similar to Battleships and frankly, it looked basic and boring. Basic it may look but today I accidentally learned how to play it. I hope these instructions don’t knock something important out of my brain!

The number indicates how many bombs are within 1 square of the number. A 3 indicates that 3 of the 8 squares directly surrounding it are bombs. Clicking a space with no bombs, which also has no bombs around it, is like revealing a 0. When this happens, the game automatically reveals all spaces surrounding the 0. If those spaces are also zeroes, it does this again. If it reveals a number, then it can go no further in that direction. That’s why clicking some spaces reveals large sections of the board with numbers at the borders of the newly empty section.
Edit: Forgot to mention that when you determine which squares are definitely bombs, right click to flag them

Finally met Michael Mamaril

I finally came across Michael Mamaril in Borderlands 2. He’s an NPC who gives loot to the player but the interesting thing about him is that he’s based on a real Borderlands fan who passed away in October 2011. Michael’s friend emailed Gearbox and they produced a eulogy and included him as a helpful character in the next game.

Android gaming with an Xbox 360 Controller

This afternoon I took delivery of an OTG USB cable for my mobile devices. I’ve previously blogged about using a PS3 controller with an Android phone but I was curious how well my wired Xbox 360 controller would work.

Plugging the OTG cable into my Nexus 7 and then into the Xbox controller was of course simple, and I had mixed results with the couple of games I tried. If you’re willing to root your Nexus 7 you can install another app that makes it easier to get things working but even with a stock Nexus 7 it worked.

First off I tried Frodo and Vice, the C64 emulators. I thought they might have support for this. Unfortunately not. Luckily Mupen64 Plus, the N64 emulator, does support an external controller! I had to redefine a few buttons, and the left analog stick but I was soon leading the races in Mario Kart 64!

I tried Shadowgun: Deadzone next. It was my first time playing this multiplayer over-the-shoulder third person shooter. The game picked up my controller perfectly! All I had to do was invert the Y axis as I normally do. I’d like to say I kicked ass but I didn’t. I got one kill to six deaths before I gave up. Looks like a good game, but it must be next to impossible to play on a small screen.

I wanted to try GTA III but I never got past the loading screen on my Nexus 7. Dead Trigger is next on my todo list. That should be fun.

I used the OTG cable to connect an external USB flash drive to my devices too. Unrooted the Nexus 7 ignores it unfortunately but my Galaxy S II picked it up and displayed a familiar USB storage notification. Here’s a video of someone playing GTA III on an SGS III. I really have to get that game working on my Nexus 7!

TCPEye: Windows network software to list Internet usage

If you use Windows and you’re curious about what’s using your Internet broadband then the free TCPEye tool will probably help you.

I used it a few weeks ago when something was sucking down gobs of data and making everything else slow. Turns out it was Windows Update, but not on my desktop machine, a laptop on my network was updating.

The odd thing with TCPEye is that CNET Downloads is in the number 1 place when searching for this tool. Reviews even link there instead of the author’s homepage!

Do more with your old MacBook

Have you got an old MacBook that Apple doesn’t support any more? Can’t install the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X on it because the CPU is too old? You’re probably seeing a warning from Chrome that Google has discontinued support for Mac OS X 10.5.3 or whatever is on that ancient beast? It’s the same with Firefox.

Flash isn’t updated either and when you go to Youtube to watch a video Chrome shows you an ugly warning that it’s outdated. Frustrating isn’t it?

What’s more, you’re probably leaving yourself open to exploits by nasties on the Internet. Problems and bugs are found in Flash all the time. Browsers and operating systems are the same too but if that software isn’t actively updated then you’re out of luck. I discovered Opera browser is still built for these old machines and it’s fast but Flash was still a problem and I needed a better solution.

As unlikely as it may seem on an Apple computer, it’s Linux that came to the rescue!

I didn’t think I could put Linux on the MacBook as there was no Bootcamp to dual boot the machine. Thanks to Zé I found the MacBook help pages for Ubuntu which pointed me towards rEFIt, a “boot menu and maintenance toolkit for EFI-based machines like the Intel Macs.” Even on an old MacBook 4,1 I could install Linux!

Installing rEFIt was simple enough, just run the package installer when I mounted the .dmg file. However the boot menu didn’t appear, even after several reboots until I pressed down ALT while rebooting.

Partitioning was a problem. I used the command line diskutil tool as suggested here but ran into problems because it couldn’t do a live resize. It would report that it ran out of space or there were too many deep links. Luckily the Ubuntu install CD comes with Gparted and after booting into the live CD I ran that and freed up 40GB of space for my new Linux install. A couple of reboots later to verify everything was working and then on to Linux!

Thankfully I didn’t run into the problems a recent Ars reviewer of Ubuntu Linux 12.10 came across. Linux installs are getting simpler and simpler. I told it to install alongside Mac OS X and let it set up partitions.

The WIFI adaptor in the Macbook requires a proprietary driver and after hooking the laptop up to an ethernet cable I started updating packages. While doing that I looked in the System settings and discovered that Ubuntu had installed the right driver without my prompting! I’m not sure when that happened but WIFI has been rock solid since.

Time to install Opera, the restricted packages (mp3 and dvd playback, etc), Java for Minecraft and finally Minecraft. Getting a Minecraft icon for Unity was a pain and I can’t find the script I used now but some quick Google-fu will find it.

Linux on the MacBook is nice and fast, even with Unity on there. I may replace that with a lighter window manager if it becomes a problem but it’s much improved on older releases. If you have an old MacBook and you don’t need some proprietary software that isn’t available for Linux then you should definitely put Linux on there. You’ll have the security of using updated software and a nice new desktop and apps to play around with!

Android: auto brightness and mute your phone

I have two great (and free) Android apps for you today:

Yet Another Auto Brightness is a useful app that will reduce the brightness of your phone display. Here’s the XDA thead about it.

Easy Mute will pause or mute music and podcasts on your phone just by placing your hand over the device. It uses the proximity sensor and you can tell it to only activate if the phone is lying flat.

It works great and it remembers it’s state when the phone is moved. This confused me at first but to replicate, cover the front of the camera to pause and then lift the phone. It will still be paused when you lift your hand off the front. After putting the phone down wave your hand over the front again and it will resume (or just unlock and hit play, the old fashioned way). (via)

Bash: compare two directories

In Unix based systems like Linux and Mac OS X there are a number of ways of comparing two directories. The simplest way is to use diff:

diff –brief -rb directory_1 directory_2

This command compares each file and reports if they differ. You can find the meanings of the options in man diff.

Diff is fine if you’re on a fast drive, if there aren’t many files or the files aren’t big. The command compares the contents of each file so it can take quite some time on a slow external drive.

If you just want to know which files are in one directory and not in the other directory it’s overkill. This little bit of Bash scripting does that however:

diff <(cd dir1 && find | sort) <(cd dir2 && find | sort)

It still uses diff, but compares the file listing of each directory instead of the files. It’s much faster and perfect for figuring out what files are out of place on my 2 relatively slow USB drives. (source)

Edit in 2021: I should have done this a long time ago. I put it in a function. Paste this into your .bashrc or .zshrc etc and reload the configuration by logging out and in or using source:

function dirdiff () { diff <(cd $1 && gfind | sort) <(cd $2 && gfind | sort) | colordiff | less -R; }

Now use dirdiff dir1 dir2 to compare two directories quickly.

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