Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

Still off

Db0

Computer @ Home is still dead. After some testing I have decided that the CPU has died and there’s not much I can do about it. What I tried is, I unplugged everything and left the MB only with CPU and Power and it won’t start (even the PSU fan), however the power led on the MB starts which means it is still getting power. I then removed the CPU and booted it again, the led still lighted which is the same effect as before. Ergo the CPU’s dead.

I’ve been using Knoppix on the Smoothwall Firewall to have at least basic internet access but it is dead slow. I mean KDE is unusable and icewm is only marginally better. How could we even work on these thing 6 years ago? Has our OS bloated so much? Anyway, problem is that my optical mouse is USB and that antique does not support that, so I settled for keyboard manipulation, which is fine if you know the shortcuts. Unfortunately I didn’t and it was hell…

At work now, I have taken an MB from work to test it. I hope it works without too much hassle because I do not have money for upgrades even at this time.
simple hit counter

Bootbootbootboot…nah.

Db0

Crap, I came home yesterday and found my PC shut down. I tried to start it up but it refused. This sometimes happens when the power goes out in the house and back up again and until now, the solution had been to take off the power for a while (until the MB is uncharged) and put in back again.
This time however it wouldn’t boot at all. I would boot, the fans made a small jerk like starting the get power and then stopped. Another boot didn’t do anything until I removed power again. I tried a few things, mainly taking out all power except to the MB but it didn’t help either. I am afraid this might be an unrecoverable MB short-circuit and I’m seriously lacking the funds to have an upgrade at this point.

Now the error is either with the MB, the power supply or most unlikely, the CPU. All I can do at this point is change the power with one I’ll take from my job temporarily.

At least that made me do something else other than spend time in front of the screen which in my case was to sleep and prepare for the Evernight campaign.
simple hit counter

Once more into the Night

Db0

We’re once again in business, the Evernight campaign I had put on hold 7 months ago is starting once more.
One player has left (I do not want him back) and two new have arrived, Konstantis and Elena. This brings us to 5 PCs which is the optimal number for this campaign. Now I can feel a bit more secure that the encounter won’t be too hard.

Problem is that Konstantis has started working on an internet cafe which means he has a variable schedule, which means he decides the day we will play. Since that is the case I plan to make him be the “Game Crier” (the one who takes phone calls to schedule the game).
As always he decided to play the combat monkey, creating a Red Knight when he found out he didn’t have enough money to create the double sword, double gunslinging character he wished. I allowed him to take an edge when he couldn’t and I’m afraid it might disrupt the game, however I am a yes guy and it would make him happy (and shut up about those 3 exp)

Elena decided to makes a rogue-like character. I tried to dissuade her but she doesn’t seem to want to play anything else. There are two problems I foresee with this.
A. She is very inexperienced and tried to make a kind of jack-of-all-trades character. Unfortunately that is not a very good tactic for RPG, especially for heroic RPGs. The player finds it hard to shine at one place and thus get into the spotlight. The end effect is that she may get bored. Everyone needs his 15 minutes of fame.
B. She is also too similar to another player, who has the street rat archetype. I hope to give her some alternative ideas she can follow. Right now I’m thinking of a tomb raider archetype. It fits with the world and is rogue-like enough.

I also would like to have Sideris play as well but he asked me too late unfortunately. If someone drops out however he will be my first choice.

I noticed yesterday as they were making characters that I had forgotten the rules almost completely. That sucked.
simple hit counter

Admin of Fruit

Db0

I’ve just been made a SysOp over at Kiwilyrics. Sweet.
The other admins are either missing or too busy so that will allow me to fix some things that have fallen by the wayside.

In case you don’t know it, Kiwilyrics is a lyrics site using the wiki engine. This is especially helpful in the case of lyrics since there are usually a lot of typos and other mistakes. In other sites, if they allow lyrics submitions at all, you have to submit the lyrics to the admins and hope they are allowed soon. If the site sports a quick response time, that usually means that the lyrics are not reviewed at all. Fixing bad submitions is almost impossible, since the responce times are greater still.

The beauty of the wiki is that you have the power to change something immediately and it is also very hard to destroy things. See a mistype as you read a lyrics? Fixing it is only two clicks away.
Missing a song? Submit it yourself immediately. Hell, submit the whole album. Kiwizer makes that braindead easy (although it still has one or two bugs)

Bow before me for I am Op.
simple hit counter

Updates? What updates?

Db0

In case anyone reads this blog and may be wondering why I haven’t been updating the past few days (yeah right) the reason is that after the new Last.fm site came live, I have been busy making journals over there. They are mostly of a musical nature and I have even started my own small review chapter named R@W (Reviews at Work).

I do have some thing to write here about my recent vacations at Crabholes but I’m waiting to get my hands on the pictures in order to post things right, so hold on to yer drawers.
In the meantime, go and check amaroK! The new 1.3 version is out and it kicks some serious arse.

Super Scrobbler

Db0

Audioscrobbler has finally finished its update and it seems that the default user environment is Last.fm from now on.

The update was supposed to have finished by Monday but eventually, as these things usually do, it finished on Tuesday evening. I Managed to log in briefly at 1:30 am before going to bed and saw the page and skimmed through the new features. ‘Twas a bit slow.
Today I tried logging in again after coming to work but the site had b0rked and I kept getting errors or timeouts, probably the surge of traffic was too great (everyone logging in to see the new thing) and something crashed and burned. It came up after a few hours or so (It seems it was down for ~5 hours) and everything was running almost smoothly ever since. Even my winamp plugin, which couldn’t submit for the last week, managed to finally unload the ~400 songs it had in its cache.

The site layout looks great and is completely based on a scripting language instead of simple html which makes it look very cool. I would like some choice of themes but that can wait for now. It has many new features such as tagging, which is putting keywords on artists, albums or tracks for easy management and search and a personal journal.
The Journal is open but it is supposed to be used for music related things. Its neat feature is that it can link stuff through AS and put them as related terms in a sidebar (with thumbnails), making it easy for anyone reading it to locate them. I’ve already made two entries which you can find here if you so wish. I plan to use the journal as my personal review site so if you find my music taste to your liking you should check it out often.

Tagging is a great idea and I plan to use it heavily to make my collection easy to navigate and manage. Problem is that the profile editor is still a bit buggy and stops saving after using it for a while (it’s been trying to save a new tagset for two hours now ) but it can work in small batches. There is also another way to tag items, by using the tag button from the web page. It lets you easily tag items you are browsing.

I tried the new last.fm player as well. It seems they have turned from the web-based stream to a standalone program that you must install. It’s a nice idea because the web-based was not performing very well (at least for me) but they haven’t implemented proxy authentication which means I still cannot use it from work. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to use it afterward, since I do not know if the port it uses will be open from our firewall. An choice between the player and the web-player would be great at this point since not everyone has administrative rights to their computer (think employees in a company) or may want to use it on multiple computers where installing programs is not always an option.

There are some other nifty things I’ve found out such as a nice Similar Artists sidebar in every artist’s page (I’d like to know how they calculate that), an option to see a complete chart of your listening habits and not just the most popular, enhanced neighbor and friend page where it shows more info (such as their recent journal entries if any) and they even fixed the group charts that weren’t working before.

The forums seems to have been reduced in number now. The classic ones are still there but the plugins seem to have been merged.

All in all I find this a very exciting upgrade. Once the people learn the ropes and fill the place with tags and journals the AS experience will become unparalleled.
Amarok will have many things to implement, especially after the Audioscrobbler page (which is a developer’s repository now) comes up again.

Time to relax or get bored?

Db0

Well, my [tag]vacation[/tag] time is finally here and damn if I know what to do with it. I’ve got two full weeks and I really want to get on some kind of vacation but seeing as all my friends are either working, already on vacation or avoiding me, I think that in the end I’ll be left here to rot. The only bright thing in the future is a friend of mine that has volunteered to take me with her on vacation with another friend of hers and another friend of mine that may go to Chalkidiki and may take me with him.
Bah! Couldn’t be vaguer.

It’s my fault in the end I think, I never found friends that were doing this thing and now that I’m looking, it’s too late. I haven’t even managed to find company to go to the beach with, and lets not get on the subject of “friends” that forget you so easily after 6 years. Yes I’m bitter.

In the meantime I’ve been spending my time working on Wikipedia. It’s a noble cause and at least I feel that my time is wasted on something worthy, instead of, for example, games. Currently I’ve been working on Savatage and before that on Blind Guardian, mainly filling in albums or album information. Took me a while but I got them where I like them, now I’m thinking what to move on to next. And to think that all this was inspired by Kiwilyrics ever since I’ve started putting artist links to wikipedia on its pages.

Other than that, boring stuff, I’ve been desperately trying to find some new friends to go out with, and one I did have has gone to the army. It’s sad not to have someone to call isn’t it?

Of Lyrics and Kiwis.

Db0

I am sick and tired of Lyrc, which is the default lyrics database for amaroK. It has a crappy layout and search capabilities, the lyrics are many times missing, duplicated or badly submitted and the user has no power other than submitting new ones, which as a feature is badly designed as well. I want to contribute but ignoring the fact it is very tiresome to do so, their forum is in spanish or something as well which means it is very hard to communicate with someone in charge.

Disgusted I started looking for an alternative, even prepared to go as far as to found my own wiki lyrics site if I didn’t find one. Luckily I did and it exceeded my expectations. Its name is Kiwilyrics which is a smart play on the word wiki.

— Interjection —
In case you aren’t very active on the WWW (although I can’t see how you’ve got here otherwise), a [tag]wiki[/tag] is a web page who’s content is submitted and edited by its user base. The most famous example of a wiki is of course Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Here’s what it has to say about Wikis. You can find my profile there as well under Db0.
—

Back to the subject at hand then. I got so worked up with Kiwilyrics that I even created a Firefox search engine which you can find here. My goal is to make [tag]amaroK[/tag] use kiwilyrics as a lyrics database since I know they will implement wikipedia (and thus the wiki engine) in some way at version 2. Hell, I may even become a developer just to code such a feature in myself.

So to all who might be reading this, get active. Go to Kiwilyrics and submit the albums you can’t find or fix obvious errors.

I'm not well…again.

Db0

Recent developments have dropped my self-esteem and my older friends seem to have abandoned me altogether. It becomes tiresome to find that someone that you used to hang out with very often does not even go into the trouble to call you or send you a instant message. Yeah, 6 years of friendship my ass!
Psymon and Yo!Master, if you happen read this, you SUCK! You haven’t called in ages even though I did try to contact you. Yeah, have a nice time going to the beach or playing games. I know when I’m not wanted, it would be nice to know why at least…

I’ve been working on my linux desktop for the last few days. I have been using KDE and superkaramba themes. It is still a work in progress and this is what I’ve managed ’till now I still need to get the thunderbird theme to work and find some more stuff to fill me screen with.
.

I have also been lurking on the Deviant Art for a while, checking things out. It would be nice to be able to contribute something there as well but alas my artistic abilities are limited to desktop configuration and game design. However I think my sister could benefit from it. If I could just get her to register.

I also found out about Folding @ Home. It is similar to Seti@Home but it is about helping find cures for diseases like alzheimer and cancer so I think it is a much better cause. Since I have a relative power over the company’s network where I work I have installed F@H to 125 PC and got them to work for the good of all mankind. Here’s an updating sample of my contributions so far

Speaking of my work, I have been asked to provide an Active Desktop configuration. I have already cooked something up with my limited HTML/CSS knowledge but I would welcome any hints from anyone who has invested on the subject.