A month with Ubuntu

Well, it’s the 31^st, and that means it’s just about time to get started with the month with Linux. I’ve most of the day set aside for backing stuff up and getting Ubuntu up and running, and Wednesday should mark the first day of bi-weekly updates. As an aside, apparently bi-weekly can mean both twice a week and once every two weeks. Bizarre, no? Anyway, in this case it means twice a week.

I should also say that when I announced this idea a month or so ago I fully intended to have large swathes of it written, or at least researched, before February rolled around. Life being as it is, however, that didn’t happen, so about all I’ve done so far is faff around briefly with booting Uibuntu off a CD and, separately, discover that apparently I’m going to have some sort of trouble with disk formatting, although I’m not too sure yet what form that’ll take. The somewhat positive side-effect of this is that you’ll be getting everything hot off the press, and any new updates and whatnot should be in date when you read this.

That’s it from me today, brace for Wedneday.

Logitech V470

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve taken a bit of time about getting my workplace set-up just so. One of the key elements of any PC setup is obviously the mouse, and the only must-have feature on my list was that it had to be wireless, in order to avoid wire clutter, and it had to be bluetooth, so as I could make use of the E6400’s integrated bluetooth and avoid having a dongle hanging out the side.

Unfortunately, the market isn’t exactly saturated with bluetooth mice. Microsoft have a handful of bluetooth mice, none of which are exactly easy to get hold of, and Logitech are the same. In fact, one of the few bluetooth mice that I could actually find was the Logitech V470. I also considered one of the Microsoft laptop ones, but I don’t really like the idea of a mouse being smaller than usual purely for portability – how much room are you actually saving by having a slightly smaller mouse?

Anyway, the V470 was available and had some good reviews, so I took the plunge. So far it’s been by turns perfectly adequate and absolutely infuriating. Mostly it’s vey good, and if it could turn 95% of the time into 100% I’d recommend it without hesitation. Unfortunately (for it and me) it can’t, and so about 5% of the time it inexplicably refuses to connect until it’s been restarted 3 or 4 times. Why this is, I’ve no idea, and it’s one of those faults that’s so intermittent that I just know I’ll never get around to fixing it, and can’t possibly justify sending it back.

Asides from all that, it’s a vey good piece of kit; striking to look at, comfortable to use, nice and simple 3 button design and with a tilt-scrolling wheel to boot. It’s quite precise, perfectly adequate for any gaming bar the twitchiest of twitch shooters, and all-round very appealing. But for the niggle, highly recommended.

My gaming wish-list

I play games a bit. I'm certainly not a hard-core gamer, but I do like the occasional bit of escapism. A week or so back I posted a list of my favourite games, and for the most part those are objectively very very good. That said, there's problems with all of them. DeusEx has poorly implemented stealth. Half-Life 2 doesn't have much by the way of stealth at all, and there's no real opportunity to influence events - either you finish the level or you play again. Call of Duty is great in the squad parts, but once you get into the corridor bits it's just like any other corridor shooter youo care to mention. 

All that said, here's my wishlist for developers. Of course no game's perfect, but there are some that are a lot further from it than others...

1) Stick to you're strengths - Call of Duty is getting a withering stare right now, as is Assassins Creed and many others besides. When a game does one thing really really well, don't pad it out with stuff that isn't so good. Call of Duty had wholly unnecessary corridor bits that took away from the majesty of some of the set-pieces, and they just shouldn't have been there. End of.

2) If you're doing something right... - DeusEx 2. Need I say more? Well, I will anyway. The biggest crime ever perpetrated against any franchise, and that idiot-genius Spector had the gall to claim it made the gameplay more "streamlined". Running down an empty tunnel with no enemies, weapons or storyline would be streamlined too, but that doesn't mean we want to do it.

3) If the story's crap... - Assassin's Creed. I'll admit, I played it for all of an hour or so, but what the hell was the point of the modern-day bit? Why did that need to be there at all? It might turn out to be an incredibly interesting story, in the end, but when it seems like padding leave it out. 

4) Settings - Some settings are genuinely cool, and I don't mind that, for example, World War 2 has been the setting for so many games. It was a momentous event in history, and that's fine. Post apocalyptic settings are another thing though. I'm thoroughly sick of them, because they just seem to be an excuse to not bother fitting civilisation into the story-line.

5) Weapons - Why are selections so limited? Surely you could put 50 different weapon types in a game, each with its own characteristics, and it would add loads without taking a significant amount of development time. Or am I missing something? Even in WW2 games, you could have some officers having different pistols or something, using the same ammo as normal pistols but better range or accuracy or something.

And there's some other stuff I'll get to, but that's basically it. I'll have my ultimate game wish-list up sometime soon too, that'll be one worth watching.

And as an entirely random bonus question, name a film which features no stairs whatsoever including no natural staircase-type features. There's a poser...

Like many people, I have delusions of being able to accurately predict future tech trends. This condition can be rather unhealthy, and the whole situation has been horribly exacerbated by my accurately predicting a Blu-ray victory in the last format wars, a prediction which was published on a school magazine at the time and so is verifiable as a fact. My more impressive prediction by far to date, unfortunately, was never committed to publication: 5 years ago I commented that a small, cheap laptop, based on something like VIAs mini-itx series, would sell like hot-cakes. Imagine how I feel now...

Anyway, in order to feed my delusions of grandeur, I need more predictions, and accurate ones at that. Without further ado, then, my current list of predictions (probably incomplete, but at least I’ll get the most pressing ones down):

1)     Wireless HD – If you’ve followed the coverage of CES this year you’ll have seen talk of wireless HD. Brilliant and all as the technology is, I don’t think it will be anything like commonplace for at least another 3-5 years. Even if it’s easy to use, most people will still go for the cheaper and simpler cabled components. The idea of having a TV wirelessly linked to an I/O box of sorts is being bandied around too, and again seems brilliant, but the associated cost means that it’ll remain a high-end only feature for the immediate future.

2)     Blu-ray – As mentioned above, I’ve been right about blu-ray before. People do like to point out that that was a 50-50 call though, so here’s one that’s not – 2010 will be the year blu-ray finally get’s decent mainstream lift-off, but it still won’t emulate DVDs success because of on-demand streaming (youtube-esque) and the fact that most people simply don’t care about higher definition, unless they’ve loads of cash to throw around. In fact, the only reason I see blu-ray taking off at all is that it’ll be approaching price-parity with DVD by then.

3)     The Internet – If you haven’t already heard, we’re due to run out of IP addresses in the next  few years. My bold and wholly predictable response is that it’ll be sorted by then, for the simple reason that there are too many obscenely rich companies who need the internet to keep operating (Google being the prime one, but also Dell, Microsoft and just about anyone else you care to name, especially the big telecoms players). On a related side-note, I love the thought that the internet was designed to accommodate a few dozen devices (at most), but was built with probably the biggest margin of safety ever seen, which still wasn’t enough. No way I can look too badly wrong after that...

4)     3D – There are a whole load of competing 3D technologies, from the Nintendo Wii –based tracking system (here) to Nvidia's solution (here) with a whole host of others in between. It will take some time before this hits mainstream, however. Games will benefit first, for the simple reason that they’re already 3D, and name one decent 3D film you’ve seen (recently or ever). Oh, and a solution which involves glasses simply won’t win punters over, nor is the Wii head-tracking system likely to achieve more than a modicum of success because it won’t work with films. Could make it into to next Wii though...

5)     5) Smartphones/portable computing – The growth of portability in computing is as inevitable as Sony’s next proprietary format, I’m afraid (there may very well be a memory stick rant soon...).  Good thing? Only sort of. Anyway, my bold prediction is that by the end of this year there still won’t be anything that can touch the iPhone interface-wise, for reasons I can’t fully get my head around. That’s as is though. Slightly more out there as a prediction,  the ability to e-mail on the go (blackberry style, though not necessarily with the same ease of use) will be ubiquitous within 3 years (not much less than that, certainly, and it could take 4).

And there you have it, my first round of predictions. I know there are a couple more squirreled away back there somewhere, and once I remember them I’ll be sure to make them known. For now though, that’s it. Oh, and don’t forget, a Month With Linux starts Sunday week, so that means first major update by Wednesday. Stay tuned…

Programs you really should try

It goes without saying that not everyone uses the same programs*. People use their PCs for different things, and that’s fine. Even still, there are a great many wonderful programs out there that people simply don’t hear about, for whatever reason. Seeing as how technological enlightenment is one aim of this blog, I will, from time to time, put together a short list of programs which at the very least deserve a quick look**. I’ll try to stay away from the obvious ones, but a quick mention of Firefox and VLC can’t go amiss, can it?

So yeah, if you haven’t already, you should really go and install Firefox and VLC on your computer. Firefox because (even though I’m using Chrome at the moment) it’s the best browser out there, and VLC because if VLC can’t play a video or audio file, whoever made it was being a pretentious git in their format selection. It is without a library, however, which leads me to my first recomendation:

1)      Songbird (www.getsongbird.com) – Songbird shamelessly models itself on Firefox, from the URL (similarities to getfirefox.com, for anyone who’s just got out of bed...) to the walnut theme (see below). And you know what? I hope it can emulate Firefox’ success. As it stands it’s pretty good, which won’t cut it, but with sufficient support who knows how good it could be? And for die-hard winamp/foobar2000/whatever users, I will continue my hunt for the perfect media player, never you fear.

2)      TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org) – Basically for file encryption, but also so much more. Using truecrypt allows you to create a virtual encrypted disk within a file, which you then mount using the truecrypt tool. There’s more though – you can have two virtual disks in one, accessed depending on which password you put in. Just like if you were a spy, truecrypt gives you the opportunity to have a special “under duress” password. Quite who’s going to put you under duress to get a look at your dirty pictures is your own business (the mother-in-law, perhaps?) but it is a cool tool whether you need it or not. And free, because who pays for software these days?

3)      Openoffice.org – Is this too obvious for the list? Maybe, but seeing as how I’ve yet to profile my readers I really don’t know. Anyway, if you’re in need of Microsoft Office for free with only features you never use missing, this is it. If you already have Office, openoffice is better at opening corrupted files, for some very technical reason or other.

4)      Cooliris (www.cooliris.com) – A very (very) cool piece of software which can, under certain conditions, be of some very limited practical use.  Displays search results on a kind of interactive wall which you can zoom up and down and... you know, I can’t really explain it too well. Just check it out yourself, OK? OK.

And that’s it for this time. Please do share your own favourites, and any thoughts on these, when you get around to trying them. Oh, and if they make your PC implode I amn’t liable, so don’t even think about suing. I mean that.

 

*I know, I know, programme is how I really should be spelling this seeing as how I claim to speak Hiberno-English, but for the purposes of this blog I think some sort of hybrid internet speak will have to do. And I know nobody really cares how I spell program, but I do, so deal with it.

** All my recommended programs will be free, always. Unless I find something really really good, in which case I suppose I might make an exception. Maybe.

Cool things you can't do with an iPhone

Sure there are loads of cool things you can do on your iPhone (or, if you’re like me, someone else’s iPhone...). There are also, however, many cool things you can’t do. Here’s my top 5:

5) Project – That’s right, you can’t use the iPhone as a projector. Why? God knows. I can only imagine how I’d feel if I spent however much on a phone plus 18 month contract and found that it didn’t have a projector. Think of the parties which just wouldn’t work without a projector. What do you mean only I want to play Halo at parties? Everyone wants to play Halo at parties.

4 ) Videos – slightly less flippantly than the above post, surely it should be capable of decent videos? I genuinely thought that shooting videos was now standard on just about any phone. Seems not. Apple, get your house in order.

3) Instant Messaging – Oh for the love of god, we’re all using IM these days. Fine, our phones might not seem ideal for it, but we text so why on earth not IM? There is, as far as I can see, no excuse for it not to be supported straight out of the box. What are they at up in Cupertino? Well?

2) Voice activated calling – I have to take it on trust that it doesn’t have this one, but appareantly it doesn’t. How the hell not? I remember lying sick in bed the better part of a decade ago with my Siemens s35i and trying to teach it how to call people by voice command (top tip: don’t try this while siffering from a bad cold. For reasons you can probably guess at, it isn’t the best idea in the world).

1) VOIP – How does it not support voice over IP? Surely there’s nothing cooler than free calls? Well in my mind there isn’t and once again Apple falls short.

So am I jealous of people who can actually afford an iPhone? You betcha. However I have made myself feel a little better with this list. So if you can’t afford an iPhone, don’t feel so bad. And if you have, stop feeling so smug. Even if I was struggling by number 5...

My Gaming Life

Although gaming has been forced to take a back seat of late, what will all the other non-gaming thin like University and exams and such-like going around, I still very much consider the games I grew up with to be a big part of my identity. Not only that, but I think most people have a top-10 games that says a lot about them. Without further ado, my all-time top-10 games ever (not necessarily in order of objective quality, but rather subjective nostalgia and so on):

10. The Lion King (PC) – I know what you’re thinking. “What the hell??” probably sums it up fairly well. Thing is though, this game was one of the first I ever played, way back in the early nineties (I know it’s not way back for everyone, but for me that’s dawn of time type distance back). I may have been only four when I first played it, but I can tell you that even on easy this game was anything but; playing on easy you got 9 lives to last the entire game, including some fiendishly difficult platform jumping bits. Having played it (although I never finished it) allows me to rightfully claim to have been on the scene back when gameplay difficulty levels were hard, very hard and impossible. My biggest nostalgia trip of the list, don’t worry about it getting worse from here...

9. Goldeneye (N64) – Did I finish it? Absolutely not. Did I even play the single player? Once or twice, maybe. In fact, I never even owned an N64, let alone this particular game, but that didn’t stop me from loving it. The first multi-player FPS I ever played, and man was it fun. I would say that I made friends with people who had it just because they had it, but they might read this. And besides, it isn’t true.

8. Dune II (PC) – Fatally flawed by modern standards, Dune II nonetheless makes my list not only because it was the first proper modern RTS, but because it was possibly the first game I ever really fell in love with. Sure you could only select one unit at a time, and this made proper strategising difficult. And sure, there are any number of foibles which would render it absolutely unplayable nowadays. But it still makes the list, because even though I’ll probaby never again play it again I still tell people how great it is at the drop of a hat. Like right now. In fact, I’d almost go so far as to say that this whole blog post was just an escuse to bring up Dune II again...

7. Wolfenstein 3D (PC) – The original, and still just about playable after all these years. What else can you say about Wolf3D? Well, if you haven’t played the ghost level you’re missing out on one of the finest pieces of video-gaming in all of ever. Ever. And the sequel was very playable too (a sequel for which they released a free multiplayer component, which was nice of them. You didn’t even have to buy the original). Doom may be more remembered, but Wolf3D has a special place in my heart that Doom will never take.

6. Rise of Nations – Despite being a better game than AOE2, RON is pipped to 6^th for very sentimental and utterly silly reasons. The biggest problems it suffers from are that those last four library reasearches just make things silly during big multiplayer games, and that its campaign map pales in comparison to the total war series. Still a top-notch game though, and very much still one of the best strategy games around 5 years on.

5. Age of Empires 2 – The first one was very good, the third one not so much, but in AOE2 Ensemble Studios crafted a masterpiece. Technically inferior the RON, AOE2 was only knocked from its pedestal of LAN game of choice in this house because Vista PCs and XP PCs won’t play nice when it comes to AOE2. A crying shame, if you ask me.

4. Rome: Total War – Just about the finest strategy game ever conceived. If there was a multiplayer campaign it’d be up around #1. The strategy map in itself sould have been released and done quite well, but the tactically brilliant battles just... I can’t even describe it, to be honest. In fact, you dig out a copy of Rome and play it right now, I’m off to eat a dictionary. Maybe then I’ll be able to write a decent review of Empire: Total War, which is just a few short months away.

3.Call of Duty – Utterly gripping, beautifully atmospheric, brilliantly authentic. The gameplay is varied, the weapons are satisfying, the AI relatively believable. I could say more, but there’s non need – this is the perfect straight-forward shooter.

2. Deus-Ex – just pipped to the post, Deus-Ex is a work of genius. If the combat was a little smoother and the stealth a little more like Splinter-Cell, the you’d have the perfect game. Except even if Deus-Ex had done this, its memory would still be sullied by Deus-Ex 2, which was a fine game except good-god-almighty, how did they let it ship carrying the Deus-Ex brand? They could have shipped it as a straight-forward shooter by just changing a few character names and they would have avoided all the public hate. But no, they didn’t, and now Deus-Ex 3 is coming and we don’t know what to think. The original can still stnad proud though, but then that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

1. Half-Life 2 (including episodes) – Storyline. Characters. Gameplay. Weapons. Enemies. Set-pieces. Level-design. Graphics. Vehicle bits. Non-vehicle bits. Everything. That is all. Oh, and the fact that it was the only one of the big 3 of 2004 that exceeded expectations. Much more than just a shooter, this was absolutely epic. Oh, and for once there were worthwhile expansions made.

So there you have it, my top 10 (although I’m already getting a little worried about some of the ones I left out). See you all on Wednesday!

slotMusic

First off, after something approaching a week of “update on a Wednesday” policy I’ve decided to push the boat out and start posting on Saturdays too. Also, the Month with Linux preperation continues apace, Ubuntu has emerged as the distro of choice and the Intrepid Ibex (otherwise known as Ubuntu 8.10)  awaits deployment. Stay tuned for the February first start date. And on to your regular scheduled blog...

Sometimes, important stuff slips under my radar. In spite of generally priding myself on being up to date with tech news as it becomes available, I do sometimes miss things. One of those things happened in September, and by sheer dumb luck I stumbled upon it the other day.

Some of you may have heard about this, something called slotMusic (for those who missed it, the story is available at tinyurl.com/8k5uop). I wasn’t actually at the meeting where this new format was conceived, but I can only assume at what happened was that someone decided that if consumers could have CDs only smaller, without the artwork and worse quality, they’d bite. There are 44 comments on that article, and every one that isn’t moaning about piracy is pointing out the blindingly obvious stupidity inherent in this whole concept. This was never a format that was going to take off.

Now I sympathise with the music industry, I do. I appreciate that it must be hard to go from being a source of music everyone adores to being an industry so hated that even otherwise decent people are willing to pirate (not steal*) your products. It’s pretty clear why it’s happened though, and I’m not convinces it’s all really worth repeating here. Perhaps just a quick recap? Okay:

Conveyer belt talent, manufactured talent, unwillingness to take risks, unwillingness to try new things, unwillingness to accept new things, unwillingness to view their customers as anything but parasites, suing their customers, inability to realise why their business is failing, complete lack of perspective. And probably some other stuff.

So what I want to do is set down exactly what needs to be done, including things that anyone with half a brain can see to be self-evident. This is, if you like a cut-out and keep guide to the music industry. Unfortunately for them, the first thing that needs to go is them.

A semi-recent article in Rolling Stone Magazine (and by that I mean 2004 - tinyurl.com/3yzvky) shows that on a $15.99 CD the Label and Publisher take $5.43. The artist gets (and a drum roll wouldn’t be inappropriate here) $1.60. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that making music costs money. There does need to be some level of reward for those who find and nurture talent but, and this is important, a) the internet now makes people who “find talent” a little redundant, and b) there’s something wrong when the label makes $1.70 profit per CD and the artist’s total royalties amount to $1.60.

So how better to do it? Well, for a start, let’s get a bit more for our money. I still like CDs, I do, but right now they simply don’t represent value for money much of the time. How about instead of a CD we get a CD and DVD – standard music CD, then a DVD with a higher quality version of the songs (for those who are into that sort of thing) and then various extras – interviews with the band, how long would they take to throw together? I could do it in a couple of hours, couldn’t add noticeably to the cost of the finished product, but they do add noticeably to the perceived value, as well as very strongly differentiating them from downloads.

Speaking of downloads, I must say I feel a little cheated here. Napster was released way back in 1999 (that’s almost a decade ago, remember). There still isn’t an equivalent legal service. You might say “iTunes!” to which I would reply “They charge extra for unprotected songs, and are an absolute nightmare to... actually hang on a sec, that first point is more than enough. I’ve paid for it, why should you get to say what I do with it?”. All the other stores around either suffer from a piss-poor interface, limited range, ridiculous restrictions or unrealistic pricing. I mean, for product with no unit- costs, 99c suddenly isn’t so cheap. And that’s not to mention the fact that there’s geographic restrictions on most of those services so (for example) I can’t purchase music online from amazon or play.

I could carry on further. I could go back to the start of this thing and point out all the reasons why slotMusic was doomed before it began. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll leave with heart-felt plea to all those horribly out-of-touch music executives out there: if you want your industry to survive, get your heads together now and say “we’re floundering, we need to have all the music in the world on one site (or preferably loads of sites) and we need to do it soon” . Or don’t. The world will hardly miss the middle-men of music, will we?

 

*Piracy is not stealing, because stealing implies that something is taken from someone and that that person no longer has that item. While it is certainly a crime, it is not now, nor ever will be, equivalent to theft. And I’ll take no arguments on that either.

Blogger... Oh, and Happy 2009!

I did post yesterday (and before midday too, as promised), but for some reason it claims to have been posted on Sunday, which is a little bizarre. I started on it on Sunday, so that's probably the reason. I'm on it, don't panic, stay calm, it won't happen again...

Also, according to my good friend Google Analytics, there are now some dozen or so semi-regular visitors, which is excellent as far as I'm concerned - at that rate, assuming exponential growth, we'll have the whole world reading in... 40 days? It was a rough night last night so don't hold me to that, the maths may be a little off... 

To clarify the state of play, Wednesday is very much still the official blogging day, although I will be posting intermittently (like this) on top of that. But if you're planning regular visits it's Wednesday at midday is the time to do it. I might look into getting really fancy and getting an rss feed going to help keep everyone in the loop, perhaps blogger already has that functionality? I'll look into it.

To everyone of those who've visited as couple of times, post a comment, say hello, let's get a bit of a community feeling going here. Oh, and happy new year to everyone, first-, second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-time visitor, whatever it may be. Let's all have a great 2009, shall we?