mykrocosm

A friend just upgraded his home office. Sweet setup!

(click to enlarge)

Been playing a few games of Scorched Earth 3D online with friends. It’s a really neat open-source game that throws you onto a random landscape with a bunch of computer bots, and you all get to lob weapons at each other. Winners get more cash to spend on new weapons in the next round. There’s a nice variety of bombs, guns and even nuclear weapons. The graphics are really impressive. Only a couple of drawbacks - the camera controls take some getting used to, and setting up the server side of things can get really fiddly, but it’s worth the effort.

There’s nothing like taking out an entire island with a Strangelove bomb

Just found out that the newly opened Adelaide Airport terminal has free wireless internet coverage, provided by my ISP. Not only that, but most of the terminal is powered by 1000 square metres of solar panels, apparently visible fom the air. These and other initiatives make it, for now, the most modern airport in Australia, turning it from an embarassment to a source of pride.

It’s about time!

I’m playing Homeworld at the moment - for a six year old game, it runs and looks great on my computer! In 1999, a six year old game tended to look a bit crap, what with the 16 colour graphics and all. But in 2005, a six year old game can be run at maximum detail and maximum resolution, without a single hiccup, and look very very nice.

Ground Control (funnily enough, also by Sierra) is another one from that period which also runs beautifully on today’s hardware.

So keep an eye on those bargain bins. There are awesome games in there.

Scratched CDs and DVDs - a fact of life if you rent, borrow, or lend them to friends. I’ve seen this remedy pop up in a few places : boil them in a pot on the stove for a minute or so. This heats the plastic in the disc and smoothes out the scratches.

Anyone tried this? Seems too easy to be true… but then again, I’ve seen remedies involving baby oil, toothpaste and floor wax. Currently my technique is to wet the DVD upside-down beneath the tap, keeping the top label dry, and then find the softest towel in the house to wipe it down from centre outwards to the edge. It doesn’t remove scratches, but it helps gets rid of that grotty rental gunk (what on earth do people DO to them?!)

Hmmm… reckon Blockbuster would notice if I boiled their DVDs?

Last night I decided to upgrade my broadband to the new ADSL2+ technology. As a pleasant surprise it turned out to be an instantaneous online upgrade, because Internode had already taken the liberty of moving my humble 512/128kbit plan over to their brand spanking new DSLAM.

My downloads are around the 500KB/s mark… about 4000kbit/s or 4Mbits/s. My theoretical speed (2km from exchange) should be double that, but I haven’t tried tweaking it or touched any settings in the router yet, I just rebooted it on my way out the door this morning. Even this current speed is 8 times faster than my old connection. It’s not just the downloads but the uploads that are boosted - Remote Desktop absolutely ROCKS now. I can finally use a connection with more than 256 colours!

I’ve been struggling to get comfortable with bittorrent technology for some time. The original BitTorrent client, and even many of the “improved” third party clients such as Azureus, are Java based, slow, clunky and unattractive.

I have a pretty tight firewall setup and because every torrent tracker uses a different port number I was constantly having to open and close ports, a painful and annoying process. Some of these clients claimed to support Universal Plug and Play to automagically open these ports as needed, but it never seemed to work very well.

Then one day I found BitComet.

BitComet has a very slick, sexy interface. It’s extremely responsive and beautifully designed. The software uses colours and icons very effectively to present information. UP&P works out of the box, and best of all, no Java. It’s written in C++.

Seen these get good wraps on hiking / backpacking forums :

www.hennessyhammock.com

They do look pretty cool. Hmm.. I wonder if they can make a two-person model?

Got a buzz in my pocket today from Virgin mobile. Turns out they’re increasing their SMS costs from 20c to 25c. It’s been two years since I got my phone, so I decided to check out the current offerings for a person who makes no calls and uses SMS exclusively. I’m not the most prolific texter either so I need a reasonable period in which to use up my credit.

Virgin : 25c per SMS as of Sep 01. Still 5c for Virgin 2 Virgin messages, but I’m not going to ask everyone in my address book who they’re with and even if I did, it wouldn’t make any difference. If I need to message someone, I’ll message them whether it’s 5c or 50c.

Vodafone : 25c per SMS. They’re really pushing these pre-paid monthly packages at the moment, $49 for $230 worth of calls, that sort of thing. Only catch is, when the month ends, so does all your credit. It doesn’t roll over. And there’s no way I burn through $49 worth of SMS’s in a month, let alone $230 worth.

Telstra : Are you f’g kidding?!? I did check them out just to be fair, and I saw absolutely nothing worth writing about. Their plans just suck, as usual. I bet most of their revenue comes from corporate mobiles. To paraphrase that old saw… Nobody ever got fired for buying Telstra.

Optus : Well, they have 4 different plans, including their famous ones where you can talk/SMS for free with other Optus phones, however you do have to read the fine print. These plans have a 60 day expiry and non-Optus phones attract a 25c SMS. However… Optus do have a standard pre-paid plan with no free Optus-to-Optus capabilities, but the SMS’s are 18c across the board and it has a 6 month expiry period. So your $30 charge up can go a really long way. I reckon this will be the one for me.

Unless, which is very likely, there’s a plan out there I’ve missed

We’ve got the CD images for Fedora Core 4 at work, but I’d prefer to have the DVD. Unfortunately, HTTP downloads seem to choke on files greater than 2 gb, and FTP is firewalled.

I found a little-known way to recombine the CD images, thanks to a small utility called Jigdo, the template files FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo & FC4-i386-DVD.template and an obscure forum post here.

First I used WinRAR to extract all the CD images to a single directory (C:\fc4\), explicitly not overwriting any existing files.

Then I ran the jigdo command:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1855 of the 1856 files required by the template
Copied input files to temporary file `FC4-i386-DVD.iso.tmp' - repeat command and supply more files to continue


Uh oh. I repeated the command with the pm (print missing) parameter:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file pm -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/ linux/core/4/i386/os/isolinux/isolinux.bin


Now this already exists in C:\fc4\isolinux\ so it should have been picked up. A bug in jigdo-file or the template perhaps? I downloaded the file again from that URL just in case, and it turned out to be the exact same size and date. I placed it in the root of the search path (C:\fc4\), and ran jigdo-file again:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC
4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1 of the 1 files required by the template
Successfully created `FC4-i386-DVD.iso'


Mounted the ISO in a VM and it booted. Sweet!