Just wanted to inform everyone of why I have not been posting.
1: I have been very, very busy with school, work and other affairs.
2: I did not like all the “features” WordPress was giving me.
4: My theme messed up and WordPress stopped hosting things for me.
3: I would like to start a new blog soon, but with Google’s Blogger service.
5: Thank you all who still use this as a referal site, I know it has plenty of useful information.
nikoPSK
Here I am now, in a perfect (to my standards at least) windows setup which took me awhile to configure. I’m sorry, this is the reason I have been away these past couple days. Everything is all set now though, so you can expect me to be back on track soon.
Well, I have a Windows disk with service pack zero. Yes, zero, no service packs on it. So, off I went to install it and then as soon as I connect to the internet, boom, I get MSblaster.exe which is indeed quite fun. So I had to reinstall Linux, burn service pack two, install XP without connecting to the internet, install AVG and then be happy.
I’m sad to say that whole process did take quite some time, and I haven’t even gotten my instant messaging (maybe Miranda?) client up yet. I did manage to get drivers for my Audigy, Printer and graphics card though, all of which work great.
I also installed Steam, yes, the main reason for my switch. The games wouldn’t work for some reason under Wine, and Counterstrike and Garry’s Mod are too good to waste 25 dollars on; so here I am now. I will return to the land of happiness, once the source engine gets ported to Linux.
Anyways, another thing I enjoy about Windows besides the games, is all the wonderful little tweaks that make you feel so gratified once you complete them. For instance, setting up your own OEM logo in system properties is an interesting one.
Also, when I lost the 512 megabytes from using CCleaner, made me feel a whole lot better right there. I’ll be playing around with my old settings in the next few days and exploring programs. AVG had a major overhaul since I last saw it, and works as well as it used to, maybe even better.
Well, off I go for a bit of Counterstrike, I’ll say adios for now. Don’t worry about me, Windows is good stuff, but many people exploit it 😥 . Off to get the just released service pack three. Thanks, and I’ll keep up my weblog as well.
Bye now!
nikoPSK
I finally got Ubuntu Hardy up to my likings and got my SoundBlaster Audigy working. Overall Hardy is a very nice operating system and I really only had one kink so far, but I’ll explain my rough ride on trying to install it. So the reason I didn’t post for the last two days was because of my troubles.
I started by downloading the .iso from the official Ubuntu website and then burning it with Brasero. I then booted into the liveCD, explored a bit and tried to get my sound working. After awhile I just decided to install it and try to fix my sound a bit later.
It was at about 75 percent through the install and then it said it encountered an error. I was doing more than a couple things at the time so I thought maybe my overloading the system caused the failure, so I restarted the process. It failed again when I had just left it so I just rebooted and ran the disk check, there was apparently one error and I couldn’t do anything about it.
Generally I always do a clean install to remove all my useless files (I back up my important ones of course 😛 ) and with the failed install was really left with nothing. I couldn’t download the alternate Hardy .iso in the liveCD as I didn’t seem to have permissions to my other drive.
So I grabbed my old Gutsy CD I received with ShipIT and installed. I downloaded the alternate version (which is a text based installer) and installed that over clean Ubuntu Gutsy. After I got that, I configured a few things to my liking and then went around asking for help on my sound problem.
When I logged out to test the updated ALSA drivers to see if maybe that would help (my good friend Jon told me they would, but in the end… just wait) but then Xorg randomly broke and wouldn’t fix with a simple dpkg-reconfigure command, so off I went to go reinstall Hardy.
I got back in, customized everything to my liking again and then was messing around in alsamixer (I honestly kept setting everything back to default), then my magical pony powers made my speakers work again. I honestly don’t know how I did it, but it’s better than crappy sound from my EasyCall speaker-phone hub or just static from my Audigy.
So now, here I am, happy as can be and just about to start a game of Nexuiz with my great buddy Nathan. Things can’t really get any better. So if you excuse me. I’ll go enjoy Hardy some more and play a bit of Nexuiz. Talk to you later!
Best,
nikoPSK
Defcon is now another great game which I just tried out. I’ve known about it for awhile now; seeing as PC Gamer has been ranting and raving about it for some time now; but only remembered to visit the site and give the demo a shot.
What I just discovered is that the kind developers (who actually care! Applause.) hand out a Linux version in the form of a tarball for those who want as well. It’s a very entertaining game and I’ll add more details.
It’s an overhead view of the globe which you can freely zoom in and out of; the continents are defined by a blue glowing outline and the units are neon basic shapes too. Defcon is highly based off the movie Wargames (which I saw at the diefenbunker in Ottawa). It goes through the five stages of warfare, or defcon.
You start off at defcon five and progress down to one. You can do more and more things as it counts down. For instance; at level three, you can send aerial units over to attack and at level one; you can start using nukes.
It’s very intense at times; and the music fits it very well. It’s a bit heartless though when you see the message hovering above the town you just attacked saying: “LONDON 4.2 MILLION DEAD” and hearing the once in awhile scream/ moan, but it’s a great game nonetheless.
The tutorial will teach you all you need to know once you’ve grabbed it from the homepage where I’ve linked to below, it’s a very good walk-through and taught me a lot more than I already knew of this game.
I give this a very high score and recommend you try it. It’s a very neat style of playing that was put into it. With land air and sea it stays interesting, an the countering of enemy moves will keep you playing strategically (or just leave you dead). I will enjoy this and possibly purchase this through Steam (yes, they have it there). Let’s play global thermo nuclear war.
Home page:
http://www.everybody-dies.com/
Instruction .pdf (for the curious ones 😉 ):
http://www.everybody-dies.com/downloads/manual_web.pdf
Have fun,
nikoPSK
After a day of watching the original Zorro accompanied by a live orchestra (which was great), I came home looking for a fun game. My friend had tried the Audiosurf demo and loved it, so off I went to grab it. It’s very entertaining and works fine in Linux under Wine which is great too.
Audiosurf is available in different forms of resale, the most widely recognized on Valve’s Steam. I decided to get it and give it a shot. I’ll explain it’s game-play first though. You can “ride” your music in different ships that you unlock from playing all the ones available to at the time.
The point is to make clusters of three or more of the blocks (in all except the “mono” rides, there are multiple colours) to get points they are located along the highway which is essentially your music. There are also power-ups that you can grab which will modify/ add blocks in your stack.
There are three stacks per normal play (two per player if in a multi-player ship) which if you overfill, you’ll lose points and can’t collect blocks for a certain amount of time due to you “re-spawning”. I haven’t tried all of the ships yet; mainly due to being too entertained by just the mono versions (they are easier too 😉 ).
I enjoy the excellent visuals as well; there are great particle effects and the track and blocks go along very well with your music due to some form of software which is quite revolutionary, the track will also bump along to your music if there is a strong beat (the track sometimes does barrel rolls too!). Other background visuals are nice too; and none of them get too distracting. I also greatly enjoy the scoreboards to see if I ever receive a place on one.
There’s lots of minute things and other twists and turns on this game (which style is wonderful; never really seen anything like it) which you may discover yourself when you give the demo version a shot. As well as being able to choose your own songs to play on; there is also a radio feature where new songs are set up every week; but one song (my personal favorite), the Audiosurf overture, remains there forever.
I highly suggest you try it and give me your feedback, I enjoy it’s “genre” and you probably will too. Give it a shot and look at some of the screen-shots and other information/ news on it’s official site. Have a blast of audiovisual gaming fun.
Audiosurf homepage:
http://www.audio-surf.com/
Audiosurf overture:
http://www.mediafire.com/?nzh4ipvxlto
Farewell,
nikoPSK
I realized something yesterday, that my best friend Nathan pointed out to me. Ubuntuforums is my home. I just can’t really leave it. It was my first forum and although I had no real clue of forums back then; it was fun just the same.
I learned quite a few lessons there and gained a lot of friends. I enjoyed it very much; but last time I visited to check up on it; it looked and felt different… darn VBulletin update makes it feel new. All the important people to me left as well, which is really sad. Anyways; I’ve also been hanging less and less around my original buddies from Ubuntuforums as I’ve been devoting times to other less important things.
It’s just I’ve changed a lot since my departure and even since my joining. I really want to somehow start anew with a clean slate. I have learned much in mainly good manners and the likes from my time spent at the forums, but devoted too much of my time to the forums, generally two or so hours a day.
I think also I spend way too much time doing other things now. I used to have a round of friendly Nexuiz every day or so; it was immensely fun, and I need to spend more time with my friends now playing this game.
I also want to say sorry to all those that were around when I changed to an extent. I acted different (which a few of you did not like) around you and now realize my mistake. I’ll soon try to get back on Ubuntuforums if my schedule permits.
I mean, it’s been great knowing you all and we’ve sure had lots of fun times together and must more must be had. Nathan and I came to terms and now I feel better. I must stay myself as if you first met me.
Well, this is a bit of a random post; but it’s all I could muster today. I do feel better now that it’s all out of my way and hope to get back on track with Ubuntuforums as a casual playtime forum where I’ll answer a few support questions every once in awhile.
Sorry, it’s hard to explain it all,
nikoPSK
By the way. happy earth day everyone. I’ve seen all the little changes take place today such as wearing green shirts and Google doing it’s normal logo change. Every day should be earth day though as we have a crisis that everyone is basically ignoring and I guess I’ll talk to the computer users here on power consumption.
We geeks all want power ( 
), but we need to draw the line somewhere. I know I spend multiple hours on computers each day; but I at least turn mine off at night. My computer takes more than double the annual usage of power my refrigerator uses (and we actually tested) which is rather alarming.
I know multiple people (shh) who keep their computers on for days on end which I find… erm… anyways. Just find some way to keep your power on everything low today at least. Lose your uptime and get some downtime for awhile. It shouldn’t hurt.
Anyways, I’m turning off mine three hours early today which may make a minute difference, but if everyone does that for one day, think of the energy saved. Well, before you guys start thinking I’m a tree hugger, I’ll just leave you with those words in mind and the option to make a small change.
See you around,
nikoPSK
CellWriter requires me at least to use a tablet (I have one tucked away in my cabinet) and improve my handwriting. It’s a nice application and I need to use it fully by means of looking through my drawer for my nice Wacom.
When I first fired it up I got a nice introduction regarding it’s core aspects and telling me it must first learn my handwriting. It then presented me with a grid of all the standard characters (other languages can be used too) which I drew into so it could figure out the way I “wrote” letters.
Once done that grueling task with my mouse (it’s like writing with a bar of soap… 🙄 ), I was presented with a one by eight grid or cell which would lengthen once I added the maximum amount of letters. I had to go back a few time to reteach it my writing (or have it “record” my writing) due to the already sloppy writing I own.
It stays focused once you have it open and will send itself to the tray if you want it closed/ out of the way. You hit enter (the button or key) to have all the text forwarded to the focused window’s text input area.
Aesthetically it’s pleasing which is nice since I’ve seen a few applications that function quite nice but don’t look too good. I applaud their efforts and think this will be quite useful to many in the upcoming days.
It looks cool when inputting, and is “kJeSOhe” (my attempt at writing awesome really fast with my mouse) for those of you that deem it fit. I’ll stick to the keyboard and mouse for now, but for shorter tasks I may use this. I recommend you try this with at least your bar of soap to test it’s abilities.
Download:
http://www.getdeb.net/release.php?id=2021
Have fun and enjoy!
nikoPSK
Hardy is so close to final; but for now I have my Ubuntu 8.04 liveCD release candidate to play with. I never installed any hardy alphas since I knew I’d have to grab the final anyways, but this leaves me drooling for the stable version due in four days.
I actually got the CD image via a torrent today (using deluge, not transmission 😐 ), since the direct download servers were probably being overused. It was very fast, almost seven times as fast as the previous… Anyways, I’ll announce the new features right now.
There is now Active Directory integration which “enables seamless integration of Ubuntu within an Active Directory network”. iSCSI support has been fully added into the kernel, there is memory protection which will defend (more so than normal) against malicious code, the new and improved firewall and the latest Linux kernel.
There is a bunch of new artwork as well, which I greatly enjoy and a few other features I covered in the other alpha “reviews” I did. Inkscape (my favorite!) has been introduced into a new version and a new utility which enables you to see the hard drive checking status while starting up. It replaces the text counterpart and is in the form of the Ubuntu splash screen. You can also now choose to not check the disk by pressing escape.
It comes with the Firefox beta five now as well. It comes packed with a bunch of new features and leaves me waiting for the final release of it too. All I can do now is play around with it (although, I still don’t like the Firefox theme for Linux).
Hardy heron has come far in the past while, and Ive been keeping a steady eye on it. I highly recommend that you give this a try (liveCDs are useful) and add your insight somewhere. After this, I want to see some Ibex!
Best,
nikoPSK
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