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August 10th, 2009
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I haven’t posted in ages, life has been ordinary, not enough gaming, work blues etc etc.
Then I went to the Disco TOG LAN in Maryborough, and had a great time. Reminded me of the old AOB LANs we used to run in Canberra, except the Disco LAN goes for DAYS!
Apart from Steam being a complete pain in the arse for LAN gaming (offline mode + COD4 is a match made in hell), the gaming went very well indeed.. I played COD4, L4D, DOD Source, CS Source, TF2 with others at the LAN (there were 30 or so folk in attendance), and then alternated with Mount and Blade, Demigod and some other sp content when I needed a rest.
We all stayed in the motel which is part of the same venue, and were treated to very reasonably priced drinks and a plethora of hearty food. Best weekend in a long long time! Thanks to Disco, the Tog DODs crew and other Toggers who went, as well as the OLDR and OSOK players who also rocked up. Apart from Haahn’s shuttle box frying a beer on my desk  the experience and setup were superb.
oh, and the single best thing about the LAN was this gorgeous contraption:
MAME running on the little box, and I played 20 levels of Rygar the Legendary Warrior.. truly a blissful experience. Managed to sneak some Shinobi and Golden Axe in too… also watched a Shock vs Woody duel on Gyrus, someone played Elevator Action in front of me, nearly made me cry with forgotten joy haha! Just to prove the setup works, see the next piccy.
Disco demonstrated his questionable sexual tendencies with some Ryu ninja skills in Street Fighter 4… I refused to take photos of that!
Here are some other photos:
Woody was afraid of being stung by my harsh wit…… and his aquarium box
The insides of the shuttle box that fried my beer into molten slag by venting towards my desk
Bodella was one of 2 water cooling nuts present at the LAN.. here he is drinking the effluent during pack up!
A happy snap of the DODs crowd.
One of the water cooled setups on display (just after being assembled and beginning a prior to a leak test I think), sexy despite the fact that I felt nervous just watching it in action.
Obligatory shot of the LAN in action, although about half the folk aren’t visible from this angle.
More comments and photos can be found at the TOG forums HERE
Feel free to post replies to this post in our forums HERE
Regards,
Scoobs
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Tags: Blogroll · Events
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June 15th, 2009
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Having just installed WHS for the first time over the weekend I figured I would share some thoughts. Beware, technical content.
My main reason for using WHS was the stupidly large collection of external and internal hard drives of varying sizes which were getting hard to manage using XP in a drive-by-drive basis. I literally ran out of drive letters after mapping various drives from other PC’s on the network. WHS lets me consolidate them all in to a single pool of storage and makes adding and removing drives from that pool easy as pie.
My secondary requirement (and this will make some readers cringe) was the ability to run the WHS server as a second utility PC, for iTunes, playing video, music, uTorrent MSN Messenger, burning CD/DVD’s and other tasks previously taken care of by the same hardware running XP. Yes, I know you’re _supposed_ to run WHS headless but I’m currently treating it like I did the XP install, complete with dual monitors and fancy wallpaper, take that!
After some initial apprehension about whether WHS could handle being used as a regular desktop install, the only real workaround I had to do during install/config was download the msi install for Live Messenger (8.5) because it didn’t want to install from the .exe. I haven’t managed to get the newest version of Live Messenger running yet but I’m working on it.
The bottom line for installing and running apps on the desktop is that anything which will run on Windows Sever 2003 will run on WHS, this also applies to drivers for your hardware. I didn’t have a problem getting all the drivers running on a five year old socket 754 motherboard (Asus K8V SE Deluxe). I even managed to get my bluetooth keyboard/mouse and Logitech Z-10 speakers and LCD screen to work as they did in XP (using the XP drivers in compatibility mode).
As far as I understand it the Raid-lite system is really just a striped set with the addition of optional mirroring for nominated shares, all handled by the software and configured by the very easy to use console. There’s no limit to how much data you can set as redundant other than the amount of disk space you have (i.e. you need the same amount of free space as you are setting to be redundant, obviously).
I’m still not 100% sure what happens if a drive in the non-redundant pool dies suddenly but I’m assuming anything which was balance to that drive will be lost forever, but that’s really no different to my old system of individual hard drives and there’s the advantage that (hopefully) WHS will warn me ahead of time if a drive is going to die so I can remove it from the storage pool and the files on it will rebalance to the other drives before the target died (hopefully). Some automatic settings to make this happen without intervention would be nice.
From what I’ve read the system uses the boot drive as a scratch area while it balances to the bigger your install drive the better, so yes, use your 1.5Tb drive as the primary boot drive (I wish I’d known this BEFORE I installed mine on a 320Gb).
I promise, once I get another "utility" PC organised I’ll put my WHS server in a closet and stop using my WHS install as a desktop, maybe.
Final note, there is a site entirely dedicated to users of WHS with lots of great hints and tips and a pretty active forum, http://www.wegotserved.com/.
Discuss this post here.
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Tags: Hardware · Reviews · Software
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May 23rd, 2009
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That old phrase seems pretty apt right now. Life has thrown us a few curveballs, none of which are fatal thankfully, but we are certainly going through a ‘this sucks’ patch.
Sick dogs, sick kids, slow times at work and then 300mm of rain in less than 2 days. This turned our backyard from this:
Into this:
and ended up damaging the carpet in my office. I KNOW this isn’t the end of the world, but I can’t wait for 2009, the International Year of Suck to be over.
This also explains the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks too
- Scoobs
P.S. Pepe just moved house too, thus nothing from him. Scratch is just slack, haha.
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Tags: Blogroll
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May 4th, 2009
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Well Relic’s DOW2 is a good game; not as great as COH is IMO, given their use of GFW Live and the lack of arranged team 2vs2, no push to talk etc… but wait!!! Relic are renowned for their post release game support, and once again look to be delivering.
Posted up the community DOW2 site are a list of some of the forthcoming changes, which I’ll reproduce here:
- We are adding a Two-on-Two game mode, with two new four player maps.
- Two-on-Two is a ranked game mode with leaderboard support.
- An improved, more challenging Skirmish AI.
- Push to talk voice chat and Company of Heroes style sub-selection options.
- New squad decorators and significant UI improvements.
- A performance test to help measure Dawn of War II performance.
It’s like Relic has read my mind. The first 4 bullet points probably resolve my greatest irritations with the game, outside of the voice acting and sounds of the space marines. As I mainly play comp stomps with friends, tougher AI will be most welcome, as currently the AI manages to make Noobs like me look professional. More personalisation of the in game units is also an excellent addition.
We can expect the patch sometime in May, although with Relic, you never know.
As for Demigod, Stardock are steadily improving the experience, from a networking point of view. The game really is excellent, oozes quality, but is still a hit or miss affair online using the in-game matchmaking service.
Stardock are regularly updating the forums with their progress on this front, and are fairly honest about the problems that exist. I’m more confident now that things will be resolved, but it still looks like another week or so before the kinks are finally ironed out.
In the meantime, many players wanting to get into large custom games are being encouraged to use Gameranger, which operates a little like Hamachi as far as I am aware. Gameranger are also being kind enough to require patched versions of Demigod, which ought to make life a little harder for pirates, and make it easier for legitimate users to find a game on the service.
Comments are welcome in the forums
DOW2 Thread
Demigod Thread
- Scoobs
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Tags: PC Games
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April 27th, 2009
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Now for something completely not gaming related…
I recently bought a 2005 Mazda2 for my wife and wanted to do something about the lack of audio options by giving it iPod connectivity… here’s how I did it.
Mazda2 iPod / MP3 Mod
- Pepe
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Tags: Hardware · Reviews
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