Tom's Corner

Gardening

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:19:01 GMT

Just finished a long weekend's gardening which has been very enjoyable and productive. The Hozelock Aquapod system worked very well watering the greenhouse whilst we were away, admittedly some plants may be a little moister than they needed: tomatoes, and some drier: cucumbers, but overall it worked excellently. The hanging baskets should have probably gone to stay with a neighbour, but after a good trim by Ann and repeated soakings in water they look to be recovering. Most things are growing very well, at last my sweet peas are peering out from behind the lilies I mistakenly planted them behind. The marigolds (dwarf) are blooming in profusion, the petunias are starting to flower, the pansies are resplendent and just next to the house the first California poppies are making a show. The raspberries are beautifully ripe, the apple trees have fruit (which I have thinned a little) and my runner beans and climbing French beans are doing well. The balcony is full of deep red and yellow lilies and the aliums have finished flowering and have become artistic globes of drying seed heads.
In the greenhouse the tomatoes are growing well, maybe I little slower than last year, but flowering well, which is earlier than last, so that's good. I have a sea of green in the pepper department and the two cucumber plants are really going for it. On the raised beds I had a cornucopia of lettuce which I harvested and have shared amongst the neighbours (the cornucopia of cabbage was before the holiday) and I have today sown carrots, peas, lettuce, radish, cress and some basil. My red onions are huge and close to harvesting, so I'll pop some beetroot into their slot, and the new rows of cabbage are already looking deep green and close to being good to eat. The mesh net isn't that great at keeping cabbage white butterlies out but at least once they're in they never get out again.. I harvested 4 potato plants and we've had delicious new potatoes yesterday and today, and my courgettes, dwarf beans and sweetcorn look good. Obviously I mowed the lawn, and did a feed and weed. I could do some more weeding but I've done the veg beds and the worse weeds in the flower beds so that's all for now.
All in all, a great gardening weekend..

mad tom

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:54:01 GMT

mad tom
Originally uploaded by tzunder.

Hi, it's me in Spain being zany. Actually I am being quite chilled but this is the kind of face you make when you do that 'top down social networking avatar' self. This has been quite a relaxed if hot holiday, not doing much, reading and sitting by the pool.

Our son Mike has been in the news, well the military news, as the Harriers return from Afghanistan. Whatever you may think of foreign wars, and I support the intervention in Afghanistan whilst disagreeing with the Iraq war, raise a cheer for the servicemen fighting there: Harriers Return. (Mike is a nice newsworthy nugget, having served as an infantry officer and now a pilot, I hope the other pilots who've served far longer don't rib him too much.. I know Mike will be most embarassed to be singled out).

Back to far too much travel and too many meeting next week..

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:52:01 GMT

I am most taken with the Dover Thrift Editions which are incredibly cheap editions of vast range of classic books from the collection of Anarchist Writings by Kropotkin that I am reading now, via Joseph Conrad novels, to 19th century books on Architecture. Spend almost nothing and get a great read..

Add PPA key to Ubuntu KeyRing

Fri, 15 May 2009 12:44:07 GMT

I know many of you use Launchpad’s “Personal Package Archive” for updated and beta packages. I have about a half-dozen configured on my machine to give me the latest and greatest of my favorite applications. The one problem with a PPA though is that the packages can’t be verified when downloaded because you don’t have the GPG imported into your Apt Keyring. The following command is a template that you can use to import whatever PPA based keys you have warnings on:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys

You can gather the in the output of:

sudo apt-get update

You should see the warnings, along with the key id at the bottom of the output.

For each GPG key that you get a warning on, run the command above, and you’ll stop seeing the warnings. You will have imported that team/project’s GPG key into your keyring, considering them trusted.

Hellfrost Adventure: N1 - Lair of the Vermin Lord

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:28:01 GMT

With the snow already falling, the key to thwarting disaster is the village of Dunross, for here are stored the winter supplies of many surrounding villages. Fresh faced and eager, the heroes are hired by a local merchant to collect sacks of flour from Dunross and deliver them to a bakery.

But things are never that simple.

I ran this Savage Worlds adventure about 66% on Sunday with Matt, Alaa, Louis and Declan. We spent a LONG time on character gen so i am going to have to estimate, but I'd say there are about 8 hours of gameplay in the adventure with middling roleplaying and midding adventuring. It's a classically laid out and developed adventure, with the story and plot first and foremost and the setting second. It is NOT the curiously fashionable [i]old school retro[/i] minimalist 'map and some stats'. This is a pleasantly told tale of food, famine and conspiracy in the somewhat Anglo-Saxon lands of Rassilon. The adventure reminded me of a WFRP setup, but that's partly due to the rats, WFRP always seems to have cornered the market in rat based plots!

The adventure is designed for 4 Novice characters and the lads (with their finely tuned minimaxing skills) have trounced all opposition easily so far. With a group of [i]novice[/i] players as well as [i]Novice[/i] PCs then I'd say it is not going to lead to too many player fatalities. The opportunities for interactive roleplaying abound, much can be made of it by players who like to chat and investigate, bit the plot is not overly complex.. no-one is going to be befuddled by this tale.

That all sounds a tad pedestrian, but that would be the wrong impression. I'd say the adventure is a well crafted starter adventure that conveys the themes of the setting well and both allows and encourages new characters and players to stretch their legs.

Plus we really enjoyed playing it.

tripleacegames.com/store/index.php

Life, Liberty and Gaming

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:28:30 GMT

We're having a busy and yet good bank holiday weekend. We are doing a lot of clearance work getting ready for resanding the wooden floor downstairs, decorating the study and having new office furniture built. I am also clearing the garage and moving my work PC and stuff into a temporary home in the dining room. Somewhere in the weekend I have about a metre high pile of roleplaying books and stuff to put on ebay. Lot's of Glorantha and the like, which should raise money to buy a new, slightly smaller pile of new rpgs and books!

I played MagBlast and Drakon with Alaa, Louis and Matt the other night. MagBlast is a card game of screaming space battles, you have to provide sound effects when launching an attack or the attack fails, and it seems a great beer and pretzels game. Drakon has a very cute premise, which is that you the players are adventurers captured by a dragon in her lair. She decides to have some fun and says the first to collect 5 gold coins can leave alive, the rest will be eaten.. It's a very simple tile laying game, and at first it seems overly simplistic until you start to appreciate the tactics of how the tiles, which have limited placement, exit and laying rules, can produce quite intriguing looping effects. Then you start to see how you can thwart your fellow players as you rotate tiles, destroy tiles or replace them. Perhaps the lesser of the 2 games and not as rewarding as Cave Troll which is also a Fantasy Flight Games production, but also a short fast beer and pretezels game. I must dig out Citadels for the next ad hoc session. I have not had time to open Wizard Kings yet, but I am hoping for some block game fun with it.

I'm thinking over the Chinese TomCon on May 9-10th? There'll be two game, one will be Newt's Monkey game and the other Qin run by Graham. I am torn between the 2. There will be a full day of jollity on the 9th ending in watching Warlords and Monkey Magic. [Looking for Chinese boardgame/wargame for the daytime.]

I enoyed Dom's Singularities game, which was good and IMHO a much better version of new transhuman/britSF/Culture SF than Sufficiently Advanced. On Monday I run Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37 for Matt and his friends. I am sure Alaa and Ben will rise to the challenge, but it'll be interesting to see if they can cope with what is a very typically Lovecraftian adventure. [I'll not spoil it since you may yet play it one day, it's a CoC monograph.]

Anyway, back to cables, printers, monitors and a copy of the new Savage Worlds setting: HellFrost which is winking at me from the corner of the room, just waiting to suck my time away..

BSG Finale

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:37:27 GMT

I was increasingly worried that BSG would end in some weak and feeble anti-climax but it still offered an enjoyable exercise in conflict, resolution, tragedy, religion and finally a loop back into our own human story. It never shied away from playing it hardball, and I was pleased that at the end the show went out on the same mix of it all.

I know that in our multiply layered world of media and entertainment that many of you may or may not have watched the end.. indeed some of you are probably still watching season 1 or 2 or 3, so I'll not say anymore.. but I was happy.

Campaigns for Roleplaying

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:14:01 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

I have been listening to some podcasts about roleplaying games and in particular listened to the deisgners and writers of three relatively new games: Houses of the Blooded by John Wick, Hellas by Michael L. Fiegel and Jerry D. Grayson as well as A Song of Ice and Fire RPG by Robert J. Schwalb. All three sound utterly great games, and I'd love to play in all of them. Now, we're doing really well with the monthly gaming weekend at my place, and we are getting a lot of good value one-off games that way. But none of these games are one-offs. Hellas and Houses of the Blooded are generational games where you play lineages of characters, and A Song.. has all the PCs play as part of a noble House, and if characters die then another steps forward from the organisation. All of this sounds wonderful, and just the sort of game that one dreams of playing in when you first picked up a rpg at the age of 15 and then read your first epic fantasy series. How can I refit my awfully complicated and complex work life into a nice shape which has a linear slot where I can either play or run just such a long running campaign, and who is going to run it? BTW this does not in any way suggest I am tired of TomCons which are utterly wonderful and great.. just that man cannot live by fastfood alone..

Casual Gaming

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:33:00 GMT

I love computer games, always have since I first fell in love with an Apple ][e in my Mum's college and spent a whole day writing a very simple text based dungeon exploration game in BASIC. Ever since I saw Sonic on a Sega Megadrive in a branch of Tandy in Newark we have had at least one console in the house, and we've gone through handhelds from the Atari Lynx, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS. A Megadrive, Playstation, Dreamcast, Gamecube and Wii have all shared our TVs, and I am proud to say that my kids have all grown up game savvy and scarily adept with a joypad.. Which is odd.. 'cos I'm rubbish at computer games.

Hand and eye co-ordination is not my area of skill. My butterfly mind means that the only adventure game I have ever completed took me 18 months [Lord of the Rings: Third Age on the Cube]. I can also throw in a busy and active work and private life, family, friends and lots of other hobbies.. but basically I am a casual gamer. If it's simple, fun and I can get 10-30 minutes of fun from it before moving on then it's probably best for me. Now sometimes I can invest an hour or two in Battle for Wesnoth or Age of Empires on my Nintendo DS, but best for me is short sweet and easy.

Over the last week I have supplemented quite a high degree of productivity on work with some great new casual games (well new to me) and I'd like to show them with you. All three are available for Windows, Mac and Linux and are either open source or free or available as a demo.

Monsterz: Monsterz is a little arcade puzzle game, similar to the famous Bejeweled or Zookeeper.The goal of the game is to create rows of similar monsters, either horizontally or vertically. The only allowed move is the swap of two adjacent monsters, on the condition that it creates a row of three or more. When alignments are cleared, pieces fall from the top of the screen to fill the board again. Chain reactions earn you even more points. This game is mostly about luck, but it remains highly addictive. You have been warned.

GridWars: A wonderfully vector graphic pschedelic game which I believe is a clone of Geometry Wars (which I have on my DS), and reminds me so very much of Jeff Minter's epic vector based games. Essentially it's a modern Asteroids with endless waves of geometric shapes trying to blow your little ship to pieces, all played on a grid that warps and twists like a first year lecture on space-time. I can sit down to play this for 10 minutes and an hour goes by, so it score very highly on the 'one more time' factor.

World of Goo: You may well have heard of this. It's Worms meets Lemmings meets Goo. Relentlessly cute, not too hard but hard enough, it explains nothing and yet is amazingly simple to play and enjoy. Essentially, build matrices of goo balls to reach a pipe and save the remaining goo balls. Simple. Download the demo and then buy the full version. I must go and rescue some right now.. Also available on Nintendo Wiiware.

So that's my 3, what are yours?

Gaming Plan 2009

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:30:50 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

Well it's taken a month but here is my draft gaming plan for 2009. Ambitious, probably unachievable, but a plan:

General

Tidy up Omniverse.net adventure and spells.
Sell WHFRP books.
Sell TORG.
Read Jorune.
Read Earthdawn and evaluate for 2010 gaming.
Read Gwenthia and re-evaluate and update Cromaigne changes in main pdf.
Buy and play more Star Wars miniatures with Kieran.
Write up Savage Showdown stats for my SF Near Future minatures and play some skirmish games
Play Tannhauser boardgame.
Play Stonehenge boardgame.
Play World at War boardgame.

Games I want to play

Play Qin
Play a One Roll Engine game
Play MRQ
Play GUMSHOE
Play StarBlazers
Play Cold Crusade
Play I-War
Play HELLAS

Games I'd like to run

Run Pathfinder Chronicles using BRP:

with cults like RQ3;
with simple Elric! level rules;
3 2-3 sessions, not necessarily with the same players.

Run Vikings using either Savage or Wordplay;

use RQ Vikings as source;
use Beowulf (various versions);
Create a short (3-4 page) players pack for playing Vikings (non system specific),

Culture,

Mythology,
Gazeteer,
Scan and collect lots of images and flavour;
Collect suitable music;
Write a 3 session arc, 1 of which is suitable for a con game, not necessarily the same players.

Renuwal Survival Horror using AFMBE:

3 part Trilogy of single games,
underground lab,
escape from the town,
post zombie apocalypse;
Strongly influenced by Resident Evil but with some twists;
Collect music and images;
Use the AFMBE pregen characters from sourcebooks,
Age the characters from game to game,
Not necessarily the same players;
Suited to cons.

Noir - Mean Streets - A Dirty World:

Prepare to run noir style games as one offs using the scenarios in Mean Streets book;
Consider using 'A Dirty World' or GUMSHOE, but probably stay with genrediversion from MS book;
Lots of photos, images, maybe some music;
Suited to cons.

Deadlands one off:

Mix up Deadlands and Coyote Trail and GURPS Wild West sources;
Use the Coffin sourcebook;
Be able and ready to run at short notice.

B5 Traveller:

Probably not going to happen in 2009, but read, prepare, evaluate.

Battlestar Galactica rpg:

Probably also not going to happen in 2009 but read, prepare, evaluate.

Talislanta:

Probably not going to happen in 2009, retire to shelves and allow to ferment.

Freeport:

Not going to happen in 2009, read if time and life allows.

Gwenthia:

Not going to happen in 2009. Need to resolve system and just how well I can get on with MRQ. Need to play some more MRQ.

Let's see how it goes

Life, games, loss and new gamers

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:28:46 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

I am in Newcastle for 2 days of lecturing, which frankly seems to take up far more time and energy than it is worth, but I agreed to do it so I had better. On the way to the Uni I popped into Travelling Man and Forbidden Planet and picked up the "Battlestar Galactica" rpg quick start rules, the "Coyote Trail" Western rpg and another copy of the "Pirates Guide to Freeport" all for a song. The latter one I shall pop on to Amazon Marketplace to make a few quid from, the rest I shall enjoy. Interestingly the Western rpg is from Precis Intermedia and is one of ther simple "genre driversion" games. I have just finished reading "A Dirty World" a Noir rpg from Greg Stolze, using the One Roll Engine. It's a fascinating game system, interstingly implemented to bring out the themes of the genre. However before Xmas I ran "Mean Streets", a genre diversion Noir game, a very simple old skool rpg. Having read both I have this feeling that if I ran a Noir game with ADW we'd spend all our time being dazzled by the system, it's cleverness and 'modern riffs on themes' and we'd forget to play a good roleplaying game set in the genre.. Now I could be wrong, but a lot of new games put the system right up front and I have started to wonder if that actually might impede the roleplaying, rather than enhance it..

Blogging Online

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:16:30 GMT

I have always blogged offline when I could, using a client and editing and uploading or in the case of my work blogger accounts (http://freightandlogisticsnews.blogspot.com/) using email to directly feed multiple blogs and sites for dissemination.

Recently I have become far more aware of how ephemeral my computers are. Even with stable operating systems and software that I enjoy using, my tendency to tinker means that my home PCs are an ever evolving and changing series of platforms. Eventually I screw up, and when that happens life is so much safer when data is either on my new Buffalo NAS fileserver or, in the case of less important data such as bookmarks or blogs, online. Thus this.. my dalliance with online blogging using Firefox add-ons to try and support and improve the richness of my blogs.

Gaming Plans 2009

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:15:39 GMT

I have managed to review my gaming in 2008, which was quite successful given how often I travel and how ill I was in the early half of the year. Planning for 2009 is quite difficult.

Part of the problem is that we have had regular monthly TomCons at ours once a month and my friends and I have sampled a wide range of roleplaying games and a smaller set of boardgames. We had the first TomCon of 2009 this weekend past and had a great game of Britannia followed by a fun game of Serenity rpg, spoiled only by my being in rather a silly mood. The weekends are great, they fulfill all the key needs, meeting good friends, eating, some drinking, playing games you've never tried and running some of the rpgs we all have on our shelves and which we look at with guilt everytime we walk past them..

I am very happy with TomCons.

But I also need to run something over a slightly longer period of time. Now I am not unaware that my work life (40% away from home) means that I am very unreliable for ongoing weekly games, but it has been possible before to start a series of games (usually with my son and his friends or my mate Martin) and stagger through 5-6 sessions without too many interruptions. Indeed I ran D&D like that for over 2 years when I first moved back to Sheffield. About 50% of Tuesdays I am at Martin's and we are currently playing our way through a Pathfinder/D&D game. Only problem is that we never seem to get more than 2 players and ref on Tuesdays and that's almost too close to zero sometimes. My son and his friends are too busy playing World of Warcraft to play trad rpgs these days, altho' maybe I could drag them together for a one-off sometime.

There are cons. Due to my issues with Gwenthia, or possibly a broader rush of anxiety, I haven't run any scenarios at cons for some years. I got in a real tizzy about it all, which is very odd and quite embarassing. I have some confidence that I may have faced that bugbear and won, providing I use published material and stay away from commitments with or to others, but simply turn up, post up and play. We'll see.. I shall certainly do 2 cons this year, probably Conpulsion (but watch how work stacks up), Furnace (better turn up to that one) and maybe 1-2 others. That means that quietly and without too much fuss I could run 2-4 games at cons.

I could play/run at our local hobby shop: Patriot Games on Monday nights. Now this is a seemingly sensible idea. There is a shop, it is full of roleplayers, the games are often over subscribed. But oddly getting players is difficult. I sat with 2 players running Savage Worlds 50fathoms for some weeks next to a d20 game that was massively overfull, and yet despite a nice poster and making it clear (I think) that we'd happily take onboard 2 more players, we never got another one. Perhaps a game of something mainstream might attract more players, or perhaps I need to ask the owner to use his pull and drag in some players to make a full group? I'd be happy with a five week run if I could pull it off.

So, where does that leave me?

Well. It says that I have about 5-6 one-offs that I can run this year. That's good fine gaming as long as I have cured the con jinx, but even if not I can probably do 3. It says that as long as I am ok with 2 players I can run maybe 8 sessions on a Tuesday in a spread over 4 months.. and that can be almost any kind of gaming, as long as it's not Middle Earth (unless they play uruk-hai hunting hobbits). It says that if I get my local shop owner to help I could do a 5-6 week run on Mondays at the shop.

You know, that's not at all bad. I think I can move forward and plan.. 3-6 one-offs and 2 5-6 week story arcs..

Games Games Games: 2008 Retrospective

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:14:14 GMT

So time has come to try and write a plan for gaming in 2009 which I can then fail to achieve, but which is fun in a kind of speculative daydreaming way. To do that I need to first mull over 2008 and see where I am coming from before I know where I am going to..

I tried in 2008 to focus on setting and not system, I am not so sure how well I succeeded.

In terms of purchases I tried to resist or at least go second hand. I bought quite a bit of Earthdawn second hand or very very cheap (when the USD-GBP rate was almost 2:1) since I loved the setting way back when but never ran it. I have sold a lot of Glorantha stuff and will continue to do so. I bought an AFMBE book, and I rather fell in love with the Paizo Pathfinder Chronicles and bought and read the first three even though they are D&D [I'd probably Savage them]. I avoided buying the new Basic Roleplaying book from Chaosium, which is fortunate since last week I saw a copy and realised that as a credited playtester I was entitled to a free copy.. it arrived today. I resisted the Battlestar Galactica rpg, but will succumb in 2009, I faced down the nostalgic pull of Dragon Warriors and despite resisting Trail of Cthulhu I did buy a few GUMSHOE games (same system) and enjoyed reading them. My ongoing love for the City of Freeport setting went wild as the setting went system free, but I haven't fully read or played there. My purchase of the Blue Rose rpg must be put down to gspearing geeing me up, although it's a very interesting setting.

Gwenthia, our shared world fantasy setting, has been getting me down all year. I can't keep up the leadership role and the creative tensions have driven me away from the setting and all d100 game systems. My angst about this drove me into a cycle that meant I couldn't face running any games at cons in 2007 or 2008, and as such I have done nothing with it all year.My

I ran Talislanta several times, which was a huge buzz for me since I've loved the setting for years, but somehow thought it was too big and weird for my friends. What nonense! It's like Glorantha or The Forgotten Realms; you take a small area and just game away like it was 1976 and the idea of a huge game world didn't exist yet.. I was delighted by how simple and smooth the system ran, and I think that all the games have been great successes, especially the one at a TomCon.

I don't think I ran anything else this year until December when I ran Mean Streets, a noir rpg set in 1943 New York. Very much a settings led choice, since the system is very light and the setting/adventures very generously provided in the cheap pdfs.

My rpg BBS, The Tavern, has pootled along ok this year with only one php insertion attack and one migration between servers which my friend Simon managed well. The migration threw everyone's cookies bonkers and I am still not sure everyone who wants auto login has it. We hosted the chat forum for the Continuum and Furnace cons, and people seem to enjoy hanging out there in a small cosy environment. I am grateful that when things get sticky Simon helps.

So, did I achieve much? Well for a year when I have been really quite unwell I have played a lot of great games, but not run many. So be it. I have greatly enjoyed playing Wordplay, lots of Savage Worlds, Traveller, Sufficiently Advanced, SCION, Atlantis, D&D 4e (!), Pathfinder Beta, SimpleQuest and many others so I think 2008 turned out to be the year of playing, and in fact it was great fun with great friends!

Next year.. or in a few days.. my 2009 plans!

.

Gaming Style

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:58:13 GMT

You Scored as Method Actor

You think that gaming is a form of creative expression. You may view rules as, at best, a necessary evil, preferring sessions where the dice never come out of the bag. You enjoy situations that test or deepen your character's personality traits.

Method Actor

92%

Storyteller

83%

Butt-Kicker

50%

Specialist

50%

Tactician

33%

Power Gamer

25%

Casual Gamer

Deeply Shocked by One Time Friend

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:58:08 GMT

I am deeply shocked ;-) by one time wholesome Friend Jennifer Aniston being unable to remember that doesn't shower fully dressed. Shocking.. quite spoiled my morning.

On the plus side.. she didn't need to go to the launderette later on..

chuckle

Going to Prague

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:23:53 GMT

I am on a Czech Airlines plane somewhere over Europe on my way to run a conference in Prague for the next 2 days, and then attend another conference on Wednesday before returning home. I am quite tired, what with a busy workload last week, either seeing friends or working every night and then Matt's 18th birthday do on Friday night [to Saturday morning].

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:00:21 GMT

Matt18thParty

Matt's 18th party went very well. Far too late for me but once it was time to tidy and taxi and so on I was fine. I crashed but most people seemed to have carried on at the 'After Party' until 7-8 in the morning. Off to Prague tomorrow for the Freightwise conference, so my mind is back in 'work mode' already.. sigh..

Gardening Day

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:05:11 GMT

Got up and gardened all day today and yesterday. Cleared nettles, cut down brambles, trimmed hedge with my eldest's trimmers. Then planted out winter pansies and put down crocus bulbs. There are lots more things to be done and much more clearance, but I feel that I put in a good 12 hours productive gardening. Compost bin totally full, as is the 'green recycling bin' so goodness knows where the next lot of green stuff is going to go.

Got to work now, then the 'Strictly Come Dancing' results show and a couple of episodes of Silent Witness before bed. Off to lecture to lecture tomorrow.

Oh, and I shaved my moustache off when in Belgium last week and both Ann and Matthew say they prefer it.. wow. I have had a 'tache for 28 years!

Very Weird Week

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:01:51 GMT

This is a techie blog.. stop now if you don't do geek.

I have had the strangest week with my Ubuntu installation on my Dell. I upgraded to 8.10 and all of a sudden my system stopped talking to the Internet via my network adaptor. Aaaargh! Nowadays a PC with no access to a network is useless, not only do I need the 'Net to do my work but all my files are not on my work machine but on my file server. A LiveCD of 8.10 had the same problem so I sighed and reinstalled 7.10, reconfigured and started the upgrade back to 8.04. It's not too awful on Ubuntu, all the apps and stuff comes as part of the install, and then there are the little tweaks and changes I make and I can do most of them from memory. All my data is on the file server so as long as I have a fstab backup then I am ok. It was eerie to see the video driver/kernel problem that scared me silly earlier this year happen before my eyes as 7.10 upgraded itself, broke the video drivers, recovered and then moved to 8.04.. like watching evolution at high speed!

In the end, after various pleas on 'net forums I began to realise that no-one else had this problem. I also noticed that I was having real problems with DNS lookups and DHCP on my laptop. I switched it to using OpenDNS for DNS (not as easy on a Linux box as I thought it would be if you still want Auto DHCP for the machine IP) and things improved. My suspicion moved to my Orange router.. the second one I have had since the last one seemed to be the cause of my 6 weeks of intermittent Internet earlier this year. So, resisting the temptation to beat it with a branch in Basil Fawlty style, I rebooted it a few times. Oh look, DNS problems gone.. wonder if it was the route all along.

Now.. I thought, it's time to be sensible and make a full disk image of my PC and have a perfect backup so I can upgrade to 8.10 and if it fails to network I can simple restore my image of my 8.04 setup. I downloaded Clonezilla and made a copy of my partition to another partition. It seemed to work. I rebooted and I got an odd error message but realised that my fstab referred to the backup partition as reiserfs but in fact it was now ext3. I changed it. Or did I? Long story short.. my system has been accessing both the original and backup since they share the sam UUID, a unique partition identifier, which they now both share! I have a working system which I upgraded to 8.10, but the upgrade seems to have gone to the backup disappeared! So.. I have edited BOTH fstabs, stopped using the UUID and moved to /sda1 and /sda3, and I am about to reboot.. wish me luck!

-------> 10 minutes later....

It worked. Mind you.. the 8.10 upgrade has vanished like snow in rain, which is very odd given that I sat here and watched the whole lot download, answered the configuration questions and so on!

-------> 60 minutes later ....

All sorted. Now I have tried a 8.10 Live CD and once again the network adaptor fails! Aaargh. I also noticed that my gnome-terminal failed to run. Have I got a dodgy LiveCD? I am downloading a new one now. In the meantime I think I shall stay with 8.04, after all it is a LTS (long term support) release so it'll be kept safe and secure and frankly I am quite happy with all that 8.04 has, 8.10 would be nice but not killer.

In the meantime I have installed Debian 5 (lenny) on my laptop.. alongside Ubuntu 8.10 and Puppy 4.. but that is my 'mess about toy'.. since it really is an old piece of junk.

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:20:26 GMT

David Davies and I are usually so far apart politically, but we agree on at least one thing: the State should only be trusted as far as is necessary:

David Davies and ID Cards

10 Films to Annoy Geeks and Full Frontal Nerdity

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:54:24 GMT

I liked this run down of films likely to annoy the geeks amongst us:

10 Films to Annoy Geeks

I also loved this loving tribute to the gaming geeks amongst us:

Full Frontal Nerdity

Whilst I hate to reduce my chances of winning (I have actually won some VNUnet comps) I'd also love a friend to win a Samsung netbook with a 120GB SSD:

VNU net Samsung Flybook Competition

So, less of a blog and more of a list of links, but hey, somedays that's all you need.

Now I have to complete a Talislanta adventure and I have 3 hours to stat up a Drakken tomb..

"Fly my monkeys.. Fly!"

Game Geeks Reviews on YouTube

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:48:06 GMT

This guy, Kurt Wiegel, does some great game reviews and seems to have very similar views to me.

Game Geeks

VaRIous

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:49:16 GMT

Finished reading the ambitious and (in my view) best attempt at a post-singularity roleplaying game: Sufficiently Advanced. I have played this when Dom ran it but didn't really understand the system. I've read the book and now sort of understand the rules, but I am very impressed by how the author has tried to address the huge scalar issues of a SF setting where it isn't a question of how advanced your civilization's technology is, but how advanced your civilization has chosen to use.

I am feeling quite odd today, aching, depressed, tired and low. Ah well.

I installed Microsoft Office 2007 on Matt's XP machine, and Office for the Mac 2008 on my laptop. I will still use OpenOffice and cloesly related NeoOffice myself but I like to see what M$ are up to. As usual Office for the Mac is so much nicer.. I guess the fact that M$ have real competition on OS X makes them try that bit harder. I have changed them all to use the older .doc formats and not the 'evil' OOXML .docx etc. but I shall probably not use them, although the Outliner in Word has always been rather nice and missing from OpenOffice.

OpenOffice 3.0 has just been released but since it'll take a while to filter through the Ubuntu releases, I'll not upgrade the XP and Mac until it hits the Ubuntu repositories. Thus is the first OO to have a native Mac build, which may threaten NeoOffice but is good news all round.

Off to watch Sliders I think.

Five Days until Furnace

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:31:50 GMT

It’s just FIVE days to Furnace 2008 and we have over 70 attendees signed up, over 50 games scheduled and planned, various publishers and traders coming and the ever welcoming gaol cells all warm and welcoming. It’s all hands on at Furnace Central, ensuring we have sign up sheets and flip charts and name badges and the Con book. Hopefull it’s all hands on with you too, digging out your dice, packing your toothbrush and manhandling your rulebooks into a manageable pile. If you’re up on Friday night then gspearing and newt will be in the Garrison bar for ‘pre-Con’ drinks, if not then Tom will see you bright eyed and bushy tailed on Saturday morning. [You bring the bright eyes and bushy tails, I'll bring the handouts..]

I'm looking forward to it all quite a bit. I've carefully ensured I am not running any games so I don't get under pressure from that, I have some clear tasks to do, and apart from the badges which I am relieved to say darransims has stepped in to do, I am on top of most things. My wish is to relax, ensure that it all runs smoothly, and enjoy some of the very great games that GMs have offered and newt has organised so well.

Oh, and world capitalism ended today.. LOL