MikeDitum.co.uk

Last month saw the first meet up for Sprite Club, a group like a book reading club but for computer games. It involves playing a single game for a month and then getting together in a pub (with people skyping in from Sweden and Japan making it awesomely international) and debating the pros and cons of the game.

This month the game to play and review was Braid, after the get together and debate session we had to write a mini review to stick on the website. Below is my amazingly articulate review…

Really got mixed opinions on this one! Braid for once uses the rewinding time ability as an interesting core gameplay mechanic rather than just saving you from your own lameness (PoP). The puzzles are difficult and give you a great feeling once overcome but the learning curve is very steep and by the time you’ve properly grasped a mechanic you stop using it. Games like Portal slowly introduce you to the concepts and teach you to think laterally, Braid chucks them at you and sits their gloating when you’re too stupid to complete the puzzle.

The art style really is beautiful with a wonderful hand painted effect and the music compliments the visuals and the gameplay, hauntingly beautiful yet nightmarish when you are failing to solve a puzzle and continuously reversing time.

For the vast majority of the game the story is pretentious wank and the mechanism used to convey it is far to dull for you to bother to take it in, but if you manage to get to the final/first world (I admit I cheated for 2 puzzle pieces in order to get there) the final reveal makes up for the previous hard slog. The final levels are brilliantly designed and executed and manage to convey the story in an interesting and engaging way. Shame it couldn’t all have been like that.

In summation; clever if irritating gameplay, beautiful presentation, stupid story but made up by a wonderful ending.

7.5 / 10

I’ve finally managed to get around to updating my 2nd hand macbook to Snow Leopard and getting a replacement battery for it. Whilst I’m not convinced I’ll ever switch to it fully from Ubuntu as I want to start doing iPhone development I need to start learning my way around OSX.

One of the things that has always really annoyed me using OSX is not knowing the keyboard shortcuts to do things, in Ubuntu I can do pretty much everything without touching the mouse so having to continually move my hand away from the keyboard is frustrating.

Today I found a couple of useful articles that go through some shortcuts for OSX…

• Shortcut Keys, Part I: Dialogs
• Shortcut Keys, Part II: Starting Up
• Shortcut Keys, Part III: Spotlight

The short cut I’ve found most useful so far is Command-Spacebar which opens up spotlight’s search facility so I can quickly launch programs without browsing menus.

Next mission to work out the shortcut key for deleting files in Finder, dragging them to the waste bin is really starting to get annoying.

Since I’ve moved up to London and had to put up with 2 x 40 minute commutes each day I’ve been reading more and more books. As a child I used to read a fair bit but they were mostly Hardy Boys and other such non-taxing books. I never really made the step past those types of books, partly due to rubbish English teachers, partly due to preferring to spend time on the ol’ Computer but mostly just me being lazy.

Since I’ve got back into reading I have decided to educate myself as much as possible in reading and have tried to find a broad range of books from vintage classics, modern classics, current blockbusters (this less than the others) and graphic novels (read “Comics” )

To keep track of what I’ve read and what I want to read I’ve been cataloguing the books on the living social website. It’s a good website and allows you to see what your friends have read and what they thought of it. However I understand that not everyone wants to join another social networking site so I decided to create a plugin for WordPress that allows you to view the info in your Living Social account on your website. It’s still in a very early state and currently only really works for my account, though I’ll hopefully get some time to develop it into a fully fledged plugin.

The result of this? My website now includes a Books page that uses the plugin to view all the books I’ve read, want to read or are reading currently. Have a view of my book catalogue and if you have any suggestions for books that you think I might like stick ‘em in the comments.

As you can probably see I’ve changed my website again. The big change is that I’ve decided to switch to using wordpress instead of my own custom software. It has a lot of cool features (like an app for the iPhone that I’m using now) which would have been a lot of effort to write… and I just couldn’t be bothered. Maybe at some point I’ll try and bring the old theme across or find a more interesting one… but for now this will do.

In other news I’m now on Twitter. You can see my last couple of tweets in the sidebar or if you want to follow me I’m @Mrs_Kensington.

It was Karen’s birthday this week, as is now customary whenever it’s a friends birthday, I made her a birthday cake. Unfortunately I have only ever baked cakes in a pyrex bowl so my cakes are a little… round themed. This year I decided to get a bit more adventurous… but not adventurous enough to ditch the round design.

To make it a little more interesting I decided to document my progress on twitter and provide some nice easy steps so people could make the cake with me. Recreated below for posterity.

1. Put all the ingredients in the bowl as the recipe says. Then cook it. http://twitpic.com/arq05
2. Put some more ingredients together (this time to make fairy cakes). Stick in baking cakes and cook. http://twitpic.com/aru9t
3. Try not to burn beautiful assistant. Fail.
4. If you’ve accidentally washed up the sieve. Swing it around wildly in the garden to dry it out.
5. Once the fairy cakes are cooked remove them from oven. If they aren’t completely round that’s fine. http://twitpic.com/arx4i
6. Make buttercream icing. Add essence of green. http://twitpic.com/arxzq
7. Make more buttercream icing (+ green) cause you didn’t do enough the first time.
8. Hopefully the cake should be cooked by now (check with a skewer). Remove from oven and leave it to cool.
9. Turn the cake out onto a plate (you may need a knife to pry it out). http://twitpic.com/as0sx
10. Take two of the (24) fairy cakes and glue them to the top of the cake with buttercream icing. http://twitpic.com/as1b3
11. Eat the other 22 fairy cakes.
12. Cover in green buttercream icing. http://twitpic.com/as7tj
13. Use ready-to-roll black and white icing to make eyes and a big smilie mouth. http://twitpic.com/as895
14. Cut a little bit of red ready-to-roll icing and add it as a Tongue. Put in fridge to let the icing set. http://twitpic.com/as8hv

If you manage to follow all of those instructions correctly you should end up with the following creation…

Froggie Cake

Whilst some people like to discuss high-brow topics and participate in intellectual debates on their blog. I shall do no such thing… instead allow me to introduce, the Yip-Yip’s….

Thought provoking I think you’ll agree.

A while has passed (as usual) since I last updated this website and a lot has changed in my life. My girlfriend of 7 years and I have split up, though in a very amicable way. I moved out of my flat in Poole and back in with my Parents at the end of January though next weekend I will be moving up to London to be with all my friends and working in the London Office.

As for my projects… not a lot has happened… I’ve started some… stopped working on some and currently thinking about new ones.

As I’ll be moving back and forth between the London and Poole office I thought it was time I had a go at Linux on my laptop and finally fixed a load of issues with it. I’ve finally managed to get the onboard network card working, the wireless is working though NetworkManager wont connect. The only functionality that I’ve had to disable is the MMC Reader as whenever I load the module the whole system hangs. It’s similar to the problems with the network card though there are no settings to change in the kernel. Not a huge issue though… To read my latest guide to my laptop visit this post.

Hopefully once I’ve moved up to London I’ll be able to start playing with XNA and start making games on the XBox360… it’s a nice thought anyway…

My old laptop was very nice and powerful but had one problem when using it for work. It weighted close to 4kg in its bag with the power adapter. I never did any 3d graphics work on it anyway so I decided I needed a new lighter laptop.

After looking around for ages I finally found one that was perfect… at PC World… I know! I normally don’t touch PC World machines but this machine was perfect. There’s a page here on the X53 which as far as I can tell is exactly the same. The specs of the machine are…

• Intel Core Duo T2050 Processor 1.66GHz
• 667 MHz FSB
• 1024 MB RAM
• 80 GB Hard Drive
• DVD ReWriter MultiDrive
• 12.1″ Widescreen Display (1280×800)
• Microsoft Windows XP Home
• 224MB Intel GMA950 Integrated Graphics
• 1.85kg
• 802.11 a/b/g Wireless
• About 4 hours battery life

…and all for the price of £799.99. I haven’t been able to find a small laptop this light and powerful for anywhere near that price. One of the first things I did was try and get gentoo running on it. Here’s some notes on how to do it.

Note: This is still a work in progress.

Initial Install

I installed the system following the Gentoo Handbook using the gentoo 2006.0 install CD. I used an i686 stage 3 release. Gentoo seems to have an issue with the network card in this laptop (see below) so to boot up the system from the install CD I had to press Ctrl-C when the PCI Coldplugging text appeared. This stops it from loading the network driver and it continues booting. I then had to use a USB network device to complete the install.

My CHOST and CFLAGS are…

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=prescott -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

Kernel

I currently have almost everything working under gentoo. I’m currently running gentoo-source-2.6.21-r2 and am only having trouble with the MMC reader.

To build the kernel I just used genkernel with the –menuconfig option so I could change kernel options. I also disabled creation of bootsplash images but that’s just a personal preference. There were a number of options I changed in the kernel to get things working. They were…

# Set Processor Information
Processor type and features
	Processor family = Pentium M
	Preemption Model = Preemptible Kernel

#set SATA controller (I believe it's Intel ESB,
#ICH, PIIX3, PIIX4 PATA/SATA Support that is needed
#but I enabled all of them to make sure
Device Drivers
	Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers
		ATA device Support = M
		All SubOptions set to M

#Linux currently has issues with the network card and
#the MMC Reader, here we disable the MMC Reader.
Device Drivers
	MMC/SD Card Support
		Secure Digital Host Controller Interface support = N

Network
Gentoo seems to have an issue with the network card in the laptop. lspci gives…

01:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 4222 (rev 02)
03:04.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

So for the ethernet controller it should require either 8139cp or 8139too. However when the 8139too module is loaded the whole laptop freezes up. After a lot of playing I finally figured out how to get it working. You need to enable the following sections in the kernel configuration

#To fix it enable PIO and RX-reset options, not sure which it is
#but it works with both enabled
Device Drivers
	Network Device support
		Ethernet 10 or 100Mbit
			Realtek RTl-8129/8130/8139 PCI Fast Ethernet = M
			Use PIO instead of MMIO = Y
			Support for uncommon RTL-8139 rev. K = Y
			Support for older RTL-8129/8130 boards
			Use older RX-reset method

Wireless
I have managed to get wireless working on this laptop. Previously I managed to get NetworkManager working fully with the wireless but recently it has stopped working. However I can still get it to connect to un-encrypted WAPs from the command line so it is probably just NetworkManager.

Gentoo comes with drivers for the wireless card. All you need to do is…

emerge -a net-wireless/ipw3945

and that will handle all dependencies. You may need to disable or enable some sections in the kernel but they are easy to find. Obviously when you upgrade you kernel you will need to reinstall this package.

Power Management
To get power management to work correctly I followed the instructions in the Gentoo Power Management Guide. The modules I had to add to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 were…

• speedstep-centrino
• ac
• battery
• button
• container
• fan
• processor
• thermal
• video
• cpufreq_conservative
• cpufreq_ondemand
• cpufreq_powersave
• cpufreq_stats
• cpufreq_userspace

For ages I’ve been using a Microsoft Intellmouse Explorer. It fits my hand perfectly is smooth to use and has two button on the side just where my thumb is. These are perfect for driving bikes and aircraft in GTA, switching to different weapons in FPS’s or just going back and forward through the history of my browser. I know other mice have these buttons but I’ve never found one that fits my hand so perfectly.

About a month ago the middle mouse button started getting a bit didgy… sometimes it wouldn’t work at all othertimes it would register a couple of click resulting in tons of tabs opening under firefox. I started trying to find a replacement but cannot find any mouse that works as well. I decided to have a look at taking it apart and giving the mouse a good clean, I ended up having to resort to looking on the internet for instructions to taking it apart and all I found were postings for people trying to find a post by “johnny5dm” that explained how to take it apart. I finally managed to find the post in the reviews of the mouse on amazon.com. The post can be found here but I’m going to repeat the instructions here just in case it gets deleted.

1. Pry the pads off the bottom of the mouse using a knife
2. Under each pad you’ll find a small screw, undo all of these and the top will come off easily

So simple yet I never thought of taking the pads off. I’ve now cleaned the insides of my mouse out and all is good in the world. All buttons are responsive and I don’t have to worry about finding a new mouse.

Not only is Knights of Cydonia the best song on Muse’s Blackholes and Revelations but it has the pleasure of being the best-video-ever-devised-ever-thats-what-I-call-really-good-music-video!!!!

For your entertainment and general rocking outness I youtube… Knights of Cydonia US Video!!!!

Hat tip to The Triforce.