Category Archives: Technology

Weeeeee fit (not yet!)

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So, finally we broke out the wii fit again.  It’s been a while, we both got sick and then it was really hard to get back into the habbit, but we managed to today.  Thirty minutes each.  We’ve gone past our initial goals without beating them, but we’ve put new ones in and we’re going to try again each day to do some wii fit.

It’s good for us in so many ways, not least of which it gives us time to be in the lounge together doing something specifically together which doesn’t involve sitting 10 feet apart at the PC’s concentrating and not talking.

So, yay us.

Also, I’m looking for some recommendations for fun, two player games on the Wii.  Something either co-operative or competative I don’t really mind, but it has to be fun and have a lot of life in it.  I look through all the Wii Ware games and they look a bit naff, and I can’t find any decent reviews on the ‘web which is frustrating.  I’m happy buying a game but not looking for anything brand new (light on cash atm).  I know there’s a few games made up of lots of mini games, but I’m not sure how much longevity they have?  So, do you know of any *fun* two player games we can spend an hour with just laughing and enjoying the Wii?

Old photo’s

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We spent the weekend in Newcastle, visiting my family (I’ll be blogging about that in a moment), and while I was there I asked my sister if she had all our old photo’s.  I sort of knew she did, she’s been making sure all the family photo’s are kept safe for quite some time.  Grete hasn’t seen them really, despite the fact that we’ve been married for 10 years, so it was a chance for her to laugh at the ones of me when I was younger.  Two in particular caught my eye in respect to my blogging.

tony-paitningThe first one is me sitting painting some miniatures, note that I’m using oil based enamels, big pots of tamya modelling paint as bases (which I’m still using, the very same pots), and that there’s a partly finished mini on the table, an elf in a green cloak with blonde hair.  I still have that mini, and I’m pretty sure it’s still got the same paint job (which since it’s oil based enamel will last for ever).  Click for the full sized pic, yes, I spelled the file name wrong.

The second picture is of me proudly sitting in front of what I suspect was my brand new spectrum.  As you can see it’s plugged into a black and white TV, and connected to an ancient tape deck (complete with mike!)

For bonus points, I appear to be wearing the same shirt.

tony-spectrum Edit: Ah, Grete points out one shirt is short sleeved and the other long, I’m blind. Also, judging by my hair these are probably a year or two apart.

Online tabletop roleplaying – maybe not yet

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Since I’m essentially too lazy / too busy / too scared to try this myself, I was (as I said here) interested in how this article over at the Chatty DM site progressed.  Well, he’s posted the first update on his online roleplaying report, and it sort of agrees with what I’d feared, what I’d briefly experienced and what I’d heard elsewhere.  You should go read the excellent article on the Chatty DM site clearly, but here’s a salient comment,

I think my feeling mirrors the others. When I did the rounds of the players I knew most, we all had the same thing to say. We all agreed that while a virtual tabletop RPG sure beats not playing at all… it remains a weak replacement for the real thing. At least, if our experiment is an indication of how such games are played… and my gut feeling tells me that they are.

Shared storytelling & roleplaying are such physical activities ((physical in the sense that your presence and facial / body language are key to having a shared experience)) that it’s hard to see how things will get much better without a) seriously good video conferencing that supports multiple people or b) seriously good shared VR interfaces.

For the first option, I’m imagining the ability to accept multiple incoming video feeds at once, and to place those images on your screen in such a way that you can see them all at once.  Maybe some composite image ability so you can paste the video into a chair around a fake gaming table on the screen.  I have no idea of the bandwidth or processor requirements to deal with that but I suspect we’re not quite there yet.

The second option is more immersive, with everyone wearing VR headsets and seeing the images from everyone elses video cameras in the same virtual space somehow, again, even more processing power required and plenty of bandwidth.

At the rate things are progressing, how long will it be before we’re there? 24 months? 4 years? 10 years?

Online tabletop roleplaying

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As a kid or someone in my early 20’s I had loads of spare time for roleplaying.  Anyone in their 30’s knows that kind of time just goes away.  Even playing a lot of online games it’s different, because you can still do stuff around the house, sort things out, and play games because you don’t have to be out or fully focussed for 5 hours at a time.

I tried messing with various tools to run some virtual tabletop D&D a while back and it sort of half worked, and I’m hopeful the tools can only get better.

So I’m watching this thread with interest over at the Chatty DM site.

I’ve already used the tablet I bought Grete to do some maps and although it’s different to doing them with pen and paper, it’s far easier than trying to use a mouse.

Oblong Industries and their ‘g-speak’ environment

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One of the founders of Oblong Industries served as a consultant on the movie Minority Report, and the computing interface you see in that movie was developed based on work he did at MIT.  Now his company have made it a reality.  Really.  Check this video,

I’m sure that the data and the input method is strongly tied together but in a few years this is going to be truly amazing.  Of course, we’ve been seeing this kind of thing in fiction and movies for quite a while (Johnny Mnemonic springs to mind), but if we finally have real world applications then that’s quite exciting.

I would dearly love to have a go at one of these, although I’ve got no idea what I’d do (probably write a blog post, I guess not the most efficient method).

Sun xVM VirtualBox + Ubuntu

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So even though I was initially seeing if I could run an XP sandbox inside Sun’s VirtualBox, I’ve ended up using the Ubuntu VM more than I thought I would.  I know I already said this but I really am impressed with the performance.  I’ve got it installed on my main machine and on a laptop.  They’re both decent machines (4-core or 2-core Pentiums), but I didn’t expect flicking between the VM and XP to be so smooth and for the operation of the VM to be so quick.

Yeh I’m gushing, but there you go.

I ended up re-working a bunch of Linux scripts I already had for backing up my websites locally, which I’d originally written when I was using a Debian machine, then changed to work under Cygwin, migrating that to an XP batch file using a different version of rsync.  So now I back the files up to a filesystem inside the VM, tar them up and move them to a directory outside of the VM (using the Shared Folders feature, which works really well).

I have some weird issues with permissions on the Shared Folder, the ‘root’ directory permissions of the mount point are r-xr-xr-x, subdirectories are fine (rwxrwxrwx).  Can’t work out if that’s me being dumb, Ubuntu being annoying or VirtualBox being crazy.

I wonder what performance would be like if I changed to Ubuntu as the host OS, with XP as the guest.  I wonder if Lord of the Rings Online (the only real game I play) would run smoothly.

I’ve messed with a straight Debian VM (using the latest test version of Debian) and that runs pretty well, but since Ubuntu is Debian under the covers, with a better look (the default Debian fonts are ugly compared to Ubuntu) I don’t think I’ll be keeping it.

So far the VM’s been pretty stable, I managed to crash it running dosemu inside it when I started Wing Commander II.  But I guess I can live without that 😉

Where oh where has my Gallium gone?

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I read about this last year, and have seen the odd article every now and then, but thought I’d make a post.  It’s not just living animals and plants on this little rock that are endangered.  There are not infinite supplies of the raw materials we use to build our technology.  For example, the gallium we use in our high-tec electronics probably won’t last more than 20 years.

From New Scientist (last year),

It’s not just the world’s platinum that is being used up at an alarming rate. The same goes for many other rare metals such as indium, which is being consumed in unprecedented quantities for making LCDs for flat-screen TVs, and the tantalum needed to make compact electronic devices like cellphones. How long will global reserves of uranium last in a new nuclear age? Even reserves of such commonplace elements as zinc, copper, nickel and the phosphorus used in fertiliser will run out in the not-too-distant future. So just what proportion of these materials have we used up so far, and how much is there left to go round?

Have a read of the full article.

Star Wars and Goose Pimples and All Things Nice

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I used one of my Star Wars THX DVD’s to check out what Rab had said about tuning your TV with THX, and he was right!  In the language settings section there’s a THX logo and it runs you through some picture setting stuff, mainly around contrast and brightness, along with some diagnostics.  Lo and behold, my TV was already spot on!  I’m really picky about contrast and brightness, because I’m really sensitive to bright lights.  I always have my computer monitor set very dark, and I try and have the TV set so that it’s not too bright, and I’d got it spot on in terms of being able to pick out the different white and black contrasts on the THX thingy.

Very pleased.

Of course, as soon as I stuck the DVD in, the surround sound popped into life and I was able to enjoy the intro Star Wars music blaring out.  Man it’s fantastic, and it evokes such an amazing set of memories.

I still can’t watch the 20th Century Fox logo/intro on movies without expecting it to fade into Star Wars.

And Sunday arrived in that usual Sunday arriving style

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In which every paragraph is a segway.

Lovely fresh November morning.  No rain yet although it looks like we might be in for some later.  I’m not sure how it works but during October it’s always too cold to have the patio doors open, where-as in November there’s nothing better than sitting in the computer room with the door open enough for the crisp clean air to sneak in.

Because spending 7 hours at a craft exhibition wasn’t enough, the girls are all going to Hobbycraft in a bit, maybe it’s considered a suitable ‘warm down’ after the full on exhibition.

A friend of mine found a screen callibration bit on a THX DVD and mentioned it to me, so I may spend the time they’re out seeing if I can tune our screen any more.  I’m quite happy with how it looks but there’s always that vague concern that you’ve picked some weird settings and pink skin is looking orange but you never noticed.  Sunday’s just the kind of day for doing lazy LCD screen tuning I think.

John Scalzi wrote up a Quantum of Solace review, which I totally agree with.  Despite the fact that I still don’t really know who John is (I just stalk his blog) I feel at least now I could share a pint of beer with him and have one topic to chat about that we agreed on 🙂  That’s the internet, bringing together people who don’t know each other and fooling them into thinking they do.

Mark wrote a blog update, which I really enjoyed, despite his implication that he shouldn’t write them too often.  How am I supposed to live vicariously through other people if they don’t tell me what they’re doing?

We watched a comedy show on ITV last night, in honour of Prince Charles’ 60th birthday and some of the acts were really funny.  One guy stood out, I’ve seen him before and really enjoyed his stuff.  He’s Omid Djalili and you can check out his web site over here.  He manages to poke fun at a lot of racial issues and particularly racial accents and still stay on the right side of the line (in my view) and is pretty funny.  There’s some videos of him on the site, check them out.