Lord of the Rings Online: Mirkwood Equipment

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There are a bunch of Malledhrim reputation based vendors around Mirkwood in various camps (in Lord of the Rings Online), selling a range of equipment.  All the items are purchased with Malledhrim Bronze Feathers.  I spent ages running around the camps, trying to find the right stuff and make sure there wasn’t something better at another camp.  Rather than do that over and over on every character, I sat down with Grete and we typed up the info.

So, for a full list of all the stats, you can download this OpenOffice spreadsheet – mirkwooditems-full.ods

For a summary (with just the major stats), you can check out a subset of that information on this web page and you can download the OpenOffice spreadsheet version of that list here.

If you’re purely looking for a list of the items and where to get them, you can see that in this even smaller table.

Slot Armour Type Min Level Reputation Item Camp Vendor
Ear 60 Neutral Golloch Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Ear 60 Neutral Thaliollos Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Ear 60 Neutral Feredillos Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Legs Light 60 Neutral Leggings of the Stars Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Legs Medium 60 Neutral Leggings of the Scout Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Legs Heavy 60 Neutral Enduring Leggings Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Shoulder Light 60 Neutral Pauldrons of Destiny Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Shoulder Medium 60 Neutral Pauldrons of the Tree Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Shoulder Heavy 60 Neutral Enduring Pauldrons Echad Sirion Gurdagnir
Feet Light 61 Neutral Raindail The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Feet Medium 61 Neutral Boots of the Wandering The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Feet Heavy 61 Neutral Boots of the Scout The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Hands Light 61 Neutral Faerchain The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Hands Medium 61 Neutral Belegaim The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Hands Heavy 61 Neutral Derngaim The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Pocket 61 Neutral Charm of Spirit The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Pocket 61 Neutral Charm of Avoidance The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Pocket 61 Neutral Charm of Defence The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Wrist 61 Neutral Manadhechor The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Wrist 61 Neutral Angechor The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Wrist 61 Neutral Filegor The Haunted Inn Glorengail
Feet Light 65 Friend Boots of Wisdom Mithechad Eregriel
Feet Medium 65 Friend Boots of Mastery Mithechad Eregriel
Feet Heavy 65 Friend Belendail Mithechad Eregriel
Finger 65 Friend Manadhrin Mithechad Eregriel
Finger 65 Friend Arangor Mithechad Eregriel
Finger 65 Friend Sidhgor Mithechad Eregriel
Shoulder Light 65 Friend Nestadranc Mithechad Eregriel
Shoulder Medium 65 Friend Swift Pauldrons Mithechad Eregriel
Shoulder Heavy 65 Friend Pauldrons of Might Mithechad Eregriel
Hands Light 63 Aquaintance Gloves of Mastery Ost Galadh Suldathar
Hands Medium 63 Aquaintance Terchaim Ost Galadh Suldathar
Hands Heavy 63 Aquaintance Brenweaim Ost Galadh Suldathar
Head Light 63 Aquaintance Hat of the Valar Ost Galadh Suldathar
Head Medium 63 Aquaintance Bronwethol Ost Galadh Suldathar
Head Heavy 63 Aquaintance Tarchar Ost Galadh Suldathar
Legs Light 63 Aquaintance Leggings of Good Fortune Ost Galadh Suldathar
Legs Medium 63 Aquaintance Leggings of the Guard Ost Galadh Suldathar
Legs Heavy 63 Aquaintance Arambadanir Ost Galadh Suldathar
Chest Light 63 Aquaintance Curucham Ost Galadh Suldathar
Chest Medium 63 Aquaintance Hauberk of the Bear Ost Galadh Suldathar
Chest Heavy 63 Aquaintance Amarcham Ost Galadh Suldathar
Neck 63 Aquaintance Thalionhighil Ost Galadh Isthel
Neck 63 Aquaintance Brechigil Ost Galadh Isthel
Neck 63 Aquaintance Balanhigil Ost Galadh Isthel
Shield 63 Aquaintance Golthann Ost Galadh Isthel
Shield 63 Aquaintance Curuthham Ost Galadh Isthel
Shield Warden 63 Aquaintance Tirithram Ost Galadh Isthel
Shield Warden 63 Aquaintance Faeram Ost Galadh Isthel
Shield Heavy 63 Aquaintance Tirithamath Ost Galadh Isthel
Shield Heavy 63 Aquaintance Brogamath Ost Galadh Isthel
Cloak 65 Friend Golchol Thangulhad Andidhiel
Cloak 65 Friend Thaliongol Thangulhad Andidhiel
Cloak 65 Friend Cloak of the King Thangulhad Andidhiel
Head Light 65 Friend Helm of Excellence Thangulhad Andidhiel
Head Medium 65 Friend Saelthol Thangulhad Andidhiel
Head Heavy 65 Friend Golhar Thangulhad Andidhiel
Chest Light 65 Friend Hauberk of the Spirit Thangulhad Andidhiel
Chest Medium 65 Friend Ducham Thangulhad Andidhiel
Chest Heavy 65 Friend Hauberk of Vigilance Thangulhad Andidhiel

Tesco / Coke Zero

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So it seems to be true.  Tesco (in the UK) has decided to stop stocking Coke Zero.  We noticed they didn’t have any and asked customer service, and they couldn’t find a re-order entry.  A few days later a friend said their Tesco (completely different part of the country didn’t have any either).  I checked their online grocery website (tesco.com) and true enough, no Coke Zero available there.

I e-mailed and phoned, and eventually got a reply from a guy saying he’d spoken to their buying department, and they had decided to stop carrying Coke Zero.  He couldn’t explain why, and didn’t understand why, but there you have it.

So now we’re buying our Coke Zero from Asda, and we may end up shopping there more often as a result rather than going to do supermarkets.  Tesco fail?

Edit: Let me know (in the comments) if your local Tesco is / isn’t stocking Coke Zero and if you’ve been able to find out why.

The true measure of irony?

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I’m a LoveFilm subscriber and I wanted to rent Public Enemies.  However, it’s not been available on LoveFilm since it was released, always listed as just unavailable for rent.  Keep that in mind.  I have four lists on LoveFilm, Movies, TV, Wish List and Comedy.  Movies are stuff we want LoveFilm to send right now and likewise TV is the list we use to get the next disc in whatever TV series we’re watching.  The Wish List and Comedy lists have no discs next to them – so LoveFilm doesn’t dispatch anything from those lists.  They’re reminders of things we might want.

Back to the first point.  I wrote to LoveFilm to ask them why they didn’t have Public Enemies.  They replied and said they were having issues with their supplier, sounds like bollocks but okay, fair enough.  They also said, here have a free disc! Cool I thought, although let’s face it, it doesn’t cost them any money.

So I checked, and there was no sign of my new disc allocation.  And I waited.  I wanted to put the new disc next to the Movies list so they sent something to watch.

Later that day I received an e-mail telling me they’d dispatched something, but it was something from the Wish List.  Disappointing I thought.  Because I was sure you were supposed to be able to pick where the free disc came from, and I assumed I’d just missed something.

Anyway, I sent them another mail to thank them but say that it was a little frustrating that they had dispatched something without letting me pick the list, since the Wish List they used isn’t something I wanted a movie from right at that moment.

They replied, they were very sorry, to compensate me for my trouble they had given me a free disc!

Which I had no way of allocating to a particular list that I could find.

And so they dispatched something else I don’t really want to watch from the Wish List.

I believe this, my friends, is the true definition of irony (in combination with a battery powered battery power checker they make a wonderful couple).

Grete’s typing ..

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If you ever wonder why Grete stops talking to you while you’re on the phone, or maybe some online chat or game.

Here’s why.

Fizz on Grete's head

Fizz climbs onto the back of Grete’s chair and then onto her head.

Fast Fizz!

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Fizz hates the snow, she doesn’t like how it falls on her head without warning and how it looks on the ground.  I’m not sure she’s that bothered about the cold but the snow itself is a real issue.  She’s been out a few times, but she comes running back in.  I wanted a few shots of the garden (see previous post) and she wandered out.  While she was staring intently at the snow on the grass wondering if it was worth checking out, I managed to sneak up behind her.  These 5 shots are taken in the space of about 1.2 seconds.  She was a bit surprised, I love how in the fourth shot, her tail telegraphs the direction she’s about the head.

I was playing with the Picasa ‘movie’ stuff, because Grete suggested making an animated image, and as usual, it makes it too easy!  Here’s the youtube vid 😉

Garden – 2010

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It’s been a while since I bored you updated you on the state of the garden.  Since you can’t see any of it due to the snow, I thought now was a good time!

We’ve had a couple of decent snow falls over the last week or so, the first didn’t melt before the second arrived, although the skies have finally cleared so we might be okay for the rest of the day.  Here’s a long shot of the garden.

Garden - full shot

We bought a water tub / plant feature thing ages ago, it’s probably been in a few shots of the garden.  We take no care of it at all, and each year it grows a few plants from the bulbs which somehow survive.  We keep it mainly because the cats like drinking from it in the summer when the water is pretty clean.  At the moment, it’s an ice cube.

Fizz - and the water 'feature'

Much like the surface of the canal near here, which is now solid ice (kids have been cycling on it) except for a couple of areas of free flowing water where all the birds are hanging around.  Anyway, here’s two shots of our apple tree.

Apple Tree

Garden - past tree

We know it’s not a real guitar!

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We’ve had Guitar Hero for a few years on a couple of platforms (Wii and PS3, the PS3 version is better, the Wii version made a horrible noise when you missed a note and was very distracting).  We also recently bought Band Hero despite the fact that there’s only two of us in the house.  We love the games, we keep trying to find a copy of Rock Band (and Rock Band 2) second hand although they’re still expensive, because they’re still popular.

It amuses me when I hear people talking about how ‘sad it is’ to play Guitar Hero and how they feel it’s not good for kids in case ‘they think they’re playing a real instrument’ and it puts them off playing a proper guitar or learning the drums or whatever.

In fact, it’s worse than amusing, it’s annoying.  Firstly, we know it’s not a real guitar folks.  In fact, if you try and treat it like a guitar you’ll not do very well in the game.  You have to treat it like a game controller (which, amazingly it is) and treat winning like playing a game of hitting the colours.  It helps to have good manual dexterity and it helps to have a good sense of rhythm and it can be useful to know the song, but these aren’t critical.  It’s entirely possible to ace songs with the sound muted, because it’s about pressing the right colour at the right time.

It feels to me that it’s only some part time musicians who feel a little threatened by the fun that people can have playing Guitar Hero and similar games.  Those of us having fun playing them know they’re games, know they don’t make us musicians and know that it’s only a controller.

I never, even as a kid, truly thought I could fly a jet fighter just because I played T.L.L. on the Spectrum for hours on end.  I suspect kids playing Guitar Hero or Band Hero or Rock Band know even better than their parents that it’s a game controller they’re handling and not a real instrument.  But you know what?  If it gets them interested in music and being musical and if it encourages cooperative gaming rather than purely competitive gaming then how can that be a bad thing?

If you are deluded enough to think the little plastic thing in your hands is a real golf club and that you learned to play golf in front of your Wii, maybe you’re better off not playing Guitar Hero, but for the rest of us, we know it’s a game, we know it’s a game controller and we don’t care.  It’s fun.

Usenet / netnews

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Usenet was one of the first things I did on the Internet, coming from a background of FidoNet / Bulletin Boards it was a natural progression, along with e-mail.  The web was still in it’s infancy, Gopher was still more useful, or e-mail responders, at the time.  IRC was huge and if I wasn’t reading Usenet I was probably on IRC (usually, both).

I spent a lot of time posting to Usenet and using software to run a news server locally (sort of a caching only server), I even wrote my own (newsmangler, although there appears to be a new tool out and about called that as well, resulting in various hits to this blog).

For whatever reason, my involvement in Usenet slowed and in fact, Usenet use for text-discussion slowed in general.  Binary use grew and is still huge, but I don’t really think it’s the right place for binaries.

Recently though my involvement has increased again, mainly in the uk.* hierarchy although I lurk a lot more than I used to and post a lot less.  I’ve been looking for an excuse to get another Virtual Private Server (this time with Gandi because their setup is so nice) and I’ve finally relented and put together an INN2 Usenet server ( http://matrix.darkstorm.co.uk/news/ ).  It’s been interesting, there’s a steep learning curve to getting it set up so that it behaves, and then getting peers (up to 3 now).  But it’s been fun.  I hope to keep developing the server and maybe end up offering access to other folk, if there are any others left who still read usenet that is 😉