Google Chrome was released recently. It has made me feel like this. Firefox feels more natural, but Chrome is so pretty and feature filled =(. Hopefully, there will be extensions made for Firefox which will give it so many of the nice features that Chrome has.

Recently, I was introduced to a game called Exalted by Kvetch. It is an P&P RPG like DnD, but better in several ways (IMHO). First, stunting. You actually gain mechanical bonuses by describing your actions well, with the highest level of stunt being so cool it actually gets you experience! (We got one of those in our game today, when we flash-banged a building before combat dropping into it in a C&C Generals-esque style). Despite the flash-banging, most weapons are still swords, so it is at about that tech level. Apart from the flame throwers. Also, it has really good social combat rules, well, actually, that’s Fixalted. Exalted rules are awful. However, I also think that the whole setting is more cool (I play a ninja with razor blades concealed in my gloves).

Now that Sean has his new blog running, I am slightly jealous of how nice his website is. So expect many changes to this one.

Tools:

Painting the top panel:

Filling the holes on the front panel:

Painting the front panel:

Connecting the switches:

Finished:

It was a lot of work, but I’m pleased with it.

Cocoa really is a lot of fun. It is so much simpler than writing in .NET or anything like that, and the foundation frameworks are amazing. I have now written a speech synthesizer which gets a list of system voices, displays them in a table, lets you choose one, type in a line to say and then speak it.

iPod touch 2.0 is a MASSIVE improvement over the old 1.1.4. The App Store is great, and so are the new functions, like the scientific calculator and push email. DEFINITELY worth £6 of my money.

It’s my birthday! After much thunking, I have decided to get an Apple Universal Dock to stop my iPod getting scratched and falling off the deck when I sync it - quite a nice bit of kit - the main complaints are with the video out features which I won’t use. I was talking about upgrading my computer with the remaining money, when my father said that if I saved up to buy a completely new PC, then he would contribute money towards it if I replaced the family computer with my current one. This seems sensible, so here is a list of components: (mainly for reference purposes)

Vista Home Premium (unfortunately)
Coolermaster CM690
Corsair HX620
Random SATA DVD drive
500GB WD SATA HDD (Plus current 120GB *nix drive)
2GB of OCZ DDR2 RAM
Zotac 8800GT (Yay!)
Asus P5Q Pro
Intel C2D E8400

Comes to about £600 - probably a bit less. I should be able to get it around Christmas, as I already have monitors, keyboards, speakers etc.

Firstly, the internet is mean to be free. When companies start buying domain names like http://www.coca.cola, it will just have been turned in to one big advert. Which is not what we want. How long until we see things like http://www.mobilephones.buyhere? Or http://www.buycomputers.verycheap. The TLD is not meant to be user customizable. It is meant to give some basic information about the site. For example, .com is a company (although it has now turned more into a generic TLD, as seen in my URL). .net is a personal website. .org is a non profit organization, and then you get country specific TLDs, like .co.uk, .fr and .de. That is it’s main purpose, which brings me onto my second point.

As it is, the internet is structured. You know that when you read .com, you have come to the end of the address. When this proposal is implemented, URLS like http://buy.mobile.phones.here.very.cheap will be a vaild URL. We don’t want this! We want an address like http://subdomain.domain.com. At the moment, if you can’t remember the address of a website, you can safely try .com as the most likely TLD. If that doesn’t work, then .co.uk, .net and .org are safe ones to try. The internet will lose it’s structure. If there are no limits on the TLDs you can use, then it’s like being able to make up your own postcode. The internet will lose all structure.

This is my view, but if you disagree with me, please say so because I would be interested to know why.

Last night, I fixed Ubuntu. Gnome had killed itself the week before, but I really didn’t want to fix it because I  had no idea what the problem was. Turned out, the problem was minimal and a sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop fixed it.

Reading a Lifehacker post on Ubuntu, I read about a program for Linux called Gnome Do. It is a clone of Quicksilver, if anyone knows what that is. Basically, I can now press Super (windows key) and Space, and Gnome Do pops up. I can open firefox by typing fx <enter>. Or any other approximation of the name of the program. I can quickly find files, and even tweet, by typing ‘tweet’ <tab> ‘Tweet here’. It really is good, and should speed up my day to day using a bit. Also, I have found a program called mail-notifier which sends you a pop up when ever you get an email. It even works with Hosted Gmail, which is good.

Sean and I are still dreaming of iPhones, but it is getting closer =). Now I just need to secure a Paper round. Joe let me help on his once, and I am confident that I could do it by myself.

Also, Ubuntu is broken. It wasn’t me. Got some new headphones. They’re nice.

(note - views expressed in this post may change after the inital wahoo-ness has worn off)

It’s my birthday in about a month, and we (Sean, Jonathan, Pete and I, the Geek Clique), are going to have a LAN party. We plan to play Supreme Commander and Command and Conquer Generals, perhaps with small bouts of Assault Cube and Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. We need a network switch, but that costs very little. The games are all on amazon for less than £5 each. We’ll see how it turns out.

This week, one of my friends at school has begun to write a comic called ‘Ronnie’. It is a blatant ripoff of Dilbert, but he denies it. I’ve agreed to host it on the internet, and I’ll see how long he keeps producing them. The link is in my blogroll, or at http://mooseguy.com/ronnie.

After last week’s ShefLUG meeting, I decided to have a go at installing Gentoo on my powerbook. The installation was successful, and I’m going to mess with X now. Should be fun.

Eyecandy aside, I’m going to try to use nix more, as I can play music over my ipod (my main reason  for using winduhs, other than gaming.) I already have Gentoo installed, but tend to use that just for remote connecting from school with SSH, and acting as a mini web server. Oh, it also lets me say that I have a triple boot computer.

Yesterday, my father said that I could have an old mac laptop (Powerbook G4, running OS X 10.3). I decided to nixify it, downloaded Xubuntu PPC and burned a disk. There are advantages to having a 20Mb/s internet connection! Slightly off topic, but last week, Jonathan and I found an accelerating broadband connection mentioned in the Guardian! 2Mb per second per second. I put the disk in, and spent about ten minutes trying to work out which boot option would boot Xubuntu without crashing the computer. Turned out to be live-nosplash-powerpc. The laptop doesn’t like spash screens, evidently. Any other option made the screen a slightly distressing shade of green, with a slight gradient. Once I’d booted, the installed ran without trouble. However, when I rebooted, it shut down immediately, because there was no nosplash boot option! Grub doesn’t run on PPC, so you have to use Yaboot, which isn’t really as mature. There was a fix on the ubuntu forums though. I had to boot the livecd again (with live-nosplash-powerpc), open a terminal, edit the /media/disk/etc/yaboot.conf file (/etc/yaboot.conf accessed from the livecd), and change all instances of ’splash’ to ‘nosplash’. Then, run ybin, or, if you like a good laugh, ybin -v. After yaboot has been updated, and, if you ran it verbosely, your hard drive has been blessed with holy penguin pee (try it yourself), then you can boot straight into Xubuntu. The next problem was getting the network card to work. Luckily, the wired connection worked, so I wasn’t completely lost. (This is turning into a guide for how to install Xubuntu on a PowerBook G4). I found a very good post on the ubuntu forums again. You need to be using a Broadcom networking card (which is in PowerBooks). You can check by running lspci | grep Broadcom\ Corporation. If you get some kind of output containing the words ‘Broadcom Corporation’ then you’re probably alright. You then need to download this file: http://svit.epfl.ch/stuff/wl_apsta.o . Then, install the package bcm43xx-fwcutter. It’s in the Universe repository, if you havn’t enabled it (Google it if you don’t know how to enable it). Ignore the GUI prompt that comes up during the installation. Just close it. Once it’s installed, run the following command: sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware ~/Desktop/wl_apsta.o .Or wherever you saved the file. Then, run sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/`uname -r` ~/Desktop/wl_apsta.o . Or, again, wherever you saved the file.  Reboot, et voila. Wireless works. Next, since the powerbook only has one mousebutton, I wanted to be able to right click without pressing F12 (The default key). It is very easy. run sudo vim /etc/default/mouseemu . Uncomment the line which says Left Ctrl + Click next to it. Do this by deleting the hash at the beginning of the line. Press i to enter insert mode, then delete the character. Press escape, and type :x <enter>. Now, run the following command: /etc/init.d/mouseemu restart. You can now right click by control clicking.

There you go! Xubuntu set up nicely, and with minimal effort.