Squaresphere

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html
This is one mighty scary article, well worth a read.

Ever wanted to run your own country? Now you can! Nation States is a game I used to play many years ago, where you can found your own nation and set-up various principles of the society and government, and then deal with policy issues which will shape the face of your nation over time. It seems I left my old nation unattended for long enough for it to be deleted. So I have founded a new nation.

The Empire of Buttermonky!

http://www.nationstates.net/buttermonky

(yes, it’s not a deliberate typo)

The new set of nVidia release drivers are out now for the 8 series of graphics cards. The jump from 90 to 100 has come from 94 to 158, with the 158.19 drivers being released now. A great deal of fixes for GTX users and various issue for the 86xx cards. Find the Windows XP 32 versions at, http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_158.19.html

Installed

Originally uploaded by Neon1024.

New year and springtime bring upgrades and preparations for Crysis, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3 and Hellgate London. As an aside, after a fantastic presentation by the CEO of the Hellgate London development team Flagship Studios, Bill Roper, I am utterly enthused about Hellgate London and would happily bill it as the closest you will get to Diablo3, and well well worth keeping an eye on. I have a pre-order myself, but I digress.

I have uploaded some photos of the new pc to my Flickr account for people to look at. Not much at the moment, but I will update them as I get more used to fiddling with GIMP on my Ubuntu machine.

One tip I would give people if you are looking to update your pc to the new architecture, such as SLi, please do make sure you buy the right motherboard! I managed to buy an ATI Crossfire motherboard, which of course did not support nVidia’s SLi technology. No big deal as nVidia haven’t yet released any SLi drivers, so you can only really use one graphics card at the moment. I have to admit the performance of just the one card is superb. Running Command and Conquer 3 on maximum settings with 8x Anti-Aliasing is pretty impressive.

These guys rock, they have a whole bunch of interesting, clever and innovative projects on the go with urban artwork, check it out.
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/

Ok, so having just forked out for an entirely new system I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of all the parts tomorrow (with luck) the breakdown is as follows.

• CPU: Intel CPU Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz 1066FSB LGA775 4MB cache Retail inc.Fan (3yr Manufacturers Warranty)
• MOBO: Asus P5WDH Deluxe Skt 775 i975X DDR2, PCIe16, dual GbLAN 1394 8ch.audio SATA/RAID0/1/5 WiFi Supports Intel 65NM cpu) ATX Motherboard
• RAM: Geil Value DDR2 2.0GB PC6400 Dual Channel memory kit (2 x 1GB) 800MHz (5-5-5-15) +Aluminium heat spreader, ATI Crossfire Ceritified
• HDD: 500GB Samsung SATA II 300 Hard Disk Drive 16MB cache 7200rpm oem
• SLI GFX: 320MB XFX 8800GTS, PCI-E (x16), Mem 1600MHz, GPU 500MHz, 96 Streams, 2x Dual Link/DVI HDTV
• DVD: Samsung SH-S183L Black DVD +/-R/RW Lightscribe DL SATA OEM SH-S183L BEBN
• CASE: Antec Full Case Nine Hundred Black Black full tower case +widow 3 x120mm and 1 x200mm fans ATX NO PSU
• PSU: Antec Truepower Trio 550W PSU TP3-550 GB PSU

Looking forward to building it all in time for i30, not sure if it will travel to lan with me due to issues with the drivers from nVidia and the 8800 series of cards. Piccies and build log to follow!