Squaresphere

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!

..scary stuff.., http://www.inteldaily.com/?c=117&a=1431

This are probably old news to most, but sometimes the old news is the best news! I was looking for a way to quickly get to my desktop but not clear anything that was on it. I’m giving, what was Konfabulator, Yahoo! Widgets another go, with the release of v4 of the Widget Engine I figured I’d dive back in, as having notes on the desktop is quite handy. To see these my first thought was to use Win+D to show the desktop, but this also cleared the Widgets away defeating the whole object. I was pointed to Win+M to minimise all open windows, which works great. This led me to looking for more, just in case there were a few gems I’d missed. Have a look yourself, freshen up your knowledge!

Keyboard shortcuts for Windows - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449

A great article on how Microsoft is actually helping to promote Linux to its own user base. Microsoft aren’t really the most popular company in the world, and their latest OS has been causing waves for quite some time. Having just recently taken the plunge into Linux myself, it looks like I picked the perfect time to make the change, if Microsoft are starting to look at ways of actively killing off Windows XP.

Find the article here, http://aaxnet.com/editor/edit043.html

I managed to find a day to backup my spare pc and take the dive into Linux in the form of Ubuntu. I have to say it’s the easiest install I’ve ever had, yes, better than Windows. The Synaptic package manager is an amazing innovation in software installation, that coupled with Automatix made installing all the software a breeze. The biggest thing I found when running though the LifeHacker Linux Roundup articles I mentioned previously, is XGL and Beryl. This amazing application converts your entire desktop environment into a fluid and more usable work space. It’s all well and good watching the screen casts and the YouTube movies, but having it on your own pc makes a huge difference. Be sure to check out thier website, at beryl-project.org.

Songbird wins the battle of the media managers. Although there is a late arrival in the shape of http://www.mlipod.com/ which is an iPod plugin for WinAmp’s media manager. Which I am yet to try. The main reason was that iTunes doesn’t allow me to copy my music off my iPod to my computer. This caused it to lose more points than the RSS podcast downloading feature (probably the best thing in itunes) gained.

The next stage is to clean-up my library and perhaps actually swap my iPod over to a SongBird library instead of an itunes one. The application can only get better with time, as development thunders ahead and more extensions are released. So go and give it a try for a while, you’ll not go back to itunes! Try it, http://www.songbirdnest.com/

In a late review of the media libraries, I actually got some time to read the Lifehacker articles mentioned in this post. Which led me to the excellent, if rather ugly looking, Media Monkey. This ace application can tag all your mp3’s using folder names or amazon as a base. After about 4 hours, I finally had all 5,000 odd tracks tagged and named properly along with artwork. The only real drawback is that the information is stored locally in an mdb file so when I arrived at work and plugged the iPod into my work pc, it didn’t quite all work out.

I guess I will have to store the mdb on the iPod and install Media Monkey at work, in order to transfer the database over. I guess Apple didn’t think that people might want to have more than one application and more than one “library” pc, shame on you Steve.