BSD & Gaming

So I was watching the U.S. version of the show Being Human, and all of a sudden this great tune came on and I had to find out more about it. A search for the lyrics located it right away. The song was called Wolves And Werewolves from The Pack A.D. ‘s album entitled Funeral Mixtape.

I’m not much of an audiophile or even general music enthusiast so I don’t keep up with the industry or any specific groups, hell I stopped listening to broadcast radio years ago and when I need to have something on in the car I mix my own cd. However once in a while something stands out for me like this song did and I have to track it down. If you are into anything at all that has a jagged bluesy riff sound give it a listen sometime, these girls rock!

Back in 2000 when Red Alert 2 was first released I fell in love with it immediately.
While I enjoyed the previous C&C game Tiberian Sun very much and still play it occasionally, it just didn’t capture the imagination like Red Alert 2 did.

Growing up in the last gasp of the Cold War I can still remember doing Civil Defense safety drills in elementary school. Those years made a strong impression on me, the fear of war with the Soviet Union weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and even though as children we may not have understood all the details we knew it would be something bad. In fact to this day any book, movie, or game that reflects the feel or imagery of the Cold War era still evokes an emotional response and fires my imagination. That connection has even led to a need to collect some Civil Defense relics in recent years… go figure. There is something about that iconic CD logo that I’m drawn to. Anyway enough of that I’ll get back on track about playing Red Alert 2 on BSD using WINE.

The ‘Good News’ :

Playing Red Alert 2 on BSD [ FreeBSD or PC-BSD ] is possible and it seems to run well now that I actually have it installed.

The ‘Bad News’ :

I have not been able to get RA2 to install easily. I still don’t know what the issue is but for whatever reason trying to get RA2 to install properly straight from the CD just isn’t happening. I keep getting errors preventing it from completing the install. I won’t go into all the gory details but basically I gave up and did what the Ubuntu Linux folks did, installed it on a Winblows box – then copied it to my WINE drive.   @*&# !!! Bah!

Once the installation ‘goat rope’ was over I ran into issues with the damned cd copy protection crap, I hate games that insist on the CD being in the drive in order to play – it doesn’t prevent piracy it just exposes the original install cd to potential for damage. Needless to say I had to continue to take the Ubuntu communities lead and follow their advice on countering that nonsense.

Red Alert 2 is over a decade old, but I think it is still a great game and worth the effort to install. I realy prefer RA2 versus what I consider to be the ‘over the top’ cartoon graphics and general silliness of RA3. If anyone ever finds a ‘finished’ conversion mod making RA3 into a likeness of RA2 please let me know. I found a few mods that are or were being worked on but found nothing complete.

WineHQ’s information about Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Ubuntu documentation for Red Alert 2 under WINE – [LINK]

Wikipedia information on Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Red Alert Den’s custom maps, missions, and misc. files – [LINK]

I’m enjoying my android tablet and having fun finding great applications for it. With the 10.2″ screen I keep a lot of photos on it but have had problems with the preloaded image viewers. The default picture viewing application blows chunks in the worst way, frequently crashing and intermittently unable to view new additions to the galleries because of buggy image caching. Forget about using it to set new desktop wallpaper, it forces you to crop the chosen image size down and limits it to a low resolution version.

I’ve tried a ton of picture viewers from the market and other sources, nothing works the way I wanted them to and until now none solved the bad wallpaper dilemma. However I finally found a program called “JustPictures!” and it is the best I have found so far. JustPictures! offers some useful features like choosing what folders to use and how to display images. Most importantly it also lets you apply a larger sized high res image for the desktop. Give it a try, JustPictures! is free and definitely better than the stock application.

Christmas came early this year for me thanks to the generosity of my family. They know I haven’t had the cash to splurge on any new tech stuff in ages and I’ve been daydreaming about a new PDA or Tablet PC for a while. I just had to decide what I wanted.

I knew I didn’t want to spend the insane dollars required just to get an iPad with very limited features. In my mind things like USB ports, built in WiFi, and flash card readers should always be included as standard fare. Neither should getting any of those items be an excuse for sellers to donkey punch your wallet and suck higher fees out of you….  No thanks Apple you lost my interest with that business model!

Being old school some facts didn’t really sink in till I started researching my choices, I found that the days of stand alone PDA designs are long over, they’ve all been incorporated into cell phones.  Bleh! No more cell phones, they oughta’ be outlawed! Get off my lawn ya dam punks!

While netbooks are appealing, actually using the super tiny keyboards and looking at the small screens for any length of time lost my interest. Ah well, crosses netbooks off the selection list. Given my idiosyncratic preferences the choices are down to some sort of a tablet and picking what operating system I wanted.

Apple’s OS is definitely out since as I already stated I have zero interest in the whole iPad boondoggle. I also tend to stay as far away from Windows as I can. That left the final contender being an ANDROID based device.

Once I decided on a DROID based tablet I spent a many hours, days actually, looking at options, system specs, etc.  I kept getting drawn to the Zenithink tablets despite a few complaints I found, which included a particularly snarky magazine article deriding them. The article was dismissive of the ZT-180 because it wasn’t the omnipotent Apple-Killer they wanted it to be. While I can see their disappointment over not having a rival to flaunt at Apple, I couldn’t agree with their conclusions at all since they based them on silly expectations.  In my view if you take the ZT-180 for what it is and what it offers in it’s price range, then it makes a very nice choice with a broad range of abilities compared to some competitors.

Pricing from stateside dealers ran anywhere from fifty to eighty dollars more than dealers outside the U.S. so I ordered one from over-seas instead. Delivery took less than ten days to arrive from time of order. I’ve had it for almost two weeks now and it’s been a heck of a lot of fun to mess around with. Once I’ve had more time to kick it around and mod it to my preferences I’ll write up the details.

In conclusion Santa was very good to me this year and I’m really pleased!!  ANDROID ROCKS!

ZT-180 Wiki page from SlateDroid

Just watched the new show on AMC called The Walking Dead. It was great, one of the best zombie stories I’ve seen in a while. The show seems more focused on the characters and in building a real storyline instead of repeated scenes of meaningless zombie slaughter.

I’ve never read the comic series it is based on, but I’m definitely inspired to check it out. Here’s hoping they build a decent enough following to keep it on air with enough profit to keep the quality up.

If you haven’t seen it yet head over to hulu.com and watch it now!

Finally got to see the latest episode “Chuck Versus the Anniversary”.  Chuck is about the only show I feel excited over when there is a new episode due out.

It was cool having the old cold war bunker as a setting and Dolph Lundgren playing the bad guy doing his “I must break you” line from Rocky IV. Not to mention having Olivia Munn guest-star as eye candy didn’t bother me one bit! Can’t wait for more!

Photoshop is a really powerful application, and the recent versions have some pretty amazing capabilities. The downside for somebody like me is the cost of it. While many software applications give discounts to students, that doesn’t help me because my student days are long since over. Even if I had a student discount it still requires an investment which I need for other things given the state of the economy. If I was a professional in a position where the expense was necessary it’d be worth it. However I’ve been using a free open source alternative that does everything I’ve needed so far.. The Gimp.

The Gimp has been around a really long time, I’ve been using it off and on for ages now. While I love the fact that there is a version available for FreeBSD, PCBSD, or the various linux flavors, there are even downloads compatible with Windows making it available to a huge audience. It is a quite powerful image manipulation program in it’s own right with plenty of free plugins, filters, and brushes to suit your needs.

The Gimp’s layout can throw people off balance if they are used to photoshop. Even though many of the features and tools are the same in function, they may have a different name or place to find them that can be confusing for photoshop users. There is a version available that tries to ease that learning curve with a more familiar layout called GimpShop. Since I am not a photoshop user I’ve never tried GIMPshop, but for someone interested in trying an alternative or wanting to transition over to free software it might be worth looking into.

The Gimp definitely has a slot in my “must have software” list and I think if you give it a shot I believe you’ll like it as well.

The Gimp – [LINK]

GimpShop – [LINK]

In a New York Times article Amazon.com says it was selling 143 eBooks for every 100 paper copies and now sales are on the increase hitting 180 per 100. I can understand why sales are up from my own perspective. I love to read …and I love books! However years of lugging around tons of books every time I move has been a nightmare, being able to have all those hundreds of pounds of books on a few data disks…. it’s just too convenient.

It’s not an easy choice when you sentimentalize hard-copy books the way some of us do. Some books in my collection were gifts from people and those are especially hard to consider getting rid of. Every book holds a memory for me, not just the work itself…  where I was, what I was doing and experiencing at the time when I read it. That experience doesn’t hold for me with the digital editions. Getting rid of my hard-copy versions is something I’ve been contemplating for some time now but not a choice I’ve been able to make yet.

NYT’s story is here – [LINK]

I finally got around to typing up what I did to get STO running on my BSD laptop. It’s quick and dirty but covers the basics.

If you want to get the details just click on article #5 to the right or click on this – [LINK]

Remember when a handheld computer was just a PDA and not a phone/camera/mini texting tool/blah blah blah as well? Personally I hate cell phones let alone text messaging, and I don’t have any real use for either. OK… I admit I have a cheap ass “pay as you go” cell shoved down into the bottom of my backpack just in case of emergency, but I don’t want it to do anything else. I love the sense of freedom I get when I accidentally leave the dam phone at home. Just try to find a stand alone PDA today, I don’t really see any except for used ones.

I had a Palm Vx for years, I loved it! Light, thin, and portable with a ton of accessories that could slip into a shirt pocket without feeling like you just put a ten pound brick in there. As time went on features like a flash card slot, sound port, and wireless capability were added to the genre – all good stuff. Then they stuffed in a cell phone too – bleh! Don’t get me started on iPads and netbooks, they’re not what I want. It’d be nice if someone served the niche market I’m in. But I know it won’t ever be profitable again with today’s market so I’ll have to settle for something else.