Why yes, it’s another one of those posting where I rack my brain about something worth typing about, or at least take space on an innocent server which really should have better things to do than parse this crap. Talking about servers, my homke-hosted server, which I’ve been toying about moving this site to for a good long while spectacularly died. I know it as windowcam3, you know it as scribcam.co.uk. Well, you don’t know it as that, as I only use it for “internal purposes” now.

I was generating some thumbnails for the gallery, when all of a sudden, it became unresponsive. The power light was on, nothing else was. A sure sign of overheating. I removed the power cable, powered it back on, and watched the CPU fan. It went at about 3RPM whilst making some ongodly scratching sound. It was dead. I’m awaiting a replacement heatsink/fan from the good folks at ebuyer. I’m a bit upset that my attempts to temorarily move the server software to another machine resulted in failure. That might be one thing I sort before I bring the whole thing back online. The server software is a bit of a mess!

Right, moving on. I’ve really not got much that I can type about. Most of the time when I’ve been in the house, has been playing some of the games that Steam have had on offer over the past couple of weeks. Therefore, not that anyone cares, but here’s a quick run down of some of the shit I’ve purchased…

Peggle Complete Pack 6.99 GBP

Yeah, Peggle.

I originally discovered this at work, when it was downloaded as a demo on the works PS3. I played it until I completed it, which took me all of 10 minutes, as the PS3 demo is very short. It was available for the PSP too, and after Kris at work purchased it, it became a bit of an urban legend after he posted this on facebook…

… with “Peggle on the toilet” becoming a short-lived catchphrase for those who also liked the game.

The “Peggle” phenomenon wore off, until the recent sale on Steam, where I purchased both versions of Peggle (original and “Nights”), then posted this on FB…

Admittedly, I have yet to take my laptop into the toilet and enjoy a nice steamy peggle, but at least the opportunity is there…

Puzzle Kingdoms 0.80 GBP

80p well spent. Saying that, the game doesn’t need a storyline. Expect me to know the puzzles are going to get harder as I play though the game. Like Peggle, this game works on my laptop.

Super Laser Racer 0.75 GBP

Glad this was only 75p, because this wasn’t 75p well spent. I don’t enjoy this game at all, despite some of the music coming from the Amiga music legend that is Bjorn Lynne. The music is by far the best part, as the gameplay is incredibly basic.

Shatter 1.75 GBP

Talking about good music, the soundtrack to this one is jizz-tastic. The game iself is simply Arkanoid on acid (or, Batty on acid for those who remember this awesome Spectrum game). It’s very easy, however, with extra lives being thrown out at regular opportunities. But, back to the music. I love it. The soundtrack is apparently available for almost 10 times the cost I paid for the game. As much as I love it, I’ll not bother.

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage (ROW) 1.70 GBP

I loved the Burnout franchise on the original Xbox. This game appears to be an xbox game , converted to PC, simply so they could show off some odd ragdoll physics engine that the manufacturers wanted to sell. Each level contains several thousand objects that can be knocked flying, though you do have to raise one eyebrow when a fence you make contact with can go the same distance as a water tank. The ragdoll physics enginemakes you raise another eyebrow as several mini-games cause you to fire the driver out of the car windscreen and control the flailing corpse in such tasks as hitting a wire mesh fence as high as you can, knock down as many skittles as you can, and skim the dead body across a swimming pool as if you’re skimming a stone across a pond.

The music is an absolute abomination, presumably from several shit indie bands. I think there’s about 5 tracks, all sound exactly the same as the last. You apparently can’t change the music. After the sale, this has gone back up to £16.99. Despite all of this, I have enjoyed playing it, but it’s not even woth close to full price. Wait until it comes back on a sale.

EDIT (SEVERAL WEEKS LATER): Good news everyone! Turns out you can delete all of the music files – just browse to…

\steamapps\common\flatout ultimate carnage\data\music

and you can delete all of the files in there. You’ll still get the game of which tune is meant to be playing, but obviously, you get no music! Oddly, the files are simple .ogg files, so I was hoping it might support custom .ogg files, but after creating a couple, it didn’t seem to recognise them. This game is also infinitely more enjoyable with a gamepad.

You can return to looking now.

Oh, OK. For those who didn’t see it on facebook…

That is all.

After much umming and ahhing, I’ve decided against getting a PS3. For ever. There were a few things that have swayed me in that direction, but mainly, it’s Sony’s decision to remove the ‘Other OS’ option in their latest firmware.

Other things contributed, such as the fact that I’ll only be able to use it when Daddykins doesn’t want to watch the telly. Also, life is too short for gaming. I suppose I could say the same about blogging too! On that subject, I’m glad to see that Chad is still reading, though not commenting.

Seriously though… nah, not my scene anymore. I made the same mistake with my original xbox. It got hammered for a week or two, then became an ugly, very dark green paperweight, before being shoved in a cupboard for three years. It would have still been there if I hadn’t been given a load of games for free, and somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen with the PS3 any time soon.

Hopefully, this will answer the question I get asked occasionally… “When are you getting a PS3?”

I’m tempted to put something in its place, as in some type of media server, but I don’t know if/when that’s going to happen. I’d comment a bit more on this, but I’ve just finished a nightshift, and am considerably goosed.

I’ll tell you what. Several free beers, that’s what! Well, lagers anyway. Thanks to Kris at work, I’m in possession of several cans of the frothy stuff, and all because he doesn’t drink the stuff, and they run out of date at the end of the month. Trust me, they won’t last until the end of the month. They’ll struggle to last the end of the day. To show my gratitude, I’ve dug out the webcam, and am now creating a time-lapse of me drinking them, which I’ll probably stick on Youtube at some point.

While I remember on, unfortunately, it’s bad news for the webcam on this site, I’m afraid. You may remember that it used to catalogue my entire life for many years. Unfortunately, since I have now upgraded to Windows 7, my Logitech Quickcam 4000 simply will not function on it, which means even though it’s not actually done so for many years, it’s never going to return. And considering that I rarely use this site now for anything remotely “recent”, I can’t see me investing in a Windows 7 compatible model. It’s a bit of a shame. I always trusted Logitech and their “futureproofing”. Unfortunately, it seems that I was wrong to do so. I can’t even get the driver to begin installation, although I did get the “setup” screen by changing a command in the setup.ini file.

While I’m geeking about computers, I might as well make a mention of the newest hard drive in my 1TB commection. I have 4 drives at 1TB. 2 internal ones in daily use, and 2 external ones to back up the internal ones. Buying a new drive was an easy decision for me to make, especially as someone I know lost pretty much his entire life when his hard drive died in his laptop. The trip to Maplin also involved the first trip to the store formally known as the Euro Trade Warehouse, now called usave. Those of you who followed the blog before the mass purge earlier this year will remember some of the classic things that has been purchased by the Percivals, such as the radio toilet roll holder…

You’ll not be surprised to find this still gets regular use, as a toilet roll holder, clock, and radio when somebody is in the bath. Altogether, this was a worthwhile purchase, and one that we have had for over 6 years now. This means, however, that the plastic’s started to turn yellow, which means it doesn’t look as fresh as it once did…

Anyway, back to the other days’ Euro Trade Warehouse usave purchases. I didn’t get that much, to be honest. Instead of coming out with a black binbag full of tat, I came out with a few huge crates to store my tat in, for you see, next week will see the 2010 edition of “Life Laundry”, where I go through the stuff which I’ve hoarded over the years, and bin as much of it as humanly possible. I’ve got plenty of stuff to chose from, and after only an hour at it, I already had a load of stuff landfill-bound. There’s also the fun prospect of actually cataloguing what I’ve got, and which box it’s in for future reference, should I actually need any of it again.

One thing I did avoid buying in Euro Trade Warehouse usave, were these “specialist” knives…

Oh, and while I remember, yes, yes, I know I haven’t updated much. That beast of a thing called “a life” is keeping me away from the computer. You may find I’m a little silent on everything at the moment, even flickr. In fact, that image you see above is only the 6th image (5th photo) I’ve published on there in 2010. In fact, let me know you a little league table of what I’ve done over the years. Here’s a quick rundown on previous years stats…

Jan/Feb 2007, 176 photos.
Jan/Feb 2008, 612.
Jan/Feb 2009, 68.
Jan/Feb 2010, 5.

I blame the weather, I really do.

I have managed to break the CPU fan on Beastbits. Honestly, after all of the things I’ve done to it over the years, this has to be the most stupid, and painful. It has suffered from dramatic fan noise over the past few weeks, sadly caused by the fan on the ‘newly’ replaced power supply (it’s actually quite a while ago now).

Whilst I was looking for a way to lessen the noise, I moved the wires around the CPU fan, even though I know they had nothing to do with it, and managed to catch my finger in the CPU fan, shearing one of the blades on the fan, and leaving my finger with a nasty red blotch on the tip.

This means that the fan no longer works, and therefore Beastbits is out of action for now. And I have a poorly finger to attend to.

My health has been in question over the past few days. Nothing serious, I’ve just got a cold that refuses to actually get going. I’ll get the sore throat, which will disappear and then reappear, along with the full nose, which would gdo the same. Ergh. Not good.

Anyway, in response to Noscere’s post, I’m going to post some of the WordPress plugins I use, just so you know what goes on “behind the scenes”. Note that I won’t mention security related plugins here!

First up is Akismet. Nothing really much to say about this particular little utility. It saves me having to delete spam, and with just over 45,000 spam comments at the time of typing, it’s saved me some work!

Secondly, there’s iMax Width, and no, it’s nothing to do with the branch of cinema. It forces any image I post on here to a maximum width of 500 pixels. Normally, this is the case anyway, as most of the photos I post come from Flickr, which automatically have a width of 500, but I’ve seen on a couple of occasions, I’ve posted one of the bigger sizes, meaning that if this plugin wasn’t there, the page would look like shite. And what do you mean by “it does anyway”?

Next up is Stapress reloaded. When work stalled on the original Statpress plugin, several spin-offs were released. This is just one of them. I’m not sure if work has halted on this too. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still usable. Unfortunately, it seems that this is the number-one cause of slowness on the site, as the database size grows quickly.

And then, we have Twitter Tools. I must admit to still not fully understanding Twitter. Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters to say something? And if I want to send someone a private message, I don’t want that 140 characters eaten in by whoever’s user name it is. I use it mainly for giving a quick twitter update, announcing a new blog post (which I’ll probably do with this one), and for quickly creating a bit.ly link, should I want to pass the link to someone else. I’m sure someone will give me a reason why twitter is so… erm, needed. Saying that, when a celebrity is reported to be dead, it’s the first place I look.

WordPress Database Backup is pretty much redundant to me, as since installation, I have other backup mechanisms in place. I don’t think I’ve used it in about 2 years. It’s infinitely slower than my other methods, and I only keep it in place for emergencies.

And if it isn’t our old friend, Google XML Sitemaps up next! (You can tell I’m really starting to struggle for introductions to these) which creates an XML sitemap readable by Google, presumably so it understands the site better. Or something.

Last up, because I can’t be bothered to do anymore, and I can already see Chad’s eyes glazing over is WP tags to Technorati, and is the reason there’s two sets of tags in here. I assumed it would help the blog get “noticed” (though I always seem to complain or get overly paranoid when it does get partially popular), and was installed after the “tags” feature was added to WordPress. I’m not sure if it provides any benefit anymore, as the plugin hasn’t been updated since the iron age, and the amount of hits I get from technorati is negligible, so I’m not even sure if it works anymore.

To answer the questions you weren’t thinking of, no I don’t use any type of cache plugin. It caused me headaches last year, and to think this blog generates any type of server load that would require cache usage, would simply be delusion on my part. The only time I’ve generated noticeable server load was when I posted that Jeremy Beadle had died about 2 years ago. It soon quietened down as soon as word started to spread across the interwebs. Obviously, with the introduction of the afore-mentioned twitter, I wonder how many people do the same as me, and just bypass Google altogether….

Right, that’s it for now. Hopefully, I’ll get my body in order shortly. I’m off work for the next few days.