Hello, Hola, Konnichiwa and Grüß Gott!

It’s been quite some time since I last posted something here on my little blog. There were various things that I did or had to do besides blogging. I’m gonna tell you a few of these things here:

Age of Conan
I longed for so long for this game. It was hailed as the true alternative to World of Warcraft. It had stunning graphics and an innovative combat system (at least on paper). It had storytelling (at least for the first 20 out of 80 levels). It had a PVP focus with sieges and mounted combat and whatnot (at least it was planned). But what truly happened was this:

May - the game comes out and 1 million players subscribe. Magazines give it the highest rankings. It is a blast to play the first 20 levels, with voice acting for every quest. As players realize that after level 20 all the voice acting is gone they are really disappointed though they cope with it. I for one didn’t really expect to have voice acting after the “tutorial” that was the first 20 levels.

June - players have to grind a lot, an aweful lot to get to the maximum level of 80. From level 50 onwards there were practically 5-10 quests per 10 levels that would give you 2, maybe 3 levels. The rest was pure, unfun, grinding.
Players at or close to level 80 want to do what Age of Conan was focused on: PVP. Yet there is no reward, no nothing, for doing PVP. Plus sieges are buggy as hell, world PVP is practially dead with every zone being instanced. Funcom says “dudes, we will get the big PVP patch out in june!”. Players wait.

July - while at the start healers seemed completely imbalanced, with having high dps and survivability through heals and tank classes couldn’t kill anything because of low dps, things changed when players discovered gems. Soldiers who socketed only +damage gems could one-to-two-shot everything in the game bar other soldiers. I had fun with my soldier for a few days doing this but it got boring pretty fast. PVP patch is still to be seen. Funcom says, early August is the new release date.

August - no PVP patch, no fix for the completely unbalanced gems. Players start to cancel their accounts. I do so too.

September - I only read the forums for this one but it seems sieges are still buggy as hell, PVP is unbalanced for healers again with gems being completely nerfed, all damage cut by 40% in pvp, but heals stayed the same. Plus raids are broken because tanks needed the gems to survive.

October: I am back to playing World of Warcraft and enjoy it a lot. Although I don’t want to raid anymore, I now focus on having fun with reallife friends in the game, doing the occasional 5 man instance, and a lot of PVP.

Work
Got a lot of programming to do with the new project. About 2 weeks every month I work for 50 instead of the normal 40 hours. Although that is most of the time only because I go home early most of the time in the first 2 weeks of each month, so I have to do the minus hours on the last two weeks so I will be at +/- 0 hours at the end of each month. The joy and pain of flextime.

Anime
I have been watching a freaking lot of anime in the last half year. Too much to count actually. Lucky Star, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Monster and some I forgot to mention (damn short term memory!). Especially Code Geass is the best thing since… a freaking long time. The storytelling is at the same level as Lord of the Rings and Babylon 5. I will write a post about the anime next probably.

Other stuff
I have been reviewing anime for Anifreak for some time now also.

You can count on more (more or less) interesting posts from now on again on this blog.

Sayonara!

Matching my last post about those annoying anti piracy ads, I’ve found this gem in the depths of the web. A short AMV by Doki Doki Productions. It’s called Plunder Propaganda and it’s a hilarious spoof of the usual ads:

A high quality version is available at AnimeMusicVideos.org (after a free registration you can download each and every AMV on the site, which are tens of thousands).

Another spoof was done by the IT Crowd:

And last but not least, as a reference the original annoying ad™:

Yesterday I rented another movie from my local videostore and planned to have a nice evening watching it. But I didn’t. Because, as all movies nowadays, it had one of those annoying anti-piracy ads before the main menu turned up. Usually they don’t let you hit the (top-)menu button while those ads are playing so you cannot skip them. Annoying enough. But the last one I’ve seen even topped that annoyance - you couldn’t even fast forward it, that button was locked out too. What. The. Hell?

I can understand the notion of putting those ads on rental disks, because franky, those are probably the disks that are copied the most (leaving bootlegs and camera recordings of movies not even on DVD out of the picture, because those don’t have those ads in front of them anyway). What I don’t quite get is why they have to lock out all of the buttons to forward/skip the ad. I mean seriously, is that going to stop anyone who wants to copy the disk anyway? Not at all.

Which leads me to my next and more important point:
Why in [whatever-you-believe-in]’s name do they put those annoying ads on every buyable DVD? Of the about 200 DVDs I own I’d say 190 have the ads, 180 have unskippable-but-fast-forwardable ads, and 10 have ads that can’t even be fast-forwarded.

So why the hell is it like that? I take pride in my collection, and if I like a movie I will gladly spend the few bucks to own it and all the specials that come with it on the disk. But I’d rather pay 5$ more to skip that damn anti-piracy ad. Not only are they awefully bad most of the time, they also really insult the paying customer which has to spend his or her time watching the ad all the time the DVD is put into the player.
Do they really think that some rediculous ad is going to stop anyone who wants to burn a disk, to do it? If they burn it, you can be sure that they will remove the ad from the disk anyway, so it really serves no purpose at all. Well maybe its purpose is just to be damn annoying.

The following image sums up my opinion on that pretty much:

Just found that masterpiece of cabaret linked in a forum and couldn’t help but post it here. That’s the german cabaret artist Volker Pispers and his program “History of the USA and terrorism”. The audio is german but someone very thoughtful subtitled it in english:

Johnny Chung Lee has made some very interesting experiments with the Wii Remote and Sensor Bar, and all the infrared tracking that those two do. While the second video I’m gonna show you is actually the lastest he posted on his Wii projects site (and shows off some cool Minority Report like interactions), it is another one that really made me go wow: Headtracking on the Wii and therefore maybe the first possibilty of real Virtual Reality displays.

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote

Tracking your fingers with the Wiimote

Also very impressive: a low-cost interactive whiteboard

I planned on installing Linux on my PS3 some weeks ago, but only in the christmas holidays did I find the time to do the task. And I intended to journal my experience and write a guide so other users can have the joy of Linux on the big screen too, and don’t have to work a whole night to get everything working.

Note: For this guide I will assume you have the latest PS3 firmware upgrade installed, which changed some wifi stuff so all the updateing at the end of the guide is nessecary.

You can install Linux on your regular PS3 harddrive, or you can opt to first upgrade the harddisk.

Things needed for the hdd upgrade:

• Phillips head screwdriver
• Flathead screwdriver (a fingernail or knife or other sharp object will do too)
• 2,5″ SATA harddrive with either 5400rpm or 7200rpm

• A PC with internet connection
• CD-Rs to burn the image files
• Storage media with a few hundred megabytes space, formated with FAT32 (a regular USB stick works best)
• USB keyboard and mouse (wireless ones with a receiver so they only need 1 USB port together work best for the PS3 versions with only 2 USB ports)

• Some time

Note: Before you change harddrives on the PS3 you should back up all data you want on the new disk to an USB stick or external drive. Backup can be done via the built-in backup utility to backup the contents of the whole disk. If you don’t have enough external storage space, you can back up individual game saves and data via the XMB in the game menu, under the entry Game Data Utility and/or Game Save Utility.
Also, of course, the PS3 should be powered down full via the switch on the back before you attempt to change the drive.

The first step is to remove the plastic cover from the hdd tray located on the left side of the system. Use a flathead screwdriver, your fingernails, or something else which is flat for this:

Next you have to remove the blue screw which holds the tray in the case:

After that flip up the metal handle on the caddy and move the it to the front of the PS3 with the handle to dislodge it. Then you can remove the caddy with the drive in it:

Use your Phillips screwdriver to remove the 4 screws holding the harddisk in the tray, and exchange the old one for the new one:

After that just put the 4 screws back in, slide the caddy into the PS3 and move it back with the handle to connect it, put the blue screw back in and finally put the plastic cover back on.
You’re now ready to boot with your new disk!
The system will ask you to format the drive, just use quickformat for this.

Now you are ready to begin with the Linux installation steps!

First things first: Download the XUbuntu PowerPC LiveCD iso file and burn the iso to a CD-R using your favourite burning program (if you don’t know how to burn iso images, refer to the Ubuntu Help forums).
In the PS3 menu navigate to the system settings and start the Format Utility, and choose “allot 10GB to the OtherOS”. After that insert the XUbuntu disk and choose “Install OtherOS” in the system settings menu. Confirm to restart the PS3 and you will be greeted by the kboot boot loader.

Protheus wrote an extremly detailed installation guide in the PSUbuntu forums so I’m gonna skip the whole procedure here. Just do what he does in the guide step-by-step (although you could and should skip the “compile your own kernel”) and you will be fine. The guide also details how to update your kernel so the wifi which broke with PS3 firmware 2.0 will work again in Linux.

But another problem arrived with the 2.10 firmware - Ubuntu wouldn’t boot anymore. So after you upgrade the kernel as described in Protheus’ post, follow the instructions in the next guide.
AliasXNeo wrote a detailed guide how to update your kernel once more so it works with the 2.10 firmware again, again, follow the guide step-by-step.

Once that is finished you will be able to boot into your newly installed Linux system on the PS3! Now you will have to configure your wifi or use a regular LAN cable so you have net access on the box. Firefox comes preinstalled with Ubuntu so once you have your network configured you can surf the web. You’ll probably want to play sound files and movies now, so just install VLC media player using the command sudo apt-get install vlc from the terminal.

So there you have it, a working Ubuntu Linux on your PS3. You can play movies, dvds, mp3s, surf the web with a real browser opposed to the PS3 one, and do everything that you can in Linux that doesn’t need more than 256MB RAM (so SNES emulators and the likes will run fine, but 3D apps probably won’t).

And to finish this guide, a screenshot from my working system (don’t mind the crappy quality of the movie in VLC, that’s normal when screencapping movies, windows media player shows just a black window on screencaps), click the image for a better quality one:

Further reading:

• PSUbuntu.com, home of the distribution
• PS3 board: Linux 101, general questions and answers about Linux
• PS3 board: Flash in Linux, because the normal flash plugin won’t work on the PPC64 architecture

There’s good promotion. There’s epic promotion. And then there’s promotion that sways you to take initiative yourself.
The last kind is probably the best one, because when you talk about and think actively about a product, whatever it may be, you are more inclined to remember it than if you just saw an ad on TV while zapping. And “thinking about” brings me back to the topic at hand:

The Thinking Blog is holding a big giveaway to celebrate its first anniverary. The price is a sparkling new, completely waterproof Laptop from RuffPC.

I can’t imagine a better promotion for a blog. Because what do bloggers need? Computers. Better yet, Laptops so they can blog wherever they are at the moment. And if the Laptop is shock resistent and weatherproof that is just a huge bonus.

The only thing you have to do to have a shot at the price is blog about the contest. And even if you don’t win, you get a free link back to your blog from the Thinking Blog, which has according to the site, more than 1600 subscribers and I-don’t-know-how-much daily visits. So it’s a win-win situation!

What are you waiting for?


P.S. The line “a winner is you”, which was voted fifth worst video game line ever, is from Pro Wrestling on the NES.

This seriously has to be the best (and geekiest) marching band ever:

Although the video is filmed upside down, I still watched in awe at their formations. And to do all this at a football game (where I imagine there aren’t too much video game players in the crowd) makes the spectacle even better.

Video games they march to:

• Pong (at the very start, looks like some guys running around aimlessly, but it’s definately Pong)
• Tetris (with the music everybody knows so well)
• Mortal Kombat (you can even hear a feint Mortal Kombat scream when the music starts)
• Pokemon (they even have a little Pikachu-ish dude fighting, probably the team’s mascot)
• Zelda (complete with Tri-Force and the Master Sword)
• Mario Bros. (the ending especially rocks, with the castle and flag like in the game)

This commercial shows just one of the many reasons why everyone should learn english as a second language. It’s just established as the language of the world. Although the french still want to speak french even in business relations…

Anyway I’ve never seen that commercial on german television, although it is supposedly a german production. They only show the worst commercials on TV here nowadays.

So without further ado here is the brilliant ad (I’m still laughing after watching it 5 times in a row):

And for you non-german speaking folk out there, the translation what the old guy says:

“Das hier ist mein Sektor” - “This here is my sector”
“Das hier ist das wichtigste Gerät des Küstenwächters” - “This here is the most important device of the Coast Guard”
“Das Gerät und das Gerät” - “That device and that device”
“Überlebens… Radar” - “Survival… Radar”

Sometimes people get on your nerves. That is perfectly fine, not everyone will always have a real good time with everyone else. But when your roommates and coworkers become a major source of your frustration, sometimes you just have to vent. And the blog Passive Aggressive Notes is a witness of such actions. The guys over there hunt all the notes that stressted out people write for their neighbords, roommates or coworkers when they are fed up with their action. Such nice notes include:

Oh, how passivly aggressive!

Sometimes you just have to wonder in what order newsstations and newsmags put their respective news. Not that there aren’t enough newsworthy stories happening all around the globe every day, with people (still) getting killed in Iraq, Dafur, etc. and all the political stuff that happens around the clock.

But somehow CNN probably thought it would interest much more people to hear about “Sheryl Crows toilet paper square”, “Heather Mills tumbling out of a dance show” or that a suspect bolted out of a local court room “hollering for mom”.

I never really thought of CNN as one of the best news around, there are lots of better informed ones, and especially more objective ones. But this frontpage just screams “boulevard tabloid” to me:

Found on the Applegeeks Blog

One day I will order a meal at our local McDonald’s like this:

The guys over at JibJab got some great new animations going. As always, they parody political (mis-)happenings. The first one, “What we call the news” shows how TV news humbly started in the ’60s and what they have become today. The second clip “Nuckin’ Futs” is a summary of the events in 2006, sung by children.
Sit back and enjoy the show: