BYO my new xbox?

I like lubuntu
it's been easy enough to use, considering its a free unix system.
ubuntu is fairly mainstream
it runs fine on the laptop I bought in 2004, as does XP (with no service packs or virus protection)
it hardly uses any system resources, leaving more for games
steam for linux beta is out, thus far it runs smooth as silk, (only tested Solar2 atm)
Connected to my TV it runs anime (via VLC) better than the TV, as good as Win7.
Getting the OS running is a simmilar hassle to setting up windows (no flash/Java/Firefox for example)
I installed a copy on a 16GB USB, it runs fine and now I can exclude the OS from any PC issues I have in the future.
doesnt nag me about openning files. occasionally asks for a password but no nearly as annoying as windows.
It's not mainstream, just like my trackball mouse.
Using it sort of reminds me of playing Space Rangers 2, one of the best UI's I have seen in a game and it also had ~3 fully integrated minigames.
ubuntu had an app market before there was such a thing and its still really easy to find and install programs with it.

For me the OS should have as small a footprint as possible leaving me plenty of power to get <100 ping and 60FPS in LOL and GW2 (for example). Thus I think Lubuntu is better for gaming that Win7, the only think holding me back is compatibility with games being built nearly exclusively for windows.

Thus;
Seems to me my broken/slow/old PC BYO will now be my new media center. Plugged into the TV for watching anime/YouTube and running the occasionall game over Steam. Pretty keen to trial Psyconaughts in BigScreen mode with a controller and pretending I am a console gamer. I suppose I need a new wireless keyboard+trackball mouse for all other games though and to press "V", "B" & " " in VLC.

Camino: The Way of St James

Note: I don’t want to be somebody who talks about stuff and is full of dreams. I want to be a person who lives. I thought about kitesurfing for three years before committing and this is a similar thing. It was a possibility to do the walk of St James for my gold DofE but I went to Nepal instead. Over the years this trip has become more appealing and I now have some people I personally know in Europe who I could visit. Knowing a local makes holidays a lot more relaxing.

Min 100k for certificate

Average 5kph

Say 8h a day walking, therefore 40km per day

3 days easy to complete

Or from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France 769km

That would be ~20 days at 40km per day

+10 days for site seeing along the way. Since Caroline took 30 days to complete the trip.

Maybe 3 days to recover from jetlag?

3 days in Norway to see Scott Bowes

3 Days to see Aurore

3 Days to see Kristina

Possibly also Stephan and Eduard?

I suppose most people would be working, but I could catch up in the evenings and maybe somebody could walk with me?

40days in Europe would be a nice number, making the most of the price of airfares too.

$2000 or so for airfares each way?

About the same for spending cash

Need a week or so to see Levi get ordained in December 2013

Possibly a Jan-Feb-March holiday?

I’m frightened to plan this for 2013, it seems too soon and will be harsh on my back account.

But the longer I leave it the worse I will feel about failing to act.

Unless I save it up for a later in life thing like a honeymoon? But that would require a wife and I’m still single, so I dont know how much later "later" would be.

Kk so holidays for 2013 will be:

1 week in Jan with Dad sailing for his BDay in Hervy Bay

1 week kitesurfing somewhere somehow

1 week kitesurfing somewhere somehow

1 Week to see Levi graduate as a Pastor on or about the 8^th of december

Then 2014

Easter is April 18-21

Somewhere march-April-May could be my Eurotrip?

All my holidays at once

God willing it will be so, if not then …um, well I’m prepared to be unprepared.

Lubuntu: another attempt to replace windows

Once again I'm goingto have a go at using linux instead of windows. This time the primary cause is that my PC at work had corrupted the system files.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/InstallingLubuntu

for general install

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1872303

for installing to USB, so I can use at work and home.

I used an old Lubuntu 10.10 install CD and attempted to partition my USB to 8GB ext4 “\”, 4GB ext4 “\home” and 4GB swap. But every partition had ~4 bytes added or taken from it so they none of them were nice round numbers.

After installing the OS I restarted the PC and ran the performance test, then restarted a few more times. Seems best to consistently keep the USB in the same slot otherwise it resets the boot order and occasionally boots Windows. Also I can only use the GRUB to start XP on the computer I used to install Lubuntu, all the others say serial number not found.

After sorting that out. On my broken PC, load times from GRUB to login screen were

3:29 Lubuntu

1:31 XP Pro

Where as on my new work laptop both systems took 20 seconds to load.

Next I’ll need to update the OS to current; 12.10

Apparently steam will have a linux beta this week open to the public.

Run full Ubuntu on BYO? Seems a slow but it shouldn’t be. Win7 ran fine and a clean install of XP should also work well.

Want Lubuntu for USB and laptop and if that works well I’ll put it onto BYO as well.

I should reformat the \home directory to FAT32 so that I can access some of the usb when it is in a windows pc. Otherwise it keeps suggesting I reformat my drive.

After that replace chrome with FF and add VLC for my anime.

Then to use it at work I probably need Java + Open Office, With that I can hopefully install NCSTools and Citect.

New Oil

Why a SSD?
Well it seemed cheap.
I never install things on the C:\\ on purpose, so the size didn’t matter
This vid was impressive
I was thinking of an <80GB HDD but didn’t see one to buy.
Whirlpool recommended it
I should replace my PC in ~7 years so I probably wont hit the read/write limit, and with only the OS on it I wont care (much) if it gets wiped.

Why 8GB of RAM?
Win7 recommended 8GB
Whirlpool recommended 8GB
Ubuntu can use all of it
More is probably better?
My old XP box couldn’t use all the 4GB it had installed, so I planned to swap 2GB it to the new PC, to total ten. But I cant because it isn’t DDR3 memory.
I suppose maybe Pov-Ray will make use of it?

I also took particular care with the case, as I wanted an on button that would work. I nearly bought a miniATX case for the tiny novelty of it. I knew I didn’t want a big box, If I go that way I intend to make it out of wood, so I settled on a squarish one with a simple flat design.
The rest was fairly straight forward to decide, I may put in a wireless card later (could have used it on the first day) I pretty much followed the whirlpool guide and what was available on Umart. In the end this is the package I came up with


I bought BYO with my first paycheck from Bundy Sugar, making it ~5yo. For the last 2 years I have been putting off upgrading it because I don’t like windows. And I haven’t reformatted it because I only have the XP CD without service packs and it takes a whole weekend to reinstall everything I use.
Small things have been annoying me for a while and after a couple of conversations at work I decided to get something new. Possibly I could have upgraded the motherboard to fix my sound card issues and replaced the box so that it would reliably turn on. But I’m the only person left in Technomancers Sojourn with an XP OS and I have the slowest PC and those upgrades would only make it more reliable, not more competitive. With this PC I shouldn’t have to wait for loading screens in GW2 anymore.

For the time being I’ll keep BYO as a spare/server, but when I know I have everything I’ll probably install Ubuntu and thus make it like new. I haven’t even installed any games yet and I’ve already checked out WineDB to see if LOL and GW2 are linux compatible yet. Win7 annoys me when it asks “are you sure you want to do this?” and when I tried to rotate the screen it took me three goes, you would think it could tell if a resolution was compatible or not without my help. I also did the thing again where instead of making a hidden folder visible I accidentally hid the directory that that folder was in.




> ITEMs to Order :
> Intel Core i5 3470 LGA1155 CPU 3.2Ghz 6Mb Cache Ivy Bridge
> ASRock B75-PRO3-M B75 4xDDR3 3xSATA3 PCIex16 GBL 4xUSB3.0 HDMI D-Sub
> DVI-D mATX
> Kingston 8G(2x4G) DDR3 1600MHz CL9 HyperX
> Seagate SATA3 2TB 7200RPM Barracuda 64mb Cache
> Samsung 128GB SSD 830 Series - SATA III 6Gbs, 2xnm Toggle DDR NAND,
> 3-Core ARMv9 MCX Controller
> Sapphire HD7870 OC 2G 256Bit GDDR5 PCIE3.0 DVI HDMI 2*MiniDSP
> SilverStone Temjin series TJ08E Black mATX Cas USB3
> Antec VP-550P 550W Strictly PSU
> Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit OEM(Microsoft OEM
> Terms&condition apply)
>
> TOTAL : $$1128


[Update 23/01/2015]
Doubling the RAM is still the only upgrade I've done.

So my graphics card is the first part to play up, occasionally it would not show any display when booting my PC. Apparently this was a common error in Germany and the fix was to flash the GPU BIOS once you can get the card to initialise properly. But I didn’t get it flash properly. Contacted support and they recommended I buy a new card because it was old. While ATI cards are usually more effective use of funds I’ve found the NVIDIA support to be much more helpful. I don’t think I’ve had a game actually make this graphics card work hard either, so I suppose its time to downgrade.Umart wouldn’t let me login and their menu system is very hard to navigate now. What a wanted was a “NVIDIA” “not overclocked” “2GB RAM” for “$100-$200” Since two years has passed I thought the 7870 equivalents would be in this price range, but it seems we are waiting on new games still to push the cards.While it is still overclocked unfortunately, I settled on the “$190 MSI GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB” but it has a three year warranty and so I suppose it is more stable than the Radeon Sapphire that it is replacing. I will miss the miniDP connections, but it seems I can still run three monitors over 2xDVI, HDMI.

Back in the good old days…

People think the golden age of youth was the best time of their life. That’s just to excuse themselves from making the world a better place now. Don’t point out what’s wrong with the world today unless you are prepared to attempt to fix it.

I also think people should change what they cannot accept and accept what they cannot change and thus I have no right to complain about anything. ~~I felt the need for a short post.

Business card for Technomancers Sojourn Inc

I like the concept of the QR code, people we spam can google out name the old fashioned way, or scan the QR code to access our website. From that they can contact us and we can easily remember the webpage.

I like the blocky font that Sam found, it looks clean and precise and matches he QR Code.

I like the color RGB<0,1,0> as it reminds me of the old monochrome game consoles. Black background fits with this and whitespace to wright on.

We need our name in some form “Technomancers Sojourn Inc.”. As for what we do “E-Sport” covers most things nicely, Also our incorporated association number makes it feel a bit more official to me, although I have not seen anybody else use that number for anything.

A logo would be nice but I couldn’t think of one I like, the medical snake around a broadsword is a possibility but how other than t&S does that relate to who we are?
This is also a nice picture, possibly we could use a small imitation of the map of the internet? It may not work in monochrome though. Logo’s should be easily recognizable, even as just a silhouette. Probably no more than four colours, and possible to print clearly on a high speed printing press. I had a go creating something like that here.

The space that we use to personalize our cards with name and contact details should have some form of heading I feel. But you can always wright on the back of the card too.

Username:
Password:

Name
email

sudo-u (runs command as the following user)
sudo-H (sets the home directory)

C:\\
MSD (CD.. or VER or format /V)

possible netmap logo

Another pov-ray code

#include "colors.inc"
#include "finish.inc"
#include "math.inc"

/*Triganometry - need to write this somewhere
cosd() co-sine measured in degrees
f_sqr() a function to square a number
sqrt(A) Returns the value whose square is A.

Hypotenuse_Length = sqrt(x_axis_length*x_axis_length + y_axis_length*y_axis_length)

cosd(Angle) = adjacent_Length/Hypotenuse_Length


*/


global_settings { ambient_light rgb<1, 1, 1> }

/*
//background
plane
{
    z,+0.1
    pigment {rgb <0,0,0>}
    //either black or colorless
}
*/

//area of interest is
//    0.0 < x < 100
//    0.0 < y < -100
//    5.0 < z < -5.0
// bit this needs to be slightly expanded for a neat boarder

//eye centered aboce the shapes, although they are 3D ther should be no traces of that.
camera
{
    location <50,-50,-150>
    look_at <50,-50,0>
}
//I'm cheating with the illumination and placing a light where the camera is
//in this way I dont have to worry about shadows at all and should get clean colors.
light_source { <-11,0,-10> <0,0,1>}
light_source { <11,21,-10> <1,0,0>}
light_source { <-50,-50,-150> <1,1,1>}// same as camera location

/*
background     Black
web         yellow
PC        Cyan
hub        Blue
router        red

each color to fade into the next, so the connection from the router to the hub will
transition through magenta.

each nexus should appear to glow in its colour due to radiosity

then of the 8 simple computer colors only green and white are missing.
*/


//WWW also the boarder
cylinder //left
{
    <0,0,0>,
    <0,-100,0>,
    2
    pigment{
    gradient y
    frequency 0.01
    color_map {
        [0.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
    }
    //rotate z*90
    }
        //rotate z*45
}

cylinder//bottom
{
    <0,-100,0>,
    <66,-100,0>,
    2
    pigment{
    gradient z
    color_map {
        [0.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
    }
    }
}
cylinder//top
{
    <0,0,0>,
    <100,0,0>,
    2
    pigment{
    gradient z
    color_map {
        [0.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
    }
}
}
cylinder//right
{
    <100,0,0>,
    <100,-66,0>,
    2
    pigment{
    gradient z
    color_map {
        [0.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]
    }
}
}

//router red
//4 port + Internet
//72° rotation
//<20,20,0>7
cone
{
    <0,0,0>, 2 //net
    <0,-100,0>,2 //router
    //first created along the y axis
    pigment{
    gradient y      //color changes from the bottom of the shape to the top
    frequency 0.01  //% of 100, because the shape is 100 units long on the y axis
    color_map
    {
        [0.0 color rgb <1,0,0> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <1,1,0> ]// the actual change in color
    }
        }
        scale y*.3  //shortenning the shape to what I want while maintainingthe color gradient
        rotate z*45 //rotating the bottom end to where it ends up
}
cone
{
    <0,0,0>, 2//hub8
    <0,-100,0>,2 //router
    pigment{
    gradient y
    frequency 0.01
    color_map
    {
        [0.0 color rgb <0,0,1> ]
        [0.5 color rgb <1,0,1> ]//dunno if this is really nessesary, possibly keeps things brighter
        [1.0 color rgb <1,0,0> ]
    }
    }
        scale y*0.6
        rotate z*9.5
        translate <20,-20,0>
}
cone
{
    <0,0,0>, 2.1//hub12
    <0,-100,0>,2 //router
    pigment{
    gradient y
    frequency 0.01
    color_map
    {
        [0.0 color rgb <0,0,1> ]
        [0.5 color rgb <1,0,1> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <1,0,0> ]
    }
    }
        scale y*0.7          //needs longer + trigonometry
        rotate z*56
        translate <20,-20,0>
}
cone
{
    <0,0,0>, 2//PC
    <0,-100,0>,2 //router
    pigment{
            gradient y
            frequency 0.01
            color_map
            {
                [0.0 color rgb <0,1,1> ]
                [1.0 color rgb <1,0,0> ]
            }
    }
        scale y*0.6
        rotate z*100
        translate <20,-20,0>
}
cone
{
    <0,0,0>, 2//PC
    <0,-100,0>,2 //router
    pigment{
            gradient y
            frequency 0.01
            color_map
            {
                [0.0 color rgb <0,1,1> ]
                [1.0 color rgb <1,0,0> ]
            }
    }
        scale y*0.6
        rotate z*80
        translate <20,-20,0>
}

//hub blue
//8 port
//45°
//<30,-80,0>, 15L
#declare hub8ports =
cone
{
    <0,0,0>, 1
    <0,-100,0>, 2
    pigment{
    gradient y
    frequency 0.01
    color_map {
        [0.0 color rgb <0,1,1> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <0,0,1> ]
    }
    }
    scale y*.15
}

#declare Count = 0;

#declare hub8 =
union
{
    #while (Count < 360)
    object {hub8ports rotate z*Count }
    #declare Count=Count +45;
    #end
    rotate z*9.3
}
object
{
        hub8
        translate <30,-80,0>
        //rotate z*10
}


//hub blue
//12 port
//30°
//<80,-60,0>, 10L
#declare hub12ports =
cone
{
    <0,0,0>, 1
    <0,-100,0>, 2
    pigment{
    gradient y
    frequency 0.01
    color_map {
        [0.0 color rgb <0,1,1> ]
        [1.0 color rgb <0,0,1> ]
    }
    }
        scale y*0.15
        rotate z*27.6
}

#declare Count = 0;
#declare hub12 =
union
{
    #while (Count < 360)
    object {hub12ports rotate z*Count }
    #declare Count=Count +30;
    #end
}
object
{
        hub12
    translate <80,-60,0>
}


// create a sphere shape to smoth the edges
#declare node =
sphere {
  <0, 0, 0> // center of sphere <X Y Z>
  2.0       // radius of sphere
  // scale <1,2,1> // <= Note: Spheres can become ellipses by uneven scaling
    pigment {rgb <1,1,0>}
}
object
{
       node
}
object
{
       node
    translate <0,-100,0>
}
object
{
       node
    translate <100,0,0>
}

/*
I wonder if I should turn this into a movie? It would be nice to make an animated CVG rather than a GIF
Since I decided against using green because we use it everywhere else the color transitions would be:
r-y-c-b-m ->back to red
Internet-router-hubs-PCs-nothing ->back to internet
this way everything should gently blend into the next colour and it should look like a rainbow moving from the internet to the PCs

Although programming this would almost require me to start from scratch.
*/