The Best Game Ever

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Well I think the title and the below video says it all.

To me the Unreal franchise is where it all started.
Back with unreal and when viewed with my Cardex Dragon 1000 and listed to with my A3D sound card I was in another world literally and figuratively. Followed by the amazing Unreal Tournament of which I have more than a thousand hours of play with, in the past I have built PC’s just to play these games and nothing else, I mean I played other games but I would always come back to game that started it all.

I have to many hours to mention with UT2003, UT2004 and over 700 hours with UT3 and now it looks like there is another title around the corner, lets hope it is just as amazing as the others.

Just a little last moment though that I will mention that A3D is amazing and a small video that I found on-line.

SSD Life

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Here is a small program that I come across in my usual internet browsing called SSD Life, all it does is tell you how long your ssd has left in years, months and days.

It also gives you Trim information, space used and free, times powered on.

ssd life expectancy

ssd life expectancy

I don’t know how accurate that is? but it looks like I have a few years left :)

This is a great little application

Here is a quick feature list comparing the lite/free edition against the pro edition.

ssd lite pro features

ssd lite pro features

Blu-ray VGA Playback Problems

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I went ahead and purchased a blu-ray optical drive for my computer, actually I did this months ago and I quickly ran into a problem that only happens if I connect my monitor to the video card via a VGA cable (which is the only way it can connect)

pdvd9-analogue-warning

pdvd9-analogue-warning

Here is a warning from then used Power DVD 9 I believe it was, the usual HDCP warning.

VLC does a similar thing

vlc-blu-ray-error

vlc-blu-ray-error

The only real way around this is to go out and buy a new monitor with at least a HDMI input which was out of the question, so I left it for a while because I wasn’t really in the mood to troll through all the crap google brings up.

I stumbled upon an answer when i went to the DVDfab website for some other software, I found a small free/lite program called Passkey Lite, what this small program does is on the fly protection removal while you watch the movie (actually it pops up a dialog from the system tray and takes about 5 seconds to remove the protection from any dvd or blu-ray that I threw at it)

Now when you run the program for the first time it comes up stating which edition you would like to use.

Just choose the Lite / Free edition as it works fine.

passkey lite

passkey lite

Out With The Old, In With The Old

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Well after the close encounter with the 4WD in the car park it was time for another set of wheels.

excel side damage

excel side damage

And in with the new, I am yet to fully check this car over but she looks good so far.

mitsubishi magna 1994

mitsubishi magna 1994

This car is in mint condition, nice chrome rims, no towbar which we kind of wanted but we can’t have it all. Needs a wheel alignment but that is about it, good service history going by all the receipts in the glove box.

Minecraft Snapshots September 2012

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I have made it a habit to now use the Minecraft snapshots on all my worlds (yes I have more than one for some reason) so I decided to take some screen shots of features over the last week or so and share them.

There are a few screen shots there, read the descriptions for the full details of each image.

The current snap shot is 12w37a which has many new features, items and bug fixes and also introduces many new bugs.

New Box For The Kids Future

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I have taken our media box apart that housed the large drive bay cage with 4 x 3.5″ drives in it with 2 TB of empty storage. The main reason for selling that gear and keeping the base items (cpu, mobo etc) is that there was no media on that box because I normally purchase my media via itunes which is stored on my 2TB storage drive and if I want to watch it on the TV I just stream it to my Apple TV or access it from the Apple TV. My partner just watches them on her computer so no one ever used the terabytes of storage that was housed on the large Thermaltake V3 case. The main hardware that I kept from that system is all low profile capable, MATX gear so a large case is now not required.

media-box-parts-1

media-box-parts-1

The parts include a socket T mobo, P4 805 dual core chip, 4GB of dual channel DDR3 1333 RAM, Geforce 210 video card with HDMI output, dual hybrid TV tuner, zalman low profile HSF and a 2.5″ 320GB HDD and some massive full ATX PSU that is so overkill but SFF PSU’s are so expensive.

media-box-parts-2

media-box-parts-2

As you can see the mobo is half the size of my hand. I have decided to put this system together for the children to use for education etc, running  Ubuntu which will be installed from the thumb drive sticking out the back of the motherboard which can be seen from the top image.

The main thing it needs to run is Minecraft for my eldest daughter which can be done fine since Minecraft is a java game, educational games are taken care of with a quick trip into synaptec, actually they have there own section.

There are about 50 DVD’s I might backup and put on there for quick access and the fact that the original disks are getting quiet damaged by the kids.