Click on the strip to go to the original!

A little background: I’m guessing that this strip is referring to Torchlight, the game I’m currently playing avidly. In there, you have a pet cat or dog (mine’s a cat named Schrodinger. Get it? ) who has an inventory the same size as yours. If you load him up with items, and you definitely will, you can dispatch him to the town and sell all of his inventory and return with the money.

Thanks for the warning Tycho! I probably should check each of the item’s value before letting him run off first.

I bought this game based solely on the video above. It’s a more cartoon-ish take on the action RPG genre. There’s nothing new from Diablo here: the same four skills, the similar skills panel, the same way to play. Even the pet plays the same as your hirelings in D2, except with the notable exception that the pet has the same inventory size as you, and you can command it to go back to town and sell them all. So if it’s all the same, why buy it?

Simple: it’s damn fun.

It might be a bit slow to pick up though. I started on Normal difficulty, but it was too easy for me, since I’m quite familiar with the genre. So I restarted on Hard and it was just right (aka. died a few times). Of course, it’s not without its misgivings, which I will detail once I have more time through it. Between work and husband duties, game time is in short supply.

One of the reasons why I jumped at the opportunity to purchase the Dell Mini 9 is because it is one of the few netbooks where OSX can run without a hitch. I got the the netbook with the default specs. It has a default 8GB of SSD storage. Of course, it wasn’t enough for anything but XP (and Ubuntu). I decided to swap it for a Runcore 64GB SSD, which costs the same as the netbook itself! Lucky me, it was a worthwhiole upgrade; read-write speeds was much faster than the old brand, and everything zipped around, despite the much-maligned Atom processor.

At this point, I’ve been reading up on how to run OSX on it. However, all of the guides pointed out that an OSX 10.5 Leopard retail disc was needed. So I scrapped that idea for the time being. I whacked Windows 7 on it and was surprised at how well the netbook handled it. It felt much more responsive than Windows XP for some reason. Is it the snappier Runcore SSD? Probably. I was too happy with Windows 7 running perfectly on it to care too much about trying out XP on it.

And then Snow Leopard got released.

One of the huge perks of Snow Leopard when it arrived is the fact that an upgrade disc costs only S$48 (US$29)! My interest in OSX perked up again and I scoured the MyDellMini forums for news and updates on installation of Snow Leopard. So far, there were some problems with getting audio to work, so it was a big deal breaker for me.

Last week, I decided to check up on it again. This time, there were many reports of people getting it to work. There was a new release of NetbookInstaller & NetbookBootMaker, version 0.83 RC3, from mechdrew, the software responsible for making this work. Then, it was a simple matter of following instructions (which I have long since realised is a very difficult task for some people.).

And lo and behold, I now have a 9″, 1kg laptop running OSX 10.6.1 Snow Leopard!!

OSX is running very smoothly on this small Atom-powered netbook. I guess the 2GB ram and 64GB Runcore SSD upgrades helped tremendously in this regard. Another surprise is the fact that the touchpad is capable of multitouch! It supports up to 3-finger touch/swipe. I am absolutely fond of 2-finger scroll. It makes life so much easier on the touchpad.

Of course, there were some things not working out of the box. Sound is only available through the in-built speakers. To get headphones and the microphone jacks working, VoodooHDA is required. There are problems with hibernate, but sleep is fine. So after installation of SmartSleep, I needed to disable the hibernation and only enable sleep. Using an external monitor, I am not able to mirror, else both screens will be garbled. The older kexts (something like drivers in Windows, but for Mac) for the Intel GMA950 works, but graphical performance is a bit sluggish. There’s no fix for that yet as of now, except to use the older kexts, which I don’t recommend.

Other than that, everything else works! From the in-built webcam to the some special function keys, like volume. The whole thing just rocks!

Of course, being a purist, I am now bugging my wife to get an actual real-life breathing Macbook. A nice 13″ Macbook will do nicely. The Macbook Pro line isn’t necessary, since now even the Macbook has a 9400M as its graphics adapter.

I do hope that such projects will thrive and Apple will leave them well alone. Because of them, I manage to try out OSX with relative ease and without actually having to buy another laptop. A big thanks to mechdrew and all the guys over at MyDellMini forums!

A friend of mine recently showed me a very cool way, how I can show I am mat.

We start with the definition of an Impulse. Impulse, I, is the change of momentum, p, of an object.

Momentum is simply the mass multipled by its velocity.

Mass is usually constant (unless one is eating while moving around which, according to the superstitions of my culture, means that one will become polygamous), and velocity is usually the property that’s changing.

, where u is initial velocity & v is final velocity.

From Newton’s equations of motion we have the simple equation relating initial and final velocity.

, where a is acceleration and t is time.

We can plug that equation into the equation for impulse derived earlier.

Therefore, I equals mat. There has never been better proof of this.

Of course, there’s a much simpler way to do this but where’s the fun?

Apparently, Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold does not require any fancy-smancy registry entries. I’m currently running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and i was pining for some nice strategy game. For reasons unbeknownst to me (read: wife), I did not want to purchase a game for that. (But I do have that Stardock code, and Elemental sounds cool…) I remembered purchasing Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold some time back, so that seemed to hit the spot. The sad part: RT2Gold uses a 16-bit installer. Bummer.

So I decided to check XP Mode out.

XP Mode is not too bad an addition to Windows 7. It is a complete full virtualized Windows XP running on Virtual PC. What prevents it from being described as “good” or even “great” is that fact that you need a processor that supports hardware-level x86-virtualization. That’s Intel VT or AMD-V, depending on which camp you are in you stupid dumb idiotic fanboys. The other requirement is that this is only for the Ultimate version of Windows 7 (not sure about Professional edition though). There are free ways to getting this of course (Virtualbox + who-doesn’t-have-a-not-so-legit-copy-of-XP-by-now) but the nice thing about XP Mode is that you don’t have to go through the entire XP installation routine and everything, including license and the fact that all your drives on the host are seen as network drives, has been preconfigured. Plus, any application you installed in the virtualized XP can now be run via your Start menu in Windows 7 and you can simply invoke the program to run as though it is in XP, UI and all. That is quite impressive actually.

Anyway, I’m digressing. For a multimedia intensive application like a game, trust me, you don’t want to run in a virtualized environment. There’s just too many graphical glitches that makes it seem as though the game is unpolished. It’s one of the major reasons why I’m not in favour of running Linux at this time, but let’s not stir a hornet’s nest shall we?

One can install Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold on another machine and simply copy it over to another and play it there! RT2Gold can now join WoW and other games I can archive and take all over with me! Cool!

Here’s my results:

Your BrainHex Class is Mastermind.

Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Mastermind-Achiever.

You like solving puzzles and devising strategies as well as collecting anything you can collect or doing everything you possibly can.

Each BrainHex Class also has an Exception, which describes what you dislike about playing games. Your Exceptions are:

» No Mercy: You rarely if ever care about hurting other players’ feelings – mercy is for the weak!

Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Mastermind: 20
Achiever: 15
Survivor: 11
Daredevil: 9
Seeker: 8
Conqueror: 6
Socialiser: 1

Hahaha! No mercy!

I guess the survey interpreted my disdain for playing with unknown people over the net as me being merciless. Actually, I like playing multiplayer, only if they are in the same room. I have hosted Wii parties at home when my parents are out a few times a few times back and they were a blast! You only need Wii Sports, Wii play and 2 sets of controllers. I have not yet had PS3 parties, but I can imagine a bunch of us having mini Street Fighter tournaments for both Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 2 HD Remix. That would be cool as well.

I guess that merciless remark about me is true. Even when same-room multiplayer gaming, I don’t give any quarter to my opponent. It’s not that I am out to humiliate them. I don’t want them to give me any quarter as well. It’s a bit lame to win because your opponent gave you chances. Of course, all of us aren’t experts in the games we play so it is somewhat of a level playing field.

Yes, I love to solve puzzles. Maybe that’s why I am such an RPG buff. I don’t know about the “devising strategies” part. I am absolute sh*t in RTS games, except maybe Red Alert 2. But I do like empire-building games and trying out ways how to win a boss-fight in RPGs.

I like to do personality tests like these. Of course, it is because I am insecure about my own self. I know myself better than my own parents. I am just curious to see how accurate the test is. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test was spot on when I took it. It was so accurate about how I feel, it’s unnerving.

This gaming aptitude test seems pretty accurate too. It’s not as precise, because there can be different meanings to certain terms in games, like my example above about multiplayer which can be with friends or over the Internet, usually using a service. It’s quite cool. If you like to play games, do try it out!

One of reported goodness that comes out from changing the species of OS X is that the harddisk space is finally displayed correctly. You buy a 500GB drive, and “500GB” is displayed, instead of “465GB”. What happens to the missing space in the latter, you ask? This happens to be one of the many questions that keeps surfacing on tech forums.

Let’s take that figure, 500GB, as an example. From manufacturer’s point of view, 500GB, or 500 gigabytes, means 500,000,000,000 bytes. Thus, giga- means multiplied by 1,000,000,000. This is what I like to call “human mode”. We give abbreviations to every three zeroes that we see. 1,000 = kilo; 1,000,000 = mega; 1,000,000,000 = giga. We are creatures who live, breathe and sleep in base-10. I’m guessing this is because that particular base is conveniently equivalent to the numeric system. We use 10 symbols to represent numbers, so we think in base-10.

However, computers think in binary, in base-2. Somehow, we also programmed that into our software as well. So in most OSes, a kilo = 1024; a mega = 1024*1024 = 1048576; a giga = 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824. Thus, taking 500,000,000,000 divided by a computer’s giga, we get 465 gigabytes.

So which one is correct? Are manufacturers screwing us all this time?

My answer: no.

I guess I prefer standard units as defined by a proper governing body, not marketing. I hate it when people use terms such as “HD-Ready”, “Full-HD” or “SATA2″, because there is no such thing. HD format is usually displayed in 720i, 720p, 1080i or 1080p. Any screen capable of displaying this is HD. There is no specification for SATA2, only SATA-150 or SATA-300. Somehow, people have gotten used to thinking that SATA2 is the latter, which is again fundamentally wrong.

The terms “kilo”, “mega” and “giga” are all standard SI-unit prefixes, along with other prefixes shown in this table:

Because the SI prefixes strictly represent powers of 10, they should not be used to represent powers of 2. Thus, one kilobit, or 1 kbit, is 1000 bit and not 2¹⁰ bit = 1024 bit. To alleviate this ambiguity, prefixes for binary multiples have been adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for use in information technology.

Thus, the correct SI prefixes for binary numbers are:

That is why, in this case, the space reported by an OS (except Snow Leopard) is wrong and should use “kibi”, “mebi” and “gibi” instead, to properly distinguish itself from the prefixes for powers of 10.

I’m glad that Snow Leopard is at least attempting to get it right. Of course, on the flip side, people are reporting outrageous space savings when moving from Tiger/Leopard to Snow Leopard. I do know that there are savings, but to report space savings of 20GB is a bit too ridiculous. I’m sure engineers at Apple are freaking smart, but they’re not miracle workers.

Apparently, the SI prefix for binary numbers have been set since 1998. The standard has been set more than 10 years ago! Why are Windows still stuck reporting GB as GiB? Is it so difficult to change that behaviour? Or is Microsoft just scared to change, in case the millions of idiots using Windows start a class-action lawsuit?

I just hate discrepancies.

[SI prefixes] && [Prefixes for binary multiples]

Boring.

I was in the mood for an RPG, and going through my backlog, I realised I stopped Eschalon Book 1 (EB1) after that horrendous episode where my PC had some registry errors (Damn WINDOWS!) and I had to reinstall from scratch. For some reason, my EB1 savegames went up the dust as well. Go figure. Spent a few hours on a nice character, only for it to go up in smoke. I was in no mood to replay at that time. But now, I don’t feel too much hate. Time heals all wounds. Especially superficial ones with your PC.

One thing about EB1, it’s not a very popular game (but it should be!). So guides aren’t very forthcoming. There are a couple at GameFAQs, but that’s about it. One thing that irks me is the damn Cartographer skill. It seems only useful once I pumped it to 4, and fortunately, I did it quite early on.

Thus, I decided to be my own cartographer. I’m jotting down a map of the gameworld, adding notes as and when I find areas of interest. Since EB1’s world isn’t procedurally or randomly generated, I guess it’s safe to do so. Hopefully, it will be of help to others who are finding it hard to find certain locations.

Since this is my own original work, I’m licensing it under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Singapore License, just for kicks! My first licensed work!

Links:

• Homepage of the Location Guide & License
• Eschalon Book 1 Location Guide

‘Nuff said!

Will need to confirm with the doctor though. Stay tuned!

I did the next best thing I can do: I begged my wife to buy me a spanking new card.

So on the 27th of July, I dragged my wife to Sim Lim Square where I conned her into buying she gracefully bought me a shiny new Asus 4890 1GB to play with!

Of course, once that card got into my system, I just had to try something out. My brother pestered me to join him in Age Of Conan, which I am currently playing on and off. Definitely not worth my US$15 a month, but hey, no price is too large to have bonding sessions with my brother. MMO’s are a bit boring and a bit reliant on the servers for smooth gameplay as well. So the next most graphically taxing game would be Grand Theft Auto 4.

I did a two-part review for it some time back. It’s a nice game with a nice story (and lots of WTF moments!) but plagued with performance issues on my 4850. So why not revisit it with a much more powerful card?

First thing I noticed: where’s my damn savegames!?!? Apparently, savegames are stored in %APPDATA%, and when I reinstalled Windows after my harddisk died on me, it went to the dodo as well. Sigh.

Oh well, back to square one I guess. This time, I’ll remember to back up my savegames!

Since I’ve starting a new game, my interest in Fallout 2 is waning. Maybe I should chronicle this instead. Hmm… Maybe I will…

Anyway, GTA 4 is running quite smoothly when I told it to auto-detect appropriate settings. Most settings are on High though, not Very High. I want to experiment with different settings, but meh, this seems good enough for me.

Liberty City part deux. This should be interesting.