Geek Update Part 3 - Gaming

In what I think will be my last of the Geek Update series of posts I think I'll talk a bit about what I've been playing of late.

About a month or so ago I got a few more games for the PS3 - Little Big Planet and Prince of Persia. Both have seem some play time, but not very much. I really like Prince of Persia, I like running around and stuff, but sometimes it can feel a little too like an endless series of press x now, and press o now. It just gets a little grating whenever I spend much more than an hour on it. Little Big Planet has seen even less of my time but I'm honestly not sure why. I think I just game so little that I find it hard to juggle more than one game at a time. And when I say I don't game much I mean no more than 3 hours a week maybe. I just don't seem to find the time.... And yet I have found a couple of hours over the last week to post some silly Geek flavoured updates?

I have also been playing Civilisation 4: Colonisation on the PC. This is a bit of an odd one. Every so often I get hankerings to pick up Civ 4 again. It never goes anywhere, I always get bored a few hours in and loose interest. But on hearing Colonisation had much tighter game play I was interested enough to pick it up. I really like turn based strategy games, I suppose from a background of RPG's and Boardgames, but I've never quite found the perfect one. Colonisation is, unfortunately, not it. But it come so very very close, it was only at the end of sinking another 45 minutes into it this lunchtime that I realised it was not to be.

Essentially it is a much tighter game. You don't have to worry about religion, tech levels, or having warriors when everyone else has tanks. And it has some neat little mechanics in that any of your population units can do anything (farm/ improvements/cigar making/etc) but some are better at one thing than others. It reminds me so much of games like Porto Rico (in a very good way). But its just too long. I realised today I was maybe halfway through my first game and have been playing it for 2 or 3 weeks now. Maybe clocked as much as 10 hours or something. And I'm going slower now than I did at the start. Arrg. I could try shorten game length with tweaked setting but its just not going to make such a difference. Its a shame, if I'd finished a game by now I'd have probably been playing this game for years to come, but alas, it is not to be.

Geek Update Part 2 - Linux

I was hoping to write this update days ago. I was also hoping to write it about how I put linux on this laptop and it went swimmingly and I'm using it to write this post. Unfortunately that won't be happening today.

Mostly the reasons for this are hardware related (go figure). When I bought this computer I though I was being very clever checking to make sure that most of the components were of intel branding for maximum compatability. But the soundcard came and bit me in the ass and the webcam don't like it much either. Doh. Still I do kinda know how to get the soundcard working now and I don't really care about the webcam (its not like I can get it working in windows 7 anyway). So hardware problems are not the only problem.

Software has been proving equally challanging. I've lately tried to speed up my internet surfing by using google reader. Its a bit odd that I never used rss up till then but I honestly never saw the point before. I guess since I've been here I surf more core sites due to free time or something. Anyway, I've been trying to find a RSS reader on linux so that I don't need to have my web browser open all the time. But, well, the gtk+ ones are a little buggy.

I've also been trying to find a flash card program to help me with my Japanese. But at the moment I haven't actually found one of them that I can enter Japanese in. Not a clue what the problem with this one is.....

All this put together has just irritated the hell out of me and worn my patients thin. So I'm trying to slow down and tackle things a little slower. To that end I've booted out to windows and am sitting reading some websites and drinking beer. It seems to be working.

Geek Update Part 1 - Internet

Ever since I got here I have been having some trouble with the Internet. The trouble being, for want of a better word, that it sucked.

It was cable Internet or a reasonably good speed (maybe 5mb) but it seemed to block everything. And by everything I mean Steam, Torrents and Skype. Then when I got my PS3 and realised that the Internet was blocking that too I figured that was the last straw. I don't care how cheap the Internet is and how much fuss it is to change to adsl its just not worth it. Wondering quite what the problem was I got my wife to ask why all these Internet services didn't work with the cable. It turned out that the cable company blocks all of the ports that these services use. Well it doesn't actually block them so much as assign them next to no bandwidth. Their reason was that nobody in this town wants to use all these services and others like them.........errrmmm......... riiiiiight.

So about a month or so ago we started looking into changing providers, asking friends for advice, and calling companies to get everything set up. And after a few initial problems (crossed lines) we finally got fully functional Internet up and running a few weeks ago. Hooray! So I can now use skype and buy PS3 games. That's progress. Its not blindingly fast Internet like you can get in a city (I think adsl here caps out at 48mb and I only went for 8mb) but its better that it was and that's the main thing.