Sometimes change is bad. :(

I remember before, I had a post that showed me downloading at like a megabyte a second. *sigh*

Tomorrow, I’m gonna head to dad’s around five o’clock, because I can get a lift at that time. I want to fix my bike up (it’s been out back for  a while now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s rusted beyond repair but I want to try. It’ll give me something relatively cheap to work on. Then, I think it’d be cool to just ride for a while. Mostly to increase my fitness, to be honest.

Then, ride back to mum’s – since I don’t have a bed back at dad’s house yet (the spare room got filled with junk as soon as I moved away to university). Or, better yet, I wanna check out the library. I’m not sure if they have wireless there but if they do it’d be rocking. If not, no problem I can do computer science theory stuff I need to do anyway – I’m sure they have books.

It’s not even noticeably annoying, until you’ve heard it for fifteen minutes and then BAM! average sized headache.

I'd much rather take my knife to him, thanks.

That stupid grin on the ball guy’s face? Grr! What’s he got to be so happy about? He could blink or something once in a while. I have no urge to help him in the slightest.

Physics engine games are always fairly fun for a while, until you get to the impossible levels that you can only hope to complete by chance after downing half a litre of Felix Felicis. Challenge is always good, but when you know you’re doing the right thing, just not at the exact right millisecond it gets really quite annoying. I spent six or so tries on the stupid level pictured above before angrily giving up and deciding to bitch about it on my blog.

I don’t like this game. I’m sure you’re all dying for one though, so here’s a walk through. At least this video has the common decency to mute the sound and overlay his own music.

There’s definitely a few things that a programmer needs, despite my thinking anyone could do it when I first started. A desk is one of them, with lots of space for my laptop, and a second monitor (lots and lots of screen space), and a notebook (I’m always doodling things that make no sense to most people, but really helps me program).

I can’t even call it “taking a break”, but I’ve given up on trying to work and decided to download Wrath of the Lich King. I’m not even sure if it’ll run on my 8MB shared memory for graphics, but we’ll see I suppose. I plan on deleting and uninstalling it after this month’s subscription dies out, which should be sometime soon.

Downloading it shouldn’t be a problem whilst at my mum’s either. She recently got her connection speed bumped up… I’ve never seen anything this fast before…

I wonder if this'll be constant...

I’m not going to set out aims because I never reach them, and I look like someone that sucks at keeping to lists. Instead, I’m just gonna say somethings that it’d be cool to get done.

First thing is making an actual web app that actually does something and release it. My problem here is I always have ideas and then typically seconds later I read on Techcrunch that a start up has had an amazingly innovative idea that’s shockingly like mine. So, I’ll at least try and make a cool bookmarklet over the holidays. It’ll do something cool, honest.

I totally want to make my Tumblr the top search for shamess. It pretty much has everything to do with me; my tweets, my shared RSS stories, even this blog. It’s pretty damn nifty. I don’t know many people that use it though. Tumblr was actually an idea of mine too, which I guess I had an age too late. I was thinking of making an extension for Firefox that’d let me grab a piece of text/image/video and stick it on another site for later viewing. Then I found that’s exactly what Tumblr did, so I started out there.

Another idea I had a while ago was what start.io is doing. In fact, I already have that system on my localhost page, but I think I’ll likely switch to start.io now. Anything I don’t like about it I can just change using a Greasemonkey script (like showing the links in a different order depending on what time it is).

I picked up WoW again today, in all it’s lowest graphical settings, OpenGL glory. I played a hefty amount of hours before I wasn’t having fun. Maybe I should just limit myself to an hour or two playing? That’s the height of fun before I get bored and leave the game thinking “I can’t believe I just spent so long playing this dumb game.” That’s just a downer. It’s just so damn easy to forget that you’re supposed to be having fun.

Same as Tribal Wars, really. My tribe is proper hardcore playing, and up annoyed at me for lagging behind. To be honest, I have been trying, I’ve no idea what has caused me to fall behind so much. But either way they’re acting like I’m a bad person because I’m not up in the tens of thousands of points and have three villages. Really? I play the game till it stops being fun each day, if that’s before I reach optimum pointage, then that’s the way it is.

Xbox hard drives: They're removable, so if you do end up using your 60Gb, just upgrade. Or get a USB one.

Update: A lot of people are getting here looking for which motherboard Amazon is shipping with their xbox 360s now. All new xboxs being shipped now have Jasper, which is the new one that shouldn’t have the RRoD problems.

For the people that are confused  there are three different packages you can get your xbox 360 in. Essentially, they’re all exactly the same except for hard drive space. Arcade comes with almost no hard drive (256MB), meaning you’ll be able to save very few games and you definitely won’t find much that you can download. Premium has a detachable 60Gb hard drive, which I think is more than anyone could want. A few gig of that is immediately used up by the system, but you’re still left with a reasonable chunk of memory for you to store saved games and downloads on. Elite is overkill. No really; unless you’re a true hard core gamer, and download almost everything and never delete it, you’ll never use up the 120Gb hard drive.

You might think “I can use 120Gb easily with all my movies, photos, and music!” and you’d probably be right. But you’d also be disappointed. You can’t actually transfer things onto the hard drive. Other than ripping music files from a CD, there’s no way at all to copy a file from your computer to your xbox hard drive – which sucks.

You can at least access your media if your computer/laptop is on the same network as the console though, which is fantastic. So long as you set up the sharing properly in Windows Media Player (yeah, you’ll have to start using that) then your xbox can get to it and show it on your TV. That didn’t seem so cool at first, until I thought of the possibilities. Oh, nice, I can play my music on the TV. Oh, I can run a slide show of my photos. Sweat, I can stream my videos and watch them on my large TV. Instantly it clicked for me, PORN ON A HUGE TV. Thanks to the xbox, ladies and gentlemen, porn has never been so good.

I knew my TV can handle 720p almost-HD, and I knew my xbox could output HD visual, but it took me a good hour and a phone call to a friend to realise that you can’t actually play on HD unless you have a HDMI cable, which the xbox doesn’t come with. (Unless you bought the EgoElite package.) By this time it was quite late so I couldn’t go out and buy one, I’d have to resign to using the standard composite SCART connection… Looking back, I’m pretty happy that I did.

Yeah, the graphics were okay, but there was definitely some huge pitfalls with using SD rather than HD. Whilst playing Fabel 2, I realised that most of the text was rendered for HD, and so pretty impossible to read without sitting right up next to the TV. In the cut scenes on other games I was blatantly missing a third of the screen, but I sat through patiently, just happy I was playing with my first next gen console, really.

Now I do have a HDMI cable, and I plugged it in my mind was blown. Playing Assassin’s Creed – even though it was only 720p rather than 1080i/p – was truly epic. I didn’t realise how powerful the xbox 360′s graphics processor actually was until that moment where I was bathed in amazing, clear cut beauty. Having my PIPBoy 2000 take up 50% of the screen rather than 80% really showed me how much I’d been missing out on SD.

The moral here is that you should definitely spend a day or so playing SD (so long as you can put up with squinting to read text), before upgrading to HD in order to have your mind well and truly blown.

A down side to that immense power how I guess is that it can get hot. How’d they stop it getting hot? By sticking a fan in of course. But no, not one of those ultra quiet fans. A loud one, which makes every surface it touches hum. It’s not the type of humming that you notice whilst you’re playing though – more the sort that you only notice when it stops, and then you feel bad that you know it’s been keeping your flatmates awake all night.

The power pack is another thing I don’t like. It’s too damn big. As a student I’m constantly travelling between Leicester and Birmingham, and carrying that thing is dire. In a boxing match, the power pack verses a bloody house brick would be ideal; they weigh about the same. It causes problems even when it’s not in transport; unless you turn it off at the socket, the glowing, orange light is enough to light up a room. Or at least bright enough to keep me awake at night.

The controller: Look, ma'! No wires!

The controllers are wireless! After generations of having to navigate around a room making sure not to trip over any cables, not having wires is a fairly odd experience for me. For a  while, whenever I moved position I’d subconsciously try and feel for the wire to move it out the way, only to find my hand sweeping through the air with nothing to grab onto, and each time that made me smile. The wireless range is also pretty far, though redundant I think. I was able to walk right upstairs into my bathroom and still be able to play (confirmed by my watching sisters, downstairs). Unless you have a huge living room, or glass walls, I really don’t see the point in investing that much into giving it such a range.

Due to it using wireless, rather than inferred, the data transfer rate it a lot higher, which means it’s perfectly acceptable to be able to plug the headset into the controller (still no wires to the console) and it work clearly – both receiving and sending sound. Why it requires a wire from the headset to the control is a mystery to me though. Just give the bloody headset a wireless device and let me use it with other things (not just my console).

The battery life seems to be pretty dandy too; I clocked my first set of batteries (the ones which came with the control, so I don’t expect them to be awe inspiring) at about a week before I noticed the battery bar getting low and I opted to change them before they’d even died, so they could have had a while left. Still though, a new set of batteries set me back £2, and £2 a week will quickly build up so I’d recommend getting rechargeable ones.

Since xbox clearly had wireless technology built in, why of why do I still need to connect to my network using cables? I’m sure it’s just so that they can make more money on selling a wireless adapter, but the customer who just forked out a few hundred pounds is clearly getting the raw end of the deal there.

Though xbox Live – the service that allows you to connect to the Internet and play other players, and get access to the various market places – is pretty damn cool. In fact, I’d say it’s a must. I bought GR:AW, because I liked the Ghost Recon games on my PS2, and at first I really didn’t like the campaign and single player stuff. I quickly decided that I’d try to resell it on ebay and put it up. Since I still had it, I decided I may as well see what online playing is like and by gosh it’s a totally different experience. Playing actual players instead of AI has a much higher sense of satisfaction when you’re sitting atop a hill and sniping anyone that walks past.

It’s not just FPSs that get better with online play either. I’ve not found anyone to play Fable 2 on co-op yet, but playing single player is great, so playing with a friend must be doubly.

The achievement system built into every game I’ve encountered is clearly a device to make you want to buy more games to increase your Gamerscore, but who cares? It’s great fun to have “Achievement unlocked: You Gotta Shoot ‘Em in the Head” pop up every once in a while, and seeing that you really are a better gamer than the rest of your friends.

RRoD: Oh shi-

The dreaded red ring of death was something that made me worried about getting a 360 in the first place. After all, how much would it suck to buy the console only to have it brick up on me in a few days. After a bit of research though, turns out that no longer happens. Or at least it’s not likely. I have the new motherboard chipset – Jasper – which doesn’t have the same problem as the old ones. These days, I really doubt you’re likely to get any of the older types, so don’t worry about buying one.

I’ve gone on for long enough now, I think. In sum, I don’t regret buying an xbox one tiny bit. I love it, in fact.

Database dieing was the reason I didn’t do last night’s happiness update, but I’ll do it now.

Yesterday’s most happiest thing for me was probably getting Fallout 3 for my xbox. That game is freaking awesome. It seems huge and expansive, however I’m worried that – because things don’t respawn (at least, I don’t think they do. There’re still dead bodies lying around that I killed in-game days ago) – I’ll kill everything and then won’t be able to level up any more. Last night, the stupid Brotherhood of Steel guys killed half of the Raiders before I had a chance.

I only found out you can queue up attacks in the VAT thing a few hours into playing…

I bought Ghost Recon too, but I don’t really like it, so I’m putting it on ebay. I only need one bid to get my money back, to be fair, and I think people will be looking to collect as many game as they can during the holidays. Especially with people getting new xboxes and stuff for Christmas.

In other news, I’m thinking of getting an Eee PC. They’re tiny, and good enough for me to type during classes.

Isohunt and IRC don’t work either. Damn censorship.

I don't think it could get slower than this...

Ugh. They really need to put some money into upgrading their PTR servers. Even when playing there’s huge amounts of lag.