Archive

Walkies!

Last weekend I went up to Edale in Derbyshire with Simon, Tam, Marky and Tom. We had a most excellent time (albeit a bit muddy and smelly). My photos are here, Tam's are here and marky's are here.


Last bongo in Brighton

DJ FormatLast night I went to a DJ Format gig at the most excellent Concorde 2 here in Brighton, with Alex and Simon. In short, it rocked! Format is a great DJ and Abdominal is a great rapper. D-Sisive was ok, but doesn't seem to be as good as Abdominal. They played some tunes off their new album, "If you can't join em, beat em" as well as some classics from "Music for the Mature B-Boy", including a very funny version of Vicious Battle Raps with most of the lyrics reversed from the original. There was a bunch of crowd interaction, including getting a guy to race against Abdominal; he had to eat a breadstick and then whistle in the same amount of time it took Abdominal to rap out 8 bars at full speed (which isn't very many seconds). Personally I think he lost, but they gave him the CD anyway ;) If Format and friends are playing anywhere near you (click here to find out), you should go see them :)


Clearing the Logitech jungle

I have uploaded a mini HOWTO into my techie documents section that covers configuring a Linux machine running Xorg to make best possible use of a Logitech keyboard and mouse (the Elite and MX700 respectively) and the bundles they are sold together in (the Duo MX and Cordless Desktop MX). It requires a fairly recent distro because it uses some features/data only available in Xorg so far. Personally I am using these settings without problems on my Ubuntu Hoary machine. A direct link to the HOWTO is here.


Grab a hedgehog

Congratulations to the Ubuntu team, who released Hoary today. If you haven't tried it yet, do :)


Quick GT4 review

I should start out by saying that I am a big fan of GT3, but I only played GT2 a little bit and hardly played GT at all. With that out of the way, I think GT4 is a fantastic game. To be fair though it is only really the culmination of what GT3 could have been and isn't a huge leap forward. That is ok though, GT3 was released 4 years ago and probably took a couple of years at least to write, so a lot will have been learned since then about exploiting the PS2 to the fullest. The addition of a huge library of cars and a good number of tracks only improves the experience. Disappointingly absent is online play, instead we get LAN play and a particularly silly photo mode. Very few games have equalled even the performance of GT3, but GT4 goes better in looks, sounds and feel and will certainly be tough to beat. I happen to have a Logitech GT Force wheel, which was the official GT3 wheel and it makes any racing game many times more fun than with a controller, but the Gran Turismo games get a particular boost because they are so technical. Snow and rally tracks are something of a challenge to whip the wheel round for opposite lock, but that tradeoff buys you exceptional control for drifting round the corners and seems to be well worth it. I just got a gold on the IA license snow track after getting a bronze first time and then two silvers, so the wheel must definitely be helping because I'm not normally that good ;) Therefore, if you are looking for a really good, but quite serious driving game, look no further. If you enjoyed GT3 a lot, this would be a good time to refresh the memory with a slightly new twist :) In addendum, it is said that engineering samples of the PS3 have been produced, so let's hope that one is on its way to Polyphony Digital so they can blow us away with a stunning evolution in the GT series to launch with the PS3 (including full and amazing online support damnit!) GT4 - IA license - snow track GT4 - IA license - snow track (Gold). Click for a larger version


GT4!

I got fed up of waiting for Gran Turismo 4, the very finest of driving games, to come out here so I ordered a copy from the States for slightly less than the recommended retail price here (although still more than the cheaper outlets); hurrah for the free market I guess. According to the scarily efficient FedEx, it should arrive by midday tomorrow. Woo! Right now it's about an hour outside Paris, having come from California via Indianapolis. I'm really not sure why FedEx think I need to know this, but I can imagine it must greatly appease overbearing execs waiting for shipments ;)


More on comments

I've re-enabled comments with an additional plugin that requires you to type a short code from a randomly generated image. That should keep the spammers at bay and let any real people comment here, not that they're likely to ;)


At last

Today I watched The Lord of The Rings: Return of The King: Extended Edition (bit of a mouthful) and I have to say I am very impressed and it's great to see things like the Saruman confrontation at last. I've only watched a few of the extra bits, the ones I thought would be most interesting/funny and they were (the stuff about weta digital and post production was great) and I probably won't bother with the rest, it's just nice to have finally closed out the full, extended trilogy at last. I can still remember seeing Fellowship of The Ring quite clearly a few years ago and I've really enjoyed watching it develop since then. I went for the boxed version, which includes a little model of Minas Tirith, which is very funky and goes with the Argonath from the Fellowship boxed version nicely :)


Half-Life 2: Deathmatch

Blimey. This is quite some intense action! In a way it's more like playing Quake than it is Half Life - it feels even more intense than the original Half Life multiplayer deathmatch at least. It's no Counterstrike:Source though, I am liking that game even more now, especially what with it running at >50fps (my CPU doing SSE2 seems to make something of a large difference over similarly clocked 32bit Athlons)


Goodbye Brighton, Hello Brixton (for one night only)

Last night I went to see Groove Armada at the Brixton Academy for marky's birthday. It was a truly excellent show - the performance was really spot on and they have done an excellent job preparing the tour so it's not just a string of set pieces; It was more like an arrangement of their work with the various tracks rolling through each other beautifully. The visuals were funky and the atmosphere was very friendly. If you have the option of seeing them live, take it. I will be hunting the festival listings next year for their appearances ;) (and thanks to Simon's parents for letting us stay the night, plus for having awesome cats :)