Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

Muse Limited Edition 180 gram vinyl – The Resistance. Muse is without a doubt one of my favourite bands, if not the favourite band. Why have vinyls these days, what with the digital age securely upon us? Well, vinyls has a special charm and nostalgic feel that even if you don’t listen to it, this LP is great to have for a Muse fan. We have a Technics SL-1200MK5 record player at home; my significant other used to be a DJ during his younger years and he still has an affinity for this music format. To paraphrase from his words “This is how music is meant to be heard, the natural sounds including the imperfections”. Admittedly, it does sound excellent and includes all the lyrics from the album.

Stone Pestle and Mortar. This is a perfect accompaniment for any kitchen and I will be using this for all manner of Chinese cooking. This is good for things such as making Black Bean sauce; Black Bean can come preserved that will need grinding down before making the sauce. It is one of my favourite dishes and this ancient yet effective device will do just the trick.

Jacob’s Creek Shiraz Rose with Lindor Truffle and wine glass. A nice little gift and more alcohol, I won’t be saying no to that.

Yashakiden novel series. I love Hideyuki Kikuchi; his famous writings include the awesome Vampire Hunter D which also turned into an anime series. The master of vampire story telling with strong influences from Hammer Horror movies and actors such as Peter Cushing, the horrific machinations of these bloodthirsty beings are brought to life on every page.

Hello Kitty – I love Nerds lunch box. I love this so much I want to take it with me everywhere; this was a present from @girlygeekdom and she sure knows what kind of things I like. I shall be taking this into work with my packed lunch, but perhaps I shall keep it out of view during those important and serious business meetings.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet. I wanted an Android based tablet and a smaller form factor than the iPad, and my wish came true. This is a very nifty device and I love how it holds in my hands, perfect for manga reading. Suffice it to say, it has not left my side since I got my mitts on it and I have installed Fruit Ninja so there goes another two hours of fruity abuse. The book type cover I got with it fits snugly around and does not add too much dimension or weight to the device. The only drawback is that you cannot close the lid when it is on charge since the cable is in the way, but this is a small gripe. The screen is lovely too and the UI seems fairly responsive what with Dual Core NVidia Tegra 2 processors inside.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 – Classroom In A Book. I recently bought Lightroom 3 during the Black Friday sales on Amazon and this book will hopefully help me unlock the power within. A photographer’s first aid kit, this piece of software is very powerful and will make your life a lot easier. I have always liked the Adobe books and each section is arranged so that it is easy to follow.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B White. This book has been revered by many in writing circles to be a definitive guide on brushing up on your writing skills. Everyone has their own style, but this book will aid you in refining the structure and composition of your written pieces. I wanted to write more and hope that this path will lead me to some exciting projects in the coming year, and this little book is a nice reference to flick through.

And finally…

Steam Sales! The festive holidays would not be complete without the obligatory Steam Sales for the gamer inside us all. It is the perfect way to send a gift electronically and there are plenty of bargains to be had every day throughout the past week. Big hitter games can be picked up for a mere £1.50 and you can get many more for less than a fiver.

Doom Bar 5L Beer Keg. I pre-ordered this straight from Sharps brewery and it arrived a few days ago. All 5 litres must be consumed in five days upon receipt and I have been struggling to make it last that long. Having beer of this quality on tap at home is too… convenient. It has been very merry that’s for sure! And with that I bid adieu, I need to exercise my right arm to pull another pint for myself. Merry Winter Solstice!

Custom DPI

As with most Razer rodents, you can adjust the DPI on the fly after you install the software. This is very useful if you play games from different genres. I never adjust the mouse setting in the game anymore, and instead I use the side buttons to up or reduce the DPI to my liking. As a rough guide, in Team Fortress 2, Unreal Tournament and other FPS games I have it set to 4,000 to 5,000 DPI. You can do lightning reflex turns with ease, something I always found lacking on a normal Microsoft mouse. If you are doing RTS games such as StarCraft 2 or Shogun 2 (my favourites at the moment), then 2,000 to 3,000 DPI is fine. You can change the increment of each step, and I generally don’t go below 2,000 DPI for general tasks.

The software bundled with the mouse has a very Tron-esque GUI which I love, I should also mention the packaging. They have put a lot of work into the presentation and I like the braided mouse cord for durability. At 7 feet, it is long enough to not have to worry about where your PC is.

Handling

At first, it seemed too square for it to work. It is styled with Tron in mind, and sharp defining lines has always been a theme in the film. This is replicated in the design of the mouse; there are no rounded corners or curves at all. It may seem strange to hold at first but after a couple of weeks it fits in my hand quite nicely. A thing to note is that it may be too small for some; it has a lower profile than some of the other models I have seen.

The first game I tried with it was Team Fortress 2. I was amazed at how smoothly it glides across the mousepad. There is no friction at all, which is perfect for first person shooters. Using a normal mouse on an average pad seems so slow and horrible to use, I have now spoiled myself in that regard. The pad is big enough for all your movements; well to be frank, at 5,000 DPI you are not going to need that much pad space. It is so fast on that setting, that I managed to jump to avoid a grenade and then spin round to gib somebody in the face within a 2 second timeframe.

Overall…

I like it, I really do. Being a bit of a Tron fanatic this satisfies the fandom and at the same time it is practical. However, would I drop 100 notes on it myself? At a push yes; the cost really is extortionate but you are paying for the Tron branding and style. I used to own a Razer Copperhead for 3 years before it died, so this is a worthy replacement.


If you want to see the light trails in action, I made a video clip of it a while ago for your enjoyment.

Enter, my triple-boot operating system configuration: OSX Snow Leopard, Windows 7 x64 and Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. In a way, this is Inception for operating systems with 3 layers.

OSX Boot Camp for Windows 7

First we will dual-boot our MacBook with Windows 7, using a utility called Boot Camp. Most people will be familiar with this, so I will not go into much detail. It is a very easy tool to use; click through all the options, decide how big you want your partition to be and install with the Windows 7 disc. There is a known bug, that you may be prompted to download Windows Support software and then failing to do so. You can ignore this and continue, all the software you need is on the Snow Leopard CD.

I chose a partition size of about 170GB; Windows will have the biggest partition size out of the three as I will be installing games which takes up considerable space. When partitioning, Boot Camp will take a slice from your OSX partition to give to Windows. Bear this in mind, as you will need to leave some space for the Kubuntu slice.

Once the install is complete, you will be able to boot into Windows 7. During the bootup chime, press and hold the Option key to give you the option to boot into Windows. Once Windows 7 loads, insert the Snow Leopard CD and run the Boot Camp software installer. This will install all the drivers you need for things such as the sound card and hardware buttons (volume control etc.). You may also want to go to the NVidia website to download the latest graphics card drivers. You have now successfully completed your dual-boot installation.

Kubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat. Triple-boot and GRUB loader

This part is slightly more tricky. You cannot use Boot Camp to do this, as it has already been used for your Windows 7 install and it does not support other operating systems to boot with. So, we shall do a little preparation.

First, you will need to prepare a partition size for Kubuntu. Boot back into OSX to prepare your partition and load up Terminal to use diskutil. To find the disk identifier for your OSX partition, type:

diskutil list

This will give you a list of all the partitions you have. Once done you need to use the following syntax command to resize your OSX partition to give to Kubuntu:

sudo diskutil resizeVolume [disk identifier] [disk size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size] [partition type] ["Partition label"] [partition size]

So an example of how I did it would be: sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 12G “MS-DOS FAT32″ “Kubuntu Linux”

You may wonder why I have chosen FAT32 as my partition type; it doesn’t matter what it is. In the guide here, under “Boot Camp & Partitioning”, it indicates “Linux” as a partition type. I could not get this to work so I used FAT32 instead. When you install Kubuntu, it formats it to EXT3 to give it the correct partition type. I gave Kubuntu 12GB which is plenty for the operating system and the swap partition.

Now you are ready to install Kubuntu. I am using the latest release, version 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I prefer KDE instead of Gnome, so I am using Kubuntu in this instance. You can, of course, use Ubuntu if you prefer or any other Linux distribution of your choice. Boot off the Maverick CD and go through the installation, taking care to set your own partition preferences and choosing the partition you just created to install the OS. If you decide you want a swap partition, you can take a small chunk from that during setup.

Once installed, the GRUB boot loader will setup everything for you for multiple operating system boot choices. A thing to note, is that initially the GRUB loader will not properly boot into OSX at the time of writing. I believe extra additional packages need to be installed for this to work, however I did not worry too much as I can still use the Option key to choose OSX at start up.

Now you have successfully completed your triple-boot system!

Additional support for MacBook Pro functionality in Kubuntu

For full functionality, you will want all the hardware to work. It is fairly straight forward, as there are instructions on how to get the hardware buttons to work and the backlit keyboard.

To summarise, you will need the Mactel PPA support tools:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mactel-support && sudo apt-get update

And pommed:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-bl-dkms pommed

And that is pretty much it, I now have Mac OSX to boot into if required, Windows 7 for gaming and Kubuntu which I use for productivity tasks. I actually use Kubuntu the most, and it is very pretty. If you want to know how to enable the Desktop Cube in Kubuntu for said pretty, head on over to Girlygeekdom where I will explain more!

So what’s been going on in the world of game and tech etc. during this time? What I should have done was do a post for each of these but here is a very condensed version! In no particular order…

Starcraft 2 – Beta
I did a post about this on the Girlygeekdom blog, but to summarise… it is smokingly hot and I’m not talking about the summer heartwave we are getting in the UK. It is due to be released on 23rd July. I’ll try not to disappear when this arrives, and also promise to step outside once in awhile.

Apple iPad
Great for some, mediocre for others. Your lifestyle dictates whether this is a good match for you or not. Personally speaking, there isn’t much room for this slab in my life. I need a full OS, I need power, I need an open platform and I need to run existing applications I currently have. Also regardless of what Steve Jobs said in his keynote speech, this for me is not going to replace a netbook. And it’s too damn heavy.

E3
I personally prefer the Tokyo Game Show than E3, but this year I think the event has been very interesting. Microsoft announces Kinetic, Sony with their 3Dness, and Nintendo with their new 3DS portable console. Out of the three industry heavyweights, Nintendo outshines the rest. I’m buying the 3DS without a doubt; Kingdom Hearts, Zelda, Kirby, Final Fantasy, Kid Icarus the list goes on. And NO 3D GLASSES REQUIRED!

Sci-Fi London
A great event every year, I couldn’t go to the entire event because of fencing commitments. However, I did go to the Anime All-Nighter; 10 hours of anime movies back to back starting at midnight (with the odd RedBull/toilet break inbetween). I absolutely loved it, it’s like a pub lock-in but in a cinema. The best anime was Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Bladeworks. I cannot tell you the sheer awesomeness of seeing this on the big screen; if you love Rin, Lancer et al then you must watch this. Unfortunately for some, it was the last anime shown that morning and the majority of the audience were fast asleep. I made sure I was completely awake for it.

iPhone 4
To grip or not to grip, that is the question. Either way, I am getting the HTC Desire running Android in a few weeks. At least people who are experiencing death grip woes get a free bumper case, offer valid until 30th September.

World Cup 2010
The tech angle for this is that I will never, ever, forgive ITV for their “transmission error”: showing a Hyundai ad JUST AS GERRARD SCORES THE FIRST GOAL FOR ENGLAND. Insert rage sentence here.

IT Crowd – Series 4
Our beloved geek series is back on Channel 4. Join Moss, Roy and Jen as they embark on more ridiculous IT shenanigans with utmost hilarity. Street Countdown!

My birthday
I got insanely drunk and played LAN games; apparently I can headshot quite well while inebriated. Everything else is a blur; I think we spent an hour trying to blow up the airbed at 4am. I highly recommend Danzka vodka with Mountain Dew.

Final Fantasy XIII
I completed it! You either love it or hate it, I personally liked it a lot. The battle system is to die for, yes the game is mostly on rails but the game does get going after awhile. There are some insanely difficuly bosses to beat, namely Proud Clad and Gigantuar if you find him on Gran Pulse. I’m just happy that I saw the ending after clocking in around 70 hours of gameplay. Also, I hate Barthandelus.

And finally…

Inception
I saw this movie when it was released on Friday. I have sat here for awhile thinking of how to review it and in summary, I just can’t. It’s such an amazing experience, that any words uttered on this page would not do it enough justice. Not to mention it’s rather difficult to describe, my mind was blown. If you think Memento was a mind masher, try this on for size… only Nolan can produce something like this on the big screen and succeed. A plot peppered full of twists and turns, stunts galore, and a great protagonist supported by a wonderful cast; these are the makings of a movie that will pull you in. I also love the music score by Hans Zimmer, it fits in with the film sequences perfectly.