Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

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!

“Apparently, the game’s menu screens aren’t framerate-limited. This means that when there’s nothing else going on, your graphics hardware renders the bejeezus out of those screens…”

As the post says, you need to add the following lines to your variables.txt file in Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt:

• frameratecapglue=30
• frameratecap=60

It will cap your framerate to around 60fps. To show you just how bad this issue is, I used FRAPS to show the framerate before and after the file edit:

I don’t know whether this is operating system specific, but I do know that other menus such as Lab Upgrades causes the same issues. I had a friend FRAPS his game and he was experiencing the same crazy numbers as I was.

I run the game using the Ultra graphics setting across the board at 1920 x 1200 resolution; you may get different framerates for your system but no doubt the problem will occur regardless. Whether it affects Macs or not remains to be seen. My gaming system is as follows for your reference:

• Intel Core2 Extreme 9650 quad core CPU
• 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards, SLi capable
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• 1TB hard disk space
• Windows 7 OS

Blizzard has just released a new StarCraft II patch, version 1.0.1. Unfortunately it does not mention any fixes for graphical issues. Hopefully they will pick up on this soon.

There are several solutions I have found, but this one is best as you don’t need to SSH into your web server… and you may not have access anyway if your blog is hosted by a third party. WordPress sometimes has excessive delays for carrying out schedules; by default you only have 0.01 seconds to initiate the cron job for scheduling. Cron is a time scheduler for Unix/Linux based systems, and it is handy for automating tasks. In this case, our automated task is to post blog entries at a specific date and time without manual intervention.

So to fix this issue, use FTP to access your WordPress install and edit cron.php in the wp-includes folder.

• Find this line entry in cron.php: wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 0.01, ‘ blocking’ => false));

• Change the timeout to 20 seconds: wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 20, ‘ blocking’ => false));

Save the file and upload it back onto your webspace.

But after four days of not sleeping I cracked it. I’m not one for giving up, especially when it comes to technical quandaries of this nature. In fact, I love challenges like these and I’m about to share with you so you can avoid the pain. Lets go back in time for a bit…

The Problem

After installing Windows 7, I bought a LG Blu-ray SATA drive from PC World; not the best place to buy hardware but they had a fairly decent deal on them. So you just buy one, install it in the Shuttle, pop in a Blu-ray disc and away you go right? Wrong. So very wrong. The Shuttle comes with an Intel GMA3100 chipset for the onboard graphics card. The picture quality produced via HDMI is quite good for an onboard, but when it comes to playing Blu-ray, it is one of the most hated chipsets known to man. I have tried both Cyberlink PowerDVD and Corel WinDVD 2010 but they failed to play a Blu-ray disc. You will be greeted with something like this:

Infinite patching for both programs produced the same result. Is it a hardware problem? Well lets go through the motions:

• HDCP compliant graphics card – Check.
• HDCP compliant monitor – Check.
• HDMI connection working correctly – Check.
• Up to date graphics card drivers – Check.

So what on earth is going on?

The Solution

It’s a software problem, as in the main producers of DVD/Blu-ray playback software have limited support for the Intel GMA graphics chipset. Maybe there is a way to get the above programs to work on my system, but I gave up. After trawling through the internet, I stumbled upon one random post on a forum. It mentioned using Total Media Theatre with the Japanese version of the files required for the video renderer. What?! Yes, without the renderers for Total Media Theatre pulled from the Japanese version of the software… it will not work. Don’t ask me how or why or what kind of crazy software development cycle is going on here, but that’s how it is.

So you need:

• Total Media Theatre version 3 installed
• VMR renderer files from the Japanese trial version (linked here for your convenience)
• Save the renderer files to: C:\Program Files\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 3\Codec

And that’s it! As if by magic, you can fully enjoy your Shuttle as it was meant to be.