Posts Tagged ‘WINE’

My Christmas Loot

Sunday, December 25th, 2011

After being well stuffed and watered, it is time to reflect on the great presents I got this year. There are two things I love in this world; gadgets and books. Being able to receive both types puts a smile on my face. Without further ado, let’s see what we have here.


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!

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Kubuntu – Do you want some cheese with that WINE?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

I have been trying to achieve this for awhile now, if anyone has a solution to this then I’d love to hear from you… because this is driving me to the verge of insanity. The objective: to run Final Fantasy VIII PC edition on Kubuntu, the result is as follows with a little bit of history thrown in.

A couple of months ago, I upgraded from Hardy Heron (8.04) to Intrepid Ibex (8.10). I still had KDE 3 for Hardy and wanted to try KDE 4, so why not just go all the way to Intrepid. And I did, the install was smooth as always except, well, the wireless. From past pain and experience, I suspected that it may not be a smooth transition. I knew what to do this time and used ndiswrapper with the Broadcom driver to get it all working again. KDE 4 looks quite snazzy by the way, a bit buggy in places but hopefully Jaunty Jackalope will resolve these issues.

I installed WINE (WINdows Emulator) via Adept, configuration was straightforward. I inserted the FFVIII CD and sure enough, it installed onto my dummy C:\ drive. All good so far, now here’s the fun part. I added the FF8Config.exe and FF8.exe programs into WINE. You need FF8Config to make sure the resolution of the game is correct and to change other settings in the game. I tried to run this and it didn’t work at all, I got the hour glass and nothing. Fine, let’s try the game itself. I run FF8.exe and a similar thing happened except, it would throw me back to the logon screen for Kubuntu. Maybe it was just being obstinate this once, let’s give it a chance. I repeat the process, KDE locks up this time and I had to do a hard reboot. I decided to do a bit of research and I am not the only one having problems, other users are getting different results. Some even manage to load the game but it may crash at a fight sequence, or it runs but ever so slowly.

I have tried all manner of possible solutions at WineHQ, to no avail. Someone did suggest copying some different files to see, but the light of hope is slowly flickering away into nothingness. You can now understand why people still cling onto Windows XP for dear life. Because even though the game works to a certain degree in Vista, the graphical anomalies are too distracting and takes away the gaming experience. I blame DirectX 10 for this but who knows what the problem is. My Windows XP VMWare machine doesn’t like it either, probably because the host machine is, yes you guessed it, Vista. As for Linux… I love Kubuntu, I really do, but this sort of thing is what makes Linux less mainstream than what it can be. It is getting there and I am an advocate for the Linux platform, but there is still an element of doubt in usability for the average computer user. The other side of the coin is that Vista is a pain in the posteria for certain backward compatability, I can name several other programs that won’t run but I have to admit the majority does work.

However, I will keep plugging away, because the feeling of nostalgia refuses to go. I am this close to dual booting into XP but I am too lazy to switch each time I want to play. I really wanted to play Final Fantasy VII PC too, but trying to get that to work really would put me in a strait jacket.

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