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  • Dark Liquid 1:06 pm on November 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: chrome, , raves, tgr, ,   

    I Did It! 

    This year, like every other, I’ve been throwing myself at NaNoWriMo, desperately trying to squeeze out 50000 words of pure novelly goodness. Every year, I’ve failed, usually even before I reach the half way mark. This year however, I finally did it.

    nano_09_winner_120x240

    I won NaNoWriMo!

    I’m completely chuffed. it’s a story I’ve wanted to write for ages even even though this particular revision of it is absolutely terrible, I’m proud to have finally completed it none-the-less. I may edit it come March in NaNoEdMo but for now I’m just blown away to have achieved it at all.

    If you feel the need to read a piece of utterly terrible literature that emerged from some in-depth world-building combined with basically no story planning whatsoever, then you can find the story on Protagonize.com. It’s called Triad: Hath Three Parts Wrought, and it’s a piece of shit but I love it :)


    Yesterday evening (and most of the very early morning today) we had a party round Lorcian’s new flat as a sort of belated house warming. We did a massive radio show special for around 5 hours or so on TGR with several of the other GRN DJs that came down to visit. We had a laugh, everyone got very drunk and we played highly disturbing, homoerotic Japanese muscle flexing games on the Wii (which I apparently have a knack for, I held the highest score of the night!)

    In other news, I’ve completed a whole month at Multiplay! It’s been awesome and I’m really enjoying myself there. There been some minor technical hiccups since switching from developing on a Mac to using Linux (everyone else there is using Windows but I’d literally go insane if I had to) but I feel I’m really starting to come into my role there and hopefully things will progress a bit faster now that I’ve found my feet. I still miss Textmate and any of the alternatives I’ve tried have various issues. At the moment I’m using netbeans, but it’s terribly slow when doing code completion after having been running for a few hours, especially on a large codebase like I’m working on. I’d like to try the E text editor but it’s been an arse trying to compile it under Linux on Ubuntu Karmic. I might try running the Windows version with WINE, though I don’t fancy relying on a non-native piece of kit for my primary editor.

    I’ve recently switched to using the Chrome browser daily builds from the karmic ppa and damn, it’s crazy fast. I am astonished at how fast it runs and for now it’s become my primary browser. It really makes the web an entirely different place, the difference is that much.

    So yes, it’s been an interesting month. Rubbish and filth are piled high where both Dru and I have been ignoring chores, housework or basic human hygiene in lieu of writing as much as we can in any spare our we have so we’ll have some interesting times ahead but all I can think of now is how awesome it is to have finally won NaNoWriMo.

    Hell yes.

     
  • Dark Liquid 11:45 am on May 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: data recovery, , raves   

    Disk Recovery 

    Well, that was pretty cool, I just managed to recover the data off of a dying 30GB hard drive on my friends laptop. It was surprsingly easy, all I really needed was time.

    First of all I downloaded and burnt off the latest beta of SystemRescueCD. After booting from that on the laptop, I set up the networking on it and downloaded dd_rhelp from freshmeat. I then mounted I directory on my main desktop machine via sshfs on the laptop and ran the following command:

    That command basically uses the dd_rescue tool on the SystemRescueCD to copy the first partition of the first hard drive into a file on my desktop computer (via the sshfs mount point at, you guessed it, /mnt/ssh). dd_rhelp is nice because it makes the process faster apparently but leaving all the bad sector, I/O error retrying till the end, instead skipping over errors when they happen in order to copy the actually working stuff first. Then it goes in and fills in the blanks. I left this running for about 16 hours after which it had all of the drive except for about 0.5MB which just would not copy. I cancelled the copying at this point and went to work on the backup image on my desktop.

    First of all I backed up the backup image. Some of the things I might do to it could be destructive and I don’t want to wait another 16 hours to grab the data again, if the drive will even work. On the backup, I then ran the following command:

    This scanned the filesystem in the backup image (in this case FAT32) for errors and asked me to choose a way to fix them. I basically told it to not mess around with anything except broken filenames and incorrect cluster sizes under the assumption that if this could actually see files to mess around with, chances are I didn’t need to play with the actual FAT table on the disk.

    After running that and writing the changes to the image, I mounted the file into my system and copied off all the data my friends would most likely want (the entire Documents and Settings folder in this case) and burnt it all onto a DVD for them. I’ll keep the hard drive image around in case they discover there is something else they need in the next few weeks but yep, that was it. Easy.

    I must say I was damned impressed with SystemRescueCD, it’s chocablock full of very useful tools and it’s ability to do networking and it’s provision of ssh tools makes it very nice to work with indeed. I could not have done this without it. Well, actually that’s a lie, I was prepared to burn a customised copy of DSL with all the tools I needed compiled and built into it but luckily I found SystemRescueCD before I wasted my time on that.

    Fun stuff.

     
  • Dark Liquid 12:58 pm on March 12, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ping.fm, raves,   

    Some cool stuff with Ping.fm 

    I’ve been using the awesome ping.fm for a while now for tying all my various social networking stuff together. From a single IM I can update:

    I can also do the same thing via email as well, and by attaching images I can also post to Flickr.

    This all ties together wonderfully with my T-Mobile G1 phone. I take a picture, use the in-built share functionality to send it via email to my secret ping.fm email bot address which then posts it to Flickr and makes a post on all my other services telling people about it.

    It’s awsome and also incredibly easy to setup. Seriously, go to ping.fm and check it out.

     
  • Dark Liquid 6:29 am on October 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , raves,   

    LittleBigPlanet 

    I’ve been playing the beta few a few days and so far it’s pretty fun. There are some cool levels out there, some crap ones and many in-between. The controls for creating things is a bit of an arse sometimes. The specific problem I keep having is that when I create something in front of something else, it’s very hard to get at the object at the back layer. Another annoying thing is that the capture object and object selection tools sometimes get confused and decide that nearly the entire level is a single object, which even crashed the game for me once.

    It is beta though.

    Issues aside the game really is quite fun, though I can’t really say why. It’s essentially a stylised 2D physics sandbox. They style of it is part of it’s charm. Because of it’s soft, natural, playful style as a creator you don’t feel compelled to make everything perfect, you can just create things and not worry about having perfectly straight edges or aligned textures. The rough, tacked-together feel of the whole visual style of the game frees you up to actually focus on doing fun things rather than struggling to make the perfectly shaped and textured object.

    Multi-player is fun too, and it’s quite easy to construct levels in such a way that you need multiple players to complete it. Running around solving puzzles together and/or battling each other to collect the most points works surprisingly well, especially in well crafted levels.

    Currently, I’m crafting a single level. Despite what I said above, I’m still trying to get everything perfect. However, it’s more to do with game-play elements now than fiddling with brushes and textures. Hopefully I’ll finish it before the beta ends. I’m also stuck on the story levels. I’ve completed them all but I’ll be damned if I can complete them all to 100% – I have no idea where the other collectables could be and there seems to be no indication at all in the levels as to where they may be hidden. So I’m stuck creating with the few objects I have managed to collect, both online from other people and in single player.

    All in all, I’m looking forwards to playing the full game. I’m not much of a hardcore gamer per se, so something nice and casually fun like this appeals to me.

     
  • Dark Liquid 6:30 am on September 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , raves   

    Married 

    It’s all done and dusted now. I’m married!

    You kind of expect the whole thing to be much more life-changing but to us the whole thing seemed almost like ‘just another day’. We deliberately kept things low-key though as we didn’t want some silly, grandiose, over-the-top wedding. Dru and I have been together for almost 8 years now, 3 of those we have been living together so I guess nothing really has changed. We’ve only made official what we already knew was true in our hearts.

    I guess we’ve been married a long time before now in spirit and now the government recognises it too. Mmmmm, tax benefits….

    I was joking with Dad about my new name (I changed my name, as well as my wife to a double-barrelled name) and how it sounded quite posh, as double-barrelled names are want to do. We were joking about when we head over to Seattle for the honeymoon, acting up like British aristocracy for any anglophiles we bump into but to be honest, I’m not sure we could pull it off, we don’t have the aristocratic look, if there is such a thing. Maybe we should call our child (when we get around to having one) Lord/Lady?

    All in all it was a great day.

    Wheee, look at me, I have a wife!

     
    • jade bloodred 4:01 pm on September 7, 2008 Permalink

      hay congratulations!
      look im really sorry we didnt repoly to your invitation although we appreciated it.
      ive been having.. mental issues, and me and james are having.. relationship ups and downs at the moment. hectic you know.

      but we wish you all the best and we will come round to see you sometime, if you will still have us of course.

      -jade
      x

    • Dark Liquid 5:37 pm on September 7, 2008 Permalink

      Hey, no worries, these things happen. See you guys sometime later on, obviously not this coming week since we’ll be in Seattle but perhaps sometime after that.

  • Dark Liquid 9:08 pm on September 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , raves   

    Big Day 

    Jeepers! It’s the Big Day tomorrow. In 13 hours or so I will be a married man.

    I can’t express how amazed and excited and happy I am. I really can’t.

    I’m getting married!

     
  • Dark Liquid 6:53 pm on August 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , raves   

    It’s Booked! 

    The honeymoon is booked. We’re going to Seattle, baby!

     
  • Dark Liquid 6:08 am on August 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: raves,   

    Featured on Protagonize 

    Protagonize - Featured Story

    Protagonize - Featured Story

    Wow, I got a story I’ve been writing on protagonize featured! Go me! What I nice thing to wake up to on a Tuesday morning!

     
    • nick 6:22 am on August 20, 2008 Permalink

      Hey DL – congrats on the feature! “My Baby Beetle” really made my laugh my arse off. Glad to have you on the site.

      BTW, nice job with the RSS feed of your posts in the sidebar. I wish more people would do that. :)

      -nick

  • Dark Liquid 8:58 am on June 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , promotion, raves   

    Let the experiment begin 

    I direct you to go and check out Severed Fifth a new project by Jono Bacon of LUGRadio and Seraphidian fame.

    What’s exciting about it is that it’s a project to test out the viability of something we’ve all been arguing in favour of – free music, free culture, free distribution. Can a band really make it without the backing of the record industry? Can a musical project survive purely on it’s own merit and the actions of the community it builds up around itself? Can that project actually make any money?

    What’s cool is that this is a project aimed primarily at consumers, people listening to music because they like it. It isn’t targeted at the free culture advocate who listens and promotes ‘just because its a free culture project’. Can real fans (which may or may not be aware and/or advocates of free culture) make a project successful? Will they even exist without the mass marketing machine working to make them aware of it?

    Who knows? No-one does, but with Severed Fifth it’s going to be interesting finding out.

     
  • Dark Liquid 8:49 am on June 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , gore, raves,   

    The Machine Girl 

    I just watched the most awesome movie ever last night. That is, the most awesome film ever if you find extremely over-the-top, clichéd Japanese slasher flicks awesome.

    Completely ridiculous plots, character interactions and reactions and events are rife in this film, but they all make the film that much more fun. The gore and violence is extremely funny, as is the dialogue. I’ve only heard the English dubbed dialogue, so I can’t say if it’s an accurate translation or not, but damn, its funny.

    Some choice moments include

    • finding out about the main characters parents
    • the main character getting her arm battered and fried
    • someone being sliced into chunks by shurikans
    • someone having their skin blasted off by machine gun fire
    • chainsaw feet
    • the drill bra

    The entire film is hilarious and the are so many things in it I’ve seen in various animes. Sort of staple scenes and scenery that seems mandatory in anything from Japan, such as ‘school kids walking over bridge’ which is in at least half a dozen animes I’ve seen.

    This film actually surpasses Brain Dead as my all-time favourite humour/gore-fest film. Well done Japan, well done.

     
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