Published at
9:32 pm on
August 24, 2009 in
Life.
Just spent an hour or so trying to get Zeroconf/Bonjour working on my LAN. As it turns out, Firestarter was blocking the connection. Ugh. My opinion: firewalls are more trouble then they’re worth.
In other news of my extremely exiting life, I bought some movies: American Psycho, Borat, Sphere, K-Pax, Team America, 8 Mile, Serenity, Die Hard, Kill Bill, and The Cable Guy. Twenty five dollars at the pawnshop. Expect a wave of movie reviews soon — or just one giant round-up, like I did last time.
Speaking of moving pictures, I finished the entire Teen Titans animated series. My verdict: way, way better then what you would expect from something that’s rated Y7. Quite mature at times. And the final episode was utterly depressing, which is always a plus in my book. As I was watching the show I kept a list of the “good episodes” — I’ll finish it and post that up soon.
Published at
11:13 pm on
August 21, 2009 in
reviews.
I think I’m about 1/3 of the way through the game, so I thought I’d share with you some of my thoughts.
First: it grows on you. My initial reaction was one of “holy shit this game sucks!” The graphics were shit, the controls were shit, the AI was shit, the difficulty was insane due to the above complaints… but it got better. Sort of. The graphics are still shit, but I’ve gotten used to ‘em. The controls got a lot better after I inverted the mouse settings and remapped a few keys. The AI… as long as you don’t have to rely on it to complete missions, it suffices. Still pretty sucky. And the level of difficulty went down a lot after I realized that I could not play this game like I played other games. Going in Rambo style doesn’t work too well, primarily because you have a non-regenerating health bar, and almost no health pickups. Luckily, there are armor pickups scattered around.
The story is actually pretty awesome — well written, well scripted, and well acted. It’s a pity the art doesn’t live up it, though — the models look like they belong in a PS1 game, seriously.
The game world is huge. Friggin huge. I’ve clocked maybe 15 hours so far (note: I’ve beaten Fable and a few other games in less time then that) and I’ve just started exploring the second of three cities.
So, that’s my thoughts so far — I’ll probably post some more in a few weeks when I beat it.
For the first time in my life I’ve used my programming skills to solve a real-world problem.
Problem: I needed an automatic wallpaper switcher that didn’t suck. The best I could find was Drapes, but it one major flaw: you could only select one global display property. So they were all zoomed, or all cropped, or all tiled… this was bad.
So, here’s mine! A hardcoded piece of shit, but it works! You’ll need easygconf — easiest way is to install is to download python-setuptools (in Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python-setuptools) then run: sudo easy_install easygconf. You will also need this daemon creation library.
Also, a note. I implied above that my tool provides per-wallpaper display settings. And, well… I think it does. I say think because it seems that if you set your preference through Gnome’s standard wallpaper selector, my app will pick it up. However, it does seem sporadic at best, so I will improve on this. maybe a dictionary, or a list of tuples… maybe I’ll even get fancy and use a sqlite database!
Since it turns out wordpress has a bug that’s over two years old that blocks use of code tags, here’s the file on Pastebin. Enjoy!
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