Playing with the Nintendo Wii

I finally had the chance to play with a Nintendo Wii this past weekend. I had a lot of fun with it. I mainly played the Wii Sports games, but did play just a bit with Legend of Zelda to see how it worked with a more traditional game. It was a good time and seems like a nice system for the money. I am not a big console gamer, so the Playstation 3 is not what I consider anywhere near affordable and the Xbox 360, while attracting me somewhat is still a little more than I want to pay for a console system.

The Wii also seemed to keep what are ordinarily non-gamers entertained – a big plus to bringing the system into the household. I might look into picking one up a few months down the road if availability isn’t too much of an issue.

Firefly loot ordered…

I couldn’t wait. One day was enough waiting to make sure it wasn’t an impulse purchase. Here’s what I ordered:

Serenity Official Visual Companion
Firefly Official Companion (Vol 1)
Finding Serenity

Since I am cheap it could be many days before I get them as I chose the Super Saver Shipping option… Something to look forward to!

Firefly

My friends turned me on to the now canceled television show Firefly (and later the movie Serenity). One of them had the series on DVD, as well as the movie. I watched them pretty quickly and I ended up getting for my own enjoyment later on. I rarely watch shows more than once – just a few movies are on the list that I tend to enjoy time after time. Well, here I am not even a month later and rewatching the series. I am enjoying just as much the second time through!

I think it is the SciFi/Western thing that I like. Sort of a wild west feel out in space. A combination that just seems to work for me. I enjoy most of the characters in the series as well, which does go far to make it interesting for multiple viewings. A really good series – too bad it was canceled.

To help fill my need for more Firefly I think I will pick up a few of the books off of Amazon. I have some gift cards built up and I think I could get most of the highly rated ones in one swoop. I will give myself a few days to avoid it being an impulse buy and probably order them up. Already have them in my cart!

The Hole Hawg

I caught this article on a mailing list I belong to (in reference to someone asking if Linux had an undelete option):

The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems

The Jerry Taylor saga continues

Jerry Taylor the city manager for Tuttle, OK can’t let it go. Now he’s sent an email to the Register asking them to make the flood of emails stop! Read all about it here.

And don’t miss the Wikipedia Entry.

22 Years of Computer Experience

I first saw word of this on the #centos. A city manager for Tuttle, OK accused Johnny Hughes of CentOS fame of hacking their city sites. His proof? A default Apache post-installation page included in CentOS installations when the website is unconfigured. That’s right, the default post-installation web page for Apache. Email after email with Johnny Hughes being more polite than I ever could be with the city manager (who claimed “22 years in computer systems engineering and operation”).

Read some of the stories yourself:

The Emails (CentOS site)

The Register

Unbelievable….

Half-Price Books Find

I was out at Half-Price Books today browsing around at computer games, RPG games and computer books. I came across Volume Two of the Linux Server Hacks book from O’Reilly. Just released in December of 2005! I snapped that up at 50% off. I always pick up a few useful tricks out of the hacks books and this one looks to be of similar caliber.

Quake 4

The Quake 4 Demo is up and running on my new computer now. Of course I am running Fedora Core 4 as my OS and this was my first attempt at getting a “real” game up and running on the OS. I went with Quake 4 as they cared enough to actually make a Linux Demo. The install was painless (after I got the Nvidia drivers installed which was also pretty easy).

Upon launching it for the first time I received a video related error. That was due to the color depth being set wrong, quick mod to xorg.conf and that was working. Then on to sound problems. Video ran fine, but the voices and sounds in the game were off, sort of garbled. Adding ‘+set s_driver oss’ to the end of the quake command to launch the game clered that right up.

After that everything ran great! Lots of fun to be had fragging my way through the Demo levels!

I think I will try out the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo and look into seeing if I can get CounterStrike to run on Linux. If I can get CS to run, I think that will be the game I settle down on, but I would really like to get it to run under Linux. Not sure if that is possible yet.

Well…. Off to do some more fragging! W00t!

First Post!

Well… I have once again bounced blogs. First it was Movable Type several years ago and then a brief stint on LiveJournal. LiveJournal wasn’t bad, but with some of the recent security flaws in the past month or so I decided it was time to move back to something I had a little more control over. So welcome to the new home! With this change I also plan on my focus shifting back to the tech side of things with some gaming bits sprinkled in here and there for variety.

Oh, and don’t worry about the theme. I don’t think it is going to last too long before it wears on me…