Category: Day of Defeat

Still lazin

Its already been for days of my easter break and i haven't done anything much constructive at all.

I'm definatly improving on DOD, if anyone wants to play just let me know, you can find me on the steam friends network as Atariboy feel free to add me. I hear there is a new gameplay mode coming by the end of the month as well, cant wait to see what that is like.

I'm slowly reinstalling things at the moment and looking for Open-source alternatives to as much as possible. I think i've only cracked 2 programs so far, any suggestions for good Open-source software is very welcome, I'm currently looking for a good alternative to Nero 6 for burning DVDs and ISOs, and a free Alcohol style program as well for mounting cd images.

I'm in a strange place with free/paid software. The really good stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator deserve to be paid for, but i dont have anywhere near enough for what they charge, and many free programs dont seem to be worth paying for them.

I'm happy to give out small programs like my servo controller for free, Visual Assembly on the other hand will not be free, i'm still working on it adding to it and improving it, unfortunately the Uni owns 70% of the intellectual rights to it because I made it due to being at Uni, and it was designed for them anyway. I may produce an offshoot of it which i can call my own and develop it as a more general Assembly IDE.

Took a few pictures in town today, I'm starting to feel a little limited by my camera, mainly with the lack of optical zoom and limited exposure settings, I'm thinking of getting a new camera with my student loan, although i feel a bit n00bish of what functions i want/need. Any tips or links appreciated.

My link of the day is: TUGZip – an Open-source archiver

xblogging

I’ve felt bloody terrible today, its been pretty stressful with uni and terrible housemates. Looks like my housemates who are sposed to sort out and pay the gas bill have not, and we may get our gas, and possibly electricity cut off.. fecking idiots, plus we’ll be charged over £330 for the privledge.

The worst thing is that it may affect MY credit rating! This got me pretty stressed, and the only response i have heard from the 2 who were sposed to paythe bill was… “We’ve already paid it”, now forgive me if i have missed something but i dont think British Gas would send out a letter saying we are being cut off if they had paid the bill!!!

Then i got an email saying that i have missed a number of labs and i have to go see my lecturer next week, or i may fail the lab coursework. Which just added to my stress!
So i’ve kind of loafed around and done nothing.

But i wasnt going to let the whole day go by without a blog, oh no.

Today both Darkplace and The IT Crowd DVDs were confirmed with release dates, and are availalbe for preorder on Amazon. Darkplace 7th July and The IT Crowd 9th October (very close to my birthday Hint! Hint!)

The Mirror for the IT Crowd episodes is having a bit of a bandwidth problem… They used up 1762GB of Bandwidth in the first 7 days!! So i thought i could get you guys to help him out by clicking a few of hits adverts or even giving him a small donation via paypal to help him keep the server up and the IT Crowd available to the whole world.
(Dont forget to disable Adblock!)

I’m going to be swanking it up in a hotel room like this in May for a wedding im going to with Lauren (all free of charge of course :P)

Check out this blog by Pedro Silva, he works for MSDN. It looks like they are developing something rather similar to “Visual Assembly” (my final year project, the website needs updating tho) as an add-on to Visual Studio 2005 called DSL Tools, (No not Damn Small Linux) its short for Domain-Specific Language Tools.

Its pretty cool that im actually doing something that microsoft considers a valid software concept, although im sure theirs will be much better than mine!


You might have noticed that i have a new link in my affiliates section: ThinkGeek, this is an awsome webshop, i would buy soo much from there if i lived in the US, namely Jolt Cola and the really cool mugs and t-shirts!

So if you feel like checking it out, i think i get 7% if you buy anything from them after clicking my link. Already made £3!
Check out this shot of my dinner yesterday:

A nice healthy 5 Bits of extra thick bacon all covered in melted cheese!

I recevied a little gift from Ergotron today as well, which will be getting a fullon review here tomorrow, heres a sneak peak picture, and the fancy camera i used to take some of the photos with:

I’ve also nearly finished Download Vista, and in Uni today downloaded a Ubuntu Live CD in 2 mins (40Mb Connection), so if i get board over the weekend then i might end up doing a bit of OS tinkering.

Oh and a reminder that there is now 2 weeks left in the Atariboy Logo competition, didnt want you to forget now :P
Keep you eyes open tomorrow for a possible Firefox 2 Alpha release as well ;)

And my technorati rank has gone up again: 7,273

Dual Monitors


It finally arrived at 9am this morning, of course i started setting it up straight away. I loved my Hyundia 19″ CRT, but the new Samsung 930BF makes it look blurry and dull. The picture quality is stunning, vibrant colours and sharp edges, makes me wonder how i ever coped before, no wonder i was getting headaches from my old screen.

Setup was very easy, just plugged in the DVI cable and the power, turned it on and it worked, and in windows its just a case of choosing to extend the windows desktop across onto the second.

For anyone whos wondering, to set a wallpaper to extend across both screens set the position to “Tile”.

This is the first time i’ve properly used two screens in windows, its a refreshing experience. Being able to watch a film or episode of simpsons on one screen whilst blogging or chatting on msn. At the moment i have 2 firefox windows open, one on each screen.

I’ve only tried one game so far, the magnificent Day of Defeat. The graphics look even better, sharper and clearer and the colours look fantastic, and thanks to a response time of 4ms the is no ghosting what so ever.
I’m very happy with it, although it does make me want to buy another one to replace my CRT, but im pretty skint now!

Oh and i got a free game too: Myst V: End of Ages

Gaming Food

Well my screen didnt turn up today, mainly because the people at parcel force are idiots, they couldnt work out where i live from my postcode?! Havnt they heard of google maps?

So that pissed me off and i went out and bought a lod of nice food and drinks and I’m setting myself up for a night of Day of Defeat with mike:

The cans are “Relentless” a caffine energy drink like red bull but come in half litre cans, really good stuff, should keep me alert later, next best thing to jolt cola, and the crisps are 14 packets of walkers cheese and onion, damn tasty, should last about a day :P

The Diddi Donuts are little donut balls with a tiny bit of jam in them, they are already eaten, little bit disappointing tho. And the Dairylea is 16 slices of processed cheese, i’ve got 2 packets because i love it so much.

I swear if i didnt have such a rediculously high matabalism i’d be soooo fat, but as it is i have a body fat index of 6%!!

Let the gaming begin!!

Links to all the pictures here on my flickr

Start of the weekend

I do love being a student… thursday evening and its the start of my weekend. I’m shopping around for a 19″ monitor for about £200, send any deals my way :P and my parents are helping me out with it so i only have to pay half.

Mike finally got a graphics card (ATi 9550), so we have been playing Day of Defeat for hours, with teamspeak too, it definatly adds another level to the game, makes it so much more team based.

I went out to PC world with Jo, Andrew and Mike earlier… its a huge one at the edge of town, i could have spent all day walking around there, so much stuff, although its all at least 10% more expensive than on the interweb.

Thinking i’ve got to get another C# book as well, to help me out with my programming, espeically mouse movements and classes, but the books in PC world were £30, a little bit much, so i’ll have a look online.

I’m also looking into java, Gary my coursemate is thinking of controlling his robot with a PDA, and java would be easy to put on it, and as it is a lot like C#, and he cant program to save his life!, i may help him out a lot, and in return get a rather tasty java book for free, and some very nice things to put on my CV too.

This weekend i’m going to be working hard on my program, with regions, context menus and custom dialogs, but that would only make sense to a programmer! I’m feeling quite confident about it, i should be able to get everything asked of me done by this weekend, so i can start adding extra credit bits next week.

Only got one link today.. A banned advert for mortal combat which i thought was cool, not as good as the banned xbox ones tho.

Oh and technorati updated finally, the rank of this blog is now: 9,969!!

Wednesday Afteroon links

I’ve been very busy with my project this week and not really had much time to blog, but i have some links that i saved:

A funny Falloutboy video – if you hate falloutboy you’ll like this! We’re going down tuuuuu in a luleelurah!!

Funny Trivium video – same kind of piss take as the falloutboy one. SEGA NATION!!

Crazy german kid (right click > save as) – this kid is insane, are there really people who get this worked up over a game?

Penny arcade – Im sure most of you already know about this one, but i only discovered it yesterday, some very funny comics, i like this one especially.

UrlyArt.com – Some very cool web2 art, pictures made from screenshots of websites, i espiecally like the digg.com one.

BlogMad!

And dont forget in a weeks time BlogMad.com goes into public beta, so sign up now and earn some early credits.

Mikes getting a Graphics card in the mail today, so tonight we will be playing DoD for hours on end. If you want to join us add me on xfire: atariby

Day of Defeat Free Weekend

This coming weekend, valve are letting anyone try out Day of Defeat for free for the whole weekend!

Basically you can download steam and then preload  Day of Defeat this week, and when friday comes it will be unlocked for the whole weekend, allowing anyone to play for free. And come sunday i would imagine that the game will be locked and you will be given the option to buy the game, possibly at a reduced price, i think it is currently priced at $20, which is about £11.

If anyone does decide to try it out, let me know and i’d more more than happy to play with you and show you the ropes and tricks of DoD.

More details here

The Sabeth

Another lazy sunday, which so far has been quite productive. I’ll get some links out of the way first:

.Net programmers in High demand – This is great news for me, as its what i’m programming my final year project in.

Defeat Source – A new Day of Defeat website has opened up, looking very nice, although i prefer the uncluttered style of DoD Network

TheOldComputer.com – Loads and loads of old games to download here, the whole site is a a haven for the older geek! I’ve been playing Super mario Bros loads.

Samy is my hero – This page details how samy created a worm on myspace, great hacking and a very interesting read, got my brain ticking to be sure ;)

And i found another hack/exploit for myspace, but i’m going to do that in a seperate post later, its not as good as the hidden comments one, but its quite suprising and easy, although not too useful, more of a strange thing.

I also found some higher quality torrents of the IT crowd and updated the post, which has become quite popular (50 hits yesterday and 70 so far today)

Last night after playing DoD as a sniper for hours i decided to watch ‘Enemy at the Gates’, a sniper film. Its really good, the sets are amazing and the whole film jsut had that feeling of Day of defeat/Call of duty which has kinda made me want to play thru ‘Call of Duty’ again, i’m also downloading another sniper film called “Sniper” and Saving private ryan as i haven’t seen that yet either.

I’ve also put a couple more pics of my ipod on flickr, and my current background i found on deviantart.

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DoD Kalt

This morning i took a few screenshots of the newest map in Day of Defeat – Kalt.

Its certainly one of my favs now, each class of player has a route which benifts them from snipers and mgs to assualt and rockets too. It makes for a very exciting and fantic game, you realyl cant win in a big game without a good team plan.

Today i played as sniper, its one of my fav classes with assault, and did suprisingly well with a kill ratio of nearly 4.

All the screens can be seen in my flickr DoD set here.

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