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Blast from the past

Jagged Alliance 2: we meet again
Mildly good news, your highness. Good Old Games is having a buy two, get one free deal now. Buy two classic PC games for USD9.99 and get one USD5.99 game free. Even considering the shaky global economy (93yen to the US dollar … Holy Lucky Strike) the amount saved isn’t anything to get excited about. Six bucks is, what, a burger tasting of warm cardboard and a large paper cup of sugared water? No biggie, really.

But go get something from GOG anyway. It’s one of those rare services that seems geared towards the gamer rather than the publisher, which makes it worth supporting. The games are cheap, without the DRM publishers persist on inflicting upon honest buyers, guaranteed to be compatible with modern machines, include bonuses a gamer (and only a gamer) would appreciate and best of all, unlike Steam, each and every title on GOG is available to gamers worldwide for the same exact price.

But maybe you’re not the altruistic type. What’s in it for you, you ask. Fair enough. You selfish bastard. Here’s why you ought to support GOG: the games may be old but they really are good games. And good games stand the test of time.

The really good news is GOG now offers Jagged Alliance 2, one of those games that has stood the test of time extremely well.
Jagged Alliance 2: feel good
I’m currently on Day 60 of my JA2 campaign, and I’m having an absolute blast tearing through Arulco with my 18 dysfunctional mercs. Even the fact I’m actually playing the Steam version — which crashes every single time I exit the game and has a nasty habit of creating savegames that crash me to desktop when I change the time decompression setting — hasn’t diminished the experience much.

I’m not sure how long it’s going to take me to complete my JA2 campaign but I may be playing nothing but retro games for the first half of 2009. GOG has Sacrifice, Fallout, Fallout 2, Freespace, Freespace 2 …

Ah, there are so many things from the past to look forward to in the future.

Posted in Games.

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By Gobi – Sunday, December 7, 2008

The Thing? Still awesome

From The Fantastic Four # 12 (1963):
Fantastic Four # 12: Going up
Fantastic Four # 12: Going up
Fantastic Four # 12: Going up

Posted in Comics.

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By Gobi – Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Additional memory and Windows XP

I was startled to learn just how low RAM prices are these days. RM73 (USD20) for 2GB of Mushkin Enhanced Basic DDR2/800? Sweet mother of mercy. I think I paid more than that for 1GB a little over a year ago.

Though my system runs reasonably well with 1GB, I was curious about the performance benefits of additional RAM in a Windows XP Home system.

Now, according to Microsoft:

In general, adding memory is the easiest and most effective way to improve a computer’s performance.

Of course the same article goes on to claim:

Although it is recommended, Windows XP does not require 128 MB of RAM. The operating system can run with 64 MB of RAM.

…

A computer with 64 MB of RAM will have sufficient resources to run Windows® XP and a few applications with moderate memory requirements. Office productivity applications and Web browsers fall into this category of applications.

According to Windows Task Manager, Opera’s peak memory usage on my system is 86MB as I write this. Have fun running Microsoft Office 2007 on a Windows XP box with 64MB of RAM, smart guy.

The real question users have to deal with in 2008 is not what the minimum should be but what Windows XP’s maximum addressable memory is. With RAM prices being as cheap as they are, users will naturally be tempted to shove as much memory into their systems as possible. It turns out, however, there’s a limit to how much memory a system with a 32-bit OS like Windows XP Home can handle.
Continued…

Posted in Hardware, Software.

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By Gobi – Wednesday, December 3, 2008

WordPress: Home alone

I was looking for a piece of code that would allow me to perform a certain action on a WordPress blog’s home page (and only the home page) and thanks to this site, I have it.


< ?php if ( (is_home())&&!(is_paged()) ){ ?>


blah blah blah


< ?php } ?>

For example, if I wanted my Flickr thumbnails to be displayed (via the FlickrRSS plugin) only on the home page, I’d use the following code in my theme’s home.php file:


< ?php if ( (is_home())&&!(is_paged()) ){ ?>


< ?php get_flickrRSS(); ?>


< ?php } ?>

You can see the above example in action here.

Posted in WordPress.

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By Gobi – Sunday, October 12, 2008

SNAFU

It’s been an interesting fortnight.

Two weeks ago, my server host’s hard disk array decided to give up the ghost and take six weeks of backups with it to the Great Hardware Dump in the Sky.

This was only mildly annoying in the case of this site considering I haven’t been updating it frequently but it was very aggravating in the case of the toy link blog I edit (which is also hosted on the same shared server) since that site is updated five days a week.

I was annoyed my host kept mum about the issue for over 12 hours, incensed when I discovered that my host’s claim that it had restored content from a recent weekly backup was false, and this escalated to cartoon-style steam-out-the-ears anger when my host erroneously billed me again for hosting services. (I had paid my annual hosting fees a few days before this.)

Then a short while after that something happened that put it all in proper perspective. Life has a way of doing that, I guess.

Still, what did we learn from this episode, Orko?

Well, He-Man, first of all, we should never trust our server host’s hardware, backups or claims.

Backing up a WordPress database is a quick and easy process, so depending on the importance of your content to you or your readers, and your update frequency, you should make it a point to backup your database on a weekly or monthly basis. I didn’t do this, He-Man, and I have no one to blame but myse- … Skeletor.

Damn that evil skull-faced Lord of Destruction.

On a side note, He-Man, if you’re restoring a WordPress backup, consider using Opera instead of Firefox. Firefox 3.0.3 crashed on me as I was restoring a relatively recent Fuyoh.net WordPress backup whereas Opera 9.52 managed to complete the process without any drama.

Posted in General.

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By Gobi – Sunday, October 12, 2008