2007 September Archive at Walking Amongst Dark Shadows

Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Clan iDentity TF2 Server Arrives!

Published

on September 27, 2007

. 17 Comments

Woo! I’m proud to announce that over the next day or so that we will have our own public TF2 server thanks to Jolt UK. ‘We’ referring to the old school Half Life DM/TFC/Quake/etc crew who I have known for utterly years - close to 10 years for a few of them. We have resided on channel #id on Quakenet for many years now.

With the TF2 Beta being a lot more robust than I originally expected, I thought to myself ‘We needs a server, our own, our preciouussses’. So I’ve gone out and gots us one! A 16 player public server will hopefully go live over the next few days and be open to all. It’ll be a good friendly place where hopefully old school TFC’ers can come and visit and have a blast.

We aren’t a clan, just a group of seasoned gamers who have ‘been there and done that’ in the past, so we just play for fun now as we have one of those things called ‘A LIFE’. Right, that’s the bollocks out of the way, now on to the rest of the details.

The server also will support Fortress Forever. Should we decide that TF2 isn’t progressing too well with regards to class balancing, we could end up switching over to that mod in future. Only time will tell.

Oh and lastly, www.halfmad.com has risen from the ashes, albeit in a slightly different form! It’s all bl00 and still run by me good mate Phil. He’s Scottish, bald and a bit of a loony but he has kindly put up a forum for our server. It isn’t finished yet, but shall be soon. In the meantime please feel free to register (that includes you goits in #id) and prepare for much TF2 discussions, rants, wines etc.

Update: 30th Sept: Not heard from Jolt just yet as it’s the weekend. Hopefully they’ll get some progress tomorrow, otherwise I’ll email them for info, as the money has gone out of my account
Update: 1st October: She’s alive! 195.149.21.186:27015
Update: 23rd October: Server moved to 213.208.119.65:27035

Noes! Wordpress 2.3 owned meh blogs! :(

Published

Darren/Kain

on September 25, 2007

in Site Stuff

. 6 Comments

4+ hours of work and counting

I was expecting this. I took a day off today after literally getting pee’d on by the British weather as I ~~walked~~ ran to work yesterday morning. This morning I felt like hell as a result with a major headache since I was drenched silly from the mad downpour.

Anyway, I woke up this morning to find that Wordpress 2.3 had been released. I was half dazed as I began to install this. I should know better than to install an upgrade to Wordpress, without doing some research to see what problems others are having. In the past Wordpress upgrades went ultra smoothly, however the team have recently begun adding features that most blogs rely on trusted plugins for. As a result those plugins get annoyed upon encountering an almost identical one and things go wrong.

I’m still not sure what has happened but my Extended Live Archives setup went totally wrong and threw a major wobbly, which resulted in me disabling the thing, then Ultimate Tag Warrior went a bit mental. The Archives page looks a bit poorly now as a result. Just when I thought I had everything under control I noticed that all my blog Categories had gone missing so now all my posts were filed under Misc! That is a colossal amount of posts that I have to now re-edit and re-assign categories to. Total time to correct all my posts = 5hrs.

For those fearing an upgrade, don’t. Most of the time Wordpress upgrades are completely flawless. It depends entirely on how complex your blog is in regards to theme template, plugins and any hacks/tweaks you’ve done. I have made heaps of tweaks to various bits on the blog so I knew it wouldn’t be a smooth ride.

Creative - Where do they go from here?

Published

Darren/Kain

on September 23, 2007

in Technology

. 4 Comments

Good things come to those who wait

I have had quite a few emails over the past week mostly asking where Creative’s answer to the new iPod’s are. Truth be told, there isn’t one - yet.

On August 30th 2007, Creative leaked out images of their next generation replacement for their flagship MP3/Video player - the Zen Vision:M. The new Creative Zen was a flash based player coming in three capacities of 4, 8 and 16GB. The player was almost identical to the ZVM, aside from having SD storage expansion, a superior screen and er, well that’s all sadly. For most users it was a downgrade because Creative, like most MP3 manufacturer’s seemed to be following the trend in moving away from hard disk based players onto Flash based players, which are cheaper to manufacture and more reliable.

The ZVM was one of the best DAP’s (Digial Audio Players) to come out of the portable music industry. In terms of sales it never could match the iPod, but specification wise it was a lot superior and for those owners who had one, they knew how powerful it was within minutes of using the player. It offered heaps of features, was solid and robust albeit a bit of a fatty. It could play almost any video format you could throw at it and it’s screen was far superior over the iPod and the rest of the competition.

September 5th 20076 saw Apple release their ‘new’ iPod range, with the main focus being on the lovely, sleek flash based iPod Touch. This device, whilst inferior to the ZVM feature wise, was enough to even grab my attention and I have one pre-ordered to arrive early October 2007, look out for a review. Creative have no answer to the iPod range, and at the IFA convention where all the Creative fans were hoping to see a new next generation player were left unimpressed by the Zen - hardly an impressive upgrade over the ZVM. Zen fans began to look elsewhere for a next generation player, as did I.

The industry is moving away from hard disk based players, and sales wise it has been clearly shown that flash players are selling much faster. The iPod Nano outsells it’s bigger iPod brothers, whilst Creative’s range of flash players are more popular than their hard disk based models. Apple customers have a good range of models at their disposal, while Creative have let their fans down by offering nothing but a smaller capacity ZVM. From a sales point of view you can’t blame Creative for ditching their support for hard disk based players. Apple can afford to take that risk because their products sell themselves through hype and advertising, the latter of which Creative have been rather slack on.

Where to now?

So Creative’s showing at the IFA was a disappointment and they’ve let down their fans somewhat. Most including yours truly were expecting an X-FI based player but instead we ended up losing our larger hard disk capacity to a flash based product.

The chaps at Tech.co.uk spoke to Alan Devine, Creative’s brand specialist after the IFA convention and he had this to say about Creative’s future. "We’re here today to talk specifically about the newly-announced Creative Zen," he said. "But yes we do have some spectacular new products in the early stages of development in Singapore. The Creative Zen will be our flagship player for the next couple of months at least."

On Creative adding XFI technology to their players, he had this to say. "It’s something we’re actively working on," he said. "The trouble is that the technology is so good that it’s quite battery-intensive, so wouldn’t currently work well in a portable device. There’s nothing arriving in the short term but we are working hard to try and get X-Fi into a player."

As to weather we can expect any more products from them in future, he had this to say. "We have a range of products coming out over the next year. We’ve done well in the entry level with the Zen Stone; the Creative Zen fits nicely mid-market. That leaves a pretty obvious area of the market for us to fill, and I can’t say more than that."

This is certainly good news indeed and proves that Creative haven’t given up on the DAP market yet, they’re branching out making different products, which includes third party devices for the Ipod range as well as their own. They have so far replaced the ZVM with the new Zen, but have yet to see a replacement for their Zen Vision:W - the widescreen version of their ZVM. So Creative will be announcing new players in future, but will they have the storage music enthusiasts really require? We haven’t seen the last of Creative that’s for sure.

It’s here…

Published

Darren/Kain

on September 17, 2007

in Babble

. 6 Comments

October 1998 - Half Life was released to a gobsmacked gaming generation

December 1998 - Valve states that TF2 is to be released soon…

May 1999 - TF2 Renamed Brotherhood Of Arms…launch date questions are largely un-answered.

Mid 2000 - TF2 Scrapped…and started from scratch

October 2003 - Half Life 2 Source code leaked with portions of TF2 specific code in it.

November 2004 - Half Life 2 released, no further TF2 news announced…

July 2006 - TF2 to be released as a HL2 mod…

September 17th 2007 - Team Fortress 2 Beta begins

Close to 10 frikken years of waiting, Team Fortress 2 has finally arrived…and I’m 10yrs bloody older as a result!

Xbox 360 Messenger Kit Review

Published

Darren/Kain

on September 11, 2007

in Xbox 360

. 10 Comments

£()%^!!!! er Medic!

Quick heads up! I’ve put up a rather rushed review of the new 360 Messenger Kit that I received this morning. A lot of people seem to be waiting for theirs right now so here’s the low down on what I think of it. Now where’s me band aid….

Bioshock, Pizza’s, and iTunes

Published

Darren/Kain

on September 9, 2007

in Babble, Technology and Xbox 360

. 8 Comments

Would you kindly bend over…

It’s been a hectic weekend! I wasted money, and then some. Oh, there’s a Bioshock review that has been added to the reviews section. Not the best I might add, but I had to let loose my opinions on such a heavily rated game, especially after seeing it’s rating on Metacritic.com.

After finishing work on Friday, I was in a spending mood. I had about £350 saved up to blow on either clothes, pc/console bits, a low end DSLR Camera or a new MP3 player. The past week saw the release of the next generation of MP3/Video devices from the likes of Creative, Apple, Cowon, Microsoft, Archos and a few other manufacturers. I was already looking for a replacement for my Vision:M despite it being regarded as the best MP3 player on the market. I’ve had the thing for ages now and would like something a bit thinner - an excuse I recently used for buying a new mobile phone, the Sony Ericsson w880i.

Some things not to admit to on Irc…

Published

Darren/Kain

on September 5, 2007

in Music/TV/Films, Technology and WTF?

. 7 Comments

What are your worst tunes on your MP3 player?

Today was the launch of the new Apple iPod range over in the states. Needless to say there were good and bad products shown here, the highlight being the iPod Touch thing, which I’m sure people will quickly snap up only to realise that touchscreen’s aren’t too COOL in use. The iPod Touch doesn’t have that much storage space either, well for some people anyway. For those who require over 16GB of space for their albums, they’ll have to carefully manage what goes onto their new iPod. Anyway, over on our quakenet channel where most of us old-school gamers chat and complain about life in general, PR was getting rather amped up about the new iPod despite stating he wasn’t wanting one.

An hour later after the Apple announcement ended, he’s started pruning away at his iPod music collection… So what follows are various snippets cut out of the channel, because some of the tracks PR has puts my collection to shame!. Let the shaming begin!

[21:26] * PR|PC prunes music collection
[21:28] <PR|PC> Call of Duty 1 soundtrack
[21:28] <Kainz> lol
[21:28] <PR|PC> keeping that
[21:28] <PR|PC> back in the day when they had real orchestras playing real music
[21:31] <PR|PC> 2 Faced by Louise (pre redknapp)
[21:32] <Kainz> LOL
[21:33] <PR|PC> shup!
[21:34] <Kainz> Louise lol
[21:34] <PR|PC> Lighthouse family!
[21:35] <Kainz> Better then Louise!
[21:35] <PR|PC> She’s hot!
[21:35] <Kainz> and now married!
[21:35] <Kainz> Ya got J-LO!?
[21:38] <PR|PC> Fahrenheit Soundtrack
[21:39] <PR|PC> Hang it Up!
[21:39] <Kainz> Teh what
[21:39] <PR|PC> When you play basketball with the cop!
[21:39] <Kainz> lol
[21:49] <PR|PC> Samantha Mumba!
[21:49] <Kainz> lmao
[21:49] <Kainz> and you have the balls to take the piss out of me for my taste!
[21:50] <Kainz> So what iplod bloat are you buying?
[21:50] <PR|PC> Who said I’m buying it?!
[21:50] <PR|PC> Tempted I must say
[21:50] <Kainz> You’re pruning e.g prepping your music collection!
[21:51] <PR|PC> Deleting Sam Mumba is hardly pruning!
[21:51] <Kainz> What about louise!
[21:51] <PR|PC> Gone

Heroes on HD DVD

Published

Darren/Kain

on September 2, 2007

in Music/TV/Films

. 5 Comments

"It is not the sword. It is the man"

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, myself and Deena did just one thing. No, not that you dirty minded readers! We spent three days watching the entire Season 1 boxset of Heroes on HD DVD. I was initially unimpressed when it first aired in America. I saw the first six episodes and gave up. What started out as such a promising show felt just too slow and dull. As the show progressed it gathered fans at an incredible rate. I’ve not seen this much talk about a US Series since LOST came out, and after a single season, that turned out to be dull tripe.

So we have just watched the finale, and yet there is a ton of content still left to be watched, including the 72minute unaired pilot episode. Universal fully utilised the HD DVD format to the max and it shows with their U-Control feature. Picture in Picture extras, Character Connections, Artwork Presentations and Helix Reveals are all selectable whilst you watch an episode. At key moments the U-Control logo pops up enabling you to access the additional information.
Continue reading ‘Heroes on HD DVD’

Walking Amongst Dark Shadows

Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Clan iDentity TF2 Server Arrives!