Bam-zine

Boys Toys

I have been trying to rebuild an old PC, that has been lying dormant in the corner of the room for the last 6 months, for my younger brother. Its no hardcore gaming rig that’s for sure, but it should be capable of playing WoW, which is all he plays, apart from Poker. Its an old AMD64 XP2000+ cpu with 1GB of Ram and Windows XP, it still only has an AGP graphics card but it’s a Radeon x1650 thingy with 512Mb. Windows re-installed with zero problems, it took ages to apply all the latest updates and service packs, WoW on the other hand has proved to be a total biatch to install. First attempt via the original CD’s crashed the PC 3 times on the 4^th cd. I then went for the full client download, which was trickling in at about 100k a sec, soon gave up on this as I can get 20Mb thru my connection. I managed to find a full ISO set of the WoW game and the Burning Coast(?) update from a dubious source. This didn’t bother me as he owns the game anyway, this downloaded in just over 1 hour and installed in about the same time, beating the 18 hours Blizzard downloader estimate somewhat. Once this was all done his account failed to work, he then tells me he uses the US servers so the US client is required not the EU one. WTF!!! 7Gb clients for 2 different servers behave! Blizzard are keeping to their reputation of being @#**@!# useless (IMHO). After 2 mins of ranting in IRC to people about how shit this was, I found that a simple 2 character edit in a config file and you are good to go on the US servers with an EU client changing eu.login……. to us.login…. apparently does the trick. I have yet to try this, as there were still a few patches to install when I left for work this morning. If this doesn’t work, my brother can download it himself over his snail speed ‘broadband’, it’s a shit game anyway, PLAY EVE!!!

One computer left in bits to rebuild, 64bit linux here I come…..

** The WoW fix does work, and my brother has collected his pile of crap hardcore gaming rig.**

Operation Anshar

It’s been a while since I updated you all on my progress with Operation Anshar, mainly because there has been very little progress. I have had a couple of near misses with my invention work, I can almost see the Anshar blueprint in my workings but there is some snag right at the last minute causing all the work to fall apart right at the end. The other problem I have been having is sourcing a steady, cheap supply of Obelisk blueprints to work from. The prices of these are fluctuating wildly these days, nobody seems sure of their actual worth. I refuse to pay over 100 million ISK for a single run blueprint, more than happy to sit and wait for the sales to drop off and prices to fall.

To keep me busy I have been rattling off a load more Scorch and Tremor large ammunition, these do not provide the instant injection of cash that larger ships provide, but they are a nice steady income. There always seem to be people who want to shoot each other, which is always good for business. It does however drive up the prices of the high end minerals, as people are losing more and more expensive ships, and requiring more advanced modules and ammunition to kill each other. Those of you who have been around a while will have grown used to these price fluctuations, high ends go up, low ends go down, so now is the time to stock up on all that cheap Tritanium and Pyerite; Megacyte and Morphite will peak and drop in price soon enough pushing the see-saw the other way.

On a totally different note, I am getting bored of Empire life again, it could be time to go walkabout and see what’s going on in the outlying regions. I feel the need to build bigger things, so if anyone is looking for a non-political Carrier, Dreadnaught, Mothership or even Titan builder then let me know. I still have to catch up with my good buddy Oresome and build a few Outposts. I can’t be arsed with all the politics and skulduggery that goes on in 0.0, I’ll leave that to the people who fly the capital ships to sort out. You never know I may even dust off some mining equipment and go in search of Morphite myself !! OK lets not be silly, that’s a stupid idea.

Obelisk Update

As you probably gathered by the delay in my progress update, the first Obelisk invention failed. I was so close too I can feel it. Next one is lined up and ready to go as soon as I make it home, if I still have a home that is. I forgot to pay the bills before I went away and some paper pusher has impounded all my assets. There is gonna be trouble when I get there if my offices have been re-let to someone with piss poor Caldari tastes.

Anyway I have a long trip home, so I will catch up with you all later…….

Back to work.

I must admit I have been taking it easy over the last couple of weeks, and not doing a great deal. Its been great, but back to reality now. Two of my Golems sold while I was away, which is nice, and the last of the components to build another two are due out of the factory in a few days. I ran a few invention jobs on some Cruise Missile Launchers just to ease myself back into work, with great results, three out of five success rate. More stuff to build…..

With my new found wealth from my recent sales I have decided to up the stakes a little on my invention jobs, Battleships are all well and good but anyone can build those, even the Tech II variants. Its time to scale up to something a little larger, much larger in fact. I have been flying an Obelisk, the Gallente freighter, for some  time now and the Jump Drive enabled version does look interesting. So I had a flick thru the want to sell ads and found a guy selling buleprint copies just past Luminaire for 95 million. Not cheap but a hell of a lot cheaper than they used to be, anyway I grabbed a few and headed back home to go thru my invention bits and bobs. Found a few handy decryptors that should help with the material efficiency if I am successful, datacores are not a problem I will be glad to get rid of some to be honest.

These jobs are bar far the most technical I have undertaken and are going to keep my labs busy for almost 3 days, I am going to be chuffed if I manage to pull this off. The next problem will be sourcing the vast amounts of materials for Capital sized components, luckily I have a few friends who owe me a favour who own a full set of blueprints for the parts. I’ll be back in a day or two to give you an update on how things went.

Geekmeet 08

I am trying to recover from last nights drinking session brought on by our annual Geekmeet event. Geekmeet is a gathering of EVE Online players who have all known each other thru the game for the last 5 years. This years lineup included myself, Drogo, Gene, Oresome, Malarkey, Muzic Man, Oddman, Exo, Bob, iBlade and Karpoa. I need to thank Drogo on behalf of everyone for this years amazing T-shirts, and Malarkey for the knock-off Quafe.

The day started off nicely with a relaxing drink in the Old Palace Lodge hotel at about midday while we waited for everyone to arrive thru the traffic jam of legend that is the M25. After a few more beers and getting everyone checked into their hotel rooms we sensibly decided to get some food inside us as it was going to be a long day of drinking and talking EVE. So we decamped and headed to the Sugar Loaf for more beer and some lunch. This was probably the last sensible idea we had all day. Next came The Bull for a couple, then over to The Wheatsheaf once it opened up for a few games of pool and several more beers. I think we headed back to the Sugar Loaf as the lack of decoration in the Wheatsheaf was disappointing, at this point the evening gets a little hazy, I can remember the pub filling up with young ladies wearing not very many clothes, and then ending up shouting at each other by the dance floor. I’m not sure how many more beers we had in the Sugar Loaf, but it was enough for me. We all left at around midnight I guess and people headed off to get kebabs and more beer back at the Old Palace Lodge with its 24hr bar. I left the party at this point to stagger home to the wife, but I hear the party carried on into the small hours. I wont go into the rumors that were around in the morning regarding extra guests……

Next years event looks like being another heavy session as there was talk of attending the office EVE Fanfest in Iceland, maybe with wives in tow.

My PC is Dead!, Long live my PC!

I have just got back from a nice week on the river doing a spot of fishing to find my trusty PC had packed up and gone to the great landfill in Essex

I have been forced to bring forward scheduled upgrade by a few months, shame, took me a while to find a good deal on a custom build PC, but I’m happy with what I have now. Congrats to the Polish guys building the PC’s at PowerC, very neat and tidy, no lose cables or anything.

Asus M3N-HD/HDMI mobo
AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core
4Gb Corsair 800Mhz Ram
nVidia 9800GTS 512Mb
700W Toughpower PSU

All in one of the nicest caes I have seen, an Antex Nine Hundred with a bottom mounted PSU. It comes with 4 nice large, quiet fans, two at the front, one exhaust at the rear, and a huge 200mm exhaust in the top of the case. There is also a side intake for a 4th 120mm fan, I dont know if I need a 4th fan, but its in there running nice and slow.

I was lumbered with Vista, but I suppose its time I bit the bullet, Vista gives my PC a rating of 5′.9 Bills’ on the Gates-o-meter. More importantly in the real world I can get over 100FPS in EVE with everything ramped up on the gfx settings, even Crysis gets a repectable 30+fps with mid-range gfx setting at 1200×1024.

I tried a little video encoding from a 3Gb Fraps movie using VirtualDub and it flew along, next test I reckon is to dig out Lightwave and run some renders with 4 cores.

At Last!

Finally, something constructive is out of the factory, time to reap some rewards from the last few weeks bordem. I went away for a week to spend some time planet-side, out in the wilderness, it was very nice, but now I’m back in station with two new Golems to take to market. I notice prices have gone up recently, it must be these inter-faction wars going on at the moment and who said nobody wins in war? I still have a few days left on the remaining parts for the last two ships so I guess its back to ammo building for a while, it keeps the ISK trickling in.