DoomBook

So I just noticed -ck attached to a bitcoin client and low, behold, it’s the same Con Kolivas who used to maintain the -ck Linux scheduler. Check out the CGminer bitcoin number crunching client if you’re interested.

Con’s done some outstanding work in scheduler development on the Linux kernel. He’s always backed up his claims with actual graphs and numbers unlike so many (not specifically Linux) developers who take a “well it should work” attitude. It’s interesting to see all that applied math going into tweaking a number cruncher.

Looking for something to run on a Linux system to log onto Vent voice chat servers? You couldn’t do much better than Mangler. It integrates nicely with Gnome’s (probably KDE and XFCE4 as well) desktop and offers up all the VoIP chatting you’d expect.

Okay, so, the Minecraft HD pack we’re using is here and you’ll need to grab MCPatcher to make it work.

What it’ll give you is some amazing high definition Minecraft textures and add in the ability to easily run other mods and patches.

These are both updated to work on the recent 1.8 Minecraft release.

So you’ve got a serial device that needs printing output sent to it and you’ve installed Ubuntu 11.04. Cups responds with an Unable to open device file … Permission Denied. Well!

Ubuntu has thoughtfully explicitly denied access to /dev/ttyUSB devices through apparmor. No reason you’d ever print to serial devices in Ubuntu, eh?

So to get your receipt printer, Okidata 320ML serial printer, or whatever working you’ll either need to uninstall apparmor (I imagine) or change a line in the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd from “deny /dev/ttyUSB*” to “/dev/ttyUSB*”.

That should do it.

Game: Puzzle Agent 2
Publisher: Telltale Games

Puzzle Agent 2 from Telltale Games brings us back to Scoggins, Minnesota to delve into the unresolved secrets of the first installment. The FBI’s sole agent in charge of the US Department of Puzzle Research, Nelson Tethers, has decided there’s a puzzle left unsolved.

Graham Annable returns with his sketch-art animation and folk-lore hidden people. The animation and story board are a good bit of the selling point for the Puzzle Agent series, with Graham’s ability to pack emotion into a fairly low-detail form of art. The art’s fun, unpretentious, and surprisingly engaging.

Audio in the game sets the mood nicely, complementing the gameplay and settings without being overbearing. Voice acting is on par with anything I’ve watched. The best complement I can pay any game not about music is that I don’t remember the soundtrack, only recalling that it was good.

And that’s the case here.

Too many titles wedge in music that undercuts the gameplay rather than underscoring it because someone “did music” or they’re trying to get an extra sales angle in.

Puzzles in Puzzle Agent 2 are slightly easier than in the first game. Some of the aspects that could make solving puzzles irritating have been altered. I really didn’t find them hard, more along the lines of a brain-teaser or Saturday newspaper puzzle than MENSA material.

There are also abundant hints available if riddles are a bit too challenging. Or if you don’t have knowledge of a particular subject.

Coming in at about 4 hours of playtime, Puzzle Agent 2 is a bit longer than an episode but shorter than a traditional long-format game. Which is about right for a ~10$ pricetag.

I liked the game. It was fun all the way through. With the sketch animation style, puzzles, and clean content Puzzle Agent 2 delivers.

Footnote: you should play Puzzle Agent first, since Puzzle Agent 2 is somewhat of another episode. It’s not going to hurt to start on the second chapter, but why would you want to?

Android devices are great unless they’re not. One of the ways they’re not-great is when you don’t have Android Marketplace installed for whatever reason and need to get applications to them for install.

So if you’re looking for a solution to getting files over to your android device in relatively secure style, an SSH server is probably the way to go.

Two of the options that I’ve picked out that that work are:

SSHDroid: A free ad-driven application that allows you to open up a somewhat configurable compile of the Dropbear SSH daemon.

DroidSSHd: this one is ad-free but doesn’t include sFTP support. It also didn’t like SCP running through it, but that may have been due to where it dumped the client in the directory structure. If you’re looking for a clean compile of Dropbear sshd for android, they’ve also got that, along with instructions on how to cross platform compile sshd for android yourself.

Just updated the minecraft server to 1.05_02. It should mesh with the client released this morning.

If you’re running a Minecraft server on Linux and you want a simple way to automate starting, stopping, and backing up the server with a single command-line option this might be for you.

These scripts are something I cracked out for the Minecraft server we run here. Feel free to grab a copy and modify them for your own use.

You’ll need basic unix utilities and “screen”, which may not be installed by default. If you’ve got all that, the only thing that it’s necessary to change should be the startup directory setting in the main file.

If you’d like the backups to be run automatically, put the backup script in your crontab file. If you need help doing that, look up “edit vixie crontab how-to” on google. If you’re not using Vixie Cron.. well.. you probably know what you’re doing.

Also note that this was created to be the absolute bare-bones of what you’d need to effectively run and back-up the server. There certainly could be more options, wrappers, MOTD on entry daemons, etc. But they won’t be in these scripts.

If you need to pop into the Minecraft server command line once it’s up and running, type “screen -r” as long as you’ve only got the single screen session running. When you want to leave the server, and exit back to your prompt without closing it down, press CTRL-A CTRL-D.

Hopefully they help, and good luck!

Minecraft Start/Stop/Backup Scripts

300 years in the future everyone’s incorporated. Not just a futuristic take on corporations ala David Louis Edelmen’s Multireal but full owning percentages of people.

Into this steps a man from the dawn of the 21st century, having preserved himself cryogenically in a last crapshoot at cheating death.

Quite a combination of themes, drawing from our current trials and memes combining them with a Rip Van Winkle from our time (in both plot and mechanic) to lend the reader eyes with which to look out at the future.

What we end up with is a solid first novel in a presumed series. It’s got some quirks in how people interact socially, but that’s par for course with science fiction. It’s easily overlooked in light of the excellent writing and storytelling presented. Go read it.

Unincorporated Man, Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin

First a quick note on getting the expansion working. In the modules section of Fallout 3: New Vegas I had to manually enable the module, otherwise it wouldn’t load. Quite a few hours were spent merrily wandering around the wasteland before that box got checked off on a re-load.

Playthrough of Fallout 3 New Vegas’s latest expansion for the PC, Dead Money, has been pretty robust so far.

Game mechanics get introduced that aren’t a part of the normal Fallout 3 game play to add a bit of difficulty to the module. Resting is impossible, resulting in rationing on things like stimpaks. Your inventory gets removed, so there’s no rotating in an auto-cannon to blow your way through the challenging enemy battles.

And the battles actually are challenging with somewhat limited resources and resilient opponents.

Puzzles in the game aren’t especially challenging so far, but that’s not much of a letdown for me. Puzzler elements introduced to FPS games always struck me as out of place, there being only so many times you’re going to run into a door you can’t simply hammer open for one reason or another.

Story elements are in keeping with the wasteland motif and provide some interesting plot to go along with the slug-fest bouts of fighting.

Without giving too much away, you’re dragged over to a hotel to commit a heist with a motley assortment of companions.

About half way in that 10$ purchase is looking pretty good. If it still pans out after the game’s done, you can read about the module in full right here!