Another year over already

In less than 1 1/2 hours I will be 28, I'll have to update the bio page (I should really knock up some javascript to do that for me) and reflect upon another year of my life coming to its chronological conclusion.

In all fairness it's been a good year, I've now had a job I love for four great years, I have a wonderful girlfriend that I love dearly and a multitude of great friends that I cherish (even if I don't always show it). All in all I have a lot to be thankful for and I'm glad of that. But I can't shake the nagging feeling that I'm another year closer to 30 and there's something about that looming milestone that's a little unsettling but to hell with doubts and angst. Tomorrow the partying begins and one does not simply drink their way into Mordor! There must be dancing and silliness too!

Bring.It. On.

SOPA gone... for now.

But just in case something equally moronic and draconian gets pushed here is a list of useful ip addresses:

  • tumblr.com 174.121.194.34
  • wikipedia.org 208.80.152.201

News

  • bbc.co.uk 212.58.241.131
  • aljazeera.com 198.78.201.252

Social media

  • reddit.com 72.247.244.88
  • imgur.com 173.231.140.219
  • google.com 74.125.157.99
  • youtube.com 74.125.65.91
  • yahoo.com 98.137.149.56
  • hotmail.com 65.55.72.135
  • bing.com 65.55.175.254
  • digg.com 64.191.203.30
  • theonion.com 97.107.137.164
  • hush.com 65.39.178.43
  • gamespot.com 216.239.113.172
  • ign.com 69.10.25.46
  • cracked.com 98.124.248.77
  • sidereel.com 144.198.29.112
  • github.com 207.97.227.239

Torrent sites

  • thepiratebay.org 194.71.107.15
  • mininova.com 80.94.76.5
  • btjunkie.com 93.158.65.211
  • demonoid.com 62.149.24.66
  • demonoid.me 62.149.24.67

Social networking

  • facebook.com 69.171.224.11
  • twitter.com 199.59.149.230
  • tumblr.com 174.121.194.34
  • livejournal.com 209.200.154.225
  • dreamwidth.org 69.174.244.50

Live Streaming Content

  • stickam.com 67.201.54.151
  • blogtv.com 84.22.170.149
  • justin.tv 199.9.249.21
  • chatroulette.com 184.173.141.231
  • omegle.com 97.107.132.144
  • own3d.tv 208.94.146.80
  • megavideo.com 174.140.154.32

Television

  • gorillavid.com 178.17.165.74
  • videoweed.com 91.220.176.248
  • novamov.com 91.220.176.248
  • tvlinks.com 208.223.219.206
  • 1channel.com 208.87.33.151

Shopping

  • amazon.com 72.21.211.176
  • newegg.com 216.52.208.187
  • frys.com 209.31.22.39

File Sharing

  • mediafire.com 205.196.120.13
  • megaupload.com 174.140.154.20
  • fileshare.com 208.87.33.151
  • multiupload.com 95.211.149.7
  • uploading.com 195.191.207.40
  • warez-bb.org 31.7.57.13
  • hotfile.com 199.7.177.218
  • gamespy.com 69.10.25.46
  • what.cd 67.21.232.223
  • warez.ag 178.162.238.136
  • putlocker.com 89.238.130.247
  • uploaded.to 95.211.143.200
  • dropbox.com 199.47.217.179
  • pastebin.com 69.65.13.216

Information wants to be free.

Minecraft on a netbook?

Happy New Year as well, by the way. So I'm back home and I had an awesome time in Germany, it's my birthday on Friday so as a little present to myself I bought Minecraft. Now I knew in advance that running it out of my netbook was probably not a wise idea but I thought I'd give it a go anyway and if it didn't work I've got a more powerful machine at home anyway.

Hardware

First up let's look at the hardware I'm trying to do this on. It's an HP Mini with:

  • 1.6GHz Atom N450 cpu
  • 1GB RAM
  • Intel N10 integrated graphics

Software

As you can see this is a fairly lowspec machine, now for the software:

  • OS version: Linux Mint Debian Edition, Xfce Desktop
  • Kernel version: Stock debian 3.0.0 686 pae
  • Java version: Sun Java 6 (6.26)

Let's do this

For my little experiment I've killed all extraneous programs and disabled window manager compositing. All that's running at the moment are two terminals, current memory usage is at 106MB. Running from a terminal we use the command:

java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame

(as recommended by the minecraft website) to launch the application aaaaaaannnddd pow! we have a launcher, so far so good!. I key in my username and password to log in and let MC run its update which goes fine. Okay, let's check out the graphics settings, I bet we can shave off some cpu cycles by turning everything down to a mimimum.

My initial graphics settings

  • Graphics: Fast
  • Render Distance: Tiny
  • Smooth Lighting: OFF
  • Performance: Max FPS
  • 3D Anaglyph: OFF
  • View Bobbing: OFF
  • GUI Scale: Auto
  • Advanced OpenGL: OFF
  • Brightness: Moody
  • Clouds: OFF
  • Particles: Minimal

This should give us the absolute minimum graphics with an FPS that doesn't cause severe internal hemorraghing and to give us one last little boost I'm going to halve the size of the game window. Yes, it'll be small but it should be playable. Click here for a screenshot.

Now lets create a world and see if the game itself is actually playable. Since this is just a test we'll start in creative mode and call our world Thumbnailia (imaginative, I know!). I kept the settings to default and let it generate and then started playing. Verdict? Success. The first few seconds were a little choppy while it loaded but after that the framerate was perfectly viable. Some people in various forums have noted that on linux they find that using the punch button often pauses the game, this may be a result of using the OpenJVM rather than the Sun JVM but even with the Sun JVM I had this bug occasionally. I found that holding it down rather than using lots of clicks seemed to solve it. I hope this post is of use to other people trying to get minecraft working on relatively lowspec machines!

Ciao, I'm off to build a castle :)

Holy Fuck, it's Xmas

Merry Christmas, Seasons Greetings, Happy Hannukah etc... Today is my last day of work for the year andI'll be celebrating the Yuletide by spending the holidays with my girlfriend in Germany. I've never been to Germany so I'm quite excited. I expect I'll get an education in German beer, food and winter traditions. Bring it on! (Especially the beer, I've heard good things about German beer).

In other news I've been modding a leather bracer for my steampunk gear, it was too big so I've made a few changes and added a few bits and pieces. I'll post pics when I'm satisfied with the overall piece.

Tonight, I'll be DJ'ing at Cambridges Q Club for a Christmas party, while I'll be doing my usual Industrial, EBM, Electronica style set I will be trying to keep it as 'bouncy' as one can. It's a Christmas party after all.

Well that's all for now, I hope everyone has a great holiday and an awesome new year.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

There isn't much else I can really add to that. Hitchens was a brilliant man and whilst I have not always agreed with his stance on certain areas, his support for the Iraq war for example, I will miss his writing and the brilliance with which he verbally and logically smacked down the nastier elements of the religious lunatic fringe.

RIP Hitch, I hope it ended peacefully.