Author Archives: InV4d3r

It’s floating away

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There’s this strange, weird phenomenon I’ve recently discovered in my life. Everytime I start something with a special goal in a creative matter, it’s no longer coming to an end. When I was younger, like years ago, I finished so many art projects like solo album (which was more a compilation of some tunes of mine). I did some nice stuff with the band I once had and so on. Nowadays everything gets a start and right after beginning the whole thing is stuck or abandoned. I was working on my second solo album and it didn’t make any progress. I wanted to dig a little deeper into the Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop workflow to improve my exposure with these tools. I wanted to do much more photography and it stucked as well. I feel more and more as if time is slipping away. Actually, time is always floating away and barely able to grab, but why do I have this immense lack of time? Probably because I’m working too much. Work is wasting like eight and a half hour a day and it feels like an eternity or two till it’s over, so one reason for this time lack seems to be my daily work. For the love of God, I can’t quit because I need the financial income. Damn it.

time

Sleep might be a reason but I cut down the time for daily sleep to something around five to six hours, which has to be enough. Sleep is for the weak, never forget that. One thing that was sucking time like a blood-thirsty vampire during the last month was the need for technical maintenance on my PCs. Changes to another operating system. Service pack crashes. Raid crashes. Hardware exchanges. All this cost a lot of time and most the invested time was wasted, because it mostly led to another maintenance or repair. Right now, I finishing working on my PCs so that I can go by and work with them instead of on them. PC number four is still in queue, but it’ll stay there for a while because I simply don’t have the delight to build up another machine that wastes time.

I actually forgot what I wanted to say in this particular post, because I’m pretty tired and exhausted today and today’s gym session will be horrible I guess. Anyhow, I’ll continue unveiling the time killers in my life and hopefully get back to more creativity or other kind of ways to spent my rare free time.

Slightly getting back to basics

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There’s something wrong in the state of Denmark… not that I know, but I just wanted to start the post with a sentence that does not start with “I was blabla…”

Actually, I’m a little pissed by myself because I simply don’t feel like I should. No, I’m sick in any kinda way, but it’s my whole condition that bothers me. I’ve got a hell too much weight hanging on my bones, I’m once again unsatisfied with my job and I haven’t found the time to actually follow up some of my hobbies. But first things first. The whole weight thing is going to change, definately. I just ordered new tires and flexible tubes for my bicycle to get mobile again, because I’m so nerved of walking. Getting me back on the road also means that I personally will get a little bit more “sportish”. I just love to cruise around with my bike around the city without any specific destination. Most importantly, I’m going to grab my photo camera to catch some fine moments while being on the road. I miss shooting with my and even though I don’t have the real talent to be a great photographer I’ll keep on doing this, because this is giving the relaxation I actually need in my daily life.

Over the last couple of days and weeks I had to struggle with lots of system and hardware crashes at home (that’s the curse of having so many PCs) that I had to fix that I had a massive lack of free time actually. First it was my gaming system that died while upgrading to Windows 7 SP1. I fixed this issue to about 90 per cent. After having solved this particular problem, the raid system in my HTPC started having issues as well and one hard drive wasn’t running as stable as I would like it to be. I replaced the hard drives, cloned the whole system, rescued the data and installed a fresh, new system which isn’t finished yet already. I’m not in a hurry with that one and I’m not going to stress me with that one. As long as the XBMC is running, everything is fine.

Bicyclet

There’s a trip to London coming up within the next two weeks and right after that I’ll restart doing early sessions at the gym again. I’m stressed and nerved and bothered with the packed gym right after work and I’m sure to gain much more when I’ll go to gym pretty early. I’ll also change my nutrition as well and get back to the healthy way of life. To get the facts straight, I’m going back the roots of my personal straight edge project. It’s clear for me, that I don’t want to live the way how I live at the moment because it’s simply not good for me. I’m doing fine when it comes to points like stamina but I completely fail meanwhile due to things like pure strength.

Anyhow, it’s curious to see how everything goes down the drain when my bike’s broke. It’s always the same, the tires burst and I gain pounds and pounds and pounds. There seems to be some kind of an invisible band between me and my bike. Like it was between Elliot and E.T. in the movie of the same title. If my bike’s doing well, I’m doing well. If my bike’s getting sick, I’m doing sick.

Till my short vacation I’ll keep my gym schedule as it is now and I’ll do some slight changes to my nutrition. The tough break is going to be right after the vacation which leads me back to no sweets and candy. I’ll also reduce the amount of coffee per day, which is now at an average of four to five huge cups a day. I’ll also reduce the consumption of Diet Coke for one simple reason, Diet Coke causes hunger and hunger finally leads me to eating and eating causes weight. Well, there are tons of things that will change all with this one particular goal to get back to a healthier nutrition, but one the other hand I’m not going to live like monk in a monastery. I still want to get a little bit of fun out of life.

PS: If you want to ask about the pic in this post, well, I just thought “Sex Sells”

In seach of…

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Once again and nearly one year after first time seeing them a Fu Manchu concert was on my plan. If there’s one band I like, it’s Fu Manchu. There are always favourite bands but this particular one survived all these years with being nearly untouched in my personal hall of fame. I’ve also been a huge fan of bands like Sepultura or Slayer, but with the years the interest faded and nowadays they are just bands I revisit sometimes to remember “the old days”. Fu Manchu is more rock solid and they were able to resist all kinds of trends I personally had and I was always listening to them. The point is simple, you know what you can expect from a band like them and you sure will get what you expect. Even though they are categorized as a Stoner band I’d rather say that they’re just a rock band with a fine California attitude, a passion for sun and muscle cars and they actually seem to care about no trend. Their sound is desert dusty, their riffs just grooving and their rhythm catchy.

So, this time I saw them once again in Berlin’s club called the “C-Club” which was previously known as the Columbia Club and Fu Manchu was offering something special. Playing the whole “In search of…” album from the first to the last track. YES! One of my faves with one of my favourite songs, “The Falcon Has Landed” The band started the gig with ass kicking songs like “Hell on wheels” or “Mongoose” and started with the “In search of…” after, I guess, the fourth song of the show. I always love it when a band goes by and plays one particular album in complete. Some songs of the album were played in a kind of extended versions and reminded me a little of a jam session. Well, this what you can call jam session considering that you’re watching Fu Manchu and not King Crimson. Like mentioned before, Fu Manchu is pretty basic, but that’s what’s charming about them and what I really like. Finally, after finishing the complete album they also played some most wanted songs like “Weird beard” and “California crossing”. This band is truely, honestly rocking the stage and I’ll visit their concerts again and again and again. You simply get what you want, rock’n’roll to the face.

Straight to the basics

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I’m a kind of proud for a very good reason about myself. It’s been a while ago where I announced the “Straight edge 3.0” project and it failed epicly. Actually, I never cancelled the whole thing. It was more a permanent breaking of rules set. The worst thing wasn’t the nutrition that bothered me, it was more the fact, that I wasn’t able to get my ass off to the gym and train. This has changed during the last three weeks. It started with one single session per week and finally reached the normal rhythm that it deserves. I can also proudly announce that I found the fun in sports for me again and that it does not feel like an evil force that gets me to the gym, it’s now pure lust and passion for sports. Due to the fact that I’m no longer smoking, for 10 month now, my cardio problems weren’t as big as they were when I was a smoker and started with cardio training. Nowadays it’s not a problem to do a one hour and a half of pure cardio, back in my days as a smoker I was gasping for air after nearly thirty minutes. You can be sure that there’s no reason for me to restart smoking.

Even alcohol consumption reached its lowest level since my childhood. This, besides non-smoking, has given my life a boost. No more drunk, no more any lost days because of hung-overs. I can say, without a doubt, that I feel much healthier these days, even on those days where I wasn’t that much into sports. I still do not consider to quit the “Straight edge 3.0” project, but like I said in a post before, I don’t want to be bound that tight to a set of rules as I’ve been in the two projects before, because this would cause a lack of comfort in living. Another important thing is, I still don’t waste time by watching my weight each and every day, because it simply doesn’t make sense. I prefer the overall feel of comfort and awareness of being “healthy”. This counts much more for me than stupid digits on a weighter. Finally, you notice an improved stamina more than one pound more on your hips.

Game of the week #6/2011 – ScummVM

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I have to apologize that I haven’t made it to announce the game of the week for such a long time, but finally I’m back and I have to apologize again, because this week I don’t have a specific game that gets the title, it’s just an emulator. Actually, this whole thing happens because for one simple reason, because I can. As you may know, I was modding and coding on my cellphone for a while to improve its performance and gain a couple of features of it that I actually haven’t had before. One side effect was the installation of ScummVM, which is in some kind of way this week’s “Game of the week”. ScummVM is an emulator that lets you play all the good old Lucasfilm/arts adventure games from the early to the mid-nineties. Actually, this emulator made me revisit a couple of games that I still love and I recommend to everyone. I’m talking of games like “Maniac Mansion”, which was like my first comedy, horror adventure game ever and it was only topped by the ingenious “Day of the Tentacle”. Secondly, “Zak McKracken and the alien mindbenders” which was for me, back in 1991, the incarnation of open world gaming. I mean, you could travel the whole world, while in other games you where simply walking from the left to the right to free the princess.

ScummVM is such a great tool, you can play these adventure games on nearly every platform. I started playing “The secret of Monkey Island” on my Android and it’s such a nice experience. If someone told me 20 years ago that I gonna play Lucasfilm adventures on a cell phone you would have found laughing on the floor. Back in the pixel days you needed monstrous computer with a large amount of nearly 2-4 MEGABYTES of RAM and hard drives with at least 80 MEGABYTES of space. My first PC actually had 2MB of RAM and a large 85MB hard drive. I wasn’t able to play a game like “Doom” since I got my first Pentium PC in 1995, but that’s another story.

I don’t want to get too much in detail with the games of Lucasfilm, but I can only advise to everyone who still does not know any of these games give it a try. I also recommend these games to everyone who is simply interested in videogames history, because if you don’t know the Lucasfilm games, it’s truely a lack of knowledge. Once upon a time where adventure games where the strongest and biggest genre in PC gaming and these games are one of the reasons why. If you tried these games and you found them great, give Lucasfilms competitor a try and play the Sierra adventures. But when it comes to Sierra, you can no longer use ScummVM, for most of the games (like 99%), the DOSBox is doing a great job. Sorry for the short and minimal description on the games, I just wanted to give a short introduction to them by presenting ScummVM.

Links:

Official Website

For the rare time being

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The last couple of days has been very busy for me, not that I had too many “private projects” but some too intense of time. First things first, my gaming system got crashed during the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update process and I wasn’t able to revive it any way. I had to reinstall everthing, had to setup a lot of applications and so on. Good thing about this, the system can now be rebooted again without getting a raid failure, which was one big issue with the previous setup. I’m nearly finished with the system, like 90 per cent, and I only have to restore most of my games profiles. Actually, this whole thing wasted a lot of time on my last weekend and is also responsible for missing, once again, the game of the week feature here in this blog.

Besides all this were I still in modifying and hacking my Motorola Backflip cellphone. I now managed to install Android 2.2 aka Froyo including multitouch, which isn’t a stock feature of the phone, and I also installed an unlocked kernel that I’m able to overclock and also underclock it. The phone now runs with a stock Android, without any Motorola software features, and it’s, compared to the default Android 1.5, as fast as hell. I’m testing the battery at the moment to see, if my also also increased the lifetime of this particular part of the phone. It’s such a hilarious feel to finally have features on my cellphone that aren’t supposed to be there actually. And most importantly, for my subjective estimation, the phone has now a status, where I would say, that one can use it instead of just getting angry about it.

Android

Far from all this nerdish stuff did I come back to a more healthier living style without all this unhealthy, calory rich and fat food. I also visit the gym from time to time and as expected, it’s giving me a boost in many ways. Say whatever you want, after a fine session in the gym, you feel refreshed and the essence of life creeps back to your bones and you feel recharged. I mentioned it in one of my previous posts, I don’t want to exaggerate anything at the moment and I want to keep it on a level where I still have fun with all this too. Getting into a boot camp like training plan as I had it once before is not my intention, even though I can say, that this was fun too. Anyhow, I’m losing weight, I start feeling better now and hopefully my cardio will increase once again. There’s no particular muscle training on the schedule right now, I just want to sustain my back and belly muscles at the moment to get a strong centre for future training plans.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any time for photography or any creative stuff in that kind of way. I also haven’t managed to get a little bit more into the whole Photoshop/Lightroom thing that was actually on my schedule for this year’s beginning. Saying that there was no time is not totally correct, I actually wasn’t in the mood to do anything like this. Maybe later, when my bike is fixed and I’ll be able to get out a little bit more often and most importantly further away.

Androidified backflip

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After a long period of reading, learning and researching I’ve finally made it and customized my Android phone. The customization included things like the simple rooting of the device, upgrading to a newer version of Android, overclocking and getting rid of some factory default applications. But, first things first. I got a Motorola Backflip (MB300) last year’s October and it was my intention from the very beginning to use this cellphone as a “learning device” to get into the whole Android stuff. Unfortunately did I figured out that this phone wasn’t able to be upgraded by simple clicking “update” here in Europe. The cellphone was shipped with Android 1.5 as factory default. It was more than clear for me to get this device to Android 2.1 which is officially only available in the U.S. for AT&T customers. A lot of theory followed after getting this phone though. Worst thing about this, I had to get back to Java coding.

It took a while but I finally found some ROMs with Android 2.1, also one version without the Motorola BLUR applications that slow the phone on factory default setting pretty direful. I’m not going into detail nor do I offer a tutorial at this point. I tried every ROM I could find for my cellphone and tried to figure out which one has the best performance, which one has the lowest number of bugs and most importantly, which one looks nice the most. Finally I found disturbing bugs in every ROM and none of these ROMs had all the “optical features” I was looking for. The solution for this problem was simple and trivial at once. I picked the ROM with the lowest number of bugs and errors and merged the features of the other ROMs into it. As expected, the system was buggy and unstable the first time but after flashing the phone the fourth or fifth time with debugged ROMs I finally had the Android 2.1 version I actually wanted.

The most important applications from the Android market for me were ADWLauncher, SetCPU, TitaniumBackup and Android Task Manager. The first one was to get rid of the Motorola look. SetCPU is used to overclock the phone and to increase the battery life at once. TitaniumBackup was my companion to figure out which of the applications of the ROM can be disabled and removed. Last but not least, Android Task Manager was and is my RAM cleaner on the phone.

My media centre – A field report

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It’s been nearly 9 month since living with a media centre PC in my living room and it has become a regular part of my daily life. The balance between the simple watching of TV broadcasts and the common use of a PC, like surfing the internet, playing games has changed. Nowadays I do watch more and more content that is streamed and published via the internet and old school TV makes only a minor part in my daily life. The point actually is, that I don’t have the time nor the will to watch specific contents on TV at a special time and nor do I have the will to spend like half an hour to setup the HDD recorder that I don’t miss a show on TV. This is old-fashioned in my opinion, especially by regarding the fact that if I use the media centre I can watch whatever I want and what I subscriped to at any time I want. If I watch TV I’m bound to a fixed schedule and like I previously said, I’m not going to waste my rare free time to TV programs.

Another, and in my opinion, very important point that the media centre has become so popular for me is, that the content it offers is mainly customized to my needs and interests. As you may know, I’m a gamer and I love to watch broadcasts with videogame content, so I watch like GameTrailers.com, GiantBomb or GameSpot contents any time I want. If I’m more in the mood to get a little relaxation and enjoy earth’s beauty I lay back and watch the marvellous shows of Earth-Touch.com. I’ve also got tons of subscriptions on Youtube, mainly gaming content but also channels with subjects like sports, news , photography or simply comedy. As you can see, I’ve got this large variety of things to watch at any time I want, I’m near the point to think about cancelling my cable provider subscribtion because it makes barely sense.

Besides simple watching of different contents the media centre also offers another ability to serve me well, it’s a gaming platform. I had to make a compromise between ultra silent media centre PC and gaming PC. This PC serves in both ways and is not as quiet as a media centre usually used to be, but this doesn’t really matter, because while watching movies or anything else like this, you can barely here the PC and it’s not as disturbingly load as a regular gaming PC. This case, where the hardware was built in, is a silent case and I also avoided the use of unnessecary fans the gain a low noise level and I’m pretty happy with the final result. I can’t deny that there’s still some room for tweaking the system to gain a little less noise, but it’s fine the way it is.

Anyhow, the media centre is a well balanced and efficient gaming PC as well and I use this PC very often for some relaxed gaming sessions. I used to play a lot of games that are played console style (with a gamepad) on the media centre PC and left the FPS and RPG to my main game system. It’s way more fun to play a soccer or a basketball game on the couch watching the stuff on a giant TV instead of seeing this on a small 24inch PC monitor. It also fulfills some social aspects because I personally play much more games with friends visiting me as I’ve done before by just having the “normal, regular” gaming PC. Another important point for me is, I don’t have to waste money on an expensive console, even though I would like to have a PS3.

As a final conclusion can I say, that the media centre was a good investment. Ordinary TV becomes less and less important for me and like I said, I’m near the point cancelling my cable provider subscription. I gain more information in a much smaller space of time and most importantly information that I actually need instead of getting tons and tons of crap information, e.g. celebrity stuff. Some of my “gaming habits” have changed too because I’m more willing to play “casual games” like sports games and games regularly played with a gamepad. Yap, I like the media centre, everyone should have one.

Decisive day

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Today’s like one of these days where everything gets decided and it’ll show me the way. If it’s going to happen today, it’ll never happen. I speak of gym, like I mentioned in a post before, the Straight edge project is complete desaster until now. I actually do not care about the sports rules except the ones that got something to do with hand-eye coordination. It is set for this very afternoon to finally make it to the gym and get back into the vicious circle of fitness. To be honest, I gained a few more pounds and my love handle has grown seriously. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I feel the lust for sports again and I don’t think, that I’m getting as lazy as I’ve been the last couple of weeks again. It’s curious to see how much these deary, pale winter days affect your mood and how tough it is to break out of it. Like I said, today’s the day, if it’s not going to happen today, Straight edge 3.0 will be cancelled.

Game of the week #5/2011 – Borderlands

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Actually, this week’s game of the week is not as “indy-ish” as the games before and one could say that this is mainstream. Well, it may be mainstream and it was very succesful in 2009 and 2010, but I still know a lot of people saying, “Yes, I heard of this game before, is it truely that good?” and I can answer “Yes it is, try it, you’ll love it”. I’m talking about “Borderlands” by Gearbox Software that delivered a great piece of software and a brilliant mixture of first-person shooter, RPG and brawler. The story of the game is simple too, but nevertheless  really entertaining. You play one out of four characters that land on the planet Pandora to unveil the secret of the “Vault” that grants wealth, fame and honour to its owner. These four character have different abilities and skills, like “sniper”, “rogue”, “soldier” and melee fighter, so you can play this basicly in a FPS style that suits you the most. I personally decided to play the hunter which is the previously mentioned “sniper”, he can also control a pet that can attack enemies. The pet control is pretty basic and only available for the hunter, all three other classes have different special skills like a phase walk, gaining more bullets for you and your team, just to mention a few.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwxiAGWJa-o[/youtube]

Team? Yes, and here’s the thing, you can play “Borderlands” completely in a single player mode, but you can also switch to cooperative online play at any time. The coop is a lot of fun, even though it lacks a few features like an interface for simply sharing loot or a roll mask to decide who’s going to get the loot. When it comes to booties of the prey, “Borderlands” has got a lot to. The developers can’t to mention it as often as they can, that they have included a “bazillion” of guns and tons of other goodies, like shields, grenade kits, class mods, to improve your character. This is also a positive catch of the game, you can’t stop playing, because you always want to get new guns and new guns and new guns and new guns. And of course new guns. Urm, and you also want to reach the next level to spend a skill point in your skill tree.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86WpLFOIYjw[/youtube]

The AI in “Borderlands” is not the smartest one, but does its job and that is what counts, I mean, this is not a high intelligent tactical shooter, this is a fun shooter with a couple of RPG elements and a nice taste of humour. The characters in the game are developed very well and the bosses you meet in your encounters are challenging and not this standard meal you have to choke on in every other game. It’s also not a game with lots of moments of frustration, when you die in the game you can revive by simply killing an enemy in your phase of dying, which is about 15 seconds, and if you die anyway, you revive at a spawn point next to the fight not too far away. I enjoy “Borderlands” for more than a year now, I also bought the GOTY edition of the game, that includes all four DLCs. The DLCs are worth every penny, except “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot”, which feels a little like a hoax compared to the rest of the game. So if you like FPS, a little of amount of RPG and have some friends to join you in coop, then “Borderlands” is the game of your choice and why it’s my “Game of the week”.

Links:

Official website

Wikipedia