Author Archives: InV4d3r

Two is one too much

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Unfortunately do I have to say good-bye to Linux Mint and an open source media center solution. Though I was pretty excited about the overall performance of the system I have to finally admit that the media performance completely failed. Full HD movies in 1080p are stuttering and nearly every movie has some ugly tearing and vsync problems. I took a bunch of example movies, and this bunch included mainly those movies with the worst performance under Linux, and they were running surprisingly much better and of course fluently under Windows 7.

Media Influence

In the end it’s the better decision because of one simple reason- dual boot is everything but not user friendly. So I will switch back to one single system which will be Windows 7 that will handle all the movie, picture, network sharing and gaming stuff. Though it’s a nice system that I really would like to keep on using I have to abandon Linux Mint and ban it from my disk. Well, I have this bunch of hardware that rests in my closet and my cellar that will be waken up in the future and I am pretty sure it’s going to be a Linux Mint system.

Another choice was to switch to Fedora but in the end I still have the dual boot problem. If I want to watch a movie I have to boot into Linux and if I want to play a game I have to boot into Windows and as you can see, this is lame and unnecessarily stressing and with this setup on our media center PC my girl-friend will become furious pretty soon. All that she wants is to watch some episodes of “Crank Yankers” and not to do some deep diving into computer sciences.

Lazy edging

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Seriously, I became pretty lazy within the last days after my vacation. Though I am glad that I can keep my new “low” weight and I am willed to do everything in a sports way to hold it that way I wasn’t able to trick my inner ratfink and make it off to gym for a nice training session or to the park to do a jog. I awoke everyday since Monday at 04:00am to the ring of my alarm clock and I really wanted to go to gym BUT I was actually too tired to do so. Well, I guess I just need one normal session at the gym in the evening, just to lick some sweat and blood and I’ll be able to kick off in the very early morning.

Well, finally I can say at least that everything else in project “Straight edge 2.0” works perfectly fine and there were no rule breaks until now. Okay, okay, okay, okay… there was  this small cupcake this one day but though it was extremely sweet and felt like it holds galleons of calories it wasn’t such a serious sin like the ones in the past. You might remember the two beers right after the start of the first straight edge project. So, this week will pass without sports BUT I promise to do better in the future, next week to be exact.

And then there was darkness

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There’s something like a curse on me when it comes to Linux installations because nearly every setup I have done in the nearby past was made twice by me. The same happens to my media center. As you may know I was searching for a solution with my vsync problem while watching movies and other videos. After hours of research and being pretty hopeless and without any other idea for soluting my problem I decided to uninstall the Nvidia graphics driver and rebooting the system. I guess you know what happened next – RIGHT – NOTHING. I got a simple black screen.

Lost in a bouquet

According to the fact that it was a kind of late and I didn’t wanted to search the root of the problem I decided to reinstall the whole system by using my old /home partition. Well, well, well, that thought was nice but Linux Mint thought differently. First of all the install routine was not able to write into the existing partitions so I had to rearrange the whole system disk with a third-party software. After that the installer told me that he still was not able to write or delete conflicting system files. The solution was to format my old home directory (d’oh). Now the installer was able to start and run the setup routine. The previous problem solving took me nearly one and a half hour. So, the setup was running until the progress bar showed me 93% and then it told me that it was unable to write GRUB into /dev/sda. Actually I don’t have a /dev/sda or a /dev/sdb neither. The solution was to delete /dev/sda and /dev/sdb before running the whole setup routine in a terminal session, the installer was then able to see the correct order and names of my hard drives. Yep, another hour wasted…

Finally I made it to get the whole system running again and the system is running a way better then it was before. nvidia-settings will be applied automatically on startup, I can use screenlets and the whole booting progress is much faster (don’t know what was wrong before). I also decided to let the system install the nvidia proprietary driver and not to install it manually with a “whatever-setting”. So vsync is now enabled by default BUT it still does not work in video playback, but it’s only a matter of time until I find a solution for that problem.

Let the pictures walk…

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Earlier than I actually thought I could finalize my new media center and it’s now up and running. Like I mentioned in a few posts before it’s a dual-boot system running Windows 7 as a “gaming system” and Linux Mint as the real movie and multimedia plattform. The Linux system itself uses to play everything that I tried, even HD movies with nearly no lags. Well, nearly, I noticed a little disturbing vsync problem while watching videos. It’s more noticable in HD movies than it’s in normal SD movies. By now I haven’t found a solution for that but the Ubuntu/Mint community is very huge and I am pretty sure that I’m not the only one with this issue. As soon as I have found solution, I will post it right here in this blog.

I also checked the gaming performance under Windows 7 with Devil May Cry 4 and Street Fighter IV. DMC4 runs at an average FPS of 45 with AA at 8 and AF at 8. The details are mainly set to super high. This is a satisfying result according to the fact that there’s “only” a GeForce 9800GT Green Edition with 512MB video RAM inside the system. I guess, I don’t have to mention that I run the games at a full HD resolution. The Benchmark results of SFIV are pretty similiar to ones I got in DMC4. I’m pretty sure that I’ll do some more benchmarks within the next days and check the performance. Till now I am very happy with the new system and it was a good choice to move the hardware to a new chassis that is not that noisy than the one before…

We’re reaching multimedia, baby!

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After being away in beautiful France for nearly two and recharging my batteries and simply staying away from everything that looks like complex work on a machine simply called computer I built up my new media center after getting back home. And of course catching enough sleep. The hardware moved from my old ‘I-don’t-know-the-exact-name’ case to a Thermaltake Element S VK60001W2Z case which is much quieter than the one before and can hold much more hard drives. On the final stage the case will hold nine hard drives with an overall capacity of something around 4 – 5 TB.

The media center was built for two things. First it’s a simple media center for listening to music, watching movies and pictures or simply surfing the web. Got it? Yap… Secondly does this PC replace a game console. Thanks to the fact that Xbox 360 controllers also work on Windows very well I can play a lot of games while lying on the couch. Well, of course I will I use other game controllers as well because I’m gaming nerd I have special controllers for every game genre.

For gaming I use Windows 7 Pro 64bit as operating system and for the whole multimedia thing my choice fell on Linux Mint because it’s pretty lightweight, got a great multimedia performance and I just like the overall file handling under linux because I can arrange a variety of disks much more comfortable.

The hardware itself is not very luxurious but will fit the matters. It’s an AMD 9550 CPU built on a Gigabyte DDR2 motherboard stuffed with 4GB RAM. The graphics accelerator is a Gainward 9800GT and the sound will be put out through a cool SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium. By now there’s only stereo output because I don’t have a surround speaker system but this will follow within the next two or three month. I am going to stuff the machine with multimedia content within the next days and then I will finally see how it works and give it a review right here in this blog.

Straight edge 2.0

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I am sorry that I didn’t wrote for such a long time and that I did not spread out any news considering my straight edge project and how it will continue. First things first, I was on vacation in France for the last two weaks, while being there I decided to continue living with my straight edge rules that exist till now. I don’t want to make any bigger changes because I think that the rules are good in the way they are now. Maybe I will change some things in the future and I’m still thinking about adding one or two new rules but it should not become too complex in the end.

I also have to admit that I was not following my rules as tightly as I have done it before I was on vacation. The reason for this is simple. When I am on vacation and when I have the rare opportunity to have some time on my own and with my beloved girl I don’t want to live like a monk. Well, of course I didn’t touch any alcohol or cigarettes and anything like that but when it comes to nutrition I had to try one or two desserts. But, hey dudes!!! I was in France and I had to experience the whole entired french cuisine.

But now straight edge continues for 12 month and and the weight I want to reach is now set to 90kg (198,41 lbs). Today I have something around 98kg so my weight did not increase drastically while being away. The deadline for 90kg is 1. October 2010, so there’s a lot of sports to do and to chose food wisely. There will be no exceptions in food like I mentioned them in a post a while ago. Everything will stay like it is now. Seven simple rules to follow and nothing else.

My name is Zim and my tank is full

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It’s just one small step for a single, but one giant step for every dungeon group on Nathrezim and the whole entire realmpool. I reached level 79 at around 01:00am in the morning and I am now about 80 percent away from the level cap. According to the fact that I am soon will be level 80 I bought my paladin some new gear that he’ll be able to wear when he’s on maximum level. I had to buy this stuff because I don’t think that I’ll find much time for active raiding and most of my gear will be farmed in the three dungeons situated in Icecrown. The rest will be bought with ‘Emblems of triumph’. Sounds like a lot of farming though.

Blood Elf Paladin

I was on a kind of ‘killing spree’ during the last levels but it ended yesterday in the instance ‘Halls of lightning’ because the paladin who was in the group pulled the first boss while he was loaded with energy and lightnings and after a short struggling fight I received a very unhealthy one hit and bit the grass. Anyhow, I am very satisfied with my tank abilities and the fact that I can finish nearly every Northrend instance in 20-30 minutes. Can’t wait to enter the last three Northrend instances and kick some mobs ass.

Finish it

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This week is the week of the finishing line. Project “Straight Edge” in version 1.0 is going to end on 15th July and on the other side I am pretty sure that my paladin in World of Warcraft will reach level 80. He’s level 77 right now and I’ll kick him up to level 79 this very evening. I bought my first part of the tier-9 set, some real nice shoulder armor that I can send the old shoulders to my undead warrior. Yep, yep, yep account bound items rule

But back to straight edge and a preview of version 2.0 of the project. There’s no doubt, version 2.0 will last for twelve month and there will be some rule changes. I was recognizing a lot of rule breaks when it comes to nutrition. You might remember the change to rule #5 because there was a kind of backdoor in consideration with sweets. So I decided to introduce the exception meal where I can whatever I want but only if rule #7 is fulfilled. I personally think that this kind of connecting rules with each other will make the whole thing more interesting and a little bit exciting to me.

Unfortunately is the weather absolutely exhausting these days because the temperature increased drastically but the humidity did not decrease. This like a murder to sports especially when you’re overweighted and your stamina is not as good as it should be. I was on a good way to get a better stamina but with conditions like these I definately have to do a step backwards and I cannot do sports at least four time a weak. If I am able to have two gym sessions a week I could very happy. It’s more a torture than an amusement. I guess I can do two sessions this week and then my vacation and trip to France will start.

If I’ll ever get the chance to do some kind of sports on my vacation I’ll definately grab it by the hand and do it. Meal exceptions are not allowed though it’s my vacation and it mainly there for recovery and fun. Hopefully I’ll be able to do some nice pictures with my Canon EOS 500D. I haven’t touched my baby for nearly two month and before it comes to vacation I have to shoot some pictures on a marriage. I fucking hate taking pictures of people. Portraits are okay but only if it’s a person I like or I feel comfortable with. But these stupid snapshots of a dumb ass party crowd are what really pisses me off. I haven’t bought my camera to do stupid snap- and mugshots, this is what grannies and old daddies do with their ugly ultra-compact cameras.

Problemiwigo

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Unfortunately did I mess up the bloodreaver gallery application here on this website. I did a simple auto-update and after this simple update was I standing there with a much more complex problem. The Piwigo gallery application needed MySQL 5.x as a minimum requirement and at the moment the whole webserver has got a MySQL database version 4.1.2. I also did not find a solution to do a downgrade or better said, I haven’t found the nerve or the time to fix it. I finally switched over to Coppermine, which will hopefully serve me well, and re-uploaded most of the pictures that were content of the old gallery. A few pictures are still missing, mainly in the photography category, but they’ll be uploaded later.

It’s Ziiiiiiim…

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After getting hacked for a few times I finally got back to World of Warcraft to continue levelling my paladin. I was a kind of disappointed that I was not able to play this char to level 80 as fast as possible. On the one hand my good old Throll hunter bores me and on the other hand I must say that the paladin is a lot of fun to play. It’s strange to get directly to the first row in combat when you were watching every encounter from the last row for years. Seeing some of the dungeon bosses from this close in combat makes me feel like, “Hmm, I never realised that this boss actually looked like this.

Playing hunter in combat makes you feel as if you are doing damage but you do not get this feeling as if you are completely smacking the mob while playing a paladin. With a hunter the mob feels a few pricks from your arrows but with a paladin you totally beat the shit out of him, especially with this one attack spell that makes this beautiful emboss sound.

If there’s one thing a paladin always forget – it’s dying. In one out of ten dungeons runs we actually wiped and when we wiped the healer was mostly a complete dumbass, a rogue felt as if he was the tank or I simply pulled too many mobs. Last but not least, the highest fun factor as a tanking paladin aka Tankadin is the power of total control. You say when to continue. You say when stop. You say when to pull. And you say how fast to get through the instance. I had a lot of disappointing dungeon runs with my marksman Throll hunter, mainly because of lame tanks or the healer was crap. Well I guess I’ll also level the hunter to level 85 when Cataclysm is out, but for now the paladin is my main and hopefully level 80 pretty soon.