The news page at debian.org has yet to be updated, but Debian Lenny has been released.
Category: English
Articles in English.
-
Smokin’ Guns
A few days ago I was told of this game by a friend, who hosts a server for it. It sounded interesting so I checked it out. It wasn’t very long since it was released either, apparently on January 1.
Smokin’ Guns is a western (movie) themed FPS, “an open sourced, total conversion of id Software’s Quake III Arena”. There hasn’t been many of those, and it’s something I’ve been looking for. There are Linux and Windows binaries, apparently it can be run in Crossover on OSX.
The game has several modes, traditional deathmatch, team deathmatch, duel, bank robbery, and round teamplay. The whole game is very nice, the graphics, sound, music, and foremost, the gameplay is fun.
In Deathmatch, one runs around and shoots and hopefully kills the other players, like any other FPS. However, weapons, and items, like dynamite, boiler plate (armour) and such, is not found on the maps, it’s bought. You buy weapons and equipment with money that you pick up on the maps, down in mines, in banks, saloons, or other places. You also get money when killing other players.
There are revolvers, rifles (one that you can mount a scope on, that you also have to buy first), shotguns, a mountable gattling gun, dynamite and molotow cocktails. One can have two revolvers, in akimbo style. The limited amount of bullets in the weapons, and the limited amount of ammunition one can carry in total, makes it quite exciting when facing other players in a shootout. The reload times, and damage is said to be, and probably are, quite realistic.
Another nice thing is the people that play the game. Most seem to be very nice and fun to play with, mostly a bit older, so there isn’t much of the usual.. idiocy on the servers, like there is in many other games, atleast not when I have played. I even got to talk to some of the developers and mapmakers, that were on their TeamSpeak server when I had a look in there. I just noticed that they have a channel on Freenode too, #smokinguns. On their site they have a forum, and development resources.
So if you feel like going around in nicely designed western maps, featuring stereotypical spaghetti western towns, mines, a big steamboat in one map, wagons, horses, saloons.. and feel like in a western movie, download (and the source code) the game, and try it. There’s also a moving train map which I found fun, mentioning it because it’s a bit special, with different kinds of wagons, that one runs around in. The train is moving, it’s possible to fall off. I’m sure there will be more maps created, as more people notice the game, and hopefully other content, and code fixes.
See you on a server, at high noon. *tumbleweedy music*
-
December rant
Ten days until Christmas. I have found most of the gifts I intend to give, though some I’m waiting for to be delivered, since I’ve ordered them. I hope they get here in time, before I go home to my parents over christmas.
A few minutes ago I updated WordPress to version 2.7. Many things are changed, in the administration interface, but seemingly to the better. Another thing I noticed was that the comments marked as spam (which is all but 1 in my case..) are now visible. Maybe they were before too, but not as easily, I think they weren’t, but, still in the database.
After some fiddling, all my plugins worked, and some could be disabled, that I had only for other things to work (for example, a thing called Bluetrait EventViewer was magically needed for the gallery2 plugin to function.. now it works, as magically, without it), so all in all, so far, it seems good.
Today is Sunday, the day when one, atleast me, mostly is restless, thinking too much, and not doing much at all. However, there’s been a lot of worse ones. Sometimes one finds something interesting to do for a few minutes. I found a picture of a little physics experiment/demonstration, that I thought I wanted to try, so I did. The picture below is the result.
301|300 As you see, I didn’t find a piece of string, but (I did find some later though..) one takes what one has, and an umbrella worked fine.
311|300 There was some snow yesterday, that had been for a few days, today however, it went away. The lights that I put up on my balcony blinked nicely, reflecting into the white floor on the balcony, but.. now they have to blink against the dull grayish concrete instead. I don’t really mind though, it was quite slippery and icy in the streets, and I’m sure there’ll be more snow later on anyway. This is how it looked 10 days ago, at my parents.
329|300 The outside christmas tree, covered in snow, well, not very deep, but covered atleast, and a view in the garden at the back of the house, below.
353|300 As a finish, a picture of the “adventsljusstake” (advent-candleholder) from the first advent Sunday, with the first candle lit. Today it is the third of Advent, so today, mom and dad will have three candles lit, in that one.
347|500 -
Gustav II Adolf Day
224 230 233 There is a bakery/pastry shop/patisserie very close to where I live, I went there today to buy two Gustav II Adolf pastries. They can vary a bit from shop to shop, these ones were quite nice. Marzipan around it, some creamy thing mixed with strawberry, with sponge base in the middle, topped with two kinds of creamy.. creams, and the obligatory dark chocolate medallion on top. Apparently the medallion can be made of marzipan too, but I have only seen Gustav Adolf pastries with the chocolate medallion. Since I bought two, I have one left for.. later.. soon.
Gustavus Adolphus Day is celebrated in Sweden each year on November 6. On this day only, a special pastry with a chocolate or marzipan medallion of the king, is sold. The day is also an official flag day in the Swedish calendar. In Finland, the day is celebrated as svenska dagen or ruotsalaisuuden päivä, “Swedishness Day”, and is a customary flag day. In both countries, November 6 is the name day for Gustav Adolf, one of the few exceptional name days in the year. Read more
236 -
Autumn Sunday
It’s autumn, the leaves are coloured, and many have fallen off the trees. It was very windy yesterday here, but today it had calmed down mostly. I went for a little bikeride in the afternoon, which made me feel a lot better than I was.. It’s good to have friends that care, and tell you to get up and break a bad pattern of thoughts.. you know who you are.
I shall print a map of the nearest surroundings and a bit outside of the city so I know where I am another time, I just kept a straight line, and then returned the same way, I haven’t been in that direction before, but next time it would be nice to go further and along the canal, there’s an area called “The Canal Forest” (translated), outside of the city, to the southwest, which would be interesting to have a look at. Then I got some groceries on the way home, and had a nice cup of coffee. Loosely measured, I think the little trip was ~7km. I’m glad I brought mom’s old bike here, it’s so nice to have the front basket when shopping, not having to drag shoppingbags all the time, even though one can’t get as many things each time, I do have a bag to have on the back of the bike though, but that’s more hassle than it’s worth I think.
I’ll start adding some photos to the gallery now I think, there’s a lot, but I guess I’ll just start somewhere.
-
Supybot handbook released
hoxu released the first version of his handbook for Supybot, named Supybook, a few days ago. It contains many good tips and instructions for setting up, running and maintaining a Supybot. It already covers a great deal of things one would consider sooner or later when running a Supybot. I hope it will be well received by the Supybot developers and community, it deserves it. (I have even contributed with a few small things. 🙂 )
Have a look at it if you are using, running, or planning to use a Supybot.
Update 2011-10-07: Supybook has changed hosting .
-
Imagetest
Had to test how an image would look here. So, here it is, a picture I took a few years ago, of a spruce’s branches, in a forest area near my parents house.
A spruce in the sun. The uploader of images in WordPress seems to work ok, used the flash based one, but there seems to be an alternative one available (just to switch to by a click) too.
That was a nice day, when I took that picture, sun was shining, and I played around with the camera, taking pictures of plants and trees.
Update: Around 10 years later, today, 2018-10-01, I have updated this post to display the image in full width.
-
Kernel update and udev fiddling
I wanted to run a little more recent kernel on this machine (that this thing runs on), and I wanted to run a Debian kernel, to see how that works, on Xen. It went mostly ok, but, with the previous kernel, udev was not being used. When it then for the first time, generated the names for the ethernet interface, it for some reason detected 3 more (nonexistent) interfaces, so the real one ended up as eth4.
That wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, but my iptables specify the interface name, and therefor, it used eth0, and blocked everything, or rather, didn’t let anything in on eth4, of course. Oh well, after solving that (thanks Johannes, for all your help), I locked myself out because I forgot to edit my rules before bringing them back on again. But that was also fixed quickly.
Now then, I wonder if I should play with the fire, and try to make udev do what I want, do a reboot, which, if things doesn’t come back as they should, would mean things will be down until tomorrow, or if I should not.. Since I like to do things Right, and also experiment with things (which to me doesn’t exclude one another), I think I will do that.
What I’ll do is, edit /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules, have the interface be named eth0, have the iptables rules not installed on boot, and.. then not forget to edit them, then bring them up (using at(1) of course, to disable them after a few minutes in case it would lock me out, again). So, here we go.
-
Upgrade to 2.6.2
That didn’t take long, an upgrade already, upgrading wasn’t a problem (if this can be read, which I think you can). Didn’t take many minutes, and I also got a chance(push) to make a backup, which also was smoothly done since I already have a nice little backupscript dumping it all, and sending it off. I’ll put it up later, in case it can be useful for someone.
And oh, I noticed that Last.fm had nice widget code for WordPress, I tried it, and added it, looks quite nice I think.
