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I’ve completed two games to 100% this weekend, Lego Star Wars II and Lego Indiana Jones.

For Lego Star Wars II all I had to do was to complete the Super Story modes on each film which basically means playing through the entire of the story mode again except you get timed. I was under the impression that because the best time was defaulted to 1 hour that if you took longer you wouldn’t get the associated golden brick. This meant that I was restarting the Super Story mode if I felt I took too long on a level. I finally decided to play it all the way through to see what times I was currently getting and then found out that the under 1 hour completion time wasn’t mandatory. So off I went to get the last golden brick in Return of the Jedi which allowed me to complete the spigot outside the cantina which spews studs so I could finally afford the multiplier extras in the shop.

This Friday I got a copy of Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii. It is very fun and I spent the whole weekend playing it finally completing it at 100% on Sunday evening. It’s a fun game and like the Star Wars II Lego game you play through the original three films collecting characters, minikits and posting parcels (which unlock the extras).

Unlike the Lego Star Wars in the Indiana Jones Game I found it much easier to get the treasure multipliers. There was also a sub quest that unlocked Han Solo which involved finding Star Wars characters hidden in the levels. Here’s where I found 4 of the 5 characters (can’t remember the last one)

• Princess Leia I found in a detention cell in the Temple of Doom (ladder down a cliff face, metal barrier to blow up, nazi needed for guard)
• Chewbacca - desert city in Raiders of the Lost Arc, door is behind where you find the vehicle which you use to smash the gate near the end of the level (door opened by academic, need short person)
• C3PO in the first level of Raiders of the Lost Arc next to a minikit.
• Luke Skywalker - found hanging by feet in snowy cave down a cliff face in ‘Into the Mountains’

Also if you are on the level battle on the bridge the minikit detector will make it appear that there are two minikits beyond the gate just before the end of the level. I think what it’s actually showing are the two minikits hidden in the very beginning of the level, one requires you blow up a metal fence, the other requires you outrun the water.

I liked it better than Lego Star Wars II because you only needed to get the “True Adventurer” (like the Star Wars “True Jedi”) once per level rather than once in story mode and once in free play. I also liked that there wasn’t a Super Story Mode which had to be completed for 100%.

This is my opinion on the topic of a bill outlawing the possession of “extreme pornography” which is set to become law next week. Here’s the BBC article

Why does porn get a different set of standards? It’s perfectly legal to show non-pornographic films which contain “an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life”. In fact in many non-pornographic films we see people seriously assaulted or killed yet no-one applies the same standard to these. If adults can tell the difference between fiction and reality in other films why single out films of a pornographic nature for this harsher treatment?

For once my comment spam on this might actually be on topic.

Here is a quick script I wrote for my dad so that when he logs in it will tell him if he’s got any new messages.

If it was anything other than a basic yahoo account (webmail only, no POP or IMAP) I could have used the mail-notification package

#!/bin/bash

#requires packages libnotify-bin, fetchyahoo

# include settings from $HOME/.yahoomail, format as shown below
# USERNAME='my-yahoo-email-account'
# PASSWORD='my-password'
. $HOME/.yahoomail

MESSAGES=$(/usr/bin/fetchyahoo --quiet --username="$USERNAME" --password="$PASSWORD" --spoolfile=/dev/null --newonly --onlylistmessages)
COUNT=$(echo "$MESSAGES" | wc -l)

if [[ $COUNT -gt 0 ]]
then
    /usr/bin/notify-send "New Email" "You have $COUNT new messages"
fi

exit 0

I added it to the System->Preferences->Session and now when my dad logs in he doesn’t have to check for emails, the emails will check on their own.

This week I decided to splash out a bit on a new PC for my parents. Their previous PC was a painfully slow decrepit Windows ‘98 install which took about ten minutes to boot and often the mouse would freeze up (meaning that I would have to save whatever document they were editing using keyboard controls only and then reboot).

The new system is a eSys PC pre-installed with Ubuntu which comes with a keyboard mouse and speakers. I have been spent the afternoon preparing it for use.

Due to not wanting to make holes in walls I was forced to open it up immediately and install a wireless card which I nabbed from lifestream, one of my other boxen. Setting up the wireless card took most of the time, it didn’t have any native drivers so I had to use ndiswrapper to beat it into submission. I had managed to get the card working in it’s previous host but it was so long ago that I forgot what stuff I needed. I also forgot to add it to my access points MAC allow list preventing it from connecting until I figured out that what was stopping the DHCP from working was the access point rather than the card as I’d initially suspected.

My parents have only ever used Windows so I am trying to set the interface to look windowsy to help them become accustomed to using Linux. I removed the top gnome menu and put the applications where “Start” would be on windows. I also arranged their icons in the familiar windows layout, putting links to the home folder, trash can on the desktop along with “Web” and “Email” links (which on my dad’s user just runs firefox with the yahoo mail login as the page to load).

There are a few more things that need to be sorted before my parents are completely happy with it, the major one is the printer, a Lexmark X1150 (always complains it’s out of ink when it isn’t) which I’ve yet to get the printing or the copy functionality working.

I’ve found the secret to defeating songs in Guitar Hero III on expert mode… and it is more entertaining than watching someone else play i.e. if you’ve only got one guitar controller.

You need three people, one for the strumming and whammy bar, one for the top three buttons (green, red, yellow) and one for the bottom two buttons (blue, orange).

Me and some friends managed to get past two songs using this technique, Ruby and Holiday in Cambodia. It is still very difficult but it does work if everyone does their bit.

It is easier with the middle person only having two buttons to look out for as their button presses will block notes further up and so they need to be extra careful not to hold notes longer than necessary.

Don’t try to IRC directly after playing “Through the Fire and the Flames” by DragonForce on Guitar Hero III

The result comes out much like this:
“I ahve been mostly playing Wii gmaes agianst my family
and i ahve been playing guitra hero
whcich has maed my fingres num”

An MP3 of the track is downloadable from the Official DragonForce website I am definitely going to be buying some of their albums soon.

Last weekend I went to the Devon and Cornwall Linux User Group meeting in a Computer shop in Penzance (which is why I skipped the Termisoc LOTR marathon) and thanks to Viv I got to see Virtualbox in use. Virtualbox is virtualisation software that lets you run several operating systems on the same computer at the same time by tricking the guest operating system into thinking it’s running on it’s very own computer.

Today I went about installing it using the Debian packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-source and installing Windows XP home in a disk image which I’m probably going to use regularly for checking sites in Internet Explorer. To me this looks like a much easier solution than trying to force a program to work in Wine although the downside is that you need a copy of windows.

The guest operating system runs smoothly at a resolution of 800×600 but it feels bizarre to be using Windows in a window. I’m also considering installing some other things like maybe Solaris or BSD in other images just to have a play with them.

Since I thought I might want a bit more memory in the host OS before letting multiple other OSes have a chunk of it I decided to upgrade my PC (first major upgrade since 2004) this will probably be the last major upgrade it will ever get. It now has triple the RAM (now 1.5GB) and a slightly quieter CPU fan (or at least one that doesn’t make the case resonate).

Update: 2007/11/16 I’ve also replaced my NVidia GeForce 4 with a NVidia 7600GT unfortuantely due to my widescreen TFT and somewhat small desk I am unlikely to use the dual headedness feature of it (though if i did get another similar monitor I’d have a whole metre of horizontal screen space)

Decided to update my Wordpress install, something which I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
This time though I’ll be upgrading wordpress using Subversion version control which should make things quicker next time.

Previously I downloaded the tar file and then extracted it to a separate folder then tried to figure out which bits I needed to keep and copy them across to the new folder.
Using Subversion this should no longer be necessary as when you update it checks for custom files and keeps them safe.

This looks like it would be very useful for scripting the upgrade of lots of sites at the same time.

Here is a render from Blender3D of the joystick that was spray painted gold as a trophy for one of Termisoc’s previous LAN parties. I changed the top around a bit, the real one has a turbo switch on the left side of the button, I left it out because I didn’t want it cluttered.

I am considering presenting another tutorial on 3D modelling for Termisoc this year.