The site was down due to a power outage. I took the downtime as an opportunity to move the shelving the machines are on a foot or two away from the wall so I can get to the back of them. One of the zombies’ networking didn’t come up properly, even with a /etc/init.d/networking stop and restart, but upon reboot it worked correctly. I wish I knew the underlying cause of that.
Month: April 2009
Scientific American Frontiers
I am delighted to discover that PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers has an online archive of shows.
ToneMatrix
This is an amazing Flash applet. You draw on a grid and it makes really nice music. Strangely enchanting… ToneMatrix!
Nvidia 182.50 Drivers Broken!
Newer drivers have less bugs and better performance, right? Not in this case, at least if you’re running an AGP GeForce 6800XT like me. The device fails to properly start, the device manager complains, and falls back on very ugly software rendering. Installing previous drivers – in my case 178.24 – fixed the problem. I learned that EVE will not launch with software acceleration.
On my eMachine where I am currently using my onboard card, (sigh) the fitting screen in EVE took what felt like several seconds to finish the intro animation, but on my machine at mom’s, it takes a fraction of a second or so. I find it amazing just how bad onboard graphics card performance is.
Dark Messiah Might and Magic
I just finished Dark Messiah Might and Magic. I got to see all four endings. Disappointingly, all the endings were rather vague and didn’t really answer what ended up happening to the world in each situation. The plot and voice acting was meh to bad. It wasn’t all bad, though, and the combat was fun at times, even if it occasionally seemed like enemies could take away a final third of my HP in a single hit. The jumping puzzles are often infuriating, some of the combat is cheap or simply slow and boring. The level design can be pretty confusing, and my guide was sometimes annoying. It probably would have been closer to impossible without the heal spell, even though potions for mana and health are usually plentiful. The skill tree allowed for useful upgrades. I found stealth and strength to be an awesome combination. Because I’m still running on my onboard graphics card, it was pretty ugly with bad framerates. Hopefully it will be better once I get a real card again. I noticed that there is no run of Dark Messiah Might and Magic on speeddemosarchive…