Classic Observatons

Scary; realizing that most of the music you like is now played on the VH1, 2 hour classics segment on Sunday mornings.

Kam

Goodbye Logitech MX500

My faithful Logitech MX500 mouse (which cost me 50 quid in 1999) has just bitten the dust. Despite some serious abuse the mouse itself is in perfect working condition, but the cable seems to have a dodgy segment somewhere and is it bends it disconnects randomly. I'm not sure how easy it is to replace the cable, but I don't mind trying :-) Even if I totally screw it up, after 10 years of service, a new mouse won't be an unreasonable investment.

Kam

ICICI Charges for reissuing a debit card PIN

Personally, I think it's appalling. Even though it's only 25 Rs + Tax, surely something as simple as reissuing a PIN shouldn't be chargeable ? Don't banks make enough money without squeezing every last penny out of the little guy ?!

Kam

Starcraft2 Region Change Insanity

I'm still enjoying playing Starcraft 2 single player. It's a bit crap that I can't play with any of my friends in the UK, so I wrote to Blizzard and asked what I need to do. To be honest I didn't find the reply very helpful, in summary they said:

1. There's nothing you can do, you can't chat or play with people outside of the Asia server
2. Region changes aren't possible
3. The solution is, we will refund you in 14 days, buy a copy of the game again, but this time from EU
   
4. When you get a refund, your single player campaign will be destroyed, you'll have to start again

Blizzard, I am not amused.
Actually, I'm pretty disappointed and somewhat disgusted.
Fortunately, we can all still play Starcraft 1 via the old battle.net

Kam

Starcraft 2

There's no question., the game is excellent. Not just because of it's history, but in it's own right. It has a great mix of the old game, keeping plenty of what made it great - with some new twists that make it quite fun.

As an added advantage for those with older, less cutting edge systems, Starcraft 2 plays OK my old laptop (with all the settings on lowest/off). It's a 1.6Ghz (single core pentium), with 2Gb RAM and an ATI Radeon 9500 -- from 2005.

That isn't to say that it's without it's own share of problems, specifically:

1. No Lan play - You bought the game, your friend bought the game and you're in the same room; but you can't play together because your internet connection is either crap or you don't have one. This is a major blow for people that like to play at LAN parties, and for people that like to play games from places with bad internet connections (where I live).

2. Battlenet - You bought the game, your friends bought the game, but you live in different countries (UK, US, Asia) and you can't play together. Why ? Blizzard doesn't think you should have friends abroad, they're not used to the concept of friends. This particular aspect is really pissing me off, because most of my gamer friends live elsewhere.

Happy yet sad,
Kam

More WiFi Shennanigans (Ubuntu Server)

I'm using a (Linksys Q87-WUSB54GC) USB Wireless dongle for my (Dell Dimension) Ubuntu Server, for whatever reason Ubuntu couldn't auto configure it during the setup process. After yet more messing around I've discovered the following:

1. Ubuntu does automatically recognise the usb device and accepts it as a usb wifi card
2. You can manually connect to whatever WiFi access point you wish using the iwconfig command from the console
3. You can automatically connect during system boot using the following code in your "/etc/network/interfaces" file

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-mode managed

4. If you want to forcibly select the WiFi AP at startup add this line beneath the code mentioned above:

wireless-essid ap-name-goes-here

5. Use the command "/etc/init.d/networking restart" to test that it works without problems

Kam

WiFi DHCP on Ubuntu Server

After alot of messing around, I've discovered that the command "sudo dhclient" is genius if you need to force your wireless adapter to do the whole DHCP-get-an-ip-for-the-love-of-god-thing :-)

Kam