It took me a while to notice these at the store, because they're clear on the other side of it from the frozen aisle. They're in a refrigerator case near the specialty cheeses. Anyway.
I've been eating these things for quite a while now, and figured I might as well get around to posting about them.
Basically, if you like pizza and want some deep dish, look no further than Uno. It's pretty good. The directions are simple and straightforward, and they have separate directions for a completely thawed pizza vs. a frozen one.
My only trouble is that if I allow the pizza to thaw at all before putting it in the oven, it has a very high chance of sticking to the oven rack. My solution is to preheat the oven, remove the pizza from the box, cut open the plastic wrapping around the pizza, then stick it back in the freezer while the oven preheats. Then throw the thing directly onto the rack once the oven is done preheating.
The cooking time is quite a bit longer than your average frozen pizza, clocking in at 35 minutes vs. the normal 18-20. But if you look at it, it's easy to understand why. Deep dish pizzas are a lot thicker than regular pizzas.
The package suggests putting the pizza in a round cake pan with some oil for "restaurant quality". I haven't tried this, to be honest, so I don't know how much of a difference it makes.
Giant carries three varieties, Cheese, Pepperoni, and Sausage. I'm unsure if there's any more. I've only tried the Pepperoni and Sausage ones, but based on those, I can't expect the Cheese variety to be much different in terms of quality. The Pepperoni variety is a first among frozen pepperoni pizzas that I've found: I don't have to re-arrange the pepperoni before cooking it.
The crust is a bit difficult to cut with a pizza cutter, I usually end up destroying the crust in the area around where I cut it.
Overall, these are pretty good pizzas.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
Guild Wars 2
Since I pre-purchased the game, I have guaranteed access to all the beta weekend events. Just finished playing my first one. It was actually the second beta weekend event, I wasn't able to pre-purchase until after the first beta weekend event.
So anyway, what race/class combos did I play, and where did I go, what did I do, who is your daddy, and what does he do?
Actually, first up is a description of how shit works.
You have a ten skill skillbar. Skills one through five are dependent on the weapon or weapons you're using. A two-handed weapon will have five skills available, a one handed weapon in your primary hand will have three skills, and a one handed weapon in your off-hand will have two skills available. Depending on what your class can equip, you can mix and match to suit your tastes.
Initially, with each possible weapon set, you only have skill number one available. Killing five enemies will unlock skill number 2, ten unlocks skill number 3, and so forth up to 20 for skill number 5. And they have to be unlocked in order.
Skill six is your healing skill. Depending on your class and the skill itself, it can confer other useful effects as well as affecting other characters around you.
Skills seven through nine are your utility skills. These do all sorts of cool things, and it differs per class. The Engineer's turrets, grenades, and mines are utility skills.
The tenth skill slot is your elite skill. I can't really say much about these because you have to get to level 30 to unlock the skill slot and the highest level I got any of my characters to was 15.
Levelling up is pretty simple. You can actually get a fair amount of experience with little to no combat. Every area you discover gives you an experience boost. There are also waypoints, which you can teleport to for a small fee (and it is in fact really small, pretty much inconsequential), and discovering a waypoint will give you an experience boost. Then there are also points of interest, which are scattered throughout each map nearby buildings, statues, and, well, points of interest. Finding them gives you an experience boost. Getting everything done in an area also gives you an experience boost.
What's really cool is, you get an experience boost for resurrecting other players. This makes it a win-win situation: you get something out of it, and they get to continue playing the game. I died quite many times and most of the time another player who happened to be in the vicinity would run over and resurrect me. The system works. If you can't get someone to resurrect you, you can also teleport to a waypoint, which will automatically resurrect you.
And then, of course, you can kill enemies. Can't forget about that.
Now, on to the three characters I played.
Charr Engineer
Race determines, among other things, the story you get to experience. Furthermore, the story is affected both by choices you make during it, as well as choices you make during character creation.
My Charr Engineer was a member of the Iron Legion. The Iron Legion is responsible for all of the Charr's technology, so to me it made the most sense. The other legions are Blood and Ash. Anyway, Engineer is quite a fun class, every bit as fun as I'd hoped it would be. After unlocking and switching to the healing turret in my healing skill slot, I managed to hear my character say "dispenser operational!" and I laughed at the Team Fortress 2 reference.
I played him for pretty much a solid 16 hours, doing a fair amount of dicking around wasting time, and even meeting up with a friend to go questing at one point. At the end of those 16 hours, he was level 13.
Engineers get guns, and guns are pretty cool. You get a choice between a two-handed rifle, or two one-handed pistols. I found myself sticking mostly with the rifle, but the pistols have some useful stuff.
Human Necromancer
After seeing all the weird and interesting stuff Necromancers could do when ArenaNet livestreamed a demo or two from Gamescom a year or two ago, I was really hoping they'd be decent. Maybe I just didn't play my necromancer enough, but it seemed like it was more of a chore than anything else. I'm still going to play more necromancer in the next beta event, with the hope that it gets better as you level one up. I got my necromancer to level 5.
Also, the human areas are fairly lag-inducing and complex to navigate. I really do prefer the Charr starting area. It's a lot simpler and more straightforward in its layout.
Norn Elementalist
I honestly did not expect elementalists to be as awesome as they are. I mean, sure, I saw that you had an attunement for each of the four elements and swapping between them changes the type of spells you can cast. I didn't really think much of that. I thought I'd start an elementalist, find an element I preferred, and stick with it.
Not so. Good job, ArenaNet.
All the elements are useful to have, and they all have one or another situation where they'll shine. On top of that, there is a vast difference in the spells you get when you change your weapons around. They cater to a lot of different play styles, and it works quite well.
Remember what I said a mile or two up the page about how you get your weapon skills? Well, elementalists have a variety of weapons, and four elements, which means... four times the skills! Elementalist is officially the most versatile class I've played thus far.
Some of the utility skills for elementalists are pretty neat, so I'll highlight a few of them here:
(yes, I didn't play a ranger... Sylvari and Asura aren't available yet.)
Overall thoughts
I love how you can work with other players to clear an area or complete an event without ever having to party up. That's pretty awesome. Also, I love the extra ways of getting experience outside of combat. Even though the level cap is 80, you can have plenty of fun in the game at level 15, or even level 5. Just play the game, and you'll have fun. There are little minigames all over the place. At one point, I was throwing snowballs at kids. Another place entirely, I was pissing off devourers with music so I could steal their eggs. And last but certainly not least, in Lion's Arch, there's the diving board.
Yeah, a diving board. Nothing special about a diving board, right? Wrong. This one is perched insanely high above the water. It has its own waypoint. There's an NPC that gives you a free speed boost there. And just before the diving board itself, there is a pair of diving goggles. If you pick them up, your skills get replaced with Spin and Flip, which you can only use as you fall into the water below. Yes. I am not making this up.
In short: If you liked Guild Wars 1, go pre-purchase Guild Wars 2. If you hate MMOs because of their reputation for repetitive and grind-filled gameplay, go pre-purchase Guild Wars 2. If you have $80, go pre-purchase Guild Wars 2. It's as simple as that.
By the way, I'm in Blazeridge Mountains. That will mean something to you when you get to the world selection screen after logging in.
I will close with the two screenshots I took on my first night of playing the game.
So anyway, what race/class combos did I play, and where did I go, what did I do, who is your daddy, and what does he do?
Actually, first up is a description of how shit works.
You have a ten skill skillbar. Skills one through five are dependent on the weapon or weapons you're using. A two-handed weapon will have five skills available, a one handed weapon in your primary hand will have three skills, and a one handed weapon in your off-hand will have two skills available. Depending on what your class can equip, you can mix and match to suit your tastes.
Initially, with each possible weapon set, you only have skill number one available. Killing five enemies will unlock skill number 2, ten unlocks skill number 3, and so forth up to 20 for skill number 5. And they have to be unlocked in order.
Skill six is your healing skill. Depending on your class and the skill itself, it can confer other useful effects as well as affecting other characters around you.
Skills seven through nine are your utility skills. These do all sorts of cool things, and it differs per class. The Engineer's turrets, grenades, and mines are utility skills.
The tenth skill slot is your elite skill. I can't really say much about these because you have to get to level 30 to unlock the skill slot and the highest level I got any of my characters to was 15.
Levelling up is pretty simple. You can actually get a fair amount of experience with little to no combat. Every area you discover gives you an experience boost. There are also waypoints, which you can teleport to for a small fee (and it is in fact really small, pretty much inconsequential), and discovering a waypoint will give you an experience boost. Then there are also points of interest, which are scattered throughout each map nearby buildings, statues, and, well, points of interest. Finding them gives you an experience boost. Getting everything done in an area also gives you an experience boost.
What's really cool is, you get an experience boost for resurrecting other players. This makes it a win-win situation: you get something out of it, and they get to continue playing the game. I died quite many times and most of the time another player who happened to be in the vicinity would run over and resurrect me. The system works. If you can't get someone to resurrect you, you can also teleport to a waypoint, which will automatically resurrect you.
And then, of course, you can kill enemies. Can't forget about that.
Now, on to the three characters I played.
Charr Engineer
Race determines, among other things, the story you get to experience. Furthermore, the story is affected both by choices you make during it, as well as choices you make during character creation.
My Charr Engineer was a member of the Iron Legion. The Iron Legion is responsible for all of the Charr's technology, so to me it made the most sense. The other legions are Blood and Ash. Anyway, Engineer is quite a fun class, every bit as fun as I'd hoped it would be. After unlocking and switching to the healing turret in my healing skill slot, I managed to hear my character say "dispenser operational!" and I laughed at the Team Fortress 2 reference.
I played him for pretty much a solid 16 hours, doing a fair amount of dicking around wasting time, and even meeting up with a friend to go questing at one point. At the end of those 16 hours, he was level 13.
Engineers get guns, and guns are pretty cool. You get a choice between a two-handed rifle, or two one-handed pistols. I found myself sticking mostly with the rifle, but the pistols have some useful stuff.
Human Necromancer
After seeing all the weird and interesting stuff Necromancers could do when ArenaNet livestreamed a demo or two from Gamescom a year or two ago, I was really hoping they'd be decent. Maybe I just didn't play my necromancer enough, but it seemed like it was more of a chore than anything else. I'm still going to play more necromancer in the next beta event, with the hope that it gets better as you level one up. I got my necromancer to level 5.
Also, the human areas are fairly lag-inducing and complex to navigate. I really do prefer the Charr starting area. It's a lot simpler and more straightforward in its layout.
Norn Elementalist
I honestly did not expect elementalists to be as awesome as they are. I mean, sure, I saw that you had an attunement for each of the four elements and swapping between them changes the type of spells you can cast. I didn't really think much of that. I thought I'd start an elementalist, find an element I preferred, and stick with it.
Not so. Good job, ArenaNet.
All the elements are useful to have, and they all have one or another situation where they'll shine. On top of that, there is a vast difference in the spells you get when you change your weapons around. They cater to a lot of different play styles, and it works quite well.
Remember what I said a mile or two up the page about how you get your weapon skills? Well, elementalists have a variety of weapons, and four elements, which means... four times the skills! Elementalist is officially the most versatile class I've played thus far.
Some of the utility skills for elementalists are pretty neat, so I'll highlight a few of them here:
- Glyph of Storms - Causes a storm based on the element you're currently attuned to. Want to rain down fire? Attune to fire, then pop the glyph off. Want to kick up a sandstorm? Switch to earth. You get the idea.
- Conjure Fire Axe and Conjure Ice Bow - Elemental weaponry at the ready! These skills give you two of their weapon, one is given to you, and the other is dropped on the ground for another player to pick up. They offer some interesting skills and open up even more play styles with the elementalist, as well as allowing your party to deal the type of damage they need to deal at any given time. There are more elemental weapon skills available, but these are the two I was able to unlock.
- Call Owl - An owl swoops in and attacks your target. Which is pretty neat, just on general principle.
(yes, I didn't play a ranger... Sylvari and Asura aren't available yet.)
Overall thoughts
I love how you can work with other players to clear an area or complete an event without ever having to party up. That's pretty awesome. Also, I love the extra ways of getting experience outside of combat. Even though the level cap is 80, you can have plenty of fun in the game at level 15, or even level 5. Just play the game, and you'll have fun. There are little minigames all over the place. At one point, I was throwing snowballs at kids. Another place entirely, I was pissing off devourers with music so I could steal their eggs. And last but certainly not least, in Lion's Arch, there's the diving board.
Yeah, a diving board. Nothing special about a diving board, right? Wrong. This one is perched insanely high above the water. It has its own waypoint. There's an NPC that gives you a free speed boost there. And just before the diving board itself, there is a pair of diving goggles. If you pick them up, your skills get replaced with Spin and Flip, which you can only use as you fall into the water below. Yes. I am not making this up.
In short: If you liked Guild Wars 1, go pre-purchase Guild Wars 2. If you hate MMOs because of their reputation for repetitive and grind-filled gameplay, go pre-purchase Guild Wars 2. If you have $80, go pre-purchase Guild Wars 2. It's as simple as that.
By the way, I'm in Blazeridge Mountains. That will mean something to you when you get to the world selection screen after logging in.
I will close with the two screenshots I took on my first night of playing the game.
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Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Back at 100%
If you've been reading my Twitter, you already know this, but...
After over 12 hours of work last night, I'm finally back up and running with Windows XP SP3.
There's still some things left to install, but all the stuff I use on a regular basis is set up and configured.
Everything I was able to do before I was an idiot and went "herp derp me install plop to MBR this can never go wrong" is back, for the most part. I've made some tweaks and changes as well.
I don't exactly have my full Firefox extension set back up and running yet. I'm kind of running an experiment to see if I can get by with less than what I had. I had to rewrite my UI tweaks CSS for Stylish because I didn't have a copy of it anywhere else, but the YouTube tweaks, well, I just went to my own blog post on the subject and downloaded it from there. Speaking of which, there's a small change I just had to make that I haven't uploaded yet, so expect that before long.
In the install/update process I did manage to finally get a copy of the standalone Windows XP SP3 installer, which sped things up greatly. The fun thing is, that's the only way I can get to Windows Update from a fresh install with my Windows install disc. Windows Update refuses to accept WinXP SP1, which is what my install disc installs. Yeah, I know, I can slipstream it. I probably should. And I should see about slipstreaming all the updates too, to try and reduce how long it takes to play the Windows Update game.
One major change is that I installed Microsoft Security Essentials as my antivirus, instead of AVG. AVG and I have never gotten along well, it's always done nothing but report false positives. Plus, AVG has a rather large install footprint and resource requirement, and craps itself all over your system installing browser toolbars and plugins and whatnot. MSE is a lot simpler, a lot lighter, and just overall better. And the best part: it's free to anyone that has a legit copy of Windows, which I happen to have.
I also changed my Foobar2000 interface around a bit. Rather than doing separate playlists for each artist, I now just have all my music imported into its music library, and I slapped in the UI element that lets you browse through it and filter it and build a playlist from it. This is one of the reasons I love Foobar2000, its interface is so modular. Any time you want, you can go into layout editing mode and tweak things. Even better, it has a scratchbox where you can play around with a new layout without having to change your existing one. Then if you like what you end up with, it's simple to apply it.
In mIRC, I basically lost all my scripts. I know I have a copy of one of them floating around somewhere, but it didn't show up quickly enough in a search of all my hard drives, so I just rewrote it. I still have a couple more scripts to write (like my auto-identify script...) but overall it's back as well.
The final finishing touch that I added before going to bed was installing and configuring Winwall. It's so sad that even though Winwall annoys me so much, it's pretty much the best wallpaper rotator available for Windows XP. It could honestly do with having a much larger (or even resizable) interface. It's just so cramped.
Anyway, I need food, so that's it for this post. Hey, now that I have a computer connected to the internet, I can keep track of my Rogue Galaxy gameplay again, which means I can play the game again. So much potential gameplay time lost due to having no OS... Yeah, I could have done a session when I was running Ubuntu, but I spent approximately 99% of my time in Ubuntu either tweaking things, trying to get it to use a refresh rate other than 60Hz, or not using it because it would stop responding during periods of high disk access thanks to the fact that I was running it off of a hard drive in a USB2.0 enclosure.
Yeah. Food. Bye.
Edit: food's warming up on the stove (yay skillet meal), and I remembered that while I was installing Windows XP, I FC'd Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love in Guitar Hero: Van Halen. I think this is my first FC of a song that contains a pattern that I have to tap. The song has two slider note zigzags, and I'm bad at zigzags one-handed...
After over 12 hours of work last night, I'm finally back up and running with Windows XP SP3.
There's still some things left to install, but all the stuff I use on a regular basis is set up and configured.
Everything I was able to do before I was an idiot and went "herp derp me install plop to MBR this can never go wrong" is back, for the most part. I've made some tweaks and changes as well.
I don't exactly have my full Firefox extension set back up and running yet. I'm kind of running an experiment to see if I can get by with less than what I had. I had to rewrite my UI tweaks CSS for Stylish because I didn't have a copy of it anywhere else, but the YouTube tweaks, well, I just went to my own blog post on the subject and downloaded it from there. Speaking of which, there's a small change I just had to make that I haven't uploaded yet, so expect that before long.
In the install/update process I did manage to finally get a copy of the standalone Windows XP SP3 installer, which sped things up greatly. The fun thing is, that's the only way I can get to Windows Update from a fresh install with my Windows install disc. Windows Update refuses to accept WinXP SP1, which is what my install disc installs. Yeah, I know, I can slipstream it. I probably should. And I should see about slipstreaming all the updates too, to try and reduce how long it takes to play the Windows Update game.
One major change is that I installed Microsoft Security Essentials as my antivirus, instead of AVG. AVG and I have never gotten along well, it's always done nothing but report false positives. Plus, AVG has a rather large install footprint and resource requirement, and craps itself all over your system installing browser toolbars and plugins and whatnot. MSE is a lot simpler, a lot lighter, and just overall better. And the best part: it's free to anyone that has a legit copy of Windows, which I happen to have.
I also changed my Foobar2000 interface around a bit. Rather than doing separate playlists for each artist, I now just have all my music imported into its music library, and I slapped in the UI element that lets you browse through it and filter it and build a playlist from it. This is one of the reasons I love Foobar2000, its interface is so modular. Any time you want, you can go into layout editing mode and tweak things. Even better, it has a scratchbox where you can play around with a new layout without having to change your existing one. Then if you like what you end up with, it's simple to apply it.
In mIRC, I basically lost all my scripts. I know I have a copy of one of them floating around somewhere, but it didn't show up quickly enough in a search of all my hard drives, so I just rewrote it. I still have a couple more scripts to write (like my auto-identify script...) but overall it's back as well.
The final finishing touch that I added before going to bed was installing and configuring Winwall. It's so sad that even though Winwall annoys me so much, it's pretty much the best wallpaper rotator available for Windows XP. It could honestly do with having a much larger (or even resizable) interface. It's just so cramped.
Anyway, I need food, so that's it for this post. Hey, now that I have a computer connected to the internet, I can keep track of my Rogue Galaxy gameplay again, which means I can play the game again. So much potential gameplay time lost due to having no OS... Yeah, I could have done a session when I was running Ubuntu, but I spent approximately 99% of my time in Ubuntu either tweaking things, trying to get it to use a refresh rate other than 60Hz, or not using it because it would stop responding during periods of high disk access thanks to the fact that I was running it off of a hard drive in a USB2.0 enclosure.
Yeah. Food. Bye.
Edit: food's warming up on the stove (yay skillet meal), and I remembered that while I was installing Windows XP, I FC'd Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love in Guitar Hero: Van Halen. I think this is my first FC of a song that contains a pattern that I have to tap. The song has two slider note zigzags, and I'm bad at zigzags one-handed...
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Ubuntu 12.04
So, it's been quite a while since I last used Ubuntu. The most recent version I used prior to yesterday was 6.06. ...Yeah. This will basically be an "impressions and some useful tweaks" post.
Overall, in the graphics department, Ubuntu has come a long way. I remember popping a freshly burned CD of Ubuntu 5.04 into a CD drive, booting it, and seeing that ugly as all fuck brown theme for the first time. Now it's actually pleasing to the eye.
Usability-wise, well, it's Ubuntu. It's the Windows of Linux. If you can't see the nice big Firefox icon and click it to browse the internet, well, you're probably blind. The thing it's on, called the Dash, works similarly to the taskbar in Windows. The button up at the top brings up a screen that immediately shows you the programs you've run most recently, and it has a search box so you can type in the first few characters of what you're looking for. This is neat for novices, but to be honest I prefer the old Applications menu structure, and I'm dying for some menus so I can organize things.
Thus begins a long list of things I preferred about older Ubuntu distributions. They didn't adulterate the environment so much, leaving it up to you to customize its look and feel from thousands of options. This one has about three options for the look and feel. If you don't like those, well, you're stuffed.
The settings program is fairly straightforward and I was able to tweak a few things to my liking through it, but two of the big things I like that I can't adjust through it are the workspaces and sloppy focus on the mouse cursor. In fact, even though there's a nice button on the dash that shows four workspaces, I can't get into any workspaces other than the first one. I even made sure I had the keyboard shortcut for changing workspaces correct. Still, the button is useful in that clicking it shows you all the windows on the current workspace and you can click one of them to focus it. So if you have a lot of stuff open and overlapping, it makes it easy to find the window you want.
Ubuntu also has an "app store" of sorts, which is basically their replacement for the Synaptic package manager from earlier versions of the distribution. In addition to letting you install free packages, you can buy commercial Linux programs through it. Including a lot of popular indie games, like Braid, World of Goo, and more. Heck, you can even buy the Humble Indie Bundle 5 through it. I'd get the bundle, but... I already have Psychonauts and I'm not too interested in the rest of it.
Ubuntu also has a cloud storage service called Ubuntu One. Just by using Ubuntu, you get 5GB of free cloud storage. Which is cool if you have files that you want to be accessible from elsewhere and maybe happen to lack a USB flash drive with the capacity to store them all. But generally speaking, you probably already use Dropbox and will be installing the Linux Dropbox client.
Getting a multi-monitor setup going is fairly simple. To do it entirely within the GUI without having to mess around with config files, you pretty much need to install the proprietary drivers for your graphics card, which are recommended anyway because your visual experience and 2D/3D performance will be greatly increased in comparison to the open source driver.
However, multi-monitor in Linux does have its nuances in comparison to Windows. When watching YouTube, if you have hardware rendering on, the hue of everything is off and it all looks blue. Fullscreen works as expected in this mode, though. If you disable hardware rendering to get correct colors, Flash sees both monitors as one big desktop for the purpose of determining your screen resolution. So it sets its fullscreen window to that size. But then it goes "oh hey, our fullscreen window shouldn't span monitors!" and scales it down to fit in one monitor. So what you end up with is a really wide and not very tall fullscreen window. And since Adobe has discontinued Flash for Linux, it won't ever get fixed. All the more reason to promote HTML5 video, I guess.
As far as running Windows programs is concerned, you have to install Wine. Wine is essentially an open source implementation of the Windows API and all of its libraries. The majority of regular old Windows programs will simply work out of the box, with no configuration changes. It's when you delve into the realm of playing Windows games that you start having to mess with things. Fortunately, there's another package called Winetricks that helps greatly with that.
Overall, it's pretty easy to use, but parts of the whole ease of use thing grate on me because I want to get in and tinker with things and Ubuntu doesn't really want you to get in and tinker with things. Still, it's decent for an intro to Linux, and proof that Linux is more than ready for the desktop. Tweaks after the break.
Overall, in the graphics department, Ubuntu has come a long way. I remember popping a freshly burned CD of Ubuntu 5.04 into a CD drive, booting it, and seeing that ugly as all fuck brown theme for the first time. Now it's actually pleasing to the eye.
Usability-wise, well, it's Ubuntu. It's the Windows of Linux. If you can't see the nice big Firefox icon and click it to browse the internet, well, you're probably blind. The thing it's on, called the Dash, works similarly to the taskbar in Windows. The button up at the top brings up a screen that immediately shows you the programs you've run most recently, and it has a search box so you can type in the first few characters of what you're looking for. This is neat for novices, but to be honest I prefer the old Applications menu structure, and I'm dying for some menus so I can organize things.
Thus begins a long list of things I preferred about older Ubuntu distributions. They didn't adulterate the environment so much, leaving it up to you to customize its look and feel from thousands of options. This one has about three options for the look and feel. If you don't like those, well, you're stuffed.
The settings program is fairly straightforward and I was able to tweak a few things to my liking through it, but two of the big things I like that I can't adjust through it are the workspaces and sloppy focus on the mouse cursor. In fact, even though there's a nice button on the dash that shows four workspaces, I can't get into any workspaces other than the first one. I even made sure I had the keyboard shortcut for changing workspaces correct. Still, the button is useful in that clicking it shows you all the windows on the current workspace and you can click one of them to focus it. So if you have a lot of stuff open and overlapping, it makes it easy to find the window you want.
Ubuntu also has an "app store" of sorts, which is basically their replacement for the Synaptic package manager from earlier versions of the distribution. In addition to letting you install free packages, you can buy commercial Linux programs through it. Including a lot of popular indie games, like Braid, World of Goo, and more. Heck, you can even buy the Humble Indie Bundle 5 through it. I'd get the bundle, but... I already have Psychonauts and I'm not too interested in the rest of it.
Ubuntu also has a cloud storage service called Ubuntu One. Just by using Ubuntu, you get 5GB of free cloud storage. Which is cool if you have files that you want to be accessible from elsewhere and maybe happen to lack a USB flash drive with the capacity to store them all. But generally speaking, you probably already use Dropbox and will be installing the Linux Dropbox client.
Getting a multi-monitor setup going is fairly simple. To do it entirely within the GUI without having to mess around with config files, you pretty much need to install the proprietary drivers for your graphics card, which are recommended anyway because your visual experience and 2D/3D performance will be greatly increased in comparison to the open source driver.
However, multi-monitor in Linux does have its nuances in comparison to Windows. When watching YouTube, if you have hardware rendering on, the hue of everything is off and it all looks blue. Fullscreen works as expected in this mode, though. If you disable hardware rendering to get correct colors, Flash sees both monitors as one big desktop for the purpose of determining your screen resolution. So it sets its fullscreen window to that size. But then it goes "oh hey, our fullscreen window shouldn't span monitors!" and scales it down to fit in one monitor. So what you end up with is a really wide and not very tall fullscreen window. And since Adobe has discontinued Flash for Linux, it won't ever get fixed. All the more reason to promote HTML5 video, I guess.
As far as running Windows programs is concerned, you have to install Wine. Wine is essentially an open source implementation of the Windows API and all of its libraries. The majority of regular old Windows programs will simply work out of the box, with no configuration changes. It's when you delve into the realm of playing Windows games that you start having to mess with things. Fortunately, there's another package called Winetricks that helps greatly with that.
Overall, it's pretty easy to use, but parts of the whole ease of use thing grate on me because I want to get in and tinker with things and Ubuntu doesn't really want you to get in and tinker with things. Still, it's decent for an intro to Linux, and proof that Linux is more than ready for the desktop. Tweaks after the break.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Herp Derp
So I ran the Ubuntu 12.04 livedisc that I downloaded for a few hours before finally realizing that I have a hard drive sitting here that I could install it to and a USB enclosure I could put said hard drive into. Combine that with setting my BIOS to boot off of USB, and we have ourselves a semi-decent workaround for the issue at hand.
lol
Much later edit: Well, except for the fact that the INSTALLER FUCKING CRASHED, yeah. Also, lol@myself for making so many tweaks to a livedisc environment that will just be wiped when I reboot. Srsly. More about these to come in another post.
lol
Much later edit: Well, except for the fact that the INSTALLER FUCKING CRASHED, yeah. Also, lol@myself for making so many tweaks to a livedisc environment that will just be wiped when I reboot. Srsly. More about these to come in another post.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
FUCK
This morning before I went to bed I had the bright idea to try and install Plop Boot Manager to my hard drive's MBR, so that it would control the boot process instead of the Windows boot loader. It offers a lot of extra capabilities, hence why I wanted it.
Except that trying to install it fucked up my partition table.
Fucked up partition table = BIOS no see OS = Can't use computer. Simple as that.
So when I woke up, I j-j-jammed in my WinXP install disc and reinstalled XP. All was fine, except for one thing that I swear I've fixed before but can't remember for the life of me how I did it: my boot drive was K: instead of C:. One of my other hard drives had taken over the stupid C: drive letter. And with Windows being so infinitely intelligent, you can't use its own disk management software to change the drive letter of your boot drive. It won't even entertain the thought of queueing it up as something to do when the computer is restarted and then telling you "Reboot your computer, moron!".
In the process of rebooting and trying to get it fixed, my BIOS started doing its thing again, where it goes "lol what IDE Primary Master? I see no IDE Primary Master!". Usually if I just turn the computer off and let it sit for a while to think about what it's done, when I turn it back on it goes "lol jk" and starts up.
That was several hours ago. Letting it sit has never taken more than 20-30 minutes before.
So I go "okay, might as well see if it's the hard drive" and swapped it out for what appears to be a brand new 120GB hard drive that had never been formatted before. Start up computer, and it still can't see it. In other words, suspicion confirmed, it's my BIOS.
First thing you're thinking is "lol, you still use IDE devices?" Yeah, yeah. I built that computer in 2004. You know, before SATA became really popular. Hell, it's got a 64 bit processor. I've never been able to use it at full power because I've lacked a 64 bit OS for it to run.
My plan was, if the 120GB drive magically worked, I was going to partition it about half and half, and set up Windows on one half and one or another flavor of Linux on the other half. But that doesn't mean much now, I can't use the damn thing.
All I can hope for now is to earn enough money from this job that I can buy the stuff for an all-new computer. Which will take very uncomfortably longer than I really want it to. If anyone I know is reading this and you have even a semi-decent computer you can lend to me for a while, I'd be really grateful. I'd want to be able to install stuff on it though. Stuff meaning my usual day-to-day setup, rather than me being a retard and FUBAR'ing your computer.
I should have just gone to sleep at 4:30 AM like I wanted to, but noooo, I was just like "lol let's install plop to the MBR! This won't take very long!" Well, half of that was correct. It didn't take very long. But now due to circumstances entirely unrelated to it, I can't even use my computer at the moment.
I'm downloading the latest Ubuntu livedisc, I'm going to see if I can't boot off of that and not have to use my parents' computer. I won't be able to watch anime (sadface), but... At least I'll have the internet.
Except that trying to install it fucked up my partition table.
Fucked up partition table = BIOS no see OS = Can't use computer. Simple as that.
So when I woke up, I j-j-jammed in my WinXP install disc and reinstalled XP. All was fine, except for one thing that I swear I've fixed before but can't remember for the life of me how I did it: my boot drive was K: instead of C:. One of my other hard drives had taken over the stupid C: drive letter. And with Windows being so infinitely intelligent, you can't use its own disk management software to change the drive letter of your boot drive. It won't even entertain the thought of queueing it up as something to do when the computer is restarted and then telling you "Reboot your computer, moron!".
In the process of rebooting and trying to get it fixed, my BIOS started doing its thing again, where it goes "lol what IDE Primary Master? I see no IDE Primary Master!". Usually if I just turn the computer off and let it sit for a while to think about what it's done, when I turn it back on it goes "lol jk" and starts up.
That was several hours ago. Letting it sit has never taken more than 20-30 minutes before.
So I go "okay, might as well see if it's the hard drive" and swapped it out for what appears to be a brand new 120GB hard drive that had never been formatted before. Start up computer, and it still can't see it. In other words, suspicion confirmed, it's my BIOS.
First thing you're thinking is "lol, you still use IDE devices?" Yeah, yeah. I built that computer in 2004. You know, before SATA became really popular. Hell, it's got a 64 bit processor. I've never been able to use it at full power because I've lacked a 64 bit OS for it to run.
My plan was, if the 120GB drive magically worked, I was going to partition it about half and half, and set up Windows on one half and one or another flavor of Linux on the other half. But that doesn't mean much now, I can't use the damn thing.
All I can hope for now is to earn enough money from this job that I can buy the stuff for an all-new computer. Which will take very uncomfortably longer than I really want it to. If anyone I know is reading this and you have even a semi-decent computer you can lend to me for a while, I'd be really grateful. I'd want to be able to install stuff on it though. Stuff meaning my usual day-to-day setup, rather than me being a retard and FUBAR'ing your computer.
I should have just gone to sleep at 4:30 AM like I wanted to, but noooo, I was just like "lol let's install plop to the MBR! This won't take very long!" Well, half of that was correct. It didn't take very long. But now due to circumstances entirely unrelated to it, I can't even use my computer at the moment.
I'm downloading the latest Ubuntu livedisc, I'm going to see if I can't boot off of that and not have to use my parents' computer. I won't be able to watch anime (sadface), but... At least I'll have the internet.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Really? REALLY?
So, CAINE is a student organization at the University of Virginia. Its website is http://www.desudesudesu.org/. It has officers, including a treasurer, whose job it is to procure funding from the university so we can have materials for meeting activities as well as expanding our collection.
A few years back, we decided that our website really needed an overhaul. After weighing our various options we ended up buying hosting and the domain name that we use today. The main reason was that if we weren't hosted by the university, they had no say in the content of our website and we could be sovereign.
The first thing they took issue with was how we referred to ourselves. They claimed that saying "UVa Comics and Anime Club" implied that we were affiliated with the university, most likely in an "official endorsement" sense. They recommended that we change it to "Comics and Anime Club at UVa". Fine, whatever, they were happy with that, so we changed it and went on with life.
Until yesterday.
Now, apparently, that's not enough. It's no longer crystal clear that we carry no official endorsement from UVa. To rectify this, they sent a huge wall of text of legalese that we are to copy, verbatim, onto our "front page". This is essentially a non-affiliation notice.
Only problem: our "front page" is the forum index. I imagine they'd want it immediately visible to visitors of the site, which means placing it near the top. This would push our actual forum content down the page just far enough to confuse new visitors, who don't generally expect a forum to have 5 miles of legalese at the top of the page. A new visitor is going to take one look at all that legalese, go "ok, whatever", and then look for whatever they actually wanted on the site and effectively ignore it. So basically, this legalese is for the sole purpose of UVa stroking its giant cock. Not on my face, thanks. I'll keep my site clean of such things.
The funny thing is that part of the notice states that they "have no control over" us. Which is exactly why we have our site hosted by someone other than them in the first place. So if they have no control over us, then why are they suddenly allowed to dictate content that should appear on our website?
The answer: they're not. At least, not on my watch. Good luck, UVa, I'm not putting your jerkoff legalese on my site. I did, however, change the reference so it says "Comics and Anime Club in Charlottesville". Let's see Charlottesville send us a notice next. I'm waiting. Then I'll take a shit on it and send it back. In a country that's as extremely litigous as ours is, SOMEONE has to stand up for common sense.
A few years back, we decided that our website really needed an overhaul. After weighing our various options we ended up buying hosting and the domain name that we use today. The main reason was that if we weren't hosted by the university, they had no say in the content of our website and we could be sovereign.
The first thing they took issue with was how we referred to ourselves. They claimed that saying "UVa Comics and Anime Club" implied that we were affiliated with the university, most likely in an "official endorsement" sense. They recommended that we change it to "Comics and Anime Club at UVa". Fine, whatever, they were happy with that, so we changed it and went on with life.
Until yesterday.
Now, apparently, that's not enough. It's no longer crystal clear that we carry no official endorsement from UVa. To rectify this, they sent a huge wall of text of legalese that we are to copy, verbatim, onto our "front page". This is essentially a non-affiliation notice.
Only problem: our "front page" is the forum index. I imagine they'd want it immediately visible to visitors of the site, which means placing it near the top. This would push our actual forum content down the page just far enough to confuse new visitors, who don't generally expect a forum to have 5 miles of legalese at the top of the page. A new visitor is going to take one look at all that legalese, go "ok, whatever", and then look for whatever they actually wanted on the site and effectively ignore it. So basically, this legalese is for the sole purpose of UVa stroking its giant cock. Not on my face, thanks. I'll keep my site clean of such things.
The funny thing is that part of the notice states that they "have no control over" us. Which is exactly why we have our site hosted by someone other than them in the first place. So if they have no control over us, then why are they suddenly allowed to dictate content that should appear on our website?
The answer: they're not. At least, not on my watch. Good luck, UVa, I'm not putting your jerkoff legalese on my site. I did, however, change the reference so it says "Comics and Anime Club in Charlottesville". Let's see Charlottesville send us a notice next. I'm waiting. Then I'll take a shit on it and send it back. In a country that's as extremely litigous as ours is, SOMEONE has to stand up for common sense.
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