I’m goin crazy here. Due to various factors in my life, I’m currently pretty broke. I’ve been working like crazy, both at my day job, and at my wanna-be job, and I’ve been goin nuts. I haven’t gamed in weeks aside from an occasional Angband quest.

I decided to give Freeciv another shot. I’ve always been a Civilization junkie in the past, and I’ve followed the Freeciv movement for years. It never seemed up to snuff, or maybe I just wasn’t feeling it. Those that know, know that Civilization is a pretty serious addiction. You have to be ready for the plunge. :) Well, I think I’m ready for the plunge.

I’ve got a Freeciv server on my main server and my main workstation now, and am picking the game up pretty quickly. I’m really excited to see the flexibility of this game. You can set coefficients for research, the year the game will end, production penalties, etc.

Another neat factor is the multiplayer aspect. It has always had a tilt to multiplay, which is something that the commercial Civilization always seemed to lack. Even when they finally implemented it, it just sucked! I haven’t had a chance to sample the multiplay on Freeciv yet, but I’m looking forward to it! Do you play? Drop me a line and let’s set up a game! Haven’t tried Freeciv yet? If you were or are still a fan of the Civilization series, then you MUST give Freeciv a shake. It’s totally worth it!

Was surfing around tonight and Stumbled onto The Linux Alternative Project. Ever stopped to consider moving to Linux? Thought you wouldn’t find replacements for that oh so crucial app in Winders? Check out this website for a pretty comprehensive list of Linux alternatives.

Just as I thought, I finally turned Beryl off. Bling just gets in the way of work. Some would argue that this is a direct admition that Aero is superior. My counter to that would be something along the lines of, “idiot.” I still like the bling of Beryl far better than Winders Aero. But, the Viewports concept was annoying me and Beryl was not allowing me to set startup points for windows and apps, even though the functionality is there. I suspect this is a Gnome vs. KDE thing maybe? Dunno, at any rate, I still approve, but I don’t want the bling THAT bad.

Success!! Oh my god that was way more difficult than I thought it would be. I’d like to coin the Law of Multiple Linux Installs, but I can’t do the math to figure out the equation. It just seems that new Linux distros always require multiple installs before you get comfortable — inversely proportionate to the amount of distros you have used in the past… Or something like that.

Anyway, Mythbuntu lives! I finally got it running like a champ on the media center machine. I must say I love all the features it has in comparison to Windows Media Center… But, Windows Media Center was FAR easier to get goin. I’ll pay the price of a less user friendly install for the increased freedom I have, though. It’s nice to be able to rip DVDs into your media library just by clicking a button on your media center. Also, there is commercial detection, master/slave configurations for multiple frontends and backends, and best of all it was $0…

So, highly recommended if you are looking for a media center solution.

So, I’ve come so very close to getting my PVR working with MythTV and Kubuntu. So very close, yet still so very far away. Some of my Gentoo experiences have really come in handy, because the GUI tools for doing things in Linux are still quite lacking, but I’m still unable to get my signal to go through on MythTV. If I cat the video device, I can pull an MPG out of it, so I know the tuners are working. But, Myth pops with a blank screen. I think I just need to change the display method, but I found a solution that I think I might like better.

Enter MythBuntu.  MythBuntu is basically a stripped down Ubuntu distro which has Myth on it. It is intended for stand-alone Myth boxes, so I think it will be perfect. I burned the iso this morning, and will be installing it tonight. Hopefully with some success, so I can turn my attention onto some of my web dev projects which have been sorely neglected for some time.

Rhys has been really missing the PVR. It’s weird to think that he has never known TV without a PVR. He doesn’t understand the concept that he cannot watch whatever he wants whenever he wants. Man… How DID we live with out PVRs in the past!?

I’ll report back with my review of MythBuntu later. Wish me luck, gang!

So, you salivating over Vista because it’s pretty? I don’t blame you one bit. Just before I finally became fed up with Microsoft (again), I was salivating over Vista too! I was totally willing to overlook the poorly thought out security enhancements. I will still admit they are on the right track with the whole running at the user level thing. But, seriously, with all the great examples of how it’s done in Linux and BSD, you’d think they could have stolen that code and made something a bit worthwhile. Mac OSX implements this perfectly — it is a BSD OS, but still.

Anyway, then I came to my senses after hearing about Windows 7, the little stealth update stunt that Microsoft pulled, and of course their desire to move toward subscription based revenue for Windows products.

I was a bit distraught. Happy to be back on Linux of course, but sad that XOrg hadn’t really made any leaps and bounds since I last saw it. No alpha transparency still!? Come on! Or so I thought. A friend of mine turned me on to the Beryl Project. Last night after a bit of fiddling I got it installed. It looks to be a gtk app, and thus built for Gnome, but it does work fine in KDE, and no real annoying inconsistencies.

If you are running Linux as your main desktop and you haven’t checked out Beryl, you must! It brings the pretty GUI to the Open Source community! So far no problems with it crashing, or getting along with KDE! Just had to give them a plug and a thanks!