Game Week : “Frag the Axis” on “Return to Castle Wolfenstein”.
Jan 29Loooos Looos Loooooossss !!!! We used to shout it across the office at lunch break. Our boss didn’t even notice anymore and our cleaning lady tended to leave the building whenever we were playing. I am of course referring to the endless lunch breaks at my old job, spent playing “Castle Wolfenstein” in multiplayer mode. Forming small teams of German or Allied soldiers and trying to invade bunkers, steal documents or liberate prisoners. I LOVED Castle Wolfenstein, both in its Single player mode (Fighting Nazi’s and Zombies) or in online multiplayer mode. Ok : Nazi’s and Zombies does make it sound like Wolfenstein was a mix between “The Walking Dead” and “Allo Allo”… but it is nothing like that.
In multiplayer game mode every teammember in our office-battalion had a specific function. Engineer, Medic, Soldier … and “That guy with the bazooka”. That guy would be me. From a tactical viewpoint you used the bazooka to gain entrance to a bunker. Once inside you would dispose of the Bazooka and respawn as a medic or a soldier .. Not me : I used the Bazooka everywhere. I was lethal in close quarters, both for my enemies, my teammates and my own health. This strategy turned me into a “loose canon” on the battlefield, terrifying both my teammates and my enemies equally. I built up quite a reputation that way 🙂 Good times , Good times indeed.
Now YOU can have a crack at Zombies, Nazi”s and Allied forces. Fire away on your Mac, your Linux machine or your Windows desktop. Download Castle Wolfenstein Enemy Territory here … LOOSSS LOOSSS LOSSSS !!!!
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Game week : “Open Arena” Cross platform Quake3 Fun !
Jan 28If I say the word “Rocketjump” and you have no idea what it is ? … Then you seriously need to read the next post. In day two of our cross-platform gaming week we point you toward the reincarnation of one of the best first person shooters ever created. We are talking about Quake 3. A fantastic, high speed, fast moving, addictive, life-eating, relationship-destroying, girlfriend-infuriating game that kept us ALL up till dawn back in the year 2000. Quake is one of those “shoot anyone that moves” games that had a massive online following. No matter what part of the world you were at, there was always a server where you could log into and fire frag and respawn to your hearts desire.
I remember fondly how I would “get rid of my girlfriend” by taking her home at ten .. coming back to my apartment and start playing Quake 3 till 4am while eating Nacho’s and drinking coke. Quake is fun, addictive and has eaten a big part of my life I can never get back. And i had such a good time… I don’t even care 🙂
Now you (and your cross platform buddies) can have a go with “Open Arena” a free, open-source and cross platform friendly port of the old Quake game. It might not be as fancy as your newest Xbox one game, but EVERY first person shooter is in some way or form a descendant ( I feel the urge to say “Derivative”) of the original Quake 3.
Feed your dog for the next three weeks and kiss your job goodbye. Download and play Open Arena .. for free HERE.
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Game week : The Dark Mod : Cross platform first person “Sniper”.
Jan 27I am old. It is a shocking statement, but there are some facts that back up that statement. For one : I am absolutely terrible with console games. My fingers turn to putty whenever I need to press the right combination of buttons on my controller. I either turn ‘Need for Speed’ into a farming simulator (trying to plow a field with my 500 million dollar Bentley) or turn ‘Call of Duty’ into a charity game by giving my enemies my rations in the heat of battle. ( Army food is a lethal weapon .. right ? ).
But with age comes a certain kind of grace : the ability to completely own & pown when you can get your hands on a keyboard and a mouse. From a very young age I was trained by master-gamers in the secrets of Doom, Quake and Counter Strike. The latter proved to be something I was very good at. I was a lethal opponent in stealth and my sniper rifle killed more men then I fired bullets. Yes .. I was a camper .. but a damn good one. Mock me and you will look over your shoulder for the rest of your life. I was ‘death invisible’.
Since stealth and secrecy so becomes me, I found ‘THE DARK MOD” a great game to play. Based on the Doom engine, the goal of the game is to sneak around, kill your enemies and try not to make a sound. Hiding the body prevents tripping off the alarms, Lurking in the shadows means opponents can’t see you … Using knives instead of guns helps you go unnoticed. I love it.
The Dark Mod is gloomy, has atmosphere and is pretty addictive to play. The great part is that this game is available on both Windows, Mac and Linux and it is for free.
Get your copy of “The Dark Mod” here.
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Geek-OCD. The urge to solve it all.
Jan 24It was going to be a nice weekend. With the soft winter weather making room for clear skies and long walks in rolling fields, the last thing I had expected was to be stuck at home behind a computer. Some kind of work emergency ? A horribly addictive game ? A burst of inspiration that triggered me to finish my book ? No .. none of the above. The one and only reason that kept me from enjoying some time away from my screen was : Geek-OCD.
The culprit in this case consisted of an issue with the wireless connection on my Linux Laptop. After installation of my new home router, the wireless connection problems on my favorite linux laptop escalated to a point that it was no longer usable. There is, for a geek like me, nothing more frustrating then buying a superfast router on a superfast internet connection .. Only to realize your superfast laptop is crawling along the intertubes slower then a snail with a morphine overdose. Quickly checking other machines on the network turned up that the issue was located solely on this one machine. And since this thing worked properly when I connected it via the cable .. It had to be a wireless issue. An odd problem indeed. It had never done this with my previous router and there were no other devices on my network that showed the same problem.
I started sliding down the slippery slope of Geek-OCD. The compulsory need to get to the root of any technological problem that comes across our path. The mental inability to say “Frack this, I don’t know what is going on here” and move on. I had to know the root cause .. I just HAD to. Deep diving into the technicalities I started analyzing the wireless network traffic in my house using specialized tools. “Sniffing” my way through every single data packet that passed at light speed from my router to my Laptop I quickly found that something was wrong. Strange errors like TCP-retransmissions, Ack packages and connections that were “out of sync” turned out to be the culprit of why it took forever to open up the www.ilovecarebears.com site. Each unknown error code led to a google search that led to tons of answers who in turn pointed to pages and pages of text on forums. The issue was slowly turning into one of these endless google rabbit holes that consume hours of your time, only to increase the sense that you have absolutely no clue what you are on about.
Reading through the 11th page on the forum of the 4th link in my 5th search attempt , I stopped myself. STOP ! I had followed several sets of instructions that might lead to salvation. I had pasted in commands in the terminal , flipped switches and checkboxes. I had rebooted, patched and botched things up .. I had reached the end of both my patience and my tether. And I still had not gotten any closer to a solution.
I decided to break one of my cardinal rules : I’ll just reinstall the system. The trigger of this drastic decision came from a second but equally powerful kind of Geek-Ocd. “You cannot keep on working with a botched up system”. Unclear of the damage caused by my tinkering, I decided that that machine just “didn’t feel right” anymore. I could no longer vouch for its integrity and it somehow didn’t ‘feel’ right anymore (+ my problem wasn’t fixed) so I decided to reinstall the system, a clear system of my second geek-OCD : every system has to work perfectly.
4 hours (and 4 versions of linux) later .. I watched the winter sun set on the western skyline and found that I had blown away an entire afternoon without getting anything done. The cause of my problem not found, my working system in shambles and still a long way to go before my fresh installation would be tweaked to my specifications. Because that is yet another Geek-OCD quirk I have, Every system needs to have all the right software and settings before I start using it…. In short : Geek-OCD ate my weekend.
Epiloge.
The next Monday after this tech intensive weekend a friendly geek in a Linux Irc chatroom pointed out that “oh, you have a common problem. It has to do with a driver issue , just disable setting X and you’ll be fine”. I resisted the urge to scream and just rested my head between my hands. I had once again become the victim of my own Geek-Ocd. The urge to find the root of every problem, to never work with a “compromised” system and to only be satisfied with a perfectly personalized install of your own computer. Back in my windows days this meant that I spent more time maintaining my systems then I did using them. These days, thanx to the macs in my house, that is no longer the case. Yet linux, stable and reliable as it is, still has the power to push me into Geek-OCD relapse from time to time.
In the end we should take the time to realize that technology needs to work for us, instead of the other way around. And that solutions that require more effort then the results they produce … are probably not the smartest way to spend your Sunday afternoon. However : The one thing you do get out of all this is knowledge. The knowledge and experience on how to tackle a technical issue like this, Expertise on the deeper darker side of technology behind the issue that you have … But maybe most importantly : The knowledge not to throw away a sunny afternoon on a problem that you could have fixed with 2 clicks, the next Monday morning.
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Use Slurm to watch your bandwith via the command line.
Jan 05Knowing “how busy” your network card is on your Linux system can be very handy in a variety of occasions. You might want to see whats holding up traffic if you use your Linux box as a router, You might want to check how fast that download is going on your torrent machine, you might want to see the top speed you can get out of your workstation. In any case : Getting a quick and comprehensible readout of how many bits you are spewing is not always easy, especially if you are connecting via the command line.
Enter “Slurm” an app that does one thing and does it well. It gives you a graphical overview on how fast your system is up – and downloading data. This information is specified into your ‘real time data usage’, your average data usage, your amount of data received and transmitted. It also comes with a cool graph that, on a glance, gives you an idea on how busy your pipe is.
Slurm is easy to use ( and does not have a ton of command line switches) an can be run on different network cards at the same time. This is very handy if you ever want to see how fast your home-built router is blasting bits on both interfaces. Slurm is available by installing it from the command line on any ubuntu/debian based system via sudo apt-get install slurm . You can use Slurm by hitting slurm -i eth0 (eth0 or 1 being the name of the network card you want to monitor.)
