Archives: September 2008 (Page 2)
I love my TS-109 II
September 24, 2008 at 22:32 by Mike McQuaid
I used to run the server powering this site from my home internet connection but when I moved to getting the worst ISP of all time free with my job then this rapidly ran out of favour. The connection was slow, the router liked spontaneously rebooting and the Pentium 3 running it was using a lot of power and struggling somewhat with still being kept alive.
Eventually I got a shiny KVM virtual machine (which reboots and only takes the web server down for three seconds!) supplied by a friend which is treating me well.
The only problem now was I wanted a something that I could keep as an always-on fileserver for backups and various things I wanted an always-on system for. After a bit of hunting I found the QNAP TurboStation 109 II which has a 500Mhz ARM chip, 256MB of RAM, a speedy gigabit ethernet port, SATA and eSATA, USB ports, runs Linux and uses 14.4W on load and 6W idle.
By default it runs some crazy QNAP distribution but there is a (rock solid in my use) beta of Debian available for it, which has been done by one of the former Debian project leaders and is all-in-all a pretty nice experience. I have it now doing my regular incremental backups using rdiff-backup and running a few other miscellaneous servers, including CUPS for my printer which works amazingly.
I’ve had absolutely no problems with either the hardware or running Debian on it and I really recommend it to anyone looking for a (relatively) low-cost, low-power and low-hassle system to run as a small file-server.
Posted in Software
Spore
September 23, 2008 at 19:00 by Mike McQuaid
My recent forays into gaming on a computational device have taken me to playing Spore, the latest game from Maxis which bewilderingly doesn’t contain the word “Sim” anywhere in the title.
Personally, I hated all the SimCity games, I found them boring and directionless. I hated the Sims series, they just seemed to be either more boring than my life (in which case I wondering why I was playing them) or more exciting than my life (which made me sad 
). Reading most of the build-up for Spore made me think it was going to be just-another-boring-sim-game. When I read that Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilisation 4 (a game more addictive than any drug), was working on it my interest was piqued.
I got the Creature Creator partly as it was £5 and I thought it might entertain me for a few hours by creating some grotesque creatures and watch my girlfriend make some pretty ones but, despite my expectations, I actually ended up getting quite into it. The intuitiveness of the tool and the sheer variety of creatures that were getting created really excited me so I bought the game.
For the last two weeks I have been living like an addict, waiting to get the next fix of the game. I think yesterday evening may be the first since I bought it that I didn’t played it (instead I just read about computer games). I don’t just play for fun, I play to elevate the Globby Empire to greatness!
Xora is a friendly fellow. By which I mean he’s eaten all his fellow cells, ripped his fellow creatures to bits, massacred his fellow tribes, nuked his fellow civilisations and blown up the planets of his fellow space empires. In Spore you can be friendly, evil or somewhere in the middle. Sadly, blowing up planets and eating other creatures has proved to be far more fun than talking to them or forming trade routes.
I realise you don’t care about Xora or his mighty empire but you would if you’d created this creature from a single cell (with a mouth, but I’ll give Will Wright the right to give cells mouths) and evolved it to a mighty space-faring empire.
Really this is just a really fun game. It continuously rewards the player through the multiple stages and in-stage checkpoints and the badge/achievement system strongly appeals to the more obsessive types like me (HAVE TO GET THEM ALL) it’s just a really enjoyable experience. Add this on top of the ability to subscribe to Sporecasts and your friends feeds, meeting them in game and you just get a really fun community experience.
I highly recommend buying and playing Spore. It’s one of those incredibly innovative games that everyone should play, regardless of their preferred genre.
Posted in Games
