Save the Hobbit pub!
**UPDATE** It looks like an offer is being made to the Hobbit pub owners to pay a nominal £100 license fee to stay as they are. You can read the details in a BBC article.
There’s this LOTR themed pub in Portswood, Southampton in England, United Kingdom that’s being threatened with being forced to remove all Hobbit, Lord of the rings branding and theme.
The Hobbit pub website here:
The Hobbit pub
The article in question:
BBC article about the Hobbit pub.
There’s a “Save the Hobbit pub” facebook page as well if you want to support them.
and the actual Hobbit pub facebook page.
I have been to this pub and it’s great fun, with hobbit styled menus, drinks etc etc..
I guess the movie studios want them out due to the the up and coming Hobbit movie, but this pub has been around for about 20 years so it seems very unfair.
Someone has commented below on this blog that this isn’t the first time the same firm has sued for brand infringement. The “Hungry Hobbit” in Birmingham, England is also being sued. Birmingham mail article here. I wonder if they can get some support somehow by the public?
Topics: Tabletop Roleplaying Games, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Fixed: Samsung 22 Inch 226BW flickering monitor.
My Samsung 226BW 22 inch LCD monitor started flickering on and off recently.
After some searching online it turned out this particular model of the the Samsung range, 226BW had dodgy capacitors.
So I found this YT video which shows you how to replace the dodgy capacitors.
Sure enough, after opening up my monitor, the capacitors in the video were the culprits.
A few quid on some new capacitors and some soldering and it’s as good as new.
Happy bunnies.
Just goes to show you can fix stuff with a bit of research.
Topics: Gadgets, Networking and PCs | No Comments »
Free Daz Studio 4 Pro, Bryce 7 Pro, Hexagon 2.5
Here’s a nice offer I found, DAZ are offering Daz Studio 4 Pro, Bryce 7 Pro and Hexagon 2.5 for FREE! I expect they’re coming out with a new version or something soon. Whatever the case, grab it while it lasts.
https://www.daz3d.com/i/3d/free-3d-software-overview?home_5_btn=start
Topics: Networking and PCs | No Comments »
Creating meeting rooms using Exchange 2007
So a user wanted to create a “Meeting Room” via Outlook/Exchange 2007. After some investigation I found this can;t be done via the Outlook client. It has to be done within Exchange 2007 itself. It’s pretty straight forward really. You create a new mailbox as a type “Room” and set it to auto accept.
The exact process below:
Topics: Microsoft Exchange 2007 | No Comments »
Pathfinder Roleplaying game Core rules
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook by Jason Bulmahn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Many years ago in my teens, I played “Advanced Dungeons and dragons 1st Edition” and had a great time with it. After playing 2nd Edition dungeons and Dragons for a while and generally being unimpressed, I moved onto other RPGs (Stormbringer, Runequest, Rolemaster etc etc). This means I missed the whole 3rd Edition and and 3.5 Edition DnD.
Anyway fast forward many years to when Pathfinder was released and what drew it to me was all the rules in large tome. I don’t like everything about pathfinder, but it works well and it’s easy to get players for.
If you want a good old fashioned, high powered, fantasy romp with RPG adventures, then Pathfinder is your game.
View all my reviews
Topics: Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Tabletop Roleplaying Games | No Comments »
DragonWarriors Fantasy RPG
Dragon Warriors RPG by Oliver Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Dragon Warriors is an easy to learn and play RPG.
It’s has the feel of a more “old School” Fantasy RPG. At first glance this game looks very simplistic and the rules ARE pretty basic, but easily adaptable. Using the rules in their core form is perfect for running a European style Fantasy RPG (there is some support for Eastern style playing, but not much).
If you’re sick of complicated rules and combats taking an hour to resolve, then Dragon Warriors is your game, it runs VERY quickly but is actually pretty deadly.
I would call it a Gritty, Low Magic, Fantasy RPG.
Topics: Tabletop Roleplaying Games | No Comments »
Hate Google Chrome Print Preview (as it messes up printing)? Then read this:
It seems that the Google Chrome browser print preview function, which seems to be mandatory messes up printing from the browser.
So if you’re on a site and want to print a recipe or something, from Chrome, when you select “Print” it pops up with a “Print Preview” page before you can print it.
This sounds great, apart from this print preview page won;t actually print successfully when you actually goto print (however printing from anything else works fine.
So anyway, the workaround if you want to continue to use Chrome is to disable Print preview via the shortcut with an extension modification as follows (assumes Windows 7, but is probably similar for other Windows OSs):
If you have the shortcut pinned on your taskbar, unpin it, then find the chrome shortcut on your desktop (or wherever) and modify as below.
Then pin it.
Note: Replace the text “YOURUSERID” with the userID name on your PC.
Before
C:\Users\YOURUSERID\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
After
C:\Users\YOURUSERID\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –disable-print-preview
Here’s a link to the article where I found the solution:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=72d06845756f9ce7
Topics: Networking and PCs | No Comments »
Up and coming Computer Action RPGs
I thought it would be nice to post some Action Computer RPGs that are coming up this year (or possibly early next year).
Well everyone knows of Diablo 3 coming out this year some time, but apparently it’s loaded with DRM, auction houses and you must be online to play it. The other thing that made me laugh was they have “Premium” forums what you’re expected to pay a fee to get access to. Anyway, the website below:
http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/
I must say it does look awesome, but I will probably give Diablo 3 a miss due to the above issues. It looks like a big hassle to play and a money sink.
Another game is Grim Dawn, made by the makers of Titan quest, a very good ancient Greek RPG. Grimdawn looks like a more traditional fantasy action RPG in a Western European type Fantasy setting. If it’s as good as Titan quest was, it’ll be good fun.
http://www.grimdawn.com/about.php
Another offer coming up some time this year is Torchlight 2. Torchlight 1 was a good fun budget single player Action RPG. Quite good fun. Torchlight 2 will also be a budget release and will offer multiplayer suppoer, over the internet and LAN. This feels more like what a Diablo successor should look like to me.
http://www.torchlight2game.com/
Another interesting RPG is “Path of exile”. It’s only in beta ATM but it looks like fun. This one looks like it’s going to be a MMORPG where as the earlier ones I linked aren’t MMORPGs. When it goes live it will have a free to play model. I assume they will have various purchase options for character slots, equipment etc. Still it might be fun.
http://www.pathofexile.com/
I would note many of the existing MMORPGs these days have free to play options, even WoW is free up until lvl 20 now. Makes me wonder if there’s too many MMORPGs out there and they have to change their model from subs to free with microtransactions.
Topics: Computer Gaming | No Comments »
Kobo Touch: “Cover Up” cover review.
I’ve created a Kobo Touch “Cover up” cover review. I recently felt the need to get some sort of a cover for my Kobo Touch as it gets shoved in my backpack when I’m out and about and it needs some protection from scuffs and drops. Video below:
I quite like that it doesn’t use elastic straps to hold it in as to me that sort of thing looks cheap and nasty. When reading in bed, the spine can be bent back quite nicely so you don’t have to hold it up with both hands. I generally just leave it open on my lap or table or whatever when reading it sitting up.
Topics: Gadgets | No Comments »
Office 2010 SP1 install “failed to install” and solution.
So a new PC came in today to set up. It was installed with Windows 7, 64 bit. It had pre-installed Office Home and business 2010 32 bit installed. I noticed that it didn’t have Service pack 1 installed, so I tried to install it. However when running the install I eventually got a popup just saying “Service pack failed to install”.
So tried a few things like copy to my desktop from the network drive and running it from there, no dice.
I then checked the “%temp” folder and found the SP1 install log that was complaining about registry permissions.
I then did a bit of googling and found this tip on Addictive tips . I just tried the following command as suggested: “secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose”. This did the trick for me…
There’s some other suggestions on that link should that command fail.
Topics: Networking and PCs | No Comments »
Archives causing Outlook 2010 to crash and freeze up PC.
Ever since installing Office 2010 on some PCs (and only on Windows 7 PCs) I have found that when attaching archives (whether imported from previous version of outlook or created new in Outlook 2010) , after a while Outlook just crashed and additionally often Windows itself would freeze up so you’d have to manually power off and restart.
The only way to fix this was to remove the archive from Outlook 2010 and then all is well. Obviously not a satisfactory fix.
So I tried a lot of different things to fix this, such as Outlook rebuilds, running repairs on the archives, checking permissions and so on.
Eventually I found that during my investigations the Office 2010 Service pack 1 was released. After installing this the crashing stopped. So clearly Microsoft must have put some sort of fix in place.
Topics: Networking and PCs | No Comments »
Outlook 2010, HTML Emails cut short, Corrupted, malformed.
A couple of Outlook 2010 (although there WAS one Outlook 2007 user with the same problem) users were complaining that emails that have had HTML copy/pasted from Bugzilla reports were getting cut off halfway after that have sent them out. Strangely the first time they sent them out, it was fine. They often send the email to themselves as a test to make sure it looks ok and then send that email out again which then had half the email cut off, corrupting the report.
To be fair, the Bugzilla reports they copy/paste the HTML from are extremely long and complicated and I’m amazed doing that sort of thing actually works anyway, however for most people it does.
So again, after much long winded investigations to do with formatting, a repair install of Outlook, service packs and generally changing loads of settings.
Finally I found what the problem was.
There’s a setting found in the mail formatting options described as “Reduce the file size of the message by removing formatting information that is not necessary to display the e-mail message”. when this was unchecked the user’s Bugzilla reports emailed went out properly.
Topics: Networking and PCs | No Comments »
Hyper V R2, SBS2008 Virtual machine intermittent slowdown.
One of the Virtual machines I support is a SBS2008 machine. Ever since I created it, I noticed that every minute or so it just stops for a few seconds, then comes back (although no tasks are lost, they just get queued).
I’ve spent quite some time investigating this and tried many things, such as making various adjustments to the resource allocated to the virtual machine, such as allocated RAM, Virtual processors, run priorities etc etc…
The solution ended up being to do with the origins of the Virtual machine. This particular virtual machine was originally a Physical server that was converted to a Virtual machine. It was originally on a HP server (A HP DL385 G6). I had thought I’d removed all the HP specific programs, such as hardware managers and so on. BUT after a good examination of all services installed on the server, there were still a couple of services active and running. after shutting these services down AND disabling them, the server ran fine.
Lesson learned. When converting a Physical server to a Virtual machine, make sure you go through ALL installed programs, services etc and remove them if they’re no longer necessary.
Topics: HyperV R2 | No Comments »
Kobo Touch Ereader vs Kindle Review
Kobo Touch Ereader
I got a Kobo Touch Ereader recently. I managed to get it from the USA, as it’s not released over here in the UK yet.
The Kindle
I’ve been wanting to get an eReader for some time, but the Kindle, although popular and a decent eReader has some limitations that I wasn’t too happy about, namely:
- It doesn’t support the EPUB format, so no borrowing books from the library or buying books from other sources. Of course you COULD convert for example EPUB books to MOBI using say the Calibre Ebook software but I’d rather not have to go about doing that if I don’t have to.
- You’re locked into the Mobi format, which you’d have to convert to use on other Ereaders.
- No external storage, you’re stuck with the 4gb internal storage.
- No touch screen. I prefer to use a touch screen to buttons.
The Kobo Touch
The advantages of the Kobo are as follows:
- It DOES support the EPUB format, It doesn’t support the Mobi format, but really there’ s plenty of places to to buy ebooks and if for some reason I could only get a ebook from Amazon, I could always convert it to EPUB using the Calibre ebook software although I’d rather not have to do this, but there’s plenty of other Ebook sales sources online anyway.
- It supports external Storage via a MicroSD card slot on the side of the ereader up to 32GB.
- It has a touch screen. This means the physical size of the ereader is smaller than the Kindle and the actual readable screen size is the same as the Kindle as well.
- The Kobo Touch is slightly cheaper, only by about $10-$20 USD, but still better in my pocket than theirs.
Unboxing, Accessories and Software
When the Kobo Touch Arrived, it came in a white box quite well packaged, and came with very sparse documentation. Not that that really mattered, it just said to download the latest Kobo Desktop software. It also came with a mini USB cable, used to charge the Kobo Touch via connecting it to a PC.
So, after unpacking it and briefly reading the guidesheet, I downloaded the latest Kobo Desktop software and installed it.
Setup
The software prompted me to create a Kobobooks User ID, a straight-forward process. I then plugged in the Kobo Touch and it immediately prompted me to update to the firmware, which again was pretty straight-forward.
After that I downloaded loads of free EPUB ebooks from the kobo books website, which again was really easy to do.
If you have you own EPUBS (or whatever formats you use) you can download the Calibre Ebook Management Software. This is a 3rd party program, but works quite well and allows you to convert all sorts of ereader formats around, in this case it’s useful to convert pretty much any format (including MOBI) to EPUB.
eReading!
After that I just got down to actually reading!
Using the Kobo Touch is very easy and for the most part has a very responsive touch screen, but evey now and then, it has a strange delay. Sometimes (maybe every 20 or so touches) it doesn’t recognise the touch and I have to tap the screen again, however the firmware updates are coming out pretty fast to sort out issues and add new features. So maybe this will get sorted soon.
Holding onto the Kobo Touch is easy enough as it’s pretty light and you page forward and backwards by tapping on the right hand of the screen to go forwards and the left to go backwards. However you can swipe in the direction you want from either side as well should you be left handed.
I also put a few comics on it, although comics with small text are quite difficult to read, as I assume they were created to originally be viewed over a larger area (like A4 or something).
One of the other reasons I wanted to get an Ereader was to store computer manuals on it. I’ve had mixed success with this. PDFs that have a lot of images and so on designed to be displayed as an A4 size did not convert well to EPUB. lots of weird artifacts and bad image placement. But if the PDF is mostly text (I.E. like a novel), then it converts well. You CAN display PDFs directly on the Kobo touch but you can’t resize fonts and other features. You can zoom in but then not all the PDF can be displayed at once on the screen, which then creates an unwieldy window. All in all Ereaders in general are too small (in physical size) to display A4 size documents properly.
The Kobo Touch also has Wifi connectivity support up to WPA2 (private) encryption. it works ok, but I don’t use it much. Mostly to update the firmware and sync with the Kobo store.
I did notice occasionally my saved Wifi connections didn’t work properly and I had to recreate them. That was quite annoying, but will probably get sorted in a future firmware update.
All in all I’m pretty happy with the Kobo Touch and except the few niggles it has will get sorted out with future Firmware updates.
Topics: Gadgets | 13 Comments »
SBS2008, 2 DNS entries for server, but only one Network adaptor
Here’s an obscure one. I noticed there were 2 DNS entries for our main server (SBS2008) , which is odd, as there’s only one Network adaptor.
This was causing all sorts of DNS problems, as this rogue IP address was getting a DNS entry with the same name as our DC (the server in question). So anyway I went looking all over for this rogue IP address, I could even remote desktop to the server using it, so it was active.
In the end I found that RAS (Remote access) sets up a new IP address with a sort of virtual Network adaptor for remote clients to access the system with. This is normal and correct. However what you must ensure is that you must go into DNS management, right click on the Server name, take properties and on the interfaces tab, you will see this IP address. Change “Listen on” to “only on the following IP addresses” and untick all IP addresses that are not the IP address of the DNS server, of course ensuring the IP address of youre DNS server is ticked!
That’s it, I hope it helps someone out there, it was very frustrating to find the cause of this issue.
Topics: Networking and PCs | No Comments »
Neverwinter Nights 1 and persistent worlds
Many moons ago (Circa 1999) there was a Computer Roleplaying Game called “Neverwinter Nights”. This was made by Bioware and based on the Version 3 Dungeons and Dragons rules.
This game was hugely successful, not so much for the single player aspect of the game, but that you could create Modules/worlds etc of your own using a toolset provided with the game. Over the years the game had 2 expansion packs, Shadows of Uthrendtide and Hordes of the Underdark. Hordes of the Underdark introduced “Persistence” functionality which allowed a home server running to save and keep continuity for online gameplay.
Anyway, I was a big fan of all of this and played in many online persistent worlds and even had a go at it myself. I did eventually play the single player (actually you can play the original story and the first expansion in multiplayer) campaign and the expansions, but the big draw for me was the online play. So I played this game for some years, eventually growing bored of it and playing other games.
However recently one of the players in a Tabletop roleplaying game I run decided to dig out his old Neverwinter Nights server and fire it up again and work on desigining and running a Persistent world again. I took an interest in this and created a forum for Neverwinter Nights on the forum list for this site where we can keep a track of the developments and discuss etc.
So I’m going to have a go at helping out, maybe create some content for it, testing and even playing.. Nothing like a bit of retro gaming. I actually had a go at playing the first exapnsion “Shadows of Uthrendtide” and quite enjoyed myself. The graphics are quite dated, but the gameplay is great. Normally I don’t like going back and playing computer games from yesteryear as it’s almost always disappointing, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised.
Topics: Computer Gaming | No Comments »
Hyper-V R2, Server 2008 R2 Clustered servers and Clustered Shared Volumes
I finally finished virtualising our SBS2008 server. It was quite a convoluted process as I was limited with what hardware was available.
Anyway, I have 2 * HP DL385 G6 servers in a Cluster running Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V R2 on them.
I then used a 2TB SAN to store the VMs on to act as the Clustered Shared Volume.
Thereafter I converted the SBS2008 server to a VM and joined it to the Cluster and Clustered Shared Volume.
As the SBS2008 box is also acting as the DC on top of it’s existing functions (Exchange 2007 etc, etc) I also have a separate Physical Server2008 box running as an additional DC (Excluding FSMO roles) so if/when I need to power down both Hyper-V hosts the Cluster will still start up. This is because a CSV will not start if the Host Servers have not started up as a member of a DC. So there MUST be an external DC running for them to start up on. See the MS best practices document for details.
Next step is to create a new Server 2008 R2 Virtual machine and take away some of the tasks the SBS2008 box is doing, such as migrating Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010.
Topics: HyperV R2 | No Comments »
Mongoose Runequest 2 > Wayfarer > Legend
Mongoose Publishing, the makers of many games, including MRQ2, recently dropped the Glorantha gaming world, this meant also having to drop the Runequest name. So they initially decided to go with renaming MRQ2 to Wayfarer.
For whatever reasons, most likely as there was already an RPg called Wayfarers out there, they renamed to Legend instead.
Interestingly the renamed product is going to be republished in a Digest format, roughly half the size of the normal A4 book size. I DO really like the original MRQ2 leather bound gamebooks, I think it could be quite nice to have the rules in a smaller format. We’ll see when it released I guess, due out around the end of 2011.
Hopefully they’ll keep support the Elric game that hangs off the MRQ2/Legend system.
Topics: Mongoose Runequest 2 Roleplaying Game, Tabletop Roleplaying Games | 1 Comment »
Installed WP-reCAPTCHA spam blocking plugin for WordPress
I’ve found since I’ve installed WordPress on my site I’ve been getting loads of spam in the comments boxes.
To stop this I’ve installed WP-reCAPTCHA a visual verification function to block bots etc. So far it seems to be working very well. If you have WordPress, it’s worth getting this, especially as it’s free.
08/06/2011
I’ve had this installed for a few days now and no spam! Yay it works really well, highly recommended! 
Topics: Web-Site Development | No Comments »
Office 2010 Professional Plus encountered an error during setup
Whilst setting up a PC with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit I was setting up OFfice Professional Plus 2010, 64 bit. I got this strange message during the install “Office 2010 Professional Plus encountered an error during setup”. No futher information like an error code that might actually be helpful. So anyway, after some experimentation I searched the temp folder ( Type %temp% from a command prompt) and found lots of logs files in there. So next I deleted the contents of the temp folder and re-ran the install. Sure enough it came back with the error.
So I then went back into the temp folder and found some setup log files. After quick scan towards the bottom I found an error code 1603 mentioned. So then a quick google search and I found this page detailing error codes. So a file was locked.
After that I simply rebooted and the install completed ok. I assume some process was holding files required by the install.
Topics: Networking and PCs | 2 Comments »
