Battle Chair Design – Revision 1

Front View

When used for gaming, laptops tend to over heat, and eventually they destroy their video cards. My Alienware m15x laptop, while it seems to have good cooling, has had 4 new video cards in the last 3 years. I have wanted to use a desktop for gaming, but prefer to do most of my playing from the comfort of my recliner. Here is the start of an idea to accomplish that. Missing from the renderings are the arm that holds the monitor from the case to the right of the recliner to the monitor in front of me. As  you can see the computer case is very large. I’ve provided for a UPS in the cabinet since in my area all my computers require a UPS due to frequent power glitches that would cause an unprotected computer to reboot. Click on pictures for larger views. Continue reading “Battle Chair Design – Revision 1”

Wow – Realm Design Has Problems

World of Warcraft

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. While the game has much to recommend it, especially since they have a trial or starter edition that is free-to-play [up to level 20], it has a serious problem with its design of “realms” or “shards” as some games call it.

“Shards” or “Realms” of course is the name used  for the “instances” of the server that are required to support very large numbers of players. These games are MMO – Massively Multi-Player – and “Persistent” which means that they do not place players in private “instances” of the game as they play. But it is not possible to have hundreds of thousands of players all playing in the same server at the time. How is the game going to solve the problem when thousands of players show up in the same town at the same time for a party or just to hang out on a Saturday night?

Well the point is that World of Warcraft solves this problem very badly. There are better solutions out there. Let’s look at the Wow solution and then look at some other games and see much better solutions. Continue reading “Wow – Realm Design Has Problems”

TomTom – Wow Addon for Mapping

World of Warcraft has a free to play starter edition with restrictions. Some are:

  • No Trading. They are preventing trial accounts from being used as farmers apparently.
  • Can’t invite players to Groups [Parties].
  • Can’t whisper unless they are a friend.
  • Can’t use mailbox. Again the farming problem.
  • Not all races are available.
  • Characters are capped at level 20 out of 85.

But you can have up to 10 characters per account so you can explore a lot of the world and figure out how things work.

Add Ons EcoSystem

World of Warcraft has a huge ecosystem of AddOns that add and change functions of the program. I needed a way to see my coordinates on the map to match up with quest descriptions. There are a ton of map addons so I chose a simple one. You can find TomTom here and comment on it here.

Compass without TomTom
Compass with TomTom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the compass of Wow without TomTom – Where Am I? With TomTom no problem I get the coords at the bottom. Continue reading “TomTom – Wow Addon for Mapping”

Guild Wars – Mercenaries Build Powerful Teams

Mercenary Party

Guild Wars recently added “Mercenaries” which are ways to add the other players in your account to your list of heroes – or players that you control as part of your team. Heroes were added with the “Nightfall” expansion and at that time were characters that you gained by progressing in the game. Nightfall had about a dozen heroes, and the “Eye of the North” expansion added many more heroes to this list, but still with the idea that you gained heroes by doing quests.

Mercenaries allows you to build your own heroes in two ways:

  1. Use the other level 20 PVP or PVE characters in your account as heroes.
  2. Create a PVP character in your account, use it as a hero, and then delete it.

Continue reading “Guild Wars – Mercenaries Build Powerful Teams”

CyberWar – The War is On

Cyber War

As I write this we are seeing daily reports of hacking and break-ins to commercial and defense enterprises world wide:

But it seems we are not doing a set of straight forward things that we can do to prepare for and mitigate the impact that cyber war is having on this country. We can start with some simple and comparatively inexpensive steps.

Continue reading “CyberWar – The War is On”

Whither Apps?

What’s the big deal with apps over webpages?

Short History Lesson

In the day of the web, starting 20 years ago, say 1990, web pages were all the rage. By 2000 we had the (dot)com boom. Nobody was talking Apps then. We weren’t writing hundreds of thousands of apps for our PCs then. The concept of having a single program on the PC that could display hundreds of thousands of websites was the way things went. We could have had a PC app boom then. Continue reading “Whither Apps?”

VirtualBox – Ubuntu Host / Guest

VirtualBox

Installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu x64. At first there was a problem: starting Guest hung system. But this problem was eventually found as a BIOS setting. Avoid enabling Limit CPUID MaxVal in BIOS when using VMM. Now system is working fine. At first, VBox installed from Ubuntu PPA, but then removed that and installed as per this page. Either would probably work fine since problem was BIOS setting.

Now have Ubuntu x86 and x86 guests running on x64 system.

Clean systems are now available for testing programs in both x86 and x64.

– ww

VirtualBox OSE on Ubuntu 11.04 – Won’t Start

Update: Problem found. In BIOS DISABLE Limit CPUID MaxVal – Set Limit CPUID MaxVal to 3. Should be Disabled for Win XP. I had enabled this when I enabled VT-X support. VirtualBox works fine now. I have updated to Vbox 4.0.8 by installing from their PPA, but VirtualBox 4.0.4 OSE from Ubuntu PPA probably works just fine too. Both Ubuntu x86 and x64 guests work fine on Ubuntu x64 host.

Host: Ubuntu 11.04 x64 – VirtualBox-OSE 4.04 r70112 installed via package manager.

Guest: Ubuntu 11.04- but I never get that far.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400. with VT-X extensions. Enabled in BIOS.

  • How can the problem be found?
  • What can be tried to get this going?

Thanks,

ww

Guest is as follows: Guest_Ubuntu_32bit_Config