Back a long, long time ago, when computers had very little processing power and the idea of upgrading ones video card meant increasing your display from CGA to EGA or even VGA, adventure gaming was at the peak of it’s popularity.  As computers grew faster, video cards rendered in real-time and sound capabilities “blasted away the sound barrier”, PC gaming gave way to first person shooters and MMORPGs and the adventure game was almost forgotten.

There have been some attempts at reviving this long lost genre with such incredible games as The Longest Journey and it’s sequal, DreamFall, or Runaway: A Road Adventure and Siberia.  These were, and still are, great adventure games.  However, no major game publishers have released anything of significance in almost 10 years.  That is until the revival of the Monkey Island franchise.  Lucasarts teamed up with Telltale Games and released the next installment of Monkey Island, Tales of Monkey Island.  Lucasarts also made a, so I’ve heard, fantastic, remake of the original cult classic, The Secret of Monkey Island, which I have yet to replay.

So now on to the other part of this topic, Wine and Linux.  Windows and I do not mix, thus, I no don’t bother wasting my money and the hours of my life installing, fixing and maintaining a Windows installation.  However, when I heard Tales of Monkey Island was coming out I was tempted to toss an install on my system.  So I did.  This lasted about a week before dying.  So I figured I’d try ToMI under Wine in Linux.  I had little hope but lo and behold it worked almost without a hitch.  The version of wine I was running at the time was 1.1.25.  It installed fine but refused to register.  My laptop was running 1.0.1 of wine, it installed and registered fine on there.  So I copied the registry over to the desktop system running 1.1.25 and it worked.  One last problem was I was stuck in 1024×768 resolution.  Attempting to change resolutions caused the game to crash.  I started playing in this mode, as it’s not horrible, but after a quick search discovered a patch for Wine to fix the resolution.  So I pulled the latest sources from the git repository and let it compile with the defaults.  I needed to run ‘apt-get build-deps wine’ in Ubuntu Jaunty to allow gcc to build 32bit binaries on my 64bit system.  I also found that the latest git repositories had the patch included.

So I let it compile, after a good 30 minutes it finished.  I fired ToMI up under this new Wine and voila, everything works beautifully.  I spent some time this evening relaxing infront of a new Monkey Island game and have been enjoying every minute of it.  What a fantastic game this far!

Aside from an odd looking version of Guybrush, I still consider the Guybrush from Curse of MI to be the best, Dominic Armando reprises his roll of Guybrush and does an excellent job as usual.  Telltale did a fantastic job of capturing the Monkey Island feel from the prior games as well.  I also heard that, while not on the payroll, Ron Gilbert (original Monkey Island creator) lent a hand in the production of the game.

Definitely worth my $35.  I am so far more than happy and can’t wait to game some more tomorrow evening.

Yesterday I put a deposit down on a new turbocharged 2009 Chevy Cobalt SS.  I wrote up a nice post about it here on my car blog.

I received a free 4th Gen 20GB iPod some time ago and shortly after the hard drive failed.  I let it sit for some time and I just recently broke down and put an 8GB flash card in it.  However, I have no OS X or Windows.  I couldn’t get iTunes to work in Linux.  I actually came across someone elses blog detailing this but I didn’t bookmark it and can’t locate it.

If you have a fresh drive or flash card it needs to be partitioned correctly.  It needs a roughly 30MB primary partition of type ‘empty’, ’0′ if using fdisk.  Then the second partition needs to be FAT32.  Download the appropriate firmware from here: http://www.felixbruns.de/iPod/firmware/.  The firmware file, regardless of it’s extension is zipped.  Before we do anything, unzip it.  I used the 4th gen iPod firmware so it was along these lines:

# unzip iPod_10.3.1.1.ipsw

What you’ll be left with is ‘Firmware-10.3.1.1′ and ‘manifest.plist’.  We don’t need the package list for this, we are only interested in the firmware.

An empty iPod will default itself to disk mode when plugged in via USB.  So plug in the iPod and, if it’s not configured in fstab to mount, check, via dmesg, which dev device it was assigned.  On my system it gets assigned as sdc.  Now we will use the diskdump utility, ‘dd’, to dump the firmware on to the iPod’s first “empty” partition:

# dd if=Firmware-10.3.1.1 of=/dev/sdc1

Once this is done, unmount sdc2 if it was mounted automatically and unplug the iPod.  It will now reboot in to the new OS.  If you have a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th gen original iPod you will need the wall outlet power adapter to complete the upgrade.

This should also work for 3rd party firmware such as iPod Linux and Rockbox.

So today I get an e-mail at work from Laurie stating only “Call now!”.  However, that was a good 30 minutes before I got back to my desk at work to see it.  So since my cell phone reception is non existent from my desk I get up to head outside to make the call.  Halfway there I notice my cell phone battery is dead.  So back to my desk, I grab the phone and call.  The news I hear, Laurie’s pregnant!!!!!  Yay!!!!!   Given the time frame the baby should be born come late February early March.  Laurie took two EPT tests, one in the morning and one in the evening and both returned positive!

We are both so excited!!  However, on a side note there was some bad news.  No, not Michael Jackson dying and not Farrah Fawcett, my Mom fell at work today and broke her hip.  She was admitted in to the hospital this evening and will be meeting with the doctor to determine if she needs pins put in her hip or a hip replacement and then the surgery.    Everyone’s hoping that all goes well.  We’ll be visiting her shortly.

We bought a new dishwasher last Sunday mostly because our old dishwasher was recalled.  The recall was made because apparently if you use a dryer like JetDry it somehow eats through the reservoir damaging the wiring behind it and possibly causing a fire.  This was a GE dishwasher and GE offered a free repair where they pretty much replace the wires and seal off the JetDry container or a rebate towards a new GE dishwasher.  We opted to take the rebate.

So last Sunday we took a trip over to PC Richards and purchased a GE GLDA69cp01ww.  The dishwasher has a steel tub so it should last a long time and is definitely quiet.  Some of the material does seem a little cheap but the overall build seems very nice.  We took delivery of this washer this past Friday. So Thursday night I spent pulling the old one out and getting everything ready for the new one.  We bought the stainless steel hose for the water, so I got that all in place. I worked from home on Friday and later that day I installed the dishwasher.  It took about an hour and I ran in to no snags.  It was very simple, the water inlet line, the drain hose and a simple power connection and I ran it through a test cycle.

The feet on the dishwasher do sit back a bit further than the old one and the tile was cut out for this.  These cut-outs are now slightly exposed so I’ll have to fill them in with some brown grout when I get a chance.

We haven’t yet done our first load, as weekend dishes are generally less than weekday.  We’ll probably be doing our first load tomorrow night.

Earlier this week, Tuesday to be exact I bottled my beer.  My Dad gave me a bunch of glass bottles as well as a second bottling bucket.  So I used this second bucket to prime the beer with instead of priming each individual bottle.

I don’t know if this method payed off as there is more to clean and preparation still takes quite a bit of time.  In the end I had 12 16oz bottles and 32 12oz bottles, a total of roughly 624oz of beer (4.875) gallons.

My final gravity reading came out at 1.026, a little high.  My starting gravity was 1.057 meaning the alcohol is around 4.061%.  This is calculated with ( starting gravity – final gravity ) * 131 = ABV%.  (1.057-1.026)*131=4.061. The final gravity was a little high because I think I let the temperature get a little too high during the fermentation process so not all the sugar was used by the yeast.  This means I’ll probably have very carbonated beer and hopefully no bottle bombs.

I tried a little sample from the gravity reading I took and it tasted great.  We’ll see how it is after conditioning in another week and change.

On Monday we did our 3rd annual Memorial Day BBQ.  We had quite a good turn out and a ton of good food.

Connor ended up in his pool with some guns and a beer…

We did end up with a bit of a grease fire the burned a good 3 – 4ft high and singed my hair, eyebrows and eyelashes…

But the food came out great and everyone had a good time.

And thanks again to Brent for helping us clean up after the BBQ, loan me parts for demandred, help me put demandred together and help us with clean up after Connor!

All the pictures from the day are in our photo gallery.

When you take your hydrometer reading you need to adjust the results based on the temperature of the wort.  Thanks to Ryan for pointing this out to me and for this link:

http://www.ebrew.com/primarynews/ct_hydrometer_temp_correction.htm

I took my reading at ~85*F.  Based on that chart I would nbeed to add roughly 0.003 to my reading.  My original reading was 1.054, so this brings it to 1.057.  Within 0.001 of what the kit estimated starting gravity should be at.

I am really looking forward to this beer to finish up.  In another week I’ll be bottling it and it will take ~2 weeks to condition it.  Cheers!

Back in the day I ran a BBS using Renegade BBS software.  I’ve been trying over time to  get this running again.  There are quite a few updated BBSs out there that support Linux and telnet services out of the box; however, I want to get my original BBS running again.  I also have a soft spot for Renegade.

After numerous attempts using dosemu under Linux, WINE, VMware running FreeDOS and implementing my own virtual modem service written in Perl but I just couldn’t get things working right.  As it turns out there’s this nifty set of programs that are part of NetFoss.  NetFoss itself is a fossil driver (communication driver talks between BBS software and modem) but also includes a complete telnet server as well for handling telnet communication with the BBS.  However, this is designed for Windows XP.  So I decided to throw a quick XP install in to a VM and fire this all up.

Please note, to the best of my knowledge this does not work in 64bit Windows XP or IIRC, Vista.  It requires the 16bit NT Virtual Dos Machine (NTVDM), included in XP (and WINE) only under 32bit implementations.

The Windows XP system is running under VMware Server 2.0 on an Ubuntu Server 8.04.2 LTS Linux installation.  The hardware is fairly old, Athlon XP 1700+ w/ 1.5GB of RAM.  I gave the VM 256MB of RAM and 4GB of hard drive space.  Everything appears to run quite well.  Especially considering the server itself is already handling quite a few other tasks.

Documentation is pretty much non-existent for this so I am documenting this for myself and others. It’s very rough and by no means 100% complete. My goal is to be able to easily get a Renegade BBS running over telnet and work with a number of common doors.

Start by downloading the renegade package which includes NetFoss:

http://renegade.bigbig.com/rgv100f.zip

Unzip it and run the installer. This will create the basic BBS structure. Next, copy C:rgnetfossnetfoss.dll c:windowssystem32. Please, replace ‘rg’ and ‘windows’ with your actual paths. The next thing to do is make the necessary changes to the ‘net2bbs.ini’ and ‘nf.bat’ files.

Use the sample net2bbs.ini they give you and alter it to the following:

     [Settings]
     Command=c:rgnetfossnf.bat /n*N /h*H c:rgrenegade -n*N -Q -B115200
     StartPath=c:rg
     Port=23
     Nodes=256
     StartNode=1
     Debug=1
     View=Normal
     Log=net2bbs.log
     Semaphore=wait.sem
     KillList=kill.txt
     KillMsg=You are not welcome here.
     KillMsgFile=goaway.ans
     Editor=notepad.exe
     Resolve=1
     ResolveMsg=Resolving your IP Address, One moment...

They key change here is the ‘Command=’ and ‘StartPath’ lines. Change those to your Renegade paths. Then we specify the node ‘-n*N’, ‘-Q’ to tell Renegade to quit after the connection is gone and ‘-B115200′ to set the baud rate.

Now the ‘nf.bat’ file needs a couple of minor changes. First add ‘%1′ to the first netfoss line and change all the paths. I used the default ‘rg’ path with my install and the file looks like this:

@echo off
c:rgnetfossnetfoss.com %1
rem ** If running a non-door32.sys system, add a " %1" to end of above line **
if errorlevel 1 goto end
c:rgnetfossnetcom.exe %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
c:rgnetfossnetfoss.com /u
:end

Okay, we’re all set. Run ‘net2bbs.exe’, make sure port 23 isn’t firewalled and attempt to connect to it. You should see the connection being made in the dos window.  Once the connection is successfully made another dos window will appear with the BBS running in it.

A basic Renegade BBS has now been started. Have fun configuring the rest of the system!

On a side note, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows don’t include very good ANSI terminals.  I came across this excellent one written for all 3 operating systems as well as a few other popular ones that handles ANSI emulation beautifully as well as being fully featured and it reminds me of the old school dialer terminals from the 80s.

SyncTERM

And I created a simple mirror on my BBS server here:

SyncTERM Mirror

This does a near perfect emulation and can run in full-screen mode as well.  I highly, highly recommend this.

So yesterday (Saturday) I brewed my Irish Red.  A lot of “firsts” with this brew.  It was my first kit from MoreBeer, my first time doing a 3 gallon partial boil and my first time using live yeast.  All-in-all it went very well and I really enjoyed it.

I started around 2PM, but got everything together earlier in the day.  It took just under two hours to get everything done, but took longer to cool.  Once I got everything in the fermenter I still had the wort at 90*F.  So I had to wait a while to allow it to cool.  I finally pitched the yeast when it was at 82*F.  I would have liked it cooler, but it was getting late and I needed to finish cleaning up.

By the this morning it had started fermenting and by this evening there’s quite a head of foam on it.  I have 5 gallons in the fermenter and it’s looking great.  I have the fermenter in the garage and manged to get it cooled down to 66*F now.  Hopefully I can keep the garage cool, in a few days we’ll be getting in to the low 80s…

The starting gravity was 1.054, the kit estimated it should be around 1.058, so that looks good.  I’ll be able to bottle this batch with all glass bottles.  My Dad has quite a few left over from when he brewed some beer quite a number of years back.

I have more pictures here:

http://demandred.dyndns.org/photos/homebrew-051609