LANCOZA Blog

I have been looking for a complete solution for my multi-media centre requirements for quite some time. The original problem was in finding a device that could accomodate the plethora of media types that exist in the wild. With the mainstreaming of HD television's , HD media has become far more prevalent and with it the MKV container.

The other problem was in connecting the device to my Home Theatre system without too many wires snaking across the floor. I received a Eureka media player as a present and it works very well but it does not have a network connection which is a serious weakness and it cannot play MKV files.

My ideal media player was the Mvix with its network connection although it too cannot play MKV files. The price is prohibitive and I could never really justify the purchase. With the WD TV Live , my world has been rocked. It can play the full gamut of media types - including MKV, it accomodates any USB drive and has a network connection. In addition it has a Full-HD 1080p output and can connect to a USB wireless adapter so that there is not need for a network cable snaking across the lounge. It is also priced at about half the cost of an MVix which really seals the deal for me.

If I am very good, perhaps Santa will drop one off at my house this year - who knows ...

But as it turns out, a really cool toy . Not worth the price that they charge for it, so if you are keen on the Modern Warfare 2 Night Vision Edition, you should wait until it gets a nice fat discount - which I think will happen soon.

The only limited edition accessories that I am interested in are figurines or something practical , like a steel lunchbox .

I did not plan on upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 but when my network manager crashed and took 9.04 with it, I had no choice. I figured that upgrading to 9.10 would be as much work as re-installing/repairing 9.04

As it turns out, my 9.10 upgrade did not go very smoothly and that may or may not have been related to the power failure that dropped my box shortly before completion. I resumed the upgrade, manually installed the Microsoft TTF fonts and all was well.

I have not had much time to play with 9.10, 23h30 is way past my bedtime. If the spirit moves me, I may do some fiddling later this week, else I may get to sleep alot earlier.

It looks like Tycho from Penny Arcade was right when he said that the PC-gamer demographic is not the core segment of the video game market. The latest news from Infinity Ward is that the PC multi-player mode has been reduced to 18 players from 32 in the original game.

Added to the fact that there will be no dedicated game servers, it really looks like the twilight of PC gaming as a platform distinct from console gaming. Is this a good thing? I have long since stopped using my PC as a  gaming platform. My 360 is currently the only platform that I game on if you discount my dusty PSP. With the convenient, multiplayer games afforded by Live, I really don't miss anything about PC gaming, especially the routine hardware upgrades that gaming PCs required. I will accept the 'degraded' controls and graphics in favour of a more accessible gaming experience.

But why does it feel like a part of me died...

Now that my graphics card driver is working as it should, I have returned to the loving arms of AWN . I still have to do a bit of tweaking and add a few launchers but aside from a tiny bit of lag, I am all set.

I am considering testing Gnome-Do again because it is far easier on the resources but AWN is so pretty, I might just live with the lag.

The recent announcement by Infinity Ward to replace dedicated game servers with a console-style match making service has been universally panned by the PC gaming demographic.

I have spent more time on Live than I have on PC game servers. And my time on Live has also been spent on private parties rather than trawling the net for a random game. I have spoken to friends who have spent alot of time on game servers especially playing Counter Strike and Call of Duty. The idea of eliminating the game servers is quite repugnant to them. As ever the guys over at Penny-Arcade have managed to summarise the entire tragi-comedy quite succinctly in their own unique style . While you are there you should also check out their take on babicide .

After much installation and re-installation, I finally managed to get my ancient Ati Radeon 7000 working with AWN .

Initially I thought that the problem was the low spec of my graphics card. But after breaking my graphics card driver a few times, I finally purged my Xorg.conf file and this fixed everything. It only took two hours. I have not had a chance to play with AWN because to my great shame I created an XP/Ubuntu dual boot and have been spending alot of my time in XP.

Ubuntu 9.10 has been released and although I am tempted to see what's new in this version, I also do not want to break my graphics card driver until I have had time to play with AWN some more.

Firefox is a great web browser because of all it's community created plugins - but it has also become a CPU and memory hog.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 recently and in the process of restoring all my settings and data, I decided to re-visit Opera . It consumes less CPU and RAM than Firefox and seems quicker. The downside is that it does not have the same plugin support as Firefox but this is a sacrifice that I am prepared to make.

I also sold my Core 2 PC and am currently working on my 5 year old AMD Athlon. What I have noticed is that if you want to work in a pretty GUI, then you have to have a decent graphics card - even in Linux. The really old, unsupported Radeon 7000 that I have is barely making the grade. Compiz is not an option, nor are any of the really pretty docks that I have found. Gnome-Do is just too slow to be a workable option. Cairo Dock and AWN are complete non starters, every time I tried to click anything with those docks installed, my CPU spiked to 100% for several seconds and then dropped.

 The really great thing about Linux on an old box is that I get better performance  because I am not running any anti-virus software. When I boot to XP on the same PC, I notice a significant drop in performance.

I finally got around to testing my WebAfrica trial account and everything seems to work. The account is definitely not as fast or stable as my normal account but this is expected. Web pages all load normally except this morning Kotaku's page formatting was not working and this persisted regardless of which web browser I used.

Still no word on the reduced pricing that WebAfrica has promised but I think that this will only happen once the trial is done.

Web Africa recently announced that they have become a first tier ISP and are busy testing a new service using a few thousand trial accounts.They also hinted at a price drop which is very promising. I buy IS local and International bandwidth and I have noticed that my web browsing is noticibly faster, my downloads are also quicker with average speeds of 40kb/s and spikes of between 42 and 50kb/s. Initially I thought this was simply anomalous reporting by my web browser but this has happened consistently over several weeks.

Given that the Seacom cable has been live for a few months now, I think that we will see incremental changes in products and pricing towards the end of this year and early next year.

I received my Web Africa test account on Friday and to my great shame have not even logged into it yet, let alone downloaded anything. I will have to remedy that soon, I think a good start will be a few Xbox demos.