December 20th, 2010
Toker
Well, Christmas time is nearly here, and as much as I hate all the adverts on telly, its a great time of year to get snowed in, crack out the old computer games and put your feet up on the computer for warmth. With this in mind, I’ve written a little guide for getting C&C The first Decade working on a modern Windows 7 system.
Command and Conquer; Tiberian Dawn came out in 1995 and was followed shortly after in 1996 with Red Alert. Hidden in the lounge at my friend Ian’s house with his mum upstairs asleep, his chronically underpowered 233mhz pentium computer wurring away I was absolutely amazed by the entire C&C experience. The installer was immensive and fell modern and damned cool, the video’s looked beautiful and like nothing else I’d experienced and the music track was fantastic. Many hours were lost.
So now, 15 years after the first game was released lets have a go at getting it all running in time for Christmas. After a couple of days of failure (and the need to multiplay with my brother) I gave up getting it running in WINE under Linux and cracked on with a Windows 7 install.
In 2006 Westwood packaged the first 8 years of gaming into one 8gb installer. Some of the games still work “out of the box”, others (like Generals; ironically the latest games) are a bit of a pig to get going; but they all will work!
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A couple of years ago, I got paid for some programming with a CiBOX C1905 19″ Monitor.
When I first got it, I thought it was the dogs-danglies, however after using it for a little while, two inconsolable problems came to light.
Personally I dislike wide-screen monitors. I spend a lot of time typing and whether it be paragraphs of text or lines of code / config files; all of which (especially if you hope it to be printable) have a habit of being in portrait; eg: Scrolling Down!
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I’ve recently come across PTCs Pro Desktop 3D CAD software when reinstalling a laptop for a friend.
As I understand it, Pro/Desktop is the younger brother to Pro/ENGINEER, “a parametric, integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE solution” produced and distributed by PTC.
And after playing with it, to try and make a vivarium, I decided I needed it to run on linux.
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December 31st, 2008
Toker
So I got asked a couple of days ago how to stop the xbox auto signing in to MSN Messenger.
Whilst its a handy feature (-I talk to a couple of people over MSN who don’t have a computer, just Live,) it’s also a great PITA to constantly get signed off from the computer and to have people trying to chat when you’re busy killing Horde or trying to complete a Rally.
So, very simpily: Read more…
Vmware’s Workstation (version 6.5.0.118166) is proving impossible to get running on my Gentoo-AMD64 box.
It seems to get installed without any bother, the kernel modules load fine, but then when I run workstation or player, it tells me it “Cannot initiate the installer DB” when trying to run it.
Currently going round in circles trying to get somewhere. -and I thought updating would be a good idea. 6.0 was really sweet.
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Edit:
Turns out, its actually quite simple. And it seems other gentoo users have been having problems((see gentoo bug ID 248813 and maybe this gentoo forums post))
The trick to getting it working, is very simple. Even if it did take me about a week of going round in circles to get anywhere. Delete (or atleast move) /etc/vmware. Then reinstall and you’re done.
However -Rather than downloading an illigal copy of vmware-workstation, or even worse paying for it, why not try VirtualBox as a direct replacement to workstation?
Its free, open source, and frankly, is preferable to vmware. Try it for a week, once you get past the fact its different, it becomes really quite sweet 
I use Google A Tools to manage email for some of the domains I’m hosting. After spending a couple of years messing about with exim, courier-imap and squirrelmail (and then roundcube, which is rather nice, if bad) I decided that when I moved the server, I couldn’t be bothered setting it all up again and google was the easy way out.
One stoned evening, after not being near a net connection for a couple of days, I started suffering withdrawal, and ended up installing Opera Mini (which is surprisingly good), set up the account to allow IMAP and then tried to configure the phone. All I got was an error stating:
Encryption error, TLS/SSL unknown certificate authority
I spent a lot of time googling and got nowhere fast, in the end it turns out to be really simple; all you need to do is have the Thwate Premium Server CA Certificate installed. Easy 
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