Stupot's site

Uptime Robot: now more useful for byond servers

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 02:06:07 +0000

So, have a server that's not hosting a website, but still want to be notified if that server goes down?

UptimeRobot (I mentioned them a while ago) has just added a new feature where you ping a simple i.p. address, no web site necessary. This is a perfect tool for people hosting byond games locally on a server that does not have a website but are still concerned about uptime.

Read about here: http://blog.uptimerobot.com/ new-monitor-type-ping-that-old-and-simple-command/

Nehrim: Oblivion redone

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 19:00:56 +0000

Got this bit of interesting info off Reddit today.

A bit of info:

Content of Nehrim

Nehrim offers you a completely new world to explore that has nothing in common with Oblivion. It is a completely new game that can easily occupy 40-50 hours of game play and includes:

*a new continent that is as big as the world of Oblivion, completely constructed by hand,
*an extensive main quest that takes you to all parts of the country and beyond (or under it),
*a number of side quests, which will also lead you far and wide,
*professional sound recording throughout the game,
*a new, self-composition soundtrack,
*new videos,
*a new game play feeling due to an experience points based leveling system in place of the Oblivion level scaling,
*new armor and weapons, some of which are specially designed for a particular class,
*new graphic effects.

How Nehrim is different from Oblivion

Nehrim makes some changes to the game mechanics. It is advisable to understand these changes because this will give you a more enjoyable game playing experience.

*The difficulty slider is strongly defused and will cause only minimum changes.
*Bows do more damage than in Oblivion.
*Sneak attacks also cause more damage.
* Naturally, the player will also thereby receive more damage. Therefore dodge and blocking are very important.
*Magic is now a more powerful tool. There are spells that you can use to easily keep opponents at bay. Fire balls can knock down opponents and ice spells can freeze them. The damage inflicted by spells is generally higher than in Oblivion.
*Blocking is more effective than in Oblivion because it absorbs more damage.
*There is no conjuration magic in Nehrim. It might still be included later.
*In Oblivion your skills increased based on how often you used them. In Nehrim they increase very slowly with use, therefore you must raise skills with the help of trainers. This training costs you learning points (each time you level up you gain some) and gold (where you get that from is up to you). The teachers can only train your skill up to the level of 90, after that you must raise them by use.
*You raise your level by gaining experience points. These you get by solving quests, defeating enemies, discovering places, opening locks and crafting items or goods.
*There are fewer Quest markers than in Oblivion.
*You cannot use a fast travel system like that of Oblivion to move quickly, you can ride a donkey or horse or use various teleport spells.
*If you encounter a teacher, this will be noted in your journal so you can find them again quickly.

http://www.nehrim.de/dataEV.html

Reddit link: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dcude/ nehrim_has_been_released_the_oblivion_total/

Sounds pretty interesting to me. I'll hopefully get a chance to check it out in the near future.

Uptime Robot

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:50:31 +0000

Host something on the internet from a box you physically own? Then maybe you'll be interested in this.

http://www.uptimerobot.com/

It's a website monitoring tool, although it doesn't really monitor websites. All you need is a valid URL or static IP address, and this will ping your box every 5 minutes or so.

If it looks like the ping isn't working (implying networking issues or that the server is down), you will be sent an email, and/or SMS, and/or tweet(why god why?).

So, if you're one of those people who likes hosting from your home computer, but suffer from brownouts or something silly like that, this utility can quickly inform you of unexpected downtime.

P.S. I dunno why I bought myself a byond subscription, but perhaps I'll actually play a bit on here in the future.

The End is Near

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:30:42 +0000

My BYOND membership is drawing to close (in approximately 14 hours).

I never really made very many blog posts and I haven't really been an active member of this community, so I suppose nothing will really change for anybody.

Thanks again to the anonymous person who gifted me this membership in the first place. It probably kept me checking into BYOND more often than I would have without it.

Banned Xbox 360's flooding the market place

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:48:19 +0000

This is just a warning, since I think the audience here is the most likely to buy a gaming console. Microsoft just recently banned a huge amount (I've read upwards of 1 million) of modded xbox 360's from xbox live.

So, if I were you, I wouldn't buy any used xbox 360s from ebay or websites like it, because that box will still be banned.

Motorola Droid

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:58:54 +0000

Well, I've always been someone who's been dying for the right Android phone to come out. This, my friends, is it. I'm even going to break my AT&T contract early and pay a hefty fine to switch over to Verizon without waiting.

And even though I realize that might not be the most fiscally responsible thing to do, I've wanted an Android phone for way too long and I have the money to spare. Secondly, AT&T only cares about the iPhone. They had chances to get Android devices but the projects were only canned. Consider this the consequences.

Anyway, if you haven't checked out all of what the Motorola Droid with Android 2.0 has to offer, I highly suggest you do. The Google Navigation App alone makes this phone's price tag worth it.

Sabayon Linux

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:02:53 +0000

http://www.sabayonlinux.org/

SabayonLinux is based on the source-based distro named Gentoo, so in order to understand the background of Sabayon, one must learn a bit about Gentoo.

On a pure Gentoo system, the kernel and every single application that is installed is compiled by that system, specifically for the system. By doing so, applications are leaner and tend to run a bit faster. This can be achieved through a Sabayon system by using Gentoo's package management, Portage.

However, compiling every application makes installations take much longer than binary installations. Many would argue that compiling does not offer enough of a speed boost to warrant the trouble. For those people, Sabayon also offers a binary package management known as Entropy. Entropy is still fairly young compared to other package management systems, but it has already proven quite capable (I personally use entropy as my package manager).

Well now, that's all fine and dandy, but what makes Sabayon so special? Good question. To be honest, besides the friendly and helpful community on the forums and on IRC, and the choice of package management, there's nothing that really stands out on Sabayon more than it's LiveDVD experience. Sabayon strives to provide the best out of the box experience that it can. It was the first distro to include Beryl (now replaced by Compiz-Fusion) on a LiveCD/DVD. If you pop in the LiveDVD and boot, you can run games, openoffice.org, firefox with flash, and so much more. You can get a feel for exactly how your system will behave after installing (except it will be faster post install). Most linux distro's have LiveCDs nowadays and some will claim that Sabayon puts too much onto their LiveDVDs. It's all about choice and Sabayon's goal is to show you as much as possible concerning what it can do before you even install it.

Even if you don't think Linux is for you, the cost of trying it out is one burnt DVD. Maybe Linux is quite as scary as you think.

Sabayon offers four different LiveDVDs two KDE versions (64bit/32bit) and two Gnome editions (64bit/32bit). I personally use KDE and would recommend giving that one a try if you just want to give linux a try in general.

Yes, there is a right answer.

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:09:07 +0000

I pretty much made this to point out that polls on BYOND are for fun only. And yes, they are fun. But don't take any result on a BYOND poll to be very accurate. People like to vote for random things, just for the hellz of it.

Stupidest Person Alive?

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 05:23:41 +0000

I wonder how she's survived this long.

What the hell, I'll make a poll.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1917596

(I tried to embed the video, but I failed.)

Windows is annoying.

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:59:09 +0000

After doing programming (C++) in a unix environment for a while during my college days, I've come to appreciate it even more. At my current job, I have to program in Windows, which is fine... until it comes to doing some things that are fairly simple in unix (forking off a child with redirected stdin and stdout) which is not as easy in Windows.

I'm bored.