Big Fat Ostrich

So I finally installed the ever popular Linux Mint 12 aka Lisa. The last time I tried Linux Mint was version 3.0 (Cassandra), which was back in 2007 (eons ago in Internet time). Back then, Linux Mint was a little shaky and one horribly broken  upgrade had me reverting back to Ubuntu.

Well, alot has changed since then and Linux Mint 12 appears very solid!

Instead of wiping my recent installation of Ubuntu 11.10 (even though I kind of want to), I installed Linux Mint as a virtual machine in VirtualBox. There’s not much to say about it except that the installation was hassle free. Typical installation, where you hit next a bunch of times. You can choose the advanced options of course, but we’re really trying out Mint for its simplicity.

Linux Mint is a Debian based distro, so like Ubuntu, apt-get is your package manager, and best friend. After using Arch Linux on my other machine for awhile, I have to say that apt-get is still the best. Pacman is fine, just a little too manual.

New features in Linux Mint 12 include Gnome 3 and MGSE aka Mint Shell Gnome Extensions which gives the desktop a super slick look. We used to make fun of Mint and call it Lounge Linux because of it’s pseudo-stylish look, but it really does look good. And the whole feel is just fast and snappy. There’s also MATE, which is a fork of Gnome 2. However, the dudes at Linux Mint central say that it’s not 100% stable yet so I’m not going to get into that now.

Overall the whole thing feels fast, and I’m running it on a mere 512M of RAM. I should say that I initially tried to install Mint using a bare minimum of 256M and that caused the installation to crash. I know. What was I thinking?

There are also tons of visual improvements, slick wallpapers, and MGSE doesn’t have the convoluted look of Unity. Unity feels like it’s there to confuse you. MGSE and Mint just feel better. Like you can just start using the OS without having to play scavenger hunt for all your apps. And it’s all running on the new 3.0 kernel.

Last new thing: I was surprised to see that Linux Mint is using Duck Duck Go as its default search engine. Yep. Where every other OS just assumes that you’re going to want to use Google, in Mint it’s Duck Duck Go. But don’t worry: you can use Google too if you want.

Aside from the weird name, Duck Duck Go is a really great search engine. I think many of us have gotten to a point where we use Google out of habit. Back in the old prospector days of the internet, we used to use multiple search engine all the time because no single search engine had all the results we wanted. Then Google changed all that by becoming so great. However, Duck Duck Go is very good and much cleaner than Google at this point. One of its best features is that its results act like a dynamic feed, so all you have to do is keep scrolling down the page for more results, kind of like Twitter does. With Google, you still have to click next page, next page, next page, etc. Which is so 3 years ago.

Duck Duck Go also has a strict privacy policy where they state that they do not collect any personal information.

All that to say, give Duck Duck Go a try. I’m challenging myself to use it for a week even if I’m having trouble getting used to looking at that bow tie wearing duck. And the name. Again: What is with people using animals in names for software and websites? Yeah, I’m looking at you, IPchicken.

One last thing! If you want a clue about how amazing Linux Mint 12 is, do a Google search for something like Linux Mint 12 Issues or Problems with Linux Mint 12. The results of my searches were mainly Linux Mint reviews, and for the most part, positive ones. The issues that people have been having have been minor so far, which is a good sign.

Ok, I need to go so let’s end this thing: Linux Mint 12 looks and feels great. Try it and adopt it.

When I heard a few 30 second samples from Lou Reed and Metallica‘s collaboration on Lulu, I was all ready to trash it. I even had a bunch of hilarious jokes and witty lines about how bad this 2 disc concept album is, but then I changed my mind and decided to take the high road and actually give it a shot.

So I headed over to Grooveshark, cued up all the tracks, and listened to the whole thing. All 87 minutes of it.

First off, there really are some truly awful moments. Many, actually. Lou Reed  voices the story of Lulu, a dancer who rises to fame, only to fall into despair and destitution. His style is more spoken word, and some of Reed’s poetry comes across as so horrible, you can’t help but laugh. But I wouldn’t use the word ‘horrible’, because again, it’s too easy. ‘Blunt’ is more like it.

Ok, horrible.

But there are moments. The average Metallica fan is going to be pissed that there are no rockers on this thing. The average Lou Reed fan won’t be too surprised. If you know what to expect from Lou, then you’ll know that he’s always trying to push the envelope. Often though, Lou’s voice just sounds like a weak layer on top of Metallica’s unrelenting power. Plus, when James Hetfield’s backing vocals kick in, it sounds like he has Tourette’s syndrome and everyone is too embarrassed to ask him to stop.

Oh yeah, those moments I was going to talk about. If you listen to the whole album, it kind of starts to gel on the second disc. Dragon and Junior Dad properly guide the listener to the end of the album on a wave, almost gently, on a magic carpet of noise. It does work, and by the end you feel relief. Yeah, you’re happy it’s over, but I think the relief is what Reed’tallica intended. Mostly.

Ostrich Picks:  Iced Honey (closest you’re gonna get to a ‘normal’ song), Pumping Blood (best comedy track), Junior Dad.

Ostrich Rating: Lulu gets all the beaks and all the internetz we have. They’re all yours. Take ‘em all.

The non-gamer is back again with some car racing games for Android.

I picked 5 games at random, installed them and took them for a “test drive”.

Get it?!

Anyway, here we go.

Racing 2D: Racing 2D has a slick splash screen. Then you get to pick a car and your race track. Then the game crashes. Awesome. Install it yourself and let me know if it works.

Graviracers: Graviracers by Other Apps Are Craps (bonus points for the name). Ok, you’ve got a highway floating in the sky. Using your phone’s gyroscope thing, you balance your car on the asphalt. In order to start rolling, tip the highway so that gravity does it’s thing and starts to pull you down the road. This one’s very challenging because there are some crazy hills on the road, so if you pick up too much speed, you’ll fall off the road and keep falling. Then you have to start over. Very cool game that really demands precision. There’s also a crazy loungy soundtrack that morphs into a more electro thing.

Update: Graviracers is impossible. I love the concept, just that it’s impossible to complete level 1. Like something is seriously wrong with this game. Oh well, great concept.

Car Fighter: Car fighter is a vertical scroller where you basically knock cars off the road using left and right arrows while shitty music plays in the background. The only fault is that each movement requires that you hit the button. Like, you can’t hold the arrow and move across the screen until you let go. It’s fun enough and a decent time waster. Look out for the yellow car! He’s your rival.

Online Racer: The tag line is “Enter the world of speed and feel the adrenaline rushing through your veins!” Well ok then. Challenge accepted! Except…you have to play through Facebook. I guess that’s why one of the “highlights” of this game is that you don’t have to install anything. (Fine, the word Online is in the title of the game. I should have known). Nice ruse anyway, but no thanks. We won’t be playing this one. Feel the rush as I uninstall whatever it was that I just installed. If this game is actually good and you want to try it, download it here. I mean fake download it.

Raging Thunder: Raging Thunder is the most realistic and playable car game so far. That I’ve played anyway. This one makes full use of the gyroscope in my Nexus S so you can drive by tilting the phone to the left and right. Great action and the text and messages remind me a lot of Atari‘s Pole Position from back in the golden age of arcade games. You know, when you pass the checkpoint and the game displays “Time Extended”? Yep, it’s the exact same text.

So yeah, Raging Thunder, Graviracers and maybe Car Fighter (just for the music. God, it’s bad) are my picks.

And, if you’re looking for some non-Android games that you just want to play on you PC, check out these car games online.

It’s done.

I wrote about how I was going to remove Ubuntu 11.10 and install Arch Linux instead and I did it.

The experience was nowhere near as painful as installing Gentoo, and as I suspected, it would be a little bit closer to an older Debian installation. You really do have complete control over what to install. Yes, you have to specify that you want xorg, or else you’ll end up with a headless install.

The first time logging in was clumsy as hell.

I get the desire to have a minimal installation. Really, I get it. Logging in for the first time and seeing 3.9 Gigs of RAM free out of 4Gigs was a thing of beauty. But do I really have to install ‘ifconfig’ separately? It’s really not included in the base install?

Choosing which packages to install is fine, but having to install sshd and ifconfig separately? Now you’re just wasting my time. Seriously, I’m getting angry again just thinking about it!

And what about the stuff I DID choose? Like Libre Office, Rhythmbox and VirtualBox? Even though I specified those, they were never installed. No biggie, since I just installed them myself afterwards.

But what about important stuff, like fonts? Don’t get me started on the fonts or the complete absence of them. Yep. Have to install those too.

So, to figure out which fonts you need, you can do the following:

pacman -Ss font

Install those net-tools as well. You’ll need them:

pacman -S net-tools

Do you need ssh? Of course you do!

pacman -S sshd

And so on.

Getting my xorg nice and slick and spanning across two monitors using the proprietary Nvidia drivers took some work. I installed the drivers like this:

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

Anyway, I’m not going to go into a huge how-to for Arch Linux here. It’s way too involved for that. Plus, they have a wealth of documentation which you can find on the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s long and involved, but all of the answers are there.

With all that said, if you don’t like documentation or reading/learning something new, Arch Linux is probably not for you. It’s definitely not for the impatient. I will say that now that I’ve got everything working, my system is faster than it’s ever been. I don’t have the fonts just right yet so it kind of looks like it’s been up all night drinking vermouth, but it sure runs fast. Everything is super snappy like and good.

I’ll be back with one more post about this, after a week of regular use. If things don’t work out with Arch-Linux, I’ll either be going back to an apt-get based system or Red Hat Fedora.

I love the way this album starts. It’s like waking up from a Rohypnol slumber and finding yourself wedged between two amplifiers that have the reverb and tremolo turned all the way up and the instrument plugged in screaming feedback is that frying pan that you burnt supper in. Again.

That’s sort of the way David Lynch‘s debut album Crazy Clown Time sounds. And like the title suggests, there’s a carny feel to it. But not in a Tom Waits Carnival Jazz way. This feels very much like David Lynch and makes Tom Waits sound like cotton candy and rainbows.

I will say that there are some cliched moments (as cliche as Lynch can ever be) where it feels like he’s being weird for the hell of it, but there are some choice tracks. What’s her name Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is on the first track being all orgasmic and deadly. I think it’s a great opener.

You can listen to the whole album here. For free! With the option to buy it.

My Ostrich Picks are: Pinky’s Dream, Football Game and Speed Roadster. Overall, I give Crazy Clown Time 6 Beaks and 3 Internetz, which comes out to about a 7.5 after the math. I mean the meth.

Personal note to David Lynch: I see what you did there with the album cover. Nice subliminal try, but not subliminal enough. *wink*

I was going to list a whole bunch of reasons why I’ll be switching from Ubuntu 11.10 to Arch Linux, but my decision really just comes down to 1 thing:

Ubuntu has gotten fat and lazy.

Actually, Ubuntu always was fat. It’s just that each subsequent install/upgrade seems to add more and more weight to the overall operating system. I may have said it before, but Ubuntu is starting to feel like the Windows of Linux distributions: bloated.

So, we’ll be test driving Arch Linux and its minimalist approach. Since I’ve never installed it before, I’m kind of expecting the process to be somewhere between Gentoo and Debian, but hopefully more Debian. Gentoo was a great learning experience, but god was it painful to install back in the day. Anyway, I’ll write about the experience next week or something.

One other reason why I think moving to Arch Linux will be a good thing: more focus on scripting and command line functions. See, as fat and lazy as Ubuntu is, it’s made me fat and lazy too. I need some more sweet command line action to sharpen my skills.

Later

Hey all. The Non-Gamer is back with another non-review. This time we’ll be talking about Skyrim.  Dan, the actual gamer, was supposed to do the actual review. Unfortunately, since Skyrim was released on November 11, his vocabulary has gone to shit and this is all he ever says anymore:

“skyrim skyrim! skyrim skyrim skyrim? skyrim skyrim skyrim, skyrim. skyrim skyrim ‘skyrim’ skyrim! skyrim skyrim…skyrim skyrim! skyrim skyrim skyrim? skyrim skyrim; skyrim skyrim! skyrim skyrim (skyrim) skyrim skyrim skyrim skyrim!! skyrim!”

So you’re stuck with me. Let’s start.

Skyrim is the long awaited fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series. This isn’t a sequel to The Elder Scrolls IV, but a chapter.  Like, you’re in the Elder Scrolls world, but you have a whole bunch of new shit to do. And by shit to do, I mean missions to complete. All with one goal in mind: defeat Alduin! That annoying Nordic dragon god! Seriously. Fuck that guy and the wings he flew in on.

As expected, Skyrim looks insane. In my last post about gaming, I actually talked about Adventure on the Atari 2600 where your dude was a square. They didn’t even bother putting arms on it or a smiley face. Nothing. You were a square! Well get your head out of your computer screen, 1980′s you (which was actually just a TV hooked up with a Game/TV switch) and have a look at the future…by looking into the past! It’s Skyrim and it’s still medieval all over the place:

So yeah, it’s beautiful and I’ll bet the movements are really fluid. But I’ll never know.

Cause I’ll never play it!

But here’s another screen shot!

Wow, by the looks of it, Skyrim is a huge success. 230,000 people were playing the game on Steam the day it was released. No doubt they were all rocking out to Jeremy Soule‘s original score (same dude who scored Morrowind). I’m not really a fan of his new stuff though. I liked him better when he was on vinyl.

Oh, before I go, I wanted to talk about the Creation Engine which is what lies beneath Skyrim’s leathery complexion. It’s Bethsheda’s own and it’s highly complex. It’s goal is to give an ultra natural feel to the world that your character experiences. For instance, weight and other variables are assigned to the natural elements so that they’re affected by wind and other things, like, well, mainly wind. So trees will move more naturally, water will look like it should. Things like that.

Well, I’m out so happy gaming! Here’s a night shot:

My trusty Ibanez. I’ve had this steel string guitar for over 20 years and the only work it’s needed has been a re-gluing of a bracing strut. Otherwise it’s been a solid standby.

Until now. Look at how the strings have hungrily eaten away at the string guide holes! I never really noticed the progression of damage until I changed strings last week. While taking off the old strings, the b string had actually become embedded in the wood of the guide hole.

Here’s a closer look. Shit that looks bad, and I probably shouldn’t have put the new strings on but hey, a couple of weeks couldn’t possibly make it any worse. Could it? I think it’s time to make an appointment with my local Luthier.