There are some very smart visuals together with multiple courses of action which bind together to form a much more involving story than the previous featured episodes have done.

Shots below!

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

Top of the "what's new" list is the brand new Odyssey class flagship for the Federation.  Credit where credit is due it is quite well modelled but it still isn't a patch on the Galaxy class to me.  Anyway, here are some screenshots from in game.

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

How about multiple breakages?

So far I've managed to compile FreeNAS with varying degrees of success and failure. Either I'm not getting the commands right half the time or I've tinkered with something I shouldn't have and reduced the reliability.

Bugger!

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

Creating the FreeBSD build environment on my PC seemed as though it would be simple enough, throw up VirtualBox, throw FreeBSD at it and hopefully job done.  In actuality it was even easier than I'd expected when I followed the guide that I found on the FreeNAS forums the other day (see my earlier post).

Problem was that I know absolutely nothing about FreeBSD in general and that after many hours of bashing my head against building FFmpeg it all came down to one simple thing.  I should have rebooted when it all started going wrong!

Live and learn!

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

Apparently in the latest bit of joined up thinking everything in your Google Plus circles is now included in your Google Contacts.

Now at first glance this might sound like a really good idea.  If you know "Jimmy" on Google Plus it makes sense that you can easily e-mail him from Google Mail using your Google Contacts, right?

Well, so far, so good.  That makes perfect sense... the bit that doesn't however is it also adds pages that you follow to your Google Contacts.  That's right, if you do the G+ equivalent of liking something on Facebook, it'll add itself to your contacts.

To borrow an old line "whoever thought this up should now be dragged out into the street and shot... twice".  There is no logic behind this.  Why the fuck would I want Coca-Cola, Nike, The Rolling Stones in my contacts? (PS: Not saying I like or dislike any of these, just examples people).

Thankfully I'm using Soocial which can manage contacts between multiple Google Mail accounts and has allowed me to restore my contacts to a useable state.

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

Does anyone have a summary of the differences / new features  in version 3.99 as the changelog is absolutely enormous and it made my head hurt when I started trying to read it.

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

Switch to something like the HP Microserver seemed ideal because:

1. I could run whatever I wanted on it because it was effectively a PC in its own right.
2. I would have 8TB of storage which was a vast improvement over the ReadyNAS.
3. 4 drives would give me improved redundancy and there would be various configurations that I could choose to suit my needs.

Skipping forward to today I have had my Microserver for a good few months and have run it using FreeNAS but now I'm getting that nerd itch because it's not running quite exactly how I want it.

Currently I have it so that it's running FreeNAS and Serviio on top of that to serve my music up to my PS3, etc. but the current method of having to dig into the console to get it all working again every time FreeNAS releases an update is not sitting well with me.

With this in mind I've just decided to follow this guide over on the FreeNAS forums and set up a build environment which with any luck I will be able to use to slipstream Serviio into FreeNAS.

Cross your fingers!

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

I've had this site since 2002 in one version or another.  Ever since Twitter and Facebook showed up though it's been even more seriously neglected.

Why?  Well because having thought about it a bit social networking sites are all basically big content whores and that actually that's what this blog was created for, content.

So, with a renewed outlook, I've taken away all the rubbish mini updates (statuses) that I've passed off on here for ages and replaced them with... nothing.

Lets see if that gets me to update this thing more than once a year!

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

With my current web host (OVH) when setting up my server (RPS) I chose to run it using their custom version of gentoo Linux (OVH Release 2).  They offer a number of choices but this seemed like the best pick because it was their release running on their hardware so I figured it would just get the job done.

That was all fine until I went and broke it.  Well, when I say broke it, I didn't break it exactly so much as stupidly try to update it so that it would be running the latest shiny version of things.

This was out not a sensible plan and the net upshot was that I broke the portage system.  Impressively though gentoo didn't fall over despite my ineptitude and kept serving up my websites (including this one) without issue.  The only thing was, I had no idea how to put things right!

So, after much tinkering behind the scenes (with gentoo still managing to keep going despite me doing my best to knock lumps out of it and wreck it completely) I managed to get things back on a proper footing, i.e. a working Release 2 running the latest patches from OVH.

Here's what I did to fix the mess I created which I'm sharing because I thought it might be useful to other people out there who have also "tinkered" with their RPS and struggle, as I did, to read all the technical support that's mainly found in French on the OVH RPS forums.

Disclaimer: These commands worked for me but they might not work for you so if you decide to use them backup everything on your RPS first because I'm not responsible for any commands you issue to your server!

1. Firstly SSH into your RPS with root access.  This will land you in the home directory.
2. Run the command: echo "2.10" > /etc/ovhrelease as this will fool the OVH updater into thinking you're running an earlier version of Release 2.
3. Run: eselect profile list
4. Look at the list and find the number of the profile that matches: default-linux/x86/2007.0/desktop on my RPS it was 4.
5. Run: eselect profile set <> where <<NUMBER>> is the profile number you looked up at step 5, e.g. for me it was eselect profile set 4
6. Remove any pre-existing upgrade scripts with: rm -rf patch-2.*.sh to make sure that you get a clean update.
7. Restore and run the OVH patch-all scripts with: wget ftp://ftp.ovh.net/made-in-ovh/release/patch-all.sh -O patch-all.sh; sh patch-all.sh
8. Now, that should, ditch the broken portage tree and run every automatic update script since they released 2.10.  I found that this upon reaching patch 2.19 it was necessary to change the profile again.
9. Run: eselect profile list again
10. Look at the list and find the number of the profile that matches: default/linux/x86/2008.0/desktop on my RPS it was 9.
11. Run: eselect profile set <<NUMBER>> where <<NUMBER>> is the profile number you looked up at step 5, e.g. for me it was eselect profile set 9
12. Run: sh patch-all.sh
13. This should finish the patches and bring you up to current which at the time of writing is 2.30.

Hopefully this will be of some use to those out there like me who just can't help tinkering with things!

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4

If you have Twitter Tools installed and keep getting stupid error messages with no obvious issues in sight then check the date and time on your web server (I used this handy command line guide for my remotely hosted Linux web server).

This has solved all my issues with Twitter Tools in a stroke.  Hopefully this will help some of you out there!

by MYstIC G from MYstIC G / v4