Feb 05

The Conjurers’ War and The Locusta

blog No Comments »

The Great Empire of The Gristika was formed on its maritime power and for centuries had ruled the oceans. Its polar opposite was The Rozan Empire, created out of a forge of magic and violence. These two great peoples conquered The Known World. Ultimately their rivalry peaked and there was war.

Neither could gain the upper hand. They had such enormous armies that the chance of either making any sort of great advance was minimal. An arms race of sorts developed. Weapons that had never before been seen in the world were used. Explosives of the most violent sort. Flames from the very pits of Hell. Artillery that could attack from vast distances.

While this unending war raged on, the people of the central territories of the Empires barely knew anything was happening. The front would move tens, even hundreds of miles at a time, but always back and forth. The central peoples were untouched. The common man in either Capital wouldn’t even know there was a war on unless the prices for his favourite delicacy increased or if his son was conscripted and sent off to the front.

One hundred and years and more this went on. If the truth was really to be told, the war was off more often than it was on. On the frontiers there would be clashes; some small, some larger. Every few years a great conflict would arise, shifting the front to the advantage of one Empire or the other and then the armies would settle back into their uneasy routine. The war became part of the daily life of the Empires. Something that was just always there. Something to talk about in the market place. A jingoistic rallying point for the leaders. A place to go for the searchers for glory.

page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4

Tagged with: • • •
Feb 04

I like… Time Machine

blog No Comments »

No, not that sort of time machine (though I do happen to like the TARDIS, and the DeLorean and HG Wells’ as well, but that’s another conversation).

No, I’m talking about Time Machine, the backup-made-so-simple-any-idiot-can-do-it software that comes with Mac OS X (10.5 and above). I won’t bore you with the details of what it is and how it works, you could find that out for yourself if you are so inclined. Instead, I’ll share why I like it so much and few extra comments.

I’m not any idiot (as referred to above), but I am a particular kind of idiot. I know the importance of backups (having desperately needed one on a number of occasions) and usually manage to keep up a good routine. The key word there is “usually”. A backup that doesn’t happen every time it is supposed is only fractionally better than no backup at all.

Time Machine (when your Mac is attached to its backup drive) backs up every part of your system every hour. Without fail. When you combine that with a wireless network-connected Time Capsule you are on to a sure winner.

Here’s what I do: I have the Time Capsule at the hub of my network (connected to printers etc) and two Macs elsewhere in the house. They get their files backed up automatically to the 1TB hard drive. Right now the oldest backups on the drive are about 3 or 4 months old and these gradually get deleted as newer ones take up more space.

Once a month, I bring home another external USB drive (which lives in the safe at work). I attach it to one of the Macs and change the Time Machine preferences so the backup is made to the USB drive. Of course, the incremental backup takes a bit longer (not having been done for a month) but it is still relatively fast and very, very easy. Repeat the process on the other machine, switch the prefs back so that the Capsule is used again, take the drive back to work and we are done.

So what I have is a local network drive with almost complete backups on it and a spare backup off-site with backups no more than a month old. If we have a hard drive failure or a broken computer, then we restore from the local backup and lose nothing. If we get broken into or our house burns down and lose everything, then we’ve got years’ worth of data safe off site and we lose at most one month’s worth.

Yes, I could do this better. My data could be even more secure, but I think this method is an acceptable blend of security vs effort. And apart from my once-a-month secondary backup, it is as good as automatic.

So, I’ve just got two thoughts on Time Machine to leave you with:

  1. This really is a killer app. Time Machine is a good enough reason on its own for you to get yourself a Mac. Seriously. I switched to Mac just before Leopard came out, but when I saw how Time Machine worked, I realised I would have swapped just for that. Setting up a computer for your parents or I-just-use-a-computer friends and co-workers? Get them to get a Mac and watch them never worry about backups.
  2. Why on Earth has no one done anything this good for Windows or Linux? Time Machine is over 2 years old. It doesn’t usually take this long for the me-too programs to arrive. Does Apple hold some super-sensitive patent that is preventing anyone from doing it? Inquiring minds want to know.

And that’s it. Thanks Apple. Thanks Time Machine.

Tagged with: • • •
Jan 28

Quit while you’re ahead

blog 2 Comments »

I watched Terminator: Salvation last night and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has thought “Enough, already!”

It was an enjoyable enough experience, in a “blokes movie night” (thanks for the company Justin) sort of way. Loads of guns, loud noises, some interesting looking Terminators and a vaguely coherent plot. Unfortunately, there was just too much suspension of disbelief required. As if a jump-start defibrillation wasn’t enough, they went on to do a heart transplant in an open field hospital with that same heart (God alone knows where the anti-rejection drugs were going to come from).

This is all an aside from my real point… Why don’t some people just quit while they are ahead?

Terminator was a fantastic movie. Highly original plot, interesting and not-carboard-cutout characters, Arnold, Arnold not stretching himself artistically, guns, loud noises. What’s not to love? I remember having a discussion with a friend prior to the release of Terminator 2 that the whole concept ran the risk of entering a time-travel paradox of its own: Can’t kill Sarah Connor? Send someone else back to kill John. Or further back and have another go at Sarah?

Any of this sound familiar?

Before I go any further, I though T2 was a good movie too (and not only because of the GnR theme song), but it really didn’t need to be made. Sure the first movie left you with some unanswered questions, but that isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it is a good thing. Sometimes we can just enjoy things a bit more when our imagination is left to fill in some of the details.

How about I share a small list of great movies (or books, or TV) that really just should have quit while they were ahead:

  • Ghostbusters. Again, I’ve got nothing bad to say about Ghostbusters 2 and I’ll be in line to watch 3 if I get a chance. But, why?
  • Highlander. Oh, dear. Is and always will be my all-time-favourite-bestest movie. Just so long as I forget they ever made sequels. Why, oh why did they forget that “There can be only one”?
  • Red Dwarf. As if seasons 7 and 8 weren’t bad enough, but then they came back for more.
  • Toy Story. Shrek. Brilliant movies that finished their stories. Only one reason for a $equel.
  • The Blues Brothers (you can make a new Bluesmobile, but a new movie? Aargh!)
  • The Godfather (they keep dragging YOU back in?)
  • Comedies like Revenge of the Nerds and Police Academy. All the jokes that needed to be made were made in the originals. Repeated, they are just unfunny.
  • Mad Max (sure the original left the story open for a sequel, but it didn’t need it. To say nothing of more than one.)
  • Rocky (exactly the same story how many times is it now?)
  • Alien.
  • I could probably go on. But won’t.

I’m giving a free pass to Back to the Future (which could have stopped at 1, but at least it looked like the sequels were always planned), Star Trek (could stop at any time, but even the mutliple movies fit like a longer TV series), The Simpsons (because) and Indiana Jones (what pulp fiction character ever stops being awesome just because we get bored?). I’m enjoying The Fixer on SBS right now, but give me a few more episodes into season 2 before I decide that they should have just made a miniseries (how many times can John and Lenny argue over whether he’ll take orders or not?).

And to justify the TILT tag on this post, here’s my list of those movies and such that could easily have kept going, but stopped when they should. I like these (because they are awesome and because they knew when to quit):

  • The Princess Bride
  • Life on Mars (I could rant here about all the shows that the American TV industry feels the need to remake with local accents, but that would take too long)
  • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. They could make a sequel today and it would rake it in at the box office. But they haven’t. Therefore: Awesome.
  • Fawlty Towers. John Cleese, you are the master of comic timing. And a perfect judge of when smacking Manuel is no longer funny.
  • Blade Runner (Am I counting my chickens before they are hatched? They let a sequel novel be written so a film is not out of the question. Please no.)
  • Doctor Horrible’s Sing-along Blog (see above). I’d also like to add Firefly/Serenity here but I think their one series, one movie is more a case of good fortune rather than good planning.

And a couple of parting thoughts:

  • District 9, are you listening to this? No, really. District 10? No. Just, no.
  • Why can’t modern fantasy writers do anything that is not part of a trilogy or longer? They can be good at short stories, but not a single novel?

And before anyone complains, I know that there have been good sequels. Even good sequels that surpass the original (if only rarely). I just like stories that get told, we enjoy and are then over.

Until we read/hear/see them again.

Tagged with: • • •
Jan 26

Here comes the Bladesage

blog 1 Comment »

For a number of years I have been telling myself I want to do more gaming (as in RPG gaming) and more writing. To make things easier, I thought I would try to make the two run together. Of course, I’ve participated in the last two NaNoWriMos (winning the last two), but precious little gaming and no writing outside of NaNo. There’s an expression about good intentions that I think applies here. Over the years I’ve had a couple of good ideas for a setting for this stuff but other than a few notes on various bits of paper, nothing much has happened. I even considered expanding the setting of my 2008 NaNoNovel and I didn’t even like it all that much!

Now, I am actually going to do something concrete. You read it here, so it must be true. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, if only because having people know about what I’m trying to do might keep me a little bit accountable.

Here’s the plan. The gaming (which will be solo initially, expanding to include the children as time and circumstances permit) will be using Swords and Wizardry and Mythic GME. The writing will be to fill in the blanks in history and world setting or to expand on something fun or interesting that comes up in the games. I hope to have plenty of back-story to be able to do NaNo ‘10 using the setting and my NaNo/Twitter friend winnie3k has encouraged me to try to add a short story per quarter into the mix too.

Mythic Yahoo! group member blastedpsychic has produced a very clever Random Campaign Start-up Generator for Mythic which I have used. While I was planning to veto any rolls that really didn’t appeal (what on earth is a ‘Noir’ theme anyway?) I managed to get a very interesting setting out of it. I’ve given it the working name of Bladesage (after the significant city state in the area) and I’m planning to expand on some of the details I rolled up as I go..

I have a basic history, a set of bad guys, a possible good guy/girl, some external influences, some internal movements, a couple of non-human races and a terrifying wandering monster. I hope to share some of these in my next couple of posts.

Watch this space.

Tagged with: • • •
Jan 21

Live Bookmarks or death!

blog No Comments »

Firefox uses Live Bookmarks, rather than the trimmed-down RSS reader that other browsers like Safari or IE have. It is the number 1 killer feature that keeps me tied to Firefox.

Let me explain why…

When you add a live bookmark to your toolbar or the bookmarks menu, it shows up as a menu, rather than as a single link. In Safari, you are then taken to a page that shows all the “stories” on a single page.

Have a look at this screenshot of Safari with my delicious.com feed (click for more detail):

The link on the toolbar is on the left, labelled “delicious/wynter”. If there was a new post in the feed it would show up with a (1) after the name of the bookmark. This is great if you want a newsreader.

Click on the bookmark and you get the page displayed as shown in the screenshot. I don’t generally put descriptions in my delicious items, but if I did, you would read them there.

So that’s Safari. It does what it does and it does it fairly well. If what you want is a bare-bones RSS reader mixed in with your browser, then you are set. The problem is, I don’t. If I wanted the latest stories from the New York Times (which btw is one of the default bookmarks in Safari) then I’ll put it in Google Reader (or my RSS reader of the hour).

Let me show you instead what I do want. This is how I use Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

The “Bookmarks” bit gives it away. I want something that gives me access to bookmarks… that is, lets me find pages I have been to before. It is no surprise that I have decided to use delicious.com (social bookmarking) as my example.

I have a small set of sites that I like to visit every day (or as often as I think to). I could just set all those pages as my “home” pages, but I use multiple browsers on multiple machines and the set of daily sites wasn’t always so small. Here’s how I manage to do what I want.

  • On delicious, I bookmark the sites and tag them with “daily” and “routine”.
  • Go to the delicious.com page where all those bookmarks live (http://delicious.com/wynter/routine+daily).
  • In the address bar I see the beautiful orange RSS logo. If I click on that, I get a page not dissimilar to Safari’s with the posts at the bottom and some subscription options at the top.
  • If I chose to subscribe by Live Bookmarks, I get to choose where to put my Live Bookmark. Normally, you would choose the Bookmarks toolbar. I have put this into a sub-folder (namely “routines”).

Have a look at what that looks like:

So you can see that if I go to my little “Routines-Daily” menu, I can get at all of my links that I want to. Even better (and this works for any FF bookmarks), I can hit the “Open all in tabs” option to get the whole lot to open in one hit. (And yes, before any smarties comment, I can right-click the menu to do the same thing).

So that’s it. Build a list specific tags in delicious, grab the RSS feed and put it in a large bookmark and you’ve got a handy menu that you can adjust and have reflected in any browsers you’ve set up with that menu. As you can see from the screenshot, I’ve got a few set up here.

I’ll be explaining the “Useful” feed (next to the Routines folder) in a future post.

One last thing:I might have to eat a little portion of humble pie. I hadn’t looked closely, but it seems that IE’s Web Slices does a very similar thing. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons not to use IE so I won’t let it bother me.

Tagged with: • •
Previous Entries
preload preload preload