Another Year

So its the start of a new bloging run this year. I haven't been up to much. Apart from reading a few discworld books. Making money (basically going postal 2) was a pretty nice book to read. However it is just a continuation of the original characters in going postal. Moist von Lipwig has to take over the bank and update it just like the post office. The amount of people complaining it has nothing is new is ridiculous. There are plenty of discworld books that continue from one another. Maybe not in a short space of time as this one but still. I finally got around to reading Guards Guards. Which is the funniest book iv ever read. Defiantly the best discworld book however, I am now reading small gods so we will see.

Hoping to make some beer soon. Lowenbrau Light Blonde Special from 'Brewing beers, Like those you buy' By Dave Line.

DOSBox on ubuntu

You can play old dos games on linux with DOSBox. DOSBox is a gpl cross platform DOS emulator. It has also been ported to psp and gp2x hardware.

Ubuntu users can download & install with:
sudo apt-get install dosbox

To play games first you need to mount a directory to the emulators C drive. I do this by 'mount c /home/username/games'. Type c: to open the folder (this is a DOS emulator after all) then enter the filename of the game like game.exe. If your looking for auto mounting read ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=171970.

Runs Discworld fine...



You can download discworld at www.abandonia.com/games/878/download/Discworld.htm.

I also tried a game I use to play years ago on DOS.

Thats rights its Electro Man. Your amazed at the graphics right? It doesn't really have anything to do with electric. You play some sort of tin man or robocop and shoot at alien things. Well it was shit then and its still shit now. What a crap game.

The Colour of Magic tv movie

It seems after the success of the hogfather sky one is going to back another discworld tv movie with Vadim Jean directing and Terry Pratchett on hand. I didn't even know it was planned. But apparently its in the "filming" status with David Jason playing Rincewind and Sean Astin (one of the lord of the rings hobbits) playing Twoflower. I cant wait to see how they going to do the librarian.

The production website is at www.skyoneonline.co.uk/tcom/.
Imdb www.imdb.com/title/tt1079959/.

Going Postal

Started and finished reading Terry Pratchett's Going postal in a few hours. It's one of the better Discworld books I have read. The amusing characters, the cat tiddles (which is more of a description), references to the uk post office, GNU and crackers.

The Smoking GNU is probably the most geeky joke in the series. A group of 3 men that are clacks (a series of semaphore towers) crackers. Cracking into the towers with their own portable tower. The group of men resemble 'The Lone Gunman' a x files spin-off about a group of computer hackers.
Why are they called the Smoking GNU? Well not sure really. No direct mention of open source but it does say that GNU is a magic message header packet on the clacks, with G indicating a message that goes on, N indicating not logged and U indicating that the message is to be turned around at the end of the line.

Cant wait to read 'making money'.

Gnome Mud client

Since I last blogged about nethack I figured it might be an idea to post about this mud client. MUD is Multi-User Dungeon. It's a type of multi player game before the days of world of warcraft. Some of them can be quite fun. The discworld mud is my favorite its like being in a discworld book. I don't really do much on it apart from walk about a lot trying out commands. Talk to people and interact with things. Being discworld its funny.


The gnome mud client can be installed with this
sudo apt-get install gnome-mud

The Fifth Elephant

Today I finished reading the fifth elephant, very good book and funny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Elephant

On to reading thud!, another discworld book.