Tuesday 31 Jan 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so I now have a trippy new computer. I’m still using my existing nVidia GeForce 260 GTX, but now the ageing AMD Athlon64 2X 4200+ has been replaced by a shiny new Intel Core i7 2600K which my dear little sister gave me for Christmas. I love that girl.

There’s something satisfying about opening Task Manager and seeing eight cores. Of course, that’s just the Hyper-Threading talking; the chip actually has four cores, not eight. But hey. And the thing is clocked at over 3GHz. (Although I gather that an automatic system turns down the clock speed if you attempt to actually use all four cores. I mean, you wouldn’t want to achieve the advertised speed, would you?)

Not only that, but the PC is housed in a brand new Antec 1100 case. I’m a bit disappointed with the dust filtration this thing offers; the product blurb makes a really big deal of the dust filters, but they actually cover about 10% of the gaping holes in the case. So this thing is still going to fill with dust in no time at all. But I am very pleased with how much easier it is to work inside the spacious case. And the fact that my gigantic graphics card now fits inside.

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Monday 16 Jan 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

It’s been a long time coming, but 8 years after I put my previous machine together, I finally have a new PC.

I thought the motherboard and RAM a few months ago. My dear sister got me the insanely expensive CPU for Christmas. And then I went out and bought the case, harddrive and a copy of Windows 7 (64-bit).

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Wednesday 01 Jun 2011 by Orphi the AweKid.

Cake! Cake!!

Um… well, actually, no. No more memes here. (As Gabe N. put it, “if you were sick of memes, I was sick of them way before you”.) So what can we say about this new game? Well, I think Zero Punctuation put it quite aptly: “Is it good? Yes. Is it as good as Portal 1? No.”

It’s still surprisingly short. The graphics are much more complex than before, but still not especially pretty to actually look at. (Although I did like the retro section quite a bit.) The single player campaign (the main bit that I care about) has quite a bit of story and not much puzzle to it. Which is a pity, because the story didn’t really do much for me.

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Monday 04 Apr 2011 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so check this out: My grandparents have a set-top digital TV receiver with record capability using an internal 320GB HD. OK, great. Ah, but the HD is almost full now, so they keep having to delete stuff in order to record anything new. [Quite how you fill 320GB I don’t know, but I suppose if you’re a pensioner then TV is all you have…] Anyway, it’s OK; there’s a USB port at the back, and if you just plug in an external HD, you can store your video on that. So they went out and bought a 2TB HD [which apparently is a lot cheaper than you’d imagine these days]. But it doesn’t work.

This of course is where I come in. *sigh*

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Friday 10 Sep 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

If you take a peek at my old website, you’ll see it proudly displaying a “Valid XHTML” badge. And that’s because, when I created the page, it passed the W3C validator with flying colours.

Today, it stops almost instantly with a fatal error: “missing xmlns attribute”.

Funny how a page that was 100% valid 5 years ago is no longer valid today, eh? Still, I guess that’s the idea behind standardisation; to keep things interoperable.

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Friday 30 Jul 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

(Yes, that’s how they spell it. NI have a bit of a thing for giving their products slightly strange spellings. I think maybe it’s because they’re German?)

So last year I bought Komplete 5. As the name somewhat suggests, Komplete is a bundle of existing NI packages. Buy Komplete 5 and you get Absynth, FM8, Massive, Reaktor, Elektric Piano, Akoustik Piano, Kontact, B4 II and Guitar Rig (software edition). Now, if you bought all that lot seperately, you’re talking about several thousand pounds. (Reaktor on its own is £500 or so.) But Komplete &ldqou;only” costs £900. (The actual price is always quoted in USD or Euros.)

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Tuesday 18 May 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

So having completed Assassin’s Creed, I returned my attention to Cryostasis. Man, this game gets weirder by the minute!

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Tuesday 04 May 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

When I finally got my mum to **** off and stop ruining my life, I got to play some more AS.

First I was sent to assassinate somebody (surprise!), and it turned out there were six somebodies to chase after. And each one of them is inside a courtyard, with two guards and a crowd of people blocking my way. There’s no obvious way to climb in without attracting way too much attention. I did manage to go up to one of the guards and kill him with the hidden blade, and just about get to the other guy and kill him before he noticed. That dispersed the crowd so I could get through the doorway. But then, predictably, I was spotted and a complex, cramped battle ensued.

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