Have I mentioned recently that Akra is a star?

I’ve been thinking about getting Fallout 3 for a while – it’s a Bethesda game, and I adored the Elder Scrolls series (Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion). In fact, Daggerfall was what got me into RPGs (and later MMORPGs) in the first place.

The problem is, it’s not available for Mac. I don’t have an Xbox 360, and Bethesda have pretty much stated that they aren’t interested in doing a port themselves. I can boot into Windows on this machine (I have Windows XP installed on Boot Camp) but I hate doing it. I’ve pretty much made a policy not to buy any more Windows-based games and spend all my time on Mac OS.

My resolve started slipping though when a friend got it for Christmas and kept telling me how wonderful it was. I finally decided to hell with the policy on Saturday and here’s the bit of the story where I tell you how great my husband is. He not only went straight out to PC World to get it for me on Saturday morning, but then took the kids out in the afternoon so I could play it!

Because, no… it’s not a game you can play in front of young children. This game has earned its 18 certificate. Not just the bleak subject matter – a futuristic post-apocalyptic RPG where you have to fight every inch for your survival – but a lot of graphic violence and colourful language.

It is awesome. I haven’t been this immersed in an RPG for years. In fact, I don’t think I got this excited about Oblivion – previously my favourite single player RPG out there. I didn’t think I would get into Fallout 3 as much, because I prefer my RPGs to be full scale fantasy with dragons, knights, swords and magic. I also hate the first-person shooter genre which I’d imagined this game to borrow many elements from.

But no, I am totally gripped – I’m struggling to avoid the main quest (I’ve been warned to leave this for a long while and do lots of side quests, like the Elder Scrolls series) because I desperately want to find out what happens next. I’ve had two very late nights, got to level 6 and haven’t even scratched the surface of the story. I’m actively counting down to my next play session.

I have a few criticisms so far. The tutorial was very cleverly done, but didn’t really give enough information on how to play. In particular, I ended up getting extra advice from friends on V.A.T.S (the fighting system), lock-picking and computer hacking as it just wasn’t as intuitive as it might have been. Similarly, the manual wasn’t very instructive until you’d already spent a few hours in the game figuring out the concepts.

That said though, it’s a highly addictive totally immersive game with a very compelling storyline. I’d recommend anyone to play it.

Just not in front of the kids!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I’m suffering for the lack of geeky friends nearby: people who “get” what you mean when you slip Twitter, blogging, Jonathan Coulton or Mumsnet into the conversation; people who I have more in common with than just happen to have children of around the same age.

Don’t get me wrong, I have some lovely casual, “say hi and chat inconsequentially” type friendships and even some “occasional meal out and gossip” type friendships but when the chips are down or I need someone who thinks on the same wavelength, then it’s online friends that I turn to.

The problem is, most people don’t view virtual friends as “real” friends (whatever “real” might mean in this context). I disagree. It’s been in my mind today in particular after a petty playground snub which made me feel like a gawky, insecure 12-year-old again.

Then a particularly lovely friend who I speak to frequently on IM gave me a virtual pat on the back and the link to an article by Anna Pickard in the Guardian: Virtual people, real friends which is the most positive look at internet relationships that I’ve ever seen in the mainstream media. It sums up my feelings perfectly.

Call me naive, but far from being the bottomless repository of oddballs and potential serial killers, the internet is full of lively minded, like-minded engaging people – for the first time in history we’re lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. The friends I have now might be spread wide, geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by about a million miles.

Do read the whole article in full, it’s worth it.

It’s certainly made me re-evaluate what makes a friendship “real” and significant to me.

The problem with staying at home once both kids have gone to school, is that the temptation to waste huge chunks of time mindlessly surfing the Internet becomes overwhelming.

It’s easy not to notice Internet time building up – after the school drop off it takes slightly longer each day to tear myself away. I just “check my email” (and Twitter… and RSS… and IM… and Mumsnet…) in between each chore. I have lunch at my desk so I don’t miss anything. All of a sudden, I realise I am addicted and am spending time on the computer to the exclusion of all else.

It’s not even particularly rewarding for me any more. I seem permanently in a state of boredom with it, constantly refreshing in the hope that there’s something miraculously interesting that has arrived in the last 30 seconds since the previous refresh. It’s fuelling lethargy and ennui, not eradicating it.

So, I’m cutting right back. For two days now I have limited my computer time with the help of a kitchen timer by my screen. I have a password on my screensaver and shut down every application so the dings of incoming mail don’t send me rushing to my desk to start reading before I even realise what I’m doing. Again.

It’s hard. I have a nagging panic that I might miss something, that I am out of the loop, unconnected. I am forcing myself kicking and screaming to get other stuff done. But I’m being productive again, starting to be interested in other activities and a pleasant unexpected side-effect is that when I am online I am being more choosy how I spend my limited time.

I’m enjoying my computer once more.

It was an impressive slow motion chain reaction of things falling. A diary slipped from the top of a Christmas card box, off my metal paperwork filing intrays and knocked hard into a full glass of orange juice.

Orange juice. Possibly the most destructive substance to electronics known to man. It launched itself across my desk and drenched EVERYTHING. I must have sat there for 5 seconds watching the devastation while it dripped off the desk onto my lap and floor.

The keyboard is okay. A bit sticky, but it survived. For a little while the spacebar randomly jammed, but that seems to have unstuck.

The mouse wasn’t quite so lucky. First every time I clicked I got Exposé instead of a nice simple left-button click. Then it started randomly flicking in and out of Exposé without me being anywhere near it. Then the cursor went awol. Hours later, orange juice is still dripping out of its orifices leaving a sticky trail over the desk.

New mouse bought. Old mouse having a little trip to the dishwasher just in case I can rescue me a spare.

I’m just very thankful that the computer bit of the imac is raised up and avoided being orange juicified.

Readers raised the alarm when they realise Pewari hasn’t been seen despite recently claiming to be back to blogging as normal.

She was last seen heading somewhere into Tiny Adventures on Facebook. This popular mini-RPG has serious health warnings for its addictiveness and time-sucking capabilities. Friends are said to be concerned for her well being.

Brave adventurers are advised to enter Tiny Adventures at their own risk, find the missing blogger and offer Pewari aid and healing.

End Message.

In preparation for our camping trips this year, I’ve been buying one or two children’s audiobooks on Audible to keep the boys entertained during the car journeys. I’ve been really impressed with Audible, they have a great collection, are reasonably priced and really simple to use – just buy, download and they automatically go into iTunes into a nice Audiobooks library folder. The iPod then downloads it when you sync and away you go.

However, we’ve also been given a couple of free audiobook CDs plus I have some other ones that the kids have been given as birthday presents. It would be lovely to have them on the iPod too rather than having to faff with remembering to take the CDs and swapping them around during the journey. However, when you rip them into iTunes, you end up with lots of little track files of about 3 minutes long and they just end up in the Music folder not the Audiobooks library, which then get shuffled out of order (as that’s the way I have my music set up to sync to my iPod).

After a little research, though, I have managed to find a way to get them as one big track into the Audiobooks folder and make them bookmarkable (i.e. when you stop half way through, it remembers where you got to, even if you listen to something else in between). Here’s how you do it.

1. If you are a Mac user, download and install (following the instructions on the site) the Make Bookmarkable script from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. It’s really quick, hassle free and doesn’t mess anything up.
2. Put the CD in with iTunes open. Click ‘No’ when it asks you if you want to import.
3. Select all the tracks on the CD with your mouse (shift left-click) then go to Advanced>Join CD Tracks. This will make it into one big track instead of lots of teeny tiny tracks. Now you can click ‘Import CD’ at the bottom right of iTunes.
4. One the CD has been fully imported, you need to find it in your music library. Search for it so its the only track showing. Check that you have the ‘Kind’ column showing in the display (if not, right click on the grey bar with the column headings and check ‘Kind’).
5. If the ‘Kind’ is already an AAC audio file you can skip this step, otherwise, select the track with your mouse and go to Advanced>Convert Selection to AAC. This may take a while, but when it’s done delete the old MP3 track leaving only the new AAC audio file remaining.
6. You may notice that the title and artist fields are a bit messed up. Time to fix that. Right click on the track and select Get Info. Go to the Info tab and amend the name and artist as appropriate. If there are multiple CDs I like to put a “Part 1″ or “Part 2″ etc at the end of the title. I also tend to put the book author in the “Artist” field and the book narrator in the “Composer” field. Change the Genre to “Audiobook”. In the ‘Options’ tab make sure to check ‘Remember playback position’ and ‘Skip when shuffling’. If you want a nice little picture to show up for the icon, go to the “Artwork” tab and upload a scan of the CD cover (or use any other picture you feel is appropriate). Click OK when you’re done
7. Last step now, I promise! Mac Users: see the little curly script icon between the ‘Window’ and ‘Help’ menus? Click on that with the file selected and use ‘Make Bookmarkable’ – that’s the script you installed in step 1. Click ‘Proceed’ and then ‘Thanks’ when it’s finished. Don’t panic when the file disappears – it’s been moved! Click on Audiobooks library and you will see your Audiobook file in all its glory! Windows Users: you will need to close iTunes, then find the file in your “My Music” directory and change the file extension to “.m4b” this should hopefully do the same thing. Job done!

Now, that may look a little long winded but it’s much quicker than it looks. Once you’ve installed the script in step 1 you only need to use steps 2-7 for any other audiobook CD you have and it makes listening to them on your iPod a whole lot easier.

Well, my del.icio.us daily link blogging has been broken for a long while now and I’ve got totally fed up. Their support system was very poor – just got a generic reply saying the fact it hadn’t been working was “temporary” and should be fine now (it wasn’t). I started to look for alternatives.

I didn’t have to look far. Ma.gnolia does all the things del.icio.us did plus it has a much prettier interface and its bookmarklet system integrates with Safari more efficiently. Oh, and the daily link blogging worked first time (oh, okay – I ended up with three copies because I kept going in and testing different settings – apologies to anyone whose RSS got confused – I’ve deleted the rogue links entries now).

Now all I have to do is import all my del.icio.us bookmarks. Oh wait… they have a system for that too. Easy peasy.

You can find my new links file at: Pewari’s Ma.gnolia.

Many of you will already be aware of the concept of grid or cloud computing, even if you don’t recognise the term. SETI@home is the famous example – I’m not sure if it was the first, but certainly the first to become really mainstream.

For those still looking slightly bemused, SETI (short for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) analyzes radio telescope data to look for a certain kind of signal that is known not to occur naturally. Unfortunately, their computer capacity was limited and the amount of data they needed to analyze was huge.

The solution? Combine a whole load of geographically distant computers that weren’t actually being used at that moment (such as when the screensaver kicks in), and get them to do the work for them – a kind of virtual voluntary supercomputer.

Now if you were anything like me, when SETI@home first came out, you got very excited… installed it, forgot about it for a while then either did a complete reinstall or bought a new computer and never bothered to put SETI@home back on, or you decided you wanted a different screensaver.

Anyway, recently a scientific podcast I was listening to reminded me of the project, so I thought I’d go and see if there was a Mac version of the client to run it. What I discovered is that it’s now run using a completely different type of client – BOINC.

The exciting thing about BOINC is that it’s not tied to any one project – it’s a gateway to a whole host of scientific endeavors that need help processing their data. At last count there were over twenty different projects covering a variety of scientific disciplines.

Also, it no longer seems to be tied to the screensaver. Sure, there is a screensaver provided so you can see pretty graphics of the data you are processing – but if you’d rather see snaps from your photo collection or flying toaster whizz by, that’s no longer a barrier to volunteering your computer’s resources.

It’s also available for Windows, Mac or Linux.

I don’t know about you, but I have very little spare cash I can donate to anything and with two children very little spare time. But my computer has oodles of time when it’s doing nothing in particular so there is something significant I can contribute at least.

So my computer at the moment (in moments of boredom while I’m off elsewhere) is helping look for ET (seti@home), analysing protein structures from diseases such as HIV, malaria etc (rosetta@home), searching the skies for new pulsars (einstein@home) and creating a complex computer model to analyse climate change (climateprediction.net).

What’s your computer doing when you aren’t there?

… it was the sound of my free time imploding.

I accidentally tried World of Warcraft last night for the Mac. I had to – it has iTunes support… how cool is THAT?!

Actually, I was really impressed. The download was short as the trial version sort of streams (let’s face it, when you’re trying you’re mainly in the noob areas anyway, right? You don’t need to download every zone ever designed for that).

So the end result is that I accidentally ordered the game + expansion combo pack on Amazon as soon as I logged off.

Oh well, free time is overrated anyway.

We have now had it categorically confirmed why PC gaming is far superior to console gaming.

Akra Jr lent his Lego Star Wars II The Original Trilogy GBA cartridge to his brother. I erroneously assumed that the game was stored on the console not the cartridge, but in any case set Li’l Bhaji up on Game 3 save game just in case.

The only problem is, that when Li’l Bhaji gets bored and wants to start again, he switches the gameboy off and switches it back on again. That defaults any save games back to Game 1. And Game 1 is where Akra Jr had collected 20 characters and got through the majority of the levels.

All wiped.

Akra Jr is devastated. We had ten solid minutes of body-wracking sobs once he realised what had happened. It wasn’t Li’l Bhaji’s fault – after all, he can’t read let alone understand the “are you sure” messages he just clicked his way through. If anyone knows any cheat codes that can bring back specific characters to save Akra Jr having to play through the lot again, it would really be appreciated.

What it does bring home to me though, is how crap consoles are with save games. Even on the Wii with loads of storage space, the maximum you can save is up to 3 save games (great when you have 4 in the family who all like to play games). Some games only have 1 save game (now there’s a family argument about to happen). Very few of them allow you to change the name of the save game to remind you which save was which.

Now, I may be overly conditioned with Daggerfall, which regularly used to corrupt save games, but on the PC I am religious about saving multiple copies of every game I play. It’s named something obvious like “Pewari’s Game” or “Pewari pre-quest”. I save to lots of duplicate files so if one does get corrupted or I want to revert back to earlier in the game before I cocked up, I haven’t lost too much progress. There is no limit on how many save games I, or any other family member, can make. Well, apart from hard drive space.

With memory cards becoming cheaper all the time, why are console games so limiting?

Or should I just resign myself to buying two copies of every Gameboy game just to stop sibling armageddon?