Interesting traffic

Interesting sights in the past couple of months whilst commuting:

• A lorry overturned on to its side on the roundabout, stopping all through traffic;
• A car on its roof on a bypass early in the morning, with a police car stopping anyone driving in to it;
• A car on fire on the motorway during rush hour;
• A coffin-less Hearse accelerating quickly up to around 80 mph along the bypass, showing that they really have some welly.

I should perhaps point out that none of the vehicles were seen exclusively in my rear-view mirror, just in case I seem to be the linking factor.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Interesting traffic
Tags: commute, motorbike, motorway, traffic

Nintendo wall graphics at Thinkgeek

In their latest newsletter, Thinkgeek highlights the Nintendo Wall Graphics product, which is a set of large vinyl stickers that can be reversibly applied to most walls to create scenes from either Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong. I have quite a soft spot for Super Mario Bros., having played it in arcades back when Flynn was fighting the MCP, before becoming accomplished in it on the NES. When I saw the mural advertising the Nintendo wall graphics I was quite excited and keen to get a hold of the graphics myself, to create a similar scene at home.

However, looking at the contents of the wall graphics package for Super Mario Bros. is a little disappointing when comparing it to the photograph. I can understand a little embellishment to show a product in a good light but it shouldn't give unreasonable expectations. It looks like the main mural, showing Mario punching a mushroom out of a block, would take three full packs of graphics to create, and that is ignoring the additional mural with Luigi to the left. I would say, though, that the problem lies within the package itself.

There are three sheets of stickers in the pack, and only one of them is dedicated to scenery, where scenery takes up most of the graphics in most games. With two sheets containing versions of Mario and Luigi, as well as items that are rarely found on the screen at the same time as each other, it seems like poor design. Adding one more sheet of scenery blocks would go a long way to making the pack offer more value as a whole, and it would surely have been better to include all the one-use items on a single sheet, one that could perhaps be sold separately. A character/item pack and a scenery pack would probably see many more sales, based mostly on the scenery pack, than the set as it currently stands.

Nevertheless, despite the cost of the item coupled with needing more than one pack to recreate anything more than a sparse scene from the game it is awfully tempting. I will print out a couple of copies of the available stickers on to paper and cut them out to see what I can create before I even think about placing an order, though.

Posted in Gaming, Personal | Comments Off on Nintendo wall graphics at Thinkgeek
Tags: nintendo, super mario bros, thinkgeek

Salvaging on-line

Last night I got my salvager on-line. After training the mechanic skill to level three, buying the skill book for the survey skill and training that to level three, then spending a cool 919,000 ISK for the salvaging skill book itself and training the first level, I was finally ready to rip systems out of ships I blow up. I spend the last while of skill training shifting my items and a couple of ships from Perimeter to Jita, which is made possible by Harvest Moon, my Badger, before finally being able to fit the salvager to a ship. Being comfortable with the missile boat of Autumn Leaf, my Kestrel, I remove one launcher from a high slot and replace it with the salvager, reducing my combat capability for this interesting new unit.

Starting a conversation with my agent in Jita I find that a secret formula has been stolen and he wants it recovered. I accept the mission and undock Autumn Leaf in preparation. A quick warp and jump to the Muvolailen system and I am soon picking through the wrecks of some rookie mercenaries. The salvager isn't always successful in retrieving systems from the burning hulls, but I manage to salvage some items! The items turn out to be burnt-out circuits and other such broken systems. After all this time spent skill training and the hopeful investment of almost a million ISK and my first use of the skill gets me some useless electronics.

I wonder if it is possible that my skill in salvaging increases with use, but that's not how EVE Online works as I understand it. I could train the skill further but this apparently just increases the chances of salvaging being successful on any single wreck. Another thought is that once I start fighting more capable foes the possibility of better salvage increases, and that I am seeing low quality salvage because I am engaging low tech ships. At the least, I hope, I will be able to reprocess these circuits in to useful minerals that I can sell when back at a station, so back I head.

After docking I am a little disappointed to see there being no option to reprocess my salvage, making me think that I really have just picked up some useless junk and wondering what I spent all my money on. My only other option was to sell the units, but I had no idea who would want to buy them. I opened up the market and started seeing if anyone had orders open to buy what I had to offer. I expected little interest or demand, and what I get instead is 400,000 ISK from selling all the broken circuits. Cripes! It seems that these units are useful to someone.

With the burnt-out circuits fetching such high costs I am left wondering what they are used for. But because they are expensive to buy I am also fairly sure whatever skills are needed to make use of them will be unavailable to me for now, so I have no problems selling the units. I am quite curious to find out more about them and how they can be repaired, it's probably just a matter of finding the right skills to learn.

I couldn't resist running another mission to try salvaging more, so speak to my agent again. This time, he asks me to destroy a convoy passing through the system. Unfortunately, 'the system' is Jita and the lag in the system is terrible again. When I warp in to deadspace I find that I have around a ten second delay in activating systems, which makes for a frustrating experience and makes me want to find a system with a half-decent agent that isn't Jita. Nevertheless, I destroy the convoy and its guards and start my salvager working again. The unit recovers more ruined circuits, and I head back to the station, declaring a successful mission to my agent before jumping back in to the market.

My account was sitting at 2,900,000 ISK at the start of the session. I bought the salvaging skill book for 919,000 ISK, taking me just below 2,000,000 ISK. The two missions I ran netted me 350,000 ISK from mission rewards, including time bonuses, and bounties from killing rats. After selling all the 'useless' salvage my account ended up sitting at 3,930,000 ISK! I had made over a million and a half ISK from salvaging after only two missions, and my account was not only finally over the three million ISK mark but pushing four million. I can almost feel the leather of the pilot's seat in a Caldari Cruiser.

Posted in Gaming | 4 Comments »
Tags: badger, deadspace, eve online, jita, kestrel, penny ibramovic, perimeter, salvage

Screen grabs in EVE Online Mac

I wrote before about how the keymapping for screen grabs in EVE Online is locked but makes no sense for the Mac version. The only solution I found was a general hint simply referring to the in-built screen grab mechanism in OS X, which is to hit Cmd-Shift-3.

I already knew about this, but in finding a link about capturing screen shots from the Apple web site I handily find some more specific uses of the screen grab utility.

Armed with the information that there is no in-game method of taking a screen grab, and after I had accidentally found that hitting 'tab' in the game collapses all windows to their menu bars, I took this shot of my Kestrel after I entered the stunning Muvolailen system for the first time:

When logging in to the game there is a different helpful hint presented on the character selection screen. The next time I logged in to EVE Online after taking the above screen grab informed me that I can remove the UI completely by pressing Ctrl-F9. Tch, I had even been looking for that option after failing to find a way to take screen grabs in the game, so either it isn't shown in the keymapping or I missed it completely. Now I know.

Posted in Gaming, Technical | Comments Off on Screen grabs in EVE Online Mac
Tags: eve online, kestrel, muvolailen, screen grab

Not unblocking pop-up windows

I find it amazing that a new, professional site has the following message on a main page:

Please ensure pop-up blockers are turned off for this domain.

People block pop-ups partly because of advertising abuse, but I imagine it's increasingly because the popularity of tabbed browsing allows the user control of the browser such that there aren't extra windows spawning unexpectedly in different shapes and sizes.

If you are aware that there are browsers that block pop-up windows and that people are likely to have pop-ups disabled, I suggest you design your site not to use pop-up windows.

Posted in Technical, Work | Comments Off on Not unblocking pop-up windows
Tags: pop-up windows

Making money ...in space!

Penny Ibramovic, space cadet, has been happy dealing with the two agents in Perimeter so far. Quite how I got to Perimeter in the first place is not remembered, and probably simply the result of ending up there after the tutorial agent got bored with me. Despite having read about agents being difficult to find, or perhaps precisely because of this, it has been made clear in at least two different channels how to get a list of agents and their locations. I found a better quality agent in Jita, a system just one jump away.

The quality of agents in Perimeter is -16 and -5, which seems quite low, particularly when there are some listed with just as high magnitude numbers but positive. From what I understand, the quality of the agent has little or nothing to do with the type of mission they give or the danger involved, only the reward that is offered. The better quality the agent, the more ISK they have on account, so a good way to make money is to find a good agent. The agent in Jita has a quality rating of -2, which is a few pegs higher than the best one in Perimeter and should get earn myself money more quickly.

Of course, these are just the agents who are far enough down the chain of command that they'll talk to me. I need to raised my reputation through these lowly clerks before anyone with a positive quality rating will accept a space 'phone call from me.

Having flown through Jita before, and run a couple of missions to clear out some rats in the system, I was aware of the horrible lag that is no doubt due to the system being popular in the same way that Ironforge was popular before auction houses opened in Stormwind and Darnassus. The lag was pretty much what was keeping me in Perimeter for the time being, because I didn't really like waiting several seconds for my missile launchers to fire after selecting them, nor was I particularly keen on warping away from danger only to explode at warp speed from a missile that hit me ten seconds previously. But I had been through Jita a couple of times over the weekend and there was no sign of the lag I had seen previously, which is why I had decided to make contact with the agent in Jita.

Sadly, the lack of lag may have been an anomaly, as it was back last night. It must have taken over a minute just to jump in to Jita, and just as long for the ship to get to warp speed to fly towards the destination space station. I perservered, though, and made contact. I flew three missions, one keeping me in Jita and horribly lagged, and two sending me to visit other systems and going quite smoothly. The missions were fairly standard. One asked me to destroy an enemy convoy that was passing through the system, another to pick up some plans that had to be abandoned after a ship got accidentally blew up, and a third to destroy a whole load of drones that was beginning to infest a system.

The rewards were pretty good, definitely more ISK than the Perimeter agents were offering. The mission reward for the drone termination was huge compared with other rewards I've got, with about 100,000 ISK for completing the mission and a further 110,000 ISK for being prompt about it. The best rewards the -5 quality agent offered were just under half that amount. However, the drones, whilst 'wanted', didn't have bounties on them, so although the mission reward was over 200,000 ISK in total the previous mission that involved killing rats was a bigger earner, with about a 120,000 ISK reward and 125,000 ISK from bounties.

All this means that I made about 800,000 ISK in one session from a few missions and selling minerals dropped by the drones on the market. I'm just going to blow that amount, plus an extra 100,000 ISK, on the Salvaging skill book, but at least I'll have it to spend and likely be able to make it back relatively quickly. I can imagine how much money can be made from an even better quality agent, and how a measly million ISK here and there will come to feel like copper pieces dully clanking off the silver and gold in my pocket.

In other EVE Online news, my skill training continues nicely. I should be ready to train in the Salvaging skill today, after having trained in the skills required to learn it, with Mechanic level 3 being the last. There may be better skills to train first, but I have a Salvager module and I want to find out how useful it is. I also found out that the warp drive takes a huge chunk of capacitor charge to engage. Whilst this shouldn't be surprising, I don't recall it being explicitly stated anywhere before, although one of the skills offers a reduction in charge required for the warp drive. This explains why my capacitor is always having to recharge after warping in to deadspace.

Finally, a note to self: swap the low quality civilian shield recharger out of the Kestrel for whatever the Merlin has, because whatever unit is in the Merlin actually recharges the shield quite quickly. Despite the extra drain on the capacitor, it's worth it.

Posted in Gaming | Comments Off on Making money ...in space!
Tags: agents, deadspace, eve online, jita, kestrel, merlin, penny ibramovic, perimeter

Longer than the working day

The Company has a flexi-time policy that allows for extended and shortened days, but we all essentially still work on the basis of an eight hour day that includes a thirty minute lunch break.

As such, when someone outside of the department draws up a day's test plan for us to complete that has a total of over eight-and-a-half hours of testing, without any contingency for set-up or power-down times, let alone changes that need to be made between individual testing periods, I consider it to be rather optimistic.

The words 'presumptuous' and 'insulting' also spring to mind, but those are not to be shared with the customer.

Posted in Work | Comments Off on Longer than the working day
Tags: vibration

Back in space

I resisted temptation no longer and subscribed to EVE Online over the weekend, after having enjoyed the two-week trial period. Even though I am already playing World of Warcraft and City of Villains I was drawn to being a space cadet and the skill-based system that EVE Online offers. I logged back in to find that my week-long absence had got my Spaceship Command rank 5 skill trained, which had taken over six days to complete, and started some new skill training before I made myself familiar with the controls again. I picked up a mission from an agent and hunted some rats just to get back in to the swing of space combat before settling down to immerse myself in the galaxy.

I had previously wondered how to keep track of everything I own, what with moving from system to system and having to pick up items bought on the market personally from their place of manufacture. When I tried to open my electronic wallet and misclicked I accidentally found the 'assets' tab, which handily shows all the sytems where you have items stored, and lists the items along with showing a count of how many items are in each area. Everything is kept track of automatically. Through discovering this feature I found that I apparently have four Ibis rookie ships in various stations in the sector. Quite how I came to own so many is uncertain.

Despite being a complete newbie I managed to help someone. They were having trouble selling some Gallente navy tags, which they must have looted from some rats, saying that they could find no option to put the tags on to the market. I asked if he had taken the tags out of his ship's cargo hold and put them in to his item storage in the station, because items cannot be sold directly from a ship's hold. That turned out to be the cause of the problem and once the tags were moved he could put them on to the market as normal. He had accidentally helped me at the same time. I had some Gallente navy tags in my inventory that I had noted were useful to someone, from their information text, but didn't know to whom. By putting them on to the market I saw that there was a buyer available, and that the buyer's order was good for hundreds of days probably meant it was an NPC. Sure enough, selling them showed the transaction in my wallet to be to the Caldari navy.

I decided to play around with ships and equipment a bit. I bought a Merlin for its turret hardpoints that allow for guns to be installed so that I could try out some lasers I had salvaged. Before I could fit the lasers I had to pick up the Merlin from the shipyard, which brought me back to my problem of moving ships around. I didn't want to travel in my unprotected and unarmed pod, because space is pretty dangerous, but if I travelled in a ship I would switch between ships at my destination and necessarily leave one behind, and I haven't got a ship with enough cargo space to hold a packaged ship to pick it up and bring it back to my nominal base.

That is, I didn't have a ship with a big enough hold until I bought the Badger. I trained in how to pilot Caldari Industrial ships, which is needed for the Badger, and bought one that just happened to be manufactured in the same station I was in. I put a few defences on it, as well as a mining laser, then flew out to the other system. I docked, threw the Merlin in to the hold using one of those neat Aliens-esque loaders (in my mind!), and sauntered back to my base system. I then made a second trip to pick up one of my many Ibis ships scattered around that I thought may be handy to have around as a gopher, although I think the Badger will now fulfil that role quite nicely.

On the way back from picking up the ships I stopped at an asteroid field to do some mining. I am interested in finding out how manufacturing works, even if I am skilled in flying attack ships and tactical combat, and will probably invest a bit of time in to that. The Badger certainly has a much larger hold than any of my frigates, and so can carry a great deal more mined ore. However, it only has a single high slot, high slots being needed for a mining lasers, meaning it gathers ore at a quarter the speed of my mining frigate. I found a suitable asteroid, started mining, went to watch an episode of The IT Crowd, and came back to find the hold just about full. Considering I had just over half the hold occupied with a packaged ship to start with it seems that I need to find a way to make mining more efficient.

I could perhaps take my mining frigate out to mine more quickly, then jettison the ore for the Badger to pick up once enough has accumulated, but I think getting better mining lasers is probably safer and easier. I am a little reluctant to leave my Badger for extended periods mining at asteroids whilst I surf for lolcats or go out to buy doughnuts, but that seems like a possibility too. Maybe I can take Magnet Magnetson out on a quick mission whilst Penny mines.

The Badger was more a means to an end, though. I picked up my Merlin and equipped it with some of the salvage I picked up. I have been flying my Kestrel a lot, with its all-missile payload, but now I could put lasers to some use. I fitted dual pulse lasers with ultraviolet crystals, along with a single missile launcher for backup. With an afterburner for escaping and a shield recharger to boost my survival rate, I was not able to install a second missile launcher. After I train some more skills I may be able to manage the power requirements of my ship to the point where I can squeeze a bit more out of the grid and equip a bit more.

I picked up a mission to take care of some rats in a nearby system and warped in. I locked on to the targets, moved in to firing range and powered up the lasers. The benefits I found for lasers include a fast firing time, which also allows for quicker switching of targets, and there being no need to reload ammunition. The need to get much closer than missiles resulted in my taking much more damage than previous missile-only excursions, even if the shield soaked it up and the recharger got the shield back to full. Recharging the shield soaked up my capacitor's charge a bit too quickly, and I lost power a couple of times during the relatively simple engagement. At one point I engaged the afterburner to get some distance between the rats and my ship to allow some capacitor charge to build up and my shield to recharge.

The close combat fighting with lasers resulted in more involved fighting, because of the need to balance capacitor use with firing lasers and recharging the shield, and whilst it is interesting to be more involved it is also more dangerous. I'll experiment further, but may go back to the Kestrel whilst I continue to pilot frigates. Another reason to pilot the Kestrel over the Merlin was shown when I tried to grab anything still working in the wrecks after the fight. The Merlin's cargo hold is tiny, and I couldn't fit half the equipment in there. I had to go back to the station, drop everything off and, well, I changed to the Kestrel and its significantly larger hold before heading back to deadspace to loot the rest of the wrecks. It's possible to make the same switch after combat to sweep the battlefied with a larger ship but it doesn't strike me as being either particularly quick or safe.

I had a good time getting back to being a space cadet, and will no doubt enjoy many more sorties to come. My current objectives are to fit a salvager that I found, which involves training a few skills, one of which will see me spend almost a million ISK on the book, and to find a new agent so that I can make my money back more quickly through their higher mission rewards. What with buying a Merlin and a Badger, as well as a skill book or two, my ISK account took some mighty hits. Although I never dropped below 1.5 million ISK I had still yet to have more than 3 million ISK in my account. It looks like I could be heading to Jita to get a better quality agent, so that my wringing my hands over a few pesky million ISK will one day seem like worrying over the cost of a cup of coffee. I am a little cautious about heading over to Jita because of the horrible lag I suffered there previously, although it wasn't noticeable over the weekend so I may happily set myself up in a new base.

Posted in Gaming | Comments Off on Back in space
Tags: badger, eve online, ibis, jita, kestrel, lasers, magnet magnetson, merlin, mining, penny ibramovic

iPod Touch Gelaskin

Melmoth's keen websense tingled a few weeks back and he pointed me towards the Gelaskins website, which sells 'artist-designed removable skins' for various iPods, portable computers, and gaming devices.

I browsed through the iPod Touch section of the Gelaskin range, which offers a large variety of different skins. I quite like a few of the steampunk skins, like the Underworld Gelaskin, and the classic art skins are attractive, such as Van Gogh's Café at Night Gelaskin. After browsing them all I couldn't resist buying the Never Mind Gelaskin.

I liked the art of the skin so much that I visited the website of the artist, Stella Im Hultberg, and browsed through more of her work. I quite like what she does.

My order for the Gelaskin was delivered pretty quickly considering it was coming from Canada. The skin itself was easy enough to apply, allowing for realignment if necessary before being pressed down to remain firmly in position. It looks quite attractive on the back of my iPod Touch. The only problem is that I generally lay my iPod face-up on a surface if I am listening to it at a desk, so I don't get to see the Gelaskin, and if I lay it face-down so that I can see the skin I risk scratching the screen. I could buy some screen protectors to mitigate that, but I get to see the skin when I'm handling the iPod and it looks good.

Along with the Gelaskin, each sale of an iPod Touch skin gives access to the site's collection of iPod Touch wallpapers. These are the skin designs themselves, as well as some different graphics from the same set, available as files to download. I grabbed a few of the ones that I liked and transferred them across to the iPod. Now I can pick and choose from my favourite design as the background image for my iPod, so even though I might not see the Gelaskin as much as I would like I get to see a similar graphic every time I wake my iPod from sleep.

The Gelaskin is a nice idea and well implemented. I rarely apply this kind of decoration to my devices, but the quality and variety of designs was alluring, as well as the ease of application and the possibilty of swapping the skins occasionally. I am quite pleased with my purchase.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on iPod Touch Gelaskin
Tags: art, gelaskin, ipod, never mind, stella im hultberg

Magnet Magnetson visits Sharkhead Isle

Having not yet subscribed after my two-week trial with EVE Online I returned to the Rogue Isles, using Crossover Games to run City of Villains on my Mac. Having completed a set of missions I was looking for a change of scenery from Cap Au Diable, somewhere new to explore. Having reached threat level 20 I get the option to have a second costume I can change in to, but the Facemaker who designs the costumes wanted me to take care of a little problem before tailoring anything new for me. As luck would have it this sent me to Sharkhead Isle, a new zone!

To get to Sharkhead Isle I caught the villainous ferry. I suppose not every villain can have a black helicopter at her disposal. When I arrived I found a new area to explore, new sights to see, and new enemies in large numbers to beat the crap out of me. I remembered that there are impediments to exploring new zones, mostly involving all the mobs being your own level or higher, making it more difficult to get around safely. It's good to have somewhere new to explore but I'll have to be more careful whilst exploring for a while.

I completed the Facemaker's task, taking care of a bit of 'Family' business, and bumped in to a new contact on Sharkhead Isle in the process. Unfortunately she didn't want to offer me any missions, muttering something about taking care of my own jobs first, so I headed back to Cap Au Diable to see the Facemaker. From there I headed to Boris the Russian, being the only other chap I know in the area. He asked me to hit a bank in Skyway City. Sure thing, Boris! As if the call of violence was sent across the aether, Zoso turned up at that moment and was keen to kick some Longbow arse, so we teamed up to get the job done with twice the violence. The bank job was so successful we brazenly decided to hit another one straight afterwards, and got even more cash from the vault.

For completing my bank job Boris the Russian introduced me to a new contact, still based in Cap Au Diable. I will hook up with my new contact, but despite the threat level being higher in Sharkhead Isle I would still prefer to move onwards rather than stay in my current zone. I'll see what sort of work she offers me and take it from there.

Posted in Gaming | Comments Off on Magnet Magnetson visits Sharkhead Isle
Tags: city of villains, crossover games, magnet magnetson