Petition for what exactly?

Sitting on SL today i saw this petition something about third party tier, and I had no idea what that meant. After reading the online petition wading though the horrible writing habits that gave me a headache; they are basically complaining about the ability to trade L$ to third parties. I have no idea why this person used the words “third party tier” when tier has nothing to do with it, he/she should have said “trading.” My main problem with this petition is LL won’t take it seriously. Even if it reaches their signature goal, or even if it gets a million signatures, it will be ignored because it’s so poorly written, as if a raging child wrote it.

This petition is so poorly written it barely made sense to me. It sounds like some teenage dropout raging about how bad the new Terms of Service (TOS) that LL updated this past week. It mostly sounds like the same whinny bullshit people have been complaining about for the past 10 years now. Issues like “we are gonna lose money.. LL doesn’t care about it’s users… We cant pay our bills… LL doesn’t listen to us.. This is gonna make LL shut down in a year..” bla bla bla.

Seriously people, this kind of rage has been going on for a DECADE, since BETA. This kina shit always happens with any MMO with a sizable community that makes even the smallest tiniest changes to any policy. Other MMOs don’t even have an exchange for their virtual currency. LL has been around for over 10 years and after all the stupid drama LL has pulled on us, they are still here and we are STILL playing it.

Now as for the issue of 3rd party L$ trading, I’ve been using LindeX since it came online. Hell everyone who buys L$ has used it. If you want a better deal then enable ADVANCED mode on the LindeX page, and do Limit Sells, or Limit Buys to squeeze more L for your buck (or vice versa).

Minecraft Xbox 360 edition Terrain Generation B0rked!

Since the last update of MCXE that introduced the End (which I’ve not seen yet) I’ve been having some serious problems with creating new worlds. Since old maps I’ve made in the past don’t have Strongholds, there is no way to reach to the END. So I I have to generate new maps and start from scratch.  Sure sounds like fun, no?

Not really. I end up getting maps with MASSIVE biomes that take up 80% of the map (and as you know XBox edition has rather small maps compared to the PC) no villages, and the other 20% is just some other biome that may or may not have trees. Twice I’ve had maps come up was nearly all mushroom biome, which is largely water, and NO TREES were on the fucking map!  Other times I get on maps that 80% snowland, and one small field of grassland.  Nearly all of these worlds generated NO structures on the surface, at least no villages. In versions past some maps would generate like 4-6 villages! Now I’m getting nothing.  And i can only assume that abandon mines and strongholds aren’t being created either.  But most of the time i can’t do anything due to the lack of wood.

Just recently i made a new map, using the seed “END” since I was gonna work on going to the END, and i ended up smack in the middle of a massive OCEAN that was about 75-80% of the entire fucking map! There were two large mountain mushroom bomes areas, one long desert island that resembled Japan, and the rest was all water with LITTLE TINY grass islands dotted around that had a single tree on them. and yet again NO villages even though i DO have structure generation enabled. Can strongholds and Abandon mine shafts exist on a world that mostly water?

I know on the PC version you have the choice of “large biomes” for world generation, but the XBox version obviously doesn’t since the maps are so small, but it SEEMS like it’s enabled which is why I’m getting such large 4:1 ratios of just two biomes. It really is making the game unplayable. And the fact they’ve added so much to this version with no new Achievements sure doesn’t give me much incentive to play anymore. Seems more fun to watch others play MC on Youtube, which is what got me into minecraft in the first place. Because of this problem, if i use any seeds i find online they just don’t work and end up creating a totally different worlds.

Linux Mint don’t like me

So while I’m still dealing with building my new i7 PC, I still have my old rig which now consists of:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 (2.5ghz)
• Mobo: Asus P5Q, LGA 775, P45
• RAM: G.Skill 8GB (2GB x 4) DDR2 1066
• Video: Asus GeForce GTS 520 (DDR3 1gb) (low profile, fanless)
• HDD: Western Digital 160GB SATA HDD
• PSU: Antec Basiq 500w

This is basically the same PC I’ve been using for the past 6 years, except I had “downgraded” the video card and HDD by replacing it with a smaller, and slower 160gb “green” WD drive.  I’m keeping the Geforce GTX 550 Ti, and my Velociraptor drive for my Sandy Bridge-E rig that I’m still trying to build for over a month now. I just shipped back the motherboard after using two different sets of ram with different brands, and different CAS settings this stupid mobo keeps seeing “abnormal” on any simm I place in slot D1, so it must be an issue with the motherboard.

So back to my old PC; I tried installing Linux Mint Mate 14, so I created a boot USB drive using an ISO-USB type loader, booted it and the login screen comes saying that it will login the user “mint” in 10 seconds. 10 seconds pass, screen kina goes weird, login screen comes back. This repeats over and over. If I manually logging as “mint” with a blank password, same thing. If i keep doing this enough times i get a message that X server has failed too many times.

Apparently looking at the log files, the X server (which is the GUI shell linux uses) keeps crashing. I have no idea why. The video card I have in this PC works fine, windows has no problems at all with it. So whatever default drivers Mint comes with just crashes Mint’s X server so there is no way I know of on how to install it. I’m far too clueless to use the command line to install the OS and manually install a nvidia driver to bypass X crashing. When I do get to the command line, I type startx and it just crashes again anyway.

I just tried a Ubuntu on a boot USB drive and it worked perfectly fine. I even watched a YouTube video that played fine; no issues at all. So is it just a bad nvidia driver in this Linux Distro? This little GTS 520 video card is slow, but it isn’t faulty. I’m gonna try some more Linux distros and see how they fair on this humble PC.

Asus P9X79 motherboard

Something I did learn about the Asus P9X79 motherboard is that it’s really picky about USB flash drives that you use to store the ROM files when you wanna update your bios.

I made a USB boot drive with windows 8 pro ISO, so I can install windows 8 off the USB drive. You can also copy other files onto it as well like drivers and whatever else if you have the room. I figured I could also drop the ROM files for my bios, rename it and use the Flashback functionality on my mobo.  Nope. So to update my BIOS I ended up using some other USB drive formatted FAT-32 and I was able to update the BIOS. I never could get the Flashback function to work mostly due to newer Flash ROM files being incompatible with my older Bios version. So I had to download a special ROM file that updated the motherboard (almost like updating your OS) which then allowed me to use the most recent version.

Flashback is a very cool function where you can update/change the BIOS with only standby power connected. You just pop in a USB drive with the ROM file on it, press a button at the back and after a moment, bingo! You can even do it with out a CPU or RAM installed on the motherboard. Kind of mind boggling but it makes sense.

I once restored a corrupted BIOS by hot-swapping it into another motherboard already booted and forced a rom flash to get it working again. This was back over a decade ago, on an AMD Athlon XP motherboard, I had a bios update go BAD and the mobo was totally useless. I read on the web about this trick where you use another motherboard that has the same BIOS chip type that’s removable but it’s a completely different brand/make of mobo.  The trick is you boot up in DOS with the working mobo, yank out it’s BIOS chip while the machine is running (GASP!) snap in the BIOS chip that isn’t working into the mobo that’s already booted, running DOS.  Run the BIOS Flash utility with special command line switches that forces the ROM flash even though it’s not meant for that motherboard. Powered down, swapped the BIOS chips back, and it WORKED! I was totally shocked! So Flashback really isn’t that amazing when you consider this, but it’s still fucking cool.

So my P9X79 mobo’s bios is all kosher now, but I still can’t use the PNY Ram I recently bought for it. I paid only $92.99 for this PNY ram, but now when I look on amazon it’s $144! So I’m gonna return it back to Amazon, and order G-Skill F3-12800CL8Q-16GBZH from Newegg. While this ram is NOT listed in Asus’ compatibility list, G-skill’s website DOES list the P9X79 mobo as compatible. Plus there’s many other G-Skill models listed on Asus’ compatibility list, unlike PNY which no PNY model is listed at ALL for the P9X79. Also I’m using G-skill my old Core 2 Quad PC right now so I know it’s good. PNY I’ve never used before, it’s a brand name I’ve seen many times, but I will never use PNY again because of this experience.

Just goes to show if I spend the extra $40 you get what you pay for. Also always RTFM before you buy RAM for your mobo!

UPDATE:

Two weeks have past and my order for this ram has arrived, and I STILL have the EXACT same problem. Why are the PC gawds doing this to me? I don’t know if I should buy a third set of RAM or replace the motherboard. I’ve already emailed the folks where i bought my motherboard from so hopefully I can get some guidance.

New PC partial fail :(

Finally got all my parts delivered only to find out that the RAM I ordered isn’t compatible with my Asus P9X79 motherboard. The RAM I have is a  DDR3 16GB kit by PNY; a decent brand name. But looking up the ram compatibility list for this motherboard, not a single PNY module exists on the list.

So my first though was to update the BIOS in hopes some compatibility was added.  The BIOS download page did mention that more RAM compatibility was added, but I had no luck getting my PNY ram to work fully.

The BIOS version on this motherboard was very old, so old that the new format of the ROM files were incompatible with the BIOS I have. So I first had to flash the BIOS with a special update that actually rebooted and ran some sort of updater which reminded me of Windows update, with warnings about not turning off or resetting the PC. After it rebooted it let me update the bios again with the newest version that was released last month.

I’m actually using this incompatible RAM to type this post, but it’s not fully working. The ram is running at 1333mhz, single channel and with all four ram modules installed but the one module in D1 slot appears “abnormal” to the BIOS. So I’m only running 14gb instead of the full 16gb.

I’ve tried swapping the ram modules around into diffident slots, but which ever module I put into D1 always came up abnormal. This slot D1 is apparently the “master” slot you need to use if only had one ram module; which oddly is the 6th RAM slot out of all eight. So if I only put in one stick of ram into D1, it won’t post. RAM in any other slot just won’t be seen by the motherboard, as if it was empty.

So it seems all four ram modules are fine, just not kosher with my Asus P9X79 motherboard. So I’m gonna return them and order some ram that IS on the compatibility list. Perhaps some Corsiar Vengeance? Or G-skill Ripjaws? I’m not exactly looking for high end performance, just something that fully fucking works!

Fortunately the new i7-3820 works fine, and I also got a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO HSF which is a friggin MONSTER! It barely fits in the cheap-ass case I bought a couple months ago. It looks exactly like the Hyper 101 I have for my old Core 2 Quad rig, but at least 2.5x bigger. Then again the 3820 is a GIANT CPU with a double latching deal on the LGA 2011 socket and built-in screw hole mounts for your HSF so there’s no need to mess with a backplate since it already has one stock.

It did take me a while to figure out how to mount the Hyper 212 Evo, and it did come with the extra parts needed for a LGA 2011, so I’m happy with that. I just need fully compatible RAM.

Minecraft Madness!

So I finally dove into the PC side of Minecraft and bought the game. I can now join multiplayer servers rather than playing single player on the Xbox, since there are no dedicated servers to play on XBL and none of my friends are playing it anymore since it didn’t take long to get all of it’s achievements. Also Minecraft Pocket Ed is a joke and has ZERO internet multiplayer.

Skyblock is a mod in Minecraft I’ve been rather fond of. Rather than playing strait “vanilla” you’re giving a tiny tiny little sky-island “block” mostly made of dirt, a few sand blocks, a chest with limited supplies, and one grown tree on the edge. The trick is to expand your little “island” around, create a cobble stone generator so you can expand it, build a farm, and whatever else.  Since there is no proper “overworld” there is no coal to mine, no iron, gold, diamond, redstone, none of that.

Depending on the server you play on, monsters will still spawn at night however monster spawning isn’t an issue much until you start expanding so there are areas that are far enough away from you for them to spawn (something like 25-30 blocks away).

One trick i learned is to place water on the edges for emergency purposes. If you fall off the edge, you are still able to “move” while falling, so all you need to do is get over towards your waterfall and you’ll be able to swim back up.  When you fall into the void, you’re dead and you can’t recover what you dropped. You mainly need to use a waterfall so you can swim under the island and build a platform under it. This will catch anything that falls down there like sand blocks, apples, and saplings from trees as the leaves decay.

Dirt blocks are in limited supply, and grass dirt blocks is even more rare. If you dig out all your grass blocks then any more dirt you place down will remain dirt. If you don’t have a proper grass field (say 3×3) you can’t use bonemeal to grow tall grass which in turn gives you seed so you can grow wheat.

There’s also one block of bedrock that basically marks your /home spawn point. I like to use that as part of my cobble stone generator as a backing so that the cobble i break down doesn’t get lost falling out into the void, and whatever pickaxe I’m using won’t break it away accidentally. This way i can just keep my left mouse button down as i harvest more cobble. But that isn’t really an option to do that when you first start out.

Infinite water is easy to make, and once you have that made you can make a trough of water (about 2×12) that you can use to go fishing in. Oh and by the way you’re only given one bucket, which has lava in it when you first get it. The water you get is usually given to you as 2 block of ice you have to place and then break (with your fists or it shaders and you get nothing) to have flowing water.

I hate my #comcast DVR

DVRs need to evolve and DOWNLOAD TV shows I want to watch, rather than record shows as they broadcast from the networks. I shouldn’t have to deal with conflicting recording schedules for content that’s already digital.  Since we all pulled the “analog plug” for TV almost FOUR years ago, why are we still “recording” shows instead of downloading them? The whole POINT of a DVR is to watch shows on my own time, and not when it’s airing. Most shows I won’t get the chance to watch for another week anyway. So if it takes longer to download a show rather than record it, so what?

I can already download shows off the internet on demand with out scheduling conflicts. I can download a DOZEN shows at the same time with out conflicts. Who CARES if DishNetwork or Uverse DVRs can record 4+ shows at the same time. the point is we shouldn’t NEED to “record” broadcast shows when they are already in a digital form. I could set up an RSS feed to download my favorite TV shows via Bit Torrent which come with the commercials already edited out.

On top of this my Comcast DVR is not very stable. There’s always a good chance that shows it records won’t play back for whatever reason. NEVER a problem when you DOWNLOAD a show since downloading it always has a built-in check the file isn’t corrupted. But a recording can easily be corrupted and be unplayable part way into the show or it won’t even start and the DVR isn’t even smart enough to skip over those corrupted parts so I can watch.

My biggest gripe with my DVR are the controls. They always lag, they don’t respond to when you press the buttons on the remote. Often times when I fast forward though commercial I smack into the END of the recording, or in odd cases it goes BACK to the start.  Some times i can get it to stop right after the commercial but then it rewinds back like 20 seconds so I’m forced to see the last ad. You can’t fast forward 20 seconds since it just puts you right back where you were when you need to stop it, or goes past two minutes into the next segment of the show.  So damn FRUSTRATING! So I’m constantly doing this DANCE with the remote to get it to play when i want it to. Sometimes i’ll spend more time fucking with the remote to skip over commercials than it would take for the 2 minutes to WATCH the bloody commercials.

I know they can’t put a 30 second button on their DVRs (they used too) but it’s always LAGGING or seemingly freezing up for a few seconds as the show whizzes by and often SPOILING the show’s story as I see something appear, but missed how it came about  because I couldn’t STOP THE STUPID DVR SOON ENOUGH.

Why can’t these DVRs be clever enough to realize that most shows repeat later that same week or even that same DAY?  So if there’s a conflict why can’t it just record the next re-airing of the same episode of the show?  Comcast DVRs are very stupid in regards as to what is a rerun and isn’t.  if it says “repeat” in the show’s description it sees it as a rerun even if it’s the same NEW episode that aired 3 hours ago. So if the description happens to omit that word, it thinks it’s new and it records it… even though it IS indeed a rerun that’s airing on an odd hour that isn’t it’s normal time slot.

 

 

 

In the market for a PC upgrade

I’m trying to do homework on a new system upgrade. I’m basically going to replace mobo, CPU and go 16gb of quad channel ram (1600 or better). For the longest time I thought Sandy/Ivy Bridge was Intel’s name for motherboard chipsets, not the code names Intel uses for the core architectures.  Problem is that most of the stuff I’m reading is about a year old. Back when LGA 2011 CPUs were really expensive (upwards of $600) but that isn’t the case anymore. It’s really hard to find up-to-date information. I’m getting really confused about Ivy Bridge, vs Sandy Bridge. LGA 2011, and LGA 1155, and reading they are some how compatible?  How can a chip with nearly TWICE the pins of the former be compatible at all? Just look at this image, they are entirely different sizes.

So I’m assuming what’s going on here is that Intel is creating the newer Ivy Bridge based CPUs in LGA 1155 for older Sandy Bridge based motherboards. I’ve read that LGA 2011 is the newest socket that only a few Sandy Bridge chips are using.  The CPU I’ve been wanting to get is a LGA 2011 i7-3820 but its a Sandy Bridge CPU. Intel’s page doesn’t say this CPU is Sandy nor Ivy bridge but it does show a 32nm lithography which implies Sandy Bridge (vs 22nm for Ivy Bridge).

I assume the LGA 2011 is the newer generation for sockets on motherboards over LGA 1155, and Ivy Bridge based CPU is the newer-gen core because it’s a newer smaller 22nm die processes.  But why does Ivy Bridge seem to only exist on LGA 1155, and only supports dual channel RAM with most of them at slower clockspeeds? Even slower than the i7-3820 I’m thinking about buying, which IS an Sandy bridge-E CPU not Ivy. WTF is Sandy Bridge-E then? Quad Cores with HT? Really, that’s it? It’s quite confusing as to what is new/current tech when you can see the so-called NEW stuff has less performance, and using OLDER specs, than the old stuff.  >sigh< WTF Intel?

Searching Ivy Bridge on amazon, the i7-3820  appears right at the top as if it IS an Ivy Bridge CPU, but it isn’t. This of the lower-end CPUs of it’s “Extreme” performace line. It has the FASTEST “normal” clock speeds of *ALL* the Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge CPUs. Has 10mb L3 Cache compared to maximum 8mb for Ivy Bridge. It supports Quad channel RAM, and is semi-overclockable (not fully unlocked like the K series). I read one guy overclocked his 3820 chip to 4.5ghz!! Daamn! Why is the new stuff so inferior Intel?

The motherboard I want is the Asus P9X79 with Intel’s X79 chipset. There are four different versions, the LE, WS, Pro, and the plain “P9X79″ with out a suffix. The LE is the cheapest, and I’m not into SLI video card setups anyway so I’m likely going to snag the LE. All I really want is Quad Channel memory which requires four sticks of the same ram. But this motherboard has EIGHT ram slots four on each side of the CPU socket that maxes out at 64gb, but I only want 16gb. So could I run eight 2gb sticks of ram in each slot in Quad channel mode? Does DDR3 even come as low as 2gb? LOL! Seems like a 4x4gb configuration is my best bet.

Every time I spec out a new computer parts I always think about having an upgrade path (or future proof) for what I’m building. But lets face it. I’ve realized that the next time I upgrade my computer I’m going to replace everything again anyway. So what’s the point future proofing, or having an “upgrade path” when tech gets outdated in 6-12 months anyway? Plus add to the confusion when the specifications for the “new”stuff performs less than the old stuff did.

That said most of my hardware I keep using years after it’s technically declared to be outdated, and really don’t upgrade it much more than a new HDD or more ram. Hell I’ve had my Core 2 Quad system for about 5 years, even my Mac BookPro is over 2 years old now and the only upgrades I’ve done to them was give them both 8GB ram from 4gb.

The best thing I (and everyone else) can do is buy what is affordable (avoid the over priced $600+ enthusiast XTREME!!!! crazy stuff) and find what looks good to you. Weigh the pros and cons of the tech, make sure the items you want match up and are compatible. Take with a grain of salt of what you read in forums, especially if the posts are a year old or more.  Buy and build your new PC, and stick too it for about 5 years and then worry about your next upgrade then when we drool over 10mn Skylake CPUs.

So for now this is what I’m thinking about getting:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 BX80619I73820
Mobo: P9X79 LE
RAM:4gb x four (16gb) Quad Channel DDR3 1600 <– Brand subject to change since ram prices change often
HSF: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (Intel doesn’t include a HSF)

I’ve already got a new PC case, new Corsair 750w PSU, and DVD burner drive. and I’ll just slap in my old WD VelociRaptor 150gb drive. Yeah I might go Solid State some day…

Windows 8 Buggery

For the most part I’m rather happy with my copy of Windows 8 on my slowly ageing Core 2 Quad based PC, however it’s a bit buggy. I tend to crash after bootup and going to my desktop from the Start (aka metro) screen.  Windows 8 has the FASTEST boot time I’ve ever seen from Microsoft.

I’m also having weird icon behavior.  Below is a snippet of my desktop icons.  Notice how some folder icons have a bar above the icon, and folders with pictures in it look like upside computer monitors. Anyone get weird folder icons like these?

my buggy folder icons

Update: (march 2013) seems all that weirdness is gone for the past couple months.  I not longer see glitched and upside down icons anymore. Win8 has updated at least 3 times since then.

Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition

They silently updated the XBL Edition with little fan fare it seems.  This update adds a lot but still it’s not quite the same content as the PC version.

There still isn’t:

• Trading with NPC Villagers, even though they had been added this update
• Emeralds (for trading with Villagers)
• The End
• Ender Dragon
• Wither

Maps are still very small and limited (not as bad as pocket edition)