I just figured out that the dynamic DNS updater for my old No-IP–based domain narnia.bounceme.net hadn’t been run for about 3 months, which meant that the IP address had been wrong for absolutely ages. I’ve fixed that now, and now I’m getting about double the traffic now, which is probably because I have so many referral links linking to my old domain.
How to make friends
27 November 2007I was reading my YouTube profile just now, and they delivered me the most depressing news:
So, yeah. I have no friends. 
Fortunately, they told me how I could make some:
Cool! So I can make friends by uploading YouTube videos! And all this time, people were misleading me by telling me I had to make friends by talking to people. Talk about confusion.
XLink Kai: play Xbox for free over the Internet
16 November 2007I’ve just set up XLink Kai for Xbox at home. It’s sort of like a free alternative to Xbox Live that basically creates tunnels over the Internet to fool an Xbox into doing its normally LAN-based “system link” function over the Internet.
Finding someone to play with is sometimes difficult, as the community that plays on XLink Kai is quite small (just now, there were only 20 people simultaneously playing, but it peaked at about 200 earlier today), and about the only game that is played is Halo 2 (although any game that supports “system link” will technially work). Apart from that, it’s fairly easy to set up; provided you don’t run the Linux version of the client — it sucks (I got segfaulting and “floating point exceptions”). Get the Windows version and run it in VMware (although you’ll need to run VMware as root to make it support promiscuous mode).
Basically what you have to do is hook up your Xbox to your home network, and run the Kai client on your computer. Using the Kai client, you join an arena where other people are playing. Your computer then automatically creates a “tunnel” over the Internet, which then makes other games from the arena show up in your Xbox’s “system link” list. Your computer is effectively repeating the network traffic for the Xbox on the other end, although it works a little more complicated than that.
Don’t bother setting this up if you don’t have Halo 2 — you will most likely find nobody else to play with. (On the other hand, if you’re interested in playing Top Spin, I’m sure my sisters would be very interested.)
How not to install Windows Vista on your Linux box
14 November 2007Folks, if you’re thinking of setting up Windows Vista on your already-set-up Linux box, just follow these simple steps, and you’ll be sure to fail:
- Firstly, make sure that you’ve already hit the “four maximum primary partitions” limit on your hard drive, so that backing up and repartitioning will be as painful as possible.
- Make sure you install Linux first, as the first partition of the drive, to make it as difficult as possible to get Windows to install on a different partition. Oh, and it’ll mean you have to overwrite the bootsector that Windows overwrites. Fun.
- Before you install, stuff your Linux drive with as many programs, videos, music, etc. as you can, so that it’s way too much to even backup, so that if anything goes wrong, you’ll lose all your data!
- Make sure that the bootable flags are set on your Linux partitions, because Windows won’t install unless only its own partitions are bootable.
- After installation, resize and move around the partitions several times to increase the chance of data corruption.
- Replace the bootloader several times from within an Ubuntu live CD by using
dd. With any luck, you’ll make a typo, and overwrite your partition table, making everything on your hard drive inaccessible. - Install Mac OS X on your PC just to make sure that it will stuff up your bootloader if you accidentally access the Startup Disk control panel which will try and install an EFI partition on your hard drive.
I encountered quite a few of these problems (although some are hypothetical) in the past month or so. No joke.
This is for real
11 November 2007Yesterday, I discovered that VirtualBox features a “seamless” mode, which allows you to display windows from your virtual machine in your host desktop environment. It’s actually very cool — check out the screenshot:
Just for kicks, I also ran a VM of Mac OS X, which you can see in the screenshot as well.
