The Clan of the Cave Bague

First stage of Campaign mode complet0rised! The Pirates are defeated and Bague’s Avengers are victorious! Now I’m up to my eyes in bi-plane flying World War 1 Germans! With the stupendous amount of coins I earned, I’ve unlocked the dreaded Concrete Donkey and the wonderful new Buffalo of Lies!

I’ve also discovered that by pressing select, I can toggle the top screen between play-area extension and world map – the latter definitely seems to be more useful, but we’ll see.

Despite being somewhat disappointed with the horrifically buggy and, frankly, unfinished Open Warfare a year or two ago, the lure of mass invertebrate extermination on a handheld console was reaching fever pitch when I spotted that Open Warfare 2 was getting better reviews. Imagine my discomfort, then, when discovering that it was sitting for a tempting 15 quid in my local GameStation.

So, first thoughts – the interface is excellent – much better than its predecessor. All the usual suspects are there – including the Holy Hand Grenade and Banana Bomb (both of which have, I understand, been inexplicably excluded from the recent Wii release). There’s a comprehensive team editor, including a fairly simple pixel program for editing your team flag. I was horrified to discover, though, that “Angry Scots” wasn’t available as a team language.

Until, that is, I completed the training mission and took the 1300 or so points I’d earned to the unlock shop – yes, Angry Scots is there for a measly 300 points, so JOCKS GET! My team has now been converted to a band of blue-painted rampaging celts. Oh – that they are, as ever, Bague’s Avengers. The teams are limited to four worms, though, so only Bague, Craig, Scabe and Plague are putting in an appearance – Babe, Tabe, Flabe, Mabe are currently languishing in the PC version.

So, I’ve only really done the tutorials so far and the resolution was worrying me a little – going from 1280×800 down to DS size was a bit of a concern. As it happens, it’s not too bad – the double height screen helps a lot so it’s only really a bit more panning that’s required.

Oh, and it has pirates.

This game is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. And it’s still miles better than many other titles available for the PC. It’s just stupid, funny, ultra-violent and, well, daft.

So I’ve created a team called Bague’s Avengers and am working my way up through the ranks in deathmatch mode, cos it’s just got to be done. They are, naturally, voiced by the Angry Scots voicebank.

For all those wierdos out there who have the closing song from Portal stuck in their head, prepare to have it replaced.

So, you know how it is. You have a CD collection going back god knows how many years, you buy some tracks from amazon or itunes, you have the whole lot ripped on your PC to stick on your portable device.

And then you realise you have over sixty gigabytes of music, most of which you haven’t heard in years and a fair proportion of which you haven’t listened to since it was ripped.

Here’s the downfall. I’d like to make use of the “copy highest rated songs” smart playlists in media players like Amarok and iTunes, but the simple fact is, 99% of my tracks are unrated, and a fair proportion of them haven’t been played.

So here’s what I’ve done. I’ve created a smart playlist called “unrated”, containing the following rule:

• Rating is <nothing at all – no stars>
• Limit to 25 items selected by random
• Live updating on.

Then I’ve made sure that this playlist is copied over on each sync (I have a 1Gb nano so obviously can’t sync the whole collection). This means that every day I have 25 tracks that are unrated and probably haven’t been listened to in years. As the tracks play, I give em a rating on the iPod and it syncs that back to iTunes/Amarok. Hooray for rediscovering old faves!

After a fairly lengthy compile (hey, it’s a KDE app) I had 99% of my concerns addressed as soon as the application booted.

Right there, on the home page, is exactly the information I was looking for – not just my current balances, but what they’ll be in 5,10, 40, etc days.

I quick rummage through the new interface reveals a wealth of new features which go even further than Money in a lot of ways:

• Each account can now be given a hard and soft limit. For example, you can set your current overdraft limit in your current account and even tell KMyMoney to alert you when you cross a user-defined threshold.
• There’s a whole budgeting section giving me control over every aspect of financial planning that I could think of at the time.
• Not only has the lack of forecasting been addressed, there’s a whole section of the application dedicated to forecasting and planning.
• All of this ties in with a massively expanded reporting engine, producing multiple types of customisable charts, graphs and textual reports. Want your 90 day cash flow line graph (like I do)? Just plug in the dates and flag it as a favourite report and it’s there.

I really can’t praise KMyMoney CVS enough – it does absolutely everything I want it to do, so my Windows partition is finally going to be converted to a /home partition.

One thing I can’t comment on yet is the stability – I’m running the current bleeding-edge CVS build after all. My plan is to subscribe to the developers announce list so I can get a heads up on any potential show-stoppers. Obviously, I’ll also need to take backups a little more frequently, but that’s a small price to pay

Yet another free application that shows the commercial boys how it’s done.

One of the few things that keeps a windows VM lying around for me is Microsoft Money. It’s one of the few applications that Microsoft have actually made a pretty good job of.

My judgment of this, though, is pretty superficial. Money provides a nice pretty cash-flow graph that lets you see, at a glance, if you’re at risk of crossing the evil overdraft limit line.

In an attempt to finally shake off the specter of windows, I periodically look at the free alternatives available and, after reading this blog, I thought it was perhaps time to give KMyMoney a look.

Rather than importing my (extensive) money files, I thought a good way to evaluate the software would be to set up a set of accounts from scratch, including all my regular scheduled bill payments. This was satisfyingly easy – actually quicker and less painful than Microsoft’s offering.

Having everything in, though, the one glaring hole I can see is that it’s all past-based – there seems to be very little in the way of forecasting other than the scheduled payments. This makes it awkward – I like to be able to evaluate whether or not a purchase is helpful by seeing what it does to my cashflow over the following weeks and months and KMyMoney just doesn’t seem to do that – at least with the current release.

So, I’m going a step further and installing the current CVS build, which the developers claim has a lot of shiny new stuff and seems pretty close to release. So, it’s compiling as we type and I’ll post my thoughts later.

The Ministry of Defence have announced five days of depleted uranium (DU) weapons-testing on its Dundrennan range in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. Despite numerous scientific studies proving the health and environmental damage of DU missiles, as well as growing international criticism of the weapons, the MOD continues to stick its fingers in its ears and repeat its mantra – “Na, na, na. I can’t hear you!”

Full Story

Well, according to El Reg, BT have been Baaaaaaad Monkeys and have finally owned up that they carried out secret tests of the Phorm system they’ve “not decided to use” well over a year ago. Without telling the people whose traffic they intercepted.

Something tells me they’re going to get a little bit sued.

Full muck here.

Well, at least BT are straight up about it. They replied saying “we don’t know anything yet, but when we do we’ll let you know.” Which is better than my mate RedSmartie got. He mailed Virgin pretty much the standard letter I put in my previous posting and in reply recieved a bunch of waffle about how bombarding him with unsolicited ads was “protecting him from ZOMG TEH PH1SH0rZ!!1!one!”

They also mentioned “ill-informed ’stories’” which are currently being circulated by people who don’t understand the systems.

People like RedSmartie. And me. Oh, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

If an ISP wants to make a shedload of cash by snooping at my browsing habits and sending ads targeted at a 37-year-old male to my 7-year-old daughter, then they should at least have the courtesy to say so, and not attempt to play on security fears by trying to pretend they’re protecting me from something.