i34 Feedback

So i34 is over and Multiplay have some time to reflect and work out what to improve for PC Gamer Showdown in September and i35 in October. My thoughts on the event are very mixed. Click to read more on my feedback!

Video from i34

Enjoy!

i34 is here!

Well it’s that time of the year - Multiplay’s summer gaming festival, i34, is here. It’s a new venue and a new style of event for MPUK and UK LAN Parties. In the past few years, the i-Series events have become more and more commercial and more of an expo/event tournament LAN with less for the traditional casual LAN gamer. Recognising this, Multiplay have upped their game and have now turned their typical large UK LAN Party into a gaming festival.

I’m here with Box ‘o’ Win and will be taking photos and putting them in the gallery. We’re on rows U and V on the far side of the hall so come and say hi! I arrived about 4PM and with the rest of the box, we set up the Tent ‘o’ Win - a 30ft x 10ft gazebo for drinking and general socialising. After that, Shazz and I went to Leamington and found our Travelodge with the largest room I’ve ever seen in a Travelodge, with room not just to swing a cat, but an entire zoo! We then went and joined the epic queue for checkin. It was only 30mins or so waiting when we queued, but there were people queuing for almost 2 hours to get checked in.

First thoughts on the event? It’s OK. Having everyone in one room is interesting and with the lights off there is a bit of atmosphere, but it’s not a patch on DreamHack. The trouble I think MPUK will have is that the tournament gamers will not want the lights off during their tournaments, and they definitely won’t want loud pounding music. Both of which are important in bringing the atmosphere to DreamHack.

The MFestival exhibition isn’t open yet, it’s scheduled to open at 9AM with all manner of exhibitors and an epic stage, that by all reports, dwarves anything attempted at a previous i-Series.

As always, photos and video can be found on the gallery as well as on YouTube.

Team Fortress 2 T-Shirts

I like Team Fortress 2. It’s a game I’m finally good at, so I’ve decided to get some T-Shirts made for it, if possible. The two T-Shirts are below:

RED Shirt

Front
Back

BLU Shirt

Front
Back

Quantum of Solace

The trailer for the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace is out now. Looks like it’s going to be a good film.

GPS Tracker and Ruby on Rails

I’ve finally managed to get Ruby on Rails working in a development environment under Windows using FastCGI. It seems quite responsive with no problems yet. The first task I’ve put it to, is a new section of the site for GPS Tracking.

Insipired by Igloo in #slack and the work-in-progress tracker by Foxdie - trackmygps.co.uk, I have made my own version for this website. It’s just for a single user and only displays the current position and the previous 12 hours of data, but it appears to work quite well on a test trip I made to Uttoxeter and back.

It’s currently a bit clunky, using a laptop, 3G USB adapter and a Bluetooth GPS receiver; but hopefully next month when I get a 3G iPhone I’ll find some software that will work on it!

In the meantime, you can check out the tracker here: http://rails.spaff.co.uk

Downtime and reliability

Well it seems that Prometheus, the colocated server I share with WiseWashu is on it’s last legs. I think the IDE controller is beginning to die in it, which is somewhat of a problem, as it has IDE hard drives. Anyhow, I’ve reformatted it, which is the reason the downtime recently and it seems to have restored some life to the server.

We are planning to get a replacement called ‘Aurora’. It will be a quad-core Xeon with 4GB RAM. A slight upgrade from Prometheus! More updates on this as it comes!

i33 - Day 1

So I’m finally here at Multiplay’s i33 event in Newbury, Berkshire. Possibly the last event here! After arriving at 2PM and checking in (although not allowed to go into the building), I set up a pro sleeping space in the red room and finally at 6PM managed to get into the Box o Win. It’s not bad, quite a decent size, good mix of games.

Not much else happening tonight, so off to bed. Quite glad I’m not staffing this event as a number of things have made it trickier for staff. Anyhow, I’m off, but the first lot of photos are up on my gallery now.

Wembley

Hi from Wembley Stadium! I’m here with the CentralanUK team and some great guys from EnemyDown running the £50,000 Unreal Tournament 3 National Championships.

A 5AM start for setup, and we’re finally kicking off with only an hour delay. We’ve had fun with power connectors, delivery, wireless keyboards and all manner of venue difficulties, but it’s all working and we’re ready to go!

I’ll try and get some photos up along with some coverage throughout the event.

A new look

So it’s about 5 years since my original site was created, and in that time it hasn’t changed much. Social networking has come about, the MyFaceTube generation have arrived and it’s all blogging, tagging and sharing.

I’ve finally given in and switched to Wordpress for my website (It is STILL a website) and I’m just in the process of transferring all the old content across. The gallery has also been updated and is now running on zenphoto with LensPic integration. I’ll be adding album titles soon. The theme is modified from the publically available Techmania theme.

The old site is still available at http://dev.murray-mint.co.uk so if you do want to check out the old articles, etc. then they are still there.

Murray-Mint.co.uk

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