Warehouse 13

I’ve previously posted here about Fringe, a great TV series from the mastermind of JJ Abrams. It’s due to return for a new season along with most other shows next month, in the meantime I’ve been passing my time by watching Warehouse 13. It’s a little bit X-Files, little bit Fringe and a healthy dose of comedy in there as well.

The storyline is based around 2 Secret Service agents who get sent to work for the eponymous Warehouse 13, a government warehouse not unlike the one from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The warehouse contains various artifacts and objects from around the world, each of which having some sort of power or ability. From swords that make the wielder invisible to wish-granting kettle and even Pandora’s Box (empty of course). The official blurb is:

After saving the life of the President, two Secret Service agents find themselves abruptly transferred to Warehouse 13 – a massive, top-secret storage facility in windswept South Dakota that houses every strange artifact, mysterious relic, fantastical object and supernatural souvenir ever collected by the U.S. government.

The Warehouse’s caretaker Artie charges Pete and Myka with chasing down reports of supernatural and paranormal activity in search of new objects to cache at the Warehouse, as well as helping him to control the warehouse, itself.

Aside from the wordy description and terrible punctuation within, the show itself is brilliant. The characters are entertaining and engaging. Saul Rubinek as Artie pulls off a great acting job giving depth and believability to his character. Eddie McClintock (Pete) and Joanna Kelly (Myka) have a great chemistry together and the writers have done a good job fleshing out the characters and making them more than just stereotypical clichés.

A great introduction in the fourth episode to the regular team is Allison Scagliotti as Claudia Donovan, a young ‘techno-wiz’ who breaks into the Warehouse to find Artie. The only character seeming out of place and redundant is Leena (played by Geena Williams) who seems at odds with the rest of the cast, bringing it a slightly mystical type presence to the show which seems at odds even with the weirdness of the objects in the Warehouse.

The story-lines and plot are excellent, there’s not so many lingering questions as with Lost and Fringe however they are setting up various elements of a season-long story-arc with a rogue ex-Warehouse agent, the mysterious head of Warehouse 13, Mrs Frederick and Artie’s treasonous past. This show is definitely one to watch and is very highly recommended.

Plants vs. Zombies

Popcap, purveyors of digital crack have unleashed their latest game: Plants vs. Zombies. It’s basically tower defence where the creeps are zombies and the towers are plants. The game is a great mix of addictive gameplay, great visuals and some absolute comedic moments with Crazy Dave (He’s CRAZY!).

The game isn’t without its flaws however. One of the biggest ones is that there are no hotkeys, you have to move your mouse to the top of the screen to select new plants. There is a solution to this – AutoIt, the Windows automation tool that has been helping me in MMOs since Star Wars Galaxies. It is able to simulate any input (mouse movements, keyboard presses) and has basic support for hotkeys.

I’ve put together a script for AutoIt 3 that will set up hotkeys on the top number keys to correspond to the 10 seed slots. You can view the script here.

Edit: Gir489 from the Steam Forums has taken the script and improved it beyond all recognition. It now features windowed support, an update checker and numerous other changes. You can find details on the Steam Forums.

epic.Technology

In my spare time, I’m the technical manager for epic.LAN. It’s a small (50-100 player) LAN Party based in the Stoke/Crewe area. With an aim of getting back to the core fun of LAN parties and bringing a party-like social atmosphere inspired by LANs like DreamHack, it’s a great event.

As technical manager, I’m pretty much in charge of making sure the LAN side of it works. This includes servers, network, wireless and all the websites (written by ChicagoTed) and supporting systems. Admittedly it’s not an impressive a job as doing a similar task for the UK’s largest LAN Party or DreamHack but it’s still a nice challenge.

With our first event over and done with, it’s good to finally sit back and relax and now go into some detail and analysis of what we did, where we went wrong, what we got right and how we’re going to improve.

Fixing VoIP phones on Speedtouch 585

If you’ve tried using VoIP phones (hardware or software phones like X-Lite or Eyebeam) then you’ll know the pain of the phone intermittently not working. It was plagueing us here at work until we finally found the fix.

It turns out that the Speedtouch routers have some settings built in for handling SIP which is great until you try and use another SIP phone on your network. The fix is to disable whatever it is trying to do and it turns out, this is easy!

Use telnet to connect to your router. If running Vista, you’ll need to install Telnet through Add/Remove Programs otherwise, you can use Putty.
Type in the following commands

connection unbind application=SIP port=5060 saveall

Change the configuration on your VoIP PBX so the phone is configured to be behind NAT

The phone should now just start working. This was tested with a Speedtouch 585. Polycom IP501 VoIP phone and the VoIP PBX is Asterisk provided by Voxhub.

Red Alert 2 Multiplayer on Vista

Red Alert 2 is one of the best RTS games that has ever existed with some of the craziest most fun multiplayer I’ve seen. We used to play it a lot at LAN Parties until last year when everyone started moving to Windows Vista. It is one of the few games that uses IPX for network games and Windows Vista does not have IPX available.

We thought that this was it and Red Alert 2 was dead, however, Scorpio9a has released a patch. The patch makes Red Alert 2 use IP instead of IPX and I’ve tested it and it’s working under Vista! How to get it working?

Download the patch: ts_ra2_lanpatch_1_00.zip
Extract it to your Red Alert 2 directory
Edit ra2.ini and change the ‘NetCard’ setting in the [Network] section to 0 (If you have more than 1 network card, you may need to try different values)
Run Red Alert 2 and choose ‘Network’ and you should end up in the lobby!

Some common problems you might come across are:

Network button doesn’t do anything and just returns to the main menu
You haven’t selected the right network card, just edit ra2.ini in the Red Alert 2 directory and change the NetCard setting in the [Network] section.

You can’t see any games or connect to someone else’s game
Make sure you’ve allowed Red Alert 2 on any firewall like Windows Firewall or Zonealarm. Also make sure everyone is running this patch regardless of operating system, otherwise they might be hosting an IPX game which your IP broadcast can’t see!

If you find this post helpful or have more problems/solutions, then please post a comment and let me know and if Scorpio9a reads this – if you come to a UK LAN Party, let me know and I’ll buy you a drink!

Fringe

The pilot for J. J. Abrams new TV series, Fringe, has been aired and it seems to be quite good. As you’d expect from Abrams, there is an overall mystery element to the series and some mysterious characters whose motives are not clear.

The music is very reminiscent of Lost with places where it rises to crescendo while zooming in on the characters. There’s a hint of borrowing from Heroes with the captions. Normal captions like locations, etc. are 3D text inserted into the scene, similar to the comic book style captions on Heroes and this works well, even if the captions do look a little like the Lost logo.

When an international flight lands at Boston’s Logan Airport and there are no signs of life, FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham, a scientist, Walter Bishop, and his son Peter uncover a deadly mystery involving a mysterious plague and a series of unbelievable events.

Moving on to the storyline and plot, this is engaging and entertaining. Definitely your typical setup for an ensemble TV sho, introducing the characters and setting up the basic interaction between them all. Anna Torv puts in a great performance as Olivia, bringing some emtotion to the character. Some great acting as well by John Noble but you’d expect that from him.

In closing, I think it’s a good pilot and it shows a lot of potential for the series.

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:

Update!

I’ve had these shirts made and they’re great. The company I used was AKAK, however any T-Shirt printer should be able to do these. They worked out about £12.50 each ($20 or so) . I’ve also considered getting a Sandvich T-Shirt made:

Sandvich Shirt

Murray-Mint.co.uk

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