Archive for October, 2007:

Great news! The developers behind KOTOR I and II are currently working on a new MMORPG, based on the KOTOR universe - Star Wars!

To say I’m looking forward to it would be an understatement. The article mentions Star Wars Galaxies, which proved to be popular in the first year or so, until a major update in 2005 (aka, Combat Upgrade). Now the game is estimated to have less than 20,000 active players. I remember Adamskii, Percy and I abandoning SWG just prior to the Publish 13 (if my memory serves me right) release.

The fact that Bioware are picking up the pieces and basing it on the KOTOR time frame, rather than that of the 2 trilogies is great. I look forward to what they’ll have to offer.

One last question - Adamskii, will you be signing up for the beta?

I finally got around to registering 2 new domains for slickhouse.  At the same time, I decided to upgrade to UKHost4u’s advanced hosting. This gives slickhouse 4GB of storage space; 200GB bandwidth/month and several other additional benefits.

I’m undecided what to do with the new domains, slickhouse.net and slickhouse.co.uk - but once my mind is set, I’ll let you know. For now, they’re pointing to empty directories until I have enough time to code a few holding pages. They could simply point to slickhouse.com, but that may be a waste.

Still, at least I’m expanding my online empire…

Many of us download our music these days for many reasons. Some acquire their music via torrents or similar P2P networks, which is illegal in many countries across the globe. Others use iTunes and it’s fantastic music store - which I find great for podcasts.

But, Radiohead appear to be revolutionising the music industry and indeed, digital content distribution.

If you haven’t already heard it, their latest album [in rainbows] is available for free from inrainbows.com Free is perhaps the wrong term, as in actual fact, you are the one dictating the cost. No more record labels or distributors taking a huge cut of a band’s profit - and no more complaining consumers.

I’ve bought a digital copy for £0.00, which has just finished downloading. If I like their latest offering, I may purchase another - this time at a higher price. I can see this as the way forward for digital content, letting the buyers decide how much they want to pay. After all, Radiohead have reported sales of over 1.2 million units - and I bet over half of the buyers parted with a few £’s.

One last point - even though you can legally buy the album through their official store, many are resorting to torrents still, very bizarre.

Let me know how you get your music - torrent? iTunes (or similar)? from a shop still? or are you looking forward to the day that all music creators take a leaf out of Radiohead’s book?

uTorrent is a fantastic little program - perfect for downloading files via the bit-torrent network.

Whilst checking how my current set of downloads were going, I noticed a statistics option under the help menu:

• Total Uploaded: 49.7GB
• Total Downloaded: 226GB
• Total Running Time: 1070:40:10
• Number of files added: 267
• Program started: 35 times

The second is the most shocking - 226GB is about a 1/4 of the storage space on my fileserver. I think I’ve been using uTorrent for about a year now, which is almost 19GB/month via bit-torrent. 1070 minutes equates to almost 45 days of continuous downloading. So, in theory I’ve downloaded about 5GB/day, on the days that uTorrent has been up and running.

Anyway, enough of the stats - any recommendations for torrents? uTorrent is currently grabbing season 1 of Prison Break and Heroes for me, courtesy of isohunt.

It has taken a good few years for me to finally get round to watching Band of Brothers. Originally aired in 2001, the mini-series comprises of 10 episodes - each around 70 minutes long.

The box-set usually retails for £50+, but whilst visiting HMV the other week, I spotted it for £20! Since then, we’ve watched an episode per evening - viewing the final tonight.

You can never tired of war films - there are plenty to see and you know what to expect. Band of Brothers is in a different league though and highly recommended by myself. If you’re like me and have yet to see the entire mini-series, or you want to see it again, then grab the box-set. Looking at HMV online, it’s only £14.99!