I’M GETTING NIGHT VISION GOGGLES

This is due to the fact, that the most expensive limited edition of modern warfare 2, called prestige edition, comes with real-life, working night vision goggles.

Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition Unboxing (Official)

Now this is obviously unbelievably cool, however much my brother calls me a loser.
Though if he has done one good thing in his life is him ringing me up and telling me it’s actually available to pre-order in the UK on the hmv website, for both xbox 360 and ps3 both for £119.99 (although my order said a penny cheaper). Now I personally have always thought night vision goggles, ever since the first time I saw them (possibly MGS1 or a film, though I think I mostly remember them and the sound from the first splinter cell). Now I have actually looked up the price of night vision goggles once before, purely out of curiousity, and to no big surprise, they were very expensive. I think the cheapest ones I saw were about £600, on one of the few websites I had looked at. Though infinity ward have said the ones in the limited edition cost $70, but they seem fairly good when you look at the description on the hmv website:

“See in absolute darkness up to 50 feet
Ability to view in black and white or night vision green
Custom-Designed and painted to replicate the in-game goggles
Wearable, adjustable and hands-free
Individually-numbered and engraved collector’s stand inspired by game character Captain “Soap” MacTavish, displays goggles when not in use”

And so I just can’t wait for the game to come. I loved the first game, completing it on veteran (mainly because my internet was off, and the game was awesome) plus I played it for days online, and I still occasionally play it, as I think it is better than cod:WaW tenfold. Plus the fact it means I’ll also get a free download of cod1 when it comes out on xbla!
So just to inform you, if you want to pre-order it, I would suggest getting your finger out, I don’t think they will be there for a very long time, and it is an online only preorder.

What I’ve been upto recently

Sorry, everybody reading, I know I haven’t posted anything in a very long time.
Basically I’ve just been upto a lot of things since finishing uni for the year. I’ll tell you all the stuff in details in other posts, but basically I have: tried and failed to install fedora 11 on my samsung nc10, played guitar hero 2 and 3 a lot (now having amazing completed both on expert, somehow – now trying to 5 star each song on expert, only raining blood on gh3!), plus been playing a bit of drums on rock band, as well as trying out my newest guitar hero game: “guitar hero:metallica” – in short a good game, though now I find most songs too easy on guitar, plus the career achievement was made stupidly. Plus, 2 days ago I was using my modded drum pedal (which I posted about before), when all of a sudden the piece of metal holding the chain to the actual pedal snapped in half. So that’s basically fucked, and now I want to try and install linux mint, or another distro, possibly opensuse … (but that will be talked about when I come to it).
I also 5 minutes ago ordered the guitar hero world tour drum kit, as I found out it can now be bought separately, as well as a separate pedal so now I will be able to do expert+ properly on gh:m and gh: smash hits (if I get it).
Anyway, I actually intended to talk specifically about my failure to install fedora 11.

So I did it the nomal way (sort of), as the nc10 doesn’t have a cd\dvd-drive built in, so I used live-usb creator, available on the fedora website, to install fedora to a usb stick.
So I simply, like installing any other OS from usb stick, change the boot settings in the BIOS, so that usb is at the top, then go into it.
I started to use it like a live cd, just to make sure of what works.
I have to say, compatibility-wise with most things it is fine, using it from the usb, I could use wireless, without having to install drivers, as well as the keyboard and a lot of things working, of course many function keys didn’t work straight off, but thats not surprise. But I was mainly going to install it for that reason, I heard it had the drivers for the wireless card, so then I go to install it, and for some reasons it kept coming up with errors about the different file systems, and such, anyway, I finally got past this and then something obviously went wrong with the installation, as it came up to either restart the computer, or format the entire hard drive, and I wasn’t going to do that as I still want xp as my main OS. I was going to try and sort this out, but I just haven’t got round to it.
I also tried another linux distro, that I forgot to say about earlier
usb pendrive linux. Ok, as it says on the website, it’s based on debian. Now I happened to stumble onto this (with stumbleUpon), and you download the OS, and extract it to a usb, which has a batch file you have to then run. I tried to install it the same way, unfortunately when I went to go into it, it came up with an Xserver error, now I didn’t know what this what at the time, but I looked it up afterwards, and it turns out I really couldn’t be bothered.
But I think if you have an nc10 (like me), or probably an nc20, presuming it has the same wireless card (since it has very similar specs anyway) and you want a linux distro, and you’re not really into going into the terminal window, and messing about with drivers if you simply want to do what most people do, and search the internet, so far I can really only suggest fedora. The pendrive linux had real problems, fedora had minor problems I think could easily be sorted (could have been down to me). However with ubuntu, although I think it’s a good operating system, it didn’t have the right wireless drivers, and it was quite fiddly, plus every time you upgrade the kernel, you would have to do it all over again.
Although, I will be back with my other tales, as well as installing mint 7, and perhaps opensuse 11.1,
thanks for reading, I promise I’ll post again sooner

Why twitter is better than facebook

Now, I have literally only just joined twitter, and started ‘twitting’ but already I can tell it is far better than facebook.
Though this may not be true for everybody, facebook has got good points, and so does twitter, though I think twitter is more for me.
Facebook seems to have become way to cluttered full of crap and seeing people results on whatever crap quiz or shit I couldn’t give two flying fucks about. And I admit it that I was very reluctant to start off with when I joined facebook. I’m personally not all that fond of ‘networking sites’ of any kind, and I didn’t want to just be on facebook coz everybody else was. I’m of the feeling that its practically just like everyother networking site, which in many aspects it is.

However twitter is different, you just seem to follow things that enjoy you, and you just make little statements. I think alot of it is the feeling i get with it. It seems a lot less of a handful than facebook. Facebook is mostly like you really get into it, or you really don’t at all. Twitter can also be used by the likes of me, who doesn’t want to spend every waking minute at a networking site. I personally spend a lot more of my time using stumbleupon than facebook and twitter put together (note: I don’t use any of the other networking sites).
Twitter is sort of like a proper networking site i guess, if there is such a thing, whereas I feel twitter is more like an rss/messenger/mini-blog. (And I don’t mean these things as they are literally, but more aspects of them – for instance most people in messenger don’t have most of their parts of conversation as huge paragraphs. Most are 1 or 2 lines long, and a mini-blog in telling everybody what you are doing, not necessarily a blog like where you would deeply discuss a topic)
Anyway, as I said this is only personal opinion, I just think it will be deemed as better as 1) its newer (as people seem to think “newer=better”), 2) it’s slightly different and 3) I think it appeals to a wider audience. Those myspace/facebook users, and people like me who just don’t care about that sort of thing as much and prefer to keep things short but still keep updated.

Stumbleupon – almost necessary

Now, I hadn’t actually realised, but I thought I had already spoken about it before, and that is, of course stumbleupon, which many people call stumbling.
Basically this is a firefox add-on which means, you can sign up and put in your preferences and then you just click stumbleupon and it takes you to a random page on the internet

There is just one thing I would admit to about this, in that it can get very addictive, and I have easily spent hours wasting time by going on websites that I would never have found on my own, as I probably would never have looked half the things up.
Plus you can rate the page, saying whether you like it or not, or other things, like on the rare occasion where you get the same page twice in the same sitting.
Plus if you aren’t on firefox, you can simply click here to go to their website, where you can just have the toolbar onscreen instead of an add on. Plus from here you don’t have to sign in and select preferences, so you will get completely random pages, that you wouldn’t even normally get. Though you still might find these interesting too.
In the end, stumbleupon is awesome, and everyone should get it, its something to waste time on if you get bored, and generally enjoyable

The evolution of rock band

I believe playing rock band, whether alone, or with friends, is a fairly good night in. Now I have had Guitar 1 – 3 (and now world tour), but I never really got into playing them, due to the fact that because of space constraints the guitars had to stay in the box, and it was a nuisance to get out. However, since I got the original Rock Band, I have played it a lot more. Partially because of the fact I love the drums on it, but I have also seen a much improved performance in my guitar playing as well. Now I mostly put this down to the fact that I re-bought GHII recently (on xbox 360, last time being on the ps2), and I love the X-plorer guitar, it feels a lot smaller and the frets smaller, and it just seems easier to play, as well as the fact it has a wire, so doesn’t use up batteries. Guitar Hero 2 has been a major player in the fact I have got better at the guitar (on GH and RB, not real life), as it is a lot harder and focuses a lot more on hammer-ons and pull-offs, and solos in general. Now, playing RB I could quite easily play through on expert and get to the last 5 songs, and I would have around 3 left that I could just star power through the hard part, but when you play GHII, I realised just how bad I was at the game. I couldn’t finish all the GHII songs on hard at the start, and I am still currently playing through expert. But now, a lot to do with playing RB2 with Loz, but also simply playing through GHII on medium getting 5 stars I was better. GHII on medium, made me better at RB on expert!!!! Now Rock Band 2 is out (as I mentioned earlier), and it has many more harder songs on guitar (and drums) than Rock Band, which is a good thing. So, what I am saying is that, if you are starting out on Rock Band, you will probably get to a part where all of a sudden, you go “WTF is happening here?!?!? ?!? I’ve never seen anything like this before?”. The way to get around this is simply to play Guitar Hero, now you could start on GH:WT, though I advise against it, as I personally think its too easy (I completed it on hard 2 afternoons) and you should try GH2 or 3. GH2 is good, and alot of the songs vary alot in what they ask of you, for instance “psycho billy freakout” is different than anything you would play on Rock band, but then I just think that they help a lot more if you want to get a lot better at guitar on rock band/guitar hero. And I currently haven’t completed GH3 on hard (only raining blood to go – should do it this weekend, Ive only tried it once), plus the fact GH2 and 3 are just better games than world tour, they have a better tracklist, and although world tour does have good songs, you have to play through a lot of crap songs in the tour.

Just as a note for anyone reading and want to know about drumming, I only have the rock band drums (with custom pedal and official silencers) and so I would NOT recommend playing GH:WT with these. It doesnt feel very nice, and I just don’t like the way the track comes at you for playing drums, it just feels strange. Though I highly recommend drums on RB, and the only suggestions I can give is to practise, try to get a custom pedal (i.e. get real pedal and add sensors this is by far the best tutorial I have seen). Also using something to make the rebound better, trust me it helps a lot – I love the drums on rock band, and I could easily play it for days on end if it wasn’t for the fact it would probably kill me. And I suggest, unless you previously play drums, that you should start on easy, and just continuously practise. I did, and now I can play most of the songs on expert. I’ve only done 10 of the 36 songs in the impossible setlist on drums (I have 36 which includes, songs from the first game, and downloaded songs), but I have only tried doing about 13, and the ones that I have failed, were sightreads. I also suggest you watch videos on youtube, and read up on better ways to practise, and also do the drums fills/beats.