Updated the blog software. The custom skins are still there, although I didn’t put much thought in upgrading them, so if anything starts flipping out, let me know. Also let me know if there are any missing files or anything.

The wiki still needs an update, that’s coming up next.

A recent special release/leak/whatever by Nine Inch Nails has been making its way around the Internet. That’s not entirely noteworthy for a lazy poster such as myself, but the enclosed image is.

If you graph what is seemingly white noise at the end of the track, you get an image of what seems to be a hand. jabxvi points out it looks like a hand they’ve been using in images on various viral promo sites. Neat. Details on how to get the graph (at least in the player I use) on the gallery page.

Oh my, I found my Dreamcast! Inside an incorrectly labeled box, which was inside another box in the corner of my apartment closet, it hid from me for almost two years! I still haven’t found about half of my games, but at least my Dreamcast and cables, two controllers, three VMUs, and a couple games have been dug up.

I’m going to be back in Port in two weeks, most likely, and I think I want to get some of the gang over so we can play some games. I haven’t found ChuChu Rocket! yet, but maybe by the then, we’ll be able to play that and other Dreamcast greats.

So while we’re on the subject, let’s take a little nostalgic glance at some games…

I may already have Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for PS2, but the original Dreamcast version is generally considered to be superior, owning to the great similarity between the Dreamcast and Sega’s NAOMI arcade hardware. I spent an entire winter break playing Phantasy Star Online. I had a character nearly at the level cap, with all sorts of cool stuff (and none of it hacked!). I have never again been so addicted to an online game.

Of course, there’s ChuChu Rocket! An oft-forgotten genre that the Dreamcast monopolized was that of the kitten simulation. And as Mark and I were recently reminiscing on for no reason, Power Stone 2, Capcom’s Smash Bros. Melee-styled game for four players, was a blast to play, and it had interactive environments!

I’ve been looking at getting a couple new games to poke around with, such as legitimate copies of MvC2 and PS2, and an import of a game in which I hear you get to fight the Pope…

With one of my machines here now acting as a router, I’ve been looking for some apps to have running often to keep an eye on the state of the system. While there are a couple I still need to look at, such as Wireshark (formerly called Ethereal), I’ve found a couple small console apps that, while not being as thorough as Wireshark, are nevertheless nice tools for watching general status.

htop is simply just a process monitor, one correctly called a “better top". The display is cleaner, the interface easier to manage, with both keyboard and mouse selection of tasks to renice or kill, and with the use of colors and non-textual reporting, the process state of the system is more easily accessible. While process monitoring isn’t necessarily the most important task on a router (especially when the router is more dedicated than the variety of tasks I use mine for, as you can see), it’s nevertheless a good way to keep an eye on things.

IPTraf watches for network packets as they pass through the system. Running on a router, it can watch both network segments’ traffic (as you can see in the above, with IPTraf displaying local -> router, remote -> router, and local -> remote connections). IPTraf can also track your simpler network statistics, such as download/upload rates over each interface, and traffic over known network ports.

Neither of these apps are complex, and their utility is in general reporting, not detailed statistics or analysis, but in case anyone else is looking for some small tools for their Linux box, there you have it. Both are small, have few dependencies, and do their job well.

In discussing True20 stuff with Kad for the Shards of Jade group, we again got on the subject of alternatives to rolling the d20 (in a d20 system, of course), and the various merits and drawbacks involved in changing the system’s roll.

For starters, I updated the graph I made before, not in content but in style. I needed to play around with Gnuplot anyway, so I figured to give the graph a revisit.

The d20 roll obviously is a linear distribution of 1 through 20. With the d20 system, this randomness is modified in various ways to provide a result higher or lower than your roll, but nevertheless, the core of the process is the random number provided by the roll. On a d20, you have an equal 5% chance of getting any roll. In some ways this is interesting (such as often getting at least a couple natural 20s every session), but perhaps not desirable.

So, with some googling and thinking, a handful of alternatives were put together. (Okay, 3d10, drop the lowest is just there as a joke.) The impact on the game is nuanced, and not possible to quickly explain, but in short, all of the alternatives emphasize the character’s skill over random chance, by reducing the likelihood of reaching high rolls and causing opposed checks and ability checks to become far less about chance.

An in-depth look at a couple alternatives is here, ending with the same conclusion we’ve made: if you’re going to switch, switch to 2d10. We haven’t decided if we will switch yet, but I’m interested to see what others think. I think I brought it up, half-jokingly, at Iron Heroes once.

Just some itty bitty news.

I’ve finally done something with the corpse of my first Mini-ITX machine, commonly known as the emulator box. The board burned out a while ago, due to my zeal (okay, and a couple ill-placed magazines), but everything else seemed to still breathe life, so I cut my losses and swiped the 512 MB RAM, tossing it and the living Mini-ITX into the vacant case. That, when combined with a second Ethernet card and some time, produces a “new” Linux router for the apartment. DHCP, DNS, Squid, all of those fun goodies. I might bother producing links to all the places I used later.

There are “share on del.icio.us” and “share on Facebook” links at the end of all posts now, if you’re using one of my custom themes. Not that there’s often something here to be considered blogosphere worthy, but still. It’s an option, if you want to stand tall and proudly say “yes, I read Brian Stephan’s ramblings, and you should too!”

Got the IRC gaming group to get on the Sepulture bandwagon, mostly in an attempt to freshen up the game a bit and to help me consolidate my brainspace, since the Sepulture content needs a lot of love still.

Also, are you aware how unbelievably cold it is? I have my coat on while I type this. In my apartment.