Tag Archives: drivel

Had to share.

  August 11, 2011 - 9:51 pm | Life, Musings, World of Tanks
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[This post has been heavily edited due to problems with authenticity.]

Oh, and just a note on World of Tanks, which has just been updated to version 0.6.6, which added a few new tanks, including the E-50, 75 and 100, a new Tier 10 tank! I had the most awesome battle the other night. I was in my KV, moving along the side of the map (slowly, as only a KV can) when I noticed our west flank had totally disappeared. I turned and rushed back, which caused my east flank to also be destroyed. I found myself the sole survivor at my own base, with 2 kills racked up already and 6 enemies (Tier 3, 4 and 5 lights, mediums and artillery) remaining. With a feeling of impending doom I waited for the inevitable rush.

But as the loading screen tip says “It’s rude to correct your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” The opposing team thought it was a good idea to rush me one by one, giving me the opportunity to pick them off as they came into range. End result: I end up with 8 kills, the win and the Kolobanov’s Medal!

Oh, and the girlfriend started playing WoW…

Fear the M3 Lee – Not!

  May 14, 2011 - 8:08 pm | MMO, Rants, World of Tanks
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I’ve finally upgraded to the M3 Lee. After the hugely fun M2 Medium, this tank is a total disappointment. What the hell were the Americans thinking? I’ve read up about this tank before buying it and the comments all pointed to the fact that this tank is bad. Well, it’s worse than bad. I’ve never experienced such a terrible driving machine. Even the VW Beetle is a better feat of engineering and beauty.

The ghastly M3 Lee, next to two devastating Russian KVs

The tank is slow, ungodly slow for a medium. It’s also built like a barn, with a high profile and a very low turret. This means that you’re exposed long before you can shoot at whatever is coming over that hill.The 75mm cannon, which was effective in the M2 medium, is suddenly underpowered against the higher classes you now face. Thankfully it is more accurate than the M2, which could be likened to a shotgun shooting into a dark room and trying to hit an apple hidden behind a wall.

Then there’s the worst feature: the turret itself. Instead of the turret being mounted on top like EVERY OTHER tank in the game, it’s mounted on the front left. This means that it’s effectively a tank destroyer… or should I say ineffectively. Its high profile and flat frontal armor makes it much more vulnerable than the sloped, low profiles of the TDs, and the gun does not suit sniping at distance much either. Your only option is to hide behind buildings and wait for the enemy to stick its nose around the corner, and then pray that you get him disabled or dead before he can swing his turret around you. Against a heavy this doesn’t work very well, and you end up having to run like mad to hide behind something before he one-shots you with his huge gun. Against a light this doesn’t work either, as it can simply outmaneuver you, get behind you and shoot at your soft ass while you try to swing that ungainly body around to get a second shot off.

Thus you’re left to hang around in the middle and hope that the enemy gets distracted by your allies, giving you a chance to fire off a shot or two before being exposed. Or finding another medium and somehow getting that first shot off true.

If it wasn’t for the T1 Heavy, I would have given up on this monstrosity after the first battle, but I so do want one. I’m also working through the USSR ranks, aiming for a KV at some stage. The devastating effects of that lumbering monster is something I must experience.

Anyway, only another 12000 experience (Much more if I want the other tanks this thing unlocks) and MANY more credits to go to the T1, guess I better start grinding…

… Yet not a drop to drink

  March 15, 2011 - 11:54 am | IT, Life, Musings, Oldschool, Uncategorized
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Technical mumbo-jumbo alert. The following post has nothing to do with gaming.

I finally convinced myself I need a bigger hard drive. Since giving up the MMO scene for more casual single player gaming (and the occasional delving into Minecraft multiplayer) and an abundance of series and movies my current menagerie of drives were constantly complaining of low space. The fact that first a 320GB and then a 160GB that I was using to back the 320GB up with decided to start giving SMART errors didn’t help either.

So out came the credit card and in came a shiny new 2TB external drive. This brings my total storage to 4.5TB. (Edit – I just remembered purchasing my first drive: a Seagate MFM full-height monstrosity with 20MB storage. Yes, thats megabytes… took me forever to find enough data to put on it.) On the way home I opened the box and was shocked to see a “quick start” manual as thick as my thumb. It’s a hard drive, how can they fill 120 pages as “quick start”. Turns out that it’s 4 pages, double spaced, granny font… in like 60 languages. I read it more out of boredom than anything else, and giggled to myself when I read the following line: “This drive has been preformatted in FAT32.” FAT32? a 2TB drive? Fat chance. It must be an old manual or something.

Anyway, I started transferring data on Sunday night, moving all my series to the new drive. This went pretty smoothly, albeit a bit slow. Next up came the Anime, which was started on Monday night. This morning I awoke to an error message on my screen. I was half asleep, so I just caught something about “not enough free space on the volume for this file”. I closed the message, thinking how on earth did I manage to fill the drive already. I’d only copied about 800GB to it.

Then it dawned on me… The drive wasn’t full, the file was just too big for the partition… it really was formatted in FAT32. What to do? I hadn’t even started copying over my Blue-ray backups yet. No way would they fit. so I packed the drive in, took it to work and started researching. I wasn’t about to copy everything back again to repartition the drive. There had to be another solution.

First google attempt: Found a program called Easus Partition Master that claimed to be able to convert filesystems without losing data. Quickly downloaded and installed it. 2 Minutes into the transfer process it stopped, claiming critical errors on the drive. It did however undo everything it had done to that point, rendering the drive still useable.

Second google attempt: Found out that Microsoft actually has a built-in command to do this. You open up a command prompt as an administrator and then run the following: convert D: /fs:ntfs (where D is replaced by the drive letter).  However when running this on my notebook, it gave me an “Insufficient memory” error. So I ran it on my desktop and 5 minutes later I had a NTFS drive with all my data intact.

If you’ve just sat through all this drivel, thanks and sorry. Personal life and quitting WoW has kept me pretty much away from writing in general, and I guess it’s time to have an outlet again. I’ve got some ideas as to the direction I’m going with blogging, just have to see if it’s got enough material and content.

Cheers for now,

b0b (Pindleskin nevermore)