Been a while...here's a movie

It has been a while since I've posted, but I thought I would share a movie I plan on watching in the next week.

I've been watching quite a few movies and shows on netflix lately, the most recent one being Moon, which quite excellent.

I'll have a post about the latest misadventures of the Kalamar gaming group up soon as well.

Drow Infiltrator

Drow Infiltrator from Templates for New Players Thread:

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=1902996&postcount=49

Played my level 4 version of this today in Irestone. Still somewhat squishy until next level when I get rogue 2 and evasion!

Endless Night

[caption id="attachment_88" align="alignleft" width="614" caption="Raid Group during Endless Night, plus pumpkin head."][/caption]

Been having lots of fun in Delera's during the endless night event. It's much better in a group, but I think levels being closer together is better to keep spawns consistent.

DDO game detection on Mac using Wine

I made a little launcher app using applescript that can be detected both my BlackFire and Steam, though neither support in game chat. Here's my current layout:[gallery]

A brief update

I realized that I hadn't updated the chronicles of Vorian, Chamele, Aldoran and Kascannia recently:

The group entered the underground ruins, in pursuit of the green dragon. They meet little opposition, and found the dragon lying in wait. A fierce battle ensued, with the gold dragon aiding in the attacking, destroying walls and potentially collapsing the ruins.

Just as the green dragon was vanquished, the gold dragon turned on the heroes, who were already exhausted from the battle. Upon his death, the dragon's hue changed, revealing him to also be a green.

"Petty dragons," comments Chamele. "They must have been having a fued, and this one thought to use us in its dispute, and then dispatch us to add to his horde. A good thing it underestimated us."

They then looted the small hordes the dragons had collected, and continued to explore the ruins, looking for clues as to the location of the lost tomb of Kruk-Ma-Kali. Unfortunately, they ran into another beholder, which killed Vorian before it died.

Chamele used her new found magical abilities to teleport the group back to Geanavue, where they both have a keep and a powerful cleric resides, who was able to raise Vorian from the dead.

In the city, they learn that the fire giants are demanding more and more tribute. The heroes intend to meet with the leaders of the city to learn what they might do to assist with these troubles. Aldoran also thinks that he might be able to divine the path to the lost tomb, possibly saving time and energy in their search.

Theming with OS, Apps

In my DDO blog, I posted about using Wine to run DDO now. I've got everything pretty much set. but because I'm using Wine, some of the windows apps look like they are running in the dark ages (Windows 2000, anyone?)

Even though Leopard and Snow Leopard in OS X allow some customization, Windows still allows for the most customization of the user interface (next to Linux, IMHO).

So I went about skinning and theming the netbook with the Royale Noir XP theme, and also got a theme for Miranda IM. I also got stylish installed in Firefox, giving me a large amount of control over the colors of websites.

I was unable to import the .theme or .msstyle into Wine, probably because it's not colors and fonts so much as a new shell layout for windows.

Anyways, you can see the results of my efforts in the screenshot.

DDO on Wine (Mac)

I was quite excited this weekend to remove my boot camp partition as I had gotten DDO working very well in Wine on my MacBook Pro.

I did have to install Xcode, updated version of x11, macports, and then use macports to install wine and used winetricks to install directx support and such.

I copied DDO from a windows partition, then installed pylotro and pidgin with xblaze so I could get game detection.

Overall, works very well. I did have to set up another xfire account so I could use a mac xfire client at the same time for growl support and so I could change apps (wine, x11 and ddo don't like changing apps!)

One advantage so far is that I am running all of my wine apps off of two 8 gb flash drives in a striped RAID. Load times are minimal, and performance is better than off of the internal 5400 rpm drive.

I'll have to test to see if my iMic and cheap headset works in this configuration, which would be another boon.

Since OS 10.6 got some updated graphics drivers thanks to Steam, I might upgrade sooner than I had thought.