September 1, 2007
Command & Conquer Gold Free (Far Cry, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Rayman Raving Rabbids and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon almost free).
Electronic Arts have decided to celebrate the 12th Anniversary of the C&C universe by releasing the XP compatible Command & Conquer Gold GDI and NOD iso images here. Download either ISO and burn it to a CD, then read the Installation Instructions document and you're ready to play Command & Conquer Gold!
Its not very clear but it seems like they will only be available for the month of September, so don't wait too long.
And over on FilePlanet they are releasing ad supported versions of Far Cry, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Rayman Raving Rabbids and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. I don't know how pervasive the in game advertisting is and you do need to be a registered member of FilePlanet to qualify, a good time to take a look at these games if you haven't before.
Posted by Brad Meier at 7:54 PM | Comments (0)
August 31, 2007
OpenVPN for (almost) dummies
I had the fun of learning and implementing an OpenVPN solution recently and it was much simpler than you would have probably guessed. Since I was using SuSE 10 as my remote server I followed the fairly comprehensive OpenVPN on SuSE 10.0 guide. I modified the OpenVPN config files from the examples given to use the ones (tls-office.conf and tls-home.conf) from the OpenVPN distribution with my own tweaks.
Here are the options I changed in tls-office.conf:
local your.interface.ip.here ; The IP of the interface that you will be accepting OpenVPN connection on
ifconfig 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.2 ; You can define your own range, I just chose this private one
server 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 ; Use a pool of IPs so you can connect with multiple clients
push "redirect-gateway def1" ; Handy if you need to keep access to your local network, splits the default route definition
push "dhcp-option DNS dns.server1.ip.here" ; Define these unless your local system can already reach working DNS servers
push "dhcp-option DNS dns.server2.ip.here"
comp-lzo ; Add compression
link-mtu 1542 ; Lower the MTU for the encapsulation overhead
And the changes made to tls-home.conf (renamed to tls-home.ovpn for the OpenVPN for Windows client):
remote openvpn.server.ip.here ; The same IP as you defined in tls-office.conf as local
nobind ; Use this unless you need a specific outbound port
proto udp ; Default, if you need to use tcp then define proto tcp-client instead
pull ; A mistake I made, those push commands don't work without it.
comp lzo ; Has to be defined on both sides
ping 15 ; And these since you can't rely on your connection
ping-restart 45
ping-timer-rem
persist-tun
persist-key
Following the guide and the modifications above you can connect to your OpenVPN server easily, now we have to add some masquerading to our remote server. I took most of the details from the Masquerading Made Simple HOWTO. The configuration below is for a system with two ethernet interfaces, one on a private network and the other on a public network.
modprobe ipt_MASQUERADE # If the module isn't already loaded
iptables -F; iptables -t nat -F; iptables -t mangle -F # flush the tables and prep NAT support
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward ; To switch ip forwarding on
iptables -A FORWARD -i tun0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE ; substitute the IP and interface as needed for your situation, only MASQ packets from your OpenVPN virtual network IPs.
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT ; They should be packets we already know about
Similarly you can do this on a system with a single public interface:
iptables -A INPUT --protocol tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT --protocol tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
; Only allowing SSH and my OpenVPN port, using the HTTPS tcp port in this configuration
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
; Same as previous configuration above
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -i ! eth1 -j ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o eth1 -j REJECT
; We don't forward packets coming in from eth1, all our masquerading packets only come from tun0
Please feel free to point out any extra precautions or missing rules.
Posted by Brad Meier at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2007
Tori Amos - American Doll Posse in Amsterdam
Tori Amos is touring with her new album "American Doll Posse" so the DW and I bought tickets, it being at the Heineken Music Hall (very close to where we live) and us being fans. The show was last night and we're sad to say we were disappointed. We don't watch many concerts since we have small kids and are not usually happy leaving them with other people (thanks to DW's friends for taking them for the evening) which makes it worse. The last concert we felt this let down by was watching Michael Jackson back when we lived in South Africa, at least this one didn't quite manage to be that bad.
The opening band, Seth Lakeman, was pretty good, they got some energy going with their ho-down style country sound. Its a pity that all the energy was long gone by the time (almost an hour after Seth had finished) Tori appeared.
She started by belting out Teenage Hustling (video from Milan concert) in her Pip persona, not my favourite track from her new album but a good song with some punch, I'm sure it will grow on me. We, along with most of the audience, were wondering when she was going to add a few of her older signature songs but I count only seven of them total of which three were in the encores, Undented has a set listing here.
We enjoyed Bliss, Big Wheel (video from Milan concert), Cornflake Girl (weird version though it was), Caught a Light Sneeze, Winter and God (videos from Paris concert) a lot, most of the other songs were not (familiar?) as much fun. Oh, one of the best parts in the show was Tori's improv bit called My Piano, everyone enjoyed that *8) Pity that the encores were four songs (Precious Things, Tear in Your Hand, Bouncing Off Clouds and Hey Jupiter, videos from Paris concert) that I would have loved to listen to because we decided to leave (at 11pm) before they started, that's how disappointed and tired we were (added to having to pick up the kids and avoid the tide of human rejects from the Toppers in Concert from the Amsterdam Arena).
Apparently the "real" fans enjoyed the concert, good for them. I'm just puzzled how all these rave reviews are there when the crowd was DEAD throughout almost the whole concert, energy level 0, as revved up as a pedal scooter. It didn't help that it was very hot, enough for two people to faint.
Maybe, if there is one, next time it'll be better...
PS. I think our disappointment was also influenced by having to drive 40 minutes in idiot traffic to cover 3km because of the roads/parking being blocked off by the Toppers in Concert scum... next time I think we'll take the bus.
Take a look at the other videos and reviews from Paris, Milan and Amsterdam at Undented.
Posted by Brad Meier at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2007
Buyshifting your TV...
I just read two great articles on Engadget about how everyone (not just the tech crowd) is moving towards buyshifting their TV watching... go read about what it is and how much its going to cost you with price comparison tables for cable, VOD, iTunes and DVD.
Posted by Brad Meier at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
Console thyself
As a family we had avoided getting a console for many years, I believe my various PCs persuaded the DW that it was not going to happen, but we bought a Playstation 2 almost 1.5 years ago while on a mini-break to London. There have been some negatives to the experience, such as our older son breaking out into wailing sessions should he be disallowed game time, and positives like getting to play games with the kids. The winter months are especially suited for games like Singstar (karaoke) and Dance UK (dancemat/Dance Dance Revolution) to be played against one another, our youngest throwing the tantrums because he is still too young to read the lyrics in the former and not agile/big enough to manage the dexterity of foot for the latter. Now that the sun is shining fairly regularly the amount of game time will decrease, having a new vegetable garden with picnic area should help with that.
But lets get back to the consoles... Yesterday Seb & I, with young Joe spectating as usual, finished playing through Jak and Daxter, loaned from a friend. We managed to get all the power cells (100 quests and mini-quests) and 1918 of the 2000 pre-cursor orbs, we could have gone back to get the last few orbs but getting the special post-ending ending was good enough. I definitely recommend the game, kids of all ages should enjoy the sense of humour. We're working on completing Spyro: A Hero's Tail, around 70% complete so far... I bought Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy the other day, still waiting for it to arrive, because I got to play it co-op on a friend's XBox 360. Hopefully Seb & I will be able to co-op our way through it with as much fun.
I'm going to have to wait quite a while before we get a Playstation 3, its way too expensive right now and the number of games for the platform are limited as well as expensive. Add to that the fact that we won't be getting an HDTV until, hopefully, next year around June/July. Prices should be a lot more reasonable by then and a few more generations of technology should have ironed out most of the issues I have with it for now, that and I'm hoping SED will stop being vapourware.
Oh, and I've been beta-testing Joosttm, not a bad idea, content is a bit scarce but its still a beta. Watching Total Recall 2070 streamed to my PC is good and it has a decent, if still obviously beta, interface. Using MPEG-4 AVC and a P2P engine to distribute it between the users means you need a decent CPU and bandwidth but it should scale well when it launches to the general public. Add more content and it should be a success for the company and the end user but potentially a nightmare for ISPs...
Posted by Brad Meier at 4:04 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2007
The Broadcast Flag on Steroids?
I could write a long article on how treating your customers like criminals is a bad idea, but I won't. Instead I'll link to a better written set of articles first by Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton, he has a cool blog, go read it) called "omg pirates" and the second by the EFF called "Who Controls Your Television?".
Having just watched V for Vendetta I think we need to express our distaste at being bullied into accepting that we aren't to be trusted with the simple activity of watching television...
Posted by Brad Meier at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
