Missing pieces

Have you ever though that TV doesn't have anything interesting on when you want to watch it? There's always Youtube, but video quality is not that great and longer shows would be nice thing. If you haven't tried Miro out yet, your mostly idle Internet connection is going to get some real use.

Miro is program guide, media library, downloader, media search and player all in one. Program guide doesn't show when something is on, as it doesn't matter. Instead of that it has small scrolling list of featured shows (or channels as Miro likes to call them), one example category, popular shows and new shows. Miro likes to call shows channels, but mostly you can subscribe to one show at a time. It's quite rare to have more than one show in one channel. If channels are meant to be similar thing as TV channels, that is.

One additional category is recommended videos (you need to create account to use it though), which recommends new shows based how you rate shows. It's not perfect, as it recommends stuff in foreign language and some shows that based on description won't most likely be that interesting. But it's one additional way of browsing available shows.

Most of that stuff is available as channels too, so it's possible to just subscribe to some category and stop thinking about what show to subscribe to next and just press play and watch shows. Miro doesn't do streaming though, so you have to wait for first show episode to download, but after that you can start watching more or less uninterrupted if your connection can download episodes faster than you can watch them.

That brings us to downloader, which has some nice features. When you subscribe to a show it starts downloading right away. By default it downloads just latest episode of the show and after that all new episodes when they are available. It's possible to change channel settings to download all available episodes too. By default it doesn't download more shows if you have three unwatched episodes, so your disk doesn't fill up immediately. Which will happen soon anyway, even when Miro does pretty job cleaning things up.

Yes, Miro knows how to keep things clean. It deletes videos after you have watched them, so you don't have to delete them by yourself. By default it keeps watched video for five days, but it's possible to tune it from 30 minutes up to a month. You can also save video to prevent automated deletion.

There's also limit for simultaneous downloads, which is great if you want to get start watching downloaded episodes rather sooner than later. It seems to get confused though if you pause and resume shows and starts more downloads than the limit. If that happens, you can try pausing and starting downloads again, which might put downloads back to the queue.

Miro also supports BitTorrent, so actually anybody could start distributing their own shows, without paying high fees for servers. It's quite easy to use for example sites like Legit Torrents for distributing the files, so there's not really anything that prevents distributing your shows in high quality and without any limits on video length. Still more work than using Youtube, but at least possible.

You're not limited to using program guide, as it's possible to add any RSS feed as channel or download any file.

Search is also nice addition. It searches videos from few different services (including Youtube) and it's possible to download search results without any hassle. Only downside is that as Miro doesn't do streaming, as I mentioned already. But you can keep the downloaded videos.

Technology behind Miro is based on standards. Channels are just RSS feeds, so it's possible to use them in other programs if you want. Miro just wraps everything up nice package, it doesn't actually do anything that hasn't been done already. But if Miro encourages getting more RSS feeds out there to subscribe to, it benefits other similar programs too.

What Miro is not suited for, is for using it with remote from your sofa. It's bit limited even with regular keyboard. That kind of interface would make Miro be able to complete with all media center programs out there, with advantage of having huge library of free media.

There's surely some stuff I forgot to mention, but with such full featured program, it's quite hard to remember to cover every feature. Miro has it's flaws, but all the embedded components work together in a way, that wouldn't be possible by using individual programs. Though on the other hand, using full featured media player (embedded player has some limitations on supported video formats for example) instead of the embedded one would be nice, but that would mean that Miro can't know if you stopped the video half way through and continue next time from same place. Also embedding Firefox and programming in Python makes Miro quite resource hungry application. But despite that, it's just hard to justify getting rid of it as everything works so well together.

If Battle for Wesnoth would be first person shooter with similar level of quality, it would be quite likely be lot more popular. Now it's excelent fantasy role playing strategy game that doesn't look bad compared to commercial alternatives. Sure, there's no fancy 3D graphics, but that's not so important in genre like this.

So what is it about? From the strategy game perspective, movement happens in hextiles and game is turn based. Different units can move different number of tiles in a turn, depending on terrain. There's certain about randomnes in combat, but there are also number variables that have effect on the odds. For example some units are much better in open terrain and some in forest. In addition units are more vulnerable to certain kind of attacks than the others. For example undead are normally tough, but are very vulnerable on holy attacks. Time of the day also gives some kind of units advantage. Orcs and undead get bonus during night. Odds are presented before doing the actual attack, so you can only blame yourself getting good units killed because odds were not in their favour.

From the role playing side, every unit has experience points and two random special features, for example unit can be intelligent and strong. In Wesnoth intelligence means that unit gets experience points more quickly. After unit gets enough experience points to advance to next level, it gets better attacks for example. Some units have different choices what to advance to. For example mage adepts can advance to red or white mage. Red mages are good against most units, but white mages have holy attack and undead don't stand much change against them. Choices are sometimes tough.

Basicly gameplay usually goes like this: You start in camp and buy some units. Once gold starts to get low, you have to occupy some villages to get more gold to maintain your army. Running out of gold means just that you can't hire new units, so existing ones don't start a strike. If odds look good enough you can go and defeat the enemy leader. Usually there's some slightly superior units that must not be killed as allies. So using them is bit risky, but usually worth it if you're careful enough.

Most common fault in freely available games is that there's not much to play, at least with single player. Wesnoth doesn't seem to have that problem. There are few campaigns to play and it could take weeks to play them all, of course depending on how much you play. To me, easiest skill level seems mostly be hard enough. And for extra challenge, there's sometimes bonus goals too. Campaigns have also plot and sometimes there's multiple choices, that affect for example what allies you get. Sometimes it's just not possible to please everybody. So plot is not in the way, actually it makes campaigns much better.

What about graphics then? There's not much to complain about them, maybe some unit portraits might be better. There's even some variation in tilesets, so every mission doesn't look the same. Sounds are also good. I don't remember much about music as I usually turn it off in games like these.

So if you're not allergic to strategy games, Battle for Wesnoth should be worth a look. It's available for number of operating systems, such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD.

Most normal people don't need to install operating systems or debug their computers, but rest of us might use some tools for it. And if those tools run straight from CD without needing installed operating system, they're much more useful. So here's two CD:s with some tools.

First tool that I have is GParted. It's graphical tool for making, moving and resizing partitions. Such tools usually cost money, but this one is free in more than one meaning of the word, so if you don't like something you're free to modify it. It requires that you already have some Unix style operating system installed such as Linux, but if you don't have one there's liveCD available too.

Here's review of the liveCD (and here's one about GParted itself), it's bit old but it should be still quite accurate. It includes Tetris, so there's something to do while partioning is still going on. Of course operating system installers usually have partitioning programs too, so this one is not always necessary tool. Though resizing partions is not always possible with those tools.

What if suspect that you have hardware problems? You could have some faulty memory or maybe hard disk isn't working right. There are lots of small tools, but keeping all those might need too many floppy disks. Or maybe you don't have any floppy disk drives anymore. Ultimate Boot CD helps in that case. It includes some partitioning tools too, so this actually could replace GParted. GParted is graphical tool though, so it might be better alternative for some. But there are much of other tools too, for example memory testers, hard disk testers (some of them are official programs from the manufacturers) and anti virus scanners. Check out the homepage, if you want to know more about what's in there.

Most of the tools are command line tools, though often automated. But good thing about is that those tools don't stop working because of some incompatible graphic card and they don't take up so much space.

Let's look at some included tools and why you might want to use them. Memtest86+ is memory tester. Sure, there are some test programs for Windows too, but this one is much smaller, so the program can do write tests to much larger area of memory as there's much more free memory. Other advantage is that this one should still boot when operating system doesn't. There's one downside with this program though, but it's not its fault. It's hard to know if the problem is with the memory or motherboard. But everything that helps you with finding the problem is good. If possible you can always take some memory modules out or switch them and run the tests again. Other thing you can do is to check if motherboard looks alright.

Another good reason to run it is when you buy memory, especially if it's used. You might avoid some suprises. Memory problems are not always so frequent, so you might not find out immediatly and even blame something else later on.

Some hard disk failures are actually predictable. Hard disk even log some information about failures through S.M.A.R.T. So don't be suprised if you get notification that your hard disk is failing. It doesn't necessarily happen though as nothing might be watching that information. But you can always check that information by yourself. There's some software links in that Wikipedia page that in linked and Ultimate BootCD includes one of such tools too.

So that's all for now. That's not nearly everything that Ultimate Boot CD can do, but you can always experiment by yourself. Just be careful, partitioning your hard disk is bit risky if you have something important in there. Other tools might have some risks too, but these tools are not for average computer users, so I assume that you know what you're doing.