Location:Evans Rd,Salisbury,Australia

Thanks to all for your support for the ShadyJames appeal!

With over $820 of smasher support we managed to build him a much needed new gaming rig.  Last night Mastercyl, SlapperJoe and myself went over to the de Vries household to deliver the new rig.

Shady was in good spirits!  He now has a long road of recovery ahead to rebuild his Six-pack-of doom.

In other news the scares left from the surgery are big enough to make any girl appreciate them!

All that’s missing from the machine is an official LanSmash case badge!  We’ll be placing one on the machine come SantaSmash in December.  For those that donated to the machine we’ll be offering people to sign his case as well.

Shady was very appreciative and wanted to send out a message of thanks to everyone who’s been wishing him well.  Although now he won’t be able to blame his gaming rig on his TF2 performance.

(JB and ShadyJames – just before JB pulled a knife out to stab him spy style)

And for those that care about the tech, here’s what we managed to cobble together.

- XFX Radeon HD5770 graphics card 1gig 
- Corsair 4GB DDR3 RAM 
- AMD Phenom II X4 965
- Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB3 motherboard 
- 500GB hdd
- Antec 300 Case
- Thermaltake 600W PSU
- Samsung DVDRW drive

and… 1 x official Windows 7 64bit Home Premium that LanSmash kicked in another $120 for bringing the total cost to $971.

Thanks to our generous donators to make this happen.

Contributed smashers:
- Blade
- Misscara 
- pcmattman
-Sensator
- Slapper Joe
- Wilko
- MasterCy
- Stackboy
- RatboyXL
- Lexi
- Plastic
- BunBun
- Scythe
- stoOds
- Pandan
- Yang
- dohzer
- chris actworth
- Graham Reynolds

The harddrive gods however had other plans.

As I was moving documents around my Macbook Pro the system gave me the ‘Spinning Wheel of Death’ and after much waiting I discovered in the console that I was receiving I/O errors.

Oh dear, so when I got home I thought I might try a disk repair to see if it was filesystem related instead of disk drive.

Disk drive failure! I didn’t have the AppleCare disk scanning tools to confirm it but was 99% sure. So I checked it in to a AppleCare repair shop near my house.

I wasn’t too concerned with my work, as majority of my work related files are on the cloud. I use Google Documents for office related documents, I use DropBox for everything else. E-mail is with Gmail, and my contacts/calendar are sync’d as well. A few other bits and pieces were on my iPhone.

Then thought to myself in horror that the all my personal photo’s/documents/movies are stored on one place, my Macbook Pro.

I do have a daily time machine backup run that backups up to an external USB disk drive.

Crazily, my life’s ‘stuff’ was now sitting on one signal disk drive and I just had to hope it had backed up things correctly.

Luckily it had, and the restore did work (quite easily with Time Machine). Now I’m going to look in investing in something like a Drobo to have at least some type of secondary redundancy in case the backup drive dies in the future.

Friends of mine will always hear me preach “Harddrive’s suck, backup your data”. Redundancy is not a backup either. You got to have multiple copies. It’s not a question of if, but when your harddrive will fail. Plan accordingly.

So now I have my precious irreplaceable data back, such as this shot from Wilko from a trip in 2004.

Or this shot with MasterCyl and our LanSmash bulk buy of Battlefield 1942 back in 2003.

Or this shot of Dan helping me assemble a Mini-ITX chassis from scratch with aluminium.

Or this shot of myself and my brother going to StarWars Episode 2 launch in the Brisbane cinema back in 2003.

you get the drift.

Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-2u48dD2EI

Way back in August 2006 I wanted to play in a MoltenCore raid with my then friend Cara. I had about an hour or so to jump in the raid, and I wasn’t ‘attuned’ for the quest.

The process is simple, you have to touch a rock at the end of an instance. Problem is that I didn’t have the time to assemble a team of 5 to do the run before the raid. So I scoured the web and founds some forum posts of players who had been able to do it as a Druid using invisibility stealth and tough bear resilience.

I thought hrmph, maybe I could use an invisibility potion instead of stealth and give it a shot.

At the time though, I had never actually even -finished- that instance ever before. So I was going in kind of blind! I had no time though, so all I had was some forum posts and guild chat to get me through.

Turns out it was a success, and to document my travels I Fraps’d it. After the (failed mind you) Molten Core run that night I quickly cut together something simple on my Powerbook and uploaded it to youtube to show my guildies.

Since then, it’s had over 35,000 views, and to my knowledge one of the first Molten Core Solo attunement run videos. It’s not even titled right, as I used ‘MC’ instead of ‘Molten Core’, so I guess it’s mainly people linking it to each other.

People still comment on it today, mainly people with level 80/70 characters that breeze through it.

One day it will die and become irrelevant, but until then it’s nice to know that some gamers are still being helped out by my hack video.

First, find a list of all usb devices on the host, remembering to run these commands as the user your VirtualBox machine is under. In this example we’ll be using a Canon MX7600 printer as a test USB device.

$ VBoxManage list usbhost

UUID:               6bac41f4-cc44-40e4-a726-4d9655a49f63
VendorId:           0x04a9 (04A9)
ProductId:          0x171c (171C)
Revision:           1.3 (0103)
Manufacturer:       Canon
Product:            MX7600 series
SerialNumber:       102787
Address:            /proc/bus/usb/007/004
Current State:      Captured

Now we use the details of the USB device to filter adding into our VirtualBox machine. In this case our VirtualMachine name is winxp.

The usbfilter command requires four options at a minimum.

VBoxManage usbfilter        add
--target ||global
--name
--action ignore|hold (global filters only)
[--active yes|no] (yes)
[--vendorid ] (null)
[--productid ] (null)
[--revision ] (null)
[--manufacturer ] (null)
[--product ] (null)
[--remote yes|no] (null, VM filters only)
[--serialnumber ] (null)
[--maskedinterfaces ]

So armed with this info let’s add our device.

VBoxManage usbfilter add 0 –target winxp –name canonmx7600 –action hold –active yes –vendorid 04A9 –productid 171C –revision 0103 –manufacturer Canon –product “MX7600 series” –serialnumber 102787

Youtube clips here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=80389EA68EEB356A

I’m not much of a fighting game competitor. Truth be told I’m terrible at fighting games, but I love them so, so much. With our new partnership with OzHadou and the introduction of competitive fighting tournaments such as Street Fighter 4 at our events I thought it would be a good chance to meet up face to face with our mates in Sydney!

Meeting up with Slapper Joe in Sydney CBD early Saturday morning we took a Bus to the University where OHN8 was held. A bunch of consoles were setup with screen for gamers to play throughout Saturday, and were free to play any game they wished. I’d have to say 80% of the machines were running Street Fighter 4 though, all practising for the Sunday tournament.

It was great to meet up with the organisers that make these events possible and to chat with them about the same issues and woes we’ve faced up in Brisbane in LanSmash. So many friendly and awesome people in Sydney.

I was toting the LS Capture box to capture HD footage at the event to try and capture some gameplay. It mostly survived the trip via Qantas baggage handlers, and was back in action after some strategically used gaffer tape. The OHN8 venue is a converted Uni food court and was quite spacious for the guestimated 120-150 gamers rock up. Luckily, I scavenged a trolly and with a bit more tape constructed the LS Mobile Capture Rig of Doom.

Saturday night I was giving the task to record the SF2:HDR finals as best I could. There was a minor issue arise that the PA system used to play to the audience was only in Mono, and only having one channel made it quite frustrating to watch. Luckily one of the organisers had a soldering iron handy, so I cut together a Stereo to Mono converter which held up long enough for the final 8 matches.

Such a long day on Saturday… Street Fighter 2 finished at around 23:30 and the the Tekken6 1v1 finals went on to around 1AM. Exhausting because there was SF4 finals to be run on Sunday!

The national aspect of this event was awesome, with gamers representing their states and proud of the rivalry. Of course being in Sydney there was quite a bit of heckling against non-NSW players. It was great to see though, very entertaining to watch.

From Queensland I saw quite a few familiar faces that come to the LS events. Haichii, Colin, Kumar, Tom, Tyrone, Vlad, and Murete were all representing their state.

Unfortunately for QLD we were only able to have one of us make it in the Top Eight for the Street Fighter 4 finals which was Kumar. He fought hard against HumanBomb but was knocked out (youtube video here). I have no doubt though with more training and more players here in Brisbane we’ll be able to do better in future national events.

No doubt that Melbourne has definitely one of the most competitive scenes in Australia. With regular events such as Couch Warrior’s run in VIC we’re seeing quite a few players with high skills learning from each other.

I had to catch a flight at 9PM on Sunday so I missed out on the SF4 finals. It was between HumanBomb (Sydney) and ToXY (Melbourne); both highly skilled and respected players. Check out this Youtube clip of their finals match.

Ultimately it was HumanBomb who seized victory. Overall I’d have to say it was a victory for Victoria though as they claimed 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place in the SF4 top 8.   

Thanks to OzHadou for letting us in to capture this event!