Benie's General Blog

Normal night. Playing Minecraft with Nick. Hearing my CPU fan sounding like a mini tornado siren, but I ignore it.
Five minutes later, sound gets more intense. So I decide to fire up CPUID HWMonitor to check my temps, and froze when I saw my CPU’s temp was 58*C.
I knew I had the damn heater over my window on. So I got up and closed the vent, thinking all I need to do is just cool down the room and everything will be fine.

Room temp started to slowly go down, but my CPU temp hit 62*C. Yet my computer seemed fine.
For ten minutes I didn’t speak a word to Nick. I was paralyzed with fear, thinking “Ohh FUCK I’m going to have to take my computer up there and get it looked at! And Father is not going to like this!!!”
I asked angry who kept on asking me if I had an air can. I eventually said yes. Then told me to hold it upside down with my computer off and spray it on the fan.

Knowing this could be potentially fatal (it says on the can to DO NOT TILT) I refused. But angry claims he wouldn’t be telling me this if he knew it wasn’t safe. Still, I rather listen to the warning on the can than angry.

Almost puking when I kept seeing my temp hovering around 55-59*C, I told Nick that I’m shutting the server down on the count of my temps. After shutting it down I watched my CPU slowly cool down. Soon it was idling around 37-40*C.

Knowing taking my computer up to the Geek isn’t a good option for me (unless I walk it up there which is hard as hell), I’m going to try a different approach to hopefully fix this. I believe there might be something maliciously running in the background causing my CPU to overwork — like a virus or something. Plus it’s been a good long time since I did system maintenance.

Windows 7 is running slower than normal when it comes to booting up as well. So there has to be something like Adware running without my permission.

Then again it may be the CPU. The thermal paste could be failing on me. This is something only a professional can fix.

UPDATE: So far my scans are coming out negative for any harmful files running in the background. This is both good and bad.
Good that it’s not a virus. Bad that it won’t be a cheap fix.

Maybe it was something Nick was doing that was causing my CPU to overheat. Because I was playing Minecraft today with no issues. Angry was even in my server and other than the lag I had no issues.
It could just BE dust for all I know. Or even maybe the temp readings I was getting with HWMonitor were false. 10*C higher than what it really was.

Some of the replies on Facepunch say it’s “perfectly normal” for my CPU to get that hot on load. And now I see proof what they say is true. 70*C is OHH FUCK temp. And the fact my computer didn’t auto-shut off should had told me I was overreacting, once again.

Still, I need to closely monitor my temps for awhile. Maybe dust out my system for good measure. I still feel that if I don’t do something soon it’s going to get worse.

All mods are broken because of this update, including all texture packs, making Minecraft boring again.
Mod creators are diligently working to fix this, and some already have fixes (such as the HoverBoat). But IMO, they should wait ’till when this Halloween thing is past us.

I feel Notch is going to do something to minecraft.net yet again when Halloween is over. So why bother making updates for this when they’ll all be broken by tomorrow possibly.

And if that’s not bad enough, there’s more bugs now. This update, like all updates didn’t fix anything. Sure, it made the Fishing Pole have a purpose. But SMP is still full of bugs. You still cannot place Minecart Tracks without insane lag.
And now, boats are bugged. When you try to remove it by attacking it, it won’t start wobbling and eventually turn into sticks and a few plank blocks. Well done, Notch.

At the minecraftnet forums, on the upper right of the screen is link to a game. It links to a game called “Haunt the House“. A perfect game for Halloween.

You’re a ghost in an abandoned house. 30 people are coming to check the house out, and all you want is your eternal rest. So you have to scare them out.
To do that requires you to possess objects scattered in the house to do freaky things in an attempt to scare the troublesome humans out of the house.
As you try to spook them, you got this Atmosphere bar. Higher the bar, the more intense spooks you can do.

Trouble is, if you scare them shitless, they have a chance to commit suicide by jumping through the windows. You don’t want to kill them. You just want them out of the house. And the more that die, the more that will… permanently live with you. And since you like living alone, you can’t have that.

Once you take care of all 30 of them, you will be graded on a basic A-F grade. A being the best, and F being.. well, keep trying. This grade is based on the ratio of scared/killed.

This game is very addicting, and seems to be for playing with friends. Trying to beat your friends’ score or vica versa.

If you want to see how the game is played, then you’re in luck. For the first time ever I’m using Livestream’s playback feature to record my antics and link it in my blogs, when needed.
So just click this link to see me in action.
Don’t mind the annoying ads Livestream does just because I can’t come up with a “measly” $350+ per month to go ad-free. I got the action “paused” for a 30 second ad, but there’s been some ads that are a minute. Gameplay starts at 0:50.

My score is 28/30 scared, and 2/30 killed, in 9 minutes and 12 seconds. Try to beat it!

I would explain about the super monster cold front that went through Tuesday at noon. Gave us our first HIGH risk of severe weather of the 21st century. But what’s important is it didn’t actually do anything but look deadly, and cause the tornado sirens to go off twice.

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Passing that, I’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas as I said I would in my previous blog post due to a friend streaming it.

So far, I can see why they made this “DLC” a game. It’s like a full game, but masked as a DLC. The reason why I believe it was never made a DLC is probably because of two reasons;
1. The size and complexity of what you can do. It’s like playing Fallout 3 but in another location.
2. Bethesda is becoming like EA and charging double for a DLC.
Whatever’s the case, it’s time to talk about the gameplay. Going by the title it’s pretty obvious it’s based in Las Vegas, 200 post-apocalyptic years in the future. According to the Fallout Timeline, the events of New Vegas started approximately three years after the events of Fallout 3 (main questline only), and has nothing to do of what the Lone Wanderer did over in Washington, DC.

Key landmarks in this game are Las Vegas, now known as New Vegas, resurrected by a “Mr House”. There is also to the southwest of New Vegas, one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th century. The Hoover Dam! Yes, it still lives! It’s under control by what I think is some police force called the New California Republic, or “NCR”.
They’re defending the dam from some evil gang called the “Legion”. Caesar’s Legion. They can easily wipe out the NCR and take over the dam if they wanted to, but haven’t yet. No one knows why they’re waiting. What they would want with the dam is anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s up to the Player (you) to find that out.
Could be to claim the power (and the Colorado River) for themselves and make everyone pay out the ass, or make everyone suffer by destroying it.

And you, you’re a Courier. The story goes as you’re trying to complete your job by delivering a package that has a Platinum Chip in it to the strip. But due to shady deals, you get shot in the head. But resurrected in a town called Goodsprings (a town that actually exists IRL).

So, the story seems to be split into two parts, and I’m confused in which is the final main story quest. Getting the chip back from the guy that shot you, and another battle of the Hoover Dam.
Why am I concerned which is which? Two words. NO FREEPLAY! D: This is why I’m desperately going everywhere I can and seeing everything I can without continuing the story until I’m ready to. I want to know the final quest so I know which quest to avoid ’till I complete all side-quests.

Well anyway, you can gamble in this game by heading to The Strip anytime you want (yes, the famous stretch of road still exists). You got four ways to gamble;
1. Slots. (requires chips purchased from that casino to work)
2. Roulette. (requires chips purchased from that casino to work)
3. Blackjack. (requires cards from that casino to work)
4. A card game called “Caravan“, which can be played outside of The Strip. (requires cards to work)
There’s also these strange-looking robots that have a TV screen for a face. Some have a cop face. Others have a cowboy face. They’re all controlled by Mr House, who lives in Lucky 38. A casino shut down and no one is allowed to enter it.

And then there’s the poor choice of music. You got of course 50’s music, but you also got country (due to being in the southwest US). As I mentioned about the town you were resurrected in, there’s other towns that look like western towns.

Other than that, Fallout: New Vegas is a pretty good game, and I like the western theme. Some say it’s “the way Fallout 3 should had been”, but I disagree to that claim.

Madness? .. THIS. IS. ..AN OLD MEME!! *kick down a hole into the arms of Creepers*

Ok, well. I needed a break from Wurm. In ways I wish I didn’t. But angry did it again by ‘dragging’ me back into Minecraft Alpha. We were playing this “Minecraft Adventure” map where you gotta do certain tasks and escape these towers.
I wondered how in the hell the map was made. You would need a shitload of resources. Then mentions the guy used a map editor named ‘MCEdit’.
I started to think “What if I was able to get my old Mynecraft maps into a Minecraft Alpha map?” and asked angry. He said it sorta does.
I then thought “Hmm.. well, it’s not that hard to make a road. But I would need alot of resources” and angry told me about this “/give” command. How I could type “/give benie 1 64”.

Later on angry tried to get one of his maps into an Alpha map, and got his first indev map into it. He then gave me OP and I saw I could spawn rock blocks. My brain started to click wildly after angry went to bed.

The next day, I got to work making a subway system in my map after getting my own server installed and going. I decided to invite RimShooter, one of the members of The Tavern. Wanted to see if others could join and he got right in.
Problem is, the server (my server) didn’t like this and started to give him lag. Later on I got angry to join and my FPS tanked.
He told me that SMP is resource-intensive, and he’ll host my map on his server. If I knew what would happen in the following days, I would’ve said “Nah, that’s fine”. But I did say “ok sure”. And now I regret that.

So angry’s hosting the map on a server he calls “Turivelk”. And because of the way the server is setup, he cannot give me a copy of the latest work. Some kind of archiving thing. His server is ran in Linux.

To move this along, angry’s doing his “Eww tacky! Must change!” thing without asking me first. Eventually he finally sees this is my map and I can do what I want. Just because he’s hosting the map, doesn’t give him the right to change my work.

Yet our fights escalated to the point I’m demanding for the map back, and he won’t give it to me back. So yesterday I started taking pictures with Fraps. My idea is to use these pictures to do the work, MY way. I’m not stealing their ideas. I just want my own copy.
If angry can’t give me that map, then I’ll make an identical one.
Of course this got even uglier. Yet it was my fault that caused it.. sorta. Thinking angry didn’t care, I said I was going to start filming everything. He tried to stop me but I ignored it. Did a few tests and was ready to start.
As I recorded, angry teleported me elsewhere. The conversation and actions were like this;
Me: “DAMN YOU ANGRY… I was recording!!!”
Him: “good”
*kicks angry out*
*gets banned*
*server goes down*

But angry wasn’t intentionally pissing me off. His real life was bugging him. Because he’s normally not that much of a dick.
Back with the original map on my server, I wondered if it was even worth continuing. But something in my head said to keep going. And I’m glad it did. Now I have completed the track section I made all the way to the third station. Now I don’t need that other map anymore.

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Today, I was putting the finishing touches on the third station when my system froze. That damn lock up issue again. Came back and fired up both the server and client with no problems.
I didn’t lose that much too. Just this and that which I was able to easily fix.
There was something missing, though. Something big. When I started walking over to the platform and heading in the direction of the mountain that the subway runs through, and I noticed what look like a bomb was dropped. A quarter of the face of the mountain was… GONE! You can easily see what looks like someone carved a nice square into the side of the mountain.

After some calculating and asking other people, I found out the freeze caused the map to corrupt at that spot, and tried to re-render itself. Why, I dunno.
The only way to put it back to normal, is to learn and use this MCEdit program. I still got my original map. So all I have to do is copy and paste that part of the mountain face into the latest one. Yes this means I’ll have to re-tunnel the subway tracks, but that’s a small inconvenience from this.

Well, I played around with it. Trouble wasn’t the fact I didn’t know how to copy a section of one map to the other, it’s.. where it is on the map. The location in the original is mixed with other blocks, making it ohh so confusing to pinpoint exactly where the crater is on the other map.
I then tried the Brush tool, and saw I could make a ball of rock and place it in the area of the crater, and notice I could possibly fill it up. So I tried Dirt and made it huge, and covered up half of the crater. Then I tried smaller ones to fill up the gaps.
Satisfied with it, I made a backup of level.dat just incase something goes screwy and then saved it.
Tried it out ingame and was happy. I’ve successfully fixed it!

Re-tunneled the subway tunnels and covered them in rock, and used the remaining dirt to seal up the remaining gaps that I missed.
And already that big ball of dirt is getting grass covering it. Quite a good “patch job” I did.

With that out of the way, I can continue construction of this subway. My main plan is to make a system of subways, linking to major points of view. Maybe throw in a city and a residential area, as a memorial to ‘city_portal_hub’ and ‘residential’.
I can see it now. Creepers walking in the subway tunnels. Pigs walking around the roads. Chickens in the buildings.

Some of the pictures in MCEdit actually feature a large city. So someone HAS done it in Minecraft Alpha!

If you’ve seen the commercials, How to Train your Dragon is coming out on DVD and Blu-ray on October 15th. There’s a ‘Double Dragon Pack’ that comes with a new never before seen DVD, and I just got done pre-ordering it on Amazon.com. 🙂

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That’s not all. I found out the release date of the third EP of WoW (Cataclysm) will be released on December 7th. I’ll be pre-ordering it sometime in November.
Azeroth will never be the same again…

Right, so.. I’m actually starting to get alittle scared. From what I’m reading, ACTA is at full steam to pass and ruin the lives of every internet user on the planet.

I’ve been using the Anti-ACTA Bomb as much as I can, but I doubt my efforts will do any good.
I feel ACTA is going to put me as a target, due to my years of downloading music from Shareaza and other illegal music-sharing sites (I never seeded them, or sold them to others. I just listened to them), throw me in jail and throw away the key.
Even though I’m trying to keep ‘under the radar’ now by stopping my.. illegal activities (by buying music), I feel it’s too late for me, and possibly several thousand other users of the internet with the same fate if ACTA takes ahold.

Then again, maybe it’s nothing to worry about. ACTA could be just a scare tactic. If it is, it’s doing a hell of a good job.

In any case, it has been said by the 9th of this month, is the day to truly panic. If it passes, our lives are over.
But if it fails… if it fails, everyone but ACTA (and our own president) will celebrate.

I’m sure most of you know about this ACTA thing. They say if it’s effective, the government can legally regulate what you do on the internet, and throw you in prison if you so much as think about pirating something.

This looks situated to the UK, but the US is also involved in this. Now I didn’t create this blog post to tell you to stop it. I’m telling you why I don’t give a shit what happens.

I’m pretty much done with pirating music, and I rarely, very rarely pirate a game. So this has nothing to do with me.
Seriously though, they can’t regulate all of us. Unless they pull something like in HL2 and have scanners that watch us all. Even then they can’t make one for every person, old and new that accesses the internet.
Their jails will be so full that they would possibly make us pay out the ass with fees.
Plus, it’s against our very own constitution. The privacy part. In reality, it would get thrown down.

But, there seems to be nothing that stops this thing.