Create your own signature for your Wow Characters: Enjin.com Signature Generator

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Armor 90 Case

I’ve completed the build of the Core i7-2600 system and it works just fine.

Here are the details, but briefly the system is:

• Core i7-2600 Processor.
• ASUS P8Z68 VGen3 Motherboard.
• 16GB memory
• 1TB System Drive as a Stripe set of 2 500GB drives.
• Thermaltake Armor 90 case
• ASUS Nvidia GTX 560 Ti Graphics

I particularly like the lines of the Armor series of cases. I’ve already built a system using the Small Form Factor Armor 30 case. A key feature of the system is the Corsair H80 liquid cooling system, which was easy to install and works very well. This case is not appropriate for the larger H100 cooling system since there is no place at the top of the cabinet to attach the radiator, but the H80 fits very nicely on the back fan point. The H80 provides plenty of cooling for this processor. I have not overclocked the processor.

I’ve moved a 1TB single drive to this system from the Cyberpower system from last year, so this system has a data drive as well as the system drive pair. The system is now my primary system in my Gaming Battle chair.

- windy

As a Warlock, my armor is cloth, so it is natural for me to have the tailoring skill. One of the exclusive benefits for Tailors is the ability to build a Flying Carpet. I have increased my Tailoring skill to 300+ and have been able to tailor a Flying Carpet mount. I had quite a bit of help from my Death Knight brother who helped with farming the cloth, and buying the other materials from the auction house. The Arcane Dust required is readily available, but the Golden Draenite is rare and quite expensive. Four Golden Draenite items are needed for the glowing globes at each corner of the carpet. (more…)

Corsair Vengeance 6GB

The Cyberpower System from November 2010, was ordered with 6GB of memory. An additional 6GB of memory is down to $39 with free shipping, so I went for it. Looks like I got the last one. They are out of stock and don’t expect any more. But I’m sure that other similar memory packages are available for similar prices.

The memory arrived and installed with no problems, but then the system would not boot. Turns out that the RAID system had a problem on system restart. The RAID controller did not wait for drive spin up, so the BIOs reordered the drives in the boot menu, and after that the system would not boot automatically. I was able to boot it by selecting the RAID array from the BIOS boot menu.

Stopping in the BIOS and reordering the boot menu fixed the problem. The system  has an ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard.

Another tip, you might want to consider whether DHL should be your shipper of choice. The memory was left in my mailbox out on the road, rather then at my door. For a couple of dollars, I could have had UPS deliver the memory, and it would have been dropped at my door, which I’ll do in the future.

Enjoy,

ww

Level 23 Priest

The Problem
Wow classes are not balanced for PVE soloing. I’m not suggesting that they aren’t balanced for other efforts or that they should be changed, but as we all know, some classes have a real problem soloing in PVE.

Some Background
I’m not a whiner, and I’ve been playing MMOs for over 5 years, so I have some experience beyond Wow. Here in Wow, in the past few months, I have played all the classes and studied the wiki guides.
Let’s look at the biggest example you are all familiar with: The Priest. The priest is the squishiest of the classes. I’m sure it’s possible to solo the priest in PVE. I’ve gotten a priest up to level 20, but it’s no fun. It’s a lot of work to solo a priest. The mental and input “load” is very high. Many different skills are required and everything needs to go just right to take down mobs, even if you are a few levels higher than they are. And if two mobs run you at the same time, forget it. You are in for a long walk from the graveyard. (more…)

Closeup While Flying

I just made my flying carpet. It takes a lot of work to achieve Tailoring (300). The best way to do that is to use a plan from one of the many websites, such as Wow-Professions. My Death Knight brother helped a lot to get me the materials, and I followed the guide for farming as well as the tailoring. (more…)

Early Barsoom Cover

Way back in 1998 I bought a Rocket Ebook. At the time my idea was to not only read books, but to convert other content like magazine articles to the ebook. I was successful and also converted a set of books that I wanted to read: The Barsoom Series by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I have purchased a Kindle Touch – which will arrive in late November – so I’m investigating the Kindle Ecosystem using the Kindle for PC app. Originally I recall getting the text files for the books from project Gutenberg and converting them to the Rocket ebook format which was a variant of HTML. After going back to Project Gutenberg I found some of the books, but I then found a better set of editions at FeedBooks.

I also found a series of “Gender Switch” books written by Edna Rice Burroughs. Those look like they might be fun as well.

I got all the Barsoom series on the Kindle for PC, although I don’t see a way to Archive them directly. I’m sure there will be a way to get them into my kindle when it arrives. I’ve seen a note that indicates that you can connect the kindle to USB and then simply copy books to it. If I can find a Mobi format converter, then I can make my own content for kindle. I’m sure there is one out there.

More later,

- ww

Death Knight Night Elf at 61

Once you level at least one character in your account to level 55, you can create Death Knight class characters of any Race on any Realm. Death Knights start at level 55, so all the drudgery of getting to level 55 is eliminated, but there are other problems to deal with. There are many notable experiences and problems for a Death Knight:

• While you start at level 55, you have only 20 silver in your bank.
• The starting quest chain is a tight story line, which is exciting and engaging. While it is not as rich with cinematics and dialog as the Undead quest chain in the Silverpine forest, it leads you through a story that places you in the world and fills in your back story.
• You will find yourself at level 58 with an updated weapon and some new armor pieces when the quest chain ends.
• The story ends differently for Horde and Alliance based on your race. But I’ll not spoil your experience by telling you the end.
• Your only starting profession is First Aid and it is leveled for you to about level 200, so you can built quite nice bandages should you need them. (more…)

The Battle Chair is complete.

Chair Open

How great is this? Whatever computing you want to do, you can do it from the comfort of the recliner. (more…)

Front View

When used for gaming, laptops tend to over heat, and eventually they destroy their video cards. My Alienware m15x laptop, while it seems to have good cooling, has had 4 new video cards in the last 3 years. I have wanted to use a desktop for gaming, but prefer to do most of my playing from the comfort of my recliner. Here is the start of an idea to accomplish that. Missing from the renderings are the arm that holds the monitor from the case to the right of the recliner to the monitor in front of me. As  you can see the computer case is very large. I’ve provided for a UPS in the cabinet since in my area all my computers require a UPS due to frequent power glitches that would cause an unprotected computer to reboot. Click on pictures for larger views. (more…)

World of Warcraft

I have recently been playing World of Warcraft. While the game has much to recommend it, especially since they have a trial or starter edition that is free-to-play [up to level 20], it has a serious problem with its design of “realms” or “shards” as some games call it.

“Shards” or “Realms” of course is the name used  for the “instances” of the server that are required to support very large numbers of players. These games are MMO – Massively Multi-Player – and “Persistent” which means that they do not place players in private “instances” of the game as they play. But it is not possible to have hundreds of thousands of players all playing in the same server at the time. How is the game going to solve the problem when thousands of players show up in the same town at the same time for a party or just to hang out on a Saturday night?

Well the point is that World of Warcraft solves this problem very badly. There are better solutions out there. Let’s look at the Wow solution and then look at some other games and see much better solutions. (more…)

World of Warcraft has a free to play starter edition with restrictions. Some are:

• No Trading. They are preventing trial accounts from being used as farmers apparently.
• Can’t invite players to Groups [Parties].
• Can’t whisper unless they are a friend.
• Can’t use mailbox. Again the farming problem.
• Not all races are available.
• Characters are capped at level 20 out of 85.

But you can have up to 10 characters per account so you can explore a lot of the world and figure out how things work.

Add Ons EcoSystem

World of Warcraft has a huge ecosystem of AddOns that add and change functions of the program. I needed a way to see my coordinates on the map to match up with quest descriptions. There are a ton of map addons so I chose a simple one. You can find TomTom here and comment on it here.

Compass without TomTom

Compass with TomTom

Here’s the compass of Wow without TomTom – Where Am I? With TomTom no problem I get the coords at the bottom. (more…)

Mercenary Party

Guild Wars recently added “Mercenaries” which are ways to add the other players in your account to your list of heroes – or players that you control as part of your team. Heroes were added with the “Nightfall” expansion and at that time were characters that you gained by progressing in the game. Nightfall had about a dozen heroes, and the “Eye of the North” expansion added many more heroes to this list, but still with the idea that you gained heroes by doing quests.

Mercenaries allows you to build your own heroes in two ways:

1. Use the other level 20 PVP or PVE characters in your account as heroes.
2. Create a PVP character in your account, use it as a hero, and then delete it.

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Cyber War

As I write this we are seeing daily reports of hacking and break-ins to commercial and defense enterprises world wide:

• Sony network down for over three weeks with customer passwords, emails and credit card information information stolen.
• Anti-bank Trojans stealing millions of dollars from customers’ bank accounts in Brazil.
• Oakridge National Laboratory was the target of a spear-phishing attack that only compromised a few megabytes of data before it was stopped.
• Millions of dollars being stolen from cell phone users in China by viruses infecting smart cell phones.
• The Stuxnet worm infects Iran’s nuclear program.

But it seems we are not doing a set of straight forward things that we can do to prepare for and mitigate the impact that cyber war is having on this country. We can start with some simple and comparatively inexpensive steps.

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