I had a few minutes of spare time today and thought I would see if it was still possible to play Populous. With the use of DosBox and the original game (if you dont have this then I will give you a link later) it is possible to play, as you can see from the screenshots. I have not played this game for at least 10 years and although the graphics are not upto todays standards, in its time this game was, and still is, amazing. The first time I played this game was on an Amiga 500 and after that on the PC.

The basic idea of the game is really simple. Conquer the whole of the map. To do this you can raise and lower the land, then your villagers will build small houses. As you make the land around the villages more even they will build bigger and better houses, eventually castles. The more castles you have the stronger the villagers become that are produced and you can then conquer your opponent, either the PC or another human.

On this screenshot you can see that the PC is beating me, not what normally happens though. I left the game running while writing this article and don't think my chances are good to turn this one around. Oh well. If you want to play this game then below are a couple of good starting points. Feel free to comment on this article and I will do my best to answer any questions you have.

Download the game from http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/populous.php

I have been more than happy with my old 1Gb Corsair Flash Voyager but was simply running out of room since I have started to move most of the applications that I use across to a portable platform. So while looking for a biger version of the Flash Voyager I cam across the GT version which has much greater access times but is only available upto 16Gb. I have to say that I am completly impressed with the performance of theis device and would highly reccomend it to anyone looking for a fast portable USB drive. I will post another blog entry later highlighting what applications I run on my drive.

Corsair Flash Voyager 16Gb GT

The Corsair Flash Voyager family of USB drives are rugged, stylish, compact, and reliable, making them ideal for transporting MP3s, digital images, presentations and more. Flash Voyager drives are fully Plug and Play with most operating systems and are backward compatible with USB 1.1.

The Corsair Flash Voyager family is comprised of two outstanding products. The Flash Voyager GT is designed from the ground up for speed, optimizing transfer rates of both reads and writes, while Flash Voyager provides a durable USB drive in large capacities.

The Flash Voyager and Flash Voyager GT are enclosed in the Corsair proprietary all-rubber housing. Boasting water-resistant properties, these drives allow users to carry more valuable data and applications without compromise. Several reviews of the Flash Voyager products have demonstrated the ruggedness, durability, and reliability of the Flash Voyager family. The Flash Voyager has been shown laundered, baked, frozen, boiled, dropped, and even run over by a SUV in many third party reviews. After all the punishment it receives, the drive continues to work.

Features

• Plug & Play functionality in Windows® Vista, XP, 2000, ME, Linux 2.4 and later, Mac OS 9, X and later
  
• Includes the True Crypt security application (Windows Vista/XP/2000 compatible only) allowing for a virtual encrypted drive using AES-256 encryption (not preloaded on 2GB models)
  
• Lanyard, USB cable
  
• Limited 10-year warranty
  

Flash Voyager GT provides fast data transfer using performance IC-paired memory and controllers.

CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT 16GB USB Flash Drive




Flash Voyager delivers the best value / performance solution in a durable USB drive.

CMFUSB2.0-4GB 4GB USB Flash Drive
CMFUSB2.0-8GB 8GB USB Flash Drive
CMFUSB2.0-16GB 16GB USB Flash Drive
CMFUSB2.0-32GB 32GB USB Flash Drive

I have been searching for sometime now for an alternative to placing an old PC on my home network and acting as a file server / proxy server / database server / torrent server and web server among countless other tasks that I might end up thinking of. I toyed with the idea of buying a LinkSys NSLU2 as this is a small device but the sheer amount of cables coming out of it have put me off. That and the fact that it only supports two USB ports by default, unless you hack it. My main reason for not getting the tired old trusty PC out and installing CentOS is that I would have to add a external SATA controller and then have three external hard drives and one internal. That would be extremely noisy and have more cables than the NSLU2. So I finally came upon the QNAP TS-409. This gives me four SATA connections and is fully RAID ready and runs Linux and can do lots more. Read on for the article below. As soon as my funds permit I will definitely by getting one of these.

QNAP TS-409 - Diskless NAS Solution

I have decided to sell my trusty Zaurus SL-C3100. If you are interested in this item then please have a look at my eBay auction. You get lots of accessories and it comes with the original box and a worldwide travel adapter. For those of you who do not know what this is then briefly it is a portable Linux device capable of running php / apache / MySQL among of host of other applications. There is also a large community and a simple Google search will reveal many links to interesting articles about this. It has a 4gb internal micro drive as well as Compact Flash, USB, IrDA and many other features.

Happy New Year, Wszystkiego Najlepszego for 2008!

I would like to wish everyone reading this blog all the best for 2008. For me this was my first time seeing in the new year not in my native country, England. Instead I was in Poland and watched the festivites happening in Krakow, Wroclaw and Warsaw. The highlight was at 22:30 seeing my friend performing on stage in Krakow for two songs. For those of you who don't know then I would recommend listening to Szymon Wydra i Carpe Diem. There were more than 200,000 people in Krakow and the show looked amazing.

2008 for me is going to be a busy year and this site will be going through many changes. I intend to launch a few web services this year including one that I have been working on for a few years. To give you some idea what the service is without giving too much away at this stage, it is based loosley around my popular download counter script with many differences. I will be posting a blog entry about this soon and also allowing beta testers to sign up for the service too.

So with this being the first day of 2008 it is going to be a fun and enjoyable ride to 2009.

We left London at 18:00 on Thursday 20th December in two cars. The plan was to travel as a convoy across Europe to Berlin where we were to separate as we were to due East and the other car South East. We had planned plenty of contingency time in case we hit traffic or snow or any other unexpected event. As it turned out we used all our time and only had seconds to spare for the ferry crossing from Dover to Calais.

The Sea France ferry was due to leave Dover at 22:30 and with 4 hours 30 minutes of time available to make the journey from London to Dover and to cater for traffic problems on the M25 we thought we had plenty of time even if we had traffic. However ... We got into Dover, about 3 miles from the port at about 20:30, still giving 2 hours to make the final 3 miles. That's more than enough time! But alas it was not meant to be. We had a major traffic jam as all cars and lorries were heading to the port for the various different ferries. Time started to slip by very slowly as we had stopped on the A2. We crawled all the way to the check in places at the port and at 22:40 we arrived at the check in. We were so worried that we had missed the ferry and the next one was at 02:30. As it turned out we were very lucky because the ferry was late! Oh well We then had to proceed quickly to lane 117 and we were both one of the last cars onto the ferry. Phew. Only just made the sailing in the nick of time. After about 10 minutes we set sail for Calais.

I have been using the Blogrush syndication site for a while now and though that I would share this with you all. If you have not yest signed up then use this link Blogrush and you can create your account. Its free and they will help to syndicate your site's RSS feeds. So far I have earned over 38,000 bonus credits and only actually had about 3,000 direct clicks that were from my own site. What this means is that my RSS feeds have appeared more than 35,000 times on other peoples websites. Now this has helped to generate more traffic to my site and increased the number of people reading my Blog. So what are you waiting for ... Blogrush ... start to see the results and hopefully more than what I am currently getting.

Well last night I was offered a coffee but it had a catch. Milk would not be used but instead eggs. Yes eggs!!! I was extremely apprehensive about this and Anna and Artur started to mix sugar with egg yolk in cups. As you can see. Well I know this is used for cakes but I had never heard of this being used in coffee and to be honest the mere thought of it was making me a little queezy.

The mixing of the eggs took about 3 to 4 minutes and the concentration they were using was something I had not seen in the art of making coffee. I was forced to taste the mixture before it was added to the coffee and all I could think about was raw eggs are in this cup. I must have had the tiniest amount of the mixture on a spoon and my face was all screwed up with the thought that this is going to taste really bad.

Oh boy was I proved wrong!!! After the small taste I finished the spoon and could not wait to taste the mixture with the coffee. I was really surprised to find that the coffee was so sweet and tasted very nice indeed.

Well the moral of this story could probably be ... If you've run out of milk then eggs will work just as well ... Honestly you have to try this.