[caption id=“attachment_5231” align=“alignleft” width=“150” caption=“A new level in Bastion”] [/caption]

While I’m not some video game hipster that doesn’t enjoy the Triple-A games, I have found myself increasingly having my most compelling game experiences on games created by indie or small studios. I think this is because indie studios are no different from starups, indie bands, and indie film makers in their willingness and ability to explore risky and new ideas. I felt the same way about Braid when I played it in 2009 as I do about Bastion this year.

So I took a look at Blogilo a few days ago. So, taking a look at my Blogilo post I have to say that it is pretty much ALMOST there for the perfect offline blogging tool for someone using Wordpress. Sure, it doesn’t allow your to create categories, but a blog like mine that’s been around for ~7 years probably has all the categories it needs. The extra fidelity can come from tags which Blogilo hands just fine.

[caption id=“attachment_5240” align=“alignleft” width=“150” caption=“Team Fortress 2”] [/caption]

Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’t said already?  This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today.  If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.

So here’s my top listened artists for 2011.  Some of these entries are a surprise and others are expected.  I can’t wait to see how many of these artists are on this list next year.  Well, let’s take a look.

1. The Beatles (492) - No surprises here; the ancestors of nearly all pop and rock in America has been on top every quarter.  So of course they’d top this list.

[caption id=“attachment_5199” align=“alignleft” width=“150” caption=“Team Fortress 2”] [/caption]

With school over I had plenty of time to get back into video games last month.  I had a blast!

Team Fortress 2 (6 hrs) - Got back into this game because my brother-in-law wanted to play it.  I’d forgotten how awesomely fun it is to play this game!

Plants vs Zombies (5 hrs) - I wanted a quick game of fun so I went after some achievements in PvZ.  I also found this game to be a blast.

For the last fourth of the year I continued to listen to my music on random via Amarok’s dynamic playlist.  I set it to only play songs that I liked, but other than that left it up to chance.  For the most part, the only exceptions were when I had exams to take and wanted some non-vocal music or to listen to new songs I’d downloaded from Rolling Stone’s website.  Here’s how the artists fared.

For the most part, I haven’t seen the point of using blog editors like Blogilo.  While there might have been a purpose to them back in the dialup days, it seems pointless in the days of always on broadband connections.  Also, back before blog software like Wordpress had their great visual editors, I could see the need.  However, I guess I could see some use for it on my laptop.  I often compose blog posts on there in a text editor when I’m traveling.  It would be nice to have it all formatted correctly and ready to go when I got an internet connection rather than have to load up Wordpress then spend time formatting it when I could have done that on my laptop while I didn’t have a connection.

I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them.  It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source.  So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out.  That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings.  Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying.  I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.

As usual, every time I upgrade Fedora I write a blog post to preserve this knowledge for others who might run across the same problem or in case it happens to me again next year.  This time around the situation was a little less smooth than previous upgrades.  After the preupgrade was done, when I rebooted I was 2 MB short in /boot.  This shouldn’t happen to you if you started with Fedora recently, but I’ve been on the same install for two years.  In the past if the preupgrade failed, the installer would put your system back into its previous configuration and you could use it again.  This time around it didn’t do that and I no longer had a working system.  It complained that a bunch of services weren’t starting and I couldn’t get a shell, not even in single user mode.

I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete.  So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta.  When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.

[caption id=“attachment_5130” align=“aligncenter” width=“384” caption=“kde-telepathy accounts menu in Fedora Rawhide (F17)”] [/caption]