or maybe something uplifting…

Maybe I’m coming late to the game but I think it’s important that everyone have a Shammy plan. If you’re Horde, this is no big deal to you since you’ve already had Shaman for ever, but on the Alliance side, people are reserving names for their shammies and getting ready. Of course me and a million other Alliance WoW players are going to make jewelcrafting Draenei Shaman the first day after installing Burning Crusade but I really don’t care. I’m going to be jewelcrafting with the rest of them. So I want to make sure I get a leg up. The obvious stuff to do is get yourself the basic gear a lowbie shaman is going to need to cruise through the first ten or so levels. That’d be five bags, some level 4 or 5 cloth armour and weapons and maybe some potions. It all depends on how what skills your alts have. For example, I have a 225 enchanter, 300 engineer and 300 alchemist. That +3 damage to a one-handed weapon isn’t too exciting at level 40 but it’ll double the damage on that level 5 letter opener.

I know the requisite skill for the new Alliance Shaman is Jewelcrafting, but for a second skill I’ll be training engineering. That way my current engineer can make doubles of all my favourite engineering trinkets and mail them off so my Shaman can use them as soon as his level allows. Things like my Mechanical Dragonling or my Gnomish Cloaking Device require 200 engineering (and player level 30) to use. I’ll want to build his engineering skill up quickly and in order to do that I’ll need the materials to do it. There are plenty of guides out there for engineering from 1-300. Sounds like it’s time for a couple lists. I just made a gnome and ran him up to Ironforge so he can bank all my stuff until BC arrives. Now to figure out what to send him. Read the rest of “Burning Crusade - Starting to Plan for an Alliance Shaman”…

My sister Linda and her SO were in town back near the beginning of summer. They were passing through Windsor en route from London to San Francisco. We went out for dinner and talked about traveling. They were going to see the motorcycle Grand Prix in Monterey, California. A week later Candace and I would be flying out for Candace to attend Blogher and me to soak up some of those silicon valley vibes.

As we sat and talked one of the things that came up was the awesome lens Chris was bringing with them. He had the same Digital Rebel XT that I do but he wanted to shoot some high speed bikes, so he was carrying some pretty hefty glass. I think it was the EF 400mm f/5.6L USM but I’m not positive. Read the rest of “It’s All About the Glass - Lenses for the Canon Digital Rebel XT”…

There are a few options in the user interface settings that I consider essential. There are a few others that are just nice. I thought it’d be useful to go through some and pass on a few tips to help out other WoW players.

The interface in WoW refers to all the stuff around the edges of your screen and whatnot. Interface options are things that change the way you interact with that stuff. First off, to get in to the interface options just hit escape and click the button that says Interface Options, it’s shown below (throughout the post, click any of the thumbnails for a bigger image).

As of this writing (things may change with future patches), there are two tabs on the screen that shows up. I’m not going through every option, just a couple I think are useful. On the Basic tab under the Camera setting one item is called Water Collision. This option decides whether you can see above the water when your character is below water.

Read the rest of “Setting Interface Options on WoW”…

I’ve had a couple cases where quest stacking helped me just fly through a level. It’s a lot tougher on my main since I don’t usually know which quests are easy to do at the same time, but I just hit on a few that are really obvious. Bloodmage Lynnore and Bloodmage Drazial are a couple NPCs in the Blasted Lands who give you a pile of quests that require you to just kill a bunch of critters nearby. The two Bloodmages are standing next to a bonfire in Dreadmaul Hold and all the creatures that drop the quest items are south of them and along the road that curves around to Nethergarde Keep (I’m writing from the Alliance point of view but this all applies equally to Horde afaik).

Lynorre gives The Basilisk’s Bite and Vulture’s Vigor then Infallible Mind and Spiritual Domination. Drazial gives you Snickerfang Jowls, The Decisive Striker, and A Boar’s Vitality first, follwed by Rage of Ages, Salt of the Scorpok and Spirit of the Boar.

The idea is that the first time you turn in a the quest you’ll get a buff and an item with one charge that repeats the same buff. For example when you do The Basilisk’s Bite the first time you get a buff for +25 intellect for an hour. Similarly the others each give you a buff on one stat and a single-use soulbound item that you can use to get the same buff again.

After you finish each of the quests, there’s another quest available which will give you another item but no experience. The second set of quests can all be repeated for the item. All-in-all there are five quests you can get that will give you experience and six quests that you can repeat for the items. The items do give a nice buff, but the drop rate of the items you need generally doesn’t make it worthwhile in my opinion.

So if you pick up the whole set of five quests at the earliest level possible, level 45, then you can get a total of 4700×5 = 23,500 XP - somewhere around one fifth of the XP for the next level. Read the rest of “WoW: A Quest Stack to Help Solo Through Level 47″…

Konsole is a nice little shell for KDE. I usually keep a few tabs open in it for the different shells that I use. Some are just me, under my normal user id. This should be generally the one for almost all tasks that don’t affect the computer as a whole or other users on the system. It can be hard to get in the habit of using a limited user id but it’s well worth the saved headaches of breaking things because you have too much access.

I keep another shell or two open on the other Linux server in my house. It used to also be my primary desktop but now it’s serving as an Asterisk and part time MythTV box. It still runs Suse 10.1 and X. Maybe one day I’ll rebuild it and strip it down so it’s better suited to the new role. Asterisk expects to run as root (hopefully this will be fixed in a future version), so I need a shell open there as root to get an Asterisk console. I use an SSH shell for that, but logging in every time is a nuisance.

The other shell that I often keep open over SSH is a connection to my web server at 1and1. SSH access on the server makes many things far easier, including backups and quick tweaks to PHP code. Again, logging in repeatedly is a nuisance but I refuse to set a weak password.

My solution on my old computer was to use host keys. Host keys make things easy and still maintain a pretty high level of security. I only put host keys on computers that I have control of, like the ones in my home. My rationale is that if someone can get at the computer in my house then I’ve got bigger problems.

So, with a new computer and a fresh Linux install, I have to remember how to make a host key. I could probably reuse the ones from my old computer but a host key should be tied to a particular host, right? Read the rest of “Making Keys and Simplifying SSH from one Linux box to another”…

A while ago I started thinking about running World of Warcraft on Linux, and someone even left me a note about a petition for a Linux-native client a month or two ago too. I’d love to see a native client for WoW in Linux, but that’s not here today. So I turned to Wine for the first time in years.

I tried Wine way back when I first installed Debian Linux in 1998. Things were different then. I’d wanted to try out Linux before then but I was help up by lack of support for exotic things like IDE hard drives. Yes, it was a different time. I was tied to a lot more closed-source Windows apps, like the brilliant IRC client mIRC. So my experience with Wine was trying to get mIRC running without really understanding Winsock, sockets, or any of that stuff. The program would start but never connected. Let’s just say I was left wanting.

While I’ve been off doing my own thing, the Wine team has been hard at work and they’ve done some amazing things. Amazing things like working without an installed copy of MS Windows on your machine, supporting some DirectX stuff and generally taking a lot of the pain out of running Windows applications on Linux. My new desktop is a single-boot machine so far. I might try out MS Windows Vista some day, but I’m not in any hurry.

So the other day I started thinking about how fast my AMD 64 X2 4200+ computer is compared to my year-old Compaq R3000z laptop that I’ve been running WoW on. I read about some very positive experiences with WoW on Wine under other Linux distros. Read the rest of “World of Warcraft on OpenSuse Linux 10.1″…

I mentioned the other day that I had a couple lockups with my new system (an AMD 64 X2 4200+ with the Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard). Since I didn’t see the setting I thought might fix a problem that X reports with the video aperture size, I decided to try updating my BIOS. As it turns out, the version that shipped on the motherboard was quite a few versions behind, it reported as 0109. When I first looked at the Asus site and saw all the Windows and DOS-based Flash BIOS update tools, I was a little disheartened. I had seen a reference to EZ-FLASH in the BIOS settings and the manual, so I decided to investigate that method.

I don’t generally put up with long-term stability issues with my computers. I fix them - that’s how Late Night PC Service got started after all. Thinking back, my old desktop did have an issue when DDR2 RAM first came out (under Windows 98 back then) so my solution was to just put in twice as much DDR . Either I’m good at building systems and choosing the right parts or I just usually buy hardware that’s old enough for the kinks to be worked out. Which ever one it is, I’m not afraid to upgrade my BIOS, I just don’t want to unless I think there might be a benefit.

Disclaimer: I label this as a “how-to” and it should work as a guide if you’re comfortable with computers. But bear in mind that I don’t warrant that any of this is accurate, current or even anything more than a malicious lie. If you need to upgrade the BIOS on your computer then I hope this helps but I won’t be held responsible for any use or misuse of what I write here. Now that all that’s clear, let’s proceed… Read the rest of “How-To: Flashing the Bios on my Asus M2NPV-VM with EZ-Flash”…