XCOM Enemy Unknown Demo Out Today!

I just played through the demo of Firaxis' re-imagination of one of my all time favourite computer games: UFO: Enemy Unknown.

Short, but sweet. Very very sweet! (But very very short... (Quite possibly the shortest 5864 MB I've ever experienced.))

I don't have/take the time to game as much as I want to/ should, but this is a game that I have been looking forward to since it was announced.

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Fix your rapid blinking Marantz SR-6004 using nothing but 3 fingers - and a thumb

A couple of years ago my (most of the time excellent) Maranz SR6004 acted up. It did't want to turn itself on. Properly. Just stood there and blinked rapidly. Its little red light that is. At me. The solution was so simple that I didn't bother to write it down as I was sure to remember it. Alas, no. Some weeks ago it did it again. (Can it be the heat?) Just stood there blinking rapidly at me. The manual just said - as it said last time around - that it was time to return the unit to it's maker. Or similar. Some googling led me to this page: http://www.allquests.com/question/4056803/Marantz-XXX4-Series-Failure-Issues.html The technical term for what I had experienced seems to be "The Pop of Death". Aïe. But!, humongous letters said: YOU CAN SOMETIMES RESET THE UNIT BY PRESSING SURR MODE, CLEAR AND EXIT SIMULTANEOUSLY And so I did. And so it was fixed. And all was well. (And now I have written it down for the next time.)

Using a Raspberry Pi as a MIDI USB/5-pin bridge

In my constant... need... to get everything music instrument related to communicate with each other, I wanted to look into ways to get some of my keyboards/synths with only MIDI over USB to talk to devices with regular good old-fashioned 5-pin MIDI ports from the eighties. Cables! First I had a quick look at off the shelf solutions. The most interesting one being the Kenton MIDI USB Host – providing MIDI host functionality for USB devices as well as regular MIDI in and out in a small box. Unfortunately it is rather expensive (~125 €) and a reliable online source warned me that it was not entirely stable in collaboration with my OP-1, so I started thinking of more... home-grown solutions. I decided to try to use my old Raspberry Pi and see if that would serve as a USB host with a borrowed MIDI USB adapter. (Thanks Simon.) A cheaper, and, as an added boon, a nerdier solution. Step 1: Get the USB MIDI device up and running This was the easy part. The device I have been lent ...

Fix upside down Skype video in Ubuntu 12.10 [UPDATED]

When launching Skype in 64-bit Ubuntu 12.10 on my Asus U35J the webcam image was all topsy-turvy. Since I don't live in Australia, or something (tsk-tsk), this was not really cutting it for me. Some quick googling led me to this forum post: http://forums.pcpitstop.com/index.php?/topic/198236-why-is-my-skype-video-showing-upside-down/ After making sure that the necessary packages was installed (notably libv4l-0) I adapted the command from the forum post to: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype and voila, the image was OK. Next step is for this to be set to default, which seems to be outlined here (in steps 2 and 3): http://pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-fix-upside-down-inverted-web-camera-laptop-asus-k51ac-issue-on-ubuntu-linux-and-debian-gnu-linux/ (Actually this post seems to cover most of what is useful from the forum post above...) UPDATE (19/04/2013): Since my laptop was working fine, I decided it was abou...

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