PortalStorm.net

Today is the 17th birthday for Linux! In just 4 days it will be my 16th birthday. I never knew until today that Linux and I had such a close birthday. Anyways, here’s to you Linux, and may you celebrate many more! Source

A couple of hours ago I have purchased portalstorm.net from 1and1.com. By the end of tomorrow tony.blyler.cc will become portalstorm.net. The rates provided by 1and1 are very decent (only 6.99 a year for .net and various others) and so far I’ve been pleased with their service. Look for some major updates to the site in September. I’ll be adding some things. I can’t believe that I’ll be forced to begin school this Monday…

As many people may know I’m a huge supporter of Steam, Half-Life, and just Valve in general. Now I just fired up Steam today and I was greeted with a nice message saying that the Orange Box is $40 this weekend on Steam. Now I was one of those awesome people who pre-ordered the Orange Box and paid $45 before it was even released. May I make myself clear when I say that I have played the Orange Box every week since my purchase and I do not regret one thing. If you need a something well spent this weekend, get the Orange Box. If you’re smart you’ll find out that the cake is not a lie.

I have finally made the desktop switch from Debian to Gentoo this past week. Although I find debian to be an awesome desktop distro it doesn’t have the customization and “1337″ feel of Gentoo. Sure Debian can install packages literally in seconds after they are downloaded, but Gentoo gives you full customization with a little speed boost after the lengthy compilation from source.
End Result: Gentoo > Debian > Everything else > Ubuntu > windows

Well 2007 was an eventful year, 15th birthday, brother’s wedding, sister graduating, and the retrieval of air (yes, we all like air). Anyways, it’s not the amount of Gordon Freeman that you may obtain or the amount of mongeese and elephants that you hijack, it’s what you remember. What you remember is just that, my mongeese and elephant. Fun times…

While I’m touching up on my fresh Debian install on my computer I found an interesting program. That program would be Drivel. It’s a weblog client that lets someone blog without having to use a web browser. I’ve tried various other clients for Linux, but they either seemed too basic or not usable for a 64 bit computer. Since I’m too lazy to go through the hassle of making a unnecessary 32 bit program to work on my 64 bit computer I just decided to stick with Drivel. It gives me all the features I could ask for such as editting/updating posts, adding posts, deleting posts, text formating, and being small. Hopefully wine will be usable this time around.

Well, it appears that Linux just loves windows (doesn’t deserve to be capitalized). Just the other week I reinstalled windows because I was getting Blue Screens of Death frequently. When I got windows reinstalled I went to check on my Linux partitions and I noticed that they were all gone! Now, I never mess up my partitions unless it is on purpose (you gotta have fun sometimes). I clearly chose to only format my ntfs partition, but windows went ahead and wiped everything that was behind it as well.

Thankfully windows left the space unallocated so I ran testdisk to recover the data. The data was recovered perfectly, however, cfdisk/Gparted/Debian’s partitioner did not want to read my partitions (just read my hard drive with all unallocated space). Fdisk read my partitions so I decided to look for a way to fix this.

After posting on about three forums with one being of any help (Debian forums) I found a method to fix this. However, it was complicated and I didn’t understand what exactly this would do. I backed up my data as a precaution, but I realised “hey, if I’m going to be backing all my data up I should just go ahead and completly wipe my drive”. Well, that’s just what I did. I wiped my drive and reinstalled everything, works like a charm.

Now that is a fine example as to why to use the K.I.S.S. method.

Well, I just put in two 2gb sticks for Mushkin last evening and now my computer is lightning fast. It seems like there is absolutely no load time at all. This memory also has awesome heatsinks on. The model number of this memory is 996557 and was ordered from newegg.com. All of my games like Team Fortress 2, other Half Life 2 games/mods, and any other game has been running very smooth without lag ever since the memory was put it.

The blog has been updated with a new theme and some ads. There is also a new search function and a calendar. However, all of my previous posts have been removed.

Alright, lately I’ve been using sayswap.com for trading my video games online. The system is quite simple and affordable. You just list your games that you want to get rid of and receive. After you do that you just wait for an e-mail or find a message on their site saying that you’re going to receive a game or mail a game. If you’re mailing you just click on a button to “mail it now” which just means that it sends you through an agreement. After you agree to all the terms they supply you with your shipping needs. You just print it out, fold, put the game in, tape, and mail (USPS). For more details just check out sayswap.com!