Twitter Twaddle
Online Gaming Cancelled For 6 Months
Yep. My Virgin Media broadband "service" has been deteriorating for over a year and it's reached a point where I'm unable to play online games at evenings or weekends. My section of network is hopelessly overloaded. I get 20Mb downloads sometimes, but peak-time ping is so horribly bad I get up to 20% packet loss making gaming impossible.
Upgrade work to be completed by September 2012 (allegedly). Web site says July 2013. You'll have seen it on telly. Usain Bolt in a comedy beard. Hilarious, I'm sure.
My only alternative is BT Infinity but they have an 18 months minimum contract. Their theoretical max. bandwidth is 27Mb (3.37MBps) but I'll be lucky to get 8Mb. Then there's the gamble that my ping will be good enough. When the Virgin upgrade completes I should get 120Mb (15MBps), so it looks like I'm stuck with it until they upgrade the infrastructure...
The Joy of Broadband.
How to get your problem sorted and immediately f*ck it up.
Whenever I see an advert for Virgin Media's "superfast" broadband my teeth start to grind. Not because you don't get the speed you pay for. You do, sometimes. Obviously not when your bandwidth is being throttled or during "peak times" but at some point, for a short amount of time you get what you're paying for. That's why they state "up to..." in the blurb. Fair enough.
Tried and tested. PC Skyrim fiddling update.
Following hours of playing with the values, I soon found myself with ini files which were all over the place and the game was starting to struggle on my non-spectacular hardware, so I went vanilla, updated the 4Gb enabler and worked through this guide:
The results were the best I'd seen without hitting performance. Ambient occlusion, the usual fps-killer made little impact on the hardware but added a huge amount, especially to buildings.
Battlefield 3. Very Pretty.
After many months of build-up, Battlefield 3 has arrived, and it's phenomenal. Until it crashes... I'm a sucker for smoke and lighting effects. In my day it was a black screen with some squares jolting about on it. etc. etc.
I have managed a satisfactory fix, but it involves disabling SLi (which I'm getting pretty disillusioned with).
If you also have 560Ti in Sli, this worked for me.
[edit]It didn't. Took me until 6th December to work it out, but my workaround is here[/edit]
Halloween Newsletters 2011
Here's this year's batch of Fancydress.com Halloween newsletters. All hand-drawn and coded by my good self. Used the usual toys: Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, Swift 3D and Notepad++.