I went to Salute 2006 Wargaming show yesterday which was brilliant. I was working on the “bring and buy” run by SELWG, there was some lovely stuff being sold (and I spent a fortune in total) but one of my main acquisitions was this 40K Necron army, complete and painted.
The color scheme is quite unusual for Necrons being mainly white but the standard of painting is very good, over time I think I’ll repaint/replace some of the units with my own, as it just bugs me playing with minis painted by someone else. Click the read more link for more piccies.

Note. I DID NOT PAINT THESE!

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A couple of weeks ago I bought some Citadel miniatures. These are the first I’ve bought in about 15 years.
Perhaps it’s pining for my youth or some sort of bizarre (and early) mid-life crisis but I’ve decided to start war-gaming and RPGing again, probably got more to do with meeting a work colleague that’s into it (thanks Steve!)

I used to eat, sleep and breathe Citadel miniatures and Games Workshop games, it was all I did. It’s strange coming back to something that you were totally obsessed with for years. There’s been a lot of changes to the world of Games Workshop and Warhammer, not all of them good (some would argue none of them good, but that’s another topic altogether) but for now I’m enjoying it and remembering all the lost hours (days/weeks/months) painting figures and playing Warhammer, Space Marine, and 40K.

Here’s some of my new Eldar figures that I’ve painted up, I’ve got a bit rusty over the years but I’m fairly chuffed with my new Eldar.

For some time now I’ve been remotely connecting to my machines at home via the mechanism of tunneling VNC and Terminal Services over SSH. This was a pretty secure (using SSH private keys) solution but a little cumbersome, as it required PuTTY configured in a very specific way to work.

I battled with the VPN support on my Netgear SG834G router, which was a terrible, un-documented, mind-melting mess (in the words of one Netgear forum poster – “I’ve been working with computers since ‘92 and I have never seen more complicated and less supported software than this!“), but today I discovered a really elegant simple soultion…

There is a VPN server and client built into Windows XP! This page explains how to set up the server side, which is the real magic and I never knew this functionality was available in XP Pro. The client end is a total doddle

W00t – simple and easy connections to home, just wondering how secure it is now…

So yet again iTunes starts up and complains – The file “iTunes Library.itl” does not appear to be a valid music library file. iTunes has attempted to recover your music library and renamed this file to
“iTunes Library (Damaged).itl” blah, blah.

Oh, well I thought, it does this ALL the time, and after 15 mins of disk grinding and thrashing the CPU it rebuilds the library. Ooooohhh no, not this time.

It’s all gone, every sodding MP3 from my library. I think spending all day recreating my library of 5000+ MP3 is a good way to spend my time, and even  after doing all that I’ve still lost all my track ratings and playcounts. thanks Apple for the quality and well tested software that is iTunes.

Why the Apple developers decided it would be a good idea to keep the iTunes library in two places – a binary file (.itl) and a XML file, is beyond me. Just one more thing to go wrong and get out of sync if you ask me (but then I’m not the god like genius that the Apple developers are). BTW, I’m not alone in this problem as a Google search throws up thousands of hits for this problem (no solutions or causes though)

Yesterday I decided randomly to upgrade the version of XBox Media Center (XBMC) on my modded XBox. In light of the media “features” of the 360, XMBC is fantastic bit of software, well it always was – but the 360 has kind of brought it into focus. Microsoft’s attempt is crippled, lacking in features and hard to use. XMBC is a joy to use, looks brilliant and has tons of features; bearing in mind this is an open-source and free project.

What would make the 360 better? well hire the team behind XBMC and get them to re-write the entire media section of the 360 dashboard, as that’s not likely to happen some more reasonable ideas would be:

• Support PC file-shares (i.e. mapped drives), the Windows Media Connect software is a travesty that I wouldn’t let near any machine (it scans ALL your MP3 and photos at startup, which can take a looong time), and most of the other UPnP media servers out there are not much better – I use TwonkyVision which is fairly passable. SMB file sharing would be such a simple solution.
• Better controls; why is the volume hidden away in weird sub-section of the UI? Why can’t I jump down the list of tracks/albums/artists? Why no progress bars, track indicators or means to fast-forward & rewind?
• Last.fm support
• Let me copy stuff to the 360 hard disk, I can plug in my iPod/camera/USB Stick and play tracks but I can’t copy media from it. Why? no reason just they didn’t want you to.
• The photo gallery support is simply tragic compared to XMBC’s

Sorry for the rant; I like the 360, but Microsoft’s media features just feel ‘tacked on’ and rushed…
Update: I’m not the only one that thinks this – http://www.digg.com/gaming/XBMC_VS_Xbox_360