On the BBC World Service Digital Planet pocast I heard about a project to create an archive of video games. That got me thinking about games I have played over the years. This means thinking back around 30 years and so I'm sure I've forgotten a few details.

I think that the first video games I encountered were the original arcade games starting with Pong and Space Invaders. Back then the graphics were black and white, but with some use of coloured films on the screen to make them look better. I spent a lot of time in the local arcades playing various games such as Pacman, Defender, Donkey Kong and others without ever becoming that good at them. I think they cost 10p a game back then and that soon gobbled up the pocket money. The one that I remember playing a lot when slightly older was the sit-in Star Wars with its great vector graphics and great sound as you attemted to blow up the Death Star. Since then I've played various arcade games. I quite like car and motorbike racing games, or a bit of mindless shooting.

At home we had some basic console with variants of Pong. I wonder what that cost back then. I probably lusted after wonders such as the Atari 2600. When I started upper school I got access to the local college mini via a terminal and acoustic coupler. There were some simple text-based games on there such as Lunar Lander and Artillery. A friend and I joined a local computer club and got to see all sorts of games on early home computers like the Commodore Pet, Tandy TRS80 and Atari 400/800.

When I was around 15 I saved up the £300 for a BBC Micro (Model A). I played many games on that, included some pirated at the computer club. I bought quite a few too such as the painfully slow, but graphically impressive Frak! and the wonderfully engrossing Elite. That consumed many hours of my youth trying to get to the higher ranks. Other games I remember are Chuckie Egg, Arcadians and some text adventures. I typed in various BASIC games from the magazines of the day, most of them disappointing. All this was using audio tape storage as a floppy drive was beyond my budget.

I didn't buy another computer for a long time after that, but had access to some PCs at work. At one job a colleage and I played a lot of Wing Commander. I think I encountered Lemmings there too. At a later job there were extensive Duke Nukem 3D death matches in the lunch hour.

Eventually I bought a second hand Amiga 500. On that and a later 1200 I played lots of games. Pinball Fantasies was fun. Alien Breed 3D was supposed to give you something like Doom, but had very basic graphics. Eventually I was able to play Doom when it became open source and clones were produced. By then my Amiga had a mighty 68040 chip with 128MB of memory and a 1.7GB hard drive.

Eventually I had to accept that the Amiga was a dying platform and bought a PC (350MHz PIII). The game I most played on that was Half Life under Windows 98.

Since I switched to Linux I have found less time for games. I have the odd burst of Frozen Bubble, Planet Penguin Racer or some form of Tetris. I've even had Doom clones running for some nostalgia and once got Half Life running on Wine, but didn't play very far. My play the non-violent games above and lots of on-line Flash games.

Last Xmas we got our Wii. That's something we can all play together and has given hours of fun, but tailed off recently. Perhaps some fresh games this Xmas will revive our playing.

I've never been the most active of gamers. I play for a bit of fun when I have nothing else to do. I'm way behind on the latest PC, arcade and console games. Most require too much commitment for me to even consider. No doubt my kids will demand better games as they get older and maybe I'll get to have a go with those.

I seem to have missed out on reporting the completion of the OGR-25 project a few days back. I ran it at various times from when it started until the end. In the last few days it was hard to get any work units, so I started running Folding@home again. Anyway, OGR-25 finished, having confirmed that the known result was the optimal one. They are now moving on to the next few levels with the hope of taking less time due to better algorithms. From the stats it looks like a lot of people have dropped out, probably due to not having upgraded their clients. I bet there are thousands of PCs in offices out there that had it installed at some time, but then the person moved on.

Now that's over I would prefer to donate my processor cycles to projects with more benefit to mankind, mainly in the medical field, but I will consider other sciences. Folding@home is worthy, but it's a bit of a hack to get it running optimally, using all processor cores. You have to run two instances on my dual-core. There are scripts to do this, but then you are still limited in how you can monitor progress. There is also the fact that those with suitable graphics cards can process much more efficiently. I've got an older ATI card that I ought to install to try and get 3D working again, but it's not suitable for such GPU processing.

A response to a comment I posted on /. about OGR suggested that BOINC may be more suitable. It's from the people who did SETI@home many years ago. I ran that for a while too, but had doubts about the chances of finding aliens. They developed a later client that could run many types of project. The choice is somewhat overwhelming and it's hard to work out which might be worthiest, but I am concentrating on another protein project called Rosetta. You have the option to specify what percentage of time goes on each project. It would be useful to know how much processing a typical unit of each requires to work out what is suitable for older computers like my Duron that are not on so much.

BOINC is available in the Ubuntu repositories along with BOINC Manager that gives you a nice front end showing current progress and allowing full control of what, when and how much you process. I like to keep track of what I have done via my statistics and so have signed up to BOINCstats that links in with the manager and combines points from all my computers and projects. It took me a while to get it all running properly, but it's looking good now. I now have plenty of stats. I'm unlikely to climb very high in the charts compared to those running faster computers and dedicated 'farms', but I'm making a contribution.

Back in November I clocked up one million giganodes on the OGR-25 project at Distributed.net. That took me about 7 years. As predicted (roughly) I have doubled that in just over 8 months thanks to a speedy dual-core processor in my main PC. It would have happened sooner if I had realised that my PC was not running at full speed and had implemented a proper shut-down script so that I did not lose work units each day. I was a little optimistic in how long the project had to run. Current projections give it almost another year, but I think that does not take faster computers into account. I wonder how many people will upgrade in that time. I certainly do not intend to do so unless I suddenly find myself with enough spare cash for a faster CPU. I could get something 25% faster for well under £100, but I doubt I would notice the difference for normal usage. If I were building another PC I would probably look for something that used less power rather than ultimate clock speed. I've not bothered keeping up with what's new in the processor world for a while, so I don't even know what the state of the art is. These days software is more interesting than hardware.

For reference, the earlier slowdown may only have affected apps like dnet with a high nice value as the PowerNow daemon would ignore them and assume that nothing important was running. By setting the '-n' flag in its defaults file I got back to full speed. I used a script from here to make sure the client shuts down cleanly. I could have been losing several hours of work in the past. I've at least learnt some more about the workings of Linux through all this.

I'm not sure I should admit to this, but my PC has been running a much less than full speed for some time. I noticed that my dnet client was running a lot slower than it used to. I hadn't noticed other stuff being particularly slow, so didn't give much thought to it.

I did some investigation today and found, via /proc/cpuinfo, that my CPU cores were running at 1GHz instead of 2.4GHz. I did some searching around and posted to a thread on < a href=http://ubuntuforums.org/>Ubuntu Forums that seemed to relate to it. Within minutes I had a response suggesting I add an applet that let you control CPU frequency scaling. That particular applet was for Gnome, but I found KPowersave for KDE. This lets me select various modes, but I just set it to Performance and all is well again.

I guess that I may have been using a little less electricity whilst the CPU was throttled down, but I don't think it's a large part of my usage.

What I wonder is how this came about. My PC was running Ubuntu for some time at full speed, but someting changed to switch it to low speed. I don't have the logs to prove exactly when this happened, so can't relate it to anything I did.

I was thinking of writing a post titled 'Are RSS feeds killing commenting on blogs?'. If you only read sites via their feeds then you probably won't even see the comment part of each page. I've had comments on my site for some time, but get very few. I know that a few friends read the site via the feed. I don't know how many strangers visit. I think that comments are valuable as they make the whole thing interactive. I often click through to posts on feeds to see the comments. So if you want to say something to me about a post please add a comment. It may be useful to others.

I had been thinking for a while of getting a new webcam. I have owned a couple, but none of them seemed to work on Linux. One may have died altogether. I mainly wanted it to use with Skype, so consulted the list on the Ubuntu wiki. Various Logitech units seemed to do well so I checked them out in PC World. I don't buy much there, but I was passing and had a voucher. I found a Quickcam Communicate STX Plus (what a mouthfull) for 20 quid. It even came with a headset, but that is less useful given my non-working soundcard input.

On plugging it into my PC I expected to have to do some configuration, but it worked straight away in Skype, including the microphone. I was also able to stream it through VLC. It gives a nice picture even in low-light conditions. I'm very happy with it so far. The base of the camera is designed to sit on top of an LCD, so I thought it might not work so well on my CRT, but then discovered that it is flexable and so can be bent to the required shape.

My other 'hardware' upgrade this week was to get a new computer chair. My old one was found in a skip at work and was never that great. I was finding that the lack of proper back support was causing me pain. So I picked up a Nominell in Ikea. I got a green one just because it was in the sale and saved me a bit. Mind you, we bought a load of other stuff in there as we generally do. This one is totally adjustable for tilt so that I can make myself sit upright or slouch.

With reference to my previous post on carbon footprints there is a great article on the Register about what would be required to actually make this country independent of oil. It would require major changes to how we get and use our energy. Taking the TV off standby and getting a little wind generator on your roof is not going to make a real difference.

I generally like to play with new versions of software, but had not got around to looking at the latest version of KDE. Version 3 has been slowly evolving for a while, but this is quite different. It adds some new features such as 'widgets' that you can rotate, but I'm not sure why you would. I installed it and was given the choice when logging in as to which version I wanted to use. KDE4 seemed to ignore my settings for what applications run at startup. I also had to configure the new Kopete. The K menu is different. You have to click through different levels to get to most applications. It certainly looks like it could offer some nice visual tricks, but I'm not sure how they would benefit me. I generally run things like my browser in full screen mode and so rarely see the desktop. or any widgets that may lurk there. V4.1 is due fairly soon. Maybe that will make it more usable and I can try it again then.

One feature I like to use on KDE/Linux and on Windows is to have applications that minimise to the tool tray. This is especially useful for things like email and instant messaging clients as I will generally only look at them when something happens, like receiving a message. I may sometimes open an IM window just to see who is on-line. Then it is very useful if I can click the same icon in the tray again to make the window close. None of the Windows seem to do that, but the Linux ones generally do. Unfortunately they are a little inconsistent in their behaviour.

If I click the tray icon when the window is either closed or hidden then I expect it to come to the front. Kmail closes if the window is open and hidden, but other KDE apps behave as above e.g. Amarok and Konversation. I think that consistency is very important and hope that the KDE teams are looking at this sort of thing.

The other new thing I've been playing with is Firefox version 3. This was included in Ubuntu 8.04, even though it is still a beta. The main obvious new feature is that the address bar is more intelligent. I often used the history to start typing a URL to go to a page I often visit, but now you can type any part of the page title to get it back. If you click to show recent history it does not show as many pages as it used to. I miss that as I would often use that list to look check back at recent pages I had visited. Unfortunately this version is less stable than version 2. It frequently crashes when I am entering text on pages. This happens most often on Twitter. I'm still having fun with Twitter. It is more intimate than blogging and I have had a few exchanges with strangers that would not have happened otherwise. So if you are not already Twittering, why not?

I may have mentioned that I was thinking of doing a fresh install of Kubuntu Linux when the latest version, 8.04 (codename Hardy Heron), was released last week. That's okay in principle, but it makes for a bigger job as I would have to do some fiddling to get all the applications I use installed and working again. I thought I may as well try out the upgrade.

The upgrade process went very smoothly. It prompted me about whether I wanted to overwrite some setup files. That was a bit confusing as I am not used to the way it displayed the differences. I didn't think I had applied any special settings and so accepted their versions. After an hour or so I was prompted to reboot. As I feared I ended up at a console prompt rather than the graphical log in screen. This has happened previously. I managed to get KDE working via startx by reverting to the free nvidia driver. Eventually I worked out that I could use an older version of the X config file and got the log in screen back. The second issue was a lack of sound. This was not a bug, but there seems to be an extra fader in KMix that does not appear in my session and it was turned down.

So everything that was working before is more or less back. Improvements include being able to set decent screen refresh rates for all users and having them stick next time. I have yet to test sound recording.

I run Linux on my home computers for a few reasons. One was that I was getting tired of the restriction that Microsoft inflict when you run Windows and another was to support the principles of the free software movement. It has generally gone pretty well. I can do just about anything I want, usually without having to buy any software, but there are a few specific pieces of software that will probably never be converted to Linux. I can generally get by without these, but sometimes I get pressure from other members of the family. We have a few Windows 'edutainment' titles that I haven't tried to get running. Then my daughter decides she wants to have another go at the Bamzooki designer that she used when we still had a Windows PC.

I said I would see what I could do. I managed to install it using Wine, but it gets an error when you try to open a file. I used Wine-doors to install DirectX 9 that it needs, but that didn't help. I've Googled the error I got, but didn't find anything that looked useful. It's hard to know how to proceed.

There are other options. I could to up a Virtual Machine of some sort so that we could actually run Windows within Linux. I'm assuming that could handle the 3d graphics. I don't really want to get into dual-boot as that means rebooting the PC just to run one application. So I am after suggestions on ways to proceed.

In other news we just acquired a bigger TV when my dad got himself a 40" LCD. So we have moved from a 28" to a 32" CRT. It's a very nice Toshiba Picture Frame that was state of the art about six years ago. It even has built-in Dolby Digital that I am using with my Freeview box. The old TV has moved upstairs. I would quite like a nice flat screen, but can't justify the up-front cost, even though it would save us a bit on the electricity bill.

The TV got a good workout over the easter weekend as we have various friends and family over who all had a play on the Wii. That was good fun. We even had some four-player tennis action. We have a couple of new games that I will report on when I've checked them out properly. One friend was playing some Pink Floyd tunes on my acoustic guitar. I tried accompanying on my bass, but could only really manage some root notes as I followed the chords he was playing. I need to find some people to play with more often to build my skills.

Malc gave myself and Rob a lift down to Stevenage through the fog. Lots of folk there. Interesting stuff was Mike's EPOS that James helped to get Ubuntu running on and David demonstrated some apps that he's been writing. One was a sort of remote-controlled presentation system that looks promising, but played up on the demo. I keep meaning to post my little Python scripts that I've written on this site in case they are of use to anyone.

I'll just include a few links to things that I brought up:

• Better than free - Interesting article on what people will pay for when copies of music/software/etc are free
• Chicken Chicken Chicken - silly video
• Local News TV - A community news service for Bedfordshire. I'm in one of their videos at a singing workshop.

You can find my bookmarks at del.icio.us. If you join then feel free to subscribe to my feed and I may well do likewise with yours. I find it a great way to discover interesting stuff. I'm into social sites that are actually useful and not too invasive. I did get a few people to join the Herts LUG Mugshot Group, but there's not much happening there are only a couple of us have active feeds. I may have another go at the Wordpress site that Dave set up. I may try and replicate the exiting site so we can see if it's worth migrating. Let me know if you want to play with it.

Another second Wednesday at the LUG and it's Xmas party time. That meant a huge amount of finger food and another great quiz from Rob. This was enormous fun, but would have been bewildering to non-geeks as we answered obscure Linux questions and tried to match up O'Reilly book covers with their titles. We were a bit down on numbers, but still enjoyed ourselves. What's more, my team won again. I am now the proud(!) owner of a USB-powered clock that also tells me the temperature. It's a USB hubb too, so does have a real use.

We also had an account from James of his participation in a budget car rally to Italy. His team had pictures of several LUG members plastered on the car.

After a long wait I finally received my copy of the latest Radiohead album. I've had the download for a couple of months, but today I got the Discbox. This represents my first new vinyl in over 20 years. There's the standard CD plus another of extra tracks, then the album on two 45 rpm records. It is very lavishly packaged in a heavy gatefold with a slipcase. There's booklets full of the usual 'art'. It's a nice thing to have, but maybe a bit decadent. Annoyingly it's too tall to fit on the shelf with our small vinyl collection. This occupies a mere 30cm as opposed to Malc's impressive collection (link removed due to it messing with my stats). This is currently dwarfed by a collection of around 3000 discs that he is minding for a DJ friend. I wish I had time to listen to that much music.