Upgrading Personal Fileservers/VMHosts

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So, my fileserver is now three years old. Well, parts of her are three years old, parts of her are nearly ten.
I think it is time to replace her… well, parts of her anyway. You know, the parts that aren’t hard drives due to the ridiculously high price of hard drives at the moment.

I’ve decided to kick off writing things to my blog again my posting a ridiculously long entry (3600 words) no one will read!  HOORAY! In short, I detail how my file server currently works, what doesn’t work, and make a few builds off of Newegg for replacing her, then figure out why the hell I chose the parts that I did.

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HP Touchpad – A SPOON!ed Review

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So, I was one of the few people that actually snagged an HP Touchpad.  More specifically, I bought one of the 32 GB ones from Best Buy’s website for 150 USD.

  • Is it worth 150 USD? (maybe)
  • Is it worth 100 USD? (definitely)
  • Does it perform better than an iPad? (not even close)
  • Does it fit in a breadbox? (what the hell are you going to do with a tablet in a breadbox?)
  • Do cats like to sleep on it? (yes)

All of these things and more will be described in my review.

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Ultimate Combat [Pathfinder] Review – Classes

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Pathfinder is, sort to speak, my home system away from my home system. As such, I tend to buy the books. In this case, I tend to buy the PDFs, and on Friday I purchased the Pathfinder Ultimate Combat PDF from Paizo.

This first part (yeah, I keep starting too many series of posts, but otherwise you’ll all lynch me for “tl;dr”ing everything) will go over the crunchy bits – how the class/class archetypes compare to each other on balance/usefulness terms, things like that.

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Let’s Play XYZ SPOON!ed

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So, an idea I was tossing around #asr was playing through one of the games that I’ve played very frequently, doing a Let’s Play of it… only throwing in some type of twist.

For an example, Let’s Play Might and Magic VII SPOON!ed might include a regular runthrough of MM7…  with a party of Goblin Druids.  Things like that.

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Wild ARMs XF – A Review

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So, I’ve basically beaten WAXF now.  I’m at what I’ll hereafter refer to as the “abandonment point” of the game, or the point of the game where I most frequently abandon what I’m playing so it doesn’t end.  This is the point right before the final series of “end game” battles at the end of an RPG that I seem to perpetually stop at.

I fully intend to finish this, mind you, but I usually end up just stopping and never resuming.

Beat it.

Wild ARMs XF Clear Data

Anyway, back to the review.  I’m a Wild ARMs Fanboy, basically.  Well, of the games that I’ve played until now.  I love the setting, WA1 was the first ‘standard console RPG’ I had played (mostly due to the fact that I rarely played RPGs until then, and the ones I did play were StratRPGs).  I’m going to start throwing reviews of games up here; I should probably include pictures, but I’m lazy.  Maybe if people actually started reading this.  :)

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Cardinal Sins of the Strategy RPG

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I like Strategy RPGs. If you did not know this before, hi, I’m aetherspoon, a pleasure to meet you, you must be one of the three people that read my site that don’t know me personally. :)

I’m just finishing up a run through of Wild ARMs XF (yeah, I know, it came out over three years ago, but I’m slow in getting through my backlog) and, once more, I find all sorts of issues with the game that could have been fixed with a small amount of effort. Just a little more and it could have been an awesome game. It just committed too many Cardinal Sins.

One day, I’d like to make my own StratRPG. I’ve had tons of ideas in mind for several years now (since before I went to college even!), but I know I have little coding ‘skillz’ in order to make such a thing (really, the graphics are the problem; I suck at coding GUIs) and definitely do not have the artistic skills. Similar to the previous post on strategy gaming, that means criticizing someone else’s work and claiming that I can do better.

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TinyBox 2: Electric Bugaloo

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Probably not a good sign for my stress levels that I’m back to looking at the TinyBox, but eh.

So, TinyBox.  For those that are unfamiliar with the concept, here is my previous attempt.  In short, I was really only working on it to distract myself from stress, but it was a DOS gaming machine designed to be as small as possible.

Well, times and technology has changed.  MiniITX motherboards are no longer ridiculously overpriced, processors have become a lot faster (not that it matters so much for direct DOS gaming…), and emulators have come a long way.  I mean, I can play Daggerfall at full speed now upscaled even.

So, I return once more to thoughts of a TinyBox.
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