Classic Games for Nintendo 64 Video Playlist
Did You Love Your Nintendo 64 As Much As I Did
Let me be honest with you. I have been a long time Nintendo fan for most of my life. My parents bought our first Nintendo when I was six years old. It was the classic NES set that came with Gyromite and Robby the Robot. Ever since then I was hooked on the gaming goodness that Nintendo offered to gamers.
Years later they came out with the Nintendo 64. People either seemed to love or hate this console. I have read many reviews where people talked about how they hated the system, and some articles talking about how it almost bankrupted the company.
On the other hand it had some wonderful games like Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Pilot Wings, and many more. If you loved this system as much as I did IGN has a treat for you with the IGN N64 Classic Video playlist.
You can checkout the videos here on IGN.com
Lego Batman for PSP - Game Videos
Liked the Movie and Want to Play the Game?
Why so serious? A Batman game doesn’t have to be serious right? We were all worrifed originally when we heard that the Hollywood blockbuster Dark Knight would be followed by the release of a video game. I think we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when we found out it would done in the vein of the “Lego” series video games.
The popular titles have already made games like Star Wars and Indian Jones which have been pretty successful among fans. I must admit I have had a chance to play the demos and even I have been impressed and have had fun with the way they have designed these games.
If you are a movie fan, or fan of the Lego series games you owe it to yourself to give Lego batman a go. With such a fun game play concept and good game design you are bound to find something you like in the title.
To checkout the movies for the, check out the IGN video site here.
Little Big Planet 24 Hour Game Jam
Checkout the Latest Video for this Highly Anticipated PS3 Title
If you have been following the news on Little Big Planet you are probably as excited as the rest of us about this new title for the PS3. With stunning graphics and a unique theme and feel the game stands to bring so fun new game play to the table on a platform that is primarily known for its appeal to hardcore gamers.
With more news coming out about Little Big Planet on a daily basis it is no wonder fans are so interested to get their hands on this title and give it a go.
Whether you are a hardcore gamer, or a casual gamer who is just looking for a change of pace you owe it to yourself to check out this title which will add a new spin to online multiplayer games.
Check out the Gamespot video here.
Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1 - The Richter Scales
I have been swamped at work and have 4 side projects going on at the moment so I thought I would post something that’s a little lighter than normal.
Another great Viral Video I found online, called “Here Comes another Bubble”. For anyone that is interested in SEO, eBusiness or blogging in general this is a great video to watch!
I won’t give away too much of the video, so sit back and watch. I am sure you’ll enjoy it.
Mounting Shared Folders to Play Media Files in Kubuntu
The world’s most complicated fix for the world’s simplest problem
As a warning, this article is not for people who are afraid to run some commands from a text-based terminal or edit some system files used by Linux. I’ve tried to make things as simple as possible, and you can use the GUI for most of these tasks, but some steps will require you to open a shell and type a few commands by hand. I don’t think there is much risk of hosing your system if you follow the steps carefully- it is more likely that the new changes just won’t work- but if you get too far off track or something goes poorly enough, I can’t be held responsible if it messes up your system. You have been warned.
Anyway, if the intro didn’t scare you off, you’re probably wondering “just how hard could it actually be to play .mp3 and .avi files over a network share?” Well, Kubuntu (or Dolphin to be specific) can open shared folders on PCs running Windows right out of the box, but it can’t seem to open media files without first copying them to the local hard drive. The reason is because shared folders on NTFS hard drives (the file system used for most Windows installations) are not “properly mounted”, which is a fancy way of saying that Linux doesn’t have enough control over them.
I almost uninstalled Linux when I first encountered this problem, because it is so ridiculously complex for such a simple request, but I’m glad I stuck with it because although Windows doesn’t have this particular problem, it has plenty of others. Now, let’s get started!
In case you were wondering, you can access shared folders by going to the System menu (next to the K menu) and selecting “Samba Shares”. Then you should be able to find the PC you are looking for. Although this is useful for some things, it is not useful for playing media, which tend to be large files.
The solution for this, as I mentioned before, is to properly mount your network drives. This involves a little bit of trudging through the command line, and there is probably a better way to solve this problem but after all the searching I did, this is the best I can come up with. There are basically 4 parts to this fix.
- Setup a local folder for mounting
- Create a credentials file under your root directory (optional, but recommended so your password is not revealed to other users on your PC)
- Edit your fstab file to mount the folders from step 1 upon booting into Linux
- A “fix for the fix”, because of a known bug when unmounting drives (during shutdown)
Setup a local folder for mounting
Go to the system menu and click any option to open Dolphin. Click on the root shortcut on the left, and then choose the option on the right hand column for “Open as root“. In here, right click and create a new folder named “net” without quotes. It doesn’t really matter what you call it here but you will use it later and it is case sensitive. In any case, open this new folder you just created and create another folder.
I named this new folder after the computer I was connecting to, then created another folder under that with the same name as the shared folder of the machine I’m connecting to. This is because I have a few computers on my network and I wanted it to be like a re-creation of my network tree, but you really just need one folder for each shared folder you want to connect to. For this demonstration, I will make a directory structure of /net/mkd/d, but again, you can call it whatever you want. mkd is the name of my computer, and d is the name of the shared folder on that PC (my D: drive in Windows).
Create a credentials file
To create the credentials file, go back to Dolphin and click on the root shortcut again (from the column on the left). You should still have root access unless you closed the window or opened the wrong Dolphin window, so go to /root in the folder list below. Right click here and create a new text file named “.smbcredentials“. The dot as the first character means it is a hidden file, so you will have to click Alt+. (alt and the period key at the same time) to see it in dolphin. Do this and then open the blank file you just created and add the following two lines:
username=[YOUR_USER_NAME]
password=[YOUR_PASSWORD]
Obviously, replace the parts that are in brackets with your actual username and password that you would use to connect to your network share. This would be your Windows password.
Edit your fstab file
Click on the root shortcut in dolphin again and open the folder named “etc“. In here, scroll down a ways and look for the file named “fstab“. Right click on it and choose Actions -> Edit as root. In this file, scroll down to the very bottom and add a couple of blank lines. Then add the following line:
//[IPADDRESS]/[SHAREDFOLDER] [MOUNTEDFOLDER] cifs credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
Again, replace the parts inside the brackets with real information. [IPADDRESS] is the IP address of the machine you are connecting to. You *can* use the computer name however for some reason this causes problems so I reccomend you find the IP address and use that. If you need to find out what the IP address is, go to your windows machine that you are trying to connect to and click on the start menu. Choose “run” and type “cmd” (without quotes) and press enter. When the window pops up type in “ipconfig” to see your ip address.
[SHAREDFOLDER] is just the name of the shared folder you are trying to access, and [MOUNTEDFOLDER] is the directories we created in the first part of this guide, for example, “/net/mkd/d“. Remember that uppercase and lowercase matters here. Also, note that between each field is a tab, though I think any whitespace (tabs or spaces) will do fine. In all, there should be 6 fields: ip address & shared folder name, mounted folder name, file system type (cifs), a long string of different options, 0, and another 0. I’m not sure what the last two are for but they are necessary.
Now when you restart you should have a network drive mounted for the shared directory sitting right on your desktop. Rename this to something meaningful like “d on mkd” and you’re almost done! You can add as many lines as you want to to fstab, and if it can’t find the network share it will simply ignore it. Just make sure to have a different folder in your net folder (or whatever name you gave it) for each network share you are trying to access. Going back to the example I used before, I might have folders for /net/mkd/d, /net/mkd/c, and /net/mediabox/d as different shared folders I’m connecting to.
A Fix for the Fix
Since that was not nearly complicated enough, we get to cover an additional fix for that fix. All of this just to be able to open a media file without copying it to your local hard drive! As you may notice when you restart, Kubuntu will take it’s jolly time to shutdown. It will also show the same cryptic error message for each of your mounted drives, which will usually add about an extra minute or two to the shutdown time for each shared folder you added. If you only mounted one shared folder then maybe this is acceptable, but if you mounted 6 like I did it is absolutely not acceptable.
First, we will need to use a script for unmounting all cifs drives before shutdown (all shared folders). Fortunately, two contributors to the Ubuntu forums came up with a solution for us: Max.durden modified a simpler version of jferrando’s script and posted it on the ubuntu forums here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=293513). You may need to log in to be able to download the archive. Once you have downloaded it, right-click on it and choose Actions -> Extract to get the script file “mountcifs“.
Next, we have to install it. Open dolphin again if it isn’t already, and click on the root shortcut again. You may as well click on the option on the right for “open as root” now, since everything you do here will need to be done as root. Go into the folder /etc and look for the folder in here named “rc6.d“. Open this and copy and paste the script that you downloaded here.
Now, go to the K menu, choose “system“, and select “Konsole” to open a shell window. type the following commands one by one:
cd /etc/rc6.d
sudo chmod +x mountcifs
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/mountcifs K02mountcifs
If all went well, you should be all set! Restart your machine and check to make sure that it doesn’t hang during shutdown anymore. If you still have problems with either mounting or unmounting your shared folders, I’m afraid you will have to consult the Ubuntu/Kubuntu forums or google. For me, the script worked fine and I believe this solution is complicated enough as it is.
I now have a shortcut on my desktop to all of the shared folders I regularly access on my Windows machines. Eventually, I will migrate them over to Linux, and hopefully this problem will go away altogether, but for now I can enjoy listening to music over the network on my Linux machine without any problems!
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