R4, NFS, BB8… in brief

To start, thanks Gerben, I know about the separator and I see your point about the R4 skins looking a little ’stretched’, I didn’t see the need to use it before as I liked to see the whole picture, but maybe I’ll give it a try…

A new Need for Speed trailer has been released for the upcoming title, Need for Speed Pro Street as well as 5 screenshots. You can see the trailer and screens on the temporary Mental Gamers site here. It appears that Pro Street is the ‘Next Gen’ title that was announced a little while ago, so if you’re on QuakeNet IRC, come to #NFSPS where hopefully people that will be playing the game and/or are interested will be chatting about it.

Big Brother 8 has started and they’re all female contestants (so far), here’s my brief summary of them (in the order they appear on the Channel 4 site):

• Sam & Amanda, the stick twins, annoying.
• Carole seems ok, might stir it up a little with her ‘political’ views.
• Chanelle is nice, a bit too much of a Victoria Beckham wannabe though.
• Charley seems to be one of those ‘get it while you can’ type of people. At breakfast, she was like an animal in the wild that was feasting like mad, not knowing where the next meal is coming from…
• Emily, very nice piece of posh totty. Doesn’t seem to be in the same century as the rest of us, but she likes The Sims and that’s good enough for me…
• Laura, VERY ample breasted Welsh nanny that appears all cutesy, but could probably give a lot more than she can take.
• Lesley being the oldest of the bunch might seem to not quite fit in just yet, but I think her wisdom may be an asset to the team.
• Nicky seems nice, but a bit miserable and is going through a man hating phase.
• Shabnam reminds me too much of Amy Winehouse … I don’t like Amy Winehouse. Also seems to be a bit full of herself, I’ll just wait and laugh when she gets knocked down a peg or 2…
• Tracey … oh dear … I laughed so much at her, I almost ruptured myself. Should be fun to watch..

And so, until next time…

How to change the R4DS theme.ini

Putting a skin on the R4DS is easy, it’s just the matter of making 4 8bit or 24bit bitmap (.bmp) images, naming them correctly and transferring them onto the R4 (well, Micro SD card).

Making the skin ‘work’ better is how the text looks and that’s where the theme.ini file comes in. In that file are the ‘color’ commands to tell the R4 what colour text and stuff should be and this post is to show you which ‘color’ is for what. You can download a basic ini file from here which has the info in the pic on the right there (click for bigger pic) –>

There isn’t a specific way to ‘tell’ you how to change the theme.ini, it’s just a case of opening it up in notepad and changing the values of each hex number, there’s a chart below which has all the basic colours, but if you’re after a more obscure colour, using a paint/photo imaging program would be more useful.

Due to some big images, the post will continue after the jump…

Kaiser Chiefs rock

It’s been a while since a tune has stuck in my head so much and as you can probably see in my last.fm box, I’ve recently listened to the Kaiser Chiefs’ new album, Yours Truly, Angry Mob.

I happened to watch Jonathon Ross’ show when they were on and played Everything Is Average Nowadays, hearing it even just that once I had the chorus going through my head and so got the album. It’s not too bad and rather rocks somewhat, I’ll need to have a few more listens before making a proper judgemen, but first impressions are good.

Click more to see an acoustic version of Everything Is Average Nowadays…

Bored City

While I’d normally still be adding stuff to the Mental Gamers site or playing something, since MG will be moved to new webspace soon (hopefully) and a TV that likes to switch into standby at the most inconvenient moment when watching or playing something, I find myself not having anything to do.

There isn’t anything going on either which is crap considering the kids are on the half term holiday from school, that’s what makes the UK pretty boring compared to the US where there’s something happening somewhere most of the time. Even fellow blogger, Skip Jenkins has been out and about to one of those Fanime conventions, something I’m not particularly interested in, yet would go to one for a laugh and something to do.

I’m only blogging for something to do, I don’t really have anything to say. I’ve even updated my ‘main’ site to look a bit like this blog, but then again, it did need a bit of tweaking due to not hosting files there any more. I’ve even started having a go at playing the guitar again and I suppose I’d better get some stuff around the house finished soon to get the missus off my back…

{edit} Just checked on Real Life Comics to see if there was an update and todays update just happens to tie in with the FanimeCon as mentioned above!

Onblog reaches 200..

..hits the last 2 days. Due to information seekers wanting to find out more about the R4DS, I’m pleased to announce that aceman Onblog has had over 200 hits on Friday and Saturday. As far as I know, they are unique hits due to the way the stats work and if so, that makes it even better! When I hosted my blog on Mental Gamers web space, I probably managed 200 uniques a month, now as the blog stats say on the right there (at the time of posting), 2,389 hits have been made since I ‘joined’ WordPress.com on April 11/12th. That’s just over 6 weeks ago and works out at nearly 400 hits per week!

Ok, so the mass amount of those hits have come from people looking for info about the R4DS, but if I hadn’t moved to here and was still on my ‘own’ web space, I don’t think I would have had even half as many hits. I’d optimized the blog as much as I could to get search engines crawling all over the place, but still the hits were low, I like to think I’m providing decent info and opinions about stuff for people to come and have a read of and maybe even give their own opinion.

I’ve put my main site on my ISP space until I can be bothered to do something with it or even update it, it could do with an update though, things need adding and changing and whatever, so I’ll think about doing something soon. I’m usually around on IRC in some channels, mainly QuakeNet #acemanOnline and #MentalGamers, sometimes, but not very often I’ll go on GameSurge and when I want to piss someone off, I’ll go on Undernet. Piss who off you may ask?! The ‘aceman’ who goes on there. He has a problem understanding that he doesn’t own the nick and so keeps bugging me to change it… which I don’t since he doesn’t own the nick and it’s basically first come, first served.

Any IRC network that doesn’t have nick registration means that whoever is first to get the nickname gets to ‘keep’ that name as long as they’re connected to the network, Undernet aceman doesn’t like that fact and pretty much harasses me to change, when I say no, I get a sob story of how he’s used the nick for years blah blah yackety schmackety. I’ve also been using the name ‘aceman’ online for years, but I don’t throw up a stink when someone else uses the name (which is quite rare on QuakeNet and GameSurge).

Anyway, thanks for your visits and for reading my ramblings and I hope any future posts are as informative or entertaining for everyone!