Keyrock

Yeah, I agree not pre-ordering is generally, as a rule of thumb, the correct course of action. I will, however, make an exception for CDPR as they have yet to do me wrong and their business practices have been far more palatable than the competition. They have always supported their games for months, neigh, years beyond the initial release, and have given away every piece of DLC for free to their customers, even DLC so robust it could borderline be called an expansion pack. Like their games or not, and I very much like their games, they treat their customers right and have earned some good will. Of course, I fully respect and support those that choose not to pre-order a CDPR game. It's their choice and ultimately a wise move. I choose to pre-order because I trust CDPR and want to show my support and because I am confident they won't burn me. Of course there was a time when I also thought this way of a different company... But I digress. In other news, The Witcher 3 has been confirmed for SteamOS, and, by proxy, for Linux. Nothing has been said regarding the GOG version supporting Linux, but considering GOG has already previously said thet they will be supporting Linux in the vague chunk of time known as the future and the fact that a Linux version of the game will be released, it only makes sense that the GOG version will have a Linux build too.

Yeah, I never use the numpad anyway so buying a 10-keyless keyboard was a no-brainer. Also, it's so nice to be using a mechanical keyboard again. I had been stuck with a membrane keyboard for too long. I'll reiterate how impressed I am with the sturdiness of the Cooler Master Rapid Quickfire. The housing is plastic, but it's thick, strong, and rigid plastic. The keyboard has a surprising amount of weight to it for one so small and not made of metal, and between the weight and the rubber feet on the underside, there is no chance of the keyboard sliding around as you use it. Time will, of course, be the ultimate judge of the quality, but it feels extremely solid and well put together.

I would absolutely buy a Dandelion-centric game.

I always assumed any flawed kata resulted in seppuku.

Asia was rather hit or miss. They put out some good stuff, but never, in my opinion, anything nearly as good as the masterpieces from the legendary bands that the members came from (Yes, ELP, King Crimson). As for drummers, obviously Buddy Rich was a legend among legends. Phenomental. I'm a Billy Cobham man myself, he's always been my favorite drummer.

Say what you will about Maria Sharapova, I, for one, am not a huge fan of the excessive grunting, but that woman has nerves of galvanized steel. Congrats to her on winning her second Coupe Suzanne Lenglen. Alrightey, bikey bike time for me.

I'm watching the French Open ladies final. Highly entertaining. I'll hop on the bike whenever it ends.

That reminds me of my old Opteron 160. That was the best freakin' processor. I overclocked it by 800 MHz on stock cooling and ran it that way for some 4 or 5 years. Socket 939 was freakin' glorious.

I read that in a Veruca Salt voice.

Yes, I stopped using regular mice many many years ago. I shall never ever go back.

Here's a (poorly taken by a terrible photographer) picture of the rig: I need to get me that gel pad thingie to put in front of the keyboard for comfort. Also, I'll eventually clean up and bundle up the cables behind the desk.

Well, if all you're using it for is streaming games and videos and you say it already does that well enough, I don't think I could give you a compelling reason to change anything. The biggest benefits of using Linux, rather than Windows, for a HTPC type build are two-fold: 1) Linux is a free OS that will get the job done just fine, so you save the $100 or $200 or whatever you would have otherwise spent to install Windows on the machine. Since you already have Windows on there that's a moot point. 2) Linux has a WIDE variety of different window managers and Desktop Environments, rather than the single one you get with Windows, ranging from big, bloated, full featured desktop environments with all the bells and whistles, to extremely light-weight window managers, to everything in between. The CPU and memory the Windows desktop, or one of the big bloated Linux desktop environments like KDE or Gnome 3 or Unity chew up is a drop in a bucket for a modern i5 or i7, but for an older and/or cheaper, much weaker chip and system with much less memory, having the desktop chew up considerably less resources could be a big deal, but mostly for running different applications and multi-tasking. If the system you have with Windows already runs HD videos well enough, I can't really see any reason to switch if that's mostly what you will do with it. I've never tried to stream video from a Windows machine to a Linux machine, but I'm sure it's possible. Still, since it already works well enough with Windows, I can see no real reason to switch. As for streaming games, Steam will handle that just as well whether you are running Windows or Linux (or OSX). The amount of resources you do or don;t save on the HTPC is rather inconsequential since whatever game you play will be running off a different, presumably much more powerful, PC. Bottom line: If you were building this HTPC currently and didn't already have Windows on it, I would absolutely recommend using Linux as it would serve your needs and save you the price of a Windows license. Since you already have Windows on the machine, I can see no compelling reason to switch.

I got my 360 controller yesterday, which means I'm full speed ahead for gaming on the Monster Rig. Warning: Long-winded alert! tl;dr version: SteanmOS is currently great as a console OS, not so much as a full-fledged desktop OS. Full version: In related news, I put the SteamOS experiment on hiatus. It's simply not ready for what I want to do with it. Sure, as a Linux veteran I could mold and shape it and work through all the conflicts that arise to turn SteamOS into a full-fledged Linux disto, but why bother when I can just install a full-fledged Linux distro and have essentially what I want out of the box? It's akin to taking the round peg and putting it through the round hole, rather than taking a square peg and trying to hammer it through the round hole. In fairness to SteamOS, it's still very much in beta. Also, for what it's trying to be, it actually succeeds quite well, even right now, far from finished. As a console-like OS built around gaming, it works fabulously. It's essentially Steam Big Picture Mode with some minor tweaks. Desktop mode is hidden by default, but it's easily enough enabled with just a couple of button presses/clicks. The default desktop is rather basic, but it will likely be plenty good enough for many users as it's more robust than what you get with Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft's consoles. Still, for a power user, like myself, it's not enough (plus, as a long time Linux user, I'm used to the freedom of being able to change, rip out, substitute, and tweak absolutely everything, right down to the very core of the system). The problem with SteamOS, when trying to turn it into a more robust all-purpose desktop, is that the official repos (named "alchemist") just don't cover much beyond what comes pre-installed with the system. You wind up adding the Debian repos to the database (easy enough) to fill in the gaps (as SteamOS is based off Debian). Problem is that SteamOS has its own version of many packages, custom tweaked for whatever reason. You can set a filter easily enough so that official SteamOS packages will always be preffered over Debian packages of the same type if said package is available from both sets of repos, which does alleviate a good number of conflicts, however, conflicts will still arise and cause problems as you mix and match packages from different sources. I could surely work through the problems and make the exact desktop I want, I've gone through much worse. As stuff got updated, minor conflict problems would likely arise once more, but nothing I couldn't fix again. Still, why go through all that to mold a square peg into a round peg when I can just get a round peg to begin with? With that in mind, I downloaded and installed Xubuntu 14.04 (Based off Ubuntu, but with the snappy, clean, classic simplicity of the XFCE desktop pre-installed rather than the crime against humanity that is the Unity Desktop that Ubuntu ships with) and now I have the lovely (in a clean, simplistic sort of way), full-featured, robust desktop, along with Steam, that I would have had to take several days to achieve molding SteamOS into, in a matter of minutes. I'll give SteamOS another look several months from now to see how it's progressed. Hopefully they expand their official repos to the point where you generally don't need to add Debian repos to fill in the gaps if you want to make a full-fledged desktop and alter things to your heart's content. Then again, they might not, as that's not really the purpose of SteamOS, it's meant to be like a console, and as such, it works quite well already.

Yes put out a rather generous quantity of seriously ****ing awesome music. This particular tune features one of my favorite outros ever. It almost seems like it goes on way too long (3 minutes!), but it's so freaking good that you don't want it to stop, then the guitars kick it up a notch at the end and you wind up wishing it could have gone on for a couple more minutes. Ain't too many bands that could pull that off.

I'm waiting for the heel turn where, after gaining power, TrueNeutral changes his name to ChaoticEvil.

I wish you could disable the Neutralize prompt in the game as I like to time the hacking to take out pursuers or pursuees myself.

Chester Cheetah is very disappointed in your snack recognition skills.

I love the fact that Polar Knight wields a snow shovel. Little details like that just make my heart go aflutter.

This guy has his priorities straight.

Aww yeah, after a few delays, Shovel Knight has a release date, and it's this month, June 26th! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yachtclubgames/shovel-knight/posts/867693 Box art: Who has two thumbs and is ready to dispense shovel justice? This guy!

No there isn't. If you fight he dies (it is a fight to the death, after all). You spare him by talking him out of the fight and convincing him and his men to drop their weapons.

Crate is working on balancing Occultists, among other things, and that mastery will supposedly get a bit of a boost in the next update (B19), along with 2-handed melee weapons and other goodies. I'm pretty excited for 2-handed melee weapons, though it will mean respecing my Witchblade as I use a couple skills that require a shield. I'm sure balancing 2-handed melee weapons will be a long process (as it has been with rifles), as you lose a slot and along with it all the magical bonuses you could have had in that slot and the attachment you could have put into it, along with whatever extra damage or defense you could have gotten from either a second weapon or a shield or caster focus.

I wound up taking some of the money I saved by buying the Xeon instead of the i7-4790K + aftermarket cooler and plunked down for a Logitech Z506 5.1 surround speaker system. Not the greatest system in the world, but I'm not an audiophile and I'm sure it will be plenty good enough for me. Definitely an upgrade over the ****ty speakers in the 27" monitor, that's for sure, though I'll still often use my pretty good JVC circumaural headphones, especially at night when I don't want to piss off the neighbors.