The Sims Freeplay

This is a free version of the The Sims which I am playing on my Nokia Lumia 920 which is a Windows Phone 8. It needs a phone with at least 1 GB of RAM and won’t show up in the Store if you have less.

Like many “fremium” games it is technically free, but every action in the game takes time to complete so if you are impatient you have to buy in game currency to speed them up. You don’t have to though – if you’re patient you can play for free.

There’s not much depth to the game though. You can create multiple people (Sims) and houses for them to live in and fill the houses with lots of stuff for the Sims to interact with, but left to their own devices they just find a chair to sit in. Buying the stuff requires in-game currency (Simoleons) and using the stuff takes time. You can easily earn Simoleons by growing plants and getting jobs, for example.

The best stuff, and some actions such as having a baby or advancing a Sim through to adulthood, requires a second in-game currency: Lifestyle Points (LPs). These are harder to earn, assuming you don’t want to pay real money. Initially you can earn them by increasing your overall level and increasing your town value. Doing any action (sleeping, eating, watching TV) generates XP which  increases your level. Longer actions usually provide more XP. Spending Simoleons on building new properties increases your town value. However, both these activities become slower to level up as you increase their levels, which means you run out of LPs, in my case by level 25.

However, there are other (legitimate) ways to earn LPs:

• Goals. The game keeps generating goals through weekly challenges which will earn LPs.
• Pets. You can buy pets at the town pet store, although these also cost LPs. I believe more expensive pets find better stuff. Shake Hands with a dog and he’ll dig something up for you. Usually Simoleons, but sometimes an LP. You can Praise the dog afterwards, but I’m not sure if it actually trains the dog to find extra LPs.
• Sims can win LPs at the town Competition Centre. One Sim can enter one event every 24 hours. Each event uses one of the various hobbies, so get your Sims to practice these.

 

Hobby	Stage	Compete	Practice Venue
Woodworking	Adult		Community Centre, first floor
Ghost hunter	Adult		Any home – buy items with the red ghost symbol on then use them to Search For Ghosts
Fishing	Adult	Yes	Town park – look for fishing rods on a wooden pier
Fashion	Adult		Buy the Fashion Studio item from the town’s Promotions R Us store and then add that to a house from your Inventory
Ballet	Pre-teen	Yes	Community Centre, ground floor
Karate	Pre-teen	Yes	Community Centre, ground floor
Skating	Adult		Snow park
Diving	Adult	Yes	Swimming Centre
Music	Adult	Yes	Teen Idol’s can’t compete in this event

Windows Server 2012–language & keyboard settings broken

Just installed Windows Server 2012 and selected United Kingdom for language and keyboard layout during the install, just like I have done for every other Windows install in the last 15 years.

Broken. The server comes up in a US timezone and with US keyboard layout.

How does this stuff even get out the door? It’s not released, so much as inflicted upon us.

WDS & Windows Embedded Standard 7

I just spent most of a day failing to get Windows Embedded Standard 7 deploying via Windows Deployment Services (WDS). We have some IBASE SI-08 PC’s nailed on to some flat screen monitors which we want to use for digital signage. They came pre-packaged with some truly awful management software running on Windows Embedded Standard 7. We’ve decided to dump the free software and use PADS 4 instead and now we’re thinking about deploying our own Windows Embedded image with PADS instead of the pre-installed image.

I already have WDS installed and running on Windows Server 2012 and have used that to deploy vanilla Windows 7, 8 and Server 2012 images over the network.

After downloading the Windows Embedded 7 Standard ISO from MSDN and adding the WIM file from the Sources folder we tried PXE booting the device and got in as usual (had to fiddle with the BIOS to enable network boot, but wasn’t hard to find). I approved the request on the server via the WDS UI as usual and the boot image then fails to load. 0x00000001. A device connected to the system isn't responding.

This turned out to be a network time out issue, probably caused by incompatible packet sizes. WDS 2012 has an auto-negotiate feature which can be switched off in the WDS server properties. In the TFTP tab clear Enable variable window extension.

This moves us along. The boot image now boots, and we get a Windows Setup GUI, but it errors out with: WdsClient: An error occurred while starting networking: a matching network card driver was not found in this image. Please have your administrator add the network driver for this machine to the Windows PE image on the Windows Deployment Services server.

According to the specs for SI-08 we need a RealTek network driver so we download and unzip that and add it to WDS and apply it to the boot image. Boot again and we get along a little more. We give the setup our locale (English: UK) and admin logon credentials and then get to choose an install image. Or we would except it won’t show us any. The event log on the server shows errors when enumerating the images. We reboot the server. Now the WDS service will not start. We have event ID 257 An error occurred while trying to start the Windows Deployment Server (0xC1020201) in the event log and An error occurred while refreshing the image cache.

I removed and re-added the WDS role, but got the same problem. I did it again and this time I deleted the c:\remoteinstall folder, trashing my handful of install images (the ISOs are still around so adding them back should be simple enough). The WDS service now starts OK. I add the Windows Embedded 7 Standard install image and the x86 boot images again and try to install on a test laptop. It gets through to the Windows Setup OK but can’t offer me an install image. The errors are back again on the WDS server and the service won’t restart again after a reboot.

There’s clearly something fishy about this WIM image file and a bit of googling around WDS and Windows Embedded Standard 7 reveals that the WIMs are not directly deployable via WDS.

It looks like WDS will let me add the WIM, but then breaks when asked to enumerate them for a client or when restarting the WDS service. This time I deleted just the Windows Embedded Standard 7 image via the WDS UI, which works even without the service running, and then the WDS service starts.

Portal 2

I loved the original Portal game and the sequel is just as good, but is now a full length game. The plot carries on from the original. The same excellent voice-acting and humour are there along with some backstory. It’s great to play a game that doesn’t simply rely on blasting things, unlike almost every other game on Xbox.

Portal 2 also adds an online or split screen multiplayer mode. I’ve only played the first few levels of this so far, but it’s good stuff. Just need to find someone to play online with. :-)

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

This is a TV series based on the Terminator films. It is set after Terminator 2 and focuses on Sarah’s struggle to bring John up to be the future leader of humanity and to keep him safe from SkyNet’s continuing efforts to kill him, while also attempting to prevent SkyNet’s invention by changing key events in the present. They are joined by a reprogrammed Terminator, called Cameron, played by Summer Glau.

They made two series, with a total of 31 40-minute episodes so there is plenty to watch. On the down side it doesn’t look like they will make any more, so the story just runs out without conclusion. On the up side, Summer Glau makes a fantastic Terminator. Throughout the series there are constant minor things that she does that indicate that her character is more than just a robot killing machine, such as taking up dancing and helping a cancer patient. It seems likely to me that the plot would develop until they came to the realisation that preventing SkyNet from being built isn’t going to work – the time travel thing makes it too simple to sidestep and even if you succeed, humanity would just redevelop something similar a little later. The real solution is to convince SkyNet (or some similar AI faction) that humanity can be co-existed with and doesn’t need to be exterminated. I think that this is where John & Cameron’s relationship would have gone if the series had continued.

The rest of the cast are also excellent and there are many mini-plots with flashbacks to the future war providing additional depth to the main story. Religion gets the usual free ride, as ex-FBI agent Ellison “teaches” a young AI, called John Henry, about the value of human life, although there were hints that this wasn’t necessarily being accepted uncritically and this could have developed had the show continued. There was also a tendency to present Cameron as sexy-Terminator, which was disappointing. As an AI combat chassis specialising in infiltration there was plenty of scope for playing down the sexy and many fashion-is-bullshit-anyway gags.

Windows Multi-boot cliff

My laptop has a legacy Windows 7 boot image on it that I want to preserve, but I want to also install Windows 8 and set that up as a development box so I can work on the move if necessary.

I used the built in Disk Management to shrink my Windows 7 partition and create ~200 GB free space, which I left unallocated.

I boot the Windows 8 install disk, create a 128 GB partition and install Windows and some dev tools. Ok so far – I can boot back to Windows 7 whenever I want to.

Next I decide to create another partition for data, so in future I can reinstall Windows without worrying about rebuilding source code repositories’ working folders, etc. I use Disk Management in Windows 8 (WinKey+X to access a handy cheat popup of tools). It warns me that to do this it will need to convert the drive to Dynamic Disks or something. Hmm.

Cancel and reboot to Windows 7. Same thing. Oh well. I can’t be the first person in the world to want more than 3 partitions. I accept the warning and watch as the partitions change from Basic to Dynamic.

I reboot. Windows 8 goes into repair mode and starts fixing things. After a few minutes it lets me login, but I’m worried I didn’t get asked whether I wanted Windows 7 or Windows 8. I reboot. Straight back to Windows 8 – no way to boot to Windows 7.

Disk Management in Windows 8 shows my Windows 8 partition and my new Data partition as both being Basic again. The other partitions are gone – just showing as Unallocated space. Oopsy. Not the end of the world and I intended to rebuild my Windows 7 at some point, just not right now.

Wikipedia has some good info on basic disk partitioning. It seems that there really is a cliff after 3/4 partitions. My laptop already had a small FAT32 partition and a recovery partition that were factory installed, so adding my 5th partition triggered some pretty drastic changes (and a warning I, um, ignored, *ahem*).

TestDisk is a free utility that I ran from within Windows 8 which showed my my old partitions and let me undelete them.

Then I booted from a Windows 7 Repair disk I made ages ago and lobbed into a desk drawer. This auto-detected boot problems and fixed them. Now the pretty Windows 8 boot loader shows me two options: “Windows 8 Enterprise” & “Windows 7 Professional (recovered)” both of which boot.

APC Smart-UPS 1500

Frequent power cuts have caused my dev workstation to restart unexpectedly a few times recently. This isn’t really a problem for individual desktops, but as this machine runs Hyper-V and hosts 20+ virtual machines there’s some small risk that sudden power failure might leave one or more boxes in an inconsistent state leading to some work to repair them once power is restored. Seems like a no-brainer: stick an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) on and do a clean shutdown before the juice runs out.

I’ve not bought a UPS before so was not really sure what to go for. This Dell Precision T7600 chassis is rated for 1300W, but I’ve no idea what it actually consumes or how variable that might be. In the end I got an APC Smart-UPS 1500 for around £500, which reports my current load, for the workstation and one monitor, as around 20% loading giving 80 minutes of battery time.

Windows Server 2008 R2 detected the battery automatically when I connected the UPS to the server via a USB lead and integrates it with power options just like with a Windows laptop. I configured a new power plan and set the critical level to 50% and the action to Shutdown, which is the only one available, expecting this to initiate the same shutdown you get from Start > Shut Down.

I switched the power to the UPS off and the battery took over. After 30 minutes it got to 50% remaining. A crash message window appeared briefly before the server was dropped. It wasn’t a nice Windows shutdown – it just gutted itself!

Upon power restore we get asked the “unexplained shutdown” question and the VMs are “Off” when I was expecting them to be “Saved”. Not good. More Microsoft stuff that doesn’t work out of the box. Worse is that it all looks OK, until you try it.

Fortunately the UPS comes with its own monitoring system, APC PowerChute, which monitors the battery and does do a proper shutdown. It’s just a shame I have to install some vendor-specific crapware to achieve something that Windows can clearly handle itself (if only it were not bugged).