Captain's Log The journal of travels on the web and what I've found.... HOME

November 2000 , June 2001 , July 2001 , September 2001 , October 2001 , November 2001 , December 2001 , January 2002 , February 2002 , March 2002
Here's the Links on this page.




December 7th 2002



Can you belive that my cartoon
CaptNemo's Depth defying Adventures is now running for almost a year? I even did special strips for halloween and Thanksgiving. I've been neglectful of log entries though so I'll try and enter these more frequently.
There's lots more designs in CaptNemo's Locker, and there's even a contest where you can win Free stuff!
Ever wish your icons would stay where you put them? I especially hate it in windows when a game or other program resizes the screen resolution and the icons wind up overlapping. Well check out this solution- Iconoid It's a great little program that remembers where your icons belongs and puts them there.




October 30th 2002


Halloween's only a day away- got Candy?
Check out my new UT2003 pageYou can download a new skin I made and my first map for UT2003.



October 20th 2002


Finished playing Unreal tournament 2003, check out this screen shot. I made the skin with my face using a picture of myself, Upaint which is on the 3rd UT2003 cd, and a slightly modified malcolm skin. The map in the background is my first attempt at making a map in the editor that comes with UT2003. (I'm still working on it but it's playable)
Are you ready for Halloween? Buy something from my halloween store and you will be :) Or check out halloween ideas on the web, there's a ton of them. I've also started a halloween story in my Captnemo Cartoon
I've got my smoke machine out- now to make sure it's working well.
Went to Santa Cruz last weekend and got some cave pictures in IXL, also some pics of Sandy the santa cruz cave spider.

September 7th 2002


A whole month with no log entries! Guess I've been busy :)
So whats new? I've added a
forum feel free to post there and discuss anything that comes to mind.
If you're into console gaming check out Arcade console Where I've added a section about using playstation controllers with pc's. and yes you can even use a dance pad with the pc version of 'Dance Dance revolution'.
I found some neat free programs at Gareths site The sub-desktop program works great and gives me a much less cluttered looking desk.
The Mother Lode Grotto turns 40 this year and to celebrate we're having a get together at Cave city on 9/21-22. Buy cool MLG stuff at the MLG store.
There's dinosaurs loose in Northern California! Check out these pictures.



July 17th 2002

Well I started
Warcraft 3 and I'm having lot's of fun playing it, I was disappointed that the Orcs part was so short in the beginning but playing the human campaign and then the undead campaign was great. Then I was relieved to see the orcs again. I can't wait to start playing an elf campaign next. That's right, unlike warcraft 2 which only had Orcs and Humans Warcraft 3 has orcs, humans, undead and elves as well as the occasional appearance of dwarves, goblins and other creatures. Combine that with improved 3d graphics and sound and that makes a great game. They really went all out with the story line this time as well.
There's some new pictures on the site. Check out my trip to Samwel cave, skeleton cave and the Caulkins family reunion (My grandmother on my Fathers side of the family).
Found a program that lets you back up 'ALL' your windows drivers on a computer for safe keeping. It puts them all in a folder and will even create an install file to help you put them back if you ever need to reinstall windows.I did notice that it backed up some unecessary drivers that I don't use anymore, but better safe then sorry. WinDriver Ghost 2.00
WinDriver Ghost provides you the easy and fast detection, backup and restoration of your drivers.


June 16th 2002

Well time for a new log entry- several new things on the web page. I went to Humboldt County this weekend, checked out the Oyster festival at Arcata, several Coast Guard cutters that were in town for Coast Guard day, and the redwoods on the way home. Check out these pictures.

I added "CaptNemo Cola" "the drink of divers", don't suppose it will show up in stores anytime soon, but I thought it was funny.

'The Depth Defying Adventures of CaptNemo' is continuing, I posted cartoon #16 this weekend (still no where near my goal of a whole years worth-52, but it's a start). I've added a couple of designs to my stores and they now carry license plate frames and clocks.

If you have high speed access such as cable or dsl check out atomfilms.com they have loads of short films that you can watch some of which are quite good. My favorite right now is 'GULP' -the story of a boy and his fish. Check out Bryans new gaming web page - even has pictures of the last 'NemoLan', held at my house. We played Soldier of FortuneII multiplayer demo and Jedi KnightII multiplayer and had a lot of fun. I'm going to have to try the full version of SOF2 now.

May 24th 2002

The Botswana National Museum has a web page finally! My Dad even has his picture on the natural history section.

I've used some online vius scanning on a friends computer that was infected with several viruses. I logged onto the internet and went to symantec and ran their security check. It found too many infected files to list them all and left me to remove them one at a time. Next I went to Panda-Scan and ran their virus scanner which was able to dis-infect most of the files leaving me to go in and remove a few manually. There were a couple of files (in the system restore folder, and fonts folder) that windows and DOS both would not let me delete, so I used my demo-linux cd to start up linux, went to the mnt folder, browsed the hard drive and deleted the infected files with no problems.


I've made a page showing all my designs that are for sale on merchandise and I recieve about $2 from each sale which will help support this site. So far I've had 2 sales yeah! A big thank you to my first two customers.



April 26th 2002

Well this last weekend I went to San Francisco with friends and we went to the California Academy of sciences/ Stienhart Aquarium. then had dinner in Japan town at
Benihana's.
Check out the pictures at pictures of Stienhart Aquarium
I've now been creating CaptNemo cartoons for over 2 months- yah! and I'm having lots of fun doing it.
Couple of new programs I've been using lately; ad-aware lets me check out my system for unwanted programs. You know- those little 'features' that get included with so many programs so they can target ads etc just for you! Other programs that are useful in this regard are;
start-up cop which lets you control which programs are started when windows restarts.
End-it-all which lets you shut down those stubborn back ground programs that sometimes interfere with the normal operation of your computer.
Mozilla is a great alternative browser. It's what netscape was meant to be before AOL added all their advertising junk.


March 30th 2002

It's been a busy month. I'm playing
warcraft2 again, now that the battle.net edition is selling so cheap, and it's been so long since I played it the first time, it's like a new game :) .
Now on my faster computer when I speed up the game, those little guys fly. It's still an amazing little game.
Jedi Knight II is out and I've been told it's an impressive game- with what they can do with the quake3 engine now I'm sure it is.
Changa and Em came up to visit this week and we went to the Winchester mystery house, what a strange place!
While checking out Changa's links I found that Cockeyed.com is a Sacramento native website!
I'm trying out a new cartoon idea- Caver Carl


March 25th 2002

Well I had a lot of fun at Lantrocity this weekend. Even stuck in a game of quake long enough to get 100 frags 100frags.
Check out these pictures.

March 21st 2002

Check out my new mp3 player controls!


March 19th 2002

I've loved using linux and a lot of the great programs that run on it.
Now there's an easier way to try these programs out.
Demolinux, allows you to run Linux right off a cd without anything being written to the hard drive. So give it a try if you're tired of windows or just looking to try something new. It comes with star office, the gimp(a great photo/graphic program), loads of networking apps, games etc. all free and it doesn't make any changes to your existing system so it won't hurt to try it. It's a big download (650mb uncompressed or 300mb compressed) So I wouldn't recomend trying to download it unless you have a fast connection ( cable, dsl etc.)
I've now been creating my comic strip "The Depth Defying Adventures of Capt'Nemo"
for a month. I've posted 4 strips and have several more made up, so look forward to many more.


February 24th 2002

I've been enjoying reading Angst Technology a cartoon strip about a small fictional gaming company where a monkey writes the web pages and the employees play games like counterstike all day. Ah if only it were real. I've been inspired to create a strip about Capt'Nemo's adventures Don't expect I'll have time to do a daily but maybe I can update it every week or so if I come up with ideas :)
I Finished playing Medal of Honor this week and it certainly gives you the feel of taking part in a WWII movie like Hart's war or Saving Private Ryan. Of course thats not suprising since Spielberg had a hand in the design of this game.
Now though I can get on with playing Serious Sam the second encounter This Game Rocks!

February 3rd 2002

I returned from a week in Southern California where my brother got married!
Check out these pictures of the wedding.Changa isn't single any more :)
I also recieved my t-shirt from cafepress and after 4 washings it still looks good so I'm real happy with it. I've reorganised and added more designs including some valentines day ones "CaptNemo's locker"


January 13th 2002

I have added a link to "CaptNemo's locker" where cafepress is selling merchandise with CaptNemo original artwork on it! A portion of sales will go to helping to maintain this web site :)
Also if you start your own cafepress site through that link I get credit for referring you. I cannot vouch for the quality of the merchandise yet (I just ordered a sample myself to see how it is) but they seem like a well put together outfit and they offer a 30 day guarantee. As soon as I get my shirt I'll post how it is. I've also updated my 404 page, try it here.


December 31st 2001

Happy New Year!

I've been busy these days getting my gaming computer converted to Linux. For those of you who may not know most of the games I play are only released for windoze, so while I enjoy the features and software Linux offers, I still use windoze for a lot of things. Well last month I heard about some new developments that may change all that. A company called Transgaming has a way to run programs that require windoze directx using a modified version of wine that they call winex. Unlike a lot of linux apps though it contains some proprietary code from game manufacturers for dealing with copy protection that is on a lot of game cd's,and so they won't release the full source. They have released most of the source but the binaries are only available if you subscribe to their website.
I purchased Mandrakes new 'Gaming Edition' which includes a custom version of the sims from transgaming and a three month subscription to the transgaming web site. I had some trouble getting access though as the sign up insists on an ongoing account which you need to give a credit card # for. After a couple of e-mails though and about 7 days wait (it was almost Christmas) I got access to my free subscription and was able to download winex. Unfortunately my sound card didn't work with either the sims or winex, it was a built in AC/97 that used ALSA(advanced linux sound architecture) drivers. Apparently winex needs OSS(open sound source) to work properly. I replaced the sound card with a pci phillips sound card (allegro) and it worked fine. I tested winex with half life which is still a little buggy in winex, the update feature hung and I can't seem to view online games, but the single player mode worked nicely and I didn't even have the sound lag that several people reported. Next I tried Unreal Tournament which isn't listed as working because there is a linux port available, but I already had the windoze version and sure enough it worked. I had to run it in a window as the 3d graphics didn't seem to work right but it played fine and I was able to join in an online game without difficulty.
Next I tried to make a desktop icon to start unreal so I wouldn't have to type in a console every time I wanted to play, should be easy right?
Well in a console I typed; cd TransGaming_Drive/UnrealTournament/ then; winex UnrealTournament.exe so on the kde desktop I made a new application icon then changed its properties to execute; winex TransGaming_Drive/UnrealTournament/UnrealTournament.exe
but this didn't work, I tried a few other variations but still couldn't get it to work and the transgaming web site wasn't any help. Finally after browsing a lot of sites from google I found one that mentioned setting up an icon for wine by having it point to; wine c:\program\program.exe
so I tried; winex c:\UnrealTournament\UnrealTournament.exe
and sucess!

So I won't be throwing windows away yet and I wouldn't recomend Linux gamer edition for everyone, but I think it holds a lot of promise. I certainly will be trying as many games as possible on it.

On a side note, VNC which I talked about before is included in Mandrake but is not installed by default. I choose to install it from the huge array of software available during the install and was glad I did. During my tests of unreal I managed to lock up the x-windows desktop/ display so badly that the normal way to kill/restart the desktop (ctrl/alt/bksp) wouldn't work. and neither would a seperate term window (ctrl/alt/F1), but I was able to log into the computer from another using VNC, then kill all instances of winex and voila! my x-windows desktop was functioning again. I could have used telnet to do the same thing but telnet is also disabled by default in Mandrake and VNC is such a nice way to work remotely.

I just finished playing Operation Flashpoint - A first person shooter type game that is also one of the most realistic military sims I've seen. In it you play the role of an infantryman, special ops, tank driver, and pilot during different parts of the game and as it progresses so does your responsibility, during some battles you have to keep your head down, command a squad of ten men, call in tank and/or air support and still fire at the enemy! Generally I found the tanks the easiest missions and even on some of the other missions I was able to complete them quicker by simply stealing a tank whenever possible. Thats one of the things I really liked about OFP - You're options are wide open, Unlike some games you're not limited on the ways you can try to complete your mission. See a truck you want? Take it. Feel cowardly? Hide in a bush till the heat dies down.Don't want to walk into an ambush? Take the long way a round. This realism is what has lead to the U.S. Marines Virtual battlefield system using OFP technology.



November 23rd 2001

Well I haven't made any entries in a while so here goes. I've been busy with school, we have a group project due next week, I threw together a simplified version at Webcity.

I'm using a PDA now and I'm proud to say it runs linux. Check out the Agenda VR3 and I was pleased to find out that Bill Kendrick who I've met at linux users group meetings in Davis has written all some software for it.Get it at New breed software.

I went through my pictures this week and managed to organise them a little- heres some of my favourites.Pictures

October 31st 2001

HAPPY HALLOWEEN Well we had a fun party on saturday and I got quite a few trick or treaters.
Found a new program called Wanyword it is very useful for searching multiple text/html documents. Also been using a very nice compact mp3 player Coolplayer It's very small and I like that no install is required.

October 11th 2001

I've recently come across two very useful programs OffByOne( a very small and portable browser no install required)
I combined these two to create cd's of my digital pictures that start the offbyone web browser automatically and display an index of the pictures on the cd!

I also recieved my first greeting from a Langa-Plus reader So thanks for the referral Fred.
I'm trying to teach myself a little PERL beyond the script I use for the message of the day, so I've installed a Hangman game from the PERL black book, and am working on customizing it a little. I've revived my intrest in playing Unreal Tournament , thanks to a MOD called 'Strangelove' which allows you to launch and even ride on rockets. Riding is really wild but you need plenty of space as they can be difficult to steer.


September 30th 2001

The work I've been doing at school has inspired me to redesign my web page. Hope you like the new format. I've tried to make it easier to navigate with a text index and buttons.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Western Regional for the National Speleological Society and took Pictures

I've been playing a couple of new games, RED FACTION is a very cool game with a 3d engine that allows surface damage such as blowing holes in walls etc. It also has a minisub you get to drive around in making this a top noch game in CaptNemo's book :)

I've also been playing Oni which has been out a while now. It's fun but not as cool as Red Faction and no multiplayer.


September 23rd 2001

I'm progressing on my work in class, I've created some textures and graphics to use on my class web pages.
Oh and I learned how to do redirects such as

-Warning this series of redirects can be annoying after awhile.

September 1st 2001

Well looks like my site is back up thanks to the folks at LinuxWebHost and no thanks to Gnx(read the details here) who treated me so poorly.
I'm enrolled at American River College this semester and am writing web pages for class at WEBCITY .
This weekend I'm going down to Chalk it up Sacramento where I got such great pictures last year. Check out the divx video I made from them.

July 10th 2001

Today I thought I'd mention some new things I've added to my page recently, News from
moreover.com on Diving, caving, open-source technology, science and gaming. These pages contain news that is constantly updated from major media sources so they should stay fairly current. I've also been doing some reading on bots or web spiders and may try coding one myself using rebol.

July 1st 2001

I've been moving things around, trying to organize the site a little better. Found a new tool that has helped me keep track of my pictures, called DMEX it allows me to rename a whole block of files at once. So for example image001.jpg , image002.jpg etc... becomes June20-image001.jpg ,june20-image002.jpg and so on. It also has a lot of other nice functions that I haven't really tried yet.

Got a few e-mails from my parents in Botswana. Amazing how technology has made it easy to keep in touch. I remember it taking weeks for a letter, and phone calls were such a hassle to make not to mention poor connections.

I've recently completed a game called Rune. I know it came out a while ago but for some reason it didn't get good reviews. I enjoyed it anyway and the Nordic mythology that the single player games story is built on, is interesting. It's a really big game, lots of interesting levels, and it has multiplayer capability.(its built on the unreal tournament engine).


June 19th 2001

Well it's been awhile since I updated this section, so there's lots of news.
First off if you're reading this you should be at my new domain-
chilembwe.net
Calweb discontinued all personal accounts so I had to move rather suddenly.
My parents are both back in Botswana now So I'll probably add a page on
Botswana links.
I've finished several games in the last few months, including Undying, Alice and Serious Sam. I thoroughly enjoyed playing these as single player adventures. Serious Sam also has a co-op multiplayer bringing back memories of doom and has been a lot of fun on-line though it's multiplayer seems a little buggy still.(Up-date as of 6/12/01 turns out they've had a patch to address these problems.)
I've found several useful new programs. First Languard netscan helped me identify problems on my isp's network when their tech support couldn't.
I found Trillian a great way to stay in touch with people who use different chat programs as it can handle irc, icq, aim, msn and yahoo.
RogerWilco lets me voice-chat with people while playing Quake3 and other games online.

I'm also reorganizing my site and I've added new pictures, checked some links
etc.



November 14th 2000
This will be a little different from previous log entries, today I'm writing about Tyrranus. This is a strategy game that you can play on the net. One of its strong points is its simplicity. It requires no download, no plug-ins or special java-enabled browsers. This also means though that it has none of the fancy graphics we've come to expect. It leaves the game up to your imagination and strategy planning ability. Basically you start with a planet that produces a certain amount of ships per turn, you use these to invade/conquer other planets and by acquiring new technology you can improve the ability of your ships, and the production of your planets. The goal is not total control of the universe but simply to "ascend" which is to reach a high level of technology. Then you get to start over again. There are a few different games to play in each with different time scales. The one I play has one turn every hour and as most travel between planets takes between 5-8 hours, I can log in once or twice a day and keep up with the action easily enough. Give it a try at; WERDNA

November 10th 2000
Today's topic: MuLinux (microlinux)-Written by M.Andreoli, m.andreoli@tin.it, ITALY, this is a version of linux where he has gone to great lengths to cut out unnecessary items. As a result you have a system that fits on a single floppy, add a few extras like the x-windows gui, vnc(described in my previous log entry), a c compiler etc.. and it still only amounts to a half dozen floppies. One of it's greatest appeals though is it's ability to run entirely in memory, this is great for a variety of reasons. First it enables someone to try out linux without making any permanent changes to their hard-drive. This avoids the re-partitioning that many beginners are nervous about(and rightly so as you can easily lose the contents of your hard drive with the wrong fdisk command). It also means you can run machines with no hard drive- just boot from the floppy then mount nfs from a server and off you go. If you only run it in memory none of the settings you choose are permanent so it's great for a quick trial of linux or just logging in temporarily. You'll need at least 2 floppies to try it out- the first is used to boot to a linux environment needed to format the second floppy (this is necessary as it uses special formatting to fit 1.77mb on the floppy). Another nice thing is that it will run on a 386 with 8mb of ram (I don't recommend trying the x-windows gui on one of these though) and runs great on a 486 with 16mb. So dust off that old pc and give it a try :) MuLinux

November 9th 2000
Today I'll write about VNC. This is a great application that lets you view a computer desktop remotely. What uses does this serve? Well I'll describe how I use it on my network- I have one machine in my living room, which I play games on, surf the net, watch dvd movies with and play around with video recording. This is networked with my computer room where I have my Linux server and several "project" computers I'm working on. In the bedroom I have a computer that answers my phone and serves as a gateway for my network to access the Internet, to avoid conflicts with the answering software I had to disable the dial on demand feature of this machine. Then in order to connect to the net I had to go into the bedroom and start the connection, then I could access it from the other machines. Now I can open a vnc window- start the dial up and surf away, all from the living room. I can also view my linux server X-desktop from within windows. Which means most of the time I don't even need a monitor hooked up to my server. And I can run a lot of my linux apps on my network with out rebooting my windows machine to linux. So check it out at; VNC

November 7th 2000
Now that I've started this log we'll see how many entries I make:) Today I'm writing about MAME (multi-arcade machine emulator). This software enables your pc to emulate the hardware in arcade machines. I've already mentioned this in my page about my arcade controller, but you don't need a custom controller to try MAME, It works with keyboard, mouse and joysticks. There are several versions for different platforms. The Dos version boasts the most compatability with a wide variety of games, but I had difficulty getting it to work with my soundblaster live(I don't have any free irq's for its Dos support to use) So I'm using the win32 version in windows98 and an x-mame version in linux. You can find links to all these at www.mame.net MAME
You also need Rom's to play the games. ROMS are the chips that make up the actual game program in an arcade machine. You can get these from old arcade machines or video junkpiles. Owning these entitles you to download rom-images which are zip files containing the programing that was in the original chips. These are mostly available at www.mame.dk. -happy gaming Roms

November 6th 2000;
Well here's a new part I'm adding to my pages- a log of my ramblings and what I've come across in the depths of the net. Lately I've been playing around with DivX and it really is great. Not to be confused with divx which was a proprietary form of dvd from Circuit City. DivX is a codec, which allows for greater compression of digital video. It has also been referred to as MPEG4 as it improves the quality and compression previously available with MPEG3. What does all this mean? Well in short DivX is to video what MP3 is to sound. It allows whole movies, shows etc. to be made small enough to download on the internet or put on cd. The DivX codec itself is a small download- <2MB and installs itself into windows media player. DivX video files have an avi extension so they normally play in windows media when you klik on them. Creating your own DivX videos can be a little more complicated- there are several programs you can download for converting various video formats to divx. I was pleased to find that U-lead video studio that I use, recognized the DivX codec and now I can create my files directly into DivX.
Check out; DivX:)
___________________________________________________
Captnemo home

LINKS


  • MuLinux
  • WERDNA
  • RogerWilco
  • Trillian
  • Oni
  • RED FACTION
  • Languard netscan
  • Serious Sam
  • Alice
  • Undying
  • Rune.
  • Unreal Tournament
  • 'Strangelove'
  • DMEX
  • bots or web spiders
  • rebol.
  • LinuxWebHost
  • American River College
  • WEBCITY
  • Langa.com
  • BatchThumbs
  • OffByOne web browser
  • PERL
  • Transgaming
  • Mandrake Gaming Edition
  • "CaptNemo's locker"
  • 404
  • CaptNemo 404
  • Angst Technology
  • Capt'Nemo's adventures
  • Medal of Honor
  • Serious Sam the second encounter
  • warcraft2
  • Jedi Knight II
  • Changa and Em
  • Winchester mystery house
  • Cockeyed.com
  • mp3 player controls!
  • Demolinux
  • Warcraft 3
  • WinDriver Ghost 2.00
  • skeleton cave
  • Caulkins family reunion
  • Samwel cave
  • pictures.
  • "CaptNemo Cola"
  • CaptNemo'
  • atomfilms.com
  • Bryans new gaming web page
  • Botswana National Museum
  • symantec
  • DVD Decrypter
  • Art of the Sabre"
  • Iconoid
  • HOME