Bit Defender

Bitdefender for Unices is possibly the best and the worst virus scanning software for Linux that I've ever come across.

Its the best because its fast, It finds almost every single virus we throw at it, its reliable and most of all its easy to use.

Its the worst because I've installed it maybe... 15 times across various Linux distributions and to this day I've not had a single installation that worked first time without issue.

Bitdefender will install, but once you update it you will be unable to scan anything.

If you use a GUI to launch it, it will just crash back to desktop with no visible error messages.

If you load if from a terminal BDGUI you will have no messages until it crashes to desktop and then all it will say is Segmentation fault.

Now the only sure fire way I've found of making this work is to totally purge your existing Bitdefender installation, Just remove everything sudo apt-get purge the nuts off it.

Once thats done download the file again from Bitdefenders website, chmod +x the file and then execute it.

Run Bitdefender
Update Bitdefender
Close Bitdefender
Run Bitdefender again and try to scan a file. (It will crash here)

Once crashed follow these steps (Thanks to Mark Greaves @ http://linuxforums.org.uk/index.php?topic=10259.0)

Open a terminal and run:
sudo rm -v /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/bdcore.so*

Then
sudo su

Then
cat /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/versions.dat.* |awk '/bdcore.so.linux/{print $3}'|while read bdcore_so;do touch /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/$bdcore_so;bdscan --update;ln -s /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/$bdcore_so /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/bdcore.so;done 
(copy/paste that one, as it's long)

Then
exit

Now try BitDefender with:
bdgui

--
Thank Mark Greaves!

Stick of Truth

I'm not going to write up a full review, I'm just going to leave this brief message here.
If you like South Park you must get this game, Its hilarious from start to finish and surprisingly its an excellent game.
When I say surprisingly I simply mean that most games based on TV shows or films are diabolical however if anyone was going to do it right it was the guys from South Park and the team that brought you Knights of the Old Republic!

The combat is amazing and the storyline is interesting and hilarious.
Granted I wouldn't pay 40 pounds sterling for the privilege but I bought it from Russia instead for 17 Euros!

I'd pay 20, 25 or even 30 pound... I wont pay 40!

Anyway, Aside from pricing the game is excellent

Spring time Lethargy!

Yesterday the Sun came out, It was 18c and the world came alive.
To some of you better off in hotter parts of the worlds the prospect of seeing the Sun and temperatures of 18c might seem strange... or cold. However for South Wales this is practically summer time.

I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a blue sky and and the Sun, To be honest if I'd not had to visit family in the evening I would of missed entirely.
The UK is grey and miserable 90% of the time and because of that I simply don't bother to open the curtains and yesterday I nearly missed it.

I've always wondered if I have that Seasonal disorder because jesus christ do I get sad and miserable when its grey and miserable... Which because its the UK it is pretty much all of the time.
However when the Sun comes out and the weather is bearable I suddenly wake up like I've finished hibernating and suddenly I actually want to do things, Like go outside...

Yes that's right,
Outside!

The only downside is that my hobby and the thing that really made me happy was driving and especially driving during the brief windows of good weather and honestly for the last 5 years we've had very little of that.
Do you remember summers where it would be blazing hot for 4 straight weeks?
I remember a hosepipe ban at one point, Why has it been raining solidly for 5 years?

What the fuck.

Anyway, I bought that Red travesty just under a year ago now and I've been miserable ever since. Its like a blight on my life and it makes me REALLY sad that I spent all of that money on a car I really never wanted.
My parents told me it was the right thing to do, It was sensible and economical on fuel.
Granted it cost me nearly £10,000 so the 'Financial' sensibility went straight out of the window.

I'm no mathematician, however the car does twice the mileage per tank of fuel but it did cost another 3 times the cars worth to buy.
It certainly does miles per gallon, the one thing it doesn't do is 'smiles per gallon'
I've yet to smile whilst driving this car. Nothing about it is impressive.

Maybe I'm spoilt with my history of cars, Prior to the FR I had that black Leon Cupra R (in the picture above) she was highly tuned and track ready and drove like a charm. After I'd completed all the work on her it felt like she was on rails, Very impressive.
I never should of sold her.
Never

Prior to that I had my silver Ibiza Cupra

She was an absolute monster, That Ibiza Chassis is essentially a Polo and that means it weighed bugger all. Give it the engine from a MK4 Golf GTI with a better Turbo and you had the Ibiza Cupra.
It essentially meant that after a bit of tuning and handling she was a complete weapon... and the only Ibiza Cupra in the country with the Seat Sport bodykit.

What an absolute beaut.

Anyway, I've gone a bit off track. The weathers good but my car is boring.
Next please.

I love you, I miss you, forever mine.

Everyday I think about how much I miss her and how I should never have let her go. Its taboo in our culture to love more than one, but I didn't care. I loved her more than life itself and to spend my life without her kills me a little more inside every single day.

We would always go out and have fun and sometimes I wouldn't return till 2 or 3 AM, People were suspicious of us when we were out on the town but they always saw that she was more than meets the eye, She was special and she made everyone jealous.

The way she felt, the way she hugged me and the way that she made me feel secure at all times. 

We would always go out on Sunny days or Stormy nights and make the most of every single day.

I treated her with respect, I always bought her expensive presents and treated her like a princess. She reciprocated that love with her constant dependability, Compared to others of her kind she was always fun and outgoing and never afraid to get dirty when we wanted to.

Sure, She was loud and she had a deep voice but that didn't deter me and on long journeys together, I never once tired of her voice and I could listen to her for hours.

When I really wound her up and let her go she would always put a smile on my face some would say that she was a bit Chavvy, but they were wrong, they mistook her loud booming voice for a lack of talent but she would always make the rich kids cry when they tried it on.

My time with her was always special and I loved every minute of it and letting her go was the worst decision I made in my life. Some say that you should live without regret and should keep moving forwards but I'll never stop looking back at the loss and what once was.

I miss you and I always will.
I'm sorry for what I did and if I ever find you again I will take have you back with open arms regardless of how many others have been inside you.

Forever yours,
Christopher

xx

P.S 

The pictures of us together below make my heart sink with sadness.

Steam In Home Streaming

So both mine and the Mrs account have been invited to both the Family beta and the In-home streaming beta.
This means now that I wont have to buy two lots of every game on the PC I can simply share it to Hollys account and from there she will be able to stream it to whatever device she wants.

I think thats pretty special and Steam really are breaking ground on the PC market. They are making it more accessible to the regular Joe and easier to share your content with those that you love.
By doing this they are offering something that no other platform can do and as such retaining those customers, as Lord Gaben said Piracy is just a service problem, and this is just another service that will keep the pirates away!


Anyhow, In home streaming so far I've only briefly tested it using a Core2Duo laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 with crappy intel graphics and 2 bars of Wireless G...

With that said I managed to play Portal 2 at 28FPS, It was playable but not something I'd like to continue doing for the moment however I imagine with a better network connection it would be far better, Tomorrow I'm going to hook this crappy Laptop up to the LAN and see how it plays.
Can you imagine having a Great PC under the stairs with lots of little cheap units dotted around the house being able to play whatever you want?

Tomorrow I'll hook this sucker up to a hard wired network connection and I'll report back however the service is awesome and I'm really looking forward to what becomes of it!

'The Talking Dead'

Well what can I say?
Whats going on with this TV show. I feel that every week I'm having to defend it with my compadres and that its all 'Building story' for one final big feelgood or feelbad episode but last nights one just made me want to snooze.

Hot blonde has an emotional crisis, Redneck saves the day by being the shoulder to cry on and buttering her up.
How has he not slept with her yet? I mean... Well

More to the point I think this may very well be the first episode that over 50% of the content I either talked over or did something else on my laptop/phone. I simply wasn't interested.
I really hope that shortly parts of the group start meeting back up and the fragmentation ceases, I appriciate we are rebuilding their stories following their world being blown apart (Literally) but I'm getting a little tired of it.

And trust me, If anyone loves back story and stage setting its me but even this is getting a little too much.

I felt that Comic book men had more action this week...

Leaving the nest and increased rent

So Holly's brother is moving out,
Obviously this is a good thing as it means that we will have the house to ourselves and wont have to worry about it being a complete shit tip all the time. The only mess we'll have to worry about and clean up after will be our own.
However this does come with its own set of problems, We will be paying £600 a month rent for the house which considering the size of this house isn't too much of a bad thing but it does need decorating from top to bottom, all of the appliances are shagged and need replacing and the Garden is essentially just a mud pit for the dogs to play in.

Now for £600 a month I could have my own house, Closer to work that's newer, better decorated with much nicer appliances and fixings and this is something we are looking to do. Currently now is the time to buy in the housing market especially with all of the deals the government has going.
It makes me feel sick to think that I'm paying £600 a month to live in a house that I don't want to live in, that in no way belongs to me and needs decorating from top to bottom and is just over an hour away from my place of work.

That means that the one hobby I do have (Driving/Cars) becomes non existent because no fucking person on this earth could maintain a nice car and drive to and from work everyday on top of all the other bills we currently have.

Its one or the other, Happiness and living my life or paying the bills.
Looks like I'll be miserable for quite some time...

At least we've got a month before we have to pay the increased rent from Holly's brother moving out!

FTL - Faster Than Light

So... I'm pretty slow to the party on this one.
I've started exercising much more recently and as such once I'm done I'm normally so tired that I head straight to bed.
As such I end up using Hollys knackered laptop which runs on Ubuntu, I decided to install steam on it last night and had a quick look to see what games would run under Linux and there are quite a few, Mostly indie titles but thats fine because If I wanted to run triple A titles on this I'd need to buy an expensive laptop!

Anyway, little ship, Turn based (sort of) combat control little dudes on a ship and blow shit up. Its fantastic.
Sadly I'm still learning so I'm screwing this up pretty much every time but I've only died once. Note to self, Buy more people.

If you see this in the sales I suggest that you grab it, It might not be a title you sit at your main machine and play but Its a bit of fun on this little laptop whilst I watch TV!

The Conjuring

Have you seen this?
If you've not seen this and your a bit partial to a scary flick then I would highly suggest it. Its one of the few films that has put me truly on edge in a very long time.

The tension builds really quickly and the things that happen around the house are truly written in a way thats designed to terrify you..

I'm really impressed, I'm only half way through so far but I'm going to say this is one of my favourite films of 2013/14 so far. Its fill your pants type of scary.

Holly is working night shifts for the next two nights which means all the horrors and the thrillers I can stomach!
Film binge here I come!

Are you ready for Godzilla?

Trailer just hit the world wide webs and I'm telling you that its going to be dynomite! I can't wait to have a bro-out with my brosefs and get my Godzilla on.

Definitely going to hit the big screen with this one, IMAX here I come!

Moving away from Gmail

I've been an avid fan of Google now for some time.
I've always owned Android phones, I've always recommended GMail and GTalk instead of MSN Messenger and Hotmail (When that was even an issue)

All of my friends and family I've moved over to Google wherever possible, however as time goes on my concerns of privacy grows stronger and with the new introduction of Google's targeted advertising to make adverts look like emails I feel that the Google machine have taken it a little too far.

I appreciate they offer these services for free to the majority of users and that obviously they should be recompensed in some way for this, However people like my parents or Grandparents who use Google products are not going to know the difference between these new email targeted adverts and their actual email.

I'll be honest this is probably the one things that's going to tip me over the edge to move to my own email server, Sure I'll keep my GMail account for unimportant things like YouTube, my mobile phone and various other online bits.

I pay google for storage space, I thought as a paying customer I may get around adverts and I'm not really large enough to have my own business Gapps account so my option is now annoying adverts?

However information that I'd like to keep private?
I'm thinking hope mail server, Encrypted with Encrypted backups.

I love you Google but I don't trust you as much as I used to.

I'm watching TV! Piss Off!

So I'm sat here watching Battlestar Galactica.
I've never watched it before and its one of the best TV shows I've ever seen. I've just started the final season and there are some really amazing twists.

If I'm sat there in complete silence. Watching intently and you ask "Everything alright" and I say "Yea fine" and then I go back to watching the TV intently.
Don't wander around asking me random questions!

League of Legends

So some people get really stressed by their jobs, Some people get stressed with their home lives or their family.

I don't, the only thing that truly stresses me out is competative play on League of Legends. The toxic nature of the community, the stupidity of some of the players and the entitlement some of the players feel they have makes this game infuriating to play.

Ranked Solo queue on EU West is probably one of the most toxic, challenging enviroments a competative player will ever see.

I've decided from this point to put to paper my daily trials and tribulations of Solo queue ranked game play.

I'm hoping that you find this funnier than I do.

New Blog

Well,
I've decided to move to a new Blog.
There were a few things on the old blog that I wasn't too proud of. There were some rough times that I'd rather just forget. Moving forward I want this to be a positive place... Or, Well, I mean I don’t want it to be me moaning about my life.

I've kept a backup of everything that was written there, I just wanted to move it from public view and as there doesn't appear to be a way to do that without deleting it I just decided to go the whole hog.