Mass Effect 1 Crashing on Vista

If you’re like me and got excited after finally reading up on the Mass Effect Universe, you’ll likely have bought it cheap on Steam

I had a problem initially where it would crash on startup. I googled around a lot, and found not much. I tried:

  • Verified the Game Cache Files
  • Turned on Windows XP compatibility mode for any .exe I could find
  • Tried all the different settings I could find while running MassEffectConfig.exe

I’m sure I tried a few other things, but none of it worked. As soon as I would run the game from Steam, the MassEffectLauncher.exe or MassEffect.exe it would crash straight away.

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BBQ Gamer Grub Review

May I present… Gamer grub. I wasn’t sure what to expect when buying a packet from MilSims.. and I’m glad I didn’t set my expectations too high!

From the back of the pack:

15 browser tabs, 11 apps, voice chat and two games running. We couldn’t find a snack that could keep up… so, we made our own. Gamer Grub (R) is a delicious performance snack packed with essential vitamins and neurotransmitters to keep you focused and quick. Just ‘Tear N Tilt’ into a pack of Gamer Grub (R) to multi-task and game… no greasy fingers.

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It’s on now!

So.. I’ve always said that I would buy myself  a banjo, and someone called me on that today. Ten minutes later, I’ve found a low-bid auction on eBay and now I’m counting down the days 🙂

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127 Hours

So, I finally got to see the movie 127 Hours. I’ve been meaning to watch it for a while, but movie-time at home’s been scarce and convincing RMB to watch it with me even harder. After finishing the first season of Revenge - hopefully there will be a second - we were completely out of things to watch, so I just hit go on the first thing in the “Incoming” list.

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Minecraft 64-bit on OSX Snow Leopard

So, 1.2’s a little slower for some reason and I wanted some speed. I did a little googling around and found a few ways to enable x86_64 capabilities with the OSX Minecraft client.

Minecraft’s JavaApplicationStub needs to be replaced, so back it up then link the new one in by running the following commands from [Terminal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(Mac_OS_X):

cp /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub.orig
ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/`

Add 64-bit to the application’s capabilities by running the following command:

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FTP to localhost and iptables firewall

I had an issue recently where I needed to allow FTP access to a server, as WordPress is a lot happier if you can allow it to (S)FTP to the account to do things. I didn’t want to allow it to clients outside the server, so I had to muck around with the iptables-based firewall I have. To work out what rules I had setup on startup, I checked out the script I have setup on startup on my linux host.

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Adding a new node to Puppet

A quick way to add a new node to a Puppet-managed system is as follows… (I run Ubuntu, but this should work on most systems)

On the new node, run this:

sudo puppetd --test --waitforcert 5

On the puppet server, run this (in a separate window, without closing the previous command):

sudo puppetca --list

It should show the hostname of the new node you’re trying to add, if you find it run the following:

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Enabling markdown syntax for .md files in MacVim

Find where you installed it, in my case it was as below because I installed it with Homebrew:

/usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.3-64/MacVim.app

Edit this file:

/Contents/Resources/vim/runtime/filetype.vim

Remove “.md” from the lines below:

Modula 2
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.m2,*.DEF,*.MOD,*.md,*.mi setf modula2

Search for the following:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.markdown,*.mdown,*.mkd,*.mkdn,README.md setf markdown

Add the below near the end of line, directly after “README.md”

*.md

Restart MacVim and you’ll be good to go.

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