BrainBeat Productions Multimedia blog

Hello everyone I am please to announce that my new website is finished and is now up and running (after a few teething problems transferring the final version from my desktop to the web server). I have decided to move away from the hard coded style website to a cms which should give me less excuses for not updating it as I can update it any ware. The cms I decided to use is Joomla which is a free open source project. I used it to make over the website for Crane Glass and found it very usable and flexible with lots of extra modules and plugins available.

There may still be a few bug to work out but I hope to have the worked out in the next day or so.

Hi everyone It has been a long time since i have posted anything onto my blog. I hope everyone has have a safe and enjoyable time. Anyway I am writing this post to inform you of the reason why my website has been down on and off for the last few days. A bit over a month ago I upgraded my desktop PC to and Athlon x2 4800+ with 2 gig ram new motherboard and a geforece 8600gt, from an athlon xp 2800+ with 1 gig ram and geforece 590tx. I decided over the weekend as it was a public holiday to upgrade the web server with the bits from my computer  and added a new 500gig hard drive this should allow more flexibility with what i host on the website. I am working on a redesign of the website also and I hope to have it up by the end of the week.

I would like to announce that i have set up a gallery page to replace the one i have off this blog and the portfolio page in the main website. I have as yet posted only a few images to test it out but more will come in the near future as well i may put some other media in it too if i can get it to work. I have also as yet not created a theme yet for the gallery as i have and still am setting up everything but i will have one the suits the rest of my website in the next week.I have chosen to use the project called Gallery for the gallery site as it looks like a well maintained and featured web gallery architecture. I will be posting a full review of Gallery 2 in the next few days once i have fully explored all the features and plug-ins available.
My new gallery page can be viewed by following this link. Please take a look and tell me what you think.

A week ago there was a total lunar eclipse and i took some photos of the event and have now finally posted them in my photo gallery on my website. The photos of the eclipse were taken over about a 20 minute stretch as the eclipes reached its peak. I also posted a few photos i took of the moon about a month ago showing a moonbow which is like a rainbow but with moonlight.

It took me longer to post these that i had hoped as word press seems to not fully support tables so i have spent a day or to trying to arrange the thumbnails. I hope you like them. I am going to at a later date post some other photos which I think might be interesting. I will try and work out a better way of displaying in the future.

The last few weeks have been very big For BBG (my main character a level 70 gnome warrior). First off I have been able to successfully save up enough gold to learned my epic flying riding skill (300 riding) this is a real achievement as there are still a majority of 70 level players with only the basic flying riding skill. The 5000 gold cost of the skill is not cheap either and took a lot of hard work farming. To get the money was not as difficult as it once was as there are many daily quests which you can do daily which most giving a level 70 11gold 99 silver up to a total of 10 a day. This means that you could earn 120 gold a day from quests and while completing these quests you will no doubt pick a heap of “grays”up some cloth a few “greens” and the occasional “blue” or epic item which you could sell on the auction house or to vendors for many gold. By completing all these quests you also gain reputation with the faction who gives the quest who at certain reputation levels offer items for you to buy.

That leads me to my next achievement where i have now achieved the reputation level of exalted with all three daily quest factions (The Sha’tari Skyguard, Ogri’la and Netherwing). From the Shatari Skyguard i bought Skyguard Silver Cross
, Red Riding Nether Ray. From Ogri’la I bought Vortex Walking Boots, Crystalline Crossbow. Finally i got Captain’s Badge, Reins of the Azure Netherwing Drake. I think i prefer the look of the Nether drake over the Nether ray but the ray was still usefull untill i was able to get the reputation to get the drake. I have also found it a little less easy to fly the ray as it while on the ground still is floating wheres all other flying mounts have feet where you can easily see then it is on the ground or not.

My guild has for the first time killed Both Prince Malchezaar and Netherspite in the instance Karazhan and are now ranked 41st according to the wesite wow jitsu on our realm Khaz’goroth. I was present for the Prince Malchezaar fight and got my first DPS (damage per second) piece Farstrider Wildercloak from karazhan. As i am a DPS warrior there is verry little for me to get in the way of loot in Karazhan as there is no DPS plate only tanking and paladin gear, there is however 2 tier 4 tokens that drop which i can turn in for DPS plate but as yet i have not been lucky enough for the warrior one to drop while i have been in there. Also i have not gotten any tanking pieces yet as i am not allowed to roll on them until the tanks have it and on this i have also been unlucky that no pieces have dropped.

The final point i wanted to say was i have tweaked my build to provide me with a bit more DPS and am now closer to a more traditional Arms Fury build. I decided to remove the last 5 points i had in protection which was giving me 20 extra defense and put it into fury where i now have points down to flurry. I have noticed that i tend to constantly have flurry on as i am criting a majority of the time and so i have seen a small DPS increase especially in arenas where in a few matches i basically took out the whole opposition, I have as yet not done any instances or raids to see how well it goes especially while tanking. Click here to take a look at my character and build.

Hi all. I know i have not been updating my blog for a while but I am hoping to get back in to doing more regular updates from now on. I have Found that i have have had lack of motivation to keep writing as i have not gotten many legitimate comments to posts i have written. I have also not had a huge amount of time recently as we have had some work done on the house and to do it we have had to pack up and unpack the house.

In the coming weeks i will be posting a guide to how to set up a Linux media server, as well as restart my series looking at different Open source projects. I am always welcome to suggestions and if you ever read any of my posts please feel free to write a comment.

To all my readers and visitors i have once again had major internet problems. The problem this time was something totally out of my control which i found out from hanging on the end of a phone for over a half an hour was that for some unknown reason my port had been switched off at the ISP which was making it impossible to sync with the DSLAM. The connection has now been up for 5mins and so it appears that the problem had been fixed.

While waiting for the beta in Crackdown there was an update released and 2 expansion packs. One a free pack called ‘free play’ which gives you the ‘keys to the city’ allows you to play in GOD mode , upgrade your abilities, and other things. It ultimately is a cheat environment that a allows you to play the game the way you like. You are however are not able to to save your progress or get any achievements while in ‘keys to the city ‘ mode.

The other pack is a content pack which has new weapons, vehicles and missions which have extra achievements attached to them and costs 800 Microsoft points. These expansions are a welcome to the game and i look forward to exploring them in the near future.

Hi all it has been a long time since i have written a proper post on my blog but i am aiming to get back into the full swing of things again. My fist post is about the pending release of the greatly anticipated release of the Halo 3 Beta on the Xbox 360. I have been an average Halo fan of the past 2 iteration and now am egerly awaiting the release of the third version. I like a majority of people who will be participating in the beta testing have gained our entry into the beta by purchasing a copy of the Xbox 360 title Crackdown. From what i have read the people who won their entry via the via the competitions may already have their beta copies (but this may be totally false as i did not win my place and it may have been just a media contingent who saw/ received theirs on Friday). At the time of writing this it is just over a half an hour until midnight on the east coast of the US which i am hoping is when it will be made available to down load if not then i will keep checking throughout the day and night here until i can get it. I will post an initial post of my first impressions soon after i get it. I will also be writing a review for each map of how they play one each day and i will cronicle any other changes that are made throughout the beta.

UPDATE

I after waiting for the last few hours for the beta to be posted on Xbox Live i thought i would do a little bit of research to see if there was a reason why i could not see it yet. I eventually we to http://www.bungie.net/ where i found that they had a counter that at the time of writing was standing at 5 hours until it is released. I also found that Rooster teeth Productions have released a special red versus Blue free video on Xbox live which has been made in the Halo 3 beta and sows off a few new features that will be in the final game.

UPDATE 2

It is now about 3 hours after the beta was released to the world well sort of. All who won their place into the beta are able to download and play the beta fine but all who are trying to download it through Cracktown are as yet unable to do so. The official word from Bungie is “Folks are reporting problems downloading the Halo 3 Beta via Crackdown this morning. We have alerted the appropriate Live authorities and they are taking care of the problem as we speak. More news as it comes in.” that was posted 20 mins after the official release time and as yet there has not been any update on the situation. I have been reading the forum thread on bungie.net which at the time of writing was up to 62 pages long full of other poeple with Cracktown who also can’t download the beta. I think i will keep trying for the next hour and if i can’t get it going the i will go to bed and try again when i get up.

FINAL UPDATE

After waiting for over 12 hours an update had finally been released to Crackdown to fix the problem that was making it impossible to download the beta. From reading some posts in the bungie.net forums some people were suggesting the the reason why it would not work was the one of the previous updates to Crackdown had a bug in it that made downloading the beta impossible. As i am downloading my copy now we will see how quickly it comes down and if Xbox live can cope with so many people downloading at once.

I would like to to wish every one a safe and happy Easter weekend and hope that you have a relaxing time and not getting sick from eating too much chocolate.