The Wonders of Optifine

What is Optifine?

Optifine is a mod for minecraft that is aimed at making the game more effiecent when it comes to the amount of CPU and GPU power that it takes to render the game. In other words, it makes your game run faster and look better. On it's forum page, it's said to generally almost double the FPS for anyone, for me it brought them from 20-30 up to 50-70, and it makes the game sooooooo much better. Whoever made this mod needs serious props, and I would recommend this to any one who has a older model computer that can't keep up or just wants to squeeze more FPS out of minecraft.

Installing

The mod is included in several mod packs, like technic but the mod can be installed solo with vanilla minecraft. Download the file from the forum page and follow the instructions (on here or the fourm).

• Open the archive with 7zip (or whatever)
• Open the minecraft.jar file in your %appdata%\.minecraft (I think haven't used windows in a while) 
• Copy the contents on the optifine.zip into the minecraft.jar file
• DELETE the folder named "META-INF" in the minecraft.jar file

Then just launch the game as normal and when you press F3 button in game there should be a optifine version number in the upper left hand corner.

Download 1.3.2 with optifine installed

Some people just don't like to do any work, it's a fact of life, for those people I have made a vanilla 1.3.2 minecraft+optifine file that you can download, copy, paste and run!

Have any problems? Tell me in the comments, I'll try to respond as fast as possible.

[How-To] Install Adobe AIR 2.6 Ubuntu 12.04

Adobe Air:

The Adobe® AIR® runtime enables developers to package the same code into native apps for iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, and other Android™ devices, reaching the mobile app stores for over 500 million devices. (From adobe website)

This is obviously not true as they stopped support for the product on Linux platforms back a 2.6 (3.2 latest currently)

Installing

Adobe AIR is no longer hosted on canonical servers for ubuntu, you now have to manually download it from adobe. After downloading it you'll want to make it exectuable and then run it.
chmod +x ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

If the installer gives you a error about not having GNOME-Keyring installed when you actually do then there are some extra steps involved;
 For 32-bit computers:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/

For 64-bit computers:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/



 Did this help you? Feel free to comment below!

 

Online Music Streaming Services

In this field I see that there are really 4 competitors,

1. Pandora
2. Spotify
3. Grooveshark
4. Last.fm 

There certiantly are more than that but the other notable ones are only by pay services and, well, I've never been one to pay for music, anyway anyhow. My personal favorite out of these is the Pandora service, I've been using it for quite a few years and has been quite good and the music never gets old for me. There are always new songs on the stations etc.

Pandora

My favorite, has a nice site, even though it still uses Adobe Flash (the horror!) for the music playing. Also has a free to use Android and iOS app which makes streaming away from the computer convient and easy. As far as desktop apps go Pandora has 'em beat when it comes to linux desktop clients. For linux there is Pithos, which supports most if not all of the main features of the website. In addition with pithos there are no ads! Like I usually say if you really do support what the company is doing than you should show them by buying their services.

Spotify

 Spotify, arrived in the US to much fanfare, but I like many others was disappointed by the requirement of having to have a facebook account to register with spotify. In addition to this facebook has now integrated what you play and what other people play so that everyone can see what you have been listening to. This is not so much a matter of that I don't want other people to know what kind of music I listen to but another unecessary and trival thing that will fill my facebook feed. The desktop client is as good as any, it like many other things these days is trying to become more "social". For mobile Spotify is on par with most of the other services; they offer the "radio" feature for non-premium users.

Grooveshark

With their recently reinstated mobile app grooveshark looks like most of the other players listed here. Like others here the website version of this service uses Adobe's Flash player. But there is a html5 beta version that you can try. It's basically just the mobile version of the site. There is a desktop version, I have never used I personally so I can't talk.

Last.fm

  Last.fm definetly focuses more on the radio and the exploring new artist than just the listening to what you want. Last.fm is also about the live shows; it will try and sell you tickets to a concert of a band that you are listening to if you are in the area. This can be a good or a bad thing, it depends on who you are.

Ubuntu on USB Drive

There are many reasons that you might want to put a distro, like Ubuntu, onto a portable medium like a flash drive that will allow you to run it even on computers that have no or a non functional CD-ROM drive. There are many different ways to do so, many covered when you download one of the images from ubuntu.com.

Windows

On windows there are a few options for making a bootable USB flash drive, here are the ones that I personally prefer. When on windows I always opt for the graphical way of doing things. The way that is recommended by Ubuntu is to use USB Installer from pendrivelinux.com. There are a multitude of other options to try if this does not work.

 

Linux

On Linux my preferred way to make a bootable USB drive is to use the terminal command dd. dd is a program that should be installed on most if not all of the standard packages for modern Linux distributions. To use it you will need to know 2 things, the name of the ISO file that you are trying to burn and the exact location of the USB drive in your computer. By this I mean the name given to it in /dev/. As a short explanation: everything on in the Linux system is seen as a file, all of the physical devices are represented by files in the /dev directory in your file system. Usually flash drives are something like sdX where the X could be any alpha character. To determine this location I use the program gparted which will list all of the drives that are currently plugged in to the computer. The command to write the ISO to the USB is as follows: dd if=/home/sam/Downloads/<name of ISO file> of=/dev/sdX. On many distributions, like Ubuntu it will be necessary to use sudo when executing this command because of the safety  restrictions installed on the system.

Best Web Browser

There are really 5 different browsers that are potential compeititors to be the best browser there is Opera, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and last (also least) Internet Explorer by Microsoft. There are other notable browsers, like GNOME's newly rebranded "Web". The minor players on the browser scene aren't covered here.

 

Opera

Opera is a hipster browser if I've ever seen one, it's been around for longer than any of the other browser and when it was originally launched you had to actually pay to get a copy of the browser. Opera has some of the coolest built-in features, like a built-in torrent manager/downloader, a chat client that supports IRC and other popular chat protocols. Opera is also well known for it's email client that works nice and looks even better.

Google Chrome (also Chromium)

Google Chrome is by far the best out of all the browsers that I have ever used. But recently it has been maxing out in the CPU usage area, to the point where it is impossible to get anything else done with it running. I have tried to fix the problem but nothing seems to help, I think that it is just that my current computer is too old for the new features that Google is putting into Chrome. Chrome is as of right now the only browser that is using Google's new Pepper Flash which is on the way to replace Adobe Flash for platforms, like Linux, on which the Flash brand has been discontinued.

 

Safari

I have personally never used safari for that long because they do not have a Linux client, but it seems to work well enough for most people so there is nothing bad I can say about this one. That said it is from Apple...

 

Firefox

I like firefox, and I would rate it as 2nd only when compared to Google Chrome, but Google Chrome on a relatively new computer. Firefox is a really great browser, with the most add-ons of any of the other browsers, the add-ons also have a wide range of API's which gives the developer more access to change and improve on the features of the browser.

 

Internet Explorer

Internet explorer is obviously limited for a lot of reasons. It's reputation has never really recovered from the security disaster that was IE 6, being the butt of every browser joke has not helped it's reputation. Another thing that doesn't help is that the browser is only for the Windows platform, especially with Google Chrome being available on almost every platform imaginable.

How to start a Minecraft Server

One of the best parts about minecraft, besides the mods, is the multiplayer aspect. Nothing cooler than being able to share all of your creations with your friends online. To do this you first need to be able to set up a server. The server can be setup on anything from a VPS (virutal private server) to a old desktop computer that you happened to have laying around the house.

Different Types of Servers

Craftbukkit

Craftbukkit is my personal favourite  when it comes to the different types of servers, the mod server are of course fun but after a while they just get boring. Craftbukkit is basically a vanilla server (which means that there are no mods installed on the client) with lots of plugins that enhance the functionality of the server.

Vanilla

My personal opinion of a vanilla server is that if you are going to go vanilla with out mods you might as well make it easier to admin (and harder to grief) with craftbukkit. But anyway, you can download the standard minecraft server straight from minecraft.net. For the purposes of this article I would recommend downloading the jar file opposed to the windows .exe.

Mod Servers (tekkit)

There aren't that many mod servers of note, many are customized to the preferneces of the people who are hosting them. But the one that is most used (in my experience) is the tekkit server. Tekkit is a mod pack with many fun mods.

How to setup the Server

I would recommend installing a linux server distrobution to run the server on but thats your own choice.
Starting the server is easy; java -jar minecraft_server.jar will start the server. Once the server has finished creating all of the files you can then stop it by typing "stop" in the server command line. In the folder that the jar is located in there should now be some files that were created by the server. The one that you want is "server.properties" in that file you can configure the different options, like offline mode, firespreading, and mob spawns. 

How to start a server with a seed

In the directory with the minecraft server file you will want to create a "server.properties" file in that file put the line "seed=<yourseednumberhere>
" If you want to use a word as a seed what you would have to do is to put "" around the text. (I think I'm not really sure about that in all honesty)

Minecraft for Nothing

 Searching "how to get minecraft free" will turn up nothing but spam and scams to try and get you to fill out a survey. Sure maybe there is one or two out there that actually do what they say that they do but I doubt it. But there is one way that you can use that will get you what you need to play minecraft, both on "offline servers" and on Single Player mode.

Vanilla

That is Mineshafter. Mineshafter, is basically a proxy application for the minecraft.jar file that convinces it that you have logged into the minecraft servers successfully. It will download all of the files that you need. As they say on the mineshafter website, if you really do enjoy playing the game then you ought to support it and what better way to do that than to buy the game straight from Mojang.

Mods

But wait, what if you want to play one of the many different mods that are out there? Well some one fixed that problem too. Welcome to Mineshafter Squared the way it works is the same it allows you to login through their servers and not mojangs. With mineshaftersquared you can download the 2 of the most popular minecraft mod launchers, Spout and Technic

Again this will NOT allow you on to the majority of the servers that are out there, there are some servers, like BitLegend that run in the offline mode and allow you to login without a account but there are not many.