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If you want fansubs for Vandread 1st (it's anime) you can find them on divxsubtitles.net, except for episodes 7, 12, and 13 which are corrupt. Attached you will find SMI files in zip archives and as gzipped files for those episodes.

One of the most excellent elements of the game Freespace 2 Open (or of course the original, Volition's Freespace 2) is the capacity for modifications. It is possible to develop an entire campaign of missions which string together into a story, to modify or create ships and weapons, to script FS2 in Lua, and to do any number of other fairly amazing things with it. But by far the most common is to create new missions. In this article I'll give a brief explanation of some details of modding that I learned developing my first non-simple mission.

Freespace 2 is one of the finest space combat flight "simulators" that has ever been made, and Freespace 2 Open, a product of The Freespace 2 Source Code Project (SCP) is a truly excellent free, Open Source version which you can play on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X. But what happens when you have played it? There's multiplayer support, so there is theoretically infinite replay value, but there may come a time when you can't or don't want to play versus other humans, and have already exhausted the campaign. What to do?

MediaVPs (or Media VPs, or MVPs, etc etc) are VP modules for Freespace 2 Open (a product of The Freespace 2 Source Code Project) which alter, improve, or even repair certain aspects of the game. They come in various pieces which can be downloaded and installed incrementally and individually, and they are (like the rest of the game) absolutely free. They represent an attempt to bring Freespace 2 into the "modern age". On this page I will provide example screenshots for comparison of what the game looks like with various portions of the MediaVPs, with default options or with some options specified, et cetera.

If you play Freespace 2 Open with the Freespace 1 Port, and you have version 3.0.3 and want to convert to 3.0.4, you are supposed to run a batch file to run bspatch and make the new VP file. You can do this on Linux if you have Wine (I imagine more or less any version would work, but I don't know) installed, with the following shell script.

It is considered axiomatic among gamers that a game that's good when it's new is always good - if it doesn't have staying power, it just wasn't that amazing in the first place. There's a few games that, years after their release, we're still playing - games like Tetris, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the original Quake, or for that matter Asteroids. Each genre has at least one game that fits this description. In the space flight simulator category there are really three games which stand out significantly: Tie Fighter, which was really the first truly-3D spaceflight sim with believable capital ships; Wing Commander, various versions of which (especially Privateer) are still being played avidly; and Descent: Freespace along with Freespace 2, two titles from Volition that years later are still the benchmark for such games. The list would also not be complete without Elite, which is arguably the game that really defined the genre to begin with.

I have a Compaq nw9440 "Mobile Workstation" class system, P/N (or type or something) EZ901#AA. There are a number of different systems called the nw9440 which come in the same case, which are slightly different. I won't go into it here; this isn't an ad for HP. In fact, this laptop has presented (in my opinion) more than its fair share of obstacles in my pursuit of Linux. ACPI is slightly wonky, the modem is from Conexant, and video, of all things, has been a major PITA. This is highly unfortunate because this laptop has quite excellent graphics, in fact carrying the best of breed for its date of release - the NVIDIA Quadro FX1500. In particular, I am able to use the display panel only at its maximum resolution.

I bought both Freespace and Freespace 2 not long after they came out, and recently while looking for games to play on Linux I decided to try to run FS2 under Wine. This didn't work, but then someplace in the back of my mind I dimly remembered that Volition had long ago open-sourced Freespace 2. Back then, I didn't have a Linux system worth playing games on, and I was dual-booting Windows anyway, so it didn't matter. But today, I run only Linux (aside from virtual machines - which aside from VMware Workstation, don't support 3d graphics yet) and so the Linux port had become relevant.

If you want to use the mapping functionality of ntop to give you [typically incorrect but better than nothing] geolocation maps on host-information pages (for IP hosts) then you need to install the mapper.pl script on a webhost someplace. Each lookup seems to take around 30-40kB but that's just a guess. I suppose I could use ntop to find out... Regardless, this is how I got mapper.pl to work.

Having fought with Crystal Reports Server XI for a while now, I've installed it no less than four times. One of those times it inexplicably failed to work. I then unpacked the very same virtual machine and installed it into the same VM on which it failed to work at all after installation, and it worked. So before I even get into this article my first tip is "if it appears that it should work after your install, and it doesn't, wipe the system and try again."