The problem with wanting something is it seems like it never comes.

So there I am in Minecraft admiring the just released update 1.5. Well, trying to. I’m looking for the weather effects naturally. After having a quick look at the new rail blocks, namely the detector and booster blocks, I waited for the rains. The lightning damn it. Snow? Anything? But no the sun shines all happy at me. So I roll a new world hoping in my twisted logic that a new world will make it rain more.

But no, it’s still sunny and happy.

I was promised rain, snow, thunder and lightening created zombie pigmen dammit. Well it looks like the weather events are quite rare indeed but fortunately there is an official video of it available already.

The main additions to update 1.5 are:

• Weather Effects such as rain, snow, thunder and lightening created zombie pigmen. Weather is quite rare. Thunderstorms are light level 7, enough to spawn monsters in the daytime. Rain will put out most fires but not lava. Snow will cover the ground and make ice blocks in the water. Rain goes through transparent objects.
• Shift-click lets you pull items to inventory or a chest without all that dragging and dropping. Might not seem like much but it adds up when you do it so often.
• Statistics – Not a bad array of statistics are available including such details as your deaths, kills, time played, distance moved via various means and item usage.
• Achievements – pretty basic so far, obviously more are added later. There are also plans to put the statistics online.

• Detector Rail – basically a stone plate activated on the rail which could be done by other means before but this is certainly nicer. They are a bit bugged. You must place this object before you place rails next to it.

• Booster Rail – A long awaited booster piece of ‘powered’ rail you can switch on or off via the usual redstone circuitry. This can replace the older, rather complex (and frankly silly looking) rail boosters. Fortunately the old boosters still work, for now at least.

• Climbing ladders with gaps is no longer possible
• The wood types have been fleshed out a bit more with new saplings for birch and spruce, for example. Hopefully this will lead to new wood developments.
• Wolves are now more common and they handle doors a bit better.
• There are also many minor changes such as the ability to change the GUI scale, Advanced Open GL option, faster movement of objects in water and placing redstone on snow.

A while ago the target date of the final version of minecraft (it’s currently beta) was also announced to be November the 11^th 2011. In other words, 11/11/11 like many other entertainment releases.

Minecraft update 1.4 is here. They wanted to get in achievements and statistics but although much of the code in in there, it’s not working well enough so will be pushed to another update. Along with the usual bugfixes and new improved bugs the main changes are:

• Tameable wolves. You tame the fairly rare, mostly peaceful wild wolves. You can have more than one. You tame them with bone but feed them raw pork.
• Sleeping in a bed resets your spawn point.
• Cookies.
• New rare sheep spawn colours pink and brown.
• New Minecraft logo. I preferred the old one.
• More common flowers, mushrooms and dungeons.
• Dungeon chests may contain cocoa beans. These are for the cookies and can also be used as brown dye.
• Slower movement in water and faster growing wheat which is no longer trampled by spiders.

Of most note however is an amusing new locked chest block which spawns randomly in new areas and emits light. When you interact with it a box pops up prompting you to buy a key to unlock it here.

On that note check out the Minecraft USB nether portal at ThinkGeek. The video is great.

Bit of work behind the scenes of this blog. All the basics are done, including settings and RSS feeds. Reworked the tags a bit still need to do a bit more. Decided to go with my old theme for now. I do have my eye open for other themes but haven’t committed to one or the other yet. There are some nice ones around. If I get desperate I can always modify my own.

Have been developing a series of articles, they should roll out soon.

Realised the previous review scoring system makes some of the games reviewed look worse than they are. I’ve decided on a reworked review system which I’ll have to re-edit the articles with. This has been given it’s own scoring page so everyone can easily understand what it all means.

Also worked a bit on a facebook page, realise I need an icon and other graphics. Nothing is truly cheap and cheap is about my budget right now so I’ve cracked open GIMP and drawn some icons like a blind chimpanzee.

Also reworked the about page. This should hopefully tone down the questions I get about what exactly ‘positive entertainment’ means.

There is a windows nuisance which seems to be getting nearer crisis point.

These are overheads, or if you like computer maintenance, which comprises of several wasteful mechanisms which sap you computer productivity, speed, responsiveness and your personal time.

What I’m talking about is everything on your system that isn’t core to your service. There’s always been this in effect in various ways. For example, boot up, shutdown, time to launch an application etc.

But now we have a whole new layer. It all started with antivirus updates and Windows update which were at least loosely useful. They became automated, mostly because the majority of computer users would never update unless it was automated.

But then everything else jumped on the bandwagon. MS Office updates. Silverlight! I didn’t even install Silverlight yet there it is pooped on my Windows system. Windows media updates, what a joke! Windows media has stunk for perhaps a decade now. And windows updates is excruciatingly slow.

And it isn’t just Microsoft, no. Quicken and Google and Abode and you name it have updates galore too. Even games do it. It’s not just updates, it’s the advertising, the known and unknown info passed back via the net, the forms and permissions and terms of agreement and read the privacy document first. How about discovering the hard way the program only runs in admin mode. ‘Error 412, Would you like Microsoft to try and find a solution to the problem?’ We all know how hard they try. It is indeed very trying. How about the User Account Control (UAC)? It ensures installing something takes much longer and locks up your system more than the installation process itself. And that’s not even including the never ending permission prompts.

Then there’s the need for antivirus, anti rootkit, anti trojan, link blockers and spam canners. Defragmentation which takes hours, cleanups for files and sloppy registry entries.

All in all there so much superfluous rubbish in Windows it’s no wonder Linux is so much faster. It’s not just the software it’s the focus on getting things done rather than making money from the masses.

Linux does have some of these issues too but on the whole it’s not near crisis and each problem is better managed. So what I want done gets done. On Windows the capacity to do what I want is hampered by amazing levels of inefficiency.

Insanityblog.com has been discontinued.  In it’s place I am blogging with my Real Name, as opposed to various pseudonyms.  Insanityblog.com still redirects to this blog, however.

Nothing much here at the moment.  I’ll expand it and try to come up with a nicer theme.  The WordPress themes changed yesterday so it’s hard to find something good on offer.  My old favourite theme ‘Quentin’ is long discontinued, unfortunately.