Battlefield 2 Demo Tweaks

For those of you dealing with the wait for the June 22nd release of Battlefield 2 by spending untold hours with the recently released demo, you might want to take a look at this BF2 Demo Tweak Guide to help your system’s performance.

And for owners of Geforce 4 cards, which the demo officially does not support, you might be interested in this forum discussion on some successful techniques employed to get the game running on those video cards.

Brownout Blues

It’s not uncommon for our part of Painesville, Ohio to get a blackout or two as the hot, muggy weather becomes more common in Northeast Ohio and everyone turns on their air conditioners. Last Friday, however, we had a brownout, which resulted in everything that was left plugged in suffering from a severe under-voltage for several hours.

While my computers were protected by an Uninterruptable Power Supply, or UPS, with under-voltage protection that was programmed to shut them down after five minutes, I had forgotten to plug my 19″ Viewsonic A91F+ into a protected socket. After full power was restored several hours later, I discovered that the monitor would no longer power on.

I replaced the Viewsonic on Saturday with a Samsung SyncMaster 997DF 19″ flat-screen CRT monitor. At $179.99 from Best Buy, it really wasn’t a bad deal, performing on par with the $249 Viewsonic.

Still, I’d highly recommend everyone consider looking into a UPS for home use. Surge protectors really don’t offer all that much protection outside of a particular type of over-voltage and do nothing to protect your electronics from temporary power sags and under-voltage.

Doctor Who Dalek Kidnapped

Dalek Ransom NoteThe BBC has a news story online about a prankster group calling itself the “Guardians of the Planet Earth”, which has managed to steal a Dalek prop on display in a Somerset, England tourist attraction called the Wookey Hole Caves.

The Dalek comes from the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who, which explains why the ransom note demands further instructions from the show’s main character, the Doctor.

Along with the ransom note, the Dalek’s “plunger arm”, referred to in the letter as it’s “destructive mechanism”, was left at the scene of the theft.

Colin Baker, who played the 6th Doctor from 1984 to 1986, is currently in contact with the attraction’s officials and may be used to send a message to the so-called kidnappers.