Things that save my sanity while on business in Lichfield - part 1: Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe

2009-10-11T13:58:00.002+01:00

On Friday I was sent to Lichfield, just outside Birmingham, to support the role out of a new in-house software package developed specifically for this business that has recently been acquired. I will be here until the Thursday.

Lichfield! Lichfield with no transport and flaky hotel wireless. For a week! With just a laptop for any techy, gaming needs. On arriving at Lichfield Trent Valley station just before mid day, I realised I had zero phone reception. I couldn't even call my lift. I actually had to find a pay phone for the first time in at least a decade.

I spent a good ten hours in the office that day, meeting people, solving issues (and the non issues of panicky managers) and settling in.

When I eventually got back to the Cathedral Lodge Hotel (how not to design a website), I checked in and headed up to the top (2nd) floor to check out my room. One of the two ceiling lights doesn't work and the toilet is obstructed by a towel rail (forcing some rather angular number twos). With half the room in semi-darkness, I plugged my laptop in behind the complimentary water and three bourbons (seriously) and connected to the wireless. And was promptly disconnected. I eventually managed to get a better signal by opening the window and moving as far to the East of my room as the one bourbon hosting power socket would allow. The room was freezing but the signal would only completely drop off every ten minutes or so from this point and I had a decent jacket. Score! This was the highlight of my day and it was way past bedtime.

Saturday, and up to this point on Sunday, has been spent mostly waiting around in the office (with no ETA) for a certain piece of functionality and then testing the production environment. This goes on until it is done, which is late evening at the earliest.

So amongst long hours at an industrial park, flaky wireless and freezing cold semi-darkness (and pinching off some angular number twos) I have managed to fit in some gaming.

I am so chuffed I got into Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe just before I came on this trip. I may not be able to take advantage of the multiplayer features due to the crappy wireless but this is one addictive, fairly deep empire building game and I am kind of embarrassed, as a gamer, that I never bothered looking into it before. It is of course graphically dated and the learning curve is pretty steep. There is no tutorial and it's not at all obvious what you are meant to be doing. With the help of the getting started guide in the OTTD Wiki, I was away though and building rail networks all over the place. The first time I started successfully making money in the game and fully paid back my loan (currently a real life objective also) was a great moment.

My games look a lot messier than this!

The inclusion of AI controlled opponents, height maps and other addons in the form of plugins, easily managed by the in game Online Content Manager adds a tonne of customization and flexibility to the game. I can tell I will be playing a lot of this game even when I'm back at my gaming rig and no longer have to use my slow old laptop.

A few other things have helped sway the boredom but I'll get to them later as it's lunch and my KFC is about to arrive (one of those things might be fast food).

How to start torrents on your home Computer remotely using Dropbox

2009-10-04T22:26:00.002+01:00

Hi all,

This is my first post and i thought I'd share a remote torrenting tip with you all. I've been sitting on this for some time and I'm probably not the first person to think of doing this but I was pretty chuffed with it so here goes...

In order to start downloading torrents on your PC/Mac from any computer connected to the web, you will need the following:

A free Dropbox account.

Dropbox installed on you target computer.

A BitTorrent client such as utorrent (used for this tutorial) installed and configured the way you like on your target computer.

Once you have all of the above, open your Dropbox folder and create a new subfolder. I called mine 'Torrents' but you can call it what you like.

Now open your BitTorrent client and select options>preferences. From the list on the left, select 'Directories'. Tick both the 'Automatically load .torrents from:' and 'Delete loaded .torrents' boxes. Now point this part of the configuration to the dropbox subfolder you created earlier.

And that's it. The setup is complete.

Now so long as you have your home computer running both the BitTorrent client and Dropbox, you can drop a torrent file in the subfolder either by using dropbox on another computer or upload it to the folder using the web interface on the dropbox website, and your home computer will grab the file and start processing it. As an added bonus, you can tell when it has worked by checking that the file has been deleted again from you dropbox folder.

edit: not the first person to come up with this - lifehacker

MajorTomG's Blog

Things that save my sanity while on business in Lichfield - part 1: Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe

How to start torrents on your home Computer remotely using Dropbox