For anyone that missed Time Crash, or wants to see it again, those nice people at the BBC have now put it on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I76p1cZbq4

That was brilliant. Another storming script from Stephen Moffat and great performances all round.

Doctor #5 played off of #10 brilliantly, and I’d never actually really clocked how much Tennant’s Doctor had actually borrowed from Davison’s before it was pointed out (well, the glasses thing I’d noticed, but that was it).

Some great lines of dialogue, and just great fun. Brilliant.

For those that missed it, or want to see it again, you can catch it on the BBC Website here. Check out the episode of Confidential as well. Its great to see how much the production team loved having Peter back.

Well, last night’s triple-boot experiment went a lot better than I thought it would.

Despite some initial hassles when installing SuSE (the installer got confused by my multiple optical drives), it installed easily.

Its certainly a slick-looking OS. The last time I tried to install SuSE (probably 7 or so years ago), it didn’t like the NVidia card I was using and refused to do anything. So this was a big improvement. The boot loader is very swish and the setup menus clear (Ubuntu’s partition manager I thought was clearer when setting up partitions though).

So, some initial thoughts:

I’m using KDE (to get the maximum difference between SuSE and Ubuntu) and I still prefer Gnome. But OpenSuSE did give me the choice in what I wanted as my default desktop. I liked that.

My sound worked straight off (despite showing as muted in the taskbar), so that’s a plus over my last few Ubuntu installs.

However, OpenSuSE by default didn’t mount my windows partition (or my other Linux partition), unlike Ubuntu. A minor thing to fix, but still another tick in Ubuntu’s direction.

The bootloader coped perfectly with the triple-boot setup though. It correctly included Windows and identified Ubuntu as options. Although the Ubuntu entry infact just takes you to Ubuntu’s Grub menu. Something I’ll tweak to include a top-level option for booting Ubuntu.

So far, I like it. Yast seems easy to use, and my network and internet connection was sorted in no time.

The lack of things like a LiveCD mode, or mounting other partitions automatically means that I’d probably still say that Ubuntu should be the distro of choice for newcomers, but so far I like this a lot.

Well, the spoilers are all over the web now for Countdown #24 and it seems the Countdown itself has now finally kicked into gear. I’m due to nab the issue tonight, but Prime’s rampage through Earth-15 sounds fairly brutal, and also gives me pause for thought.

Earth-15 was one of the (many) interesting new Earths that we’d met via Countdown. The idea of a utopian Earth out there was an interesting one, that would’ve made for more interesting stories.

The fact that its now gone, with the heavy implication that more of the 52 (51 now I guess) are going to bite it by Superman Prime’s hands makes me think more and more that the multiverse as it currently stands, isn’t going to be around by the time Final Crisis wraps up. Of course, that doesn’t mean that some kind of multiverse won’t be around. It would seem strange to reintroduce the idea to the DCU just to revert back to the single universe again, and the “52″ multiverse as we’re seeing in Countdown is an interesting place.

Again though, I think the fact we’ve not seen much of the new Earth-2 will be key to this. It was specifically hinted to be different to the other revived Earths during Infinite Crisis, and it currently is the only Earth we’ve seen that directly ties into events from the main DCU (the missing Kryptonians).

Of course, this also means that in my eyes, Superman Prime is now completely irredeemable. He’s now gone from “messed up kid”, to planet-slaughtering adult. While the chances of him being redeemed were slim before, I reckon the only way out for him now is the noble self-sacrifice route (or imprisoned again until the next Crisis).

It’ll definitely be interesting to see where this all takes us. Its good to see Countdown’s finished its meandering and kicking off. I think I’m definitely starting to get excited for Final Crisis.

This was the view from my office last night. Really nice dramatic sky.

So, over the last month or so I’ve been taken with various other Linux distributions. Now, I’m perfectly happy with my main Ubuntu setup, but knowing that the 20Gb partition I set aside for it had a lot of unused space, I came upon the idea of resizing it down, freeing up a couple of Gb, and using the spare space as a testbed, to install any distros that took my fancy, and check them out.

Tonight’s the first attempt, using OpenSuSE 10.3 which came with this month’s Linux Format.

Wish me luck.

So, with my front headlight bulb failing, and Halfords refusing to replace it, I finally decided to just book the car into a garage and get the driver’s side electric window fixed at the same time.

However, it turned nasty when the garage informed me that the window needed a new regulator, which would need to be an official part and would cost £220 (apparently for other cars, they maybe cost about £80).

*sigh* I really hope my car is better behaved next year breakdown-wise.  This year’s been really nasty for repair bills.

I was chosen to be best man at a wedding over the weekend, but the bride and groom decided that they wanted to steer away from the more traditional best man gift. As a result, I’m now the (very) proud owner of a Master Replicas ForceFX Lightsaber.

I’m amazingly impressed by it. I’ve seen them in shops before, but it doesn’t compare to actually getting to try one out. The metal construction is fantastic (especially when you’re used to the cheaper plastic toys), the blade gives off a fair amount of light (as you can see), and the sounds are clear and crisp.

While they’re more expensive than the plastic versions, they have been dropping in price over the last year, and I can’t recommend them enough to anyone that’s ever thought of nabbing one. Well worth it.

Remember all the fuss when DC ruined Kyle’s fate in the Sinestro Corps War by having him turn up in Countdown?

Remember everyone being really hacked off at DC for ruining part of the most successful event of the year?

Lets just say, anyone that’s not already seen the Countdown #24 preview might want to avoid it.

Honestly, do DC care at all about spoilers these days?

I’ve been barely gaming at all over the last couple of months. With being a bit burned out by work, most nights on the PC have been spent either updating missing album artwork in iTunes, reading Wikipedia articles and forum posts, or seeing what’s on Youtube.

However, this weekend I finally managed to get in some gaming. Inspired by a recent article in the Metro, I downloaded and played the demo for Hellgate London. I was pretty impressed, so nicked out to the local Woolies and nabbed a copy of the full game. Its really well made, and good fun, combining RPG elements with a more action-focused gameplay. The setting is interesting, and its refreshing having something set in London rather than somewhere in America. Great fun.

Being an RPG junkie as well, I decided to reinstall Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. I’d been playing it on my old PC, but fell out of it when I changed over to my new one. Not having played in a good while, rather than start straight off from my previous save, I thought I’d play through it a bit from the beginning to get back into the swing of it.

Its a really well-made RPG, with great characters and an interesting storyline. I also found it more engrossing than some RPGs out there which lean towards hack-and-slash. Granted, there’s quite a bit of action, but its always centred around a well-formed plot. I love things in RPGs like having my own house (such as the flat in this game, home ownership in Oblivion or the Ebon Hawk in Knights of the Old Republic) which just add another layer to my involvement in the game world.

I don’t remember this game making a huge splash when it hit, but its definitely worth a look for anyone who likes a good RPG.