Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

Experimenting with video game capture, and here’s my capturing of the pre-game movie. This is referred to by Square Enix as the “Prologue” video. For those (like me) who joined the game late, this short movie connects the first version of the game (Final Fantasy XIV) with the second version of the game (Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn). The end of the first game showed the first part of this movie (up until where the heroes get teleported), and it cliff-hanged there. With the release of the new version, they released this updated version of the movie, which added the ending to the movie.

Tethering and Routing

As you may recall from an earlier post, I discovered my broadband connection at home was horrendously slow compared to my 4G/LTE connection on my phone. Now, I regularly tether my laptop to my phone and enjoy download speeds in excess of 1.2Mbps, compared to 300-400kbps over my home broadband. However, if you try to turn the phone into a WiFi hotspot, then my MNO (Three) doesn’t like it and asks me to pay £5 for a 2GB allowance. However, there doesn’t appear to be a restriction on physical tethering (and I’ve downloaded more than 2GB).

So, the question is, is it possible to tether my phone to my laptop and share that connection to other machines on the network? I suspect so, but it will involve me tinkering with my internet settings, and disabling settings in my broadband router, so it behaves more like a hub than a router.

My thoughts are (and this is subject to my tinkering):

  1. Configure my broadband router to not issue IP addresses — not necessary if you have static IPs on your network.
  2. Configure my laptop (which has the phone tethered) with a DHCP server so that it does issue IP addresses. Again not necessary if you have static IP addresses everywhere.
  3. If you have static IP addresses everwhere, change the default gateway to be the IP address to be the machine with the tethered phone (laptop in my case)
  4. Configure my laptop to route out packets via the gateway — notably, to switch on IP forwarding. From brief researching, this might require kernel recompiling, or at the least, module inserting via insmod or modprobe
  5. Make adjustments to the firewall (ipchains) to allow IP masquerading/NATting, preferably utilising security lock down, so not anyone can access the net via my phone.

If I can tear myself away from my newly found Final Fantasy XIV questing, I may try messing with my settings and see if I can get this to work.

Christmas Run

So, it’s Christmas Day, and rather than lie in, I let my alarm go off this morning, got up, and did an early morning run. Not a long distance, mind you, since it was only 6 deg C, but a nice, quiet run. No cars on the road, just me, my music, and the pavement in front of me.

GTA fan dialled 999 to report death of video game character

I might be a gamer myself, but I might get pissed off when my character dies, but calling the police just because your game character died? That’s a sad state of affairs.

David Grady: How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings | Talk Video | TED.com

David Grady: How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings | Talk Video | TED.com.

Final Fantasy

Grrr. So I uploaded some Final Fantasy videos over the weekend using my mobile phone to speed things up, and one of them got hit immediately by Square Enix. They were only opening videos….