COVID-19 update
The whole Erongo region of Namibia is still under lock down.
Honestly, I am putting the final touches on this blog the day before having to publish the next one. So far concentrating on all the negative aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has seriously brought me down in the dumps. So depressed that I did not want to move. No more. I am writing the next week’s blog now, and it will be positive! I mean, just read what I was thinking during the week:
The future is not looking too bright either, as another case has been reported positive during the last week. This time the case is a woman from the correctional facilities. She has no history of travel, and our authorities are scratching their heads as to where she could have contracted it.
In my mind, either the virus is out there and undetected, in which case the lock down makes a little sense, or the test is a false positive, in which case we are panicking over nothing. Unfortunately, lock down is influenced by how many people are getting sick.
Time on my hands
My mother used to say that idle hands are the devils tools, so I try to keep busy. But then I am also a serial procrastinator. This lock down certainly is a mixed bag! There is a mile long to do list of jobs that I really don’t want to start!
The web site of Awesome Chapters is nearly done. I spent quite a bit of time during the week end of lock down to disable the “Enhanced Connectivity” of TripAdvisor. Each tour had to be gone over with a fine toothed comb to make sure I am not telling fibs.
This week, apart from little odd jobs around the house, I messed around with the source code of VegaStrike.
With the huge amounts of time that we suddenly have available due to the lock down, and not allowed to do many of the things we are used to doing, it is easy feeling bored. However, this VegaStrike is keeping the brain juices flowing. So, let me tell you more about it.
Vega Strike
Vega Strike is a space flight and trading simulator. It uses a lot of similar concepts to Elite, but is different from it in one key way. Elite was built to be a game first and foremost, and so a lot of realism went out the window. Planets are too big, distances does not add up and so on.
Creative licence, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, on this computer there is a version of Oolite, which is a remake of the original Elite for modern machines. It’s fun to run around and blast people out of the sky. Perfect to take out your frustrations of lock down.
Vega Strike, on the other hand decided to keep distances and sizes somewhat realistic. This makes for a mind-bendingly large playing field. Physics are a lot more realistic, so you have to think about the inertia of your ship, how much your cargo weighs and that sort of thing. Also fun, if you are into that sort of thing.
I got into Vega Srike some years ago because some guys were re-making Privateer, which is another Elite inspired game. In the intervening years the project went cold to the point where it did not want to compile on modern systems anymore. Sad, but this happens all the time.
Imagine my surprise when I noticed some life on the project pages! After a couple of days of hacking at it, there is now two packages in Arch Linux (my chosen OS) which can be easily installed and played. The packages are not pretty, but they work. The developers are nice, and it looks like we might just hammer this thing into a proper game.
🙂
Pictures
Ah, it’s almost time to write the next blog post, and I have not even completed this one! There really is not that much that happens in a lock down. However, the one thing that I do is to find a nice picture every day of some Namibian landscape, and post it to Facebook. However, on FB the pictures get lost in the noise.
So, the seven pictures you see in each blog is a copy of the posted pictures, and it is their beauty that gets me through this, and I hope it helps someone else too. Nambia is a beautiful place, with fun people and a safe atmosphere.
