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Lagview – The Last Wish (Andrzej Sapkowski)

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Tetchro
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Well, here’s a first! A lagview about a novel! I told you I wanted to read more books this year, so here we are.

This book is about Geralt of Rivia, the witcher. The whole reason I bought this book on my kindle is because I was so impressed with the story of the game, I figured it had to be a good read. I was right, but not exactly in the way I expected. It’s available both through amazon and indigo, for the Canadians among us.

The book is broken down into several sections that appear to be short stories (although they do link back to each other in some instances). This makes it a great book to sit down and read for an hour or two on a weekend. You can just sit down, read a section, and get back to doing something else. Each story basically consists of a different conflict Geralt has to face – some are political, some are personal, and all of them have some intriguing – and occasionally humorous – elements. The book is short enough that you won’t get bored of it before you’re finished reading it, which is a problem I sometimes experience with longer novels. I just get bored.

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Posted in Misc. Lagviews | Tagged , | No forum topic. | 2 Comments

Amazon’s (Cheapest) Kindle Review

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Tetchro
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So I bought a Kindle. I was little bit reluctant because, after all, you can’t beat good ‘ol paper, but I really wanted a book. Now, this book was over $100 in paper format on Amazon, but only $7 for the Kindle. The decision was obvious – the savings in buying the book in Kindle format would pay for the Kindle itself for pete’s sake, so I went ahead and bought one. Not anything fancy, just the cheap one with next to no fancy features.

Keep in mind before I start that I have not used any of the competing products to the Kindle, so this review in no way is meant to promote the Kindle over other eReaders. That would just be unfair. I’m not sure how similar other eReaders are compared to this product, and they may be better or worse in different people’s opinions. Just bear this in mind! I can’t tell you what eReader to purchase, but I can tell you the pros and cons of them, especially this particular one (which should be applicable to the competing eReaders to some degree, I’d imagine!) I’ve also included a bunch of links so you can look at my examples and see what I’m talking about. So! Now that that’s out the way, let’s begin! Also: I put my main points in italics after most of the following paragraphs. If you want to go through this quickly, look for some slanted text! Of course, all my italicized suggestions are my personal opinions, so take them with a grain of salt as you should with anybody’s opinions.

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What makes the OpenPandora special

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Colby
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In the nearly two years since receiving my Pandora, the company behind it has faced some pretty serious issues. They managed to slowly but steadily produce somewhere between 2000-3000 Pandoras, but at some point it just stopped. The company they were using for PCB production and the many delays they suffered led to the rest of the boards being rendered unusable. So they had no choice but to regroup and only now are they finally back in production.

This article is aimed at those new adopters of the Pandora, or those who may be skeptical of spending $500 on a device that may seem outdated.

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Getting an Android SD Card Image to work on Mac OS X

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Tetchro
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When I began experimenting with Android development one of the first hurdles I encountered was trying to get the emulator to recognize a fake sd card so that I could reference it in the emulator. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of resources out there for doing this on Mac OS X (at least that I could find, but usually I can’t find anything on the internet so what do I know?), so after finally figuring it out with the help of a few different websites, I thought I’d post it here for any one else struggling and also for my own reference in case I ever need to do it again! I’ll keep the steps as simple as possible after the initial step (getting Eclipse installed and all that jazz). Basically, we just want to create an .iso file and get Eclipse to recognize that it exists:

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Bastion – It’s your story

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Colby
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Bastion is the most finely crafted game I have played in years. It might even be the most finely crafted game I have ever played. And I don’t say that lightly, either. It’s not necessarily the funnest game, or even the most engaging, but it is without equal. For me, Bastion is proof that a game can be work of art: I can’t remember any other time where the choices I made in a video game got me thinking about more deeper issues and reflecting on myself as a person (The new Deus Ex came close, but that was more of a “hmm… what if?” kind of thing).

Before we really begin, I’d just like to say that I think Bastion can be enjoyed most if nobody has told you anything about it yet. I have taken some care to avoid things I’d consider to be spoilers, but even so, I think if you enter the game without any expectations you’ll generally get more out of it. So if you haven’t played it yet, do yourself a favor and go do that right now. It shouldn’t take you more than 10 hours. ;)

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From Blackberry to Android – My Android Review

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Colby
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I resisted the upgrade to a more capable smartphone for a long time. It wasn’t even until 2010 that I actually got a phone that did more than texting and phone calls, that was a Blackberry that was already quite out of date by the time I got it. But I set it up to receive my emails and I was pretty happy with that. Trying to do anything more was painful. A couple weeks ago I got a Galaxy Nexus which runs the latest version of Android and I have been playing around with it since then.

For the most part, this isn’t any better as a phone than my old Blackberry. About the only phone-related benefit is the ability to manage my contacts on my computer, synchronizing with my Gmail account. As a general computing device though, it’s so far beyond what my old Blackberry could do. As I said, anything more than receiving email was painful before, well now doing more is easy, so long as it doesn’t involve too much manual data entry – the lack of physical buttons takes some getting used to.

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Lagview – Battle for Wesnoth

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Colby
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I’ve known about Battle for Wesnoth for a few years now, but I never took the time to actually try out it for more than a few minutes. I’m seeing now that may have been a mistake, it seems I was missing out on a pretty good game.

Battle for Wesnoth is free; free as in open-source and free as money. That may trigger some kind of bad response from you, surely a game that has been worked on over many years by dozens of people in their free time will feel all weird and inconsistent. But somehow it doesn’t. In fact, it feels as consistent and polished as any other retail game, actually, I’ve played a lot of retail games that were less consistent and less polished. So however they’re managing it, they’re doing a really good job.

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Half-Life: Opposing Force – 13 years later

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Colby
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How many of you have fond memories of playing Half-Life and it’s expansions? I do. The other day I was bored so I started up Opposing Force, the expansion from Gearbox where you play as a soldier that shows up at Black Mesa. I expected to play for 10 minutes – through the “boot camp” tutorial level – and stop, but before I knew it I had started up a new game on hard difficulty and was playing through it.

I find it amazing that I can start up a 13 year old game and play through it at 1680×1050 on a modern 64 bit operating system without any trouble at all. Valve have really done a good job maintaining it.

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Review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC)

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Colby
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In 1996 John Romero left id Software and formed Ion Storm. You may remember that it was Ion Storm which released Daikatana, a game that was almost universally considered a failure. That’s not all they did though. Some time before the release of Daikatana, Warren Spector joined Ion Storm and went on to make Deus Ex, a game which was almost universally considered a huge success. I never played it, and when I bought it on sale through Steam one day and tried to play it, I got turned off quickly. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time, maybe it didn’t age well, I don’t know, but now we have Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Now, I get to see what all the fuss was about without getting turned off by the game’s age, assuming Edios Montreal hasn’t messed things up.

The game takes place in 2027 and augmentation technology is the latest and greatest thing. Everybody’s doing it! That is, they are replacing their natural body parts for mechanical ones which in many ways are superior. It’s an interesting premise for a game and allows for some interesting ethical debates and even some conspiracy theories. I believe the title, “Human Revolution” is a reference to both.

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Does your Lenovo Ideapad U400 run hot under Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04?

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Colby
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Update (2012-04-26): I have confirmed that the steps listed here still work in version 12.04.

It turns out the excessive heat and constant fan on my Ideapad U400 was being caused by the switchable graphics, which so far have proven themselves to be more effort than their worth. The situation isn’t even that much better under Windows, not being able to play more graphically intensive OpenGL games like Minecraft (yes, I just that about Minecraft). Maybe the Nvidia cards are better off, but next time I won’t take that chance and just get a laptop without any kind of switchable graphics if I can.

I haven’t yet figured out how to get AMD card working at all under Linux, so if that’s what your looking for, sorry. The integrated card has worked surprisingly well for me though, so long as I stick to graphically simpler games. Minecraft even works well enough with it, maybe even better than it ran with the integrated card in Windows.

This article might also apply to other laptops with switchable AMD graphics that are running Ubuntu 11.10 (and anything based on Ubuntu). So if you have a laptop like that which you want to run cooler, keep reading.

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Posted in Tutorials | Tagged , , , | No forum topic. | 4 Comments

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