Yes, it’s been a long time since I have posted anything on here. I guess that’s the way life goes. Anyways…
I have updated the HTML5 test page. There are a couple of notes. The first being that Opera is moving to WebKit. The second is that Apple has decided to stop making Safari for Windows. Whether this is permanent or not is the question. The last version is 5.1.7.
It’s been quite a long time since I have posted on this blog. I’m sorry about that. Life’s adventures have taken a great deal of my time. I have a few posts planned over the coming weeks.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago talking about my n900 – which was new back then. Times have changed and contracts have expired. I decided to switch over to Android – and my first Android phone is the Samsung Galaxy Note. I’m using the WordPress app and the Swype keyboard to write this post.
I’m also listening to Scarling’s album “So Long Scarecrow” via Spotify.
What I just mentioned above is a couple of things that have really set apart my experience with this phone and my old n900.
MX Player For Android
Until VLC comes around, MX is my go to player for playing videos on my note. While the note comes with a capable player, the MX can play more formats including one that is dear to me – the .rec format. It was also able to play .mp4 vids that I downloaded. These vids are apparently encoded differently than the ones I make.
So, if you have videos that don’t play right in your stock player, give MX a try.
I have recently begun playing Battlefield 3, my wife bought it for Father’s Day, which is in November here in Finland. I played the single player first (yes, I finished it). Half way through the first session of playing, my eyes really began to hurt. By the end of the 2-hour session, my head hurt and I wanted to gouge my eyes out in the hopes that maybe that will make me feel better.
The next day, while my eyes were still sore from the night before, I did some research and I found that a lot of people were having the same problems I was. The answer came down to Battlefield 3’s contrast is really high. Check out these comparison shots here – courtesy of Battlefield 3 Online.
While you are able to make some change within the games config files, I read a lot of comments saying that did not help and, someday, maybe you might get a boot off of a server via Punkbuster. Fortunately, my Benq e2200HD monitor has settings where I can change – via the buttons on the side of my monitor – the “mode” of the display from “movie” to “picture” and so on. I changed the mode setting from “movie” to “sRGB”. Since then, I have been playing hours of BF3 with no headache whatsoever. If you do not have any mode settings, try manually lowering the contrast. Monitors usually have at least this feature.
I hope this works for you.
For a while, a “Sync Error” message has been sitting on my Google Chrome browser. I haven’t had the time to do anything about it till now. So, when I clicked on “Sync Error”, it took me to “Personal Stuff” in “Options”. I entered in my password and waited.
And waited….
And waited some more….
You get the picture. Nothing was happening. The little Ajax loader graphic was spinning but, that was it. I solved this by clicking on the button “Stop syncing this account…”, then I pressed the “Stop syncing” button in the “Stop syncing this account” pop up window and lastly clicking on the “Set up sync” button and entering my log in information.
A little stupid and annoying but, at least it works again.
I own a Topfield 500 PVR hybrid (cable/terrestrial). The machine comes with a 320GB hard drive. When a TV show or movie is recorded, it saves a file in .REC format. Which is, in my experience, a little difficult to work with. You can watch these files using VLC but, if you want to watch them somewhere other than your computer… enter in these two tools: rec2mpg and TFRecToTs. Continue reading
For a while now, I have been incredibly annoyed with how YouTube.com automatically displays the user interface in a certain language. What makes this even worse is that you cannot change the setting anywhere in your YouTube.com profile settings. I thought that this was because detected the country that I live in (Finland) – a noobish mistake on my part. While I can speak a bit of Finnish, and read even more, it takes me a lot more time to read each word carefully so I fully understand what is written. Continue reading
I recently saw an article on Tom’s Hardware which asks if Steam has a monopoly over PC gaming. It should be noted that at in the headline of the article, Tom’s mentions that some “report” (I’m assuming it’s the linked Tech Radar article) says that Steam, “has a monopoly over PC gaming”. It points to preparation for a Mac version of Steam and explains that the eventual release twists the panties of conspiracy theorists and that fingers are all pointing at Steam saying, “You see! They did it!”
Tom’s links to this article in Tech Radar. While Tom’s declares that this “report” (again, Tech Radar?) says that Steam is a monopoly, Tech Radar merely poses to question to the reader while giving the POV of all sides. My take on this is simple, while Steam is the most successful PC game digital distribution platform, it’s not the only one. This already busts the myth without even mentioning that it’s fair to say that Steam does not control PC gaming. I say control, simply because this is what’s in the dictionary definition of a monopoly. I wouldn’t even be talking about this if Steam didn’t have competitors (like Games for Windows and Direct2Drive) and Valve was forcing game makers to allow it to distribute CDs and DVDs of the games it sells. Direct2Drive sells games for the Mac and PC yet no one will even mention monopoly because, simply, it’s just not as successful as Steam.
In other words, Steam is not a monopoly. So, go relax and have some dip.
Over in the States, the fear buzzword of the day is Socialism. You’ll be damned if someone points their grimy little finger at you and shouts, “This one’s a socialist!” In the tech world, ever since the big anti-trust cases against Microsoft, if you are called a monopoly, you shit yourself. Just ask Google what it feels like when they become the target of someone’s monopoly rage. Of course, this is not limited to the tech world but my point is that if you repeat a word enough and sprinkle a dash of fearmongering, you’ll get any weak-minded sheep to believe whatever drivel you wish to spew from that hole in your mouth.
Free speech is a pain, ain’t it? 😀
It wasn’t too long ago that these same questions were being posed when talking about iTunes. Fortunately for Apple, they learned from the demise of the industry whipping boy (Napster) that you need to make deals with the Recording mafia err… Recording companies so you can sell digital files for mass consumption. You need to make it worth their while and you need to show them that it will work. Apple apparently did just that and they became the most successful digital distribution platform for music – and that was before they dropped the crappy DRM scheme!
If anything, people should be thanking Apple for iTunes because now other retailers have gotten their act together and are now selling DRM-free digital music. Places such as Amazon and CDON.fi here in Finland. I’ve purchased music from both iTunes and CDON. I believe the same thing will happen in the digital game area once companies get their act together and figure out how to compete against Steam. To call a more successful company a monopoly, when it doesn’t even fit the definition, is giving other competitors excuses and crutches.
So, am I biased about Steam because I use it? I don’t think so. I happen to believe that someone or something deserves a label when it actually fits the definition of that label. I have bought games from Steam and I have criticisms and questions that I do not believe have been properly addressed.
Some of the comments I read on the Tom’s article are a little silly. They refer to reasons why some do not use Steam:
“I don’t use Steam because I don’t want to re-download the games if something should happen to my computer and I have to reinstall everything.”
-You can make backup copies of your games you purchase from Steam by right-clicking on the game in the Games tab and selecting “Backup game files…” This will create a backup copy that you can store wherever you like. It also creates an installer which you can use to reinstall the game.
“Steam does not allow me to play games offline. I have to be online in order to play.”
-This has already been proven false for most games. This is the Steam support article addressing how to play games offline.
The whole point of this article was to basically say that Steam does not have a monopoly over PC gaming. In fact, the whole topic should not have even been addressed and it was ludicrous to have even suggested it. In my personal opinion (Read: not fact), both Tom’s and Tech Radar wasted everyone’s time writing fluffy, fear pieces intended to drive up traffic. While Tech Radar gets kudos for merely posing the question to it’s readers, Tom’s fails hard for a sensationalist headline that was not representative of the meaning behind the Tech Radar. Assuming, that is what Tom’s meant by the so-called “report”…
Engadget is reporting that NVIDIA has temporarily pulled it’s 196.75 driver after reports of slow FPS framerates, bad performance and overheated chips. Apparently this is due to a problem with how the update handles the automated fan controller. In some cases, the video card died altogether.
It is recommended that this update is avoided until NVIDIA fixes the problem.
GophaSpeak 