Technology, the Universe and Everything

Good Android apps

2012-01-29T02:00:00.000+02:00

A few months ago I blogged about the best Android apps and the runner-ups for that list. Since then I have installed some new software so I figured it would be a time to give an update. So, here are a few of the best apps I've installed within the last couple of months.

Wordfeud is a clone of the Scrabble board game that you play against other people. In it you try to form words out of random letters and a new word you play must touch a previous word on the board. I wouldn't play against random opponents as they may cheat, but it's great fun to play against trusted friends. The games are 1 vs 1 and you can move as seldom or as often as you please -- the game notifies you when it is your turn in any of the games you are currently playing. You can also chat with your opponent using the built-in chat function. The free version displays adds somewhat annoyingly after each move but you can get rid of them by buying the full version in case they bother you too much.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. A very comprehensive and easy to use dictionary app. Goes well with the Wordfeud game when you need to know what that "word" means that your opponent just played. ;)

Unified Remote turns your phone into a remote control for your Windows PC! You just need to install a server program into Windows and voilá, your Android phone turns into a remote control device. The most basic remote controls keyboard and mouse, but there are dedicated remote controls for individual programs such as Spotify and some web browsers. The full version has more different kind of remotes than the free version.

Finally, Aldiko is a solid, easy to use, nice looking ebook reader. You can import your own ebook files or you can use the built-in interface to the Feedbooks site and download new books. Feedbooks contains both free and commercial books. Start filling your virtual bookshelf now. :)

Angry Birds

2011-12-14T16:36:00.001+02:00

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Melinda Seckington / Flickr

Angry Birds is a super popular phenomenon that keeps on expanding, so I figured I'd collect some interesting Angry Birds links to this post. For example, the latest news on the subject is that the playground equipment manufacturer Lappset starts making Angry Birds playground equipment.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra has played and recorded the Angry Birds main theme which can be listened to on Spotify. Shane Parker has drawn the birds in a real retro ornithology book fashion. People are crocheting Angry Birds like crazy. There has been an attempt to negotiate peace between the birds and the pigs.

A couple of professional footballers, Lassi Hurskainen and Dan Jackson, created a real life Angry Birds video. That's some accurate kicking! Conan O'Brien has also played a live action version of Angry Birds a couple of times. :)

MauroNewMedia has written a quite extensive analysis on the reasons that Angry Birds has become so successful. This includes, of course, "simple yet engaging interaction concept" but also more complex concepts such as the way the game deals with the user's short-term memory management. The Wall Street Journal's Matt Ridley also analyzed the game a bit and figured that people just like predicting parabolic trajectories. The early Homo Sapiens, for example, basically relied on this exact skill when killing mammoths and other animals by throwing spears and rocks.

Finally, you can play the basic Angry Birds or the Fazer Tyrkisk Peber Volcano special levels in your browser. :) You might also want to follow the Angry Birds on Twitter.

The Humble Indie Bundle #4

2011-12-14T15:24:00.000+02:00

I have written about the Humble Indie Bundle before, but now that a new one is out again I figured I should blog about the concept again. The Humble Indie Bundle is a collection of indie games (games from independent developers) sold for whatever price the buyer wants to pay. The games are cross-platform and work on Windows, Mac and Linux. Part (or none, or all -- you decide) of the price you pay goes to charity. Each bundle is are available for only a couple of weeks only and new ones are published irregularly, perhaps four or five times a year. Right now it's the Humble Indie Bundle #4 and there are 13 days left to buy it. This time the default bundle contains five games, but if you pay more than the average buyer you'll also get two more games. The bundle includes such games as Super Meat Boy and Gratuitous Space Battles. Go get your games! :)

Fresh new look

2011-11-19T14:54:00.000+02:00

I have changed the name of this blog from Netbooks, the Universe and Everything to Technology, the Universe and Everything. This is because the previous title didn't quite catch the essence of this blog anymore. When I started this blog I blogged about stuff related to my then new netbook, but it appears that there's only so much you can write about one. Since then I have, for example, bought a new desktop computer and a new smartphone as well and I have written about things related to both of those.

While changing the name I figured that now it would be a good time to renew the looks of this blog as well. Blogger didn't even have the previous look in their selection of styles anymore. I have now also added a box of the most popular entries to the side bar. So, welcome to the same old blog with a fresh new look and name. :)

PS. In case you didn't get, the name of the blog was and still is a reference to the novel by Douglas Adams.

The best TED talks

2011-11-11T00:15:00.003+02:00

I have compiled a list of the most interesting TED talks I have watched so far. There's a talk about gaming, a couple about data visualization and a few about brains. There's a talk by F-Secure's Mikko Hyppönen and one by the skeptic James Randi. MythBuster Adam Savage's talk is also featured. It's not about robots but there's another one about them as well. Currently there are thirteen talks but I'll probably update the list as I encounter more good enough talks. Watch one or a few, let me know what you think about them and also feel free to suggest new talks for me to watch!

TED: Ideas worth spreading

2011-10-21T21:32:00.004+03:00

TED is a non-profit organization arranging conferences where the top experts of various fields give short, 10 to 20 minute talks on all kinds of topics. TED is short for "technology, entertainment and design", but the scope has expanded vastly since the original conference back in 1984. I have been watching the TED talks with my smartphone using the TED Air app, but they are viewable at the TED website as well.

If you now got even slightly interested I recommend starting with a short talk and a familiar topic. I'll make it really easy for you and post a suitable video right here. The talk is called Doodlers, unite! and it's just six minutes long:

Now, I haven't watched that many talks yet but they have all been very fascinating. Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight, for example, is, as far as I understand, regarded as one of the best TED talks ever. I'm tempted to give more suggestions on what to watch but as I haven't watched even ten talks myself I'll just give you a link to the most viewed TED talks which should be a good starting point for finding some interesting ideas worth spreading.

Dart programming: 99 Bottles of Beer

2011-10-15T14:06:00.005+03:00

Dart is Google's new programming language, designed to replace JavaScript. Compared to JavaScript, Dart's main advantages are that it introduces classes and interfaces and removes primitive data types. In fact, typing is completely optional in Dart. Every variable is an object anyway, even those "int" and "bool" variables. In addition to those things Dart has a prettier and more modern syntax than JavaScript.

The downside is that as of writing this no browser natively supports Dart, not even Chrome. You can, however, try the language using the so-called Dartboard program at the Dart homepage. It is basically a Dart interpreter written with JavaScript. Note that currently it only works in Chrome and Firefox!

To test the new language I wrote the 99 Bottles of Beer song in Dart. The link will take you to Dartboard where you can try the program yourself. The program uses the neat one line syntax for getters, one setter (using which looks just like using a regular public variable!), a class with a constructor with one required and one optional parameter, a method with an optional parameter and also an exception is thrown when the wall runs out of bottles.

After writing this program and submitting it to The 99 Bottles of Beer Website I searched Twitter for other versions of the song in Dart and indeed found one from some Japanese blog. That version of the song is somewhat different to mine and nice too, but fails to follow the lyrics in the end.

So anyway, Dart looks nice and easy to learn. It looks like everything that JavaScript should have been in the first place. We'll see when Chrome gets support for it and whether other browsers decide to start supporting it as well. Unfortunately some people apparently tend to use old browser versions for ages, so Dart won't overtake JavaScript any time soon.

The best Android apps: runner-ups

2011-10-09T01:50:00.003+03:00

A while ago I posted my own top 5 Android apps list. Of course, there are more great apps than just those but I wanted a comprehensive list of apps that would benefit everyone while still keeping the list short. Here are the other apps I considered for inclusion to my list of best Android apps:

• Locus, another map software. I use it at least as often as OsmAnd, but I chose OsmAnd to the top list for the easier, built-in vector map downloading feature and routing/navigation. Locus contains good features for geocaching once you just load a GPX file of caches into it. It even seems to have an addon for online geocaching.

• SoundHound & Shazam. What's that song playing here right now? These programs can answer this question by listening to the music and comparing it against their music databases. I haven't decided which one of these is better, but SoundHound is apparently more tolerant to background noise.

• Gesture Search. This app allows you to search apps, contacts and music tracks on your device by writing their names on the touch screen with your finger. Much more convenient than trying to hit those small buttons of the on-screen keyboard. Especially useful if you install a shortcut into the app drawer of GO Launcher EX, where it is always available.

• imo. Do you use any instant messaging software, such as Messenger, Skype, ICQ or Google Talk? This app can handle those and some other protocols as well. Very simple and clean yet effective interface.

• KeePassDroid & Dropbox. I have written of both KeePassX and Dropbox in the past so it's excellent to have them on Android as well.

• Bump. Quit messing with Bluetooth when you want to share files to another device, just bump the devices against each other in your fists and that's it! Bump magically transfers files between Android devices. They also claim that bumping between an Android device and an iDevice works as well! Once bumped, you can also send messages to the other device even when the other device isn't anywhere near.

• Battery Monitor Widget. Does what the name implies and does it well. Keeps a history of the battery usage data and shows calibrated estimates on the run-time that's left.

The best Android apps

2011-10-03T18:21:00.009+03:00

When you google for the best Android apps you get a huge number of lists, each list with a large number of apps. In addition to those lists usually containing way too many apps to be really that useful, the apps are often US-specific, being of no use to 95 % of the world's population. Here's my take on the top 5 Android apps -- these are the apps that I think every Android user would really benefit of:

5. GO Launcher EX. You might not have thought about it, but pressing the home key of your Android device doesn't just "take you to the home screen", it actually launches a home screen program, also known as a launcher. So in your Android device even the features of your home screen are not statically defined but can be changed by installing a new launcher. GO Launcher EX is a versatile launcher program that contains many improvements over the default launchers. For example, GO Launcher EX allows you to resize your widgets to any size you like even if they don't support those sizes out of the box. It allows you to add multiple shortcuts at once and also contains a nice scrollable and customizable "app drawer" at the bottom of the screen. GO Launcher EX also supports scrollable widgets, so Launch-X becomes even more useful. With Launch-X widgets you can squeeze more shortcuts into a smaller space, saving lots of precious screen space. Use, for example, one Launch-X widget for all of your games and another for your best apps, and you'll still have plenty of room for widgets in your main screen!

4. Tiny Flashlight. Ever been in a room with little to no light? Yep. This app lights and keeps on the bright flash light of the camera of your device. You can even install it as a one click widget to your home screen. Always have a flashlight at hand with this app. And even if you don't have a camera or a flash light for it in your device, this app can turn your screen to white and to maximum brightness allowing you to see in its light.

3. OsmAnd. One of the best map programs available. As the name suggests, OsmAnd works primarily with OpenStreetMap (OSM) but also supports Google, Microsoft and Eniro tiles, for example. OsmAnd is special in that it also supports navigation and can even speak the route directions using a speech synthesizer. The program can also download OpenStreetMap vector maps into your device's memory so that you can use the maps offline, for example when you are abroad. Yet another very useful feature is that you can easily find points of interest based on a category. Where are the nearest restaurants or gas stations, for example? OsmAnd can show you. I recommend getting the latest version for free from the OsmAnd homepage.

2. Opera Mobile. A blindingly fast web browser at best, it beats the default browsers in all aspects hands down. Opera Mobile is easy and intuitive to use. It supports multiple tabs and contains a Speed Dial screen to which you can set visual bookmarks to nine of your favorite web pages.

1. Llama. Llama is a Location Aware Mobile Application. Llama introduces profiles and location based events to your device. For example, you might have a profile called "Home" in which the WiFi would be turned on, the ringer volume would be set to medium and the vibration off. Then you might have a profile called "Outside" in which the WiFi would be off, vibration on and ringer volume set to maximum. Llama then knows your location based on the phone masts: you only have to tell Llama that "I'll be in a place I call 'Home' for the next hour" and Llama starts learning the masts. When the learning is done and your phone then connects to a mast Llama doesn't know, it triggers the event "Left home" which switches to the profile called "Outside". Similarly, when you get back home your phone connects to a mast that Llama has learned in the past, triggering the event "Enter home", which switches to the profile "Home". In addition to location, actions can be attached to events such as plugging the device into a charger, entering a certain WiFi network or just on certain times. For example, Llama can be told to automatically completely mute your phone for the night. This is how it should have always been and I find Llama an innovative and extremely useful tool that everyone should have.

This concludes my list of best Android apps. I hope at least a couple of them were new to you and that you find all of them useful. :)

Edit/Add: For some more great apps check the runner-ups I considered for this list!

Furlongs per fortnight: Comparison of unit conversion apps for Android

2011-07-02T23:47:00.008+03:00

The Android Market contains software for almost any purpose you may think of. Usually when you search for a program to do a given task you even get multiple hits. The programs can be rated but that doesn't tell much about their features. So, I now present a comparison between free unit conversion programs for Android. All of the programs were downloaded on June 30, 2011 and they are presented in a random order.

First there's Unit Conversion gratis version. The program's main menu has the categories presented in a large and clear light gray font on a black background. The program has a good numpad of its own and doesn't use the default virtual keyboard provided by the system. What bothers me, however, is that when you enter a category there's no usable default conversion selected. Instead the selected conversion is something like "km -> km", i.e. it does nothing. You also need to press "convert" instead of seeing the conversion result change as you type in more numbers. So, all in all not too good.

Second, we have aUnit Converter Free. It also has got a keypad of its own but in addition to that the default Android virtual keyboard pops up if you click the number field. The program is green text on black background -- some people apparently think it's cool but I'm not too fond of the scheme. The program does neatly operate in just one screen as there's first the category selection drop-down box, then the number field, and then the input unit, converted value and ouput unit. So, OK.

The third program is ConvertDroid. Compared to the previous two programs it boasts a way larger number of unit categories: 46. There are, for example, typography, fuel consumption and radiation related units available. The user interface of ConvertDroid feels rather crammed as it tries to display all available conversions at once. You don't select the input and output units from a list but instead just click on the number field for the desired input unit, begin typing and see the result of all conversions immediately. The program uses the default Android keyboard and as a slight annoyance it displays it in the letter mode by default, forcing you to tap it once to switch to the numeric keypad. The program does have a reasonable selection of default units visible in each category and you get less often needed units by clicking "Show all". Not too bad, but the keyboard-thing is annoying.

Next on the list is the cleverly named Unit Converter. The program has a very polished look with green "Web 2.0" icons and black text on white background. As the only program in this selection it has got a button for swapping the input and output units, which is a nice feature. You can also save your most often used unit conversions in the program's Favorites category which is shown at the top of the list. The program also converts currencies, loading up-to-date information from the web on the fly. I like this program, and the only annoying thing is that you have to hit enter or "Convert" to see the conversion result, i.e. it doesn't convert as you type. I might also want to have the categories as a drop-down list at the top of the screen but I'm not too picky on that.

Then, the pithily named Converter. The program operates as pithily as it is named: there are three drop-down boxes, two number fields and a "Clear" button (if you so choose -- you can also hide it from the settings). There is also a separate view for the categories as well but that's not needed at all as you can change the category from the main view as well. I like this one as well. It's simple and plain but has a very decent selection of categories and units. It even does number base conversions, which many of the other programs don't do.

Second to last, we have ConvertPad. The first thing you notice about the program is the insane amount of unit categories: 89! You can do conversions regarding viscosity, entropy, cooking and image resolution, to name just a few. This program would probably be your choice if you had a degree in theoretical physics, astronomy and some third subject as well. For anyone else it seems like an overkill.

Finally, there's another program named Unit Converter. Unfortunately this program also has the questionable honor of getting the last place in this comparison as well. It can only convert units from six different categories, not including such an obvious choice as speed. The Android keypad covers the target unit at least on my phone so at first you only see the "Value" field, "Convert from" text and drop-down box and the "Convert to" text, but not the drop-down box! The program also doesn't have any sensible default conversion values set but happily converts from, say, centimeters to centimeters. When you hit "Convert" the result slides in and you need to hit the Back key to get back to your number field and drop-down boxes. Due to all these little annoyances this program appears almost unusable to me.

There! Now the only thing left is to present the previous information in a nice tabular format. I hope this helps you pick a converter program -- or why not pick two: one for every day use and the other for the odd chance that your life would depend on correctly converting furlongs per fortnight to some sensible unit. ;)

Motorola Defy review

2011-07-02T11:44:00.005+03:00

I recently switched from Nokia & Symbian to the Android bandwagon by buying a Motorola Defy smartphone. I got the phone for 261 euros when I also made a new operator contract -- the normal price would have been 299 euros. The price to quality ratio for the device is very good.

Defy is small (107 x 59 x 13 mm) compared to many smartphones, such as Samsung Galaxy S (122 x 64 x 9.9-14 mm) and thus fits nicely into your pocket. The 3.7" screen is also very sharp and clear with approximately 265 dots per inch (10.43 dots/mm)! What I was especially impressed by, however, was the fact that Motorola has made Defy a very durable phone. It is water, shock, dust and scratch resistant, as proven by these YouTube videos where the phone is abused but just keeps on going. Also, Engadget couldn't really think of any downsides in this phone, save for the Motoblur UI, which my version of the phone didn't even have in the first place. My version also does have Android 2.2.

As this is my first Android phone I cannot really tell the difference to any other similar phones, but to me the phone feels fast and responsive, although I have had to reboot it once when it for some reason became very sluggish. Other than that playing Angry Birds, for example, has been a pleasure. Only few levels in Angry Birds Rio, for example, have so much stuff around them at first that the game slows down a little, but that is fixed after you slingshot the first bird out and manage to destroy anything. :)

Multiple home screens is also a nice feature. I have my calendar and SMS information along with the most used shortcuts in the first, a Facebook and a Twitter widget in the other, etc. The pull-down menu at the top of the screen is nice and features many kinds of announcements (mostly just for new email and newly installed programs). In the app menu I would like to sort my installed programs into different folders but that doesn't seem to be possible, although there's probably an app for that too in the Android Market, and using the different home screens for different program categories has been working for me so far.

As nice surprises for me the phone also features a radio (once you connect any headphones to it using a standard 3.5 mm plug) and a magnetometer, which basically translates to an electronic compass. The phone also has a GPS receiver so it knows its location and orientation, allowing you to use cool apps such as the Google Sky Map which is basically a virtual planetarium where you can point your phone into the sky (or the ground for that matter) and it tells you what stars and planets are there in that direction. The phone also has WIFI so you can enjoy fast internet connections wherever you have a WIFI access point.

The virtual keyboard takes a little practice but I guess that's inevitable with the first virtual keyboard you have ever used. When you get used to it it's easy and has been called better than the virtual keyboard in other Android smartphones. Swype is also a neat method for entering text -- if nothing else then it at least provides amusing guesses. ;) A little drawback is that if you want to write an SMS message with the phone in a horizontal orientation (to get a larger keyboard), you don't see the amount of characters used until you exit the writing mode, so you risk writing too long messages and having to shorten them before sending (if you want to fit it all into one message). Even when using the phone in a vertical orientation, you need to write something like 40 to 50 characters until the area for the text is made taller and the character count becomes visible.

All this being said, so far I have been very happy with my phone and can recommend it for anyone looking to buy a new Android phone. :) It has been made durable so I would expect Defy to last more than the two or three years which has been the life time for my previous two Nokia phones.

Assembling yet another computer

2011-06-15T22:33:00.003+03:00

I recently put together a new computer at work. It consists of an Asus M4A89GTD Pro motherboard in a Codegen M-610 case and some other components, including two 1 TB hard disks in a RAID 1 setup.

Compared to my personal computer, you could definitely tell the case was a cheap one. You were supposed to raise the motherboard up and away from the side of the case with 8 or 9 gold-colored screws, I think, but included with the case there were one too few of those. There was also only some four proper large'ish screws to secure the motherboard to those raising screws, so I had to use some smaller screws for the rest. They were possibly meant for hard disks but had the same diameter anyway.

Also, it was impossible to install the optical drive from inside the case, as the case is small and the power supply unit was too close to the front of the case. As a result, I had to yank off the entire front panel of the case. (Well, it was re-attachable.) There were some rubber things that you could push to the holes on the sides of the optical drive to secure it in place, but those quickly got mangled and I had to shuffle them around a bit to get them to stay in shape while sliding the optical drive past them.

The most show-stopping issue came then: the PSU only had two sockets for giving power to SATA drives! So I had to choose between (a) an optical disk drive and one hard drive or (b) two hard drives. I needed the optical drive to install the operating system (CentOS) but I also wanted a RAID 1 configuration.

This turned out to be a non-issue after all, as the motherboard's RAID controller easily created the configuration after I had installed the system, powered off the computer and swapped the optical drive for the hard disk. It was actually so quick I thought it did nothing, but I had to believe it after I powered the computer off again, pulled off the cable of the first drive -- and successfully booted the computer into the operating system, with a brief warning from the RAID controller.

So, what did we learn? Don't buy the cheapest case around there if you intend to build your computer yourself. The cheap cases are small, they might not have enough screws, and their power supply units will lack connectors. You probably couldn't fit a large video card into this case either. The motherboard seemed OK though, and the RAID controller appears to work very well.

I forgot already, but either the motherboard or the case came with a small socket thing into which you could connect the little wires from the case: the disk activity led, the power button, etc. Then that socket could be attached into the motherboard at once. That's a hundred times easier than connecting all those wires directly into the motherboard and I'm a bit jealous that my more expensive case did not have such a socket, even though it's not a new invention.

Finally, here's a bad quality photo of the case with the motherboard. There's also an AMD Athlon II X4 640 processor with the boxed heat sink and fan installed. You'll see that they are approximately as tiny as with my own quad-core Intel's boxed accessories that I recently replaced.

Thermalright Silver Arrow in a Nexus Version1 with Asus P7P55D-E LX

2011-05-15T21:20:00.009+03:00

In November when I bought a new computer I wrote that I should've also bought a proper CPU cooler instead of going with the boxed heat sink and fan. Now with the summer and warmer weather coming I finally did that. After reading some reviews I chose the Thermalright Silver Arrow which had received some favorable reviews. I checked the specs for the thing and saw that it was 163 mm tall. Well, good! There is approximately 168 mm of space above the motherboard in my Nexus Version1 case, so there's plenty of room (well, 5 mm!) for the cooler. At most I'd have to rip some of the noise absorbing material out.

The installation would have been easy with a brand new computer. However, as I had already once assembled it, I now had to remove almost all of the components so that I could install the supporting prop thing under the motherboard. Without it, the heavy cooler would most likely just bend the entire CPU socket out of the motherboard, destroying it.

Now I had finally disassembled and assembled my computer again. But d'oh! It turns out that the cooler is indeed 163 mm tall, but it is installed to the top of the CPU, about 10 mm above the motherboard! So, now the case cannot be closed as the heat sink extends out 5 mm too much. :(

You wouldn't think a normal case would pose a problem to any heat sink, but the Silver Arrow is just huge! I was more concerned that it wouldn't fit on the motherboard as there are many components that might be too tall and prevent the cooler from being installed. I looked up some random Thermalright Silver Arrow Motherboard Compatible List which said my motherboard, an Asus P7P55D-E LX, would be compatible with the cooler. Turns out, that list was slightly optimistic. In theory the Silver Arrow can be installed in two ways and in those two ways the two fans can have two different configurations. However, it appears that only one fan can be used with the motherboard! The fan would fit above the heat sink but the metal rods that secure it tightly in its place would make a contact with the bottom of the graphics card. The fan cannot face the back side of the case as the Ethernet, USB and other connectors don't leave any room for it. The bottom side is out of question as well because of the interestingly placed hard disk holder of the case, and the fan cannot be placed towards the front of the case either because that's were the RAM modules are.

Luckily the cooler works fine with only one fan that's installed in the middle of it. With the boxed cooler running the system at a 25 percent load would bring the CPU temperature up to 75 to 80 °C. With the Silver Arrow and just one fan the same temperature isn't achieved even at a 50 percent load and even then the noise is much more bearable than with the boxed cooler. The system idle temperature is also 10 to 20 °C cooler than with the boxed heat sink and fan.

Bottom line: the cooler works very well but now I have to use my computer without the side panel of the case. Because of this I unfortunately cannot recommend the Silver Arrow if you happen to have a Nexus Version1 case or any other case thinner than 210 mm or so. With a sufficiently large case, however, it is undoubtedly one of the best coolers out there.

Finally, here are some photos. The first photo shows the boxed heat sink and fan, right there in the middle:

The second photo shows the system with the boxed cooler replaced with the Silver Arrow:

The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

2011-04-12T22:15:00.003+03:00

Last December I wrote about The Humble Indie Bundle #2, a collection of indie games for whatever price you chose to pay. Apparently it was a great success as a new humble bundle is already out: The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle. The games are Trine, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, Shadowgrounds, Splot and Jack Claw. I don't know much about any of them but I bought the bundle anyway. All of the games work on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can also donate part or all of the price to charity. As I'm writing this the bundle has been out only for some 2 to 3 hours and has already been bought more than 27000 times with an average purchase of 5.20 USD. :)

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 newbie FAQ/tutorial, part 2

2011-03-23T17:18:00.006+02:00

Since my first post I've been playing the game some more and thought I'd share a few more points that I forgot or didn't know at the time of writing my previous post.

1. Use your combat knife to cut through obstacles like fences and doors. The knife is used by default by clicking the mouse wheel. It can obviously also be used to kill enemies should you get close to them.

2. Always play until the end of the round, especially if your team is winning. Winning a round earns you some extra points. You can tell the situation by looking above the mini-map at the lower left corner. Above the mini-map are the tickets left for each team. Each ticket corresponds to one respawn. Medics can get them returned by resurrecting dead teammates, and in Rush games new tickets are earned when M-COM stations are destroyed. In Rush games the defenders have unlimited tickets and the attackers a finite number. If the attackers run out of tickets the defending team has won, but if the attackers manage to destroy all the M-COM stations then they will win. In Conquest games both teams start with the same amount of tickets.

3. I have recently gotten into playing as a medic. Their machine guns are nice as you mostly don't need to be afraid of running out of bullets. You can also earn a fair amount of points by throwing first aid kits to teammates that are hurt or are about to get hurt. Do also resurrect your dead teammates when playing as a medic. Get next to their body and hit them with the paddles. You can see your dead teammates in the mini-map as a kind of an EKG symbol. (Finding the body from the map might prove a bit difficult sometimes, though, as the symbol does not pinpoint the actual location too accurately.)

4. The symbols shown in the mini-map change based on the character class you are playing. As a medic you see the EKGs but as an assault soldier you see ammunition symbols when your teammates need you to drop them some ammo boxes. Do help them. Engineers see wrenches when a vehicle needs to be repaired. I don't know if recon specialists see any special symbols, but anyone driving a vehicle will see an arrow if someone wants to get a ride. When you are on foot you can indicate the need for a ride by looking directly at the vehicle driven by your teammate and hitting the Q-key.

5. Don't be afraid of trying out the hardcore multiplayer mode. The main difference is that there's no mini-map. That might not be bad, though: you certainly won't be able to see as many enemies at once, but at the same time the enemies are less likely to see you!

6. Spot those enemies. I said this in the first post already but I cannot stress that enough so I'll just repeat it here again.

7. Finally, watch this video by Pixel Enemy. The title is Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - How Not To Be A Noob:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 newbie FAQ/tutorial, part 1

2011-03-03T17:12:00.009+02:00

I've recently been playing the hugely popular online multiplayer game Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I'm late in this train as the game was released a year or so ago already, but better late than never. The game contains a ranking system with 50 ranks and I'm currently at rank 3 or 4 after clocking some 10 hours in the game. I've noticed that there are some great guides to the game, like the ones Brighthub has (must read!), but I haven't seen a good tutorial/FAQ aimed for those of us who are total newbies to the game. This blog post is my attempt to at least partially rectify that lack of guides aimed for newbies. This way I'm also documenting my own process of getting into the game.

Single player vs. multiplayer

So, what should one know about the game? It's got a single player and a multiplayer mode. I played the first few maps of the single player campaign before moving to the multiplayer. I admit I don't know if the progress in single player makes any difference in the options you have available in the multiplayer, but I doubt that. I'll focus on the multiplayer mode exclusively.

The multiplayer mode can have up to 32 players in a single game -- 16 players per team. The game has a few different game modes of which the Conquest and Rush seem to be the most popular.

Conquest

The Conquest mode contains areas of interest that the team must capture and hold to win the round. There are a few areas to be captured at any given time. You capture the area by clearing it from enemies and hanging out in there until it switches sides, which may be about 10 seconds. You get points for capturing the area or assisting in the capture. The color of the area (or actually the color of the square marking the area in your mini map, HUD) tells the side which currently controls it: if the square is red, the area is controlled by the enemy. Blue squares are controlled by your team and white squares are still neutral.

Rush

In the Rush mode one team attacks and another defends crates that are placed in the map. The crates are shown as squares like the areas of the Conquest mode. The attackers aim to blow up the crates by getting to them and holding the E-key until a bomb is armed. This again takes some 10 seconds. Then a sort of warning time follows during which the square of the crate blinks in the HUD and a red light blinks in the building the crate is in. During this time the defenders must try to disable the bomb, again by getting to it and holding the E-key. The crates may also be destroyed by collapsing a building on it, which requires some heavy weaponry such as a mortar strike called in by a Recon specialist, but more on that later.

Character classes

At the beginning of each round you may pick a character class. You can choose between assault, medic, engineer and recon.

Assault is your typical assault rifle -carrying all-around guy who does most of the dirty job in the front line. I don't really like the class because I find the basic assault rifle too inaccurate and not powerful enough, plus the class lacks the neat gadgets the other classes have.

The Engineer class is something I prefer to the Assault class. The basic submachine gun is accurate and I've gotten many kills with it. The trick here is to use the iron sights - brought up by clicking the right mouse button -- and to shoot in short bursts or even single shots. Full auto will just empty your clip in no time while giving away your position, leading in your quick demise. The engineer also starts with the RPG -- rocket propelled grenade launcher -- which is great for eliminating not only tanks but also enemies that are hiding behind some walls. Remember: you don't need to see the enemy to kill them. You can shoot through fences and thin walls and I've already scored many kills that way. The RPG allows you to kill enemies behind thicker walls by bringing the wall down altogether.

The Medic class is somewhat boring in the beginning: it does not start with the medical equipment, you have to earn them. Sure, the PKM machine gun is neat, but I find that it's not too accurate.

I played most of my first hours as a Recon specialist. The Recon specialist is basically a sniper: armed with a sniper rifle, capable of taking out individual enemies from a distance. Sounds cool, but I've found that the maps don't support this too well, as most of the time they are crowded and have several passages, allowing enemies to sneak behind you. The other issue is of course the fact that if you can see the enemy then the enemy can see you. A sniper's worst enemy often seems to be another sniper, and as most of the players have much more experience and better weapons than a newbie sniper, it's not difficult to guess the outcome.

The Recon specialist's first earnable gadget is the motion detection mine. Use them! They are like grenades but instead of exploding they stay in the ground for a short while, alerting your team about enemies that enter their vicinity. You will also be awarded some points if your teammates kill the enemies spotted by those mines.

The second gadget that a Recon specialist earns are the binoculars. These are used to call in mortar strikes. You don't need to be able to see the enemy to call in the strike. To call in a mortar strike you may first locate the enemy by moving the binoculars so that the white dot in the middle turns red. That's not required, though, so you can just target the wall behind which the enemy is hiding. Then hold the left mouse button until the progress bar below the dot fills and the rounds are on their way. The strike is not instant, of course, but it takes a while for the shells to fly into their target. This is, however, a good weapon if the enemy has, say, parked a tank somewhere and is shooting at your troops from a basically stationary position.

About the guns the recon specialist first earns, the Type 88 sniper rifle is pretty good. It is semi-automatic as in opposite to the basic rifle which is a bolt-action one. The difference is that with a semi-automatic rifle you can shoot your magazine empty without ever leaving the scope view, whereas a bolt-action rifle needs to be reloaded after every shot, slowing your rate of fire considerably. The recon specialist also earns some shotguns which may be used if the number of sniper rifles in a team is limited by the server and if you still want to use the binoculars or the motion detection mines.

Spotting enemies

Talking about spotting enemies, that's a really important part of the game. When you see an enemy without the red triangle over his head, you should always hit the Q-key, or the "Socialize button" as it's called. This alerts your team by displaying a red triangle over the enemy's head and in the mini map. Nothing is more frustrating for a sniper than trying to find out targets without any spotting help when obviously a constant firefight is going on in the front line. The front line warriors also appreciate a lot if you spot enemies that are, for example, trying to flank them. I've found out that spotting works best while using the scope of a sniper rifle or the iron sights of a regular gun, but that's not necessary. Again, you get points for spotting enemies if they are killed because you spotted them. So don't try to kill all the enemies by yourself, help yourself and your team by spotting the enemies as often as possible!

Stationary guns

One of the factors that made me change my primary character class from Recon to Engineer was the fact that I noticed that most of my Recon kills were coming from using stationary machine guns, not the sniper rifles. Some maps have heavy machine guns that can be mounted by going next to them and hitting the E-key. When you mount a heavy machine gun you will want to see better, which is why you probably should shoot down as many of the obstacles in front of you as possible. This includes, for example, trees, crates and walls. By creating a large open space in front of you you force the enemies to cross it without much cover, allowing you to nail them better.

Vehicles

Many maps in the game contain vehicles such as tanks and helicopters. Vehicles are entered by going next to them and hitting the E-key. Tanks have a spot for the driver, who also controls the main cannon, and a shooter, who controls the machine gun. The shooter's primary responsibility is then to spot and kill enemy engineers with RPGs. The tanks also have some spots for passengers, if you want a ride.

Helicopters are very nice but difficult to fly. You should practice flying them in an empty, unranked server, as you are most likely to crash the thing on your first few tries, and that's not something you want to do with a crew inside the helicopter counting on you. The pilot also controls the missiles. The gunner's position is much easier to handle. The Gatling guns the attack chopper has are very powerful and can even be used to bring down walls. Helicopter's worst enemies are Engineers with RPGs and heavy machine guns, possibly mounted on tanks. Skilled snipers may also shoot the crew members of the helicopter, which is pretty bad for the helicopter if the shot member was the pilot.

Finally, some maps have little computer stations that can be entered like machine guns but cannot be used to shoot at anything. They are UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) control stations. UAVs are small, unmanned, easy to fly helicopters. They can be used for reconnaissance and for painting targets for hellfire missiles (which work like Recon specialist's mortar strikes), but I don't have much experience on that.

Other tips

The bullets have a travel time and they are affected by gravity. Gravity means that for targets that are far away you must aim at the top of their head to score a hit. If you shoot at their torso the bullet might drop enough to barely hit their ankles. This is not a concern most of the time but especially snipers should be aware of this. Aiming at the top of the head usually scores a headshot as well, killing the enemy with a single shot. Travel time means that if you are shooting an object that's moving fast, you should aim a little ahead of them. You will know that you have hit your target once an "X" appears at the center of the screen (which is where you always shoot). That happens with all guns, including the stationary machine guns and sniper rifles.

Experienced enough medics can drop first aid kits into the field. The kits are marked by "+" signs in the mini map. They won't heal you instantly but they will accelerate your regeneration when you hang out next to them. Healing teammates like this also earns the medic some points. Similarly, assault soldiers can drop ammo boxes. If you manage to stay alive for long enough to run out of ammo, you should find these boxes. The ammo is grabbed automatically by going next to the box.

Something else that can be grabbed from the field are the kits of deceased soldiers. A kit contains all the weapons and gadgets the soldier was carrying and replaces the kit you were carrying at the moment. This is a nice way of getting a taste of some more advanced technology. A kit stays in the ground for a short while after their owner has been killed so if you want to have one you should make your decision quickly. You will know you can pick up a kit with the E-key when a message in the middle of the screen says so. The symbol next to the message tells you what kind of a kit it is: a circle with a crosshair in it means a recon kit, a "+" means a medic kit, etc.

Finally, here's a neat site that displays statistics about your soldier: Stats Verse. You don't even need to register to get a huge bunch of information about your progress. The official site also has statistics, but they are always more outdated than Stats Verse's where you can even force an update of your stats. The official site might be a bit clearer, though, and it has got textual descriptions of all the guns and gadgets.

So, I believe here are the most important things I've learned about the game so far in my short career. Did I miss anything? What were your biggest aha-experiences as a newbie player? Any other tips or tricks for the newbies? Please discuss!

Edit/Add: See Part 2 for some more tips!

Samsung TV Twitter app

2011-02-22T16:16:00.005+02:00

Now that I recently got myself a Twitter account I figured I'd finally try the Twitter app in my Samsung BD-C6500 blu-ray player.

The app contains pretty much the same screens as the Twitter web site: Profile, Home, People, Topics. The app felt quite slow to me but it seems to do its job and is definitely one of the best apps available to the system (not that it'd be very difficult to reach that level, though..). I'd use this for my twittering if my desktop computer, netbook and phone all died simultaneously. :) Here are a few photos -- click to enlarge:

Twitter revisited

2011-02-05T15:20:00.006+02:00

A month ago I got myself a Twitter account just to find out what's all the fuss about. Much to my surprise I now see that I have tweeted some 160 times: that's five tweets a day on average! I'm also following 59 other users and 12 are following me, although I suspect a few of them are not interested in my tweets per se and are instead selling something and trying to get me to follow them as well.

I have found TweetDeck a decent Twitter client. It can, for example, automatically shorten your URLs. It also pops up a message box at the edge of your screen every time you receive a new tweet, which will, however, get annoying if you are actually trying to do something that requires you to concentrate. In these cases I've found it best to just close TweetDeck and to occasionally check the Twitter home page.

What do I tweet about? 5 to 10 percent of my tweets seem to be messages to other users, i.e. comments to something they have tweeted about. I rarely receive any replies to my comments... 10 to 15 percent of my tweets are retweets. That's just forwarding other people's interesting tweets. 20 to 30 percent seem to be my original thoughts about things like movies and everything else. The majority of my tweets are just links to interesting blogs, web pages and articles that I have found from various sources.

Twitter is a convenient way of getting interesting pieces of information and quickly sharing pretty much anything. You can also use it as your sort of public bookmark list by favoriting the most interesting tweets. :)

(Image by Randa Clay)

Ordering stuff from Amazon and Book Depository

2011-01-22T12:45:00.006+02:00

A while back I decided I needed a new flash light for geocaching. I compared some products and decided to go for the Led Lenser P7, partly because I had seen one in use and was very impressed by its Cree LED. So, the lowest price for the torch in Finland was 55 €. This led me to search it in foreign online stores and sure enough, Amazon.co.uk offered it for £37.00 which is about 43.50 € so I decided to order it. However, at the final page, just before clicking that button that places the order, the price was displayed as "£37.92". In other words, the price had just gone up by almost a pound, with no explanation whatsoever. Huh?

Naturally I aborted the ordering process and mailed to the Amazon customer support instead. It took them a couple of days to reply, during which time the price of the torch had gone up by a couple of pounds. This is because the prices keep changing constantly according to their availability. Apparently there's nothing new in this. "Thanks." (I then waited for a couple of days for the price to drop back to £37 before ordering the torch.)

The customer support was pretty clueless about my original problem with the price being different at the shelf and at the counter, and I had to find the answer via other means: it turns out the price they show in the store has been calculated assuming the 20% VAT (value added tax) rate in use in the UK. However, in Finland the standard VAT rate is 23% so the difference in the taxes is added into the total at the checkout stage.

I also needed a couple of books, but as the VAT rate for books in the UK is 0% and 9% in Finland, the difference between the displayed and the actual price is a lot larger than with other items. Complaining about this to some friends I was told about another online book store called Book Depository. Both books I needed had a lower price there than in Amazon and Book Depository also has free delivery, so I ordered the books from there.

Morals of the story:

Check the final prices carefully when ordering from one country to another: there may be additional costs in the item prices.
When ordering something from Amazon, wait for a few days and observe the price of the item. You'll get an idea on how the price changes (because it does keep changing) and may save a few dollars, pounds or euros.
Even if Amazon is the best-known book store out there, it's not the only one nor always the cheapest one.

Death Rally

2011-01-15T02:42:00.007+02:00

Great news! I have finally found the perfect action game for netbooks: the 1996 hit game Death Rally! It is actually made by Remedy Entertainment, the same company that created Alan Wake — the game that the Time magazine selected as the best game of 2010.

In case you haven't heard of Death Rally it's a racing game where machine guns are an integral part of your car. You drive through races and try to climb up the ladder of competitors. You can also buy new cars and certain new parts and power ups. Every now and then a shady sponsor will offer you an extra task, such as destroying another player's car in the next race...

Death Rally has been ported to work on modern computer hardware and software. When playing on an Asus EeePC 1101HA (or any other netbook with a lousy graphics chip) you only need to give the game the -nogl parameter to make it play smoothly:

Usually the problem with playing old games on a modern computer is that the game refuses to run because it does not recognize the software that is being used. Probably the support for some old features has even been intentionally dropped from the DirectX drivers, for example. The problem with playing new games on a netbook is that netbooks often just don't have the oomph to play games. Even Droplitz, for example, a nice and simple puzzle game in the spirit of Pipe Dream et al. with a Bejeweled-kind of a twist is just unplayable on an EeePC 1101HA.

The great thing about Death Rally is that it's still exactly the same game as 15 years ago, the only difference with the previous release seems to be the fact that it runs on current computers. :) I must warn you though: by today's standards the game is not that pretty. However, the playability and enjoyability make that up more than well. There will even be an iPad/iPhone version soon so start practicing on the Windows version already!

Open letter to Team17 / Worms: Reloaded review

2011-01-04T17:08:00.015+02:00

Dear Team17,

Worms 2 was one of the best games of the late 1990s. I remember playing it countless of hours, designing my own maps and even playing some online games over a dial-up connection. Those were the days!

Now, I recently bought Worms Reloaded from Steam. I figured Worms would be a perfect, simple yet entertaining game to play on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook. Well, I was wrong. I couldn't even get past the initial profile creation screen, the game wouldn't work well enough. It probably has to do with the lousy GMA500 graphics chip, but still I would've thought that a game whose looks haven't really changed in 10 years would have worked. Lazy programming? I even tried searching through the game's configuration files to see if the resolution could be changed by editing them, but no luck.

Anyway, I then tried the game on my desktop computer and sure enough, this time it started without a problem. However, the first WTF-moment came right in the beginning: I was asked to create a team but I could only set names for four worms?! Four? As in half-of-the-previous-maximum-of-eight? Seriously? More worms equals more fun, so why on Earth would you reduce the amount of worms per team?

Then I tried playing a game with my newly created team. The main menu already has ten different options but I chose the one where it says "Single Player". Now, a menu of seven items appeared:

Huh? I suppose it's good to have some variety, but what are all these Warzones and Body Counts? There's not even a tooltip explanation for them when you hover your cursor over the menu items. Custom Game sounds like some good, old-fashioned fun so let's choose it and ignore the rest. Now the player is greeted with this screen:

Now, pay attention to this. I think this screen is an exemplary example of what's wrong with Worms: Reloaded. Over the time certain standard user interface widgets, such as drop-down boxes and scroll bars, have been developed and established as good and usable features. This screen, however, tries to reinvent everything. It took me a while to figure out how to add teams into the game. Turns out you need to click the team name between the arrow symbols to move it into the Current Teams box. The next question is "How do I get computer opponents into the game?". There's no view of all the available teams, so you need to scroll for more teams. Turns out computer players have a microchip symbol next to their names, but their difficulty level cannot be determined before adding them into the game. So, two major issues in choosing the team alone: you cannot see all the available teams at once and you cannot see the computer team difficulty levels beforehand. This was certainly done better in the previous Worms games. In an attempt to confirm this I even installed and tried Worms 2 and Worms World Party but unluckily neither one of them would even start on my Windows 7.

The next whatchamacallit on the screen is Game Style. What are these? No information whatsoever is given about them here. To find out more information about them one has to abandon the current setup, go back to the main menu, choose Customise, then Manage Game Styles, and then Edit the game style one wants to know more about. It's a bit of a hidden feature and I was surprised you could actually customize the game this much. There are four different categories of options and the menus look like this:

I find it inconceivable that even on 1920x1200 resolution only seven options are shown at once. Team17, you've got more than 2.3 million pixels at your disposal and you waste it by displaying information that could be easily fit into a thousand pixels?! The only reason I can think of is that this game has originally been designed for consoles and that the players are supposed to be sitting on the other end of the room, but you could do so much more for the PC version! The least you could do would be to scale the menus to show more items at once. Possibly the worst example of menu design is the weapon customization menu:

Really? With 2.3 million pixels you could only fit in information for one single weapon at a time? Have fun customizing all the 47 weapons, let alone comparing the settings of different game styles. I certainly don't want to create new styles or edit the old ones with this user interface, so I'm stuck with the pre-created ones. And by the way, what's with that 47 weapons? Worms World Party had more than 60 weapons! Since when have sequels been made by reducing the available options or by making menus more difficult to use? Talking about weapons, here's the in-game weapon menu:

There are less weapons than probably ever before yet the menu takes up the entire screen, as opposed to just one corner like before! Previously, the weapons were also nicely grouped by purpose: bazooka-type of weapons first, then grenades, then handguns, martial arts, explosives, animals, air strikes, and so on. Now, they are all there in one big mess. The numbers are also horribly off: for example, you cannot easily tell if you have got two or three ninja ropes left in the image shown above.

Now, back to starting the game. We have already seen that the Custom Game menu is counterintuitive and is trying to conceal as much useful information as possible. It does very little to actually allow the player to customize a game. So after setting the teams and clicking Start Game, the game, well, does not start. Instead, you get to choose a landscape. The random landscape generator looks like this:

Looks nice enough but you quickly get frustrated: creating a new landscape takes about two seconds. Forget about Worms 2's instant new random landscape button, the ability to enter a textual random seed for new landscapes and the nice and clear landscape profile view. Now, you'll have to watch an animation of horizontal and vertical scan lines going through the screen and then the random objects are placed around the landscape! The buttons that choose the theme and terrain shape also exhibit the "click to cycle" behaviour known from other menus already, so if you know that you want to play a pirate-themed cavern level you may end up having to click many times and watching the new landscape creation animation equally many times. And all I wanted to do was to play a fun game of Worms! Because of the random landscape generator's repulsive controls you might as well keep playing quick games instead because selecting the landscape is not fun.

Anyway, after selecting a landscape you finally get into the game (to be plagued by the weapons menu). Here's an in-game screenshot:

Yep, the entire playing area fits into one screen (if you zoom out). It just doesn't feel right: it has never fit into a single screen at once so why cannot it be bigger now as well? It may be just an optical illusion caused by the large resolution in use but still. And look how sparsely the worms are placed! You could certainly have bigger teams as well. Luckily the actual gameplay is still pretty fun.

As a conclusion, I've got mixed feelings about Worms: Reloaded. I really would like to like it and it seems to be the only Worms that works on the current computer systems. However, the counterproductive user interface is taking much of the fun out of the game. Team17, if you've got a UI designer then why don't you listen to that person? Or if you don't have one then hire one quickly! Finally, and I hope this is not the case, if you do have got a user interface designer and that person did design all those crappy menus, please fire them or at least give them a serious warning. Wrapping up, the most serious drawbacks of the game are:

user interface tries to conceal as much useful information as possible
weapons menu: lacking many weapons, fills up the entire screen and is not organized
the maximum size of a team is only 4 worms

In case you decide to publish yet another sequel then I suggest you call it something like Worms: Resurrection and get back to basics instead of coming up with six new single player modes.

Twitter

2011-01-04T16:03:00.004+02:00

I just got myself a Twitter account: @ZeroOne3010. I don't know if I'll be using it for anything but at least I can say I have tried. Does anyone know any good Twitter clients for Windows 7, or anyone interesting worth following? So far I'm following some news feeds, @MythBusters and @ConanOBrien.

Trying out some Steam games on the netbook

2010-12-28T00:01:00.004+02:00

I have recently tried out a few games on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook and will now briefly report the results:

Flight Control HD: Not playable
Worms Reloaded: Not playable
World of Goo: Playable

You'd think that Flight Control, which also exists for mobile phones, would run on a netbook, but no. Sure, it's HD, but still. The same actually goes for Worms Reloaded: Worms 2 was released in 1998 and the graphics seem to be essentially the same as back then, but now I couldn't even get past the initial "This is your first time playing the game! Would you like to create a player profile?" screen of the newest incarnation! World of Goo is a happy surprise and runs almost smoothly, even though I'm willing to bet it does more complex calculations all the time than either of the two other games. Goes again to show you that the weak spot of this netbook is its Intel GMA500 graphics chip. Oh well, at least I've got my still brand new'ish desktop computer.

The Humble Indie Bundle #2

2010-12-25T11:42:00.003+02:00

There's only 13 hours left of this offer so act quickly: The Humble Indie Bundle #2 offers five indie games for whatever price you choose to pay! The games are Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos and Revenge of the Titans and most of them are redeemable on Steam as well. If you pay above what the average user pays (currently 7.80 USD) you'll also get the first Humble Indie Bundle which contains six games, including the hits World of Goo and Gish. World of Goo alone is well worth the 7.80 USD and I have heard good things about Braid, Machinarium and Gish as well. This is the first time I hear about Osmos but it looks interesting too. I already bought the games and might have done that even if I already had all the games as I find the Humble Bundle concept very supportable.

New computer for playing Civ5

2010-11-08T11:56:00.006+02:00

So, a month went without any updates, sorry about that to both of my readers. What have I been up to? Well, I bought Civilization V but found out that my computers wouldn't run it. The game wouldn't even start on my 9-year-old desktop computer. It did start on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook, but it took no less than 15 minutes to get into the game with all the loading, and even then the game responded to mouse clicks with a one second lag. So, I was forced to buy a new desktop computer.

My new desktop computer is built on an Asus P7P55D-E LX motherboard into a Nexus Version 1 case. It has got 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, an Intel Core I7-870 processor and a silent Gigabyte R575SL-1GI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card. There's also an OCZ Agility 2 90 GB SSD data storage device. The computer is fast and rather quiet. :) A small mistake was that I bought the processor as the boxed version, i.e. with a heatsink and a fan. A separate, larger heatsink would've been in order as under full stress the CPU core temperature rises above 90 °C, when the idle temperature is around 40 °C! :O Intel customer service did assure me that modern processors can take high temperatures and that the CPU will shutdown itself to protect itself before any damage occurs, but I'm still a bit skeptical... Maybe I'll buy a better heatsink (something like this) later.

So anyway, the new machine runs Civilization V (and other games) very smoothly. :) In case you are interested in my experiences with the game, see my blog post at the Civilization wiki. There's also another game log I posted.

Free arrow icons

2010-09-12T22:15:00.005+03:00

Some time ago I was looking for some arrow graphics to be used at work. The criteria I had for the arrows were:

pointing to all eight directions
round background
in multiple colors
nice looking (think "Web 2.0")
permissive license

I searched Wikimedia Commons and a few other resources but didn't manage to find a good icon set matching all these criteria. Luckily these were more of a nice-to-have feature than an absolute requirement so I just went without the arrows then.

Later on at home I began to think it shouldn't be too difficult to create the arrows by myself. So, I surfed to Six Revisions, which is an excellent blog for web developers and designers, and did a few searches to their archives. Surely enough, I found a great tutorial for creating Web 2.0 -like icons.

The result you can see in sample image attached to this post. Download the icons (.zip file, 1.5 MB) and see them all. The images are saved as 256x256 pixel PNGs with transparent backgrounds. There are 48 different images: all eight directions in white on green, white on yellow, white on red and inversed colors. I have licensed them with the CC0 1.0 Universal license which is effectively the same as giving them into public domain. In other words you are free to do whatever you want with these images, no restrictions. I would appreciate a note if you use them somewhere but that's not required either. Enjoy!

Dropbox

2010-08-22T17:25:00.004+03:00

Dropbox is a neat online service for saving your files. It is basically an online hard drive where you can store any kind of files to be accessed from anywhere. Using Dropbox has been made very easy: you register to the site and download and install a client application, which then displays as a regular folder in your file system. The magic happens when you move or copy files into that folder: they are automatically copied into the Dropbox servers and you can access them from any other computer, either by using the online user interface or by the dedicated client!

The client is available for Windows, Linux, Mac and even some mobile platforms, so there's really no reason not to use Dropbox even if you use multiple computers with different operating systems. I figure Dropbox is a great way of storing data when using a netbook: even if the system breaks, your data will be safe, plus it will be available for your desktop computer as well. It is also unlikely that you will be handling very large files with a netbook that doesn't have too much power so the default amount of 2 GB that you get should be plenty. Register using this link and you'll even get an extra 250 MB of storage space. :)

I registered to Dropbox in the spring when someone wanted to share some photos with me (yes, Dropbox can easily be used for sharing files too, and no, those who then just want to view your files don't need to register). After that I forgot about it until I tried the Jolicloud Linux distribution which has got some sort of a Dropbox integration. I figured Dropbox would be an excellent place to store, for example, my KeePassX password database file so I could access it from both Windows and Linux, and from both my desktop computer and my netbook. I have now also saved the installation packages of some key software to Dropbox so that the next time I'm installing a fresh system I won't have to browse through a dozen web sites to get all the programs I need.

Steam's pricing policy

2010-08-19T22:20:00.006+03:00

Steam is an online content delivery system where you can purchase and download games. It also involves some social networking features. Steam offers some indie games that cannot be bought elsewhere, but it also distributes some big titles. In the past I have written about a few games I've downloaded from Steam.

Lately I have been contemplating pre-purchasing Civilization V which will be out in about five weeks. I might have purchased it already if it wasn't for Steam's ridiculous pricing policy: the exchange rate of 1 USD = 1 Euro! The basic version of Civ 5 costs $49.99 for US-based customers but 49.99 € for EU-based customers! The current real exchange rate is something completely different and the correct price in Euro would be 38.98 €. With the Civilization V Deluxe Edition the situation is slightly fairer: shopping from the US the price is $59.99 (46.77 €) but for European customers it's not 59.99 € but 54.99 €, which of course still leaves a difference of 8.22 € ($10.54)...

I was able to check the US prices using some proxy servers located in US. Basically my browser connects to a proxy server and asks for a web page, after which the proxy fetches the page and returns it to my browser. The target site (Steam) deduces the country of origin for each request and chooses the prices accordingly. When the proxy server is located in the US it looks like the requests are coming from US and Steam shows the prices in dollars even though it's me requesting the sites from Europe.

Anyway, while I was at it I decided to check the prices for the United Kingdom as well. Turns out Civ 5 is in discount at the moment: the regular version costs £29.99 ($46.78 or 36.49 €) and the Deluxe Edition £39.99 ($62.36 or 48.68 €). Still slightly more expensive than the prices in US. However, these were just the discount prices -- the normal prices are £39.99 and a whopping £49.99 ($77.97 or 60.82 €) respectively!

Alas, while writing this post I just found out I've been doing it all the hard way: you don't need to use a proxy to get the prices from different regions, just install this script to your browser! At least the US prices seem to be displayed correctly. However, for UK it only displays "N/A". For Australia it displays the prices 79.99 USD and 89.95 USD but I wasn't able to confirm those using a proxy. If the prices are correct, however, it's an enormous difference from the US price! I wonder how Steam can just keep doing this? There's even a Steam Community group called 1€ ≠ 1$ with more than twenty thousand members.

Best mobile games

2010-08-17T21:16:00.003+03:00

I'm a Nokia user and every now and then I feel like playing something with my phone. Here's a little list of games of enjoyable games, in no particular order. They should work with other models than Nokia as well as they are made with Java.

Ukko's Escape. A free and addictive one thumb game where your mission is to keep jumping upwards to make Ukko happy. Ukko's happiness decreases if he falls or does not jump and when he's out of happiness the game ends -- unless you managed to actually jump all the way up, in which case you win. The levels get increasingly harder and you can feel how you are making progress when you get further and further with each try. Ukko's Escape has even got a global highscore list at RumbleX and it seems that my record for the Hard difficulty level is still unbeaten. :)

Yet Another Tetris. Just what the title says, but this is the best free mobile implementation that I have come across. The arcade mode keeps the games short and hectic when extra rows are regularly added to the bottom of the screen. :)

Rollercoaster Revolution 99 Tracks. This is a commercial game but I once came across an offer and got it for free. In the game you control the speed of rollercoaster cars and try to collect smileys while avoiding crashing. As the game progresses you unlock new tracks, a couple of new car types and so-called awards, which are just cosmetic but nice anyway. 99 tracks do sometimes make it feel like the game was repeating itself, but if you like perfecting your accomplishments then this game might just be for you. There's also a free online version of the game available.

Tower Wars. I had actually forgotten about this free game, found it again when writing this post and ended up playing it for quite a while. Tower Wars is a tower defense game. In the game you place various kinds of gun turrets in front of forces of Chaos and either try to create a maze for them or to fill the edges of existing mazes with as effective cannon setups as possible. The graphics are good and there's a nice twist in that the game progresses through decades and millenniums: you start with rock-slinging huts and progress all the way to laser turrets and such. My online favorite of the genre is Desktop Tower Defense. :)

Samsung Facebook app

2010-08-17T01:01:00.004+03:00

In June I wrote about the Samsung BD-C6500 blu-ray player and its applications, noting that the Facebook app still only said it would be ready "in April". Later on, in July I think, they updated it to say it would be ready "soon". Yesterday I was going to watch a 119 minutes long 'making of Iron Man' document (got the 2-disk blu-ray edition of Iron Man from the library) and figured I'd check the Internet@TV feature first. Much to my surprise, it informed me that it needs to update itself and removed and reinstalled the Facebook app. Probably just to update the message to "Will be ready in December 2012", I thought, but no; lo and behold:

It's actually a working Facebook client in my blu-ray player! (The texts are in Finnish, just get over it.) Sure, typing a status update with just ten or so buttons while having to precisely point the remote at the player eats some of the usability, but at least it's got pretty much all the basic features Facebook has. The most natural use case for this app would be to watch photos, I think. Sure, they look a little small on a 37" full-HD screen but they aren't that big on an 11" laptop screen either, and cannot really be watched by more than two people at the same time. Nonetheless, having the client scale the photos up would be a nice feature.

As a final note, in July I wrote about Samsung support and how it was rather un-supportive. They reasoned that the apps are made by third parties and that they don't know anything about them, but looking at the App Store menu I can clearly see that it says that the Facebook app is made by Samsung. So, the Samsung support team still does not convince me. :P

Jolicloud

2010-08-14T02:05:00.010+03:00

After trying Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE from now on) and failing I decided to try something else. At the comments of the post someone suggested Jolicloud (JC) so I chose that. Jolicloud is yet another Linux distribution, the current version being based on a not-so-current Ubuntu 9.4. Jolicloud is based on the idea of utilizing the services on the web – the cloud. This should mean it is pretty tightly tied with Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Dropbox and such services.

So, I downloaded the Jolicloud Windows installer, followed the instructions from the site and got the system up and running really easily. The installer even created a nice boot menu so I can choose between Windows 7 and Jolicloud when the computer starts. (And I did even validate that I can still boot to Windows, unlike with UNE!) Here's a screenshot of the Windows installer:

The installer forced me to either create a Jolicloud account or to link one with my Facebook account. Well, if the idea of the OS is to utilize the possibilities of social networking, then I suppose I must choose the Facebook option. Turns out none of my FB friends are using Jolicloud... So much for that synergy.

When Jolicloud booted up the first time its relationship with Ubuntu became very clear to me. The top-bar and the mouse cursors were practically indistinguishable from UNE. Like UNE, Jolicloud also likes to maximize new windows automatically (which sometimes results in sad views when the new window is just a small prompt with few words and just one or two buttons). The launcher, which is apparently a popular concept with Linux distributions customized for netbooks and contains the most popular programs, does look different though:

Exciting, huh? Sure, at first, once you realize that those icons to Facebook, Flickr, etc. are actually nothing but glorified shortcuts to your browser (Chromium by default). The shortcuts present the web sites without any of the browser UI such as back/forward/reload buttons or the address bar. Click on a link that would take you to an external site and a new, "real" browser window opens. Also, notice those white dots at the bottom of the launcher? They change the page. Not that intuitive.

At this point I should probably mention that the Jolicloud launcher is made using HTML5 and apparently loads from the net. Thus, if you were using a few different computers and had Jolicloud installed on each of them, JC would keep your launchers synchronized. However, the launcher can only contain programs installed from the dedicated Jolicloud App Center, so programs installed with apt-get (known as "legacy apps" in JC) can never show up in it, which I find distracting. You can't even add a shortcut to the terminal into the launcher! Luckily I found a way to install the shortcut into the top bar. The terminal (and other programs) can also be launcher from the menu which can be brought up using the, well, menu-key of your keyboard (the one that's likely to be located between your AltGr and right Ctrl. Not the one with the Windows-flag, that shows the launcher.) So the profit from having your launcher synchronized (and probably some other settings too) is not too obvious. Sure, JC is a nice, new toy OS but who'd want to immediately install it into every computer they use?

Anyway, let's continue the tour. Above the shortcuts of the launcher there are a few icons: "Add", a satellite dish, a folder and a gear. The folder and gear are pretty obvious, they bring up the folders and some settings (namely your Jolicloud account information). The "Add" button brings up the App Center I already mentioned:

It's pretty much what you'd expect: a selection of apps someone else has picked as being representative. The Communication category, for example, contains about 20 instant messaging and email client applications, etc. I guess someone might have fun trying out all the different apps. However, I still don't approve of the concept of calling simple web links "applications". As noted before, installing the "YouTube application" only creates a shortcut to the site, etc. There are, of course, "real" applications to be installed too, such as the VLC media player, but if the application refers to a web site then it's certainly just a shortcut to that website.

VLC reminds me of another problem with Jolicloud: the audio won't work! I can (most of the time) hear the "jungle sound" that is played at start up but after that the netbook goes mute, sooner or later. You might just hear a faint "plop" from the speaker when trying to play an audio file.

Onwards. The next icon at the top row is the satellite dish, the "Stream". Great! This must be the heart of the system! I bet this is where all my social networking feeds and emails are joined together and displayed to me with little icons! Not quite. Not like that at all, in fact. Turns out the stream, despite having such a great showcase place in the user interface, only displays messages from your Jolicloud account. Remind you, none of my Facebook friends are using JC. My stream is not very flowy:

Thanks for nothing. Even if all my friends were using Jolicloud, what would I see here? "Mr. X likes the VLC media player application" or "Ms. Y installed the Spotify application". Wow, how interesting. And once everyone got ready with installing everything they needed, the stream would just dry out. Seriously, the Jolicloud team needs to thoroughly rethink this stream thing.

The rest of the two buttons I already explained but I'll still comment on the folder button. The launcher works with a one-click principle: hoover your cursor over an icon to highlight it, click on it to open it. The folder view displays your personal Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos and Windows folders with the same style as everything so far. Opening a folder, however, launches the Nautilus file browser which just doesn't match the visual style of the rest of the system. It also works so that you need to double click an item to open it, which is a slightly irritating inconsistency.

So, let's recap. JC is a rather new and young OS. The basic idea behind it is good but seriously lacks in execution. Jolicloud also does not contain a hibernate mode at all, which is a bad disadvantage for an OS designed for netbooks. It also does not support the Fn key combinations of the keyboard so you cannot, for example, adjust the brightness of the screen. Thus you are pretty much stuck with the retina-burning level that also draws the battery quickly. However, Jolicloud is a Linux distribution anyway and for me has it some definitive advantages over the Ubuntu Netbook Edition:

It installed easily on the side of Windows 7 and did not wreck my Windows installation
You can access your Windows file structure from Jolicloud just like that, with no extra tricks whatsoever
The native resolution of the screen, 1366x768, works out of the box
Jolicloud feels faster than Ubuntu Netbook Edition

Back on tracks

2010-08-10T23:35:00.005+03:00

About a month ago I managed to completely destroy my Windows 7 installation. Since then I have been using my desktop computer or the memory stick installation of Ubuntu Netbook Edition on this Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook of mine. Until now, when I finally managed to borrow an external DVD drive. See, the netbook actually shipped with a bootable recovery DVD which happily erased the hard drive and reinstalled Windows. That was rather surprising as I didn't see any obvious hints on the DVD that it would contain a feature like this -- I actually found out by accident that it was bootable at all. Anyway, my Windows 7 is now back up and running again. Let's see if I can find another way to wreck it later. :P

Samsung Support

2010-07-19T19:56:00.004+03:00

I'm going to have to vent off a bit, but I'll start from the beginning. In my blog entry about the Samsung BD-C6500 blu-ray player and its apps I wrote:

"The total number of games and applications combined is 17. You should be able to download more but I cannot see any applications in the store that haven't been installed already. Could be a regional issue, maybe there are more applications available in the US than here in Finland -- I don't know."

At that point you probably thougth to yourself: "Oh, that Internet@TV thingie seems rather lame." I cannot blame you, and I actually also started wondering what is the matter here exactly? So, I sent a polite rant to the Finnish Samsung support. I'll translate and shorten it:

I bought a blu-ray player about a month ago. It has since turned out that the Internet@TV feature doesn't quite live up to the marketing hype. There are 17 apps and cell-phone level toy games. The Facebook app still in late June says it will be ready "in August" and the YouTube application is somewhat dysfunctional. The App Store does not have a single application that has not been installed already.

The Samsung web page is vaguely misleading. "The unique Internet@TV technique opens more possibilities than you can imagine. It is better, better equipped and easier to use than before. You can sort, add and remove content using the Samsung Apps application library." The English version of the page, however, lists a few apps. I'd love to use the Flickr application but even that one cannot be found.

The Finnish Internet@TV help page contains a broken link to Yahoo Help.

I also just found an article that says that Samsung has entirely moved away from using Yahoo Widgets which, to my understanding, are used to create the applications in my blu-ray player as well. It cannot be possible that a product this new is sold using a feature that works this badly, while the marketing paints a completely different picture.

So, not too bad? Well, here's their response:

Thank you for contacting the Samsung customer support. All internet@tv apps are made by third party manufacturers so Samsung has no support or "control" over the application finishing dates or their count. In the C-series allprograms are published in the Samsung Apps service, so as you mentioned, Yahoo does not have anything to do with the Widgets anymore. The widgetsofthe B-series come through yahoo but no new applications are developed that way.

What? I have tried my best to preserve the brokenness of their language. Well, naturally I then tried using the "If you are not satisfied with the answer we provided, please click here" link at the bottom of their message. I typed my message and hit "send" at which point I was greeted with a happy error message that sent my message into the heaven of dead interweb things. Crap. But I had to get a better answer, so I loaded the online feedback form again (as a completely new issue, without the "reply" feature) and sent another, shorter message:

I have understood that the Internet@TV applications are not controlled by Samsung. Where could I ask the schedule for the Facebook application, improvements for the YouTube application and availability of the Flickr application? Are the manufacturers of the applications listed out somewhere?

Now, with the first sentence I show that I have read their message. However, I feel they could've done more for me in the first place, so the rest is actually just for that. The message is very simple, you shouldn't have a problem understanding what I want. Their response:

Thank you for contacting the Samsung customer support. Unfortunately we do not have a list of contact information. One way is to try in the TV, at the applications in question, pressing the red key of the remote, to see if the information comes up. Finding information from the internet is a little difficult for us as the sites in question have been blocked from us at work so we cannot reach them for getting any information.

Whaa-aaa-aat?! Samsung has installed some fancy firewalls into the desktops of their customer support people to prevent them from doing their work?! I cannot believe this, these guys are totally useless!

But as Samsung does not have any information on their own services, I figured I'd ask Flickr if they knew anything about the Flickr application I was missing. At least I could tell Samsung later I had tried. So I sent them a polite message with the disclaimer that I think this is Samsung's problem and I'm only asking them because Samsung is being most unhelpful. After exchanging a couple of messages to really make sure what I want they escalated my case over to a "senior representative in an effort to obtain the best answer". Cool, now I was being treated like a human being! However, Flickr's answer was expected:

I am very sorry for the trouble. We have no direct information on Samsung's system or interface, if you are still having trouble with their App list, please contact Samsung directly.

Cannot blame them... I'm still a happy Flickr user, however unhappy Samsung user I'm turning.

So... If the Finnish Samsung staff cannot help me, surely their US counterparts would have much better resources at their disposal? I figured I'd try the 24/7 Live Support Chat they've got. Here's a screenshot of the discussion that followed -- please click to enlarge:

In case you did not just click to enlarge the chat I'll recap it. Almost before I can start explaining my problem, they ask whether I bought the device from the US at all and explain that they do not have the training for non-US models. I tried asking if my player is not sold in US but never got a straight answer. I was only told that the range of applications available "depends upon the Internet Service and also the local Samsung providers". Providers? What providers? Providers of catering services, dental services or escort services? I'm pretty sure the people at my internet service provider support will just politely laugh at me if I go to them complaining that my blu-ray player has lousy applications. The support person also pasted me the http://samsung.com/finland link a couple of times and then actually gave me a new phone number, one that cannot be found from Samsung Finland web site, also. I quit the conversation as I realized that it wouldn't take me anywhere if I just read some rather generic template answers.

So... At this point it had been more than a couple of weeks since I contacted the Samsung support for the first time. I decided to send them yet another, well defined, simple question:

Which party decides what applications are accepted into the Samsung App Store? Could I please have the contact information for this party?

Their response:

Thank you for contacting the Samsung customer support. Differentprogram manufacturers make individually deals with Samsung Electronics. We at the support do not have the contact information for that party.

Now, WHAT THE F***? Translate the above and you get: "WE DO NOT HAVE OUR OWN INTERNAL CORPORATE NUMBERS AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO GET THEM FOR YOU. ALSO I WON'T ASK MY SUPERIORS." Usually, when a customer approaches the customer supports and asks if they could help him, the support says "Please hold while we jump through hoops to find the information you need!" That's what they are paid for. I'm sure they just sent me that message and happily clicked "problem solved, case closed". Or they will click on that button in a couple of days as the form behind the "If you are not satisfied with the answer we provided, please click here" link is still broken. (As is, by the way, the link to the Yahoo Help I mentioned before.) I wouldn't want to tell them how to do their job, but I just can't belive this s***. They are basically saying that they have got a service of which NO ONE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR. What are you supposed to do with people like this??!

Ubuntu Netbook Edition

2010-07-13T20:56:00.005+03:00

It all started when I wanted to know what www-address does my new blu-ray player contact to at start up. That should've been easy enough: just install Wireshark and listen to the traffic in the air. After all, it's my WLAN so I'm free to tap it and can even turn the encryption off temporarily. Unfortunately it turns out that virtually no Windows Wi-Fi card driver supports the so-called promiscuous mode which means listening to traffic not addressed to the listening host. Luckily almost all Linux drivers do support it.

So, I figured I'd install some live distribution of Linux into a memory card, boot the computer from that, install Wireshark and get the job done. Fair enough, that was rather easy. I followed the instructions at the Ubuntu Netbook Edition download page, edited the BIOS settings so that booting from an USB device is allowed and so that something called the "quick boot" is disabled. Then I only had to figure out that to actually boot from an USB device (or the card reader) you'd have to hit ESC when the BIOS was starting up.

Now, the Ubuntu started fine, "apt-get install wireshark" worked perfectly and I managed to capture all sorts of traffic caused by the blu-ray player. Job well done, end of story, let's go home? Not quite. As we say in Finland, appetite comes with eating. I had had a small bite of Linux and now I wanted more. I figured I'd start with the screen resolution: it was set to 1024x768, which meant it was badly distorted because the native resolution of the screen is 1366x768. So I looked for some instructions for installing new drivers for the video chip, Intel GMA500, and found this one.

After doing the "sudo add-apt-repository" and "sudo apt-get" commands I restarted the computer, booted to Ubuntu again -- and was greeted with a white screen and an error message. Obviously the drivers didn't work that well. The Ubuntu crash reporting application refused to send an error report as there was a few hundred megabytes of outdated packages installed. So I tried updating everything using the Synaptic package manager, but the system brought it to my attention that there wasn't enough space for these updates in the memory card where I had installed Ubuntu.

At this point I should've stopped, booted back to Windows and erased Ubuntu from the memory card, but instead I got a better idea: I'd install Ubuntu to a free partition on the hard disk. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot of things. For one, the Ubuntu Netbook Edition installer apparently overwrote the master boot record of the hard drive, rendering Windows unusable -- trying to boot to Windows would only bring up an error message and a recommendation to re-install the entire system. Right. Luckily ASUS had added a hidden 10 GB partition into the hard drive with an image of a working system. Also, it's just a netbook so I didn't have much stuff in it that I couldn't reinstall back later. A few photos maybe, but I wouldn't miss those.

So, the system restore can be launched at the boot up time and I did that. Surprisingly, it did absolutely nothing, besides probably erasing all my data. Ubuntu cannot read the mangled Windows partition either, otherwise I would've rescued all my data beforehand, of course. OK, so, now I had no Windows but an Ubuntu with a terrible resolution. Surely the video chip drivers would work once I updated all the outdated packages? Nope. I was greeted with the same white screen, and this time I didn't even get an error message. I could use it by launching a terminal and other programs from that but it isn't that much fun.

So now I've got a crippled netbook with a Linux system running from a memory card and no Windows and none of the data I previously had on my Windows installation. Luckily the Ubuntu on the memory card works fine, except for the bad resolution... Moral of the story? Don't install Ubuntu Netbook Edition on your Asus EeePC 1101HA if you plan to keep your Windows too. Also don't go messing around with the video chip drivers. Just use Ubuntu from a memory card or an USB disk if you must, but don't go beyond that.

Samsung BD-C6500 and its apps

2010-06-05T21:11:00.022+03:00

I received some extra money so I decided to invest in a Blu-Ray player. After reading reviews and reviewing technical details of several players I ended up buying a Samsung BD-C6500. This decision was influenced by the fact that I've already got a Samsung TV and that the BD-C6500 has a wireless network connection built in.

I have only watched one Blu-Ray movie and one DVD so far and the player has been working fine. It's also nice to be able to control the basic features of the TV with the BD player's remote control and vice versa. I also managed to get file sharing to work from my netbook with little effort, allowing me to view my photos from the TV screen. The player does not ship with an HDMI cable so one had to be bought separately, but as I understand it this is the case with all Blu-Ray players.

The BD-C6500 has a feature called Internet@TV. There's no web browser but some dedicated applications for certain web services and some simple games. The total number of games and applications combined is 17. You should be able to download more but I cannot see any applications in the store that haven't been installed already. Could be a regional issue, maybe there are more applications available in the US than here in Finland -- I don't know. Anyway, here's a photo of the main application menu:

So, from top-left to bottom-right: YouTube, Picasa, Twitter, AccuWeather, History Channel, Dracula's Coffin, Getty Images, Google Maps, Kurakku, Mahjongg Fruits, Memory, Quizz Master, Rock Swap Adventures, Sudoku, Texas Hold'em, USA Today and Facebook.

And here are photos of the applications in that order (except for Twitter, to which I do not have an account, and Getty Images, which refused to work when I was taking these photos. Sorry about the layout, Blogger just won't let me format the images nicely. And there's some Finnish language in at least the YouTube photo/screenshot, don't be alarmed. Anyway, click to zoom in:

As you can see, the Facebook app will be available in Apr.. wait, what? It's June already! Maybe it means April 2011? Anyway... The apps are not too pretty and look like they could be used on, say, a mobile phone as-is. My main problem with the games, though, is that they are completely stateless. You can't save your progress and there are no high score lists. Most of them don't seem to have any sounds and none has any music, so they may get old pretty quickly.

Google Maps works fine. However, there's no zoom-in or zoom-out animation, just a spinning "please wait" symbol, so the experience is not quite as smooth as it could be. You can look at a map or satellite imagery just as you could on a regular computer.

The YouTube application looks strange because it seems that all videos have the ranking of just one star. This is probably because YouTube recently changed its rating scale from 1 to 5 stars to just "like" or "dislike". Also, I could not find a free search interface so you are pretty much stuck with whatever videos the different categories offer you. Of course, there's the My Favorites category which should contain the videos you have favorited in the past, but I did not test it yet.

Custom style sheet for xkcd

2010-05-23T13:12:00.008+03:00

In February I wrote about custom style sheets. Basically they allow you to modify any web site's visual appearance to your liking. So here is a custom style sheet file for the xkcd web comic for you to download. Here are the deployment instructions for Opera again:

Direct Opera to xkcd.com
Hit F12
Select Edit Site Preferences...
Choose the Display tab
Into the My style sheet box, select the CSS file you hopefully just downloaded
Hit OK, then refresh xkcd.com.

Here is a screenshot of an xkcd comic before the custom style sheet:

And here's a picture after installing the custom style sheet. Notice how the comic now fully fits into the first screenful:

The top bar has been moved below the comic and the title-text of the image has been rendered visible. Some elements have also been made transparent so that they are less distracting.

New GMA500 drivers

2010-05-20T23:12:00.002+03:00

After installing, trying and removing Portal yesterday I thought of the graphics card drivers and found out that there's a new version out. Intel calls it 5.0.0.2024 which is rather strange since the previous version was called 5.2.1!? This driver still has a newer date than the previous one and in the device manager it appears as version 8.14.10.2024 which is greater than before (8.14.10.2020). No visible improvement in the Windows Experience Index figures though, but go install it anyway.

Portal

2010-05-19T21:43:00.003+03:00

For a few more days, until May 24th, the mega-popular game of Portal is free on Steam. I downloaded it and tried it on my Asus EeePC 1101HA and found out, less surprisingly, that it is entirely unplayable with this hardware. I kind of guessed that when the Steam launcher displayed a message that the Valve database has never even heard of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 500 graphics card. The game loads for ages, the sounds are jerky and the frame rate is about 1 frame per second, even with the lowest possible quality settings. Oh well, at least it has been tested now. However, I have no doubts that with proper hardware Portal is a great game anyway.

Software bugs and nerd humor

2010-05-11T19:21:00.004+03:00

I recently came across a heisenbug: a software bug which disappeared or changed its nature when I added debug output into the program. The Wikipedia article explains other interesting types of bugs as well, such as a schroedinbug, bohrbug and phase of the Moon bug. Phase of the Moon bug links to another article, Time formatting and storage bugs. This article unfortunaly omits the favorite example of many: the Ubuntu bug #248619 where OpenOffice.org would not print on Tuesdays!? Matt Zimmerman writes that it's a great example of the aforementioned concept of bohrbug.

Related to bugs, the Global Nerdy blog recently compiled a list of New Programming Jargon. The list contains such gems as hindenbug ("A catastrophic data-destroying bug. Oh, the humanity!") and Loch Ness Monster Bug ("A bug that isn’t reproducible and has been sighted by only one person."). :)

Case: Lots of Flickr traffic

2010-04-20T13:47:00.005+03:00

One of my photos, the Empire State Pigeon (also shown to the right), was recently featured in the official Flickr Blog. The Flickr Blog has the property that it is featured on the main page of Flickr, at least for the logged in users. Now, as Flickr is a high traffic site, anything on the front page is likely to get high traffic too, and so did my photo.

I posted the photo to Flickr about 19 months ago. In that time it had gathered some 5000 views, which I found an impressive number. However, when the blog post was published, the view count surged all the way up to 30000 in just a few days! Below is the graph that shows the daily traffic statistics before, during and after the event. Click to zoom to the full size view:

The graph shows that the photo was getting a steady amount of some thirty views a day and then, on April 14, it suddenly got 11133 views, 106 comments and 468 favorites. The next day it got even more views, 12635, but way less comments (8) and favorites (40). Why?

Well, that can be explained by drilling into the referrer statistics: on April 14, only 4784 of the 11000 visitors came through Flickr.com. Almost as many, 4594, came from another high traffic site called Reddit.com to where someone had posted a link to the photo. On April 15, 9798 visitors came via Reddit and only 517 via Flickr, as by then the Flickr Blog already had new posts. Reddit users don't necessarily have Flickr accounts and thus cannot leave comments or favorite the photos.

Another difference I observed in the behavior of Flickr visitors and Reddit visitors was that Flickr visitors looked at my other photos too. Thus the aggregate views over all of my photos was a lot higher on April 14 than it was on April 15, even though that one photo got more visitors on April 15:

(And now for something completely different. If those graphs above felt dry, try the GraphJam site instead!)

Tools for web developers

2010-04-06T18:04:00.002+03:00

A handy tool for web developers is Dynamic Drive's Gradient Image Maker. Creating gradient images is a basic thing that a web developer has to do and there's no need to fire up Photoshop for something like that. Microsoft Paint can be used to create gradients, too, but a dedicated tool beats that hands down. :)

Another nifty tool, possibly for selecting the colors for your gradient, is Iconico's ColorPic. It can be used to pick a color anywhere from your screen. It's got an adjustable magnifier, you can nudge the mouse cursor pixel by pixel using the arrow keys, and you can select the average color of a small area of pixels in case selecting the color of a single pixel is not desired!

Firefox Personas

2010-03-20T14:02:00.003+02:00

The newest version of the Firefox browser, 3.6, offers a new, nifty little feature called Personas. A Persona is like a skin that Firefox can wear. Personas only change the background and not, for example, the buttons. On the Firefox Personas site you can try the personas by just hovering your mouse cursor over the Persona image and take it into use by clicking "Wear It". It couldn't be any simpler! There are already thousands of Personas from which to choose. I am using different Personas on different computers. So far they are these:

Opera 10.51 RC1

2010-03-15T01:51:00.004+02:00

A month ago I wrote about Opera 10.50 beta. Now the 10.50 has already passed the beta stage and what's more, Opera 10.51 Release Candidate 1 for Windows has just been released. This version contains performance improvements and an even better JavaScript engine, especially what comes to memory management. These features are of course very welcome to all netbook users. :)

Image processing software

2010-03-09T12:36:00.003+02:00

When you open an image file in Windows 7 it opens in Windows Photo Viewer by default. It can be used to view and rotate images but nothing else, so you need a better piece of software if you intend to crop, resize, adjust or otherwise edit your photos.

IrfanView does all this. It is a piece of freeware that I have used for as long as I have used the Opera browser and the NoteTab text editor, ten years or so. The user interface is minimalistic and the program is controlled using the menus or the shortcut keys. IrfanView can be used to batch process an entire folder full of images or just one image at a time. It can read dozens of file formats and write an impressive number of formats too. There are also lots of plugins for it bringing in some extra functionality. They are really easy to install because they are provided as one big installer file from the IrfanView homepage. What's also very important for netbook users is that IrfanView is a lightweight and fast program.

Hint: If you work with images that have transparency, set the IrfanView background color to pink (Options | Properties/Settings... | Viewing | Main window color). Then you will know exactly where the transparency starts and where it ends, as pink is featured in really few pictures, unlike black and white.

Text editors

2010-03-07T01:34:00.005+02:00

So far I have introduced you to alternative office software, browsers, instant messaging software and PDF readers. Today it's text editors meant for plain text.

So, Windows ships with Notepad. It's as simple as a text editor can get. A good text editor can save you time by having useful shortcuts, being able to have several files open at once, allowing you to do search and replace on several files at once, allowing you to use regular expressions when searching and replacing, etc.

All this and much more can be done using NoteTab Pro. It costs $29.95 but is well worth every penny. There is also a free version called NoteTab Light which is a very capable program too -- a comparison of features between the different versions can be found here.

I myself have been an avid NoteTab user for years already, not least because it has got its own scripting language which can be used to program the application to do almost anything you can think of. Automatic reformatting of any text you just copied to clipboard from another program? Consider it done. HTML table wizard? Piece of cake. FTP integration? No problem. The scripts are called clips and organized into clipbooks. The program comes with many ready made clipbooks and more can be downloaded.

NoteTab has also got a very active and helpful community at the Yahoo! Groups. It is divided into a general section, clips, and www-authoring.

The only thing that NoteTab lacks is syntax highlighting for other languages than HTML. If you need that, I can warmly recommend an open source program called SciTE.

Alternative PDF readers

2010-03-05T14:30:00.000+02:00

Previously I have written about alternatives to Internet Explorer and alternatives to Windows Messenger. This time it's alternatives to the Adobe Reader.

Foxit Reader is a small and fast PDF reader. It is commercial software but the basic version is free and has all the main features and, in some aspeceven more than Adobe Reader has.

Sumatra PDF is another slim and quick reader. It is designed so that it does not require any special installation procedures and can be used from a USB stick. It is also open source, if that's what you prefer.

Both of these are good alternatives to the Adobe Reader, so it's a personal choice between them. Either one works faster than the Adobe Reader, and the software that you are using on your netbook can never be too fast.

Pidgin instant messaging software

2010-03-03T14:06:00.002+02:00

Windows ships with the Messenger instant messaging (IM) software. I, too, use Messenger, along with ICQ that I have even been using for a much longer time.

A while ago I found out that my Messenger was taking ridiculous amounts of CPU time, slowing down the entire system. It appears that it was because of (some of) the advertisements that the main view displays so I started looking for another IM software and found Pidgin. It is a lot faster than Messenger and does not display any advertisements. It also supports multiple IM protocols, i.e. you can use both ICQ and Messenger using the same piece of software. Google Talk and many other protocols are supported too, so give it a try. :)

PS. Related to alternative software: a month ago I wrote about alternative web browsers!

Keyboard woes

2010-03-01T20:33:00.000+02:00

Some time ago I wrote that I bought a Bluetooth dongle and a Bluetooth mouse. Now I can plug my netbook into my TV and go sit on the sofa and still control the mouse. But how about keyboard? Well, surely there are Bluetooth keyboards too, I thought and went browsing a couple of resources, Hintaseuranta (literally 'Price monitoring') that tracks the prices of several retailers and Verkkokauppa.com, a large retailer which is not included in Hintaseuranta. They both revealed the ugly truth: the prices of Bluetooth keyboards start from around 60 euros, while you could get a cordless keyboard with a proprietary connection for around 20 euros! D'oh. I wouldn't want to get another dongle to fill my netbook's USB ports but I also wouldn't want to pay thrice the money for a Bluetooth keyboard, so I don't know what I'm going to do.

In this light the Asus EeeKeyboard sounds like a nice living room computer: it's a full featured PC in the case of a keyboard! They also claim that you are able to connect it to your TV wirelessly. Sounds nice. :)

Synergy

2010-02-27T14:47:00.001+02:00

If you are using more than one computer on the same desk simultaneously, such as when using your netbook next to your desktop computer, you will find Synergy a very useful program. It shares the mouse and keyboard of one computer to the rest. The mouse moves from one computer screen to another just by moving it "over the edge" and the keyboard control is switched simultaneously. Synergy uses your existing local area network so you don't need any special hardware either. Here are some screenshots: the first two are from a Windows XP computer (called Mjollnir) that acts as the server, i.e. shares its keyboard and mouse. The final screenshot is from a Windows 7 netbook (called Hummingbird) that acts as a client and can then receive commands from the Windows XP server.

Disable login prompt

2010-02-25T00:48:00.000+02:00

A quick tip on how to speed up the system when it is waking up from hibernate or sleep mode. If you are the only person that has physical access to your laptop or if you trust everyone else that does, you might want to consider disabling the Windows password prompt. In Windows 7 this is done in Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Power Options > Require a password on wakeup. Then click "Change settings that are currently unavailable" and then select "Don't require a password" and finally "Save changes". Now Windows won't delay you with password prompts when waking up. Plus, you can always lock your computer any time with Windows key + L.

Laptop sleeve

2010-02-23T00:23:00.000+02:00

The Asus EeePC 1101HA did not ship with a protective bag so I had to buy one separately. Naturally you don't want your laptop to roll around in your backpack without any extra protection at all. It turned out to be a bit tricky as this laptop is 11.6" in diameter. All the bags in the market seemed to be have been designed either for larger or for smaller laptops!

After visiting about three other stores I finally wandered into Clas Ohlson and found what I was looking for: a neoprene sleeve, for less than 15 €. The brand name is "Aldata". It says in the case that it is designed for 10" laptops but I found that it still fits the EeePC 1101HA perfectly. It is also nice to be able to use the laptop without actually removing it from the sleeve, as there are two zippers going around it. The sleeve also contains handles that may be left outside the sleeve for carrying the laptop around when inside a building or for short distances anyway.

HD videos

2010-02-19T22:17:00.005+02:00

Slashdot recently featured an article called How to play HD video on a netbook by PCPro. It includes buying a codec for about $10 (although someone commented on the original story that Shark007's codecs do the same thing for free). However, I'm happy to report that the Asus EeePC 1101HA plays HD videos out of the box! I tried it with a 1920×816 (1080p), 23.967 FPS trailer of The Bourne Ultimatum, found from H264info.com. As is mentioned in the PCPro article too, some stutter in the video is inevitable, especially in the scenes where a lot is happening at once, but basically it is perfectly watchable anyway. The sound plays very smoothly and there was no stutter to be heard.

inSSIDer

2010-02-17T16:35:00.000+02:00

If you are using WLAN, this piece of software is for you: inSSIDer. It shows you the signal strengths and channels of the wireless networks visible to your computer. With inSSIDer it is very easy to see competing networks, i.e. networks that are on the same channel and thus interfere with each other. Many people just leave their network to operate on the default channel which also contributes to the risk of using the same channel as your neighbor. inSSIDer also draws a graph about the signal strengths as functions of time so you can, for example, walk around your apartment with your laptop and determine if your WLAN reaches every corner of the place equally well or if you should move your access point to ensure better reception. I have also tested that inSSIDer works on Windows XP and on Windows 7.

Oh, and one more thing. What is this "SSID" that's highlighted in the name of the program; why not just "Insider"? Wikipedia explains: SSID stands for service set identifier, which is just a fancy name for "the name of a wireless network".

Sounds

2010-02-15T02:03:00.000+02:00

I noticed that I haven't written anything about the speakers or the general quality of audio regarding the Asus EeePC 1101HA, so I guess it's time to fix that. In short, the speakers are no better than with any other laptop you may have used. They are definitely not designed for listening to music. They do well enough when playing speech driven games such as Monkey Island which only has ambient background music, but otherwise you're better off just muting the device altogether.

That being said, I find that the netbook's audio jack's output quality is from an entirely different world. Plug it into a proper amplifier and speakers and I, for one, couldn't tell it from a more professional audio source. :) The same goes for proper headphones.

While we are talking about audio, here are a few links to Spotify songs that you may use to either torture or gentle your ears, depending on your speakers (and personal taste):

System Of A Down – Vicinity Of Obscenity

Queen – Don't Stop Me Now

Trio Töykeät – Pizzitaxi

The Offspring – What Happened to You?

Password management

2010-02-14T17:51:00.003+02:00

Many of us have dozens of passwords to tens of different services: emails, web forums, workplace computers, games, etc. It is often quite difficult to remember all of them and as a result people use the same password in many services. This is a bad habit because now if your password gets stolen from one service, the attacker gains access to your other systems too. Many people also use very weak passwords, something like "qwerty" or "12345", which are easy to guess just by trying out the most common alternatives.

Luckily there are solutions to these problems: password manager programs. The program saves and encrypts all your passwords behind one master password. That one still needs to be a strong one and you need to memorize it, but after you have set up the system, that's the only password you are ever going to have to remember again. I have been using KeePass and its cross platform version KeePassX. I won't bother writing a full featured review as I just found a recent KeePass review by soft2review, so if you are not yet convinced that you need KeePass, go read it!

Command & Conquer

2010-02-13T16:28:00.007+02:00

Netbooks are not known for their ability to run new games but luckily there are good, a bit older games that may still be entirely playable and enjoyable. I just learned that Electronic Arts has released Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (1995), Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996) and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (2000) as freeware games -- Tiberian Sun was released yesterday. They can be downloaded from CommandAndConquer.com.

Edit/Add: Here's a Spotify link to Frank Klepacki's music. Klepacki is the man who made the Command & Conquer soundtracks!

Opera 10.50 beta

2010-02-11T20:52:00.001+02:00

Opera Software just released a new version of Opera browser, 10.50 beta. It seems that they have borrowed some ideas from Google Chrome. The user interface is more minimalistic than ever, providing more space for the actual web pages. Individual tabs or windows can be made "private", i.e. Opera forgets everything that has happened in them after they are closed. The JavaScript engine is claimed to be significantly faster than before, and it just looks nice on Windows 7. :)

Custom style sheets

2010-02-11T13:13:00.000+02:00

About a week ago I made a post about browsers, namely alternatives to Internet Explorer, and I recommended Opera. I also promised some tips on how to get more out of it, so here goes.

In a netbook the screen space is usually quite limited. However, many sites are designed with larger screen resolutions in mind and may have, for example, excessive margins or too large navigation menus. You may not even have thought about it before, but wouldn't it be quite nice to customize the layout of some sites a bit? With most browsers, including Opera, this is actually possible. You will need to know some hypertext markup language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS) but that's pretty much all it takes. If you use style sheets created by other people then you don't even have to know those.

Anyway. Take geocaching.com. The individual cache pages actually have a lot of clutter: buttons, linebreaks, information that is just not used. Here's a screenshot of a cache page as they typically look like:

You'll notice that there is so much extra information that the actual cache description barely even starts on the first screenful. Using a custom style sheet you can strip the unwanted elements out of the page:

How many differences can you spot and which version of the page would you rather use? To achive this result I used this style sheet. You may copy it and save it anywhere in your computer. How to take this file into use then? Here are the instructions for Opera:

Direct Opera to www.geocaching.com
Hit F12
Select Edit Site Preferences...
Choose the Display tab
Into the My style sheet box, select the CSS file you hopefully just downloaded
Hit OK, then refresh geocaching.com

Presto! Your geocaching.com browsing experience has vastly improved. :)

Geolocation; Street View in Finland

2010-02-09T22:26:00.000+02:00

Tangentially related to nothing in particular, I felt like sharing an interesting service I just found: Geolocation in Firefox. Based on the WLAN access points the computer sees, it is scaringly accurate at best. I have tried it in two separate urban locations and in both the coordinates were extremely accurate: the margin of error was probably less than 100 meters. Just follow the link above, click on the "Give it a try!" link, and then click "Where am I?" below the map that opens.

Note that when I say "extremely accurate" I don't mean that it could even be compared to the 3—4 meters that you can get with a GPS receiver. However, it is extremely accurate in the sense that traditionally you would get the location of a computer based on its IP address, and then you are lucky if you even get the city or state right.

In other news, Google launched Street View for Finland today. In case you haven't heard of Street View, it is a supplement to Google Maps that you can use to virtually drive inside cities. They have taken thousands, if not millions, of photographs of many major cities and composed seamless landscapes out of them, so why don't you take a while and go for a tour in Helsinki? :)

Utilities for Windows XP

2010-02-09T11:15:00.000+02:00

While I'm running Windows 7 on my netbook, I still use Windows XP on my desktop computer. I'd now like to share links to a couple of my favorite utility programs for Windows XP.

Firstly, Taskbar Shuffle. Picture this: you have been using your computer for a few hours and you've got a dozen of programs open: your browser, email client, instant messenger, a few Windows Explorer windows, and so on. Now, your browser crashes and you need to restart it. Suppose it was the first program you started after you booted your computer. Now, the browser's icon is moved in the taskbar from the leftmost side to all the way right, after all your other programs. I know it distracts me when suddenly a program icon is not located where I expect it to be. This is the situation where Taskbar Shuffle comes to rescue. It is a very simple program that allows you to reorder the icons of the running programs in the taskbar.

Another neat piece of utility software is Shell Enhancer. It also does what the name suggests: adds features to the Windows user interface. It has got a lot more features than Taskbar Shuffle but it also stays nice and quiet until you need it. My favorite of the long list of features is the ability to pin any window on top. Simple but effective. Another one is the ability to make any window transparent by any amount.

ReadyBoost

2010-02-06T14:33:00.000+02:00

Trying to improve the performance of my netbook led me to try out the Windows ReadyBoost feature. ReadyBoost is a feature that utilizes a memory stick or a memory card as a fast cache, in addition to using the slow hard disk. This works because flash memory is usually faster than a hard drive, at least in random reads/writes. So, I used my USB memory for a while and, while I did not commit any actual measurings, I felt the computer was indeed more responsive, especially when multiple programs were running simultaneously.

Because a memory stick sticking out from the side of the netbook is not a very nice feature I went ahead and bought a fast SDHC card (Class 6, 8 GB, ~14 €) to be permanently stuck into the memory card slot (which, by the way, in Asus EeePC 1101HA's case only supports SD, SDHC and MMC cards and not, for example, MemoryStick cards..). Then I formatted the card into the new exFAT file system and gave it to Windows to be used as a ReadyBoost disk.

You may think that this is a waste of money and time but as far as I can see it is never a bad idea to buy SD cards. Firstly, many, if not most, digital cameras support those. Secondly, 8 GB is quite a lot of space, so the card could well be used for copying files from one computer to another. Thirdly, you could just use it like any other drive in your computer and, for example, install another operating system (namely Linux or Chrome) to it. Running an OS from a flash disk should save the battery because flash disks only consume a fraction of power compared to the regular, spinning disks. So who knows, I might do that some day. And if I do, I will be posting about my experiences here.

Browsers

2010-02-03T13:46:00.000+02:00

I have been using the Opera browser for ten years or so and still find it to be the best there is. Opera has had all the best features, such as mouse gestures and tabbed browsing, long before Firefox or Internet Explorer. What's more, they are built in so you don't even need to download dozens of plugins to make it usable in the first place. I'm also using Opera Mini in my cellphone.

That being said, I think Firefox is a great browser too. I couldn't, for example, do any web development without the Firebug plugin anymore. Adblock Plus is an absolutely crucial plugin for any Firefox user as it blocks the ads -- netbooks usually don't have screen space to waste, nor do they like heavy, flashy web pages.

Chrome is a fast and light weight browser by Google. It, too, supports plugins. There's a post at the Google Chrome Blog that walks you through with those. Chrome has got a highly optimized JavaScript engine so those modern web applications such as Google Docs should be pretty fast with it.

So, my point? There are alternatives to Internet Explorer, and as a netbook owner you should definitely try them out and see if they perform better than IE. Lifehacker's blog post from a couple of months ago compares the browsers. In the end, IE gets the lowest score of them all. They were the first to admit that the measurements are not very scientific or too accurate but I do think their results bear at least some significance.

If I were you I would now start using Opera because a) it is, in my opinion, the best and b) because I will post some Opera tips later.

Tales of Monkey Island

2010-02-01T13:00:00.001+02:00

In my previous post I made a note that while the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition does run on the Asus EeePC 1101HA, you still have to fall back to the antiquated graphics at times because the graphics chip, Intel GMA500, just can't take it all. On this background I felt a little uncomfortable buying the Tales of Monkey Island because that one is fully in 3D, while the Secret of Monkey Island is completely in 2D. So I thought that if the computer cannot run a 2D game smoothly, could it run a 3D game at all? If nothing else then I could've played the Tales on my desktop computer anyway.

Luckily, I was worried in vain. Sure, you need to tune the game's graphical quality settings way down. The scale is from 1 to 10 and the game becomes playable at quality level 3 or 4. Tuning the resolution down to 800x600 is not a bad idea either, but after that the game works perfectly! The story and humor are still guaranteed Monkey Island quality and the voice actors as good as ever. I recommend.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

2010-01-31T05:12:00.000+02:00

In my review of the Asus EeePC 1101HA I noted that it had a pretty lousy Windows Experience Index score at the gaming graphics section. This, of course, does not stop me from trying out some games anyway.

First on the line was The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition which I had bought from Steam but which refused to work on my desktop computer because of the Athlon XP 3000+ processor. That's actually the first game I have ever run into to mean business with the system requirements, "Intel Pentium 4 3GHz or AMD Athlon 64 3000+". Odd, since it's just a point and click adventure, but anyway.

So, the Special Edition is a remake of the original game that was published in 1990. The game features one Guybrush Threepwood, a young wannabe pirate, trying to become a real pirate. The remake contains exactly the same plot and everything as the original game, but all the lines are spoken out loud and the graphics have been modernized. You can, in fact, toggle between the old and new graphics on the fly with a single key press. This feature does come in handy when playing with the netbook, because while it can run the game well in many of the scenes, it becomes unplayable if there are any fire of water shown on the screen. The game is well worth the money anyway and should give you some good laughs. :)

Windows + P

2010-01-30T08:19:00.000+02:00

Windows 7 introduces some new shortcuts compared to the earlier versions of Windows. My absolute favorite of the new shortcuts is Windows key + P. This allows you to choose the presentation mode, i.e. attach or detach an external display, such as a projector, a TV or a regular computer display. In the previous versions of Windows there was no simple way to do it (well, according to my definition of simple -- of course I know how to do it, but anyway). Windows 7 makes it extremely simple.

Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 review & X-Mouse Button Control

2010-01-29T17:01:00.000+02:00

I started writing this post and noticed that I was never getting to the actual point, so here it is in the first paragraph. Software of the day: X-Mouse Button Control. Why? Read on if you are still interested.

I believe that everyone prefers a real mouse to a touchpad. I do too, and with a portable computer I wanted the mouse to be portable as well, so I bought a cordless one. More specifically a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, since I had bought a Bluetooth dongle too.

The mouse is quite small but feels good and it comes with a neat protective bag. I have two main problems with the mouse, though: firstly, it only has one extra button and secondly, Microsoft drivers do not even support this mouse at all! It is a problem recognized by Microsoft too, and I doubt they will be doing much about it. The extra button, that is on the left side of the mouse, is set to do the "Back" action by default. That's all nice and well but I use mouse gestures with my browsers so I don't do anything with a back button.

With my desktop computer I use a mouse that has got two buttons on the side. I have binded those to Ctrl and Shift, because you often need to do ctrl-clicks or shift-drags or something similar. It is a Logitech mouse and I was able to do that with Logitech software.

But, as I already wrote, the Microsoft software does not support the Bluetooth Mouse 5000. I started to look for another piece of software that I could use to rebind my mouse button functions and found X-Mouse Button Control. And it turned out to be even better than I expected! Not only are you able to rebind all the buttons, you can do that on a per-program basis. In a Media Player you could have the wheel adjust the volume and in all other programs to scroll. In games you can adjust the buttons to whatever key combinations you please, etc. So don't wait anymore, go download it!

New Windows Experience Index figures

2010-01-28T10:07:00.000+02:00

When writing my previous blog entry about the graphics driver I found out that there's another new version of the driver available. In the Device Manager this version knows the number 8.14.10.2020 but on Intel's site it is known as version 5.2.1. Anyway, this update improved the Windows Experience Index figures again: the rating for gaming graphics rose from 2.4 to 2.7 and the rating for desktop graphics from 4.3 to 4.5. :)

Update your drivers

2010-01-27T11:47:00.000+02:00

The Windows Update is a good way of keeping the system up to date, but it doesn't always contain all the updates, especially for device drivers. One of the key components of a computer is the graphics chip, Intel GMA500 in the EeePC 1101HA's case. It is not a very powerful chip so any performance improvements for it are welcome. The newest version when I got my netbook was 8.14.10.2019 but the Windows update only offers the version 8.14.10.1015 or something like that. It may not sound like a big jump but it actually improved the Windows Experience Index for desktop graphics from 2.9 to 4.3! Mind you, the scale is from 1.0 to 7.9. The number for gaming graphics was also improved, although very slightly, from 2.3 to 2.4.

To check the version of your driver, open Device Manager, locate 'Display adapters' and double click the Inter(R) Graphics Media Accelerator 500 below it. The driver version reads on the Driver tab.

If your driver is not up to date, direct your browser to the Intel Download Center. Download the win7.zip, extract its contents into a temporary location and run the Setup application. This installs the driver after a few dialogs. The screen will blink during the install, so don't be alarmed. When the setup completes check back in the Device Manager that it really updated the driver. You may now run the Windows Experience Index benchmark yourself to see the improved figures. :)

Uninstall Microsoft Office, use OpenOffice.org instead

2010-01-26T12:24:00.000+02:00

At least my EeePC 1101HA came with a pre-installed trial version of Microsoft Office. It turned out to be nagware so I uninstalled it almost immediately and replaced it with a free alternative, OpenOffice.org. I haven't tried if Excel macros work at all with it but other than that it should fulfill all your office suite needs. It doesn't even feature the stupid ribbon-interface that the newest versions of Microsoft Office have.

Of course, if you have always got an internet access available you might as well keep your documents online. For that I recommend Google Docs. It is really nice to be able to access your documents from any computer with an internet connection. You can also share your documents, spreadsheets and presentations to others for collaboration. Import and export to and from the most popular formats are available too.

Tweaking Windows Aero

2010-01-25T21:30:00.000+02:00

In my previous post I noted that some bells and whistles of the user interface, Windows Aero, are best toggled off, because the Asus EeePC1101HA just doesn't have the oomph to run them smoothly. Here I'll describe what I have done with those settings.

First, go to Control Panel. Select 'Performance Information and Tools' and then 'Adjust visual effects' from the left hand side of the window. Choose 'Custom' and uncheck at least the following boxes:

Animate controls and elements inside windows
Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
Animations in the taskbar and Start Menu
Fade or slide menus into view
Fade or slide ToolTips into view
Fade out menu items after clicking
Save taskbar thumbnail previews
Slide open combo boxes

Then hit 'OK' and voilá, your UI should feel a lot faster already. :)

Asus EeePC 1101HA review

2010-01-24T22:12:00.000+02:00

I wrote this review when I had had the netbook for a month and published it elsewhere in Finnish. People seemed to like it so I have now translated it into English.

***

I have had this netbook for a month now and I've been pleased with it. I've never really liked the keyboards of laptop computers but writing with this one can even be a joy, even though some ergonomic bending would still be nice. Only darkness causes problems: the keyboard has no backlighting and it is very difficult to see the markings in the glow of the screen only. Good details, on the other hand, are the placements of the Delete and Ctrl keys: right in the upper right corner and in the lower left corner, respectively. After using this layout you will be at loss with any other laptop keyboards.

I believe that the EeePC 1101HA comes in two versions: one with a Bluetooth receiver/transmitter and the other without. Because I did not read the specs carefully enough I happened to get one without, so I had to buy a separate Bluetooth dongle. That one has been working perfectly both with my cellphone and with my cordless mouse, though.

The netbook in itself is silent and the fans can only be heard in a quiet room. The keyboard is rather noisy though and you wouldn't want to type a lot in a silent room with other people in it.

The computer does not get too warm and you can, for example, use it comfortably on your lap in jeans in a subway. In a warm room and in thin pants it may still get too warm. Because the computer is so small it is not too stable and when using it on your lap you should keep your legs at least almost together, and certainly not one leg over the other.

The computer is not too fast to wake up from the hibernate mode, at least if there are several programs running. Waking up from the sleep mode is fast.

The netbook came with Windows 7 and you were allowed to choose your language from, if I recall correctly, the Scandinavian languages, Finnish and English. I chose English. Windows 7 is otherwise a nice operating system but you must not let it choose the graphics settings by itself. Some of the bells and whistles of the interface should be toggled of immediately to ensure smoother experience.

The touchpad can do a few two-finger mouse gestures: scroll, zoom and rotate. However, the zoom works quite slowly (or not at all) in many programs and the rotating gesture has even less support. Scrolling works fine, as you'd expect.

The viewing angles of the screen are horizontally in an acceptable level, but if viewed from too high or too low the screen quickly gets darker, so sometimes you wish you could tilt the screen back even more.

As I'm writing this the computer is in power saving mode and informs me that there's 80 percent or 7 hours of the battery left, so the battery life time seems very good.

The 250 GB hard disk is, in my opinion, way too large. I would've liked to have an SSD drive because those are way faster, more durable and less power consuming than regular hard disks. Even 64 GB would've been plenty. Too bad you cannot customize netbooks when you are buying them.

As a 11.6" computer I find this netbook very handy and small but not too small. The laptops with screen size less than ten inches don't really improve the user experience compared to, say, a cellphone. The native resolution of the screen is 1366x768 which is guaranteed to produce too small text for some people by default, but you can always adjust the text size so it should not be a problem.

Finally some raw data about the performance for those who are into numbers:

The Windows Experience Index: A rating calculated by Windows for the various parts of the computer. 1.0 is the lowest rating, 7.9 is the highest.
Processor: 2.1
Memory (RAM): 4.3
Graphics: 2.9
Gaming graphics: 2.3
Primary hard disk: 5.7

BOINC CPU benchmarks:
Number of CPYs: 2
489 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
1005 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

Welcome to the blog!

2010-01-23T16:01:00.000+02:00

Greetings. My name is ZeroOne. I'm a student of computer science at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). I have established this blog firstly to share my experiences with my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook and secondly to share my experiences with everything else. I'll start with a review of the said netbook and continue with other posts. I've got no commericial interest in this blog so you can trust that everything in this blog represents my personal opinions. I'd also be more than happy to hear your tips about usage practices with netbooks, Windows 7 or other software, so do post comments.

My hobbies include geocaching, board games and taking photos, so you might see an occasional post about those subjects, too. Hence the name of the blog, Netbooks, the Universe and Everything -- I didn't want it to be too restrictive. The name is also a reference to the book by Douglas Adams.