RoamingGecko

Found a bunch of these stickers in a box over at the Math Emporium. These particular stickers shipped with the Power Macintosh 8600′s. That’s right, Mac is short for Macintosh. Amazing how many new Apple converts don’t know this. Any who, I’d be happy to give them away to all the new, as well as the old, Apple fans out there. Just send me a message or leave a comment to this post.

Personally, I prefer these over the plain white ones that ship with Apple products these days. I will never understand Apple’s fascination with the color white. Maybe they like their products to look dirty.

As some of you already know, I collect cards. I have dozens of decks from all over the world. I recently decided to scan them to keep a digital record of the cards I have for easier access. Unpacking all those cards can be a pain so to make it easier to show them I decided to keep digital scans on hand. I figured I would do a brief write up on the decks as I scanned them.

I started with this deck because today is the day the game shop that produces them released a new deck on the world. The Deck of the Living Dead from BentCastle.com is a Zombie deck. More on that deck later.

I love the artwork of this set. So much that I have purchased several decks. Unlike their earlier deck, Pippoglyph Deck, the card stock used to print these cards feels much the same as the higher quality stock used for Bicycle decks. It has something that approximates an air cushion finish found on those Bicycle decks.

Because of the finish the cards spread, shuffle, fan well. They are made of paper so they will degrade with heavy use slightly faster than the acetate cards I collect. All the more reason to to purchase several decks, right?

Included with this deck is the standard 52 cards plus two jokers but the deck also includes four X cards. These cards can be used as extra jokers or special wild cards in any game you can create.

I did not scan all the cards only the court cards in the spades suit, the nine of hearts, and jokers. In the case of this deck I also scanned the four X cards. You can view all the scanned cards over on my Flickr account by clicking the joker card below. If you’re a card collector like me I highly encourage you to head over to BentCastle.com and pick up a few decks for yourself.

Cheers!

Kind of a mixed bag on this one. I really enjoyed the single player campaign of this game. That alone is almost enough to tell you to go ahead and buy this game. Multiplayer is a whole different story. I am baffled as to why they decided to make this game a third person shooter. After playing it for roughly 50 hours I can honestly say I would have enjoyed the game more had it been a first person shooter. To be fair, I have to admit I am not a fan of third person shooters. Gears of War was not my bag. I like the single player side of GoW, but passed on the MP.

There were some really annoying things about multiplayer that eventually led me to shelve it and stop playing. Here’s the hit list.

Load times. For the love of all things holy are the load times ridiculous in this game. First for some baffling reason there are two start screens. What I mean is you are presented with a “Press Start button” screen and after you do this another screen appears that asks you to “Press the Start Button”. What’s the purpose of this? No earthly idea.

By far my favorite though is when you join an MP game you get a loading screen. Ok that’s to be expected, happens in all games. After the match loads you appear in the game lobby and a waiting timer slowly ticks down. I assume this is syncing players and also to be expected. But then 9 times out of 10, yep you guessed it, more loading. The aggravating thing is that you see other players on your team fanning out over the map while you are stuck loading. Don’t even think about changing your character class unless you want to endure more loading.

Suffice to say, the loading is beyond ridiculous.

Kill cams are also frustrating. They almost never show what you saw in the last seconds before your character dies. I have heard all manner of explanation for this and I don’t care. If they are that irritating and don’t show what you personally witnessed they make the game all the poorer for it.

Not a fan of the unlock system. You have to choose to unlock one of two things at certain points in your progression. I assume this is some ploy at trying to get you to level up yet another character and keep you playing longer. If that’s the case then the dev’s should have made the game less irritating to play. I will not be leveling another MP character in the same class.

This game also employs the player hosting model. Really don’t like that. It’s just a low ball attempt by Ubisoft to save money by not having to host games on dedicated servers. More than that, you have to put up with the dreaded “Host Migration” screens when the host leaves the match. Even more irritating if you are playing the MP mode Decoy and your team has managed to capture two or three objectives, they reset when the player host leaves. Let this happen a few times and let me know how you feel. There are also times where the match just ends and you get the “connection lost” screen. I think this is also related to the player hosting model but also happens when the Ubisoft servers go down.

I could go on and tell you about several other annoyances but let’s just end this with multiplayer being a wash and move on.

One last thing I want to mention before I sign off, playing the single player missions with a friend was also lots of fun. High marks there.

To sum up, single player was pretty enjoyable but multiplayer misses the mark. In hind sight I would have waited to purchase this game after it dropped in price. You make your own call.

Built a small collection of Ringtones and SMS Tones the other day. Most of these I recorded from soundboards on various web sites. Other I recorded from files on my system. I used Wiretap Studio throughout the process. Excellent little app from Ambrosia Software. It’s a little pricey at $69 but I managed to pick it up as part of a Mac bundle so ended up paying less than half that. It’s great for all those websites out there that want to sell you a ring tone but let you play it before purchasing it. I just used Wiretap and recorded from their website.

All files are high quality ACC encoded when available. To use them as an SMS/ringtone just change the file extension from m4a to m4r. After that you can just double click (or drop on iTunes) to add it to your Tone library for syncing to your iPhone or iPad.

Cheers!

8.3mb zip file
90 SMS/Ringtones
m4a audio files

Click here to download sms/ringtones.

2011-10-22_15-36-00

Originally uploaded by gagegecko

View of the lodge from across Otter Lake. Love the leaves this time of year.

I have had more people than you might think come to me looking for help with forgotten passwords. Most of the time there is little  I can do to recover your password. There is, however, something users can do to make sure they don’t forget their passwords. Use a password manager program. I use a program called Keepass. It’s available for both Windows and Mac users and combined with your dropbox account you will never, NEVER, be without your password.

 

First let’s download Keepass. For you Windows users out there head over to the following link…

http://keepass.info/

Once you have download the app, go ahead and create a new password database. You can do this by clicking the first icon on the toolbar in the Keepass window (See the orange arrow in the Window dialog image below). Choose a password you will remember!!! When we are done with this process you will only need to remember this one password. For extra security you can create a key file that you can store on a USB drive. This will prevent access to your new password database unless the user has the master password and the key file. I’ll let you decide if you think you need this.

After you have chosen your master password create an entry in the database by clicking the “New Entry” icon on the toolbar (See the red arrow in the Window dialog image above). Here’s where Dropbox comes into play. Select -> File -> Save As… from the file menu and then give your database a name. I suggest something inconspicuous like RefData.kdb or Clients.kdb anything but “passwords.kdb”. Browse to your Dropbox folder and save it to a folder there. This will sync it across all your computers with Dropbox installed as well as give you access to the file from any where as long as you have access to the internet and a web browser. Any changes to the database, ie. add/change/delete a password, are automatically synced across all your desktops. This means you only have to worry about this one file and it updates pretty much instantly across all your desktops.

 

For you Mac users the process is pretty much the same. You download a program called KeepassX which is virtually identical in every way.

 

 

 

 

You can download the application from the following URL…

http://www.keepassx.org/

Once downloaded follow the steps outlined above for Windows users. Remember to save your newly created password database to your Dropbox folder so you will have one database that you can access from all of your computers. That’s it. One password to remember. One database that syncs across all your desktops. Doesn’t get much easier than that.

Last thought. If you combine the above suggestion with a smartphone app, either iOS or Android, you will have access to your passwords on the go. I use Kypass on my iPhone and a friend of mine uses KeePassDroid. Can’t speak for the Android app but the iPhone app performs well.

Might just be me but I see definite uses for this in the classroom.

Way to stir the pot

Originally uploaded by gagegecko

This comic book cover has got to piss some folks in the bible belt off. This was from the holiday special of this comic series.

I have a lot of comic books scanned, some where around six thousand, and I tend to sort them into different categories and folders. Well, I got bored and decided to make my own folder icons. Figured I would put some of them up here in the event any one else wanted to use them. These are full sized icons, all the way up to 512 x 512, although I can’t image why anyone would want icons that size buy hey, they look good.

Click here to download the icons.

The image to the left shows what the icons will look like. They are screen captures of actual comic books that appear to arrange as if sitting on a table. Covers were selected at random for some of the icons and along a central theme for the others. I may produce more in the future to help, maybe character themed icons.