Month: May 2011

Gadgets and killer apps (Acer Iconia A500)

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple of weeks ago I bought my first Android tablet, the Acer Iconia A500. This in spite of owning an iPad, which I love. So why a second tablet? Mostly curiosity, backed by the fact that I write a lot about Android tablets on my ITworld blog and I always feel more secure writing about a topic if I have real-world, hands-on experience. Yeah, I could’ve gone into a store and played around with an Android tablet, but that doesn’t compare to living with a device.

So far, I’m really enjoying the Iconia. Is it a “better” tablet than the iPad? No, I don’t think so. iOS is more refined than Honeycomb (the version of Android made for tablets), more stable (the Iconia locks up probably once a day) and there’re a lot more apps available for iOS. Also keep in mind my experience is with an iPad 1.

And yet these days when I reach for a tablet, I generally grab the Iconia. Weird, no? Part of it is the ‘new’ factor, but after naval gazing for a while I’ve come to realize it’s mostly about a “killer app.” In this context, a killer app is that one program that just sings to you, personally. It might not be the best or the most popular, but it just fits for you.

In my case, the killer app is Feedly for Honeycomb. Feedly pulls in my Google Reader feeds and presents them in a nice browsable format. There are a ton of apps that do this, and in fact Feedly is available for the iPad too. But I like Feedly on the Iconia. It just feels right.

Feedly only runs in portrait mode, and the Iconia is narrower and longer than the iPad when held in a portrait orientation. That makes Feedly feel like I’m reading a magazine. Each page has a list of new stories. I can tap one to drill down into full content, and from there (if needed) I can choose to open the story in a web browser (I use Dolphin HD on Android). Generally I only need to do this if there’s embedded video. Feedly’s built-in browser doesn’t handle video.

If there’s nothing on a page that I want to read, I just swipe to go to the next page, and Feedly marks all the stories read (you can disable this if you like). If I want to save something for later, Feedly supports Instapaper, which is a tool I lean on heavily.

Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a Feedly review. But it’s just odd to me that this one free app is what makes the Iconia my preferred tablet these days (unless I want to play games…the iPad is still better for that just due to the number of titles available). Well, the Feedly app and the different proportions of the Iconia tablet.

I never would have discovered this combination by playing around with a tablet in the store, and now I just love it. I also prefer the Dolphin browser to iOS Safari (or Android’s built-in browser) for general surfing, too. I find myself laying in bed at night, reading my feeds just like they’re a magazine, now. It’s killing my book reading, though! (Although that reminds me, I like reading Kindle books on the Iconia more than on the iPad, too…again because its narrower and longer. Shorter lines but, I’m guessing, the same number of page turns.) I’ve moved from Evernote to Springpad because of their Honeycomb client, too.

Huh, so Feedly got my foot in the door but I guess I’m really gravitating to more and more Android apps. I didn’t realize that, really, until I started writing this.

Anyway I was wondering if I’m just weird, or if other people have gadgets that they love just due to a specific feature?

I still might trade in the Iconia for the Galaxy Tab when it comes out next month, but I want to see what the proportions are. I’m a little leery of switching at this point, to be honest.

Terraria’s big world

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m still poking along with Terraria in my limited free time (having kind of a hell week at work). Here’s my house so far:

I’ve got a forge and workbench on the 2nd floor and an alchemy table on the first. That platform on the roof is to make it easy to get across a big hole just outside the front door. Some dumbass built his mine right there (oh wait, that was me). The little platforms on the outside are so I can climb over the house when I need to.

I found a utility that’ll print out a map of your world. Unlike with Minecraft, your Terrraria world has a finite size, and when you start a game you pick a small, medium or large world. I picked medium. Here’s the map (click on it to get a larger version but I’ll warn you, it’s pretty darn large, and that’s after I cut it down by 50%):

A mess right? Well at first it is. See that black box? On the surface right about in the middle of the map, horizontally. Inside that black box, if your eyes are keen enough, you can see the outline of my house. A bit to the right on the surface is that outline of a second house I’ve build, and below and to the left is the mine I’ve been working on.

I have to admit, I felt a bit intimidated when I saw this map!! I’ve got a LOT of world to explore!

Here’s the thread with the mapviewer in it. Use at your own risk, of course…
http://www.terrariaonline.com/threads/terraria-map-viewer.4226/

ABC’s Once Upon A Time

Posted on by Nimgimli

A long, long time ago, I covered TV here at Dragonchasers. Genre TV at least. I kind of gave it up because I’m a horrible TV reviewer…I just enjoy too many shows that others hate. Maybe I don’t take TV seriously enough, I dunno, but if its genre stuff, I can almost always find something to like, and I’m pretty patient. I didn’t like Stargate Atlantis at all for the first half season, but I stuck it out and by the end I was bummed to see it go.

Anyway… ABC reached out to the blogger community to promote a new upcoming show, Once Upon A Time. The premise seems to be that, in this town at least, fairytales are real. Hey, I’ll give that a try! Here’s the first look (lots of familiar faces!) and following that is the blurb that was sent out.

The series is coming to ABC this Fall, and I’ll definitely be watching!

Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (Lost, Tron: Legacy) invite you to a bold new vision of the world where fairytales and the modern day are about to collide.

Anna Swan (Jennifer Morrison) knows how to take care of herself. She’s a 28-year old bail bonds collector who’s been on her own ever since she was abandoned as a baby. But when the son she gave up years ago finds her, everything will change. Henry (Jared Gilmore) is 10 years old now and in desperate need of Anna’s help. Henry believes that Anna actually comes from an alternate world… and is Prince Charming (Josh Dallas) and Snow White’s (Ginnifer Goodwin) missing daughter. According to his book of fairytales, they sent her away to protect her from the Evil Queen’s (Lana Parilla) curse, which trapped the fairytale world forever, frozen in time. Of course Anna doesn’t believe a word, but when she brings Henry back to Storybrooke, she finds herself drawn to this unusual boy and his strange New England town. Concerned for Henry, she decides to stay for a while, but she soon suspects that Storybrooke is more than it seems. It’s a place where magic has been forgotten, but is still powerfully close… where fairytale characters are alive, even though they don’t remember who they once were–including the Evil Queen who is now Henry’s foster mother. The epic battle for the future of all worlds is beginning, but for good to win, Anna will have to accept her destiny and fight like hell.

Brace yourself for a modern fable with thrilling twists and hints of darkness. Brimming with wonder, and filled with the magic of our most beloved fairytales, Once Upon A Time is a fitting follow up to Lost from two master storytellers.

SHORT:
Welcome to a world where fairytales are real. Anna Swan is like any other 28 year old, until she discovers she’s a lost princess destined to save her world from darkness. Experience the passion project of executive producers/creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (Lost, Tron). Once Upon A Time is a thrilling twist of our most beloved stories.

CAST
Robert Carlyle – Rumplestiltskin
Josh Dallas – Prince Charming/John Doe
James Dornan – Sheriff Graham
Jared Gilmore – Henry
Ginnifer Goodwin – Snow White/Sister Mary Margret Blanchard
Jennifer Morrison – Emma Swan
Lana Parilla – Evil Queen/Regina
Raphael Sbarge – Archie/Jiminy Cricket

CREDITS
Production Company – ABC Studios
Executive Producer – Edward Kitsis
Executive Producer – Adam Horowitz
Executive Producer – Steve Pearlman
Executive Producer/Director – Mark Mylod

Terraria: Your first house

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday Terraria launched. What is it? Think Minecraft meets Flatland. Or more simply, a 2D Minecraft. The game deserves a much more in-depth post than I have time for this morning, but I wanted to do a real quick post to help people get over some of the sticky points I encountered.

As in Minecraft, the first thing you need to do is build a shelter. You can dig a hole if you like, but let’s build a house. You’ll need wood to start with. Use your starter hatchet on some trees until it falls apart in a shower of wood pieces. You’ll also need some gel from the slimes that’ll pester you. You can attack them with that hatchet, too. When they die they drop gel bits. And for our purposes you’ll need some dirt too. Use the Pickaxe on the ground to get that.

Pro-Tip #1. When using a tool, your avatar will swing the tool pretty widely, but you need to focus on the tip of your pointer. That’s where the magic is gonna happen. You can swing wildly to hit gels and dig random holes but when you need precision, it’s all about the tip of your cursor, not the representation of the tool on screen.

OK so now you have wood. Hit Escape to open the crafting panel and pull a Workbench out of the menu and into your hotbar. Unlike in Minecraft, crafting here is just a matter of dragging an item into your inventory…assuming you have the materials it’ll be made. Too bad; I really enjoyed Minecraft’s “drawing” based crafting.

Drop your Workbench anywhere then stand near it and make a Door and some Dirt Walls. Assuming you’ve gathered gels, make some Torches too.

Now find or make a flat area for your house. There are two kinds of walls in Terraria. The ones you see edge on, and the ones that form the back wall of your house. The edge-on walls are built with wood you collected right from the trees. Just stack them up to make two outer walls a reasonable distance apart, then start laying the same wood horizontally to form a ceiling. Drop some spare dirt blocks to stand on in order to reach high enough to do the ceiling.

So now you’re trapped! So pull out your hatchet and destroy 3 woods squares at the bottom of one wall (you’ll recover the wood automagically). Then stick the door in that gap. Again remember: tip of the cursor. Now you can get in and out. Right click the door to open/close it.

Next use the Dirt Wall blocks you made to ‘paint’ the back of the house. That’s going to prevent monsters from spawning indoors. You can do this with rock or wood too, but for me at least, I didn’t have enough of these materials but I did have plenty of dirt. Last, place a couple of torches as a light source. Again, tip of the cursor right at the edge of the wall to get these to ‘stick’ (I had a dumb amount of trouble with this at first).

Your house is complete as a shelter, but apparently you can get NPCs to visit your world if you build a House with a capital H. To turn your shelter into an official house, build a chair and table and place them inside (this bit I haven’t tested yet). You should probably also build a hammer; used to knock apart things you’ve built.

By now you’ve probably used the pickaxe to get rid of those dirt squares you were standing on. If you have wood left over you can make platforms and stick them pretty much anywhere in your house if you want to try making a second story or something. You can jump on these platforms in order to climb up. I wonder if there are ladders to be made somehow?

Here’s my first very modest house.

Terraria is available on Steam for about $10. It’s still a bit buggy (I couldn’t go full-screen without it crashing, for instance) but if you’re looking for more of that Minecraft building itch, with a bit of a different spin, I’d say it’s worth checking out.

Gods & Heroes Dev Diary: Estates

Posted on by Nimgimli

The good folk at Heatwave Interactive reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in sharing some info about upcoming MMO Gods & Heroes with my readers, and of course I said I would. I haven’t personally found much time to get back into the beta (or any other games, really) since my previous post but I’m hoping to get more hands-on time this weekend.

This dev diary is about Estates. I know lots of MMO players who enjoy housing. Well Estates seem to be housing on steroids. It sounds as though you’ll spend time improving your estate; adding and improving buildings, and as the estate gets more elaborate you’ll get access to better minions. Sounds fun, at least on paper, and I can’t wait to see how it works in game.

The diary is also unique for another reason. As I mentioned, Gods & Heroes was in development by Perpetual before they gave up on it in order to focus on another game. Heatwave Interactive bought the unfinished game and are finishing what another team started. The devs here are pretty frank in referring to the things they’re fixing and improving. This isn’t a super-slick marketing-driven dev diary. It feels a lot more ‘real’ than most similar videos from other teams. I enjoyed it. I hope you do too.

Clearing up the Sony FUD

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK listen, it sucks that some thieves stole your name, address and hashed passwords. I get that. Sony should be held accountable on some level, though I’d say the thieves more so.

But I’m so SICK and TIRED of the professional game bloggers making everything look so much worse than it is, spinning things to make it seem like Sony all but rolled out the red carpet for the thieves. I’ve seen it on Destructoid (though to their credit, they went back and updated the post later), Kotaku, Joystiq, Gamespot, Massively… all saying some variety of “Experts say that Sony had unpatched servers and no firewall, and knew about it.”

This is all coming from Dr. Gene Spafford, from Purdue University. Or so the spun stories will tell you. Most of these stories even link to the written testimonial. Which actually says:

In the Sony case, the majority of the victims are likely young people whose sense of risk, privacy and
consequence are not yet fully developed, and thus they may also not understand the full
ramifications of what has happened. Presumably, both companies are large enough that they
could have afforded to spend an appropriate amount on security and privacy protections of
their data; I have no information about what protections they had in place, although some
news reports indicate that Sony was running software that was badly out of date, and had
been warned about that risk.

(emphasis mine)

Most of the testimony is really basic stuff about how bad having data stolen is and what “phishing” means and other stuff that 99.99% of the people reading this blog already understand. As for the spoken testimonial, here that is:

There’s your expert and you can hear it for yourself. Basically he read a mailing list where someone claims to know that Sony had an out of date version of Apache (no details on how out of date) and no firewall (this is clearly bullshit…there’s no way they didn’t have a load balancer in place to distribute 77 million users across their servers, and pretty much every load balancer is also a firewall; between the apache servers and the application servers there needs to be some kind of firewall to handle NAT or something…unless all of Sony’s servers were on public facing machines, which is very very VERY hard to imagine) and claims that Sony reads the same mailing list and knew all about it.

That’s not exactly compelling testimony to me… people say all kinds of random shit on mailing lists and forums. Also note that in his written testimony he refers to news reports, leading me to wonder if he even reads the mailing lists in question.

Now whatever security measures Sony had in place, they were clearly not up to the task at hand, and shame on them for not having beefier security. We’re all paying the price for that mistake. But there’s a big difference between “not enough security” and what this expert is saying, which is essentially “there was no security at all.”

Add to that the fact that Sony says the breach occurred via an application server, not a web server, and with all the security people looking over their shoulders, the FBI involved and the intense scrutiny they’re under, I find it a stretch to think they’re going to try to pull off a lie right now.

And yet.. every one of these posts have commenters nodding their heads and dragging out the pitchforks and torches and assuming that yup, everything this old gentleman has to say must be 100% true.

I’ve never been more ashamed of the community of professional bloggers out there.

Two Worlds II initial thoughts

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last week I picked up Two Worlds II for the Xbox 360. A few of my XBL friends saw me playing and asked how I was liking it, so here’s my answer.

In case you aren’t familiar with the title, TW2 is an open-world RPG. I bought it because I really wanted to play Skyrim but it isn’t November. I just had the itch to basically play an MMO that wasn’t an MMO and it turns out TW2 is pretty close to that. It has quests and leveling of course, but it also has rudimentary crafting and alchemy systems. In the former you destroy gear to get raw materials to use in improving other gear, and in the latter you harvest bits from the landscape and the corpses of things you kill and combine them to make potions. TW2 also has a big enough world, and enough stuff in it, to keep your attention if you just feel like wandering around exploring. At least, so far.

The combat system is action based but not really frenetic. You have 3 “equipment sets” that you can switch between on the fly. I set up one for melee, one for archery and one for magic. The system takes some getting used to. There’s basic 1 button to attack, 1 to block combat, but also more complex things like a multi-arrow attack that lets you ‘tag’ several enemies and then shoot an arrow at each one.

The magic system is quite interesting. You have a couple of “spell amulets” and you collect various magic cards in your travels. By combining cards in the amulets you can create a spell. It’s kind of similar to Magicka, of all things. So you might combine a Fire card with a Bolt card to make Fireball spell, for example. I don’t have a lot of cards yet but I’ve read about some pretty crazy spells people have put together. I don’t usually play Mages but in TW2 skipping the magic system just seems like too much of a shame, so I’m trying.

I’m only 5 hours or so into the game (though I’ve played longer than that..it feels enough like an MMO that I keep forgetting I have to save my game. Doh!) so can’t pass any comprehensive judgement on it, but I will say the game feels pretty rough in spots. The interface can be really awkward to use and at times the engine will stutter or hitch for a second. None of it, so far, is game-breaking but it makes me think that the full $60 price I paid was too much. It didn’t help that Direct2Drive had a sale on the Windows version this weekend: $25, and according to the various forums I’ve poked into, the company is much better about patching the PC version than they are the console versions. If you decide to play I’d really point you at the PC version.

I considered PC, but I was really looking for a couch-title. I wanted to stretch out and relax and explore a world and honestly TW2 is giving me that. One quick example. Your very first location to explore is a small island. You’ll have a couple of quests but soon enough you get access to a teleporter that takes you to a 2nd, larger island. I got there and started questing and things felt a bit tough. After dying a few times I headed back to that initial smaller island and started wandering around. I found lots of stuff I was never sent to in a quest, including some caves full of mobs that were actually still too tough for me to take on. I know now I’ll have to go back and explore this area further. To me, this is exactly what I was hoping for… a place to explore where I’ll find un-marked caverns and lairs to fight in.

The game has some kind of multiplayer but I haven’t tried it yet.

Don’t buy TW2 at $60 unless, like me, you’re really hankering for an open world RPG on console and you have nothing else to play. If you can find it for $20-$25 (like the Direct2Drive deal) and you’re looking to roam a fantasy world, then it’s probably worth it.