No Reader RSS Feed

A hotly requested feature is the removal of my Google Reader shares from my RSS feed, mostly because of the duplication if you’re someone I share with natively through Reader.  So I present to you the feed with the omission:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/thanson-reader

For anyone else using WordPress here’s a nice tutorial for customizing the feeds for your site:

http://dailycupoftech.com/2007/07/25/creating-custom-wordpress-feeds/

Links for July 8, 2009

From my Google Reader shares

Windows 7 Pre-Sale

A reminder: Microsoft is offering Win7 Upgrade versions at a significantly reduced price until this saturday.

Preorder Windows 7 cheaply

In select markets, Microsoft is offering its customers the ability to preorder Windows 7 upgrade versions at a significantly reduced price. This is easily the most aggressive pricing Microsoft has ever offered for Windows. The low preorder price will vary per country:

  • US: Windows 7 Home Premium ($49.99) and Windows 7 Professional ($99.99)
  • Canada: Windows 7 Home Premium ($64.99) and Windows 7 Professional ($124.99)
  • Japan: Windows 7 Home Premium (¥7,407) and Windows 7 Professional (¥14,073)
  • UK: Windows 7 Home Premium (£49.99) and Windows 7 Professional (£99.99)
  • France and Germany: Windows 7 Home Premium (€49.99) and Windows 7 Professional (€109.99)

The deal includes select retail partners, such as Best Buy and Amazon, as well as the online Microsoft Store. This program begins Friday, June 26 in the US, Canada, and Japan. It goes on while supplies last or until July 11 in the US and Canada, and until July 5 in Japan. For the UK, France, and Germany, the preorder starts July 15 and runs while supplies last or until August 14. Microsoft was not willing to discuss the limits of the supplies, but a spokesperson did confirm to Ars that the reduced prices for the European countries will simply apply to the full version (as noted above), as upgrade versions will not exist in Europe. In short, these preorders will allow those in the UK, Germany, and France to purchase full versions of Home Premium or Professional, except without IE8, for a very low price.

Links for July 7, 2009

From my Google Reader shares

Links for July 6, 2009

From my Google Reader shares

Last.fm vs Pandora Update

Well I was supposed to be using Last.fm at work and Pandora at home, but I’ve since just stuck with Pandora. The simplified interface makes it much easier to customize stations whereas in last.fm it’s a bit more complex than it seems like it has to be, certainly when compared to Pandora. Maybe I’ll give last.fm another shot, but Pandora’s simplicity seems like it’s too hard to beat.

Crisis Core Review

Ok so I finally played through Crisis Core. There are some good things and bad things but overall it was enjoyable.

The story! First of all, it’s cool to see this person that’s mentioned very briefly in FFVII and how his story plays out. Zack also makes a super brief cameo in Advent Children. This whole situation revolving around Cloud kind of made no sense in FFVII. All these years later the bulk of what I can even remember from FFVII is a haze and playing through Crisis Core actually does fill in the gaps pretty nicely. Overall though, I’m not sure if it’s due to the portable nature of the game, but it felt like I was moving from event to event and there wasn’t a strong connection between the events that were unfolding. Some elements of the story were a lot weaker than I expected them to be such as relationships between Aerith and himself. I also played this over the span of about 1.5 months even though the actual playtime was under 20 hours, so maybe I didn’t feel as strongly due to the gaps in my personal play. The end is where everything wraps up and feels really strongly connected to FFVII, enough so that I’m very compelled to load it up on the Playstation and give it a run through.

The gameplay is totally monotonous. Combat is super simple X button spam and minor tweaks in equipment and materia make it so that never really changes much, but hey, is that so different than usual Final Fantasy games? You can cast spells and only in maybe 2 fights do I feel that even mattered. In those fights you can’t reach the flying opponent so you’re forced to deal with the problem at range. Leveling up and limit breaks are handled through a random roulette wheel. I suspect that there’s an actual experience counter and that once you reach certain points it levels you up, but then again it may just be totally random. That aspect really irked me since the very very few times I was stuck I didn’t actually know how to deal with the situation. Typically I’d just go kill monsters, get a few levels, but in this game it’s erratic. You feel less in control of that.

On the flip side, you are a Soldier 1st class. You feel very powerful throughout the game. It would be strange to see Zack struggling even though he’s this very elite mercenary. So maybe I can forgive that element just due to the strangeness if he were in fact weak.

Only much much later did it even occur to me to run through missions to power up. What they’ve devised is a sort of side-mission setup where you go into the menu and you can look up all these missions that get unlocked through the course of the game. Though the missions you can gain new summons and various other items, however only 2 of the mission types are so overtly named. The rest have more storytelling elements. I completed about 25% of them as of now and feel foolish since one of them is called something like Valuable Treasure Hunter and with the first 2 sets of those missions I was able to equip 2 more items which made a huge difference in the end. The missions are very repetitive though. They’re practically all identical (search for the unique monster and kill him) but I think it’s made for the portable nature of the system.

My major grievances with the game are the horrible camera angles. Some fights would start and the camera would just jam up in a horrendous spot. This ends up tweaking your directions and most importantly your ability to target monsters to attack. That was a separate problem of it’s own for a few fights where I’m hacking away at the wrong monster because of the way the auto-targeting works.

While I didn’t get stuck too many times, the times I did get stuck were typically on bosses. Bosses that required you to sit through 2-3 minutes of UNSKIPPABLE dialogue. The game even has a new game+ mode where I imagine you simply don’t care anymore about what’s going on and you want to zoom past this stuff but sorry, you have to watch it.

The soundtrack is very off. There are a few tunes that are remixed versions of songs from FFVII but the original stuff isn’t memorable at all.

Anyway, despite that stuff, which isn’t so bad if you play smarter, the game is enjoyable. I’m resisting the urge to plop in FFVII and continue trudging through my uncompleted game library.

New TV

Well I traded up bedroom TVs.  I was using an old CRT 19″ Sony and moved up to this Toshiba 19″ HD.  I’ve discovered a very fascinating thing about it though. As you may or may not be aware we’ve made the switch to digital broadcasts which also allows for over the air HD broadcasts. Some stations were already broadcasting in HD before the switch but now all your local channels should definitely be.  Knowing this I thought to myself that it kind of sucks that I can have my cable plugged in and get all those channels but need to plug into an antenna for the over the air HD stuff.

Well this is actually false. When I setup the auto-tune it picked up on all the digital channels and local HD channels! This only makes sense of course due to the switch, but it’s a very pleasant surprise. I get all the regular channels plus, strangely, Animal Planet in HD. If only I could trade Animal Planet for Food Network!

So when I was at the parent’s house in SA I decided to retune their TV as well and there were the HD channels! Wimbledon in HD was pretty great I must say. Anyway, if you bought a new TV with an ATSC tuner you should retune and check out all your local digital/HD stuff.

Digsby Tip

Using multiple messenger programs you may not realize or notice that the default category your buddies go to end up in are named differently per application.  With Digsby (and probably any other multi-IM client) you can drag and drop names into the various categories and the changes are then saved back into each separate application. Why I didn’t realize this sooner I’ll never know.

It’s possible perhaps that because I tend to use AIM more than MSN/Yahoo that they had different labeling systems simply due to usage.  Regardless, I’m down to 4 categories again instead of 4 major ones then the defaults for Yahoo/MSN/GChat which made the list a lot longer than it had to be. Combine this with lumping people with multiple screen names together and I have a nice and tidy buddy list again.

On the other hand, I very rarely use IM clients anymore. I twitter more than I send IMs (except in rare cases) which is almost kind of sad considering I can usually count my daily tweets on one hand, but that’s probably the evolution of this type of communication.

Links for July 5, 2009

From my Google Reader shares