–Wolfen

The big question I am struggling with right now is which game(s) to play. I have a lifetime subscription to Lord of the Rings Online, so I am leaning towards it for now. I have already started a new character and I am working on the newbie quests now. Of course, with LOTRO becoming a free-to-play game soon, being a lifetime subscriber doesn’t mean much anymore.

I had focused heavily on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes when I started this blog. I contemplated starting it up again, but I just don’t see this game having much of a future. This dampens any desire I might have had to play it.

I have friends who play Star Trek Online. I gave the free trial a whirl but never got past that. Plus, my friends would be light years ahead of me by now. It was an interesting game, but it didn’t pull me in enough to make me stay.

The game I am really waiting for is Star Wars: The Old Republic. I just wish it was going to launch sooner than it is. It looks to be a fantastic experience, and I hope it is better than Star Wars Galaxies turned out to be.

So, the Ultimate Casual Warrior is back in the saddle. I will begin making regular posts soon.

So I welcome you to the new Casual Tech Notebook blog.  I hope you will enjoy what you find here.

Kevin

Today Apple listed many of the new features coming to the iPhone.  Chief amongst them are copy, cut, paste, and MMS messaging.  Yes, you can argue that other phones have had these features for years, but now that the iPhone has them, why would you want to use those phones?  They are also opening up the API so that developers can create turn-by-turn direction applications, so expect to see some cool GPS navigation software to pop up soon.  I also like the fact that they are introducing the landscape keyboard to other applications, mainly the Mail application that needed it badly.  SMS gets it, too.

There is only one glaring omission to the iPhone feature set and that is that it still won’t be able to play Flash media. I don’t understand their reasoning for it because every iPhone user in the world would love to have that ability.

There’s too many new features to mention here, so head over to Apple’s preview site and see for yourself.

Anyone have any ideas I can try?

Edit:  Well, wouldn’t you know. I make this post and the problem goes away on its own.  There must have been a problem with the post that got pushed to the next page.  /shrug

If you are using IE 7 and want to access various areas of my site, the Sidebar does show up of you click the Contact Me option at the top.

My last post mentioned that I had purchased a Lenovo S10 netbook computer. I have been using it has my main machine at home and I can say that it was a very worthy purchase. Now, you may ask why would I use a 10″ netbook as my main computer. Well, I decided to sell my Alienware M17 gaming laptop and go back to a 17″ Macbook Pro. The Macbook Pro does not have nearly the same graphics card power as the M17, but I really missed using OS X. Plus, with the hours I have been working, my gaming time has dwindled drastically.

The Lenovo netbook is what made me realize I missed OS X. You see, it is possible to install OS X onto the S10 and that is exactly what I did. I am now dual booting Windows XP and Mac OS X. Installing the Mac operating system on a machine like this is not the easiest thing to do, but when you get it completed, it runs perfectly fine. All the hardware works well. The only exception to that is the built-in ethernet card. It currently does not work, but the built-in wi-fi does, so it is not much of a problem.  I started with this guide from the Lenovo S10 forums.

The Lenovo S10 uses a 1.6ghz Atom processor. Its intended use is light tasks and that is exactly it shines at. I can browse the web, check email, view online video, play music, and other standard things. It can’t view high definition video. It just does not have the raw power necessary to do so. I don’t find this much of a limitation as I don’t think most people get a 10″ netbook with the intention of watching high definition video. Non-HD content plays fine, but it does push the processor. If I watch a YouTube video or watch Twit Live, the CPU utilization stays at 75%.

I only have one complaint about it and that is the placement of the right-hand “shift” key. It is not in the standard position and I find myself pressing the “enter” key most of the time by mistake. It is awkward but I can live with it. All-in-all, the Lenovo S10 is a great little machine.

My 17″ Macbook Pro won’t ship until February 26th, so I will get even more use out of the S10. I wouldn’t recommend it for every day use, but for light use and travel, it can’t be beat.

The iPhone 3G was not ready for release when it went on sale.  Many promised features were not available or pushed back to a later date.  The iPhone OS was very buggy and slow.  Apple usually does not make mistakes this large, but they had to have a product ready by convention time, so they released it as-is.  I also believe that the App Store was meant to launch at the same time as the iPhone 3G but it was not in a shippable state at that time.  Also, the release of OS X 10.5 had many problems at release and needed to be corrected with several updates.  Again, it had to be released at a keynote convention.

Apple has done a fantastic job at creating good products and growing the company like never before.  They have more products in more categories than they have had in the past.  All of them require major R&D, programming, testing, and production time.  I believe that Apple no longer has the ability to release products and services in time for all of these conventions.  To appease Apple fans who seem to demand greatness from Apple at each convention, they have had to rush products to market to meet these hard deadlines.  Because of this, more bugs, errors, and problems are introduced into released products, causing bad press from the media and complaints from loyal customers.

Now that Apple has removed itself from most major conventions, they can now release products on their own timetable.  They don’t have to rush production and release things before they are ready.  They will no longer be expected to have an amazing new product available each time a convention rolls around.  This will benefit customers in the long run because the item they buy at release will be more polished and refined.  All the parts and pieces can be ready at the same time so that the whole user experience can be had right away.

Apple has grown, and maybe they have grown too fast and expectations are higher than ever.  This will make it much easier on them going forward to get things right, and in the end, will please their customers greatly.

First, I don’t want to give the impression that the M17 is not a good gaming machine.  It is a great one.  The 3DMark ’06 score is well over 12,000 and it plows through World of Warcraft at max settings while running at 1920×1200 resolution.  WoW has a very refined graphics engine, however, while Vanguard falls far short in this cateogry.  It also plays Crysis and other games extremely well.

I expected to be able to run Vanguard at Very High settings while keeping to my screens native resolution of 1920×1200.  In reality, the best I could do and still get a smooth experience was set it to High and tweaking it from there.  One of the biggest performance killers are shadows, and I had to set them to low quality.  I wanted to use full drawing distance but I had to set it at around 70%.  Turning on HDR made the game flicker like crazy, so I had to keep that turned off.  I also had to lower tree detail at long range.

I am not a FPS numbers kind of guy, so I don’t have that for you.  What I find important is how the game feels and flows as I play it.  If it hitches or stutters, that is all I need to know that the game isn’t running well at the current settings.  With the above modifications to the High graphical settings, the game runs very well while I am out in the field adventuring.  Things get much worse when I go into a town.  The game struggles to load NPC’s and buildings, which causes major stuttering until all the objects are loaded.

I had read that Sony had made some improvements to the graphics engine that they claimed would improve performance and reduce the “chunking” effect.  The Vanguard world is cut into many squares of land, or chunks, and when you pass from one chunk of land to another, the game freezes and churns away while it loads the contents of the new land area.  My experience since returning to the game is that there has been no improvement whatsoever.  My character still freezes in mid-stride and I have to wait a few seconds before he moves again.  Many times my character will start moving again but his legs are stuck in place, which makes him float over the terrain instead of running over it.

Keep in mind that all of this is happing at a high screen resolution.  Sure, I could lower it down to 1650×1080 or even lower, but I bought this computer in order to run games at high rez.  Other games are not a problem, but it is painfully obvious that Vanguard still has a long way to go before it will run well, even on high-end computers.

Now here is the kicker.  After being disappointed in the performance of this game on the M17, I did some research and discovered that SLI in Vanguard is not supported if you are using two separate video cards.  Bingo.  This is the reason for my troubles.  It boggles my mind that it doesn’t.  Here we have a game with extremely high hardware requirements and yet it doesn’t support SLI.  Fah!

So, the fault isn’t with the M17, it is with the game itself.  With this information in mind, the M17 plays Vanguard amazingly well.  I am not so disappointed after all.

My new resolutions are:  devote more time to playing MMO’s, win the lottery, and have sex with Jennifer Aniston.  I wonder which will come true?

First off, I was laid off from a job that I very much enjoyed. Needless to say, all my recreational expenses had to come to a quick halt.  I had to say goodbye to my MMO subscriptions.  It was necessary to do so, but that didn’t make it any easier.

It took more than two months to finally find a good job.  I was happy to be working again, but I was also working a crazy amount of hours, usually six to seven days a week.  As you can imagine, there was no play time to be had.

Now, months later, the job is starting to slow down some, which has allowed me time to play again.  I am not sure which game I will settle on as my main, but I am currently back in World of Warcraft.  I am also taking advantage of the free play time that Vanguard is offering former players.  This will last until the end of January.  Chances are that I will keep both World of Warcraft and Vanguard and split my time between them.

A friend of mine wants me to come back to Everquest, and while EQ will always be my first and best MMO love, I just can’t see myself doing it.  Everquest requires more play time and it usually requires several people to get anything done.  My play time is casual at best, so Everquest doesn’t really fit what I need right now.  I wish it did.

So, I will slowly start posting on this blog again.  My adventures in World of Warcraft and Vanguard will mostly be lower-level stuff, so I am not sure how interesting it will be for most people playing these games.  I will do my best.

Yep, I got the new Pet drop and it is awesome!  It’s a Miniature Pinscher that is one year old.  I camped the animal shelter until this one spawned and I snapped him up!  I named him Zip.

–Wolfen

This is a sad announcement for me because I always assumed this magazine would be around forever.  I have very fond memories of this magazine when I read it back before I had a computer to play games on.  As a teenager, I was fascinated by the games you could play, and I anxiously awaited for each issue to arrive.  Once I was finally able to buy a computer, Computer Gaming World became my staple for gaming news and reviews.

One of my favorite sections was written by an author known as Scorpia.  She wrote about role-playing games and sometimes went into great detail about her adventures in those games.  Reading her articles on the Ultima games really sparked my interest in the genre and was one of the catalysts that eventually got me involved in Ultima Online and MMO’s in general.

I think the magazine took a big downward turn when it became Games For Windows Magazine.  The new design and focus didn’t appeal as much to me as the old school CGW version did.  It was decent enough, but some of the quality was lacking.

We can probably blame the internet for putting the magazine out of business.  The same thing is happening in the newspaper industry.  People can now get all the information they need on the subject with just a few clicks on the mouse and without paying a dime.  The digital revolution claims another one.

I salute you, Computer Gaming World, for bringing me all the fantastic gaming news and reviews for so many years.  You helped spark my interest in computers and computer gaming.

My first order of business is to upgrade this blog to the new WordPress 2.5.  I will have a post up today if all goes well with the update.

I’ll leave you with the ultimate rubber band-shooting machine gun that I saw via Endgadget.

–Wolfen

I won’t say much about the service at the moment, but after I use it for awhile, I will put up a review of the service and see how it compares to landline phones. I ordered a Philips VOIP841 cordless Skype phone to use with it. This makes it so that you don’t have to use your computer to make a call. I will be able to walk around the house and make calls when my computer is turned off.

Look for a full review of the Skype service and the Philips Skype phone in about a week or so. I hope to report that paying high landline prices are a thing of the past.  We will see.

–Wolfen

 –Wolfen

I went with the Choice Xtra with HD & DVR package that gives me over 200 channels with about 40 of them being in high definition. That is 40 HD channels compared to the 10 that Comcast offered in my area, and the DirecTV package is less expensive. I also got a bunch of premium movie channels free for three months. Being a true geek, I am very happy to finally watch the Sci-Fi channel in glorious HD.

Installation went just fine and no issues were encountered. I had the HD DVR installed in the living room and a standard box placed in the bedroom. Since I didn’t want to pay for a third box just to watch television in the office, I had the installer “mirror” the signal from the bedroom to the office. Whatever channel is on in the bedroom is on the office. This, of course, makes changing channels a pain, since I would have to walk across the house to the bedroom to change it. I got around this issue by purchasing a “remote control extender” made my Terk. You place one little receiver next to the satellite box, and put the other in the office. I point the satellite remote control at the Terk receiver in the office and it magically sends the remote control signal into the bedroom and changes the channel for me. Brilliant.

I only had one problem with the DirecTV service but it was a big pain. The first HD DVR that I received had a very loud hard drive. It would make these “clink” and “clunk” sounds that I could hear three rooms away. They sent me a new one at no charge but the replacement had a problem as well. The hard drive was silent but the box kept losing my HD channels. I had to reset the box several times a day to get them back. Thankfully, it seems the third time is the charm, as the latest box is both quiet and I have had no channel problems with it.

The picture quality is excellent and I am really enjoying the large number of HD channels as compared to Comcast. As I said, I get about 40 HD channels, but they offer many more if you get the higher packages. In my opinion, if you have a high definition television, you owe it to yourself to get a service that offers you the most HD channels. DirecTV turned out to be a perfect match for me.

–Wolfen

The Vanguard druid varies from the standard druid mold. Unlike the EQ-esque druid, the Vanguard version does not have a heavy focus on direct or heal over time spells. Instead, it is an arcane caster, blasting enemies in a higher dps role. In a neat little twist on the class, the druid can call down some potent spells called Calamities. These are powerful spells that can only be used every so often, but when used, can dish out the damage. The Vangaurd druid isn’t all about dps, either. It can benefit groups as well with its dps increasing spells and other utility spells.

So, the druid might just make for an interesting time. Add the above skills with the ability to solo well and it sounds like a good choice for me. Only time will tell.

–Wolfen