Author Archives: Johan Appelgren

About Johan Appelgren

Software developer and gaming nerd.

I’ve actually had time to watch some TV shows

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I recently spent some time catching up with my favourite tv shows. That we only have 24h days sucks.

Stargate SG-1 is still a lot of fun to watch, and lately I’ve felt it’s actually gotten a lot better. Who would’ve thought that could happen on the 10th season of a show. Unfortunately the spin-off Atlantis hasn’t really improved. The only thing that keeps me watching is McKay. A similar situation to the holodoc in Star Trek Voyager. 🙂

Battelstar Galactica though is slipping. It’s still somewhat fun to watch, great characters and environments, but they really need to tighten things up a bit story wise. It’s starting to go the same way as Lost, a series I completely lost interest in somewhere in the second season. A confusing mess with no apparent sense of direction or plan. Hopefully there is a plan, and all the confusion will start to make sense soon.

I’ve also watched a few episodes of Smallville and I really like the JLA direction it’s heading in at the moment. 😀

Second Search Firefox extension

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While browsing the extensions on Firefox Add-ons I found an extension called Second Search. It adds a shortcut menu to the search box with the different search engines. It allows you to search using any of the installed search engines without having to change the default engine using just a few key presses.

A much needed usability improvement to the search box if you ask me. 🙂

No Live! with Assault Heroes?

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Bought Assault Heroes on Live Arcade a couple of days ago and it’s a blast. Simple shoot’em’up that both plays and looks great.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get as much fun out of it as I’d like. Renewed my Live Gold account a few days ago and wanted to try playing Assault Heroes with a friend online. We managed to connect to each other just fine but after the loading was done the game got stuck on the waiting screen for both of us indefinitely. Same thing happens if I try a quick start with some random player.
When I e-mailed Microsoft’s Xbox support all I got was that I had to call them for them to be able to solve the issue, and when I did that they couldn’t help me at the call center either because they did not have the full version of the game available. Sounds somewhat weird to me. I’m supposed to try calling them again tomorrow, hopefully I’ll get a more helpfull answer then..

Gears of war

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Managed to find time to play through Gears of war yesterday. Based on what I’ve experienced so far with the game it really deserves the praise it has received in reviews. The single player game is a blast with non-stop action all the way through. Nothing really revolutionary but just plain fun with some interesting game mechanics, great graphics, good controls and pretty well fleshed out game world.

The one negative thing about it I can think of is that it felt a bit short, possibly because I played it through on the easiest difficulty or because sometimes the story jumped ahead just a little bit too quickly sometimes leaving me scratching my head. Hopefully the sequels will improve on the story aspect of the game.

The single player game is just one part of the game though. But I haven’t tried multiplayer yet because my live gold account expired and I haven’t bothered to renew it. Playing games with British teenagers who only scream obscenities was no fun. A friend and I tried playing co-op splitscreen though, but that didn’t work all that great. It felt really cramped and it was really hard to get what was going on. Maybe my 32″ TV is too small for what they had in mind. It’s probably a lot better online.

Anyways, I’m really happy that I bought it and if I manage to renew my live gold account it and my live arcade games will probably keep me occupied until Mass Effect. 🙂

Synchronizing Google Calendar with my phone 2

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Since I last wrote about synchronizing my phone with Google calendar I’ve given up on the gcalsync j2me application. It simply was too cumbersome to manually start it up once in a while in order to get my calendars in sync.

As a replacement I’ve started using ScheduleWorld instead. It is a calendar service that in addition to supporting synchronization with google calendar sports a SyncML server. This allows me to use my phone’s built-in SyncML client and so far it has been working great except for some downtime a few days ago.

I’ve set it up so that my phone will synchronize ScheduleWorld once per day, and since ScheduleWorld can sync with Google calendar whenever a SyncML session is started it should keep all my stuff up to date.

I’d still prefer it if Google calendar would expose a SyncML service directly but you can’t get everything I guess. 🙂

Firefox extensions

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Currently there is only one extension that I find really useful, and that is Download Statusbar. Are there any other useful extensions out there worth having installed?

At the moment I’m toying with a few additional extensions together with Firefox 2.0.

  • ChromaTabs – Colors the each tab with a different color depending on the domain
  • del.icio.us – Adds “My del.icio.us” and tag buttons
  • Tab Catalog – Shows thumbnails of the pages for each tab similar to the new IE7 feature

I think the Tab Catalog one will the first to go since I can’t really come up with any good uses for it. But the other two I might keep. Having two small buttons for del.icio.us instead of an entire Bookmarks toolbar visible is nice. The only thing that could cause issues is if it starts crashing the browser as some previous version did when I tried it with Firefox 1.5. And the colored tabs looks really nice and adds a very easy way to distinguish between different sites when I browse forums and so on.

Fall Xbox 360 dashboard update

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With the improvements made in the fall update I can finally say that I’m really happy about my Xbox 360 purchase. The update has fixed some things that has been nagging me now and then.

  • Lightning-fast enumeration and listing of all Xbox LiveÂź Arcade games on the console.
  • Optionally disable notifications from Xbox Live while watching DVD movies.
  • Better handling of unreadable discs.
  • Added new page for viewing content size by category.

And added the one feature that I’ve really missed.

  • Stream WMV video from a Windows PC running Windows Media Player 11, Zune software, or Windows Media Connect.

With the streaming capability it now really is the media hub in my living room in addition to being a great gaming machine.

To be able to stream video to my Xbox 360 from my PC I currently convert my video to WMV I’m using VideoLAN and the batch file found here. I’ve added it to my SendTo menu for quick access. It’s not the fastest and most easy to use solution but it works, and once the transcoding is done the video player on the Xbox 360 works really well. Much easier to use than hooking up my laptop to the tv.

When TVersity supports on the fly transcoding to WMV I’ll probably use it as server instead of Windows Media Player 11 which should make things even easier to use.