Now this series just keeps getting better and better. I’ve even gone so far that I’ve bought the miniseries and season one on dvd. Have I gone mad? 😉
Anyways, the finale will apparently be an extended 90-minute episode of Battlestar Galactica fun. Looking forward to seeing it, but considering the last end of season cliffhanger maybe I should wait.
Read more about it over at *** contains minor plot spoilers *** comingsoon.net (via GamersCircle).
A while back my SE k750i phone broke down again. This time it was the third time the camera stopped working, so I incorrectly thought that OnOff would verify that the phone was broken and give me a new one. I’m not sure how I could be so naive considering my past experiences (link, link).
It’s now been a couple of weeks since I handed the phone in to OnOff. When I did, I was told that they would verify that it really was broken, duh, and then send me a new one by mail. This monday I got a letter that told me that the service of my phone will take longer than expected and that I will be notified when a new phone will be ready for me to pick up at the store where I turned my old one in. As I found out when calling OnOff’s customer support this is standard procedure for OnOff, and what I was told in the shop was not correct.
I’m not impressed. Why does it need to take one and a half month for them to verify that the phone is broken and get me a new one?
Update: Talked to a guy in the store and apparently for the phone to be verified as broken so I can get a new one it first have to be checked by their service partner, and then sent to another service company that does some more verifying. And since the service partner has a new owner the first step took some time. Maybe there is a good reason to handle it like this, but it sounds really stupid and slow to me, even with an external issue like changing owners.
My Xbox 360 crashed for the first time yesterday. Or more accurately, the game I was playing froze. On some level it is understandable since I was playing a original Xbox game, Halo 2, but still very annoying. Apparently Halo 2 only saves to the harddrive when you “quit and save” the game so all my progress made during that session was lost. Argh!
Luckily the second time through the same part of the game it worked just fine. So it looks like I’ll finally be able to finish Halo 2 and get to see the ending everyone has been complaining about. 🙂
Apart from yesterdays crash the only noticeable difference when playing Halo 2 on the Xbox 360 are some graphical glitches, the background gets stuck and is overlayed over the foreground in some areas of the game. So overall I’m quite impressed by the backwards compatibility of at least this title.
Just upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.0.1. It sure has happened a lot in the administrative view. I like!
I’m thinking of using this as an oppurtunity to make myself spend some time creating a better look for the site. For now I’ve reset things to the WordPress default.
When I upgraded the installation package included a plugin called Akismet. It is a spamfilter for WordPress, free for personal use, that hopefully will stop the incredible amount of trackback and comment spam I’ve been getting recently. Kinda funny really, When I wrote things here I got no spam at all, but when I stopped writting for a while it started coming like this huge never-ending avalanche.
I ment to write some short blurb here about getting a xbox 360 and what my impressions has been so far. But instead, I haven’t written a thing here for a long time. Wonder if it’ll change or if this is one of those rare events on my blog.
Anyways, there are plenty of things about the xbox 360 to like. It was a breeze to setup, even the wlan worked instantly without a hitch although it was a pain to enter the encryption key. The image quality on my 32″ LCD TV is great, although sometimes I wish I could’ve afforded an even bigger TV. 😉 Connecting it to my computer to stream my music from it to the better speakers hooked up to my TV works great, but I do wish they added the ability to stream video as well in the future. It is possible today, but getting Windows Media Center just for that feature does not sound very appealing to me.
A somewhat meaningless but still fun addition to the new xbox is the achievement-system. You get awarded a little image as well as points, called gamerscore, that everyone online can view and compare themselves with. For some of the games it really feels like it has added to the replayability of the titles. Not that I have made much progress in unlocking achievements for my games. And I guess it could be fun competing with friends in unlocking difficult achievements but my friends list on xbox live is incredibly empty so far 🙂
I’ve bought four games and one live arcade game and I think they’ve been good choices.
Essentially a simple linear FPS game, but with great environments and some interesting twists. Fun enough for me to play all the way through it. Haven’t tried it online at all though, read to much about how horrendous it is. But with the rumored patch that’ll fix most of the issues people have maybe I’ll try it some time.
Cool cars, environments where you can recognize most buildings from real life and a great sense of speed. Only thing missing is some more game modes for playing multiplayer locally. I mean, playing with brittish kids who scream profanities or racing alone is only fun for so long. It’s playing with friends where the fun is I think.
Somewhat enjoyable singleplayer RPG-light. The action sequences where you use the different characters are fun, and it looks good. But it’s probably the game I’ve enjoyed the least of the ones I’ve bought so far.
Lots of fun, but as with Project Gotham 3 really needs some more game modes when playing locally with friends. Still fun both singleplayer and multiplayer though. I really do suck at it though, and regularely get my ass handed to me by both the computer and online opponents.
The only live arcade game I have so far and it’s a great time-consumer. Simple and fun. I think Microsoft has a real winner with xbox live arcade. Downloading games like Zuma for a small amount of money is a great idea. It’ll be interesting to see how Sony and Nintendo respond to all the xbox live goodness 🙂
Just talked to Sony Ericsson support about the PC Suite that wont start. The reason it fails to start is that it needs to be installed and started on the account where it is going to be used, and that account needs administrator privileges during the installation and first start. This isn’t an installer bug, but by design.
Why not just set everything up when the applications are installed so they just work when they are started regardless if the current user is an administrator or limited user? I can’t think of a single thing that they possibly couldn’t do during the installation using an administrator account and per user settings can be setup just fine in HKCU, or other things that needs to be written to the current users profile. So what is it they need to do the first time the application starts up?
This commercial should make anyone want an Xbox 360 😀
No idea if it is a real commercial by Microsoft or a fake, or if it is and has been banned. I found it absolutely hilarious though. Too bad nothing like it would ever happen in real life. 😉
No idea how I could’ve missed it, but in the KeePass projects FAQ there is an explanation to the behaviour I was seeing as well as instructions how to fix it. Very embarrassing.
It seems that if the global .ini file exists it is loaded on start, but if it is readonly changed settings are stored in a per-user .ini file. But since the global one exists it is read on start, the old settings are used. So if the global one is deleted everything should work okey.
I wonder why they don’t try to read the per-user .ini file first though.
When I recently reinstalled Windows XP on my main computer at home I decided to try to use an limited user account as much as possible. An interesting experience to say the least. After I had installed Windows I created two users, me and an account with administrator rights called Installation that I intended to only use when installing new applications and system maintenance. Using fast user switching to switch back and forth when necessary has made installing new things relatively painless. Not that I install new things that often, not after the initial rush to get the things I knew I wanted to use installed anyways.
Not all applications play nice when run with limited privileges though. A little bit disappointing but not very surprising, and since it is mostly minor issues I’ll probably continue with a limited user account as my main account.
Previously I used a bittorrent client called BitComet, but it wouldn’t work correctly now. Even if I made the .ini file in its application directory writable by all it wouldn’t download torrents. So I switched to µTorrent that I had read about a while ago and it worked just fine.
KeePass Password Safe, an opensource application I use for storing passwords. It also uses an .ini file in its application directory to store settings, which is by default readonly. Easily worked around, and it seems to work even if you don’t allow it to write to its .ini file, but you loose the ability to change any settings in the interface.
The software that came with my phone that among other things has a tool that lets my synchronize my contacts and calendar with Outlook, Sony Ericsson PC Suite, wont start at all. I tried to contact their support about it but after having filled out a support form I get nothing but 404:s when trying to submit. It would appear not only their phone hardware has issues.
FeedDemon 1.6 RC2, my favourite rss-reader, gave some error when started until it had been started once using an administrator account. Hopefully it will be fixed before the final version is released, installer issue probably.
Yet another chat client I use, Xfire, has a file download feature that does not work since it writes the downloaded files to its application directory, and I haven’t found a way to change that location. But chatting works, and that is what I use it for.
The price for the worst behaviour when run with a user account though goes to EA’s Battlefield 2. It seems it needs administrator privileges to run, there is a small note about administrator privileges on the box. But nowhere in the manual or elsewhere is it stated when it needs administrator privileges. Naively I thought I might as well try to run it, maybe it was only when installing the elevated privileges where needed. Unfortunately what happened was that the game happily started and when I tried to join a server I got a message popup that told me that my key no longer was valid. Not cool. Why not just detect that I didn’t have administrator privileges and tell me that it is needed, instead of detecting that I didn’t have administrator privileges and invalidate my key? I’m not impressed. Hopefully their support can do something about my key so I can play again. 🙁
Not all applications I use has had obvious problems though. Here is a short list of applications I regularely use that so far has worked just fine:
Update: Battlefield 2 has started working again, earlier it said invalid key even if I started it on an administrator account, but when I tried today I could play.
Was a little disappointed finding out that you need Windows XP Media Center to stream video to the Xbox 360. I had incorrectly assumed that I would be able to stream all types of media from my PC to the Xbox 360.
To be able to play music and watch photos from a Windows XP computer you install an application called Windows Media Connect. It would seem that it supports video just fine, so why have they added the arbitrary limitation to the Xbox 360? Am I just too stupid to realize how smart it is? Maybe I am since I can’t understand why the Xbox 360 dvd-player is region locked either.
So now I have to keep my dvd-player as well as my laptop connected to my tv. I use my laptop to play video on my tv via my wireless lan from my main computer.
What is the point of adding the media functionality to the Xbox 360 when I have to keep my other devices anyways? They could’ve just put the money spent on half-duplicating existing features into making the machine cheaper.