techpluslifestyle

This is equal parts funny and painful to watch. Enjoy the poetic justice at the end.

October 22, I can’t wait for you to arrive.

Infinity Ward has been kind enough to grace us with a gorgeous trailer for Modern Warfare 2. Releasing on November 10th, it promises to be an incredible ride. Check it out.

This is a video I threw together to complement a CD review + interview that I wrote for Independent Clauses. After the pieces have been published on IC, I’ll repost them here. If you’re into prog/alt rock, Nothing More is worth a listen. Their latest album, titled The Few Not Fleeting,  drops in five days on February 21st.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I love tower defense games. Can’t get enough of the suckers. In celebration of my love, I’m reviewing two of the best games in the genre that I’ve played recently. First is Defense Grid: The Awakening, a great indie title on PC that’s been a sleeper hit. Next is Fieldrunners for iPhone/iPod Touch, arguably the best mobile variant of this game style. Both are relatively easy on your wallet - Defense Grid retails for $19.99, and Fieldrunners can be had for $4.99.
I know what some of you are thinking. At least I think I do. “Tower defense games? Aren’t those just casual games for people that can’t get their heads around meaty titles like Fallout 3 or F.E.A.R. 2 or Sins of a Solar Empire? For the love of all that’s holy, Fallout 3 was so good a cinematic masterpiece was made based on it!”
*end sarcasm*
Sure, tower defense games aren’t as complicated or deep as a really good RTS or RPG, but that’s the point. The tower defense genre (or hybrid sub-genre, really) is to real-time strategy what checkers is to chess. Is it as hard? No. Does it take as long to master? Heck no. It’s accessible without being brainless, easy to play in ten or fifteen-minute increments without devolving into a “press this button as hard and fast as you can” monstrosity. At the same time, it’s decidedly more complicated than something like Bejeweled or Scrabulous.
Allow me to get off my soap box. There. I’m off. Without further ado, here are my mini-reviews for Defense Grid and Fieldrunners.

Fieldrunners (iPhone/iPod Touch)
Fieldrunners is a less expensive and less complicated game than Defense Grid, but it’s still a lot of fun. Recently updated to version 1.2, this game has three different maps to play on with three difficulty settings and 100 rounds of enemies to shoot up. This new update has fixed a ton of bugs, added some new content, decreased load times, and generally made a great game even b...

At the end of the day, or perhaps more appropriately at the close of business, what are a company’s top executives responsible for? The most obvious answer is that they work to make a company profitable, and if it already is, either increase profit or at the very least, maintain it. In the pursuit of that, I would argue that executives must come up with a cohesive business plan/model, something that applies to every product or service they develop. That plan is then passed on to upper-level management, who ensure that their respective divisions are working toward achieving a particular part of said plan.
That’s how it works. In theory, anyway.
Microsoft has apparently chosen an alternate method to business. All of their products are related, more or less, but creating something that is actually desired by the public seems to be optional.
“What on earth are you talking about?” you ask. “I thought Microsoft was doing pretty well, with the exception of that horrific bloatware they call Vista, and besides, didn’t they learn their lesson from that? My beta of Windows 7 is pretty good!”
Yeah, Windows 7 is a distinct improvement, and their productivity software is good, too. Even the Xbox 360 is doing pretty well, and the newest die shrink for the chipset seems to have solved the overheating that gave gamers that spectacular gift known as RROD. Believe it or not, Microsoft makes products other than operating systems, productivity software, and gaming consoles.
First, there’s Games for Windows Live. You don’t know about it? Don’t feel bad, most people have  no idea it exists. Even among PC gamers, those that are aware of the existence of Games for Windows Live are in the minority.
Let’s make a distinction here. There’s Games for Windows, which is an unnecessary initiative by Microsoft to ensure that games are compatible with Windows, as if that were necessary. Honestly, it’s nothing more than a bit of free advertising that gets slapp...

Kind of a cryptic title, right? Give or take, that’s what I was going for. The subject matter is equally unclear, yet incredibly fitting for my blog, perhaps more so than any of my past writing here. Mostly I write about tech and PC gaming, with the occasional music review, political rant, or automotive coverage. Overall, I’ve got the Tech side of things pretty well covered. What about the + Lifestyle stuff? It’s my goal to create an ongoing discussion and analysis how how technology increasingly becomes part of everyday life - not just for the nerds out there, the fan-boys and the early adopters and the computer geeks, but for everyone else. How does technology affect the luddites - people who have largely avoided technological advances? Some even go out of their way to remain “offline,” as it were.
Despite their best efforts, technology is an intrinsic part of our world. It advances inexorably, permeating every part of life until eventually you cannot have one without the other. Technology is, at times, invasive; it is dispassionate, it doesn’t care if it helps or hurts you, whether it has given you a job or taken one away. It just is. The closest biological approximation to technology might be a virus - its sole purpose is propagation (from a certain, anthropomorphized point of view). It advances slowly in some areas, and with blinding speed in others; regardless, it continues to spread and evolve.
One of the more recent examples of technology’s pervasiveness is Google Street View. You might not have seen any yet, but Google has vehicles roaming the streets of major cities worldwide, each with large photographic apparatuses (I wish apparatii were the plural) attached. they photograph the cities in - you guessed it - “street view,” literally what places look like from the street.
Incidentally, the cars themselves have become something of a meme. The hunt for Google Street View cars is a hobby for some people; there are even websites dedicated to

One of my friends over at Zestful Contemplation put together a fun machinima video using Fallout 3. It’s called Green Dawn 2: Leafy Redemption, and it made me laugh - the humor is especially relevant if you’ve played through the game. Here’s what he had to say about it (in the original post):
It tells the tale of a hero’s journey, based on the steps of the hero’s journey by one Mr. Joseph Campbell.  It is a fictional story set in the world of Fallout 3.  Our protagonist, however, might not be what you’d consider a typical hero….
Let’s just say we turned the steps of the journey on their head just a bit and had fun with them in a way much more fitting to the world of Fallout 3 than the myths of old told to us by Campbell.  The protagonist is a man who is a hero… in his own mind.  He follows the voices in his head that tell him how best to serve the world and spread purity to its people.
Well, purity or mini-nukes.  What’s the difference, really?
Anyway, here it is. Watch it, comment, tell your friends. 

These guys hooked up two wiimotes to a gaming PC for some Left 4 Dead fun. Here’s the link to their guide if you want to replicate it.
Writing the script to use wiimotes in Left 4 Dead? Boring.
Actually getting to motion control while fighting off zombie hordes? Freakin’ awesome.

I bring you what I consider to be the best parody/joke/ironic retelling of the Star Wars trilogy (the real trilogy, not the new sacks of crap that barely pass as cinema) that I’ve ever seen. Yes, this is better than that 3-year-old little girl. It’s way, way funnier.
Without further ado, I give you the plot of Star Wars in redux, as told by a member of the great unwashed:

That’s right. The blog just passed 9,000 views. I started it at the very end of last August, so that’s not too shabby. Thanks for all the hits.

Let’s say you received a new camcorder for Christmas. Maybe you got a Flip Mino, maybe you got an Aiptek Action HD like me, or maybe you even received a high end consumer model like a Canon Vixia HF-100. Regardless, you’ve been shooting footage with your new toy and you’re itching to post some of your work. It’s a simple choice to upload video, but once you’ve made that decision, what service do you use? Should you go with YouTube, the everyman’s video site? Or do you use a Dailymotion, which obviously has a smaller audience, as compared to the crowd favorite YouTube? Do you go with any number of other sites and services, which each promise quality, but also can cost widely varying sums of money? Your options can be overwhelming at times. To help you solve your dilemma, I’ve uploaded a 32MB test video to two different sites for purposes of quality comparison. I’ve chosen the following services:
YouTube:
This guy is arguably the 800 lb gorilla of the bunch. With YouTube, you’ve likely maximized your chances for large viewership (assuming you’ve got any talent with a camcorder). On the other hand, the massive amount of video YouTube handles means they’ve got to limit the size of anything uploaded to 1GB, and processing seems to reduce the quality of anything uploaded that’s above SD quality (640×480 resolution). Honestly though, it’ll be hard for you to hit that limit, and you really don’t want to anyway. That would takes ages and ages to upload.

Dailymotion:
Dailymotion is pretty cool. The interface is slick, and while uploading gives you an estimate of the status, which you don’t get with most video services. On the other hand the upload is slow - it averaged around 50kbps while I was uploading the test video, which works out to 10 12 minutes to upload, plus processing time. Maximum allowable duration is twenty minutes, and max upload size is 150MB.

Overall, Dailymotion seems to do a better job of maintaini...

Happy 2009, everyone. The new year means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me, I always get really excited about what new PC tech will be released, and perhaps more importantly, what new games I’ll be able to play on that hardware! Here’s my list for the top five PC games of 2009:
5. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origins

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say two things right now. First, I never played the original F.E.A.R., though I really should have - it was a great game by any standard, and a bunch of my friends really enjoyed it. Second, I participated in a focus group for the upcoming title’s box design, in which I proceeded to tear the game a new one based solely on what the text on the back of the box might read. In my defense, on the first issue, I was completely obsessed with Oblivion at the time, and wouldn’t have played another game if you’d given me money to do it. As for the second, I took a rather mischievous pleasure in being so brusque - after all, they were just trying to improve their product before it’s release, and I was providing constructive criticism (of a sort). That got me interested, though, and their poor description aside, the game looks really fun. It’s a Survival/Horror FPS with an interesting back-story, and I’ll leave it at that. Look for this game to be released in mid-February 2009 (10th for the US, 13th in Europe).
4. Mirror’s Edge

Nothing truly needs to be said for Mirror’s Edge. Released in late 2008 for XBox 360 and PS3, Mirror’s Edge was (and still is) one of the most realistic games out there when it comes to proprioception (the sense of where your body is, essentially). This had the unfortunate side effect of making some gamers nauseous as they guided the protagonist, Faith, through a seemingly endless series of jumps, dives, rolls, and similar acrobatic maneuvers across a dystopian world filled with enemies. Overall, though, the game is fascinating, and really good ...

Check this out. A guy named Percula created a WoW Machinima video that is, frankly, one of the best I’ve ever seen. He did a great job of matching the visuals with the musical score in the background.

So I promised some videos in my last post on the Aiptek Action HD, and here they are. I tried to cover a wide range of the Aiptek’s functions so you can get a good idea what it is (and isn’t) capable of.
First is a video taken while driving on the highway @ 70mph. No, I wasn’t shooting video and driving simultaneously. I got my little sister to hold the camcorder.

There are two things that you should take away from this one. First, 60fps doesn’t guarantee a smooth picture (though in all honesty, I don’t ever expect to shoot in that manner). If the camcorder can’t process your shot quickly enough, fast-moving objects will still be blurry. Second, if you don’t know how to shoot video and don’t want to learn, this isn’t the camcorder for you. Without image stabilization and good autofocus, you need to know what you’re doing to get a good product out of the Action HD.
This next one is fairly self-explanatory - it covers the Action HD’s ability to do night shots.

Overall, it works decently well (at least at close distances). Even then, it’s more suited for low-light situations than absolute dark, and putting it in night mode makes the video noticeably jerky at times, even in the small screen it’s got.
Next is a comparison of video shot at 1080p and 30 fps, versus 720p and 60 fps. This certainly isn’t a perfect test, nor remotely scientific - The video subjects remain the same, but they aren’t repeating the same action, so its a bit of an “apples to oranges” comparison. Also, these are all uploaded to Youtube, which I’m fairly certain reduces the resolution of full HD clips to 720p.


The videos both show a bit of jerkiness, which is due to the lack of image stabilization. For best results with the camcorder, a tripod is recommended, both by me and by Aiptek. The reality, though, is that most of what I shoot will be sans-tripod, so it made sense to test it without using one.
Finally, I’ve got a...

As requested, my parents picked up an Aiptek Action HD camcorder for me for Christmas. Check out my video review + pictures below:

The product includes:
Camcorder
Camcorder (cont'd)
Mini-tripod
Component and composite cables
Remote
Assorted documentation!
Fashionable carrying case (with strap)
Can you tell I’m bored? Anyway…
Wall charger and usb cable
Related Software
Batter and SD slot
LEDs for shooting in low light
Overall, I’m pleased with the camcorder. It’s small, it wasn’t very expensive, which will be great when I’m in China - easy to transport, but it won’t kill me if I lose it or it gets stolen. The video quality is pretty good, though I haven’t had much opportunity to test the low-light capabilities. The included microphone isn’t great, but it picks up the user pretty well… just not people who are far away. I’ll be looking into maybe rigging up an external mic, or doing simultaneous recording on a separate device and adding it the audio later. I’ll be shooting some more test shots in the next few days, which will dutifully get posted here. Check back for more information as I get a better idea of this thing! For now, I give it a score of 6/10; it’ll probably go up as I figure out the best ways to use it.

You know what I played a couple nights ago for the first time? Yep, you guessed it - World at War, the most recent addition to the CoD franchise. I was hanging out with a friend that purchased it when it came out, and we ended up playing through parts of the campaign, a couple of the multiplayer maps, and the zombie mod. Want to know what I thought of the game?
I hated it.
It wasn’t so much that the game was really bad, just that it wasn’t all that good. Allow me to explain.

As some of you know, this particular iteration was created by Treyarch, the studio that also created CoD 3. Treyarch is essentially the red-headed stepchild in the CoD family. The original, as well as CoD 2 and 4, was released by Infinity Ward, who produces arguably better material. The difference in quality is obvious, making me wonder why Treyarch was ever used in the first place. I guess even Infinity Ward needs to take a break once in a while.
First of all, I have to rant about the single player campaign. Actually, I’m not even starting with the campaign, but rather the intro sequences for each mission. Treyarch tried to do some sort of hip, artistic thing that combines animated graphics reminiscent of block prints with old video footage from the Pacific during WWII. The result is an awkward, unwieldy beast that is as ugly as it is confusing. Here’s the intro video for the whole thing, so you get an idea:

Once you get past the sequences, the single player campaign is, well, just boring. Treyarch over-hyped the addition of the flamethrower into this game, and then drank their own Koolaid and use it way too much. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that they just came up with some flame effects that everyone in the development studio really liked, and they decided to use them whenever possible because the rest of the game is unexciting in the graphics department. Don’t have a flamethrower handy? Don’t worry! We’ve added molotov cocktails to this game. Flame on! (I know, that was a

Check out this bootleg of a trailer for J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek prequel. Not sure how long before it’ll be taken down, so watch it while you can.

I’ve been of the opinion that this movie won’t be that great, but that was just from seeing movie posters and cast pics. This gives it an entirely new feel, and I’m actually looking forward to it.

Apparently this video was posted *almost* two years ago. I just came across it, so I’m going to treat the thing like it’s brand new. Watch and enjoy, they put some serious effort into this.

Check it out. This company called Mgestyk (say it out loud, you’ll get it) has posted videos of their product being demoed on Youtube.

Essentially, they’ve taken a high-end 3d webcam and paired some software with it that allows gestures to be recognized as input, similar to a mouse or keyboard. The interesting part isn’t the concept itself, because it’s been done before. What piqued my interest was the complexity of possible inputs. Mgestyk’s solution recognizes changes in depth, allowing gesture