Firefox 2 - The Return

Ok, I can say I've tried them all now. Well not quite all, but the major players (excluding the Mac one of course). Opera is definately top notch, but I missed the look and feel of firefox and my firefox extensions. I gave IE7 betas, release candidates, and final a fair shake and must say they have come a long way. It still feels clumsy. When are they going to understand that I want an integrated ad blocker or at least integrated 3rd party plugins like firefox. I want to be able to control what I see and do it by clicking on the site I'm on.  I don't want to have to dig around the options and manually add everything to the restricted sites list. I like what they have done with the  custom search engine generator. So, I've come back to firefox and really dig the new on the fly spell checker especially when doing webmail.  I also really like the latest del.icio.us bookmarks plugin and clipmarks looks promising. Tags are definately superior to bookmarks after you get use to them and having them wherever I go using the Delicioius Bookmarks plugin is sweet. I have also recently discovered the Firefox Extension Backup Extension (or FEBE).  Finally my firefox can be exactly the same at home and the office. Some other must haves in my opinion are Adblock Plus and sidekick Adblock Filterset.G Updater, NoScript, Greasemonkey, and IE Tab just for the occasional backward website. Some other optional cool ones that I like are VideoDownloader, Viamatic FoXpose, StumbledUpon, Scrapbook (might be replaced with Clipmarks), Preformancing (for blogging), PDF Downloader, Mouse Gestures, and Download Statusbar.  I hope TorPark updates to v2.0 soon for the extra bit of anonimity.

powered by performancing firefox

Battlefield 2142 - A consolidated BF2 Mod? (3/5 stars until EA gets it together)

My brother told me about this game, saying that he thought it looked like it was going to be cool. I've bought the last two episodes and thought they were pretty cool. So I threw down the cash and happily took it home. All I have to say is BETA at best. Well that's not all I have to say, because I want to rant some more. EA get your QA act together! As far as I can tell this looks like a detailed mod of Battlefield 2 with a whole lot of bugs. I dropped out of servers left and right, experienced weird graphic glitches, and lag died oodles. My biggest complaint is on the most compelling part of game, moving up in rank and getting unlocks. I was moving up in rank and had a couple of locks when out of the blue they were gone! So sadly I started over at recruit... and then a little while later they were back! I got up to 200 points and was waiting for my promotion to gold gunner, and waited, and I'm still waiting at 280+/200 for my promotion and new unlock. Then finally last night after coming home from a 10hr shift at work, I thought I'd play for a half hour. After I find a server that I think looks good and hit connect all I get is a message saying "invalid CD key". I spent my half hour and more trying to get it to work. Finally, in desperation, before taking the game back for an exchange and new key, I reinstalled and re-patched and it worked again. But then sadly it was time to get the kids to bed. Oh, yes, I did say re-patched. Be prepared, the game only recently released and already there is patch you have to download (more waiting, less playing) and I can't say I can tell that it fixed anything. So in conclusion, if your the easily frustrated it might be worth waiting a while for EA to work out the bugs on this one. I wasn't sure I liked the consolidation of soldier types at first but it has grown on me along with some of the other minor changes. I still think Titans suck at the moment but I'll give it some time before I make a final opinion. All in all, when it is working, it is pretty fun (maybe because if nothing else it's something semi-new).

EA, if by some chance anyone reads this, I want to have my unlocks in single player mode! And, I want to be able to move up in rank and have it stay with me even if I don't get credit for it in multiplayer mode. Also, I want to be able to play the larger sized maps with more than 16 bots. If my computer could handle it I want 64 bots. Oh, and I think the command system was easier in battlefield 2 (but maybe I'll get use to that too and love it).

Parrallels Is Amazing

I thought I'd give Parallels a shot. For those of you who don't are completely off the radar, it is the software that everyone is talking about for the new Intel chip based Macs that allows you to run Windows and the Mac OS at the same time (without rebooting). OK, for those of you who know me, you're probably thinking to yourself why does he care he doesn't even have a Mac. Well, I don't care about that exactly, what I care about is there is a Windows version that allows me to run Linux with out doing a stupid (and frankly scary) dual boot system. In fact, I am running both right now and just happen to be in SUSE 10.1 (Linux) writing this blog entry. What is cool about this VM (virtual machine) technology that it is portable. You can throw it on an external HD and take it to any machine running Parallels Workstation.

Another mobile VM type technology I'm testing out is the Mojopac v1.0 that was recently released. It's so new, they don't even have their store open yet. The trial is 30 days or 99 boots and goes for around 30 buck (but supposedly is going up after the first month) You can basically have a windows to go on any removable storage device. Cool idea for an Ipod. Think about putting your Itunes and other music software right on the Ipod and being able to run in on any computer you plug into to charge up. So far I've noticed a few quirks, but it is still an amazing idea.

Recently I bought a new 2Gig thumb drive that had the U3 technology. I thought it was going to be cool but was very disappointed. It is limited to a handful of portable apps that you can download from the u3 website. Also, it failed to boot up every time I inserted the stick. I promptly uninstalled it and luckily heard about Mojopac shortly after, which was everything I thought U3 was going to be.