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Pretty Sweet Portable

I’m posting this from my PSP and I’m way too impressed by this. Sure, typing on the PSP’s virtual keyboard sucks things that oughtn’t be sucked, but my god, I’m posting this on the PSP. These are strangely wondrous times we live in, my friend.

Posted in General.

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By Gobi – Monday, December 8, 2008

Blast from the past

Jagged Alliance 2: we meet again
Mildly good news, your highness. Good Old Games is having a buy two, get one free deal now. Buy two classic PC games for USD9.99 and get one USD5.99 game free. Even considering the shaky global economy (93yen to the US dollar … Holy Lucky Strike) the amount saved isn’t anything to get excited about. Six bucks is, what, a burger tasting of warm cardboard and a large paper cup of sugared water? No biggie, really.

But go get something from GOG anyway. It’s one of those rare services that seems geared towards the gamer rather than the publisher, which makes it worth supporting. The games are cheap, without the DRM publishers persist on inflicting upon honest buyers, guaranteed to be compatible with modern machines, include bonuses a gamer (and only a gamer) would appreciate and best of all, unlike Steam, each and every title on GOG is available to gamers worldwide for the same exact price.

But maybe you’re not the altruistic type. What’s in it for you, you ask. Fair enough. You selfish bastard. Here’s why you ought to support GOG: the games may be old but they really are good games. And good games stand the test of time.

The really good news is GOG now offers Jagged Alliance 2, one of those games that has stood the test of time extremely well.
Jagged Alliance 2: feel good
I’m currently on Day 60 of my JA2 campaign, and I’m having an absolute blast tearing through Arulco with my 18 dysfunctional mercs. Even the fact I’m actually playing the Steam version — which crashes every single time I exit the game and has a nasty habit of creating savegames that crash me to desktop when I change the time decompression setting — hasn’t diminished the experience much.

I’m not sure how long it’s going to take me to complete my JA2 campaign but I may be playing nothing but retro games for the first half of 2009. GOG has Sacrifice, Fallout, Fallout 2, Freespace, Freespace 2 …

Ah, there are so many things from the past to look forward to in the future.

Posted in Games.

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By Gobi – Sunday, December 7, 2008

The Thing? Still awesome

From The Fantastic Four # 12 (1963):
Fantastic Four # 12: Going up
Fantastic Four # 12: Going up
Fantastic Four # 12: Going up

Posted in Comics.

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By Gobi – Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Additional memory and Windows XP

I was startled to learn just how low RAM prices are these days. RM73 (USD20) for 2GB of Mushkin Enhanced Basic DDR2/800? Sweet mother of mercy. I think I paid more than that for 1GB a little over a year ago.

Though my system runs reasonably well with 1GB, I was curious about the performance benefits of additional RAM in a Windows XP Home system.

Now, according to Microsoft:

In general, adding memory is the easiest and most effective way to improve a computer’s performance.

Of course the same article goes on to claim:

Although it is recommended, Windows XP does not require 128 MB of RAM. The operating system can run with 64 MB of RAM.

…

A computer with 64 MB of RAM will have sufficient resources to run Windows® XP and a few applications with moderate memory requirements. Office productivity applications and Web browsers fall into this category of applications.

According to Windows Task Manager, Opera’s peak memory usage on my system is 86MB as I write this. Have fun running Microsoft Office 2007 on a Windows XP box with 64MB of RAM, smart guy.

The real question users have to deal with in 2008 is not what the minimum should be but what Windows XP’s maximum addressable memory is. With RAM prices being as cheap as they are, users will naturally be tempted to shove as much memory into their systems as possible. It turns out, however, there’s a limit to how much memory a system with a 32-bit OS like Windows XP Home can handle.
Continued…

Posted in Hardware, Software.

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By Gobi – Wednesday, December 3, 2008

WordPress: Home alone

I was looking for a piece of code that would allow me to perform a certain action on a WordPress blog’s home page (and only the home page) and thanks to this site, I have it.


< ?php if ( (is_home())&&!(is_paged()) ){ ?>


blah blah blah


< ?php } ?>

For example, if I wanted my Flickr thumbnails to be displayed (via the FlickrRSS plugin) only on the home page, I’d use the following code in my theme’s home.php file:


< ?php if ( (is_home())&&!(is_paged()) ){ ?>


< ?php get_flickrRSS(); ?>


< ?php } ?>

You can see the above example in action here.

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By Gobi – Sunday, October 12, 2008