My first Android Tablet.

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Asus Transformer PrimeSo my wife’s netbook’s screen died, and since she was already fed up with the performance of the thing, she decided to abandon it and try out a tablet. Due to her inexperience with the platform, the decision fell on me.

After some looking around, I decided to go with the Asus Transformer Infinite which just came out this month, and is the first (AFAIK) tablet to sport a true HD 10′ display. I was also considering the more budget oriented TF300T Asus Transformer, but after discussing with some iPad 3 owners around here, they informed of the pros and cons of a higher resolution which has to do more with reading on the tablet, than about watching movies and so on.

So given that the wifey is more likely to be using it for reading and writing than anything else, we went with the more expensive model. Yesterday we received it and I got to play with it a bit, and I must say that I’m very impressed with it. It makes my Samsung Galaxy S phone look ancient and ugly. Here’s the promotional vid.

So the thing comes with Android 4.0.3 which is the latest and greatest of the OS. It has very little other bloatware (comparatively to Samsung at least) and is very responsive. However I still needed to root the thing in order to install some basic apps like Adfree. Other than that though, she’s going to primarily use it as her home workstation so I’m trying to figure out what kind of apps and setup I should be installing. Also another significant issue is how to import her previous emails from thunderbird which I don’t even know if it’s possible. With Ubuntu these kind of things were fairly easy to figure out (even when migrating from Evolution to Thunderbird) but with the current OS it gets more tricky.

Issues I still need to consider

  • How to import emails/mailboxes from thunderbird to Android’s email client.
  • She likes to save stuff like images she sees online, locally. What’s the best way to handle that. Should we try to send those in the cloud instead?
  • What is the best office suite to use for a tablet. In the laptop she used Libre Office so it needs to be able to handle .odt and .ods files.
  • Should I even bother to install Flash on it?
  • What kind of thing is a tablet best used for? What kind of apps do you recommend?

OCTGN is going cross-platform

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I’ve talked a bit before about my favourite card-game playing engine on the net, OCTGN and the games I’ve developed for it. I just wanted to spread the news that the client is improving and even though there’s been few public releases since 3.1.0.10, this is because the developers were working on making the client cross-platform via Mono.

I know many Free Software enthusiasts are not crazy about Mono, but this was the only viable option for an app that was in MS dotNet, so this is definitelly better than the alternative as OCTGN is heads and shoulders above all other card game engines in my opinion, both for its usability and looks, but also for its natural support for a proper scripting language in the form of python, rather than no scripting or having an custom one that one needs to learn, like GCCG.

Good stuff.

+5 Defense against Steam Sales.

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The latest Nerf Now sums up my reaction to the latest steam sales. It’s been, 4 days now and I’ve only bought 4 games and 2 DLC with I think a total sum of 25 Eur. There’s definitelly a lot of stuff I’m willing to buy but given the ridiculous backlog I’ve got already, I can’t justify to myself buying games at more than 10 Eur that I’m unlikely to play in the next year anyway. In that case, why not just wait until next year anyway and buy themthen when their prices are going to be sub-10?

Quote of the Day: The right to offend

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Quoth Gary Younge

Second, the right to offend is a two-way street. It means nothing if it is not accompanied by the right to be offended. Those who believe racism is fair game should at the very least understand that calling them on their racism is no less so. You don’t have to accept the accusation but if you want to be taken seriously then you have to take the accusation seriously and engage with it. To hide behind your right to free speech is little short of pathetic.

h/t Shevil Empire

Quote of the Day: The Deadly Words

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Quoth Dr. Nerdlove

There are certain words that are applied to women specifically in order to manipulate them into compliance: “Slut”, “Bitch”, “Ugly/Fat” and of course, “Crazy”. These words encapsulate what society defines as the worst possible things a woman can be. Slut-shaming is used to coerce women into restricting their own sexuality into a pre-approved vision of feminine modesty and restraint. “Bitch” is used against women who might be seen as being too aggressive or assertive… acting, in other words, like a man might. “Ugly” or “Fat” are used – frequently interchangeably – to remind them that their core worth is based on a specific definition of beauty, and to deviate from it is to devalue not only oneself but to render her accomplishments or concerns as invalid.

Read the whole thing to get a good idea why throwing around the word “Crazy” against women is a sign of internalized sexism. “Hysterical” is the same btw.

Oh and since we’re on the subject, I want to address the hordes of misogynists that descended upon Anita Sarkeesian in an attempt to silence and cower her. You’re a waste of oxygen and I hope a lightning surge burns out your VGA and console.

Endless Space short pre-review (beta version)

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From my reply to a reddit thread

So I’ve been playing Endless Space for something like a dozen hours by now. Still on my first game on a small universe. It seems to progress slower than I expected.

In general, I’m very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the game. I love how streamlined the empire building is and how you take decisions about your systems with very little micromanagement. It still ends up requiring quite a bit of system building in the end, since the AI governors are not very smart but it’s not that bad. I particularly enjoy how they managed to work with so low “population units” per planet in a way that is very simple and easy to grasp.

I also really like the ship design, how each ship type is better suited to different things, how resource abundance reduces costs (thus giving you a reason to trade) and thus making different empires focus on different technologies just out of what resources they end up having around. I like how the support modules are limited and give interesting effects.Needs more ship types/models though. I hope they’ll eventually allow people to make their own.

I like the Civ way of handling resources. That along with the bonuses for abundance or monopoly really promotes people playing more aggressively or diplomatically. The AI needs a lot of work though, as it’s ridiculously stupid in trades.

I don’t like that there is tech trading. I don’t know if there’s an option to turn that off, but I find that tech trading really cheapens science and research. Your hard choices don’t matter because you can just trade yourself to what you need and in multiplayer the absolutely best strategy is always to try to trade techs with other players as much as possible.

Combat is “meh”. I hope they improve it so that you can take a bit more significant choices rather than the “pick & pray” luck-based method they have now, that barely involves any strategy at all. I’m also not a great fan of the speed at which I need to choose my cards which requires that I learn them by heart before I go into battle. The cinematic gets kind of boring after a while as well. Nothing is happening except the same old “sit at opposite ends and pew-pew”.

Also combat is fairly straightforward. There’s no funky tactics to use. No weird weapons. I can’t make a boarding ship with tractor beams and boarding pods and the like. No big-ass Laser beams (ala Freespace), no Huge Mass Drivers, none of that (or perhaps it’s unlocked later on? I don’t know)

All in all, it’s very nice and if they improve combat and diplomacy it will be amazing!

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A Kickstarter that I can support, and so should you.

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I’ve made it no secret that I do not approve of the way most game developers are using kickstarter, that is, as a way to double-dip on their fans. I’ve also always said that something that is publicly funded, should be publicly owned as well, by which I mean that the end result should belong in the public commons, which at the moment means Open Source and Creative Commons for code and art respectively.

So to my grand delight I had the chance to put my money where my mouth is by supporting Haunts: The Manse Macabre. They are not only going to release the source as open source (under the BSD license) but also all the assets as creative commons.  This is great news, both for the culture, which will be able to reuse and improve on that base, but also for the game itself which will open itself to be extended by the public.

The game has already been funded, and now there’s a few days left to put some money towards adding more content, which makes sense to support given that we get to use it in the game as well as to make it part of the commons.

So what are you waiting for. This is the kind of game that needs all the support it can get. I do hope to see this become the norm in the future as well as the benefits to me us a supporter increase exponentially the more such games are made and passed to the commons, given how easier it will become to see more games built upon those foundations.

Cthulhu didn't save the world

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Just finished the third installment of the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness and it was good. Even though I’m not particularly impressed in the faux 16 bit graphics, the mechanics were solid and the game was enjoying to play. With that experience in mind, I tried playing Cthulhu saves the world, which comes from the same developers and I got disappointed. The game is missing all the improvements that made the RSPoD game enjoyable and just turned into an annoying grind. I tried playing in hard to have a challenge (because in RSPoD normal was too easy for me) and quickly found out that hard in this game doesn’t mean more challenging encounters, it merely means one needs to grind more to proceed. I just spent 1 hour sitting in one spot in the map and doing random encounters until I realized that the game is just not interesting enough to worth doing that. The battle is not even as interesting as RSPoD. Half the time I didn’t know why I lost, and that, combined with the fact that you can actually lose the game and thus from minutes up to hours of play as well (if you forgot to save and didn’t have “continues”.)  Combine that with the fact that mana points carry over from one battle to the next and first town was so designed that I needed to travel one minute to refill my MP, and it was just an exercise in frustration.

Perhaps the game would be not so annoying had I not played in hard, but if your only difference between the modes is how much grind you need to do, then that’s bad design right there. I hope they reuse the engine of RSPoD to more games because the ones they had before just don’t grab me in the slightest. Not in gameplay, nor graphics not even story.

Meh.