Month: April 2012

20 things as bad as paying to unlock "DLC" that's already on a disc

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In a recent interview with GameSpot, Cliff Bleszinski called on-disc bonus content an “ugly truth” of the gaming industry, adding “When you’re making a game, and you’re getting into a ship cycle, there’s often three or four months where the game is basically done. And you have an idle team that needs to be working on things.” Oh, CliffyB, how you’ve led us astray.

It’s because of events like this that people will continue to find ways to exploit that content (after all, their community did not take the news lightly). Charging $20 for some characters that were on the disc all along, as though you put in some additional hard work after the game released and then charged us for it seems absolutely insane. But was the precedent set long before video games and DLC became common place? Continue reading “20 things as bad as paying to unlock "DLC" that's already on a disc”

And who are you?

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As you may have noticed, I do a little self promotion from time to time. I think every blogger does, we have to. I find it most fascinating when I am practically BOOED away from one social network or another, as though I am just your average spammer.  Trust me, the eight cents I earned from AdSense didn’t make it “worth it.”

When I recently posted my own opinions on what Microsoft hopes to accomplish with Windows 8 to various sites, it got mixed reviews.  The websites that allowed simple down voting without reason interested me the most.  It’s almost as if people are asking questions like “and, who are you?” Or, “why should I care what you think?” Then again, it may have just been people habitually down voting anything with the word “Microsoft” in it.

Still, I pondered the “who am I” question. I suppose I don’t have a direct answer to that. I’m just someone like many of you who have been around computers and technology a long time. I don’t pretend to be a knowledgable source with any insider information… I just look at situations and technologies, then talk about them.

I invite comments on the blog, and even tried to make it easy using Disqus.  I just hope people take a little bit of time to learn about me, both personally and professionally, and give a little thought to some of the things I say.  If I’m not making any sense, then let’s talk about it in the comments!  I’m always interested in what people are thinking.

App 2 SD for Android does more than you think!

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App 2 SD does more than you might think it does! True, the primary function of this small, free download for Android is to make it easy for you to find applications that are taking up space on your phone’s internal memory and relocate them to the SD Card. When you load the app you can see what programs you might have missed anad need to move over yourself. It also has a handy notification feature which will let you know if an app that you just installed can be moved to the SD Card.

But here’s the bonus feature that blows me away, and I wonder if it could’ve saved me the hassle of wiping my phone a few weeks ago. When I load the application up, it will tell me that I can free up cache on my phone by deleting the collective temporary cache files of several applications. So far I haven’t had it remove any vital data – I haven’t lost any Browser favorites, I haven’t had to log back in to the Facebook app, nothing like that. It works very well and keeps my phone from running low on memory, since the internal storage on the Evo Shift 4G isn’t quite what I had hoped. But this app helps!

How to Change your Windows 7 Password

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Lots of people, whether they’re at home or at work, have passwords on their computer. Now, these are not necessarily passwords to things like your email account if you have GMail or Yahoo Mail or something, and it’s not your Facebook password – just the password to unlock your computer either when you first turn it on, or if you’re coming back to it and it has been on a screen saver for a while. Some people don’t even have passwords set up – but let’s say you’re at a coffee shop – it might be heavily crowded enough that you can go order another drink without someone stealing it, but they may sit down and tinker. If you want to prevent them from doing so, here’s the easiest way to set or reset your password in Windows 7:

  1. On your keyboard, press Control+Alt+Delete
  2. On the next screen, select Change a password

  3. On the final screen, enter your current password (you may not have one at all, in which case just leave the top space blank), then enter your new password twice and press enter or click the blue arrow to the right of the last password field.

This part calls for a special note: if your computer is a member of a corporate network, you probably want to do this while you are IN the office, otherwise it can cause a few things like Exchange & Outlook based email and other services to get a little crazy. Also, those corporate networks usually have pretty strict security policies, about passwords being changed every so often and being a certain complexity (8 or more characters, no more than 2 sequential characters, upper case letter, lower case letter, number, and symbol, can’t match any of your 20 previous passwords, etc…) – so it may take you a little while to put in a password that the darn thing will accept, but keep plugging away at it. If this is your personal computer, however, and you just use it at home and take it with you on the road, you shouldn’t need to worry about much. Enjoy the peace of mind a fresh new password provides!

UPDATE: If you don’t have your old password and need to “hack” or “crack” you password, you can use the tool NTPassword to do that.