argonel

Seems like this is about the only thing I post, but it continues to amuse me and I have changed up some things from last year. So from biggest to smallest my New Years resolutions are:

1. 1920x1080 My primary gaming computer and my PS4 are both plugged into the projector and I have around a 100" screen.
2. Also 1920x1080 as the Chromecast and PS3 are plugged into 42" TV and occasionally get used.
3. 3200x1800 Lenovo Yoga 900 laptop, to replace a cheap laptop I was using. The high resolution screen and being able to fold into tablet mode makes this great for use when running roleplaying games. I can easily read a full page PDF instead of zooming in to see what the text says.
4. 1920x1200 Shield tablet which works great for android gaming and portable web browsing.
5. 2560x1440 My phone is no longer my highest resolution device, but it still probably has the most pixels per inch.

This was much easier to write up than a bunch of meaningless goals for the next year.

As with last year, my resolution is still 1920x1080. However with my new projector that resolution is at a little over 25 PPI. This fall I picked up a BenQ W1070 and a screen and have been greatly enjoying the image quality in a darkened room. The image gets a bit washed out with the lights on, but it is still perfectly readable. The 3D mode works great with active shutter glasses when driven by my playstation, unfortunately my computer is really cranky about outputting 3D through the HDMI cable, so less interested in doing that.

I've been using Google plus for most of my posting. However I had enough fun with the auto awesome effect that I had to cross post a bit wider.
https://plus.google.com/115876886932412426838/posts/LZsaWHcrzKX

My new years resolution is 1920 x 1080.

#Borderlands2   first impressions 9/10

I'm really digging the game, it is definately a sequel to the original Borderlands but that is exactly what I wanted and expected.  In the single player game I haven't noticed any major changes, but it is a new story, with new characters, and there are a lot of little tweaks and polishing. 

So far I am just playing single player with the character Axton, but I have left my game on the default setting where my friends can jump in without an invitation.  However there are some nice control levels including a LAN setting, a completely private game, invite only, and wide open to the whole world.  I expect these will get more use once the initial rush of people have completed the story once.

*Negatives*
-Same wonky driving controls as Borderlands.  Keyboard controls for forward/reverse and the vehicle auto-steers toward the mouselook target.
-Storage and ammo limitations seem tight early game, seems harder to expand them to meet challenge levels.  New eridium system for purchasing upgrades doesn't seem to add much, especially compared to the claptrap mini-quests to expand the backpack from the original game.
-Difficulty ramp vs. weapon damage ramp seems misaligned, I don't feel like I am doing enough damage to match the challenges in a lot of areas, which means I'm dying more than I remember doing in Borderlands.
-Occaisonal lag.  I'm not sure what triggers it, but on my PC the game gets very sluggish at times.  It seems related to loading/pre-caching of content but it happens at wierd points.

*Neutral*
-Character customization.  Not sure I like unlocking color schemes to change character appearance vs. selecting 3 colors to fill out zones.  However unlockable heads to change the appearance are pretty cool, and the unlockable color schemes do allow for more detailed skins.  If you have a Borderlands save you automatically get a themed set of skins.

*Awesome*
-Badass points.  By completeing achievements you get points for character customization that is shared across your characters and can be turned off if you wish.  Each point you spend gives you a choice of about 5 stats that can be improved selected from around 20 total stats.  The first point gives a 1% increase while additional points have diminishing returns.
- *More everything*.  The awesome stuff from Borderlands is still there, but there is more of it.  More guns, more characters, more vehicles, more variety in enemies, more boss characters, more special abilities/special ways to kill things.
-Graphical improvements.  Gun models seem more detailed and have additional animation.  Polygon count is probably similar, but there is more visual flair on the guns.

Steam has now made torchlight 2 available for preorder and as a bonus if you preorder you get a free copy of the original torchlight. Torchlight 2 is $20 to preorder or $60 for a four pack. The 4 pack includes 4 copies of torchlight 1 to give to your friends.

Torchlight is a fun Diabloesque romp of dungeon exploration and beating monsters like a pinata until money and goodies fall out. Torchlight 2 will be a refinement of this but with added multiplayer features. And unlike Diablo 3 you can play it without a live Internet connection including LAN play. https://store.steampowered.com/app/200710/?snr=1_702_7__13

You can find me on Steam as joeargonel if anyone wants to find me for multiplayer.

https://plus.google.com/115876886932412426838/posts/fFt8VxQqpft?hl=en

Did some experimental cooking and posted more on my google plus account.

Up entirely too early in the morning to shovel a few inches of the white stuff out of my driveway. Then I drove my wife to work. Plows are out but the roads are still pretty ugly, snow is coming down pretty hard and drifting. I usually curse the guy that is driving 45, today I was that guy except when I met other traffic and slowed down. Glad I was driving, my wife probably would have sensably turned around about the time she got out of town.

Big plans for the weekend include shoveling the driveway again when I get home and one or two times on Sunday. Gotta love the weather, all crying about it accomplishes is icecicles on your cheeks.

Really stressed out this week. Been busier than normal for the last month and a half and will continue to be at least this busy for the foreseeable future. The last couple weeks I've been so busy doing routine BS that I was falling behind on the various projects that keep my job interesting and fun. Then this week the overall load dropped off a little bit, but my boss was out of the office Tuesday and Wednesday so we didn't have the usual division of labor.

On the home front our ferret Christopher had an intestinal blockage due to a hairball and required surgery on Tuesday. Wednesday afternoon we were were able to bring him home and pay an $800 vet bill. This afternoon we finally got him to eat a little bit of solid food, the first he has kept down since Tuesday. This is a really good sign, but I'm still pretty worried because a critter that small doesn't have much for reserves to heal up and bounce back from surgery. The only good news is that he doesn't seem to be bothering the stitches and I don't see any signs of infection. This is the second ferret surgery we have had to have done this year and between this and the Lupron injections to control adrenal disease in the girls there have been over $2500 of Veterinary expenses.

Prognosis for the near future is starting to look up now that Christopher is eating solid food again. But I am really glad the weekend is almost here and that it is bringing a 7th anniversary celebration for our friendly local game store. Also helps a bit to write this up and get it out of my system.

Now that I wrote about ebook reading software there is another addition to the fray. Barnes and Noble just released an Android version of their nookie reader (sorry nook ereader). Unfortunately it suffers from the same problems as the borders app and the kindle app. By design it tries to lock you into their online bookstore and doesn't read books that you may have acquired from other bookstores.

Unfortunately the nook ereader does not have a bunch of important features available in other ereader apps. There are very limited options for customizing the text display. It only displays black text on awhite background with no night mode or color customization. It also doesn't have access to the bookstore in the app, instead it it has a link to launch your web browser. On a plus side BN does have a partnership with google to freely provide ebooks that aren't covered by copyright. These are provided as plain .epub files so with a little work they can be copied out and read with a better ereader. As far as I know the books for sale are encrypted with adobe drm.

Amazon.com just recently launched a kindle app for Android and Borders released an ebook app yesterday. I have tried both of these applications and wanted to post a quick review of them as well a couple oother ebook apps.

My first comment on the kindle app and the borders app is they make it pretty easy to buy and read DRM locked ebooks. Unfortunately they appear to be limited to their own ebook stores, I didn't see any way to import the ebooks I already have. Both bookstores have a selection of free books as well as paid books so I was able to try them out without spending money on an indefinate book rental.

Both applications give a nice, but limited reading experiance. They both give several options for font size and give day and night mode color options. The kindle app also adds a sepia color scheme and in application brightness control. Under normal or low light conditions I find that I prefer the night mode which uses white text on a black background and doesn't cause eyestrain for me. In sulit conditions the screen is difficult enought to see that day mode is required this mimics a traditional book with black text on a white background.

While both the kindle app and the boders app access large ebook markets and are easy to use I find them to lack features and options that other ebook reader apps provide. I currently use Aldiko as my ebook reader of choice, but fbReader also works very well and offers a slightly different feature set.

Fbreader reads a broad range of ebook file formats and offers a comprehensive set of options to customize the appearance of the ebbok. It also reads the books direcly from the file system so adding a book is as easy as dropping the file in the appropriate folder. It can also read books stored inside a zip file saving an unpacking step. Unfortunately this make it slower to open the application as it updates the directory listing.

Aldiko also offer substatial display customization of both the day and night mode displays. I currently have it set to display black on white for day mode and amber on black for night mode reading. It also displays books in a bookshelf view with cover art if it is available. The main downside to aldiko is that it only reads .epub files. And that it stores them in a database to reduce load times. This means that new books need to go through an import process and may need to be converted to epub prior to the import.

Aldiko and fbreader also share a common "weakness" in that they don't read DRM locked files. This restrics my ebook purchases to vendors that don't put drm on their files such as webscription.net but this also means I don't have to worry about what will happen to my books if the publisher goes out of business or if I change readind devices or programs. As long as I back up my files I will be able to read them.

I am currently downloading/installing the cataclysm beta. This is beta test 2 of the 5 that were promised when I bought my laptop. And for a change the beta club is actually getting early access.

The current stage of the download is 2.2 GB full install is around 14Gb so I doubt that I will be playing before tomorrow. However after work tomorrow I have time off with no bothersome plans until Tuesday July 6th. Even better my wife will be working most of the weekend so I shouldn't have too many honeydews to drag me away from the game.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsjP7J5D16uBdGhNcUZQRU1qTHRiSmg1Qnk1OGExZWc&hl=en

I'm thinking about modifications to Arkham horror to increase the influence that various cults could have on the game. This is becasue I think the concepts behind The Black Goat of the Woods expansion are great, but the execution is a little lacking. Basically I'm putting together set of modifications to go along with the base game and any expansions that will allow investigators to join one of several competing cults and gain benefits and penalties for being a cult member. This is because in the Black Goat expansion it is both difficult to join the cult and it is almost exclusively a penalty to being a cult member.

If you are not familiar with Arkham horror it is a cooperative board game for 1-8 players published by Fantasy Flight games. It is based primarily on H.P. Lovecraft's mythos stories and is almost as much an RPG as it is a board game.

More info at Fantasy Flight games http://new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=6&enmi=Arkham%20Horror
and Board Game Geek http://boardgamegeek.com/geeksearch.php?action=search&objecttype=boardgame&q=arkham+horror&B1=Go

If you have suggestions or ideas comment here or request editing access to the google doc.

At this point I figure anyone who is interested already knows as much or more about amazonfail (the battle between Amazon.com and McMillian publishing) If not There are a number of author blogs with a lot of detail and analysis. I'll link a few of them but I mostly want to talk about my perspective on this as a customer. Good starting points are John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell, Catherynne Valente, aka catvalente, Jay Lake aka jaylake and Charlie Stross and Seanen McGuire aka seanan_mcguire. As these are professional authors they are biased sources, but they disclose their biases and provide very useful info. Also as professional authors they are much better at articulating the issues.

At this moment I have absolutely no dog in the fight, I would like to be a customer of either or both, but neither one is offering what I want to buy. I have more than enough object in my life, so I don't have much interest in buying books on paper. However I love reading so I do buy and read e-books.

I have a few preferences and some absolute requirements before I will purchase e-books. The first is obviously a reasonable price, preferably cheap because I don't like spending more money that I have to. The second is that the file must be portable, I have used several different devices to read e-books on and I am not willing to give up my library when something breaks or I upgrade to something new. This actually ties into two separate items, open file formats, and no DRM.

For my purposes I like having a small device with a backlit screen. IT allows me to read at night without disturbing my wife and doesn't require a separate light like the e-ink book readers do. However this also locks me out of DRMed e-books as I am not using a nook, kindle, sony book reader, or an iPhone kindle app. I do realize that most of the DRM schemes are trivial to break, but why should I pay for a product that I find unacceptable, I would rather try to convince people to my view so the product I want will be offered. I also understand that publishers are afraid that book piracy will destroy their profitability. I can understand this fear, after all it is hard to compete against free, and think that an unobtrusive watermarking scheme is probably the best compromise. This will help them track leaked books back to the source without interfering with my being able to read their books. I also think that book piracy will have a smaller impact on sales than most publishers think.

As a science fiction reader I buy most of my books from Baen books through (http://webscription.net) They make the books available in several common e-book formats with no DRM and at quite inexpensive prices. Typically they charge $6 for an individual book, or $15 for 4-6 books published in a single month. They also sell e-ARC for $15 several months in advance of the publication date for title that are in hot demand. This model works for me and I don't really want to think of how much I have spent buying books from them over the last decade. I even find the convenience of the e-books to be high enough that I have repurchased some of the books that I have specifically bought books I already have so I can have them in an electronic format and carry them with me.

I apologize for the disjointed post, but I felt it was import to talk a bit now, rather than spend more time polishing and post long after it has become irrelevant. I may return later for anther post on this topic or to polish this post some.

So I am breaking down and joining more social media sites. Specifically I've joined facebook to connect to family and some people I know in person and twitter just to see if the shorter format prompts me to post more often. If anyone is interested in what I say on twitter I'm JoeArgonel and as far as facebook goes anyone that I would add should already have enough info to find me.

I also bought Wii fit last night and spent a few minutes trying it out. I'm afraid that BMI has been thoroughly debunked by now, but it should help me lose some weight and tone up a bit. The Wii thinks I ought to lose about 70 pounds, I'm going to target losing 30-40 over the next year or so. Once it warms up I also plan on doing some hiking or bicycle riding and I may post the GPS tracks after I start that.

I am more than ready for this year to be over. And with how tough this year has been on me and a lot of other people I am thinking a midnight ritual to put a stake through the heart of the Calendar, then burn it and scatter the ashes to the winds might be a really good idea, just to be sure it doesn't come back from the dead to make next year suck too.

Specifically I'm near the Minneapolis/St. Paul area so if anyone has good ideas I'm all ears.

This has turned out to be a game that is living up to the hype. Very stylish and a pile of fun. The vehicle controls are a little odd on the PS3, and the quests are generally uninspired, but the weapon selection more than makes up for that. If anyone that reads my journal is playing it I'd like to hear about it/friend you on the PS3 to try out some of the online features. I use the same username on the playstation as I do here so I should be easy to find.

Where is the global warming I was promised. It's snowing again this morning with a forecast of 1-2" of accumulation. This shouldn't be happening until halloween at the earliest.