This was the first games expo I’ve attended but I must say that it was largely what I would have expected: various game companies pushing their latest games and consoles (Sony and Nintendo doing the lion’s share), various tertiary education institutions pushing their games-related courses (sadly Melbourne Uni hasn’t caught on) and various vendors trying to sell you stuff. Still, overall it was quite enjoyable and great to be able to check out the latest games without having to, say, buy a PS3. Following are some of my highlights from the event and my general review.
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
I recently discovered eXtplorer, which is a Javascript and PHP file manager. The system looks very impressive and the feature list sounds great for allowing less technical users to manage their own websites (rather than requiring an FTP program). However, from my admittedly brief examination of the software I found that many of the things simply didn’t work or there were enough minor issues to make using it rather annoying.
A relatively short list of things that I’ve found in Civilization IV that tick me off.
With my new computer one of the things I wanted to try was to see exactly how much functionality I could achieve on Windows using only freely available software. Having gotten most things like multimedia playback, word processing and other essentials out of the way I found I needed a decent replacement for Nero. After using ImgBurn for a while, which is workable but better suited for burning and ripping discs rather than building them, I stumbled upon InfraRecorder (IR) on Sourceforge. The software is apparently intended to be an open source replacement for Nero so it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. Here are my thoughts on it.
I haven’t written a post for quite some time. The blame lies entirely on Civilization IV (Civ4) - specifically the “Complete” pack that I bought the other day. I really can’t stress enough how addictive this game is! Seriously, several times now I have sat down to play for “half an hour or so” only to stop later and realise that half a day has passed. So I guess caution is advised if you’re going to play this game. Anyway, let’s get on with the review proper shall we?
I’ve been running version 2.3 of Wordpress for a couple weeks now and I’m getting more accustomed to using tags with my posts. One thing that struck me about the default handling of tags is that, while free form, it’s a bit unwieldy for long term use. For example, you have to remember what you named various tags (”did I use web or internet?”). The Simple Tags plugin gets rid of most of the problems associated with tagging and makes it an absolute joy to use - I’ve been using for editing my posts for a few days now and I love it.