Posted by Ub3rG33k on Jul 9, 2010 in
Brain Dump As some of you may have seen on Facebook and Twitter that I’ve been messing around with a number of Star Wars action figures. These in particular and a couple of stormtroopers, and an R2D2 unit (this is what happens when a 35 year old goes shopping after a couple of beers).
I’ve also been after an opportunity to put the iPhone 4′s camera to work. All the images below are shot with the iPhone 4′s 5 megapixel camera.
Now I wish I could take credit for the idea, however there are a lot smarter people on the internet, with a lot better camera’s than me, just google StormTroopers day off.
Below is my contribution 
Tags: action, beers, Below, camera, contribution, couple, day, facebook, google, idea, images, iphone, iphone 4, lot, megapixel, Mini, number, opportunity, star, star wars, star wars action, star wars action figures, Stormtrooper, stormtroopers, twitter, unit, year
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Feb 16, 2010 in
Tech Ok, just a quick blog post, but some people may find this useful . 
If you are like me and have a number of friends of facebook that play a lot of the facebook apps such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, etc and tend to hit the publish button every time they fire up the game, or what seems like every 30 seconds, your Facebook news feed, like mine can get a little crowded.
You could un-friend them, but that’s not very friendly, and if they enjoy playing the games, and I’m sure they have other friends that may finds the post of interest (eg, if they are playing the same game), but for me, it just makes my News Feed unreadable.
The solution is simpler than you think !, when you see one of the offending posts, just mouse over the top right hand corner, and click the hide button. This will hide this post, and give you the option to hide notifications from just this app, or from this user. Hiding the app, will hide all posts from this application.
I spent 5 minutes running through my news feed, hiding all the apps, and now my feed just has relevant information to me, it’s like the good old days of Facebook again.
edit : Just has a message from Chris, and apparently if you just use Lite version of Facebook, you don’t get any apps showing.
Tags: app, blog, button, cafe, Chris, facebook, farmville, feed, fire, game, games, hide, interest, lot, Mafia, mafia wars, mine, mouse, news, news feed, notifications, number, post, same game, solution, time, wars, world
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Oct 30, 2009 in
PC Gaming,
PS3,
XBOX 360 I like most of you, use twitter, facebook and occasionally pop on to myspace to see how many bands want to be my friends.
Anyway, on the 4th of October, through total fluke read through a twitter conversation, and noticed a load of twitter entries from @squ1r3ll, with updates on his gaming status….linking to a site called raptr.com.
Being a bit of a gamer I’ve tried for months to get my gamertags, achievement, out to my friends and virtual friends, but the only way I’ve found to do this is manually.
I tried a number of facebook apps, and had varied success, they would either change my status to “Darren is playing…..” after a couple of hours of gaming, or just not bother at all. The achievements would post to my feed, however this was a manual process, I belevie the app is called “Xbox 360 Live GamerCard”.
Anyway, raptr.com, what is it…well let me tell you, it’s fantastic, and what I’ve been looking for, for ages. You sign up (using Facebook connect if you like) and add your gamer profiles, eg Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, Warcraft, etc etc, what it then does is monitors and reports on your gaming activities, eg which game your playing, on which platform, and records how long, and any achievement you may get.
Xbox live is monitored through the feed that Microsoft so kindly provide, and updates almost in real time (can be a 5/10 min delay), PSN tracking is currently broken due to Sony putting a restriction on their data. Everything else is tracked by the client.
The client is a custom messenger type client that can also run your msn, gtalk, aim, yahoo, xfire and icq, however this is the key to tracking the stats on your PC/Mac. On initial install it will scan your hard drive for games, and add them to your collection (both on the client, and on the website), any new games installed it will pick them up and also add to your collection.
When your ready to play a game, just start as normal and this will change your messenger stats to “Darren is playing xxxxxxx”, as it does with your online raptr status too, and logs the time played. When finished, it calculates the time you were playing and adds this to your tally on the website.
With the site you also get the option of a couple of signatures with varied information, all updating in real time, varying from currently playing to, the last/most played with you longest played 6 games.
Once you start to build up your friends, it will give you a ranking out of your current friend on a particular game (bases on the number of achievements you have), you can also compare achievements on a game with upto 3 friends at a time.
Finally one very cool feature of Raptr, is that when you get an achievement, it will tell you what percentage of Raptr users who have that game, have gained that achievement, giving you an idea of how hard it was.
The only downside with Raptr, is that it is unable to check your PSN stats, now this is through no fault of their own, it just seems Sony is being a little protective about their data. You can update your playing time, but this is manual, hopefully some day in the future, they will allow this.
From googling the PSN issue, I stumbled on a number of other social networking for gamer sites, GamerDNA, Playfire and Giantbomb.
I haven’t used any of the sites as much as I’ve used Raptr, however they all seem to be kinda tracking my stats.
GamerDNA, does seem to track PSN stats, and pull through the trophies, but there seems to be around a 2 day delay
Playfire, Love the layout, but again doesn’t pull through the PSN stats/trophies, doesn’t track time, and also about a day behind.
GiantBomb, I only signed up for this last night, but it’s already tracking my Steam, Warcraft and XBL, but again, no PSN.
All in all, it’s good to more and more of these sites popping up, I remember the day when gaming was deemed as geeky, however seems every man and his dog is doing it now, and it’s now socially accepted.
Personal recommendation, give Raptr.com a try, it just works and if you do, feel free to add me as a friend
My ID’s for the sites are as follows
Raptr
GamerDNA
Playfire
Giantbomb
and no, Raptr isn’t broken, I’ve actually spent that much time playing Borderlands
Tags: achievement, apps, client, com, couple, Darren, day, facebook, fluke, game, gamer, gamer profiles, GamerDNA, gaming, gaming activities, Giantbomb, hard drive, mac, Microsoft, monitors, msn, new games, number, pc mac, Playfire, psn, raptr, real time, restriction, site, sony, status, steam, time, twitter, virtual friends, xbox, xbox 360, xbox live, xfire
