STG's

Battlefield 2: Special Forces can be run by doing a few steps each time  (Steam employee post). The alternate method involves changing the launch options back and forth for Special Forces and regular BF2 - quite annoying. A third way involves going to menu Games in Steam and clicking on Add a non-Steam game to my library. Then browse to BF2.EXE (in "C:\Program Files (x86)\steam\SteamApps\common\battlefield 2\BF2.EXE" or wherever you have installed Steam) and add +modPath mods/xpack to the Target field. ( Thanks to Weedo for the tip ) Then just run it from the BF2 shortcut on Steam or use Create Desktop Shortcut on the BF2 item. I'm not sure why Steam doesn't just create the shortcuts by itself - it does on many other games... Maybe because BF2 was so old when they started selling it? And for anyone wondering about it, yes, it is an old game but that doesn't mean it isn't still fun.

AI Apocalypse - by William Hertling - is the sequel to Avogadro Corp - which I read and reviewed a few days ago . The sequel is almost as good as the original. The story takes place a few years after Avogadro Corp. ELOPe is still hidden, but has enormous influence. It designed the most used computer designs, a mesh network that is now the main mean of net access for mankind, achieved world peace and mostly cured cancer. Now Leon, a teen genius, is coerced into writing a virus. But he is too good, and now ELOPe is going to have to save mankind from the consequence. Pretty good and I really enjoyed it. Some annoying points, however ( Spoiler Alert ) - the ending seems a bit forced (what about all the backbones?). The teen genius card was unnecessary and cheapens the story to a direct-to-TV movie level. And the main argument includes a magical program that reverse engineers and analyses software to steal functions - itself an AI complete problem. I LOLed a bit when Leon said n...

Freedom(TM) - by Daniel Suarez -  is the sequel to Daemon. It starts as Daemon - the massive botnet with scripted AI - has gained enormous power and turned out to be a force for the good. It is now joining people together in self-relying communities, destroying Intellectual Property and financial parasites, and doing all sorts of good in the background, by using the members of the darknet. The ultimate democracy. Meanwhile, the powerful companies are not happy, and are out to destroy the darknet - by any means possible... Very, very good. And it is hard not to imagine that if something like this could be done, it would be great. Even though I think that there is no way this would work as well as it did on fiction...

Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than it Appears  - by William Hertling - is an excellent SF novel, which just stretches current tech a little bit to create a "sentient" AI. The story takes place on the Avogadro Corp - clearly a book version of Google (the name is even based on a number, too!). In Avogadro, David and Mike are part of the team that is creating ELOPe - a program that uses a ton of servers and information in the company e-mail servers to optimize e-mails to be convincing - to the people that will read it. I just took a Natural Language Processing earlier this year, and overall that seems reasonable - just very hard. Tons of servers and a lot of e-mails to process should help. Just as the project is going to be canceled because it just uses too many servers, David sets the program to go wild on an attempt to convince the responsible parties to get them more servers. ELOPe succeeds beyond David's wildest dreams - but not on the way he expected.....

Max Payne 1 and 2 were great, and I played through them more than once. They did have some annoying, extensive storytelling stops, but it also had bullet time, which more than made up for it. Max Payne 3 puts the annoying stop for mostly pointless story telling ranting to a new level. It is common to stop for a few minutes for general ranting for Max, as well as slowly moving the story along. It has been a few years since I last played it, but I remember the gameplay on 1 and 2 as being much better. It is not that bad, but I am not a fan of the outside view - I much prefer FPS. Of course, once you have a cover system, you either have to keep flipping the view from FPS to outside or just have an outside view all the time. It is certainly unusual to have dialogue in portuguese in a game. I've lived in São Paulo most of my life, and the accent is sometimes clearly off, but nothing major. Still a bit annoying. The game also has rail sequences - so far only one on a helicopter wi...

I'm really impressed with the GPS on the Galaxy S III. While I never had the major problems some had on my Galaxy S, it still took at least a few (20-30) seconds outside to lock on, and never worked inside. On the Galaxy S III, I got a lock 5 seconds after turning it on - inside the house! Excellent!

You might have noticed my use of quotes around review on the title. The reason is that I really don't have the patience to do a real review of my cell phone. Instead, I will just mention the points that came to my attention about it, specially as they compare to my previous smartphones - a N95 and a Samsung Galaxy S. First of all, while some people complained about the design, I really liked both the blue and the white versions of S III. They look great to me, and while the back covers don't feel actually sturdy, they feel strong enough, and less like cheap plastic than my S did. One factor of my purchase was the camera. The camera on the S didn't have a flash, and even photos that didn't require flash looked bad - my N95 beat it by an enormous margin. The camera on the S III is much better. Pictures look reasonably OK, the flash works fine, and an important factor is that it is fast. You can just pull the phone out of your pocket, put up the hold screen, swipe up o...

Hacker Monthly  is a magazine version of Hacker News. What is nice is that it contains hand picked articles with nice formating, in topics as diverse as programming, start-ups, cooking and more. They also nicely handle Kindle delivery, which means that new issues just appear in my iPad (I really wouldn't  want to read it on my Kindle - it looks too nice in the big screen and has plenty of photos). I have to say that I am not sure if I would have subscribed without the Appsumo sale - 3 years for US$39. But for that price, it is pretty good value.

Legends of Grimrock is a classic style Dungeon Crawler. As you can see below, the graphics are pretty good - but it really uses the classic approach, including the grid-based floor (you can walk only on the 4 directions or rotate), 4 element party in a square, and many more of the old school elements. In Legends of Grimrock, you will have to crawl this Dungeon to escape. You can pick your crew, or use the predefined group, with the fighter, tank, rogue and magician. You start with unarmed combat and get weapons as you get along (although I am not impressed by the variety of the loot so far). Magic use depends on finding scrolls with the runes you must select. I'm not a huge fan of the system for doing spells - click on the runes every time you cast it, then click another button to cast, but it is acceptable. You can also mix potions, such as healing. But I found that the easiest way to get along is using rest after each battle. It is also interesting to note that just going...

Year Zero is an hilarious SF novel. I've heard a few comments comparing him to Douglas Adams, and it is hard to disagree. The plot revolves about aliens hearing our music back in the 70s. They loved it so much that their brains would explode after hearing it. But given time the hardiest of them survived - and rewrote their date system to take that first time as year zero. A few decades after that (now), they finally got around to reading our Copyright law. Turns out that they really take native law seriously, and now they realize that they own all the wealth in the universe (several times over) to Earth. And an alien group decides that it is easier to just destroy Earth... And a lawyer and two aliens are going to have to save it. The book was hilarious, and I'd recommend it even for people that are not usually SF fans.

World of Goo is a pretty cool physics puzzle game, which I have played on the PC when it was released, a few years ago. Basically you move different kinds of Goo figures into places supporting a tower (I vaguely remember the original game which was just making a tower), so that it will reach an objective with enough of the goo balls to get sucked through a vacuum. There are several different goo ball types - regular, which become part of the tower permanently once placed, those that can be removed later, some are gas bubbles that can be used to lift the tower, etc. The actual puzzles can be very hard and clever. There are signs spread over the levels to give you hints, as well as a form of tutorial. I got the Android version on Humble Bundle earlier this year, but I didn't get around to trying it till now. Graphics are almost exactly the same as on the PC, and they look awesome. Sound and music are identical, and pretty good. Gameplay suffers somewhat compared to the mous...

I have noticed these temp_%1%2 files for a while, but until today had no idea what they were related to the Kindle for PC app. For whatever reason, it looks like the app was trying to update itself by creating a temp_%1%2 file whenever I open a Mobi file (usually from O'Reilly e-book store or The Pragmatic Library). Obviously, 28MB files popping up all over my HD are quite annoying. However, it is quite easy to solve - just install the latest version from Amazon  .

Foreign Legion: Multi Massacre is a third-person cartoon style shooter. The art is cute, although the poor animation is a bit jarring. The music is incredibly annoying after a few seconds. The gameplay itself is quite repetitive and mostly boring. For whatever reason, Steam has the Single-player "badge" on the store page - this seems to be incorrect. Personally I really didn't like it - not recommended.

The Apocalypse Codex - by Charles Stross - is the newest book in the Laundry series. The Laundry is a British occult organization dedicated to saving us from the horrors of other dimensions - kind of a UK terror version of the MIB. In their universe, proving specific mathematical theorems is an advanced way of doing magic. As usual, the main character - Bob Howard, computational demonologist - gets assigned into more than he can handle. But this time, he has other major players with him - a powerful witch called Duchess Persephone Hazard (the name is a little too Bond for me) and her companion, Johnny McTavish. They go hunting for information on an american pastor who is - as usual in the Laundry books - trying to release another alien god. Very good, as usual, and recommended for fans of the series.

Infinity Blade I and II are iPad games. They have relatively little story and dialogue - they mostly consist of short sword battles with monsters, knights, golems or special characters. I feel that is very adequate given the tablet medium - and time limitations while on the go. With such a think story as a start, I was a bit surprised that this book was pretty good. The story - which take place between the two games - detail what Siris did after killing the God King, how the God King returns on Infinity Blade II, and why Siris went chasing after the Worker of Secrets. Another big point is how Siris didn't know what he was, albeit the mechanics of how this work in the game seems a little off. Overall, really recommended for fans of the game series.

I really liked a few of the older single-player Tribes games. The jetpacks and skying made it different from most cookie-cutter games, and allowed for quick, fun moving around. While I'm really not a fan of most multiplayer games, I tried Tribes: Ascend as soon as I could. After a mildly annoying installation with way more prompts than necessary, I got started. The graphics in the tutorials are disappointing. They are probably a little better than the last Tribes:Vengeance - a 2004 game. After a little while feeling like I'm playing a several years old game, something threw me out of the game to the desktop (didn't seem like any of the usual culprits, either - maybe it was the game itself, maybe not). When I returned, the game managed to freak out in a spectacular manner (too bad I forgot to get screenshots) - I was throw inside a mountain, from which I managed to leave with the jetpack. However, the level geometry was completely messed out, with terrain popping appar...