STG's

I have been using Apple Music since shortly after it became available. I have used it on an iPad Air, and on my PC. My smartphone uses Android and there is support for it so far. I have only used it at home, with a 60 Mbps internet connection. Apple Music has a great selection. Still, there are clearly some restrictions, at least for Brazil, as some music will appear with a faded title and isn't available to play. That is not very common, though. The playlists on For You are usually excellent, and a good portion are very relevant to what I like. In that aspect, the service is pretty good. The playlists on New tend to be good though, but they are clearly not as focused on what I like. Overall, this seems much better than my (relatively short) experience with Spotify. The iPad app is, quite simply, spectacularly bad. It will crash again and again, and not while doing complex things - just returning to a playing music will sometimes crash it. Adding a music will crash it, starti...

Honor Among Thieves: Star Wars (Empire and Rebellion) is a book by James S.A. Corey on the Star Wars universe. The book takes place just after the Star Wars was destroyed, and is mostly from Han's point of view of a mission involving an ancient alien superweapon (which seems to be James SA Corey's specialty). Overall, I liked it. I never read any of the Star Wars novel, and it is fun to see into the space between the movies with characters I know well.

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...

I imagine I will grow sick of it eventually, but so far I really like WindowFX 5  . It has a bunch of clever functions you can see in the link above, but the silliest thing I really like is the animations. They are just adorable. The animations are set to random, and each time I close, open or minimize a window I get a different animation - rolling from various places, moving from the edge and wobbling after it reaches its place, doing a magic poof, and many more. You can get it as part of their Object Desktop package (which is how I got it - I wouldn't have paid US$10 for it alone).

Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot is a DLC package for Borderlands! . Mostly it involves fighting in arenas. The arenas are quite clever, and you get waves of enemies of different types - melee, bosses, etc. This is further mixed up with clever bonuses - for example, you may have pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, headshot bonuses. This really makes it more exciting. The problem with Moxxi's is the exact same problem that all Borderlands! DLC (and many of the original missions) have - it expects that you have a lot of free, continuous time. You can't just stop at a specific wave after an hour of play - you have to keep going until you finish it. For me that is really annoying, and means that I can't recommend Moxxi's.

I recently bought an iPad 2. I already had a latest generation Kindle, which I really liked. However, reading PDFs (which are quite common for technical books) is a major pain in the Kindle. It is slow (and slows down more the further I get into the book), and highlighting is pretty slow too. The screen for the regular Kindle is nowhere big enough for a regular A4 formatted PDF. I had the option of getting a Kindle DX or a tablet. I kept hearing good things about the iPad 2, and it can do a lot more than just reading books, so I decided to try it out. (This is a Kindle vs iPad 2 comparison - I posted my iPad 2 review separately). One thing I really like about the iPad 2 is reading PDFs. It is pretty fast and works great. iBooks is not perfect - it seems I can't set a zoom level for a PDF and keep it there. Nor can I highlight text and add notes, only bookmark pages. I also read any Kindle technical books mostly in the iPad now. The bigger screen and faster highlighting ...

Risk:Factions is based on the classic board game Risk. Some of the added features are silly characters, and a whole bunch of level specific game mechanics. For example, on the level on the screenshot, whoever has 3 barracks get control of the missile. The missile adds to your attack power on territories within range. On the next campaign level, you have mines. Whoever has the mines get extra troops depending on troops stationed at the mine. The animations are well done - specially the (somewhat silly) cutscenes. The sounds and music are ok, albeit a little repetitive. The only thing on the interface that really bothered me is how you select the number of troops to deploy or move - you have to move the mouse, but the control moves too fast and you have to try more than once to get it right sometimes. Overall, pretty good for the fans of the genre. Risk:Factions EA Review Date: 2011-03-09 4 out of 5 stars

Spacechem is a puzzle game. You use sequences of blocks to - and that is the very original part - assemble molecules from atoms. I have in fact played many similar games (i.e.: connect blocks to achieve a certain effect). I've rarely really liked them, and that is the case here. I just don't see much fun in it. The music is pretty good, though. If you like this kind of game, you might enjoy it.

I had played and bought Titan Attacks - a wonderful Space Invaders style shooter, with great retro graphics and neat physics - quite a while ago. So I was on Puppy Games list and got the pre-release demo of Revenge of the Titans. It was an incredibly annoying RTS (some might say tower defense game). You had to click on your refineries to collect cash. You had to click on your guns to reload. I honestly thought I was doing a re-review here, till I noticed I didn't ever review that version. I just forgot about it till it was included in the new Humble Indie Bundle. I bought the bundle, and didn't even bother to download it. That is, until I got a message mentioning that the new version completely removed all the clicky mechanics I hated... Then I downloaded it (and a few extra releases - they had several in the last couple of months), just to check out how it played now. And turns out I really like it. It always had a fun retro style I liked, but with the changes in rel...

I've just finished reading  The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman - by Tim Ferriss . It's an interesting guide that contains a lot of techniques to improve your body - such as a diet, exercises and concepts for gaining muscle, strength, speed, and improving you swimming, running or baseball performance. I thought it was quite interesting. Do the ideas make sense? Many seem to, and confirm published studies. Other seem a little crazy. The diet he proposes, the slow-carb diet, which has plenty of protein and vegetables, but no carbs with high glicemic content (rice, bread, etc), seems to make sense. There a few interesting ideas I'm already trying: You might have heard of drinking 500 ml of cold water when you wake up. I had, but since I didn't heard a good explanation I completely ignored it. According to the book, in at least two studies this increased resting metabolic rate 24-30%. Cold Showers: at s...

Another semi-generic retro game. Cute neon wireframe graphics, somewhat annoying music. In a variation on the classic 2D racer, you have shields and a few different weapons. Not worth the time of trying it out, unless you specifically like this sort of game.

Rush is based on a classic computer puzzle game - some sort of entity (in this case, colored cubes) are released or start from a point in the puzzle, and you must use some sort of tool (here arrows, teleports and conveyors) to make them go safely to a specific spot. As usual, you get the exact type of tools you need to complete the level (at least for the levels I played). The graphics and sounds are nice, but I can't say that the super abstract style seemed to help.  I just didn't like it. However, I'm not a big fan of this particular puzzle type. If you are, you might want to get their demo.

System Protocol One is another tower defense game. The game world is based on cool looking grids and components representing a server, in the glowing wireframe of the now classic retro look. The game has a competent tutorial, ok soundtrack and an interesting theme. It seems to have all the classics of tower defense games, both on attackers and defense, and a few interesting twists. If you are a fan of tower defense games, it's worth taking a look at this one.

Children No More - by Mark L. Van Name - is the latest book in the Jon and Lobo series. Jon and Lobo is a SF series on a not very near future where humanity is spread across the galaxy, mostly through instantaneous travel gates (in a very deus-ex machine way they come from nowhere - I hope it will be explained eventually) . The main character is the only man with nanobots in his cells, who is an ex-soldier with a heart of gold that keeps getting into trouble, and his sentient ship, Lobo, which is one of a kind, again because of nanobots experiments. This book is in many ways a manifesto against using childrens in war - the plot is based on Jon saving ex-children soldiers so that they can be just children. Several characters from the first two books appear, and there are a lot of flashbacks about Jon's own experience as a child soldier, in Pinkelponker, which were hinted at on the other books but never fully fleshed out. Overall, pretty good even though there was a lot less ac...

I am a fan of the TV series and I really liked the first book - Heat Wave  - so I was fairly happy to see Naked Heat - by Richard Castle on the Kindle store. Now that I've read it, I'm not disappointed. The story was pretty good, and the mini tie-ins with the series, such as a body being robbed, really add to the fun for the fans. Quite recommended for the series fans.

Jump Gate Twist - by Mark L. Van Name was a very quick read for me - it's an omnibus volume with the first two volumes of the Jon and Lobo series - A Jump Ahead and Slanted Jack - and two short stories. I've recently read the two books, so I naturally only read the short stories. They were interesting - one has the pre-fix Jon, and the other is an absurd and interesting Christmas tale with Lobo (before he met Jon). If you plan to read any of the other books, then this should be cheaper. Getting it only for the short stories would make it a bit expensive - I only got it myself because it came on a Webscriptions package.

This is a very quick review, since I only bothered to play the game for a few minutes. Booster Trooper is a side-view (plataformer) shooter. It reminds me of Soldat, but I liked Soldat a whole lot more, while I really hated this one. Maybe the tempo of the game is too fast, or maybe it's because I'm older and slower :-) . The graphics and music are nice, but the gameplay didn't work for me.

Slanted Jack - my Mark L. Van Name - is an old purchase. It sat on my cell phone for a couple of years until I got around to reading it. I'm glad I found it, however - while not great, it was quite fun. The story passes on a galactic (human) civilization that has found jump gates - the very common magical device that allows FTL travel. These are a little more convenient than usual - they only exist on systems with planets that support human life. The main character - Jon Moore -  is an ex-bodyguard with an interesting past - he's the survivor of a planet where mutation caused humans to get "powers". He also got infected by experimental nanotech, and can heal fast, doesn't age, and can unleash deadly nanotech clouds and talk to machines (the whole thing reminds me a bit of Jake 2.0 ) The machines all have embedded AIs, down to panes of glass. That does cause the addition of a number of silly dialogue between them, as they seem to chat all the time. The bulk...

Mission of Honor, by David Webber is the latest book in the Honor Harrington series. I'm a fan of the series and have read all the books, including the ones with short stories from other authors - some of which were surprisingly good. Mission of Honor follows the disastrous altercation with the SLN which ended with an overwhelming victory for Manticore. Meanwhile, the Mesan Alignment has a little surprise for Manticore... Eventually Cachat and Zilwicki, the super secret agents emerge after their Green Pines adventure from a previous book (ok, I am too lazy to look them up, even though I blogged about them). And thus comes a long revelation about the Mesan goals, that were never properly explained before. The relationship with Haven changes by the end of the book, in a mildly surprising way, that nevertheless shows where the next story arc of the series is going. It's looking pretty good. As always, recommended. The book does feel to have large segments cutting into the ...

As usual, a game was on sale on Steam so I went and checked out the demo. This time it was Power Of Defense, which is a common theme on flash games - you choose certain units, which will be sent to attack the enemy. You can usually choose the units for specific effects against the enemy types. That is basically it. Except that I've seen a dozen flash games that were better than this...