Call of Duty: Black Ops

In a word: clusterfuck. I really enjoyed Modern Warfare.  It’s one of my favourite FPS’s of all time.  It was fun, challenging, had an interesting storyline… it was “realistic” but not to the point of losing the whole point of the game – to be a game, a form of entertainment.  Alas, Black Ops is… Read more

Amazon’s lying product listings

I bought some extension tubes from Cameta Camera, via Amazon, about two weeks ago.  The product page was titled: Vivitar Professional Metal Macro Automatic Extension Tube Set of 3 for Nikon (13mm, 21mm &  31mm) I suppose I should have caught on that something was wrong by the fact that the description for the same… Read more

Shooting tethered with a D3200

Ugh… random tip:  the Nikon D3200 will refuse to take a shot, while tethered, unless there is an SD card in the camera.  Even if you turn off shutter lock (which does work when not tethering). Also, Live View isn’t available at all while tethering.  That’s annoying.  The point of tethering is to get precise studio/macro… Read more

“Realistic” unit behaviour in real-time strategies

In addition to the frustrating lack of reliability of Company of Heroes as a software product, I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with some aspects of the gameplay itself.  One aspect in particular is the behaviour of units. When you give an order to units in that game, they ostensibly follow it.  But oftentimes they don’t, for… Read more

Quality control of current Mac games

The age-old sore point of Mac gaming has been performance.  Ports from Windows versions would often run significantly slower for no apparent reason.  Interestingly, this seems to be less of an issue as of the last couple of years – whether because the games are being optimised better or Mac hardware is just better able… Read more

WP Retina 2x

I installed the “WP Retina 2x” plug-in, excited to use and abuse my iPad 3’s extra pixels (and those of any future Retina Macs I might acquire).  Unfortunately, two hours later, while it’s mostly working it’s basically requiring too much manual fixing to be viable. The first problem was that it uses the PHP variable… Read more

Ergonomics

You know you’re old when you have aches mostly all over, and you want a higher chair and one of those desks with a under-hung keyboard tray.  Ugh. That and voice dictation that actually works.  Siri, I love you, but you suck.