A few weeks ago my brother found a deal at Elkjøp for an Acer Iconia W511 tablet with Windows 8 (instead of Windows RT which most tablets have) for 1995NOK minus 1000NOK cashback from Acer as long as they accept the cashback form. We bought three of them, one for me, one for my brother and one for my parents so they can try using the touchscreen for writing Chinese.

After we ordered it, we were told that the store ran out of the tablet-only packages, and kindly offered to deliver the package that included the keyboard/extra battery for no extra charge! So while I have complained earlier about deliveries from Elkjøp taking too long to arrive (some of the games I ordered didn’t arrive for several weeks), I guess their customer service isn’t always that bad.

Anyways the laptop/tablet works quite all right. It does have quite a slow CPU for a laptop, so it lags if running too heavy web sites or videos, but it works all right for 720p video files and 480p flash videos. Widescreen ratio means videos are no longer shown with black bars on top and bottom. The biggest advantage of this tablet compared to Apple, Android or Windows RT tablets is the fact that it runs Windows 8, so it is a lot more flexible than a pure tablet. The drawback is that lack of good touchscreen-controlled games, especially compared to iPads, but even compared to Android. The Windows Store really still sucks when it comes to contents. If this tablet didn’t have Windows 8, it would definitely be a lot less useful because of the lack of good apps.

I also managed to fix my old laptop! The graphics card died a while back, and I was about to take it apart for throwing away*. But then when I picked out the graphics card, I tried googling for information about it and found a video about fixing graphics cards by baking them in the oven. Which amazingly worked:

So now I have my “gaming” laptop back! This laptop was a great buy. I made sure to buy one with decent specs and graphics card, so even though the laptop is now 6 years old, it still runs super smoothly! (I did upgrade it with a SSD hard drive and more RAM.) Biggest problem with the laptop is that it’s quite heavy, so I’m glad I got the Iconia as a travel laptop.

A few weeks ago I went to Stavanger to visit some friends, which was nice! Played a game called “Vil du vedde?” (English version: “Wanna bet?“), walked around in town a bit, and ate lots of food. Completely forgot to take any photos though… Oh and I also met Elisa and her daughter Rebecca. Rebecca started crying loudly every time she saw me, so I had to hide in the kitchen. After a while she got a bit more used to me so she didn’t cry right away, but she still started crying if I got too close. But I was told that she was like that with everyone, except for girls. Huh.

I finished a few games this past month: The Last Window: Secret of Cape West, Thomas Was Alone, Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4, Magicka (with my brother Vilhelm), Kirby’s Epic Yarn. Started playing Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Mario and Luigi: Dream Team on the 3DS, and FEZ on Steam. Oh and I finally started doing exercise biking again. While playing games. Which works all right because I almost forget that I’m exercising! Except my butt starts hurting if I bike for too long. Not sure how much is because of a bad/hard/non-ergonomic seat and how much is just because I’ve exercised too little. Maybe I should try biking without sitting on the bike seat some time.

I also finished Drawn: Dark Flight and Layton Brothers: Mystery Room on the iPad earlier this summer, seems like I forgot to mention those. Both are decent games, though quite short. Drawn is a good point and click series which unlike many iOS adventure games doesn’t consist of tons of “hidden object” stages. Layton Brothers reminds a little of the Ace Attorney/Phoenix Wright series of game, with finding evidence, interviewing subjects and pointing out contradictions.

I’m still kind of interested in making Android and now also Windows 8 apps. My Windows 8 tablet has multi-touch, should be great for making multiplayer games! And the store is so “empty” that if I can make any even half-decent games (or apps), they might not have that much competition. The question is whether I can actually make anything decent I guess. *sigh* As soon as I stop spending so much time playing games maybe I can actually start looking into it and try making simple apps.

* When your computer breaks, don’t just throw it away! Make sure you take out the hard drive and get the files there deleted first. Otherwise someone could pick it up, take out the hard drive and access your documents and photos! Unless the hard drive was the broken part in your laptop, but in that case, buying a new hard drive should be enough to fix your computer and shouldn’t cost that much, as long as you are able to install Windows or some other OS on the computer.