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Author Archives: Johan Ho

Busy November month

Haven’t had time to post anything in November because I’ve been busy almost every weekend! The first weekend in November was the only weekend I didn’t have any plans. And the last weekend in October I invited some friends over to play Nintendo Land and also a bit of Wii Karaoke U, had a great time! Also we made dumplings.

Dumplings with colorful noodles

Dumplings with colorful noodles!

The second weekend in November I went to SpillExpo, which was way too packed on a Saturday. I originally wanted to go on Friday, but my brother didn’t want to go, so we went on Saturday instead… Meh, last time I go on a Saturday, next year if I go I’m going on a Friday, so maybe I don’t have to stand in line for an hour to try things. Nintendo didn’t come to SpillExpo either this year, but I guess I already know which games from them I am looking forward to anyways. We ended up staying at the expo almost all the time it was open, but a lot of the time was spent waiting in queues.

Some stall at SpillExpo with retro (and new) consoles

Some stall at SpillExpo with retro (and new) consoles

The best part of the expo was actually the indie stalls, where I could try out some cool games that I haven’t really heard much about before, and where there were almost no queues! I didn’t try all the games though, but I tried these:

  • Amphora by Moondrop – A physics puzzle game for PC where you can move things around with the mouse and also draw threads that can be connected to objects. In each stage you have to figure out what you need to do by looking at the characters and objects that are in the stage and how they react to your movements.
  • Little Big Mansion by Krisjet Game Design – A puzzle game for iOS where you control two magicians with different abilities: One of them can swap the location of two items, while the other can swap the sizes of two items. You have to move one or both of them to the exit. I guess it is somewhat similar to Escape Plan on the PS Vita.

Also got to try the Oculus Rift in a few stalls, but I feel like they probably had lowered the 3D depth/effect, because in my opinion the demos we got to try felt quite “flat”, things didn’t really pop out much. Since I’m used to setting the 3D setting to max on my 3D monitor at home when gaming, I was kind of disappointed. Still, I’ll most likely buy the Oculus Rift once it’s out, so I can actually adjust the settings myself.

Oh and on Sunday I made a “Father’s Day” meal for my father/parents. Fried chicken and baked chicken. Also an ice cream cake, but they said they had eaten a lot before so I saved the cake for later.

Father's Day meal

Father’s Day meal – Fried chicken, baked chicken, salad

Third weekend in November I went to Gothenburg to visit some friends. I also played through Heavy Rain, which had really quite an impressive story! I didn’t even notice that I had played till 2 at night when I finished the game. Besides that, I played badminton, ate at Super Rullband, went to church and the Science Fiction Bookstore. The food at Super Rullband isn’t really superhigh quality, but they had enough different sushi, Asian dishes, cakes and ice cream that I got super full after eating there! At the Sci-Fi Bookstore I bought Guild Hall: Job Faire, a stand-alone expansion that can be played without the original Guild Hall cards. I kind of like this game! Though I lost a few times when playing against my brothers…

All the caaaaaakes!

All the caaaaaakes! (At Super Rullband.)

Fourth weekend I had my birthday party at my house. I made almost the same food as for the Father’s Day meal, but also potato gratin, and I served the cake I saved, an coconut ice cream cake with chocolate pieces!

And then we played Wii U Party, more Nintendo Land and also some quiz games on Kahoot!, which was also kind of fun, because everyone can join as long as they have a smartphone and internet connection! But there weren’t that many “good” quizzes to pick from, and people also generally replied so quickly that it was hard to catch up once you were lagging behind in score. Anyways, had a lot of fun and got some nice clothes and other gifts! What I regretted most was not taking a photo with all my friends, oh well. I always forget…

Grilled and fried chicken, potato gratin, also salad

Grilled and fried chicken, potato gratin, also salad

The fifth and last weekend in November we had a costume party at church, the theme was “Superheroes and supervillains”. I actually ordered an anime costume from China, but it still hasn’t arrived as of now… So anyways I threw together a costume from mostly normal clothes, except I bought a costume hat and glued together some plastic and textile into a pair of goggles. The party was fun, we had food, a superhero quiz and some games, and took a bunch of photos that I will refrain from posting here in case anyone are embarrassed of being seen in their costumes, so I’ll just post my own selfie here.

My half-assed Spider-Man Noir costume.

My half-assed Spider-Man Noir costume.

Besides all of the things I did, a lot of great games came out over the last month! I bought Pokemon Y (which I still haven’t beat because I got into all those other games), Ace Attorney 5 + DLC, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Super Mario 3D World, and Vilhelm said he would buy Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy, but I don’t think he has yet, which is fine by me since I still have all those other games. I even bought Assassin’s Creed 3 (Limited Edition, came with a coined medal/coin/thing) for the Wii U because it was quite cheap by now, but I don’t know when I will have time to play through that. Only played through the first chapter or so to test it out.

Pokemon X & Y and Assassin's Creed 3

Pokemon X & Y and Assassin’s Creed 3

And for fun I bought Pokemon Typing Adventure, a DS game which comes with a keyboard. The keyboard can actually be used as a normal Bluetooth keyboard with f.ex. your smartphone or your tablet, so if you find this game cheap somewhere it’s actually not a bad deal! As long as you can live with an English keyboard layout.

 

Learn With Pokemon Typing Adventure!

Learn With Pokemon Typing Adventure!

 

Ah, it doesn’t seem like I wrote this in my blog before, but I bought an ice cream machine with an actual motor for freezing so I don’t need to waste space in my freezer to pre-freeze a cooling bowl. This also means I can make bigger batches of ice cream at the same time! Anyways I’ve been using it almost every week after I bought it, and I’ve tried making various ice cream types.

"Chinese Triple Ice Cream" - Black sesame, green tea and coconut ice cream

“Chinese Triple Ice Cream” – Black sesame, green tea and coconut ice cream

Norwegian "gløgg" ice cream with raisins and almonds

Norwegian “gløgg” ice cream with raisins and almonds

In addition to those two examples I’ve also made:

  • Pineapple sorbet
  • Apple sorbet
  • Pineapple and cinnamon ice cream

And just to point it out: Making ice cream yourself is most likely not going to get you “cheaper” ice cream, especially when making it with actual cream, which in Norway is quite expensive. I guess making sorbets can be quite cheap if you buy fruit that is on sale. Anyways I’ve mostly been trying to make the kind of ice creams that you can’t easily buy in Norwegian supermarkets. Not all of them turn out all that well, but nothing has turned out inedible at least till now!

 

Posted by on 2013-12-05 in Rambling

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Got Wii U and Windows 8.1

With the release of Wind Waker HD Nintendo released a Wii U bundle with a “limited edition” Zelda Wii Gamepad, so I thought it was a good chance to get that Wii U that I intended to buy but never really did because of the lack of games.

Wii U Wind Waker bundle box

Box shot of the Wii U Wind Waker bundle

Zelda Wii U Gamepad and Zelda Wii Motion Plus controller

The Zelda Wii U Gamepad next to the Zelda Wii Motion Plus controller from the Skyward Sword bundle

That being said, there still is a lack of really good games for the Wii U. I bought Nintendo Land (which has at least a few multiplayer games that are quite fun) and also ordered Assassin’s Creed 3 which I look forward to playing on the Wii U just to see how much better it feels to have a map on the gamepad instead of having to go into the map screen every 10 seconds. Oh well, honestly I’m not in a hurry to get more games, but I do want to get a few more party games before I get too bored of playing Nintendo Land!

 

Windows 8.1 was released a few days ago, and while my Acer Iconia W511 could automatically upgrade from the Windows Store, my stationary computer had to be upgraded with an installation DVD because it was installed using a corporate version of Windows 8. And it took a long time to download the Win8.1 DVD from Microsoft’s website, probably because a gazillion people are downloading it right now. But I eventually managed to upgrade my stationary too.

It is nice that I can now boot directly to desktop, see my desktop wallpaper on the start screen, and that it is slightly easier to move icons around on the start screen. Though honestly I don’t really use the start screen for much except searching for programs, which is why it is still a bit cluttered in my screenshot.

Start Screen Wallpaper

Now you can choose to keep your desktop wallpaper on your start screen

The search is supposed to be improved in 8.1 too, now it automatically searches across all apps and files. I did try just now to search for one of the songs on my computer, and Windows did find the file quite quickly. Selecting the file started playing it in my default audio player (Mediamonkey). When I say supposed, it’s only because I never really tried “advanced” searching much in Windows 8, so I wouldn’t really know what has changed.

Oh and now you can dock more than two Windows 8 apps on the screen at the same time (as long as it’s larger than a certain resolution), and you can also dock apps on more than one monitor at the same time (in Windows 8 I could only dock things apps on a single monitor, and the Start screen would insist on opening up on that screen when I had something docked). If nothing else, I can at least now keep the Facebook app docked on some edge of one of my monitors. Yeah I might be kind of a FB junkie.

In Windows 8.1 you can now dock apps to multiple locations and also still use the desktop at the same time

In Windows 8.1 you can now dock apps to multiple locations and also still use the desktop at the same time

While chatting in the Facebook app for Windows 8.1, I noticed that Microsoft still hasn’t fixed the issue of spell check being enabled in apps even though it’s disabled in the PC settings… I think I noticed this in Windows 8, but because I didn’t use so many apps before, I forgot about it. Until now that Facebook made an app. Eventually I gave up chatting using the app and installed the desktop version of Facebook Messenger. Because I do chat a lot more on FB than on other services nowadays.

Oh and yeah, they did add the start button back to the desktop task bar. I don’t really care since pressing the Windows button on the keyboard is 10x times faster than using the mouse to click on the button, but I did notice that they added a bunch of shortcuts to useful system settings if you right click on the Windows button! Which could potentially be useful. I guess.

So I guess now it’s about time for me to start making Windows 8 apps! As soon as I finish Wind Waker HD. And Fez. Also I ordered the new Pokemon game. Oh well, soon.

 

Posted by on 2013-10-19 in Rambling

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Bought A New Laptop, Fixed My Old One

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.

Acer Iconia W511

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:

Acer Aspire 5920G

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.

 

Last Window boxart On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4

I finished a few games this past month: The Last Window: Secret of Cape West, Thomas Was AlonePenny 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.

 

Posted by on 2013-09-27 in Computer

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