Yummy Yummy Shots of Lense CLeaner

This is exactly what I want santa to give me as a gift fo being a good boy this year.
I shall get it from here hint hint darling

Hellllloooo

Awesome Cricket Sledging

Mind the Windows Tino

Ron Swanson

This is by far the best thing I have seen all day.

Ron

*******

Swanson

Comparing digital and Physical Books

Comparing Books - Digital or Physical

We are blessed to be living in an age where education is more accessible than it has ever been before.
Years and years ago, the ability to read and the knowledge it brought was purely the domain of the rich nobility and their priests. That is why every single document that exists that is over 150 years old is religious, be it analysis of religions texts or translations of them into various languages.
Throwing off the religious yoke is but one of the advantages of the spread of knowledge that Gutenberg gave us all those years ago.

The Internet has been named the next great leap forward in the spread of knowledge to every person in the world. It has given every person with a computer and a phone line access to the entirety of human knowledge at the very tips of their fingers.
The availability of books online, be they HTML or ebooks, can be seen as nothing but good, unless you are a book publisher of course.

That said, there is something to be said for having a physical book in your hands. The feel of the paper, the fragrance of the ink. It is somehow cathartic to hold a book and have it take you away with its words.
But digital books have a great number of advantages going for them as well.

I have been thinking about this for a while, comparing  books and their digital equivalents, and here are the por's and cons as I see them.

Books
Traditional books maintain a good resale value compared to their e-equivalents. First editions are hugely collectible, where as the idea of a first edition of a digital book is ridiculous.
The Smell. Many people laugh at me when I take them into a book store, and the first thing I do is to sniff the book. The smell of a new book is something very special. Its like a drug to me.
You dont need to charge them to be able to enjoy them.
Used book stores, who doesn't love the atmosphere of these.

Digital Books
Readers can bring the books with them without having to lug around something large and heavy. One eReader can carry hundreds and thousands of books at a time. Literally.
To have a well-organized book collection, you do not need to be a librarian.
When you have book on your phone, you will never again found yourself with out a book ever again.
Digital books, at this point in time, are quite often more expensive than their physical equivalents. Comparing the manufacturing costs of the two would lead you to believe this should be the other way around, and I tend to agree. But publishers will always be publishers and will gouge the consumers until the cows come home. I do expect this to change in the distant future.
There is no such thing as an outdated edition with a digital book.
Whilst it does seem silly to have to charge your book, the Amazon Kindle has a battery life of about 3 months when you are just using it to read books, which is fairly remarkable.The invention of E-Ink readers also means that the eReaders that use this wont tire out your eyes like iPads and Ipod will. You can stare at the latest Kindle for hours with no eyesight problems what so ever.

So, whilst it does seem that there are more advantages to buying digital books over physical, I still side with a good old fashioned book.
And using a site like this to compare book and eBook prices gives you the best of both worlds.

Today I Learned...

That India, the third largest muslim population in the world, with over 10% of the worlds Muslims, is being blocked from entering The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, by Pakistan.

Russia, on the other hand, who has just 1% of the worlds muslims, has been granted "Observer Status"

The organisation attempts to be the collective voice of the Muslim world and attempts to safeguard the interests and ensure the progress and well-being of Muslims.

I dont know how India feels about this, but I was just randomly browsing Wikipedia and found this mighty interesting.

Cricket Season!

Rod Marsh(Aus) and Ian Botham(Eng)

The best way to respond to a clever sledge, a better one.

Rod Marsh : “So how’s your wife & my kids?”

Botham : “The wife is fine but kids are retarded”

Source 

Official Steam App

Well, An official steam companion app has been released for andriod rendering my amateur efforts at delivering the daily steam specials to your phone obsolete.

Even if i wanted to continue my little app, I couldnt. My apps have been suspended from the market.
I guess Value didn't want anyone encroaching on their territory.

Well, it was great fun while it lasted.

Skyrim Pre-Order Guide (PC)

I had a good response to my Rage pre order guide, even though the game is more buggy than Amy Winehouse at this present moment in time, so I thought I would do one for the next big game that exites my genitals enormously.

Cool Shit

Just want to throw a quick hello to my friends over at coolshitoftheday.
I love what's coming out of your sick demented minds.
I should probably note that I am dating one of those sick demented people, but I love them anyway.

Rage Preorder Buying Guide (PC)

So yeah, I'm terribly, horribly excited for id's upcoming game "Rage".

Yes

Oh GOD yes

Alas, living in Australia I am in real danger of being terribly, horribly screwed by crappy localisation of prices.
So I decided to compile my efforts of finding the best Rage pre-order deal available.

I am a huge fan of Steam but at $89.99, I am afraid that the ease of use that this platform affords cannot justify that price.


Amazon.com is awesome as always, selling the physical game for $59.99, automatically upgrading to the Anarchy edition which gives you some free ingame crap, and also adding $10 to your Amazon account.
I have ordered games from Amazon before, and it does take about 10 days to get here to central NSW, but if they do decrease the price of the game before it is released, they will sell it to you at the lower price.
I am tempted to go down this path and use the $10 credit to buy the paperback novel of the game.


As always, ozgameshop.com has an awesomly cheap price. $38.99 with free delivery.
This doesn't appear to include an upgrade to the Anarchy edition, but I feel that the inclusion of these free in game items can really cheapen the initial experience of the game.

The only thing with ozgameshop is that I think they are based in the UK, so it has taken from 5 to 10 days for the games to get here, but it is a very good price.


Digital Distribution.
Direct to drive has it for $59.95, but they only operate in USA and Canada.
Gamersgate, Impulse, and greenmangaming don't seem to have it available either.
I even had a look on gog.com in the small hope that they might have it, but to no avail.

Conclusion 

I will keep looking around, but for the moment ozgameshop's $39 is pipping Amazon's $59.95 deal.
Funnily enough its almost cheaper than game.com.au's $35 for the strategy guide.

Countdown Widgets

I knocked up a Skyrim countdown widget the other weekend, and heard some lovely stuff about it. I also had a couple of requests to do countdown widgets for different games. After spending my morning doing up a BF3 one I decided, rather than respond to each and every request I would put up the code.
It is from a tutorial I did a while ago and is very very simple.

Setting up the Wishlist Notification In Steam Specials

Quick guide to setting up the Steam Wishlist watcher component of Steam Specials.

Open up the steam specials app and select wishlist from the menu option:

Steam RSS feeds

So I have been working on reliable rss feeds for the Steam Specials for a while, and I feel I finally have it.
So here they are:

US Feed
UK Feed
Aussie Feed
EU Feed
EU Region 2 Feed coming soon.

If you find any problems with these please let me know.

Wut?

Amazon Daily Free Mp3 and Daily Deal RSS feed

I couldnt find an RSS feed that simply showed me the daily album deal and the Free Mp3 of the day so I went and made some for myself:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AmazoncomMp3SpecialDeals

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreeAmazonMp3OfTheDay       (Amazon changed the way they display this data, making this feed invalid)

Instead of the free MP3 of the day I have made a Feed of the top 15 Free MP3's of the day.
TOP FREE MP3's

These are the top 15 paid songs of the day.
TOP PAID MP3's OF THE DAY

Steam Specials update!

So I recently updated my app, Steam Specials to android 1.6 to be able to include ads. I checked my statistics and there were 11 or so users still running on 1.5. I feel bad for all of them so hopefully they manage to find there way here.

http://www.mediafire.com/?4p7lw98xd5nxkd1

That there is a link to the ad free 1.5 version. No notification capability sadly.

Save as Ringtone Android Dev

The biggest trouble i had with my louis soundboard was getting the "Save as ringtone or notification" feature to work with my sound files.

This page from Stealthcopter helped me greatly. This sweet guy did basically all the work for me, the only problem was that it didn't work straight out of the box for me. After much trial and error, the only way i could get it to work was by adding a switch statement for each of my raw sound files, cumbersome and an example of very poor coding yes, but it works!

e.g.

public boolean saveas(int ressound){

String soundname = "";

switch(ressound){

case R.id.sound1:

ressound = R.raw.sound1;

soundname = "louis1";

break;

}