Category Archives: Tech

Technology related stuff

Halo: A Tribute

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The Halo series is, in my opinion, the best video game series ever.

It’s an epic journey through a brutal war fought to literally save humanity.  Throughout the main storyline, you play as “Master Chief” – an ironically quiet, humble, subdued character that shoulders the heaviest of burdens.  He is one of few remaining super-soldiers called “Spartans” and is genetically enhanced for combat.  I guess I really don’t want to go too far into the storyline or details of the Halo series – but feel free to read a brief summary on wikipedia if interested.

So what makes the Halo series so great?  Well, There are different aspects in different games – and they culminate together to form something that I find to be profound.  I’ll break down some of my opinions before breaking down what I like most in each of the three main games.

The Master Chief
The hero you play is the single most powerful part in the series.  He hardly ever speaks, but his actions speak volumes.  Fighting until any bitter end, this faceless and nearly voiceless character is a perfect personification of a video game hero…  I think the Bungie designers deserve a fair amount of credit here because the player subconsciously projects themselves fully into this character.  It’s impossible to play through the Halo games and not picture yourself behind the helmet.  I think the fact that you never see the face of Master Chief makes it easier for the player to put themselves in his place.  Even his mirrored visor plays a role, it reflects what he sees allowing the player to unknowingly be put just that little bit more into the character.

A fearless guardian that does whatever it takes, Master Chief’s quiet confidence sets the tone for the entire story…

The Music
Maybe a slighter role in the quality of the series to most people is actually quite strong for me.  The majority of the music the Halo games is original composition via Martin O’donnell and Michael Salvatori.  Their unique style fits perfectly alongside the in-game action, and adds an impossibly perfect touch to the cut-scenes and pre-realease teasers and trailers.  Some of my favorite examples are the Halo 3 E3 Trailer, and the Return to Sender cut-scene.  But, even aside from the impressive original works; there are artists contributions that have had perfect fits within the series.  Specifically here I’m referring to this part in Halo 2 where an instrumental version of “Blow me Away” by Breaking Benjamin plays…

The music is just awesome, plain and simple.  It adds a whole dimension on the game, making it feel as though you’re playing through an amazing action movie.  It couldn’t have possibly been done any better.

The Plot/Story
As I said, I don’t want to simply re-tell the entire story of the Halo series…  But it’s important to address what it adds to the mix.  For me, I relate hugely to this type of storyline.  It’s similar in a way to the Matrix trilogy, or the Harry Potter series.  In the Matrix movies, Neo comes to know that his destiny is literally fight for the survival of the human race.  It is only he that can do it, and it is something he faces without fear no matter the outcome.  The subsequent final battle depicts Neo sprinting full speed toward his fate

Many people may laugh at the mention of Harry Potter here, but it’s honestly a genuine comparison.  Harry has to face the same sort of fight, and once again it’s only him that can do it.  “Neither can live while the other survives” – I still remember that quote from the book, and it is just profound.  My point being – a single person fighting against almost unbeatable odds.

The Halo series has a similar element, where the Master Chief willingly faces fate no matter what the outcome.  Not only to face it, but to run full speed directly at it. I’m not exactly sure why, but that sort of notion really appeals to me.  The fight or flight, the will to act, the choice to keep fighting.  These few examples I believe accurately illustrate what I’m trying to get across.

Finally, the Gameplay
The first Halo game was ground-breaking.  The main launch title that defined the Xbox as a console.  There really isn’t anything much more to say about this first game in the series, other than that it set the bar.  And, also, this warthog jumping that the Vanbergs, Vanlandw and I tried to re-create back when I lived in Ramblewood will always be a part of me.

Halo 2 increased the intensity, pushed the bar further, and all the while brought on a ton of criticism for its introduction of the Arbiter.

Halo 2’s battle against the scarab is possibly my favorite part in any video game.  The music fits it perfectly (once again, a perfect example of the music making the experience).  The first time you leap onto the massive scarab  from a bridge above is really without rival as a standalone moment of gaming excellence.

Halo 2 also honed in the multiplayer capabilities to new levels, and really this was the first case I could recall where the multiplayer was almost more sought-after than the single player campaign.  I personally didn’t get into the multiplayer until later, and I wasn’t all that great at it anyway so my loyalties continued to be with the single player storyline mode.

Most people’s primary complaint as mentioned earlier was the fact that Halo 2 had you play as the Arbiter for several levels.  You get to try out cloaking, the plasma sword, etc.  But, many people didn’t approve of surrendering control of Master Chief.  I didn’t mind playing as Arbiter, but definitely I did not love how Halo 2 ended…

Halo 3 brought the same level of multiplayer gameplay, but made use of the better graphics hardware of the Xbox 360 console.  The campaign was maybe a tad short by some accounts – but the plot and storyline out was enough to get me over Halo 2.  Again, some people did not enjoy the plot of the game – but really the expectations had been set so high that it is almost impossible to meet them.  I liked the storyline, and I thought the ending was fitting for the conclusion of this particular trilogy.

ODST and Reach, while still being Halo games, don’t really count in my opinion.  They are parallel storylines that center around characters other than the Master Chief.  I think that’s fine, and I have and will play these games – but for me the meat of the series are the three primary games where you play as Master Chief.

In summary…
Obviously I’ve got Halo on the mind because of the Halo Reach beta.  I’ve been able to balance a solid 3-4 hours of this beta into my life so far, and the multiplayer is amazingly fun.  FINALLY I can run in a Halo game using the scout class.  I could use a little more practice though, as my .70 ish kill/death ratio will attest.

I hope the fun continues as Halo Reach is released, and I’ll be sad to see Bungie’s final Halo game come to fruition.  It’s pretty amazing to look back on these games that I played in different phases of my life – hopefully another video game series comes along that can come close to meeting this level for me.  But if you ask me – I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Grand Theft Auto 4 – Mission Complete Ringtones

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Back when I was playing through Grand Theft Auto IV, Vanlandw and I were trying very hard to find the sound samples used when the player successfully completed a mission…

For those that may not know what I’m talking about:  Depending which mission you were playing in GTA 4, one of three various sound samples would play upon successful completion – and they were all very catchy, cool sounding clips.  Mainly, our thought was that they would make great ring tones on a mobile phone.

After I had long since given up, Vanlandw did actually manage to find and make one of the sounds into an mp3 ringtone – for which I give him immense credit.  I’ve used that very ring tone off and on as my ringer for some time.   Today, I came across a youtube vid that sampled all of the various mission complete sounds (even 2 additional “sad” mission ending sounds that I didn’t think about).  The sampling on the two “sad” clips is kinda shaky – you can hear traffic and footsteps from the game, so I elected not to use those.  But, I decided to use some rip/dub/export awesomeness to get the audio into a usable mp3 format and create a ringer for each different sound clip.   Check them out below, or just click on the “Files” tab up above and find them under Ringtones.

#1 is my fav, I think…

****Update****
Noticed these ring-tones were very quiet when played on a cell phone – So I’ve uploaded amplified versions – as well as a double ring version of the 1st tone.

YEAH

Get Bent Apple

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I would say most “techies” these days are privy to subscribing to RSS feeds using their favorite aggregator of choice (read: Google Reader).

Therefore it is impossible to miss the outright flood of Apple/iPad/iPhone OS/etc/etc/etc news that continuously pours in from every single feed I subscribe to. It’s to the point that it is just effing ridiculous and it’s totally out of hand. I simply do not understand why everyone cares so much about Apple products and why they get the media attention that they do.  I’m definitely not alone in this, as some media outlets actually offer an “Apple Free” feed option.

Let’s just run down this all star tech item called the iPad:  With the starting price of $500, you get an AMAZING 16 GB of storage, you get no USB ports, no media card slots, no camera, overpriced apps, no flash support, and proven Wi-Fi issues.  I see nothing to tell me that it’s not just a gigantic iPod.

Any other netbook or tablet device will give you more functionality for your money.  Call me crazy, but I think a built in camera is simply an absolute must for any netbook or tablet device…  But, people won’t line up for hours on end to buy a netbook or tablet with a camera.   The “Apple hardware is better” argument doesn’t fly with me here, especially given the early Wi-Fi issues the iPad is experiencing.  I know a lot of people that have owned various netbooks for various lengths of time and have never heard of any of them having any hardware issues.  At some point, all hardware devices could and will have issues on some scale, and they will do so at random times…  Apple is not in a special boat; and in fact they lag behind more then half of their competition.

Yet, with all this in mind the iPad still owns the news across the board, and it just makes no sense to me whatsoever.  Somehow, Apple has managed to be one of the most closed/communist companies on the planet and still manage to get the majority of people to eat candy right out of their hands.  “Oh, the iPad doesn’t support flash… That’s ok… Every major company will just re-design an iPad specific homepages to function on this awesome device!!”  Seriously???  How and why is that even a possible scenario?  Apple should be conforming to existing standards (even if flash sucks).  In no possible universe should the internet be forced re-tool and comply with a device.  It’s asinine, plain and simple.

Just imagine the backlash if Microsoft’s Internet explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox did not support flash.  I would wager that the browser would be in ruins instantly.  Keep the thought going – just imagine if Microsoft had to pre-approve ANY application that you installed on a Windows 7 netbook, tablet, or Windows mobile phone…  Nobody on the Earth would stand for that level of censorship from the evil empire of Microsoft, yet when Apple does it, everyone just seems to accept it willingly.  There have been numerous documented cases of fair and usable apps that Apple rejects or pulls with varying degrees of vague reasoning, and it really pisses me off that they can get away with that.  I give props to the hackers and modders that give the world the option to jailbreak their Apple products, freeing them to install the apps they want.

In the end, all I can really do is hope that some day soon Apple’s antics will catch up with them and they’ll ride their wave of undeserved success right back down to ground level…

Unfortunately though I don’t think it will be anytime soon – The media flocks to Apple once again today while they announce and show off the iPhone/iPod OS 4.0.  Wow, an effing software update…  One that you’ll probably have to pay for no less.  Microsoft, please hold a massive media event when Windows 7 SP1 comes out!!  Or, better yet… at your next patch Tuesday even.  Oh, wait – nobody would go to THAT.

In summary: Get bent, Apple.  You continue to charge too much for your products while your earnings seem to reach record highs.  I consider it literally no different from $4/gallon gas prices while ExxonMobil reported record breaking earnings (except for the fact that the public got angry when that happened.. Oddly).  You gouge your faithful fan-base of their hard earned money on the premise that you’re simply better than everyone else.  The majority of media and public seems to think you are as well…  But, I promise you, you’re not.

Better Twitter Integration

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I both love and hate the Twitter-Tools plugin for WordPress.

On one hand; I really like how it can integrate Twitter into my blog via both sidebar widget and weekly Twitter digest posts… But, on the other hand, I was really starting to feel like these digest posts were cluttering up both my blog and my archives. Several times recently I have found myself scrolling back through way too many Twitter digest posts in order to get at my ACTUAL blog posts and content that I had written. Basically, I came to the conclusion that “I didn’t like this” and I had to modify how Twitter integrated with my Blog.

Today I’ve taken the steps necessary to achieve what I believe is the best of both worlds. I now have weekly Twitter digest post created as usual; but they do not display in my main blog page or in my archives page — AND you have to specifically navigate to a “Twitter” page in order to see them at all.

This was actually a little more challenging for me than I’d like to admit – but I’ll go through the steps below:

First: Exclude the Category
To block out my Twitter category from displaying on my blog and archives, I added the following function to the functions.php file within my theme directory. The “-28” below refers to the corresponding category ID for the Twitter category. This code made it so all posts within the “Twitter” category are ignored in both my blog page and my archives.

function exclude_category($query){
if ($query->is_home) {
$query->set('cat', '-28');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

Second: Make the Category “Navigateable” from the Main Page
The more challenging part for me was figuring out an “easy” way to navigate to these Twitter digest posts. It sounded like a fairly easy thing to do; but I had a surprisingly difficult time with it.

I experimented with some .htacces redirection, and also some plugins that claimed to do exactly what I wanted (but, sucked). In the end; I chose to just modify my theme’s main loop logic and save it as a new page template. I copied the the text from my theme’s index.php file, and and pasted it into my a file called “twitter.php” which I saved as a new page template. I then replaced the following code:

if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) : the_post();

With this code:
$recent = new WP_Query();
$recent->query('cat=28');
if ($recent->have_posts()) :
while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();

This actually worked fairly well, and in retrospect is very easy – it just took me quite awhile to arrive at this solution! The final step here was then to add a page called “Twitter” via the administration panel; and simply change the page to use this Twitter.php template instead of the default page template.

Voila, a Twitter page that you can navigate to which displays all the weekly digest Twitter posts created automatically by the Twitter Tools plugin.

**** UPDATE ****
Vanlandw had a great recommendation about excluding these Twitter digest posts from my RSS feeds as well. That was very simple to do… My exclude function in the functions.php file in my theme directory now reads as such:
function exclude_category($query){
if ($query->is_home || $query->is_feed) {
$query->set('cat', '-28');
}
return $query;
}

And, now the Twitter digest posts are excluded from my RSS feed as well! 🙂 WordPress and PHP are both awesome.

The Twitter Enigma

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Love it or hate it, Twitter is really a pretty amazing thing.

I’ve been using twitter for a little over a year now, and I’ve gone through phases ranging from daily use to weeks without tweets. Overall, I’m a fan and I think it’s a “cool” technology.

Granted you’re always going to have the annoying too much information or 100-tweets-a-day type of annoyances that really nobody likes. But, you also can really do some cool things.

Example 1
I posted a “tweet” regarding my frustration at Best Buy for canceling my order for a $9.99 52” television. CNN reporter Abbi Tatton, searching Twitter, finds my tweet and looks up my contact information. I am then interviewed and referenced on a CNN airing of “The Situation Room” and also countless online news sites that seemingly feed from CNN. A mild 15 minutes of fame that is then followed up by a radio interview about the whole situation. The entire thing started because I posted a tweet – and that is just amazing to me.

Example 2
Yesterday I had a pretty creative idea for Google Voice, a service I have been happily using for about 6 months now. I thought it would be pretty cool if Google Voice had the capability to set a wakeup call. This would be set just like any other alarm, and then maybe even have the wakeup call go to different phones on different days.

Surprised at myself for actually coming up with a good idea, I post a tweet directly to Craig Walker (co-founder of GrandCentral and top dog at Google Voice now) about the wakeup call idea.

He replies: “@vanberge love this idea”

So, very possibly this functionality may actually make it into Google Voice some point down the road… All because of Twitter. I was able to directly pitch an idea to the person that can do the most with it. Simply amazing.

Like I said – love it or hate it, Twitter makes some pretty cool things possible. Here’s to hoping for a wakeup call functionality to show up soon under my Google Voice settings page.