Ye olde geeky blog

I did it! I finally have my man cave, with my won dedicated gaming pc in it! And it feels great! It took slightly longer to get together, because my son was born in October, but I finally did it! My wife's old PC was graciously donated to me to be my gaming rig. It's about three years old, but it's definitely not a bad rig at all! It's got a 3rd generation i7 CPU, my old ASUS GTX560 ti Graphics Card, 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM, and a fresh 1TB WD Blue hard drive. The screen I have connected is a Samsung 20", which runs at a 1600x900 resolution. Not ideal, but for a start it's perfect! I formatted and did a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional, and have so far loaded up Steam and Dragon Age Inquisition is installing as I'm writing this. Also, my wife bought me a not too shabby 2.1 set of Creative Speakers (hasn't arrived yet, thanks to the incompetent couriers Takealot use - hopefully tomorrow, or all hell will break loose!) for Xmas. So, it's ...

It has been a while since I last posted something on this blog, but I have good reason! My son was born on 3 October, and boy oh boy, what a ride it's been! He is also, in part, the reason I started playing Spellfall. On one of the many nights where I was awake at two just after changing so my wife can feed him, I checked out the Google Play store, and discovered this little gem of a game... Firstly, it is a free-to-play game, but there are real money that you can spend on items and coins, which is the in-game currency. Personally, I really do not like the whole free-to-play kind of games. Especially when the company charges absolutely ludicrous amounts for an in game item. In the case of Spellfall, there are these fancy weapons you can buy with real money, and they go for around $80-$130! I mean, who in their right mind would ever spend that on an in-game item! There are also things like recharging your health quicker for a dollar, or buying some additional coins to help yo...

So far, all the sites I have made in Drupal (both of them hehe), have had numerous content types, and each node of that type needs to be displayed in it's own theme. By default, it seems, Drupal doesn't have this functionality built in, but luckily it's not hard to add. Let's say your content type is called "Products" - naturally you would want to name the page template for that content type something like page--products.tpl.php - but without the little hack below, that won't work. So, to get that to work, make sure you have a template.php file in the root folder of your theme, and then add this code to it: <?php      function nameofyourtheme _preprocess_page(&$vars)         {             if (isset($vars['node']->type))             {                 $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__' . $vars['node']->type;     ...

This will just be a quick post. Drupal tends to add a gray line at the top of any <table> elements you may have on your page, even if you don't have a border specified. A quick and simple way of getting that annoying line gone is by adding this table {   border-collapse: separate !important; } to your stylesheet file. Does the trick for me!

For the past 8 or so years I've been using Avast as my free anti virus. But, ever since the last update, I've been getting these really annoying popups advertising other Avast products that you obviously have to pay for. These popups were never there, and now they decided to introduce such an annoyance?? I had a look at the settings, and discovered that you can only disable them if you have the premium version. See below: See in red in the middle - well done Avast, I'm uninstalling and going someplace else. Also, there goes me recommending it to all my clients as well...

There are a few games that I currently play, but also a few I'm really looking forward to. Here's what I'm playing these days: 7 Days to Die - The Zombie/Crafting/Survival/Sandbox/FPS/Stealth game that is only still in Alpha, but is extremely fun even in the early state it is. It is ESPECIALLY fun when you do it co-op with a buddy! I blogged about it a few weeks ago, check that post here Diablo 3 - Patch 2.1 just launched today, and I'm looking forward to jumping back into it. I like how Blizzard has revived the game from the sad state it was before version 2 and Reaper of Souls launched. It's a much better game, and it's getting better with every major update! GTA 5 - I dusted off the Xbox last weekend and fired up Grand Theft Auto V again, and man that's still a massively fun game. Trevor just took over a strip club as his base of operations, so what's not to like right? This is also a major game that I'm looking forward to launching on ...

Howdy people, the next major patch for Diablo 3 is out, version 2.1 this time. It introduces a few cool new features, like seasons, leaderboards, greater rifts and even a way to get to the realm the treasure goblins teleport to. This video by Blizzard themselves summarises it nicely:

I have a client who asked me to look into how they can provide support to their own clients with Whatsapp, but not have to sit with a phone, and rather do it from a PC, or something similar. I looked at getting MHL connectors for a phone, connecting that to a PC screen with HDMI connection, and then also adding a bluetooth keyboard for the phone, but that all turned out to be quite a pricey option! Then I did some searching and got to a solution where you can actually take control of your phone (in my case my Galaxy Note 3) from your PC by using good old TeamViewer! I first thought this isn't possible, but it turns out it is, and I tried it, and it works great! Here's how: Obviously you need TeamViewer loaded on your PC - get that from here . Then, you'll need the Mobile TeamViewer app on your phone as well - here's the one you need . It's called TeamViewer QuickSupport. The first time you open it up, it will ask you to download and install another app t...

We recently moved into a new place, which is quite a bit bigger than our previous place, and our study is on the one end of the house, and our main bedroom on the opposite end. My ADSL router's wireless just doesn't reach our bedroom, and I decided to remedy that by getting the D-Link 1360 Access Point, specifically to use as a wireless signal repeater, which according to their website it can do. It cost just over R400 here in South Africa, which is around $35-$40 for those interested... Anyway, I opened the box, which has a very short network cable, the power supply, a manual (with 3 pages of English) and the two antennas. According to the manual, you should connect it via the LAN cable to your PC to do the initial setup - you then access the device by either going to http://dlinkap or 192.168.0.5 - doing that for the first time allows you to do the setup for it - you can select from 3 options - one of which is Wireless repeater, which supposedly boosts an existing wifi...

Last night my good buddy and I decided to give Far Cry 3's co-op campaign a chance. We both like the single player game, but haven't played any form of multiplayer on it, and I knew it's got a dedicated co-op set of maps, so we thought what the hell... We started the game, and discovered we needed to be friends on Uplay first, so we did that, and fired up the game again, and went into the Co-op section, I hosted a private match, invited my friend and that was as easy as that! We got in no problem whatsoever! Damn what a fun experience! Just tons of baddies to kill, and with us chatting and coordinating with voip it was really great! We took our dinner break, and when we got back, the game didn't want to load. It just kept on saying "can't join game". What a huge pain this turned out to be - the only thing that changed since 30 minutes before that, was we now both had level 10 characters instead of brand new players. We hit Google, and saw all kin...

Ok, that was a long title for this post hehe - here's a nice little trick I just figured out. I have a headset that I generally use when playing games or watching movies and I don't want to bother the wife. But, it's always a pain, because I have to plug in the headset (yes I'm that lazy) when I want to use it, and then unplug it again when I want to switch back to my speakers. In the "Sound" control panel option you can easily switch between the two, so what I did was create a shortcut to Sound, and I connected a unique shortcut to it, so now it's as simple as hitting the shortcut at any time, and then setting whichever device I want as the default. Now, my headset, the Steelseries Siberia V2 USB  came with it's own USB sound card, so I'm not sure if this will work if you just connect a headset to your front audio jacks (maybe leave a comment and inform us about that if you want). So, in Sound, it shows up as a separate device. Here are the ...

My buddy and I got ourselves each a copy of 7 Days to Die in the previous Steam Sale. And we are not sorry that we did! We took a bit of a chance on it, seeing it's still in Alpha and was released on Early Access, but damn, it's very good so far! The game was Kickstarted last year ( click here for the Kickstarted page ), and they managed to get backers to pledge a cool half a million Dollars, and they only wanted $200k to make the game. The game is currently version 8.8 Alpha (we started playing when it was 8.7), and it's already such a fun game! It does have a few bugs, but that is definitely to be expected from an Alpha build on Early Access. Although you can play the game solo, I highly recommend to rather play with a friend coop. I've never been a fan of Zombie Survival games where other players are a bigger threat than the actual zombies. There are tons of servers online to join, but you can also host a game yourself, which is how my friend and I are playi...

I've been on Steam since I got Half-Life 2 back in December 2004. At first, I hated Steam, like I'm sure many other people also did back then. But now, I get sad when a game I want isn't on Steam. As such, I have, over the last few years, purchased many a game on Steam, and here's my list as of 15 July 2014: 10,000,000 7 Days to Die AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome Adventures of Shuggy Age of Wonders III Alan Wake Alan Wake's American Nightmare And Yet It Moves Anomaly 2 Anomaly Warzone Earth Aquaria Atom Zombie Smasher Avadon: The Black Fortress Awesomenauts Back to the Future: Ep1 - It's About Time Back to the Future: Ep2 - Get Tannen! Back to the Future: Ep3 - Citizen Brown Back to the Future: Ep4 - Double Visions Back to the Future: Ep5 - OUTATIME Bang Bang Racing Banished Bastion Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY Edition BioShock BioShock 2  BioShock Infinite BIT.TRIP BEAT BIT.TRIP RUNNER Borderlands Borderlands 2 Braid...

In a previous post I bitched quite a bit about how Logitech products are failing me. And now, yet again another Logitech product I own has failed me. Shame on you Logitech! This time around it's my Z506 5.1 Speakers. They just died without provocation. I read up and it seems this too is quite a common thing, it seems something vibrated loose inside. My father-in-law is good with such things, so he is checking to see if he can figure out what's wrong with them. Come on Logitech, stop making stuff that breaks! Or is this normal for stuff that is out of warranty with you?

For the last 6 months or so I've been working in Drupal, which is one of the top open source content management systems out there. I was kinda thrown in the deep end with it - I had a customer who really wanted me to do their website, and was actually willing to pay me to learn Drupal. So I did. And I'm super impressed with it as a CMS. It is quite a complicated system to learn from scratch, but not impossible. I silly mistake to make is to assume that you know Drupal if you already know PHP, HTML, JS, CSS and MySQL. Knowledge in those things help, yes, but it's a brand new system to get to know. Anyway, one thing I really like is that chances are, there's a module for that - this is a very popular saying among Drupal developers - because it's such a popular CMS, there are thousands of developers doing the grunt work and help expand and develop the platform, and as I found with my first big Drupal site, 9 out of 10 times there actually is a module for that! He...

In my previous post I was complaining a bit about the loot drops in Diablo 3 - my thoughts were that why should you play at torment levels when legendary drops still happen at Normal difficulty. Well, it appears that while legendaries do indeed drop at the pre-torment difficulties, there are certain items that can only drop when your difficulty is set to Torment 2 and above (I might be wrong about the 2 part, but yes). After doing some research, I saw that there are some really cool gear items that you can find when you push the difficulty up to Torment 2 and above! For example, there are legendary potions, and class specific set items! Here are some links that I found handy http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/10189299133 and http://www.diablowiki.net/Torment-only It appears that certain acts also have specific drops from the Horadric caches that you get for completing bounties, with the exception of Act 4, where any of the Act-specific items can drop from the cache. A...

I've been playing Diablo 3 almost exclusively since Reaper of Souls came out a couple of weeks ago. I must say, Blizzard has really turned the game around, and it is now what it was supposed to be from the get go two years ago. Anyway, I'm very happy with the game as it is now, and I try to play every spare moment I can. One thing kinda bugs me though. Last night, my good buddy and I decided to do some gear farming, and played the game on Normal difficulty. Me with my recently leveled-up-to-70 Witch Doctor, and him with his nicely geared Crusader. It was an absolute breeze. Elite enemies we killed with two or three shots, and even bosses didn't last long. Needless to say, we killed a lot of enemies extremely quickly. Now, to get to the reason for this post - the loot drops didn't feel any different. I got a two legendary weapons for my Witch Doctor, and even a few legendary plans and a set plan. My friend got a set item and a couple of legendaries as well. After...

I always kicked against open source CMS's quite heavily, mostly because I personally found that regular people, and by that I mean people who aren't in IT or web development, struggle to use them. That was why I created my own CMS. The whole idea behind it was to be a very straightforward way of managing stuff in a database. It didn't have advanced things like modules or templates and stuff like that, the backend and frontend were two separate entities. At the end of last year I had a client who really wanted me to do their site in Drupal, and even offered to pay me to learn how to work with it. Their reason is a good one - if I die (sounds a bit harsh, but it's a legitimate concern for a big client), who will be able to carry on with the site. Drupal is one of the top three CMS's on the internet. Anyway, I was very reluctant, but I thought, hey might as well do it and learn something new. I started studying Drupal. I watched numerous tutorial series about t...

I was one of those who were extremely excited about Diablo 3 when it finally came out. And I really enjoyed playing the game. One thing really bugged me though - I didn't ever get any decent gear drops, I literally had to hit the Auction House after each level up just to be able to survive my encounters. I ended up leveling up my Demon Hunter to about level 46, my Barbarian to about level 27 and a few more to the early teens. No cool gear drop worth mentioning. I know why Blizzard decided to do an Auction House - they wanted to keep an eye on things, because in Diablo 2 people sold gear all the time to other players, so Blizzard wanted their share of the pie as well of course. Anyway, it really hurt the game more than anything in my opinion. I lost interest very quickly, and didn't even level one character to level 60. I wasn't in the mood to grind till I level up, and then spend an hour searching for nice new gear in the Auction House. Last year I learned that Blizza...

This morning I saw a post on Facebook about Pixel Piracy, and it was made by the same guys who made Terraria. I found myself immediately intrigued. Terraria claimed over 275 hours of my time - that in anyone's book is money well spent! Now, I haven't bought Pixel Piracy just yet, but I think I might just do it. Check out this gameplay video, looks really cool hey! It's on Steam now as an Early Access title for $15, but with 33% off :) I will definitely give it a try sometime...

I just got this email from Gian Visser, the CEO of Afrihost (Yes I'm sure it's an automated email, but I don't care): We have a gift waiting for you... Why? Because we're sincerely grateful for your business and wanted to say 'Thank you' for trusting us with your internet and for sticking with us through thick and thin. So there are free, fresh GBs waiting for you in your ClientZone right now. Here's how to claim your extra GBs: - Click this link - You'll see your Bonus Calculator - Press the 'Show My Bonus' button - You'll be given a percentage of your   monthly GBs - Your account will be automatically    topped up with these extra GBs for the    rest of the month - This costs you absolutely NOTHING What's the catch? There isn't one! Enjoy! Have a spectacular weekend Gian CEO, Afrihost And here's what I got: Hehe, that makes me a happy chappy!

One of the features of the Galaxy Note 3 was that it's camera can capture 4k video. That has a 8.3 mega pixel resolution of  3840 x 2160. That's huge! Anyway, after I got my phone, I only saw full HD as an option for recording video, and it's not a mistake. You see, there are two versions of the Note 3 - the one I've got has the 1.9Ghz Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5420 3G processor, and the other one has the 2.3Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 LTE one. That probably means I don't have LTE either, but to be honest, I'm not missing it, or the 4k recording. My phone is blazingly fast, and pretty much anything I throw at it, it handles without breaking a sweat. I've also read that even in some countries, the 4k feature is also missing on the Snapdragon version. I only think that once 4k TV's become mainstream then this might be something you'd want, but here in South Africa we're not even close to having affordable 4k TV's. Anyway, bottom line, my ...

Last night we played the Annihilation game mode of Loadout. At first, I had no clue as to what the hell was going on, but caught on quite quickly. It is basically a combination of 3 of the other game modes, with a few twists of course - and it's a huge amount of fun! Firstly, to understand the other game modes: Death Snatch This is Loadout's version of classic death match. You run around and kill people. The twist here, however, is whenever you die, you drop a Blutonium vial. You must collect this item in order to score the actual points. This also means that if someone snipes you from far away (which I personally hate a great deal), they don't get the points unless he/she or a teammate picks up the vial. And, your team mates can get your vial, and prevent the opposing team from scoring. A very nice take on regular old boring death match indeed! Jackhammer Everyone knows Capture the Flag - you each have a base with a flag, and your job is to go over to the enemies...

Yesterday, I finally got my Steelseries Siberia V2 gaming headset, and I couldn't wait to do a proper gaming session with it. Now firstly, I'm not a pro gamer at all! A gaming session for me is playing for 2-4 hours. Anyway, my buddy and I booted up Loadout last night, and I switched my headset over to the 7.1 channel emulation. Boy oh boy, I am not disappointed with my new headset at all! The sound is amazing, the mic works very well, and the best part, it's extremely comfortable. When you look at the set, it looks quite big a bulky, and heavy, but it's really not. And the USB soundcard that came with the headset is definitely better than my regular onboard soundcard. Here are some screenshots of the software (which you have to download - there's no driver disc with the device): Not the prettiest interface, but it does the job it's supposed to. Here's what the USB soundcard looks like: It's got volume control, and mute buttons ...

My awesome wife bought me this baby for our anniversary: I just unpacked it, and I'm listening to some music now as I write this. I've got it loud. Very loud. And it sounds freaking amazing! I've never had a decent set of headphones, and I cannot believe how huge a difference it makes, even to something as simple as listening to music. The bass is incredible, I can feel the set vibrate on my head, and the noise cancelling is spot on, I cannot hear anything from the outside world, not even me typing on the keyboard (can't hear that even when nothing is playing!). And, when nothing is playing, you cannot even hear the slightest hiss in the background, they're dead silent! NICE! I cannot wait to use it for this evening's Loadout session! I will definitely be updating this post with my experience :D

This post is basically a continuation of this one:  http://yeoldegeekyblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/logitech-is-failing-me.html  - it was basically a summary of how Logitech, once one of my favourite computer peripheral brands, is failing me. As you can see on the above post, I've gone through numerous Logitech devices, and they always seem to start failing or breaking after a while. Usually just out of the warranty period. Anyway, on 14 October 2011 I bought myself a G330 gaming headset - now, firstly, it's not the top of range model at all, and it didn't cost me that much - ZAR313, which is around $30. Anyway, so I've had it now for just over 2 years (2 years 4 months to be precise), and the pad on the left ear has torn off. I do not use it a lot, I don't ever go out to LANs, so I literally only use once, maybe twice a week for a gaming session. Or when I need to use the mic if I'm Skyping someone. Here's what it looks like now: As you can see,...

I've always liked shooter action games, and I remember a buddy and I used to LAN (with coax cables nonetheless!) Half-life 1 a decade and a half ago. I grew up in a small town, and it was basically just the two of us who played. Every now and again a 3rd guy would join in, but that wasn't very often... Always had fun though :) I've never been a huge online shooter player, I leveled up my Battlefield 3 character to about level 20, and that's pretty much it. I tried Team Fortress, but man I just couldn't get into it. I've never played Call of Duty, and I probably won't be taking part in the Titanfall beta which is going on right now. But, I was nonetheless intrigued when I saw Loadout pop up on my Steam home screen. I checked out some videos, and the curiosity totally overwhelmed me. I installed it (only about 2.1gig download, not too shabby!). See for yourself: The idea behind the game is firstly it's a 3rd person shooter. Secondly, you get to cr...