Ye olde geeky blog

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 ...