Escalation hit the interwebs last week, and having played a bit this weekend it's not bad!  The Smoke & Mirrors mission reminded me a little of Star Wars (the aesthetic), and a little bit of Captain Planet (the "don't mess up your planet by polluting, Kids!)I played a bit in the competitive warzone queues and the space one is definitely my favorite or the two. The ground missions (invisible

A while back I had bought Max Payne 3 on super sale for my xbox 360, so I thought it a good idea to go back and play the previous two.  Even though I have the original xbox discs for Max Payne, and Max Payne 2, it seems that the backward compatibility was throwing up some hiccups for the original Max Payne.  Luckily Humble Bundle had it on super sale ($2?) so I got it for steam.Max is a

Ubisoft was having a sale on the UPlay store recently.  Since an Xbox One is not in my near future, I decided to get the Assassin's Gold Pack (on sale of course) which included both Unity and Syndicate.  After about 2 days of downloading Unity (approximately 50GB) I discovered that the game is unplayable on my Surface Pro 3.  Even on the lowest settings (which I was pretty content to

добрый день товарищ!Man...that's DONE!  Holy smokes!  What the heck?  Whaaaaaat?OK... I guess that I need to collect myself better before writing posts and game reviews.  I just finished playing Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia (just now for me, a few days ago chronologically) and all I have to say is "Effff yoouuuuuu!"  This game was one frustrating piece

I had started this game in Madrid, once I had finished with the first in the series (China), but being back home also means a lot less time for games ;-) In any case, picking away at it a little at a time means that progress was made in completing it (sounds like a parallel for dissertation writing, eh? ;-) ).The game follows Arbaaz Mir in Amritsar (India) in 1841, in the midst of a war between the

It's been an interesting experiment using the Motorola Razr as my daily driver, however with the lack of being able to just search the internet the phone didn't really do it for me (despite the satisfying "clack" you hear when you flip it closed).  I was looking on the web and I decided to buy a refurbished Nokia N8 to keep me going a bit until I find an android phone which I like.The N8 was

Jedi KnightJust before the Christmas break I decided to give Star Wars: The Old Republic a try.   I am definitely much more of a Star Trek fan, but I decided to give this game a try anyway.  It is free-to-play, so this was definitely a draw.  The game takes place a long long long time ago, in a galaxy far far far away.  As a player you have the ability to pick from six classes:

Seems like some enterprising individuals has gotten Windows 95 to boot on a Nintendo 3DS.  Pretty cool! Not sure how useful it is, but cool nevertheless.

I wasn't quite sure if I should write this post in English or in Greek.  I've been focusing my #metanastis posts in Greek as I have been recalling my experiences as a reverse immigrant back to the US.  Most things deal with acculturation, school, things that were different, new, or peculiar to me at the time.  One of the things that I really liked was gadgets...however I tend to write

Well lookie here! Seems like Microsoft has also put out a "year in review" for people who play games on xbox (I wonder if it also counts xbox live on Windows).  Seems like I spent a lot of time playing games in 2015 (to balance out the hard work of studying for my doctorate no doubt).  It does seem like my friends (the 3 that I have on xbox live) don't play a ton of games.    Maybe

Sure, Windows 10 isn't "new" any more, and there are enough people out there that upgraded so that they could get that annoying popup to go away, but as an enterprise user I am happy to not have had to deal with that "do you want to upgrade now?" (they should have used Clippy to make those announcements) :-)With work done at my home, and my work computers resting for now, it seemed like a good time

RaidersI've been geeking out a bit on Defiance these past couple of weeks and focusing on getting the main missions completed before moving onto more episode-based missions.  I am currently at an EGO rating of 292; pretty meager when you consider that the max EGO rating is around 6000, but anyway.Thus far I've completed the Mount Tam missions, where the main antagonists seem to be mutants of

IBM PS/2 Model 12Αφού λοιπόν το πρώτο καλοκαίρι θα το περνάγαμε στην Βοστόνη, ήταν ευκαιρία να ζητήσω υπολογιστή από τον πατέρα. Όλες οι εργασίες στο λύκειο έπρεπε να είναι γραμμένες στο υπολογιστή, τίποτα δεν ήταν δεκτό το οποίο

RuthusWell, after a few years of being on the fence, and now that Defiance has gone free-to-play, I decided to give this game a try.  I had actually bought the xbox disc (at a steep discount) back at Christmas, but I had not activated my xbox live subscription (school and all), so I never really got to play Defiance on my xbox. Once it went free-to-play (or at least f2p was announced for PS3

Well.  As if running MacOS 6 in vMac on your smartwatch wasn't enough, if you are craving some classic operating systems check out PCE.js which allows you to run MacOS 6 in a web browser, as well as Windows and DOS.  I wonder what my younger self would think of this if I had seen this 20 years ago... Now it's time to start emulating Amigas, IIgs, and OS/2. If you feel nostalgic for Windows

I've been experimenting with Linux on and off since 1999.  I was first introduced to linux when I was working at Barnes and Noble and I was working on the textbook floor with a number of other computer geeks. I think the first distro that I heard of was Slackware, but I don't think I have actually ever actually installed slackware.  I remember seeing their software boxes at stores like MicroCenter

Well... I wasn't particularly looking for another MMO to start, but I have been getting recommendations for EVE online and Marvel Heroes.  The Marvel Heroes trailer looks good, and it's free-to-play!  If I have space in my hard drive I may end up testing it out :)

I was listening to MacBreak Weekly today, when they were discussing this ad.Personally I am not interested in switching to the Lumia just yet (like the device, but Windows Phone isn't quite there yet for me), but I found this ad hilarious :-)

I was reading my email this morning and I got a note from Microsoft telling me that they are trashing Windows Messenger and keeping Skype in it's place.  The truth is that I haven't used messenger in quite some time, but with Windows 8 I was looking forward to having it run in the background so I could use it for messaging (sort of how I have iMessage logged into my Yahoo, MSN Live, and AIM accounts

Alright! I finally made it to Vice Admiral on Star Trek Online ("3 Stars" equivalent to real military) and thus I have reached the highest rank in the game (level 50).  Too bad, because I was looking forward, with Season 7 just being released, having the capability of going up to full Admiral. Oh well!I got my Vice Admiralty while completing Season 4. Not bad at all! I am currently mostly finishing

It's been three weeks since I got the Enterprise edition from our friendly help desk (those guys rock!) and I installed it on my work computer, and aging Dell Optiplex GX620, which runs on a 3.4Ghz P4, 2GB of RAM built-in graphics and 500MB of hard drive space.Yes, I know, you must be wondering how I can get work done.  The truth is that this is my backup machine where I undertake specific tasks,

Quick and dirty home office setupIt's been a few weeks since I've had my new Samsung Slat 7 tablet PC and I thought I would give it a quick review before I upgrade the OS to Windows 8 (this way you get a sense of what it's like out of the box).The cool things about this PC:The tablet hardware is actually pretty freakin' nice! The chassis of the PC is nice and thin, the touch screen responds to both

Microsoft, steal this idea!I was listening to Windows Weekly the other day and Laporte and Thurott were discussing ARM based Windows 8 tablets, versus Intel desktops, and how Microsoft's strategy is windows everywhere (as opposed to some sort of fragmented windows like we have now, and which was much worse in the past).  What seems to be escaping people is the idea of the dock!You could have an

I came across this video on YouTube (by hearing about it on Windows Weekly) and  I have to say that it is a riot! The tablets are bulky, they still use the stylus as inefficiently as they did back in 2005 (when this video was made) and...well it's so corporate!  At least the Knowledge Navigator video by Apple was a little more "real life."This video reminded me of the awesome motorola handset

Το περασμένο σαββατοκύριακο είχα πάει επίσκεψη στον πατέρα και πήρα μαζί και το iPad2 ως συνήθως. Το έδειξα στον πατέρα μου και φάνηκε εντυπωσιασμένος (αλλά δεν είπε τίποτα) και με ρώτησε πόσο το πήρα - του είπα $500, και με ρώτησε

I've heard lots of grippes over the past week about Windows 8 but I have to say that I for one am quite interested in it, and I have been a Mac fanboi for most of computer using life and I have never particularly liked the Windows OS line. Windows Vista and 7 are OK. With Windows 8 things have an opportunity to change (no, I am not switching to Windows, but I could consider making them part of my

I have to admit that I've been warming up to Windows these past few years. I really disliked everything before Vista.  I don't know if it's a sign of a maturing computer user (less dogmatic) or if Microsoft is pushing out a better product (or both?), but one thing is certain, with each release of Windows there has been more incentive to use it.  Having a Mac that is able to run both operating

A few years back I had hypothesized that Nokia would roll all of its intellectual property and know-how into creating one kick-ass next-gen version  of its Symbian OS, making Symbian not only competitive, but also able to support from the lowest of the low end phones to the highest end smartphones.  Last week we found out otherwise.  Nokia and Microsoft entered an agreement in which

Finally a Windows Phone that I am jazzed about!After many years of Microsoft holding onto backward compatibility, they've decided to pull a MacOS and move forward! This is something they needed to do for a while because, as I've said before, the older code base was holding them back! Now they can finally move forth without the ball-and-chain of backward compatibility, innovate AND finally integrate

What can I say? I am sucker for a good concept UI!If Windows Mobile 7 looked like this, and if it were more stable and got rid of their horrid backwards compatibility, I would give it a try ;-)Locus OS Interface from Barton Smith on Vimeo.

OK, this is pretty gross!I was reading the register and I saw that Burger King in Japan has made a special burger for the launch of Windows 7.According the register, this burger comes with 7 beef patties (I guess 7 for Windows 7).So the big questions that I have for this cross promotion:1. Can you actually eat this without utensils?2. Can you actually finish it?3. It is meant to give you sustenance

Μωρέ δεν μας χέζεις ρε Windows!Κάθε τρις και λίγο ο υπολογιστής μου στην δουλειά (που τρέχει Vista) μου λεει πως υπάρχουν νέες διαθέσιμες ενημερώσεις! Αμάν πια! Άμα τις αγνοώ το σπαστικό λειτουργικό σέρνετε (λες και παραπονιέται)

Αυτή την εβδομάδα άκουγα διάφορα podcast - milaraki.com και TUAW πιο συγκεκριμένα, και έμαθα για το «σκάνδαλο» που αφορά την νέα έκδοση του safari για windows και το apple update. Ήταν πραγματικά λίγο περίεργο να ακούω για το σκάνδαλο μέσο podcast γιατί

Ένα περίεργο πράγμα συμβαίνει εδώ και καιρό με τον Dell υπολογιστή μου που τρέχει Vista. Κάθε πρωί που έρχομαι στην δουλειά ανάβω τον υπολογιστή. Ο υπολογιστής σέρνετε, ή μάλλον τα windows σέρνονται, αλλά δεν σέρνονται συνέχεια!

Χτές εγκατέστησα κάτι Windows Updates γιατί εδώ και καιρό τα windows με έχουν πρήξει πώς το σύστημα μου (αν και εικονικό) είναι σε κίνδυνο! καλά λέω, άντε, εγκατέστησε τις αναβαθμίσεις και τα πάτς σου, και σταμάτα να με πρήζεις! Έκανε

Σήμερα γίνεται της Πόπης στην δουλειά. Κάνουμε αναβαθμίσεις στους διακομιστές στην βιβλιοθήκη και μαζί όλα τα clients. Επειδή οι βιβλιοθηκάριοι δεν έχουν ιδέα περί τεχνολογίας τρέχω...τρέχω και δεν φτάνω! Το γαμώτο είναι πώς