k42

New Website

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:56:25 +0300

Update your RSS feeds :-)

Machinarium

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:47:00 +0300

I’ve been playing this game for the past hour, and I can confirm its greatness. It has one of the best blend of art and atmosphere to ever grace gaming, and a beautifully haunting soundtrack. The puzzles are very clever and quite, well, “puzzling” at times. Loving it a lot, and I highly recommend it to every person who appreciates good ol’ gaming.

Go and try it out right now.

Twitter

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:00:00 +0300

~~No no, no. I’m not going to bitch about it. They responded, but hey, I deleted my fucking account already.~~

~~But no, that isn’t the worst part. I MISS THE FUCKING TWITTERVERSE. I discovered that WHORING MYSELF IS A COOL THING.~~

~~Where’s the scribble note when you need it! I want my fucking time machine!~~

~~Shit.~~

I’m back.

"Horror movies; as you know them, have been shit, have always been shit, and will always be shit."

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:53:23 +0300

“Horror movies; as you know them, have been shit, have always been shit, and will always be shit.”

- Noah Antwiler

Final Fantasy 8

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:23:00 +0300

Yesterday I had a great amount of fun with one of my cousins, and a particularly interested one: he and I always played games, while the others were hunting for soccer all day long. He plays soccer as well, so that makes me a bit of a loser, but let’s just ignore this in here. It’s undoubtedly sad how time strikes us lightning-fast these days. One moment we’re playing Final Fantasy 8, and the next: he’s married and well-settled with a beautiful child. I mean, I still remember the days in which we fought Ultimicia together. I still remember how we got every single card in the Triple Triad mini-game, and I’m sure as hell he’s not forgetting all the great fun we had while grinding at the backyard of Balamb Gardens, way before we knew the term “grinding” even existed.

So, why all our memories consists of Final Fantasy 8? It’s because we spent a whole freaking summer holiday playing nothing but that game. Yup, we kicked ass in the Resident Evil games, and we did wonders playing Red Alert 2 continuosly on LAN, but nothing will ever touch our fond memories of that summer holiday. And I’m not exaggerating in here, we literally spent almost four months playing the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 8, and guess what? We finished it. In a day where people were pussied to try out a new system in their RPGs, we loved the Junction system that was presented in FF8. We both hated Final Fantasy 7 with the obvious reason as you do; FF6 outshines that shit in every imaginable way. Back in the day, I wasn’t able yet to fully comprehend and finish an epic RPG game, but I remember setting closely to my cousin while he figures everything out. So it’s true, while I didn’t finish FF6, but mastered FF7, I prefered 6 at that time, and to this day. I loved how Kefka is purely evil for the sake of it, and not because of some loli-animu crap that was presented in FF7 and onwards. Saddam and Hitler weren’t “victims of life”, if you catch my drift. Evil people are often evil for the sake of it.

I’m sure we would have loved FF7 if it had the opening scene of FF8. I still remember the scene to this day; we just bought the game, and we kept pushing the reset button to watch the FMV sequence all over again. We spent over an hour just replaying that scene. We were kids, epic FMVs like that were enough to keep us all hyped and bombastic for the game, and we were like “this will kick the batshit that’s FF7 HELLZ YEA”. I remember commenting on FF6 as well but he gave me a strange look in which I knew how much he sacred that game. All this talk aside, I believe that FF8 was our first J-RPG in which we couldn’t wait for the NA release and we just wanted to PLAY. The game, played in Japanese with no prior knowledge of the language, was a test of shattering one’s mind in half. We were naming our characters with things like “ずずずず”. When I asked my cousin why, he told me “It would be easier to know if people are referring to us in the dialogs”. That, of course, doesn’t make any sense because we still wouldn’t understand what they’re telling us, but we were naive. Fun fact: ず was (and still) a personal favorite Japanese letter, I used to love it back in the days of Captain Tsubasa 2 on the NES, and I still, to this day, call the letter “Tornado”. It looks like one, don’t you think?

I know that people nowadays hate Squall for being a jerk whose words are either “…” or “Whatever”, but I thought he was really cool. I also loved the names of the characters, even thought we didn’t know them at the time we were playing the game. Quistis, Rinoa, Zell. I think those became classics just like Kefka and Terra. Walking around the university, dueling other students and winning their cards, hunting for new Guardian Forces, those were the true times in which I appreciated gaming, and if it wasn’t for that particular summer holiday, I don’t think I would have appreciated J-RPGs (and gaming in general) like the way I am doing today. We were the first in our family and friends in overcoming all the difficult passages in the game. If history was ever correct, we would be credited for inventing what people are calling today “grinding”. We used to play the game continuously and religiously for days. It’s this simple; I level up (read: grind) near the place where you first fought against T-Rex, and if I felt sleepy, I’d wake up my cousin (who is sleeping right beside me) and he will continue the journey while I take my fair share of sleep. We did this for days. We wanted not only powerful characters, but useful GF abilities (we didn’t know what these are, but we noticed that after couple of battles, we’d gain a new ability and that looked fun and intriguing). We ended up breaking the flow of the game, kicking pretty much all the asses in the game, even before getting to Irvine.

All the rambling above was me and my cousin trading memories over the course of eating Subway’s delicious grilled chicken parmesan and cookies. I then told him “Hey, my vacation starts on the 27th of this month and…” “Holy…! me too!” “Then, wanna replay FF8 one last time since that crazy summer?” And I got the sweetest reply ever; “YES!”.

This is the story of how me and my dear cousin decided to replay one of our favorite RPGs of all time. And even though The Cult of Kefka wasn’t originated from this idea (the hellish mind of NSider brought it to life); we are the cult that appreciates Kefka and all the great villains (and games and music and everything else) that are interesting with no dramatizing events leading to their creativeness. It was also loosely connected to my love affair for FF6 when I couldn’t figure out where to go after marching to the world map, which happened to have an outstanding score. Oh Uematsu, how much we miss you.

"Sometimes I don’t know whether I hear music while playing games or that I play games to hear the..."

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:55:15 +0300

“Sometimes I don’t know whether I hear music while playing games or that I play games to hear the music.”

- Sean Malstrom

Dubai 2009

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:15:58 +0300

Recently I went to Dubai with my best buddy Nawaf and we had a blast. I uploaded some photos of the recent trip, you can view it in Flickr.

I’m definitely going there again late Sep/early Oct :-)

Thekra, Alf 3omr

Sun, 17 May 2009 09:55:39 +0300

Thekra, Alf 3omr

"I believe if Tetris were presented today, here is what the producer would be told: Go back give me..."

Fri, 15 May 2009 18:27:30 +0300

“I believe if Tetris were presented today, here is what the producer would be told: Go back give me more levels give me better graphics give me cinematics and you’re probably going to need a movie license to sell that idea to the public. The producer would go away dejected. Today, Tetris might never be made.”

- Iwata

Angham, Ma Yehemesh

Wed, 13 May 2009 23:41:15 +0300

Angham, Ma Yehemesh

"Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out from what."

Sat, 09 May 2009 18:21:09 +0300

“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out from what.”

- Mae West

Jem - Falling For You

Fri, 08 May 2009 13:42:24 +0300

Jem - Falling For You

Sharing Mac connection (through AirPort) to a PS3

Mon, 04 May 2009 13:33:00 +0300

I’ve been going around through this for almost two weeks, and I finally got it to work. As you may have known, when sharing your Mac connection to a PS3/Xbox 360 it will give either an IP Address error, or a DNS error. I searched google and couldn’t come up with a solution. So there goes the ancient way of solving things: prematurely messing around with the system. Conclusion? it worked.

Note that for the following tutorial, I was using VIVA USB modem (hence the need for sharing the connection), a PS3 updated to the latest firmware, Mac OS X version 10.5.6, and a cup of hot chocolate.

Mac

Open “System Preferences” window
Under “Internet & Networking” click on “Sharing”
Check the box near “Internet Sharing”, and then “AirPort”
Go back to “System Preferences” and click on “Network”
Click on your network’s name (mine was “HUAWEI Mobile”) and click on “Advanced”
Click on the DNS tab. In here you will see two set of numbers, grayed out. Type them down on a piece of paper (or better, in a text editor). We will need them later

PS3

From the “Settings” tab, go to “Network Settings”, and choose “Internet Connection Settings”. For a setting method, choose “Custom” and then “Wireless”
Let the PS3 scan for an access point, and choose your Mac SSID (make sure to turn on “AirPort” on your Mac)
When asked for a security setting, choose “None” (the PS3 won’t identify a WEP key from a Mac, as far as I know, so don’t bother creating one on your Mac)
When asked for an IP address setting, choose “Manual” and enter the following:

IP Address: 10.0.2.210
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Router: 10.0.2.1
Primary DNS: the first number we noted down from the DNS tab
Secondary DNS: the second number we noted down from the DNS tab

When asked for MTU, choose “Automatic”
When asked for a proxy server, choose “Do Not Use”
When asked for UPnP, choose “Disable”

Test your connection, everything should be working fine now. If you have any questions regarding this subject feel free to e-mail me anytime. (colorization at gmail dot com)

"All the hardships a person had to face, non was more punishing than the simple act of waiting."

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 06:19:25 +0300

“All the hardships a person had to face, non was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”

- Khalid Hosseini

Amazon Kindle

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:11:45 +0300

I got the Amazon Kindle 2 yesterday. I was thinking of spending a week or so before writing this small, first-impressions review, but I figured that a week is way too much. You simply don’t need a whole week to settle on an opinion regarding reading on the Kindle.

You remember when I said, in an earlier post, that the Mac OS X is wheel re-inventing? that wasn’t literal. Don’t get me wrong now, I love my Mac. But I was exaggerating a bit, because, though it is clever, it’s not re-inventing. However, reading on the Kindle (now literaly) is wheel re-inventing. People may disagree, but I never thought of the day in which reading from a screen would best a book. The electronic paper display for the Kindle is a mystery to me; I have no idea how it functions, but it looks (and feels) like a goddamned book. If you’re an avid reader, you already know the feeling when you spend a lot of time reading texts from a computer screen. Yes, it gives you headache, for several reasons I won’t bother mentioning. But reading from this e-paper is unbelievably incredible. It’s just natural. I really don’t miss my paperbacks. I’m sorry, paper sellers, but Kindle has won the compition.

When I first considered buying a Kindle (back when Amazon announced their first one), it wasn’t because I thought that regular books aren’t good. Oh, no. Regular books are destined to live a better life than you. But what got me into buying it is the sole fact that I’m running out of shelf space. Oh my poor, poor shelves. Just how games eats up all the RAM; books eats up all the space you have. I didn’t want my room to turn up like my aunt’s, where even under her bed and closet you could find several books thrown here and there and, literaly, everwhere. Buying contents for Kindle is a smooth, shelf-saver operation. I know you already know this, but the fact that you could carry thousands of books (and magazines and newspapers) in the palm of your hand is simply… astonishing. Do you know what thousands of books means? It means no room for my action figures and Mega Man posters to be seen, and that’s a non-negotiable crime in my little kingdom (or as known as, my room). What’s better than quitting a book to read a said article you just remembered in The Wall Street Journal, and by the time you finish it you can delve straight back to the last word you were reading in your book? No poundaries, no nothing. It’s that simple. I just think that I’ll be going to work on Sunday with my favorite newspaper, favorite magazine and my recently-purchased books, all without compromising space or looking wierd, and that makes me grin happily.

All the buttons on the device are dead simple. You have a button to flick to your next page, another to go back a page, a home button (which brings all your items, as seen above), a menu button, which brings a list for options you could do (such as searching your books, playing your MP3s, starting the text-to-speech feature, and so on), a back button, which functions like a “back” button in Firefox, and finally a 5-way controller which acts like a d-pad, choosing stuff and so on. It’s so simple that you don’t need to read the included manual to understand all of this, though I did, because I’m addicted to reading manuals. I think they’re fun. But yeah, it’s really simple and gets the job done.

There are a lot of small things you can do while reading a book that, when combined, would show the very big potential the Kindle is promising. Obviously, when you feel like you don’t wanna go through another page, just leave it there and let your Kindle go to sleep. You can even read another book(s) then return to the first one and voila, you get to the last page you were reading. If you came across a word that is riddling, you can use the 5-way controller to locate the word in the Oxford dictionary. This will not interrupt your reading; the definition will look like a footnote at the bottom of the page, and you can continue reading normally. However, if you feel like exploring more of the word’s meanings, you could press “Return” from the keyboard and it will bring you the dictionary in all its glory. This is a very, very neat idea to implement in the Kindle, and will make a lot of readers happy, to know that they could read anything, even those hard-to-read classics, without getting the “owhellno” feeling.

There’s a lot to talk about here, but I only spent a little time with my Kindle and I haven’t tried everything yet. I really think that the Kindle is one of the very few things that will alter the way I live my ordinary, boring life. I just can’t go back to reading books again. This is way better than I expected. I don’t care how, just get it and thank me later.

Whatever you think,

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:03:00 +0300

…think the opposite.

This may never work all the time, because, well, life isn’t a game you’re crafting. But some of the time, following the masses isn’t the most ideal choice you could make. In Paul Arden’s book, I was inspired to not only follow the rule, but to feed on any consequences I may reach afoot. It’s a common fact to not follow any advice you read, not because they wouldn’t work, but because you wouldn’t know how to fix them to work for you. With reading books you ought to be versatile; keep the information for yourself, and broaden your imagination. Don’t be a fool and try out every little bit of information you may think is good, because most of the time you will be disappointed. And believe me, I’ve been there and it’s goddamn awful.

However, when I wanted to step up and do as the book told me to, it wasn’t because I thought it’s cool. I had done it because I thought it was the right thing to do.

Several weeks ago, when we finished our training for the new job, they told us to write a finalized report in which the person should write all that he learned from this extensive training. I began writing as soon as I got home and tried to achieve the zen-like report we all dream of. But then I realized it’s not possible, because I’m writing about things I have lesser experience in than most of the people around. I could copy portions of the internet, but then it wouldn’t be my report.

When I went to work the following day I was literally shocked. My report was only 5 pages with only two images (that I took myself). All of my work-mates had reports that ranges from 20 to 60 (yes, sixty) pages. Numbers, yearly stats, lots of tables —everything you could imagine. Now, I could have turned my Mac and woof, copied the entirety of the internet. But I didn’t, for a sole reason: why in the stinkin’ hell would I need a 40-pages report? I’m just a trainee, my work experience would be so minimal, and so do my report. I cold copy the web, but then what’s the point? It’s our duty to write our own experience, no matter how tiny it may be. That’s the point after all, isn’t it?

The rest is easy to guess. I took the promotion with my 5-pages report, while my buddies are re-doing all that we did for the past months. It’s pretty funny when I look at it in retrospect, because everybody thought I’d be the one who’s gonna redo everything all over again.

What do we learn from this little story, you ask?

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. —Oscar Wilde

Have your own thoughts and opinions :-)

[Mac] Niftier application folder

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:05:38 +0300

If you’re a Mac user, it’s a close chance that you already dragged your application folder to your dock. This cuts half the time you need to lauch your applications, which is really cool. Now, what to do if your applications folder gets new visitors every single day? I found a great way to elevate from this mess:

To this:

Nifty? I know. Here’s the trick.

Open up your Macintosh HDD, create a new folder, name it “Most Used”
Open your applications folder, go to your most-used applications (in my case, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Transmit, to name a few) and for each of them right-click and choose “Make Alias”
After performing this to all your frequently-accessed apps, drag them all to the “Most Used” folder we just created. (drag the alliases NOT the original applications)
Drag the “Most Used” folder to your dock
Enjoy the lite experience!

Of course, you can update your folder everytime you install an application that you like and use frequently.

Mac, 2

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:29:00 +0300

I think I’ve been climbing up all this time; surprisingly, from the “I’m not sure I’ll be comfortable with this system” to “this is wheel re-inventing all over again”. No, seriously. Screwing with my Mac for the past week, I came to the conclusion that Mac is like heaven on earth. An incredibly versatile system that you will tinker and love for each and every minute you spend with. I never loved a machine before as much as I’m loving my Mac, and it’s not because of the huge investment, because I paid well over 800$ on my Limited Edition MGS4 PlayStation 3, and god knows how much I hate the console. Money is never an issue, not to me, not to anybody else. If you’re not comfortable with a system, console, hell —even a car, you’d be hating it no matter how thousand of bucks you wasted on it.

One of the very first things you will notice when using a Mac is its extreme responsiveness. Everything is juicy and fluid, there is no blocks that cuts your way, no unnecessary lag that crumbles your enjoyment. None. It’s a 100% unmatched creativity. You will learn to love your system. And it will love you back, with all its great applications and the ease-of-use of literally everything. I think that the Macintosh operating system gets the best of both worlds —the secure, solid code of the UNIX system, and the streamlined use of the Windows. Now, mix this up with the great minds at Apple’s, and you have the perfect recipe for the perfect operating system that ever graced human mankind. (Hyperbole?)

In these past days I’ve been using some great applications that I would like to share my experience here with my readers. Now I know, if you’re a Mac user, you probably heard of them, so I’m sorry if I’m not giving you any notable informations.

Xtorrent (25$): All my life, I never thought about the day I would pay for torrent applications. If you told me about this one year ago —hell, 20 days ago, I would have laughed so hard at your face. I still can’t justify this purchase, because there are tons of free software. Good software. But I didn’t want a good torrent application. I wanted the extreme. The best. Xtorrent was (is, still and forever) shockingly amazing. I never had files that rack up a speed of 200 Kb\s before. But that’s not the only reason. It also have a very good looking and user-friendly GUI that’s very entertaining to navigate your files in. And with a built-in search engine, the fun will never stop. If you don’t mind paying 25 bucks for a torrent application, then I highly recommend getting it.

EventBox (15$, get it legally for free!): This must be installed in every Mac system. A great application that keeps records of all your Twitter, Face Book, Google Reader and Flickr activities. This will halve the time needed to do all those mentioned above without the headache of going through individual applications that handles them. Fortunately, MacHeist are offering the application for free at their site. Just scroll down a bit and you’ll notice its banner.

iWork ‘09 (62.99$ @ Amazon): This application is a work of genius. Speaking Gates, it’s Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Which are, respectively; Pages, Keynote and Numbers. I only tried Pages for my weekly report, and it was fascinating. Microsoft Office is spectacular, there’s nothing against it. But there’s something about iWork that makes it entertaining to work with. I seriously never had fun building a report as much as yesterday. Weekly reports are boring, believe me. You do the same work every single week, with different statistics and math. However, the lovely UI and the amazing templates was enough to make me build a very stylish report that isn’t too stylish, if you know what I mean. It’s simple, but clean and organized very well. Sure, you can do everything with Microsoft Word, but personally I’m preferring Pages. This is a definite purchase for me; I tried the 30-days full-trial yesterday, and I just placed my order @ Amazon (with the new shuffle ;-) for my daily walks). Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

CandyBar (29.99$): This is a delicious application. It makes you replace your icons and dock with some new and clever ones, sporting hundreds of fantastic designs. Nothing much to say about it except that it’s a must-have application for graphic junkies. Checkout my new desktop, you’ll like it ;-)

I’m also planning to pick up Transmission and maybe Statto and Desktastic later. In a nutshell, yes, I’m glad that I bought a Mac system. My digital lifestyle has been completely revamped. PCs for games, Macs for everything else. I’m super cool and you’re not, huzzah!

"The Mac, truly, rules. Any developer that says otherwise has forgotten what it means to love..."

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:16:03 +0300

“The Mac, truly, rules. Any developer that says otherwise has forgotten what it means to love computers.”

- Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic.com

"I find nothing more depressing than optimism."

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:39:00 +0300

“I find nothing more depressing than optimism.”

- Paul Fussell, a cultural and literary historian