january 1, 2012 : steve kong : 0 comment(s)
It's that time again to recap Mookie's last year...
After spending too many hours to count in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Team 409 has moved onto the new Battlefield 3. 2011 also saw the addition of a member to Team 409: Reckless. Reckless joins Paddles, Marksman, McStabby and Tank in the fight against n00bs.
In 2011, we left AT&T because they started capping DSL data usage. The move has been really positive because we switched to the superior service of Sonic.net. Sonic.net not only costs less per month than AT&T for both landline and DSL, but gives us more for our money - uncapped data usage and data speeds; premium voice features that are free; free domestic long distance (and long distance to Canada); and a free static IP address. I'd like to give a big thanks to AT&T for forcing us into looking at better alternatives.
On the same note, a thanks goes out to Citibank. Their extreme greed also forced us to reconsider them and look into alternatives to big banks. We had all our finances with Citibank (checking, savings and credit cards), now they have nothing from us. We have found an alternative in a local credit union and haven't looked back since.
2011 saw us move from the big players, who have shown their greed, over to smaller players who are out to provide better service for their customers. Our credit cards are still with big players, but only because we pay-in-full each month and we like to reap the rewards of these new cards.
The Year of Tablets
2011 saw an explosion of tablets on the market and I was one of those who was caught up in the excitement. I started out the tablet frenzy with an el cheapo AOC tablet which fell squarely into the "you get what you pay for" category. It was returned for a Samsung Galaxy Wifi, which got sold on Ebay because...well, Samsung has shown that it sucks at long term support for any of their devices. Samsung has now officially entered the Mookie blacklist of companies whom I will not spend money on.
The Samsung was followed by a far superior Motorola Xoom which continues to be used daily in the household (both by myself and the kids). At Christmas, I received a Amazon Kindle Fire and that has become my personal tablet that the kiddos do not get to touch.
The Year of Paying for Entertainment
In 2010, we cut off Netflix DVDs and Streaming. Then we cut off Dish Network TV in favor of OTA TV. This was all part of cost cutting. In 2011, we returned to paying for some entertainment. We signed up for Amazon Prime and started using their streaming service -- and I subscribed to some cable TV shows via Amazon Streaming. Amazon streaming (both paid and free Prime) is robust and the library is deep enough that we have been using it consistently. We also signed up for Blockbuster DVD mail rentals, which has turned out to be surprisingly good.
The Year of Mobile Data
In 2010, when AT&T Mobility introduced tiered data, both phones in the family had their data plans reduced to the lower cost data plans. This was because we both had data-efficient (or feature lacking?) Blackberry phones. Now that I'm on an Android device and my wife is on an iPhone 4S, we have upped our data plans again.
Now, it's time to look forward to 2012! Happy New Year!
november 5, 2011 : steve kong : 0 comment(s)
The other day JR reminded me of a RSS news aggregation software that I had used before: tt-rss. The recent UI changes to Google Reader kind of suck: too much wasted space and a scrollbar that is near unusable.
The only thing that would keep me from moving on was a good Android client, that was easily solved with a quick search on Android Market.
Then, I ran into a roadblock. I set up tt-rss and it continued to stall when I used it. Apache error logs showed that it got "client denied by server configuration" errors consistently. I went through all the configuration settings for the directory and nothing was wrong. I checked filesystem directory ownerships and everything was what it was supposed to be. I was perplexed until I stumbled on a posting that complained that mod_evasive was denying connections because they were coming in so fast (tt-rss makes a lot of background calls to their backend.php script) -- and looked like a DOS attack.
After disabling mod_evasive, tt-rss started working brilliantly. tt-rss is a nice little RSS reader and the Android client works great. Thanks Google for changing the UI on Google Reader.
november 2, 2011 : steve kong : 0 comment(s)
I am playing with Fedora 15 and I turned off the wifi (Atheros 9k) in my HP dm3 via NetworkManager. The light on the hardware wifi switch goes from blue to orange -- that's normal. Then, I try to turn wifi back on. Nothing. I reboot and try again. Nothing. The hardware switch doesn't work at all.
I did a: ifconfig wlan0 up
And I get this error: SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill
After doing some research, I hardwired my dm3 and installed rfkill. Running rfkill list showed that I had both a soft and hard block on my wifi adapter. I run rfkill unblock all and nothing.
I then blacklist the hp_wmi module and reboot. Nothing. Out of frustration, I remove hp_wmi from the blacklist and reboot. Then I did a rfkill list and it showed only a soft block on the wifi adapter. rfkill ublock all kills the soft block and everything starts working again.
I tried turning off wifi via NetworkManager again and it works. It turns off and turns on no problems.
Anyone have any ideas what's going on?
october 30, 2011 : steve kong : 1 comment(s)
Now that I have a dozen hours of online play in Battlefield 3, I want to write some thoughts about it. The short version: The game is awesome, but online play is seriously hampered by some bad flaws.
While online play is extremely fun and well-balanced, if you want to play with a bunch of friends, it is infuriating to no end -- I know because I keep trying to play with my buddies and we cannot get our squad on the same server and on the same squad.
The problems that I have observed are:
- Battlefield 3 does not understand the concept of a full squad. If a squad of four tries to join a server that is near full, but still has enough room it will get split if someone gets inserted before the squad does. So, if you look for a 24-player server that currently has 18-players, a four person squad would fit there. But, if three players join at the same time as when the four person squad does, BF3 doesn't tell the squad of four that the server is full. Instead, BF3 will let three people on the squad of four into the game. The leftover person is kicked back to menus.
- Battlefield 3 gives priority to balanced teams over intact squads. If a squad of four tries to join a game that has 12 people, but is uneven (say five vs seven because of people leaving the game), then BF3 will split up the squad of four! It will put three on the team of five and one on the team of seven -- therefore making the teams balanced at eight players each, but leaving the squad broken.
- VOIP chat on the PS3 platform is horribly broken. Not only can we not hear each other talking because the volume is so low, but it becomes choppy after a while. So, no one can understand what each other are saying.
In essence, EA/DICE has released BF3 with the best part of Battlefield broken: Squads and playing with friends. They need to get this fixed immediately.
october 25, 2011 : steve kong : 1 comment(s)
Back in February of 2010, I was knee-deep in playing Modern Warfare 2 online with my buddies when a demo came out for a game named Battlefield: Bad Company 2. My buddies and I had seen the videos and were impressed (ATV? Dude on back shooting while guy on front is driving? Awesome!) I remember downloading the demo and starting it up and getting dropped in Port Valdez.
I remember the sheer confusion of battle, not because it was a frantic spawn-die-spawn-die MW2 cycle. I was confused because I was dropped into an open area with no good idea what to do. I was stuck in some bushes behind a guard house and there was gunfire from all around. I died an unceremonious death and spawned again. This time I ran around, but had no idea what was happening. A few minutes later, I deleted the demo and went back to MW2.
The next day, I talked with Rohan and he said he had the same experience. We all wrote off BFBC2. When BFBC2 launched in March of 2010, we did not pick it up, we were still playing MW2. I am not sure why for my birthday in June, I asked for the game. Maybe it was because I was getting bored of MW2 at that point (only eight months into MW2). Anyways, I picked up BFBC2, finished off the single-player and then jumped into multiplayer -- and after some stumbling around, discovered that the Battlefield way of warfare was much better than the Modern Warfare way. And roping in my MW2 buddies made it just that much more fun. We discovered that BFBC2 was better in every respect than MW2.
In MW2, a sniper could snipe from a second floor of a concrete building with no real way to kill him (think Scrapyard). The wall was concrete and nothing could get through it, not even a rocket. BFBC2 didn't subscribe to this thought of invincible buildings, given enough time I could level an entire map.
MW2 was about being twitchy only. Maps were small, spawning was random, and one game had dozens of spawn-die-spawn-die cycles. BFBC2 had large maps, gave people space to think and strategize. A smart player in BFBC2 could live for long periods of time and still be productive for the team.
In MW2, the voice chat was team wide and usually the team was populated by young yelling kids -- so playing with your buddies was no fun because you had to mute everyone on the team at the start of every round. In BFBC2, we were introduced to the idea of a squad and communication was restricted to the squad of four. This was brilliant because we could sit and play as a team of friends. And the players in BFBC2 were usually more mature.
In MW2, the focus was really on KDR. The more kills you had, the more perks you got. The more perks you got, the more kills you could get. It was fun in a Pacman sort of way, but I think that's why the game didn't last long for me. It got stale. In BFBC2, the focus was on team objectives: MCOMs in Rush and Flags in Conquest. Yes, MW2 had the same Conquest-type gameplay, but it didn't work as well as it did in BFBC2.
I played BFBC2 with my buddies for more than a year now. I didn't get to level 50, but I did get past level 40 which was my goal. I got platinum on a whole slew of weapons and vehicles -- my most proud platinum was on my knife. My KDR started off in the low 0.50's and stayed there for a while, but I worked it back up to almost 1.00. My best weapon is the AN-94, but late into the game I started using the M14 Mod 0 Enhanced (last four months or so) when the M14 got the 4x ACOG. That gun has quickly caught up with the AN-94 (it's only behind the AN-94 by two dozen kills). The M14 remains my favorite gun in the game. C4 and Mines both were memorable weapons -- I didn't reach the level of Mine-awesomeness as Josh (aka Paddles) or Rohan (aka Marksman) though. And the weapon that made me laugh in joy the most was the 40mm shotgun attachment.
BFBC2 is a game that I've played for the longest time. It is because of its mixed of pure awesome and because of my buddies. This game has served us well and has given me many memories of classic moments. Today, Battlefield 3 will be arriving so we all will be putting away BFBC2 and moving onto the next battle. After 429 hours of multiplayer gameplay in BFBC2 (and a dozen in singleplayer), I say thanks DICE for such an awesome game.