Please Stay Calm

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Sep 102013
 

Since yesterday I started playing Please Stay Calm on my phone. It’s a zombie game, kind of turn based. You have a limited amount of energy (and health of course) that you can use to scavenge for stuff or to hunt/kill zombies. Other than most games, the scavenging and hunting is done GPS based, so the game will list locations (shops, streets, etc) you will know.

Of course you can connect with friends (via Facebook or the app). You need to level to progress. You need money (found by scavenging or by selling stuff you found) to buy weapons, build safehouses, etc.etc.

It’s a simple game to play, the interface is not difficult and you don’t need superfast reflexes to dodge the zombies like most other games. I like it. At the moment I’m only at level 4, but for less than a day playing that seems okay (maybe it’s not).

Have a look here: http://pleasestaycalm.com/ and find the app in the Playstore or on iTunes.

Wi-Fi part 2

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Aug 192013
 

Wow. The signal from upstairs is so strong, that I go downstairs again, the phone does not switch access point and retains the connection. Maybe I should think about replace the Netgear downstairs with a Siemens 😉

Wi-Fi upstairs

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Aug 182013
 

Finally I solved my wi-fi problem that I was having upstairs. In the bedroom and bathroom I have a weak signal, and sometimes in the middle of a page reload or a game load, it would switch to my providers network (3G). Upstairs in the computerroom or on the roof-terrace I have no wi-fi signal whatsoever.

Until now.

I thought, why not try the old Siemens SX762 ADSL router, and just skip the ADSL part? Turns out it can be used without ADSL, and LAN-port4 can be used to uplink. With that port connected to my switch upstairs I now have wi-fi there. It’s only 54g, but good enough for the phone.

Yeah!

Plex (Media Server)

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Aug 082013
 

Experimenting with Spotify, throw (Sony), DLNA, uPnP and knowing that my Squeezebox server is something that will obsolete in a while, I found something that might just be right. Of course it does not have the nice hardware like the Squeezebox itself, but I get some stuff in return.

I found Plex. It is a mediaserver that you run on a computer in your home. It indexes your music, your movies, and your pictures. And with the Plex clients, you can browse and even play that content. DLNA browsing is not so surprising, but DLNA by itself does not help if the browser/client does not know how to handle a specific filetype. My phone does not know how to handle a movie in MKV format. It does not recognize my camera’s RAW format. Plex does. And it does it well.

The client app on my phone was not free, it was € 3.71 or something like US$ 5.

When connected to WiFi on my local LAN, I can play content (movies will be the main bottleneck) in any quality, even 20Mbps in 1080p is no problem. But you don’t always have your own WiFi at your disposal, that’s why you can connect your server to myPlex. On the server you enter the myPlex account information, and you enter the same credentials in the Android app. This is how they find each other, much like the Squeezebox has.
Now I can still see everything on my server, and from within the client I can choose the quality I want the data to be streamed to me. If you’re on a tight data-subscription, you can turn the quality down, but when that is of no concern you can turn it up as much as you like (or as much as your provider lets you).

Just tested all this, and tonight in the restaurant I could show a movie in full HD with subtitles. Over just 3G. Don’t worry, it was just a test, we had a lovely dinner with no movies 😉

Zombies, Run! – for real

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Aug 032013
 

Yesterday I started with the “real” Zombies, Run! app, not the 5K training. I knew I had to evade the zombies for real now, noone to protect me or so. Very early in the run, I picked up some supplies. Batteries, a sports bra, things. Not long after that, I got a zombie warning, about 100 meters away from me. Evading the zombies meant accelerating, so I did. But the distance between me and the zombies only got smaller and finally I threw away 3 items from my inventory which seemed to distract the zombies from me. WTF? This pattern continued until the end of the run, so in total: 0 zombies evaded.

Read the FAQ.

Here’s how chases work:
When a Zombie Chase is triggered, the app calculates your average pace over the previous 30 seconds
You must increase your pace by 20% from this average
You must maintain that increased pace for 1 minute in order to escape the zombies.

Right. Should have read that before I ran. Hope things get better on the next run. You can see my run here.

Google acquires Waze, now save on fuel!

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Jul 272013
 

It’s all over the news. Well, something like that. It spiked my interest and I installed Waze on my phone. It looks cute, and for people without paranoia (you will be sharing your location), it can be both fun and helpful. One of the features is that it lists gasstations nearby. Not so spectacular, it’s on Google Maps too you might say. But Waze lists them sorted by distance from your current location including the current fuel prices. So, let’s save ourselves some money, and start using Waze 🙂

Waze on Google Play.

Cleaning old (broken) links

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Jul 242013
 

This blog is starting to get old 🙂 Next February this weblog will be 10! I think it started with pMachine, then b2Evolution, and after that several versions of WordPress. I know I used some ASP.NET software at first, when the server was still a Windows machine, but “.Text” was not stable enough (reboots made the weblog unavailable), so that’s when I started with PHP-based weblog software and finally ended up with the best one!

Recently I installed a broken-link checker plugin, and that resulted in quite a number of dead links. Some that were links to my own weblog. I “unlinked” most of the external links (so the link is removed), and I am trying to sort out my own links. I restored some pictures already, but disk crashes in the past resulted in some media referred to by the links to be gone. Should have made better backups. Mind the word “should”.

Zombies, Run! – results sofar

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Jun 242013
 

Last month, I started to run with the Zombies, Run! app. Actually, the Zombies, Run! 5K training to be exact.

This is my result sofar, of which I’m proud, since I didn’t skip any mission, not even when I was tired or it was bad weather. In this short period of time I ran in tropical heat and in rainy weather!

ZombiesRun - sofar

Next week the missions start to get really challenging (for me), since the intervals will have longer running periods than resting periods.

VGA connectors?

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Jun 102013
 

Funny. Just to have some sound and some movement in the background, I turned on the TV and stopped zapping on a channel with CSI:NY. All the latest equipment, super cool gadgets, user-interfaces nobody has ever seen, but still…..they connect their monitors to the PC with…..the famous blue VGA connectors? No HDMI or DVI or DisplayPort, just the age-old VGA connector.

Zombies, Run!

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May 302013
 

I bought a Sennheiser/Adidas PMX 680 today, so I could finally “test” Zombies 5K. First the unpacking and connecting the headphone of course, it’s a nice thing.

So I changed into my running gear, changed some settings in Zombies 5K, and started listening. Yes, listening. Zombies 5K (and also Zombies, Run!) is a novel, a game and a training assistant in one. A novel, because it tells a story about a zombie-infected world. A game, because you are a runner (Runner 5) in that infested world and you need to do tasks/complete missions to proceed. And of course, it’s a training assistant because you guessed it: you can only complete missions by physically running!

First mission I thought would be easy, but I never do interval trainings, so after the mission I was more exhausted than my regular training. But I felt good about it, and the story and game is such a great addition to running, it actually makes me WANT to run more. But….doctor Myers gave me a day of, so I will run on Friday!

Check their website for more info on Zombies, Run!

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