IDLE BLOGGER

What’s dripping down Christina’s legs?

2012-01-31T17:48:13Z

I usually don’t like posting gossip and celebrity images but I thought this is kinda funny. There is something dripping down Christina’s legs as you can see in the image and some people are saying it is spray tan mixed with sweat but I don’t know. I’ll leave it up to your imagination, however dirty is that. Haha! (Click the images for bigger version)

Image/Article Source: Oh no They didn’t

Spotify’s Latest Version is Awesome

2012-01-24T07:30:18Z

Spotify is the music streaming application that is available for a variety of mobile and desktop platforms. You can stream unlimited music for free with ads and you can also purchase a unlimited subscription which removes the ads for $4.99 and a premium subscription that allows streaming through mobile and offline syncing for $9.99. I have to say that their latest version (0.8.1.64) is quite amazing. Here is a round-up of the new features I’ve noticed.

1. Social

There is a new start page now which includes a list of “trending” songs among the friends along with the usual “New Releases”. It resembles more like Rdio with album art from the latest albums and the tracks your friends are listening to. There is also a separate tab in the sidebar for people. The people tab loads in the main window now instead of the list in the sidebar. This is more efficient and the large portraits of friends looks great.

2. Apps

Apps seem to be buzz word these days. Spotify now has an ability to add apps to the program. This means that you don’t have to go different sites searching for playlists. The biggest thing missing from Spotify was the ability to have music discover ability like Pandora/Rdio/Mog and having apps is going to fix this in a big way. There is a Radio option which generates playlist based on the genre/music type you like. There are also top lists and app that generates music based on mood (Moodagent), an app that displays lyrics (Tunewiki) and my favorite app that displays the top tracks in emerging/mainstream media (We Are Hunted).

There are also Billboard and Rollingstone playlists. I had trouble with Rollingstone playlists so I don’t know if it’s working right now. I really like this version of Spotify. It looks very clean and usable. It hasn’t even hit version 1.o yet. I can only hope there are good things in the future for Spotify.

Having said all that, the biggest downside to having to pay streaming media is that you don’t own anything when you finally cancel the subscription. It’s true that you have access to all the amazing library of songs but it’s about $120 /year and you could own 12 albums or 120 songs for that price for life. Is streaming media really worth it? I’ve tried using Zune Pass/Mog/Rdio before and nothing really satisfied like Lala did. I am currently leaning towards Amazon Cloud and Google Music but Spotify is really convincing me to take the bait and buy a premium subscription because they’re on a lot of devices. Do you like buying music or streaming music or pirate it? Let me know in the comments what you think.

Temple Run Achievement List

2012-01-18T20:10:34Z

List of Temple Run Achievements & Difficulty

Novice Runner – Run 500 meters (Easy)

Pocket Change – Collect 100 coins (Easy)

Adventurer – Scored 25,000 points (Easy)

Sprinter – Ran 1000 meters (Easy)

Miser Run – 500 m collecting no coins (Sorta Easy)

Piggy Bank – Collect 250 coins (Easy)

Treasure Hunter – Scored 50,000 points (Sorta Easy)

Mega Bonus – Fill the bonus meter 4x (Medium)

Athlete – Ran 2500 meters (Easy – Use Mega Headstart)

Lump Sum – Collected 500 coins (Medium)

Resurrection – Resurrected after dying (Easy)

Basic Powers – All level 1 Powerups (Easy)

High Roller – Scored 100,000 points (Medium)

Payday – Collected 750 coins (Medium)

Head Start – Used a Head Start (Easy)

Steady Feet – Ran 2500 m without tripping (Easy)

Allergic to Gold – 1000 m collecting no coins (Medium)

5k Runner – Ran 5000 meters (Medium)

No Trip Runner – Ran 5000 meters without tripping (Hard)

1/4 Million Club – Scored 250,000 points (Medium)

Double Resurrection – Resurrected twice in one run (Medium)

Money Bags – Collected 1000 coins (Medium)

1/2 Million Club – Scored 500,000 points (Medium)

Super Powers – All level 5 powerups (Easy)

Dynamic Duo – Unlocked two characters (Easy)

Million Club – Scored 1,000,000 points (Hard)

Money Bin – Collected 2,500 coins (Hard)

Fantastic Four – Unlocked Four Characters (Medium)

Sexy Six – Unlocked 6 characters (Medium)

Interior Decorator – Unlocked 3 wallpapers (Easy)

10k Runner – Run 10,000 meters (Hard)

Fort Knox – Collect 5,000 coins (Hard)

2.5 Million Club – Scored 2,500,000 points (Hard)

5 Million Club – Scored 5,000,000 points (Hard)

The Spartan – 1 million without power ups (Very Hard)

10 Million Club – Score 10,000,000 points (Very Hard =/)

Temple Run Highscore Glitch/Hack [Updated]

2012-01-29T20:28:17Z

I mentioned in my previous post that there was a glitch that can help you rack up a huge score in the Temple Run game. This is not a good idea as it can kill any interest you have in the game. If you like breaking the system or just want to get on the leaderboard, then read on.

Still here? Alright. I’ve warned you enough. Follow these simple instructions:

Go to options and turn the tutorial mode on.
Start the game and when the game asks you to make a turn, swipe twice instead of once
Now your dude will be running forever without any obstacles
Just keep your iPhone running until you reach the score you want. You won’t be getting any gold coins this way
You could also get one tough achievement easy using this glitch – Getting a million score without using any power ups
When you want to stop it, just make him run into the wall.

If those instructions don’t help, watch the video below. It takes less than a minute.

Update: I forgot mention that you won’t get the usual game ending screen after you die. You need to go “Main Menu -> Stats” screen to see your new highscore. Thanks to Bob for pointing this out in the comments. This is no scam.

Update 2: Thanks to Tyler Johnson, there is a method to get the gold coins during the glitch. I’m posting his comment here. I haven’t been able to reproduce it but maybe someone will have better luck. Let me say, I was able to get to 5 million and the Fort Knox achievement without glitching. But if you need it, it’s here.

In order to get the power ups in the glitched version of the game, you need to play in regular mode. When you are in regular mode, use a power-up until it is out and then die. After this, go to options and turn on tutorial. This should allow you to have power-ups and the super speed after the sprint power-up. It will be the same as the regular glitched version except it is much easier to get points and the “Fort Knox” achievement can be easily attained. Hope this works!

Temple Run Tips

2012-01-23T04:51:57Z

Every once in a while I run into an addictive iOS game that I just can’t stop playing. There was Angry Birds, Cut the rope, Civilization, Game Dev Story, Tiny Tower, Smurf Village (I played it until I unlocked Smurfette :-/ ) and now it’s Temple Run. It made my bathroom breaks a lot more entertaining (kidding! ). I just can’t put it down. It’s quite addictive and makes you want to play one more game so you can beat your high score. Currently, I’m at ~~2.9~~ 5.7 mil and I don’t think I am going to beat it any sooner. I am sure the people on the leaderboard and exploiting a glitch. There is no way anyone can rack up 2 billion odd score in that game. Getting to 2 million was hard enough. So I thought I’d leave some tips here so you can benefit from my experience.

Basics: If you haven’t played the game before, I recommend you get it from the iTunes store. It’s free. The game is pretty simple and it starts with a tutorial so it’s not hard to play at all. You swipe up to jump, sideways to turn in the direction you want to turn and swipe down to slide under tree stumps and fire. That’s easy enough. There are coins to collect on the way and power-ups that make your life easy.

Power-ups:

Boost: This makes the game go into auto-pilot mode. The amount of distance this power-up stays active is dependent on how much you upgrade this in the store.
Invisibility: This makes you invisible and invulnerable to all the obstacles around you. But you do have to make all the turns when necessary.
Magnet: This lets you automatically collects all the gold coins as you go along without having to tilt the phone. With upgrades, it will last longer and doubles/triples the value of the collected gold coins.
Mega Coin: You get 100 gold coins and with full upgrade you can get up to 150 coins. These gold coins can help you buy upgrades.

Advanced:

Once you master the basics, you need to make sure you start using the gold coins to upgrade your power-ups.
Start with upgrading the magnet. A fully upgraded magnet not only lasts longer, but it also triples the value of gold coins. This means you’ll be collecting all the gold coins in your way and also racking up points from the triple valued gold coins.
Upgrade the coin values next. This means that you’ll have a better chance of getting double value coins after 1000m and triple value coins after 2000m.
After that I suggest upgrading invisibility and boost. These will basically increase the amount of time the power-ups will last.
Finally, upgrade the Mega Coin. It will only increase the number of gold coins by 50 but it’s something to use your gold coins on once you have everything.
Get some angel wings as this will help you resurrect once you’re dead. The power lasts only 30 seconds after you’ve activated it. You can use another angel wing after another 1000 m.

That’s all I can remember for now. Hopefully this will help you make a new score and help you understand the system better. Good luck and happy running.

Update: My high score so far 5,722,698

Assassins Creed: Revelations Review

2012-01-18T23:54:12Z

I realized that I had never written a review for the Brotherhood game even though its a significant game in terms of Desmond’s story. The storyline for Ezio in Brotherhood was more like a pause before the eventual finale in Revelations. I did not like Brotherhood a lot. It was more of the same and the story wasn’t very long. The game won me over in the multiplayer segments though. I am not the kind of gamer who loves to get online and play with others but I found myself staying online late nights to increase my level. It wasn’t a great game but it was a still a good Assassins creed game.

The developers promised a lot of answers with the new game Revelations. I wouldn’t want to get into the details of the story without giving away too much but we do get some answers and also some more questions. The story starts with Desmond being trapped in the Animus in safe mode. He has to collect pieces of animus shards in the Ezio’s story to open portals that allow us to find out more about Desmond’s story. We have Ezio in Acre and Constantinople trying to figure out the story behind the Assassins. He finds Altair’s keys which allows him to view the story of Altair. We get to know Altair a little better and it’s a good way to end his story. It always felt to me like Altair was a big arrogant prick from the first game (I liked that about him). We finally know that he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Ezio’s story however does not end with this game. I believe they leave it open ended so we have an animated series featuring him. Everyone loves Ezio but it was getting tiresome. So it’s good to see that this is the last Ezio game. It will be interesting to see how they will flesh out his story after the games. Going into the details.

The Good: This is an Assassin’s creed game and that means we have all the good things from the old games. There are some brilliant set pieces and missions. Running around on a burning boat was just amazing. There are bombs to play with now. The addition of bombs adds an additional layer of strategy to the game. The assassin’s guild missions are not just something you do to keep yourself busy. They’ve an interesting role to play as we take over cities and level up the assassins in the guild. The leveled up assassins can be made the head of the towers and a fully leveled up assassins have the advantage of ensuring the tower does not get taken back by the templars (I will talk about this in more detail in the bad stuff). There are more interesting platforming sections when you collect the Altair’s keys. There are also some memorable characters. Ezio himself is still a charmer even if he is a lot older now. We find some answers to the questions and the end of the world in 2012 conspiracy but eventually that leads to more questions.

The Bad: After the game moves from Italy, there is a lot less color in the game. The dullness of Acre is back and bright colors of Florence are not there to be seen anymore. The fighting is still too easy and you’re too much of a badass to be killed. Taking back the towers from the templars to unlock the shops around the area was a cool thing in Brotherhood but they add a new layer in Revelations. When you gain maximum notoriety in the game, the templars will attack your towers and you have to initiate a tower defense like scheme where you take back your tower from the templars. This is complicated, convoluted and boring. It takes away the excellent pacing of the game. The worst part is that it is very difficult to get rid of notoriety in this game as there are no posters anymore. We have to find the a herald to bribe or a witness to kill. The good thing is that you can put off taking back the towers until you level up your assassins so they’re powerful enough to keep the templars at bay. There is very little human interaction outside of the Ezio world. We hear people talking about what is going on from time to time but that is not the same. We also interact with subject 16 and he is not very interesting and I did not care for him as much. Eventually, this game leads to more and more questions.

The Ugly: Another assassins creed game and another year. I guess that’d be none =P

*SPOILERS* I’m so much glad that they’re done with the Ezio’s story as far as the games are concerned. As much as I love him, 3 games in the span of 3 years is an overkill. I’d like to see where they’re going to set up the next part of the game. A lot of people are saying France will be a great place and I agree. It will also be interesting to see where the Desmond’s story is going. It’s clear from the talking outside the animus that Lucy is dead. The things I’ve been reading online say that the Desmond’s story will now happen in New York. We never know where the developers want to take this series. But this is time for fresh starts and new ideas. Probably time to start jumping into things other than haystacks. I’m curious what the next game will be like and I hope the developers take their time with this game and not screw up the series by releasing a game every year just like Activision milked the Guitar Hero series dry. Hopefully, Ubisoft is smarter than that. *SPOILERS*

Final score: 8/10

Quick Tips for Visual Basic in Excel

2011-08-31T18:04:49Z

I use primarily Fortran for my research and I teach Visual Basic for the undergrads. It’s very rewarding because I’ve been able to learn a lot of tricks in Excel as well as VB that I wasn’t previously aware of. Let me start with Excel first.

Absolute and Relative cell addressing:

Sometimes when we enter a formula in the spreadsheet, we want to fix a cell value (Eg: Mannings constant or Young’s Modulus). This can be done by adding $ signs. If you want to fix the value in A4, then it should be written as $A$4. You can copy the formula wherever you want but the cell address does not change automatically. If you only want to fix the column then use $A4 and if you want to fix the row then use A$4. Just put the $ sign before the column or row you want to fix.

Using Activecell to select a cell:

This is probably my favorite thing to do in Visual Basic. Most people like to use cells() to reference a cell number in the spreadsheet. That is quite easy to do but if you switch things around, you will need to change the cell values for everything you referenced. However, with Activecell way or referencing, you just need to offset it to the reference to the new cells.

For example: Lets say originally you wanted to put velocity in cells A2, Dispersivity in A3 and so on. Then you realized, you want to move the cells down by a row so now the velocity is in A3, Dispersivity in A4 and so on. Now all you have to change the original selected Range to Range(“A3″) instead of Range(“A2″).

Additionally, Activecell.offset(rowoffset,columnoffset) allows you to move the cell reference to a new cell number.

Adding color and changing font attributes

After using Range or Activecell to select a cell number, we can change the color of the cell and the font attributes of the cell.

Selection.Font.Bold=True – Sets the font to bold

Selection.Interior.Colorindex=44 – Sets the cell color to yellow.

However, when you clear the contents of a cell, the color does not go away. So it’s a good idea to set the colorindex to 0 (white). The code segment below is something I use often to clear a sheet.

Range(“a16:z1000″).Select
Selection.Cells.ClearContents
Selection.Interior.ColorIndex = 0

The above code segment clears the cells from A16 to Z1000. The color palette for all the excel colors can be found here.

I hope this helps anyone. I assume that you’re familiar with most things in Excel programming before you came here. If you need a more detailed instructions, do let me know in the comments. I would be glad to help you out.

Piratebay’s Immunity…

Indiaplaza Website is Run by Frauds and Cheats

2011-08-23T03:46:52Z

When you’re living in a foreign country and want to send some gifts to your loved ones back home, you’d prefer to use an online service which ships locally without incurring huge shipping fees or delays. There are a lot of websites that do this and operate under the name xyz2India where xyz can be money, flowers, sweets, gifts etc. A more popular website under this category is Indiaplaza. They were probably the first Indian e-commerce website. I remember the time when they were Fabmart and then Fabmall and finally settling on Indiaplaza more recently.

Introductions aside, I think that the website is run by crooks, frauds and cheats. I’m not talking about the typical “NRI Tax” imposed by all these websites that ship to India.For eg: A cake that costs Rs 500 in India typically costs over 2500 online (excluding the shipping charges) and a Pen that costs Rs 100 costs about Rs 800. For most people who want to quickly send something, that is acceptable considering that shipping something from here takes over $20 and will definitely take several days to reach India.

However, my problem is not with this increase in prices. Sometimes, you have to pay for convenience and I’m okay with that. My problem is that they have horrible customer service and they send different products because they run out of stock instead of returning the money or putting up an out of stock sign before letting more orders through. There have been two major issues with the site. Let me explain below:

1. I bought my brother an iPod Nano an year ago for his birthday. I think it cost about Rs 11,000 something at that time. There was a promotion running at that time that said you’ll be getting a gift card matching the amount of purchase for a maximum of Rs 5000. My girlfriend also made a couple of purchases during that time until the promotion ran out. We never got those giftcards. I have written to the customer care and they apologized saying they would fix it but that never really happened. I got tired of it and because I didn’t make those purchases for the free money, I never pushed it too far and let it go.

2. More recently, my sister ordered a Rakhi from their website. It was a week late and they sent me the wrong Rakhi. She tried really hard to get it shipped on time and they hadn’t even shipped it until the end of the week ( a day after it was supposed to be delivered). I didn’t even receive the shipment until the end of next week. There were sweets with that package and obviously they’re not mean to stay out for that long. They were supposed to send me a peacock feather Rakhi and I got a bland one instead. I’m sure she must’ve been terribly disappointed considering she paid her hard earned rupees (not dollars) for something I didn’t even get to see.

It makes me really mad that these people are just milking people’s emotions like this for their benefit. To say that I’m disappointed with the site is an understatement. Those are just a few instances that are worth mentioning. The site is run by crooks who steal the hard earned money of honest people. Next time you want to send something to your loved ones in India, send them money. They can get something much better than the shoddy service that is Indiaplaza. I won’t use this site ever and if you came across looking for help with the site, take my advice and go somewhere else. The title should’ve said enough anyway.

Netflix Increases Prices

2011-07-13T17:23:07Z

A wise man once said:

This is why we can’t have good things - Anonymous

And lo-behold, the giant in video streaming industry decided to screw up a good thing. Reading some of the comments from Gizmodo, there was a clear consensus that people want to either cancel or change to just streaming plans. I’m probably getting way ahead of myself here. Netflix decided to change their pricing plans from $9.99 (before tax) to an Unlimited DVD-only plan of $7.99 without streaming. If you want the streaming component, you will have to add the Unlimited Streaming only plan which also $7.99. So this effectively increases the plan from $9.99 to $15.98.

There is no way in hell I’m paying $16 for a service that I barely use. I haven’t watched the movie I rented last week and I haven’t watched anything on streaming since I finished 8 seasons of Monk. I intend to watch Star Trek eventually but at this rate, I might just cancel the service. I’ve seen the movies Netflix has on their instant streaming and it is not something that can stand on its own. Sure, there are some good shows but nothing I haven’t already seen before. I will most definitely cancel after the billing cycle or stick to just streaming only because I don’t want to lose all my ratings and reviews.

(New netflix plans)

I understand Netflix is improving and making changes but part of the appeal of Netflix is that it was affordable even in a college student budget. This increase in price means that a lot of people will be getting out and potentially losing a lot of subscribers. I’m only guessing but considering the comments on Gizmodo, Engadget and Twitter, this seems like a fair assumption. The author on Engadget does offer a fair and balanced opinion on this fiasco. Also, I do like his idea of paying for DVDs rented out like Redbox in addition to the streaming service. I will gladly pay $2 per DVD to have them delivered to my home instead of driving to Redbox.

And for all those people who think everyone is over-reacting to a $6 increase, consider that fact that you’re paying $72 more over a course of an year that is plenty of savings for someone living on paycheck to pay check. Let me know what you’re gonna do in the comments.

Net Neutrality

Assassin’s Creed 2 Review

2011-07-07T21:22:41Z

What do you do when your Professor is away for a month? Well, you can work hard to get ready to graduate or complete the backlog of games that has been hounding you for an year or two. Since I am not the best of the students and lack motivation to do things unless my Professor is around, I decided I will finish some of the games I’ve been playing for awhile. I finished Oblivion after nearly spending 200 hours in the game. It was a relief but that game is way too old to write a review anyway. If you haven’t played it by now, you probably won’t play it.

I wanted to write a review for AC:2 mostly because I wanted to touch upon the improvements they have made from the first game. While, the first game had its merits, it was marred by repetitive gameplay and some really stupid baseline story that was made for a sequel. Thankfully, the second game is much better. The story of Ezio unfolds slowly turning him into a badass by the end of the game. This game has some new tricks up its sleeve and some old ones to boot. There is a lot of hand holding in the beginning and while it seems like it is moving at a slow pace, it sets up the revenge story nicely.

The Good stuff: The story of the game is just brilliant. The number of characters in the first game was limited to 2 outside of the Animus and very few that I can remember from Altair’s part of the game. The characters outside of the Animus doubles and there are a lot more vital and interesting characters in Ezio’s story itself. Ezio himself seemed like an interesting character in comparison to the brooding Altair. Even Leonardo Da Vinci steps in and provides some gear for Ezio. There is Uncle Mario, Lorenzo, Antonio and who can forget all the pretty women =P. One of the major complaints from the first game was the combat system. Once you learn the counter move, you’re pretty much set to kill everyone in the game. It is a little more complicated here with different kinds of enemies. You cannot counter the Brutes and Seekers because they carry Axes and Spears. The “Disarm” move is especially handy for these kind of enemies and so is the “Dodge” move. I liked the challenge, even though, it wasn’t a lot.

The missions are a lot more interesting. It is true that some of them are kind of repetitive in a way but there are some very interesting missions. Let it be Assassinations or Beat up events. Even the side missions are blended into the story in a way. You get a feeling that you’re part of this world and that you’re doing your bit to help with the progress of Lorenzo in Florence. Even the collections have a lot more meaning in this game. Collecting the flags in the first game seemed trivial and meaningless for the achievement’s sake. However, this game has feathers and treasures. While collecting treasures has no real significance (AFAIK), collecting feathers does. I liked having some meaning behind these things instead of just some mindless achievement.

The bad stuff: The enemy AI is still kind of dumb. They just wait around and attack in turns. You can almost anyone walking from behind or by throwing a knife or two. Jumping at times feels sticky and Ezio always jumps towards a ledge even if you want to jump somewhere in the middle. The game also sets up for a sequel instead of giving some answers to the questions posed in the first game. There are a lot of interesting questions that are posed and while this increases my appetite and curiosity for the sequel, it also leaves me with the fact that the game is incomplete. It kind of makes me feel like the TV series “Lost” which caused a lot of interest because of the questions it posed and then ended with a whimper. I hope the creators of the game have planned the story well ahead instead of winging it with every sequel.

The game also introduces a money system that lets you buy different kinds of armor, paintings, health potions among other things. The game’s economy is kind of broken because you will be swimming in more money than you can spend. There are upgrades to the Villa and I had purchased all the upgrades before I even went past my first city. It would’ve been nice if they had more ways to spend the money. I’m beginning to nitpick here.

The Ugly Stuff: None

Assassin’s Creed 2 is a vast improvement over the repetitive first game. I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game and this has me totally excited for the next game which I will be getting very soon. It might not end up being my favorite game like Red Dead Redemption or Mass Effect 2 but it is definitely up there as far as the story and good games are concerned. I would say this game is definitely something every gamer should play and experience. Unfortunately, that means playing the first game because the knowledge of the first game definitely helps in understanding Desmond’s story better even if it is not required for Ezio’s story.

Final Score: 8.5/10