Bait and Tackle Limited Time Building (LTB) – Building Payout and Upgrade Cost – Crime City

The Bait and Tackle LTB has been out for awhile, but this is the first time I’ve seen the complete list of stats. This is another less than spectacular offering that won’t do much to increase IPH, especially without modifiers. The initial cost is just shy of $130M and will cost the usual $32B to complete. That will yield and income of $32M every 17 hours. The collection amount and time are certainly less than stellar. As we’ve seen before, the reward is the low defense item "Weapon Payload" with 403,800 atk and 100,900 def with +1% Melee Attack. Seriously, when can we get a weapon with decent defense on it? To be honest, I would like to see Gree show some stones and throw out a multibillion dollar building with a reward sporting a couple of million in attack and defense. Give me a building that costs a few billion to buy but also gives me a final income […]

The catastrophic failure of my download machine

It is indeed a dark and tragic day. The Dell Inspiron that I bought back at the beginning of 2010, that has served as my faithful download machine ever since, went to sleep for the last time. I have no idea what went wrong only that the machine was fine the night before, doing it’s duty in serving up the 60+TB worth of music and media that it stores, only to try and turn it on and find that all the lights had gone out. It wasn’t that the drives had failed or that it wouldn’t boot correctly, it was quite literally pushing the power button did nothing. There was no power to the keyboard or mouse and no signs of life when I tried a different power cord. Normally with a Dell, you get that small rush of power to let you know the machine is alive when you plug it back in. I got no such sign. After […]

RightNote Standard and Professional on sale for 50% Off

As I build up a new writing workflow, I need a new tool to replace Microsoft OneNote since it’s still the 2007 version and isn’t getting updated or supported. I’m not going to install the new version of OneNote for a variety of reasons including I don’t like the way it looks and I have privacy concerns in regards to how Microsoft is treating it’s latest apps. Microsoft is getting far too entrenched in this idea that simply because I use one of their apps, whatever I do with it or create with it is somehow theirs. I prefer to keep my data local and I prefer to make sure it stays mine. With that, I have brought in RightNote as my new multi-purpose, multi-tabbed writing environment. Like OneNote, you can create multiple "pages" to organize ideas and separate out topics. From there, each page can have multiple notes in a tree structure that can easily be moved around and […]

Launching the Shuttle SH67H3

Not too long ago, Woot had a deal on a machine called the Shuttle SH67H3 which comes in a small form factor with a MicroATX case and looks like something that should be scooting along the floor in a Star Wars movie. At first glance it appears to be some sort of set top box used for browsing. But after a closer look, I saw there was a pretty hefty engine under the hood that made this a sassy, portable gaming machine. In a computer the size of toaster was an Intel I7 3770k chipset with 16GB of ram, 2 hard drives of 2TB each, a DVD drive and an expansion slot for a larger video card. It also included HDMI ports, USB 3 and 7.1 Surround Sound. Ok, wait a minute, this looks kinda cool! After reading over the specs, I thought this would make a fine gaming machine for the living room. I have that AMD FX 8350 […]

The WordPress.com Desktop App

As I started looking for a blog tool for Mac, I almost immediately came upon the new WordPress.com Desktop App. Now WordPress has made apps before, but to be honest, I didn’t think they were all that great. They were truly bare minimum and when it came to working with images, things went sideways. However, it seems WordPress has gone back to the drawing board and has something pretty neat and usable in their latest desktop app. Unlike other blogging tools that hook into all sorts of services, WordPress is only publishing to WordPress and it has to be a site hooked into their Jetpack service. That shouldn’t be a problem as Jetpack is free and offers a lot of useful tools. But if you don’t have it and a corresponding WordPress.com account, well, it’s not going to work. Once installed, the desktop app will ask you to log in to your WordPress.com account to retrieve a list of blogs […]