Time for the cabin in the woods

Not that Cabin in the Woods, my cabin in the woods. Time for a long weekend amongst the trees and the quiet. No phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury. Wait, it’s not quite that bad. Go Go Gadget Go Kart!! Now, where did I put that big bottle of Crystal Head Vodka?

Big Gold Sale for Crime City HD

It goes against everything I normally, but Crime City is having a 40% off sale on gold and cash as an in-app purchase. Now, I hate in-app purchases, I think it’s a pathetic way to fleece people out of money. Gameloft and EA have become notorious for making substandard games and then charging people to advance within the game. That’s total crap. Let’s Golf 3 is a prime example of example of how NOT to make a game. Crime City is different though. I wish they would just let me buy the game outright, but you can’t do that. Since I’ve been playing this game for months now and I see no signs of stopping, I decided to buy some gold to reward the devs for the game. This has become one of my favorite games. I actually find the gameplay to work very well. I like the idea of buying a building and waiting for it to complete. I […]

Massive movie conversion

Xilisoft DVD Ripper is a pretty awesome tool. I ripped hundreds of DVDs to my hard drive over the past couple of months and now I’m converting them to MP4 using DVD Ripper. It reads ISO and VOB files so you can simply drag and drop the entire movie. Plus, it can do multiple movies at the same time. CloneDVDMobile is only able to convert one movie at a time. That machine will be running at full speed using all four cores to tear through those movies. Soon, my NCIS collection will be ready to watch on my iPad. AVI is a great video format, but it seems that MP4 is becoming far more usable and universal.

Bridge over troubled water

So that’s what a mud bog looks like. The recent rain has created a mud pit at our property. It tried to swallow a Lowe’s truck the other day and it tried to eat me today. The clay makes it a ridiculous mess. My rudimentary attempt at covering it with rocks, trees, hope and dreams may not be enough to keep us from getting stuck again. Looks like we’ll need to fill it in and build some sort of bridge to get over this muddy patch. This Carolina Clay is some wet and sticky business.

A few minutes with Artisteer 4.x

Spent some time with Artisteer. There are some parts I like, and others I really don’t. I don’t like that it doesn’t start out with a standard blog layout. It also tries to make it look like a magazine with columns and blocks and the text flowing in all manner of chaotic ways. I just want the standard look and feel of a blog. I like the way it used to look and these new ones are a little too flat for my liking. I’m sure it can all be changed and tinkered with, it will just take time. I don’t like this idea of jamming as much text onto the page as possible and turning the page into a treasure hunt as you try to find the next block of text. It might be good for SEO, but it makes for a damn hard read. I will update my sites using 3.x and then tinker with 4.x as we […]