January 6, 2016

Improving Game Performance with DimmDrive

I brought up the idea of using a Ramdrive to speed up games a few months ago, so with the big Steam sale, I decided to get DimmDrive and try it out. The main focus was to improve load times for Shroud of the Avatar, which is still in pre-alpha and hasn’t been through the optimization process. As the name suggests, you need a fair amount of ram to see an improvement. I’ve got 32GB installed on my gaming machine so it seems right for the task. The specs look like this: AMD FX 8350 at 4Ghz, 32GB Ram, GTX 660, 1.5TB Western Digital drive with no SSD. So here we go. Installing DimmDrive was easy, just like any other app from Steam. Like a game, you Launch DimmDrive to get your config screen, which shows the games you have installed (not everything in your library) that can be copied into memory and how big of a ram drive you […]

December 30, 2015

Building a Writing Environment with Notebooks, RightNote and Scrivener

As we hit the end of the year, I think I have all my writing tools sorted out. I’ve been going out trying all sorts of different things, but I think I have it locked down now. As it stands I’ll be using Notebooks for Windows, RightNote and Scrivener. Most of the writing I do will start life in Notebooks. It’s a simple but very effective text editor that gives me a hierarchy to organize my topics, but doesn’t get bogged down with formatting and styles. When I’m trying to put an idea together there’s no point in worrying about how it looks, that is the final step. It also gives me the ability to work across platforms – Windows, Mac and iPad. Notebooks is also a great way to take notes on the iPad and then sync them up to the desktop where I can expand and refine them. More complicated, multi-part or sensitive documents will be handled in […]

December 29, 2015

Rocket League – Making it to the playoffs in the first season

I’ve brought a new game into my stable and it’s one that I passed over the first time I saw it. I’m a big fan of racing games, but the idea of combining that with soccer just seemed a little too far out in left field for me. Sure, it looked amusing, but not quite amusing enough. Jump ahead to the Steam Winter Sale and Rocket League is on sale and it has scores of reviews tacked on to it. With over 30,000 reviews it still has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating. How the hell can that be? Ok, let me have another look. And then let me have a real look by checking out some of the videos on YouTube. As with so many of these games, the only reason they’re good is because of the multiplayer, and as I’ve stated, I don’t play multiplayer. However, quite a few reviews are about single player and the AI is apparently decent […]

December 26, 2015

Time to throw away Freemake

Even though I think the Freemake tools, VideoDownloader and VideoConverter, are pretty good, they have to be removed. Both Norton Internet Security and SuperAntiSpyware are throwing alerts every time they scan these files. In fact, Norton quarantines the latest versions as soon as they’re downloaded. They don’t enjoy me trying to put OpenCandy on my machine. It’s a real shame too since I paid for VideoConverter. But even though I have a key, there is no OpenCandy free download for me and it still tries dump it’s payload on my hard drive. Not good. I understand Freemake needs to support themselves, but there has to be a better way. Let me buy the app so I can have a clean copy. Or at least let me put in the key and not riddle my machine with your ads. It was a good ride while it lasted, but Freemake needs to change their model. Clearly you aren’t going to make any […]

December 23, 2015

RightNote – A $15 replacement for Word and Excel?

Now, Word and Excel are extremely large and extremely powerful programs, but to be honest, people use maybe 5% of the features, if that. You literally end up paying and arm and a leg for a piece of software that does more than you will ever need. Most of us make up a quick document with a couple or bold items, a few bullet points and maybe a heading or two. In Excel, it’s a couple of columns, most likely some sort of budget and that’s it. We aren’t doing desktop publishing, nor are we setting up an account ledger, so why pay for all that nonsense? But here is a neat alternative – RightNote. The RightNote editor has all the basic features of Word and Excel built right in. You can create a formatted document with the standard bold, italic and underline, along with headers and styles as well as inserting a table if you need it. Then there […]

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Shroud of the Avatar
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