Great marketing by browser-based MMO - Battle Dawn

While surfing randomly, I chanced upon a new browser-based MMO game - Battle Dawn. Though I myself am not a big fan of MMOs, I still like to just check them out, see if it's the next World of Warcraft.

The worst part for a common user is that you always have to register and provide your e-mail (or link to your facebook account) - not great especially if you're trying to save yourself some mail junk in case you're not really into the game.

So, I headed over to the Battle Dawn site, planning to go through their forums first, look for reviews online, but I just clicked their Launch Game button on the spur of the moment. At first, just as I feared, it showed me a login/new player box. Clicking the New Player button brought up a 'select theme' page followed by a 'select server' box - configuring the world/server I'd be playing in. But imagine my pleasant surprise when after this, it put me right in the middle of a tutorial!

Smart utilities to juice up your PC

When was the last time you almost pulled your hair off over the frustration of windows copy failing over the last file from a set of hundreds? Or perhaps when you lost that software you installed just last week, but can't remember where in your start menu it may be hidden?
The answer to these questions can now be - never! I was facing exactly these situations and many more, and my searches ended up with quite a set of utilities to help you spruce up your daily computer use a little. That too spending 0 cash and only a teeny amount of your PCs resources! If you've never heard of the utilities in the list below, you might be surprised that they remained out of your sight for so long!

Using a Memory Stick PRO Duo with Card reader supporting Memory Stick PRO

So, a few couple of days backs, I was sitting at home getting bored on an uneventful night. Suddenly, my girlfriend called to remind me to transfer pics off her camera's 1 Gig Memory Stick Pro Duo to a USB drive. Which started me off on wondering how to do that with my Acer Aspire 5920 laptop.

The Acer Aspire 5920, a fairly old model by now, still serves me extremely well. It's got all the juice I need as the highest intensity of my use is limited to a few rounds of CounterStrike. Plus, it's got fairly good expansion capabilities for all the portable HDDs I need for my large movies/TV shows collection.

Nifty thing even has a 5-in-1 card reader which is able to read PRO Duos, so I'd set out to exploit it. But my seemingly mundane chore turned out into quite an endeavor. Turns out that the card reader slot in my 5920 is sized for the Memory Stick PRO (which is bigger than the PRO Duo), and I didn't have an adapter for the PRO Duo. Thus, began an online hunt to find out if I was gonna get a kiss on the cheek or a knock on my head from my girlfriend.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Hey folks! I've just started using Ubuntu for the past 8-10 days. I have a dual-boot system with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu. Turns out Ubuntu is as good as people say it is! The installation is a breeze, but you still need to be able to partition at least.

Once installed, it just starts working on its own. Not that it doesn't need any tweaking, but that's only when you want to adventure-seek. Also, the first tweak I have found, though a small one, is to fix the problem of bad network access, especially when using firefox.

Welcome!

Welcome to my first post on my new blog! Here, I shall be trying to bring as much useful and interesting information I can find. I may also use this blog to showcase my understanding of various topics. I hope this may motivate some of the people who know me, along with anyone else, into improving their technical knowledge or at least appreciating technology.

The tone of the blog will be as technical as I can make it, but I often ramble a lot about my philosophies about diverse topics. Still, I assure all readers that here, I'll limit my ramblings to technical issues alone!

Let me start without further ado!