It’s me, live with it

So, my Nokia 5070 refuses most of my attempts to charge it. This, as you might have guessed, pissed me off. So I went to do a research for a decent new phone. After reading specifications and comparing prices, I went and bought an LG KM380t. (those guys making the flash-infested-site-that-does-not-even-list-this-phone should be strangled)

I don’t have any decent camera, so I used a Sony Ericsson Z710i. Sue me.

Anyway, here’s some more pictures of me (my hands, actually) holding the phone, for size comparison:

This phone comes in "Dark Brown, Orange Point" colour that doesn’t make any sense to me. The colour only shown on music control keys and inner keypad

If you haven’t guessed yet, It’s a semi-flip phone, much like the old Sony Ericsson T10 or T28. And, like them, It’s rather slim.

See?

Now, I’ve been tinkering around with his phone and am rather satisfied with it.

First, the part which makes me want to buy the phone, the music player.

The sound quality from the built-in speaker is surprisingly good. No bass, of course, but you can’t expect to get good bass from integrated speaker. The treble and mid sounds comes out nicely, and the volume is loud enough for most purposes.

But the sound quality with the bundled earphone is, I should say, freakin’ good. I tried plugging my Sennheiser HD212 to it, and the little canalphone gave it a run for its money. The sound is clear, and… well… I should just say really good, minus the somewhat unpronounced bass. but that’s it for the sound weakness. And, If it means anything, this phone has "natural sound" enhancement by Mark Levinson. It is also written on the side of the box.

The music player itself can use some improvements. Whenever I shuffle, It seems to be giving me the same ‘random’ order. And if I juggle through the menu or the music player itself while playing anything, I notice some slowdown. It seems that this phone doesn’t have enough juice to multitask.

And the side buttons that controls volume, opens music player, and keylock, is rather hard to press with my bulky fingers.

Next, Internet connectivity.

This phone doesn’t support 3g. But the specification lists this phone as EDGE - capable, so it is fast enough for me. And, sure enough, It blasted through the web using opera mini. It is not as responsive as 3g phones, but again, if I need quick Internet connection, I’ll get it on my PC.

I tried connecting it to my PC as a modem, but It can’t complete any speed test or download, but I presume it is because of my crappy provider (IM3 GPRS) and because I’m trying it on hot traffic time, Sunday morning. For general purpose, though, I’d bet this phone is more than fast enough.

Now that we’ve touched PC connectivity, Let’s talk about it. It is a product of designer programming, a program that does nothing much but tries hard to look cool while doing it, resulting in sloppy performance. While trying to transfer music files to it, I ended up just using the phone’s "Mass Storage" USB connectivity mode, then synchronizing music files with Media Monkey. Because, as you might have guessed, the bundled music-sync software sucks.

The camera, just like that Z710i pictures above, sucks. But what would you expect from a music phone?

You agree? Good. But it is decent enough for me to take review photos for this blog. Expect ugliness to come soon.

I think the rest of the phone is pretty standard, so I’m not gonna write about them, maybe besides the "Mini Game World" that is rather fun to play.

Overall, I really like this phone, It sucks right at the feature I don’t need, so I like the rest. Well worth the money.

Earlier today, I had a problem with my media players. Both Media Monkey and WMP refuses to play mp3 files. Since they can play mp4 and AAC files without any problem, I immediately know that there’s something wrong with the mp3 plugin on my sistem.

Fixing Media Monkey was a breeze, I only need to download the MAD plug in and everything returns back to normal. But while googling for the plug in, I came across XMPlay. It is nothing new to me, I used it a few times before as portable music player (I brought it on my UFD). It’s been a while, though, so I wanted to see what new tricks it has. 

And those tricks are good, let me tell you.

Firstly, the way it sounds. I am used to the way Media Monkey plays my music, listening XMPlay doing the same gave me a surprise. I tried listening a song back and forth between Media Monkey and XMPlay, and I like XMPlay more. The bass is a bit more emphasized, and the treble is a little crisper. It’s nothing I can’t do with careful equalization, but still, It’s a nice thing to have without having to fiddle with those sliders.

Next is memory usage. XMPlay is only a 300 kilobytes download, so I won’t be surprised if it uses little memory, too. And it does, it only uses around 3000 kilobytes, compared to around 30.000 kilobytes in Media Monkey and 20.000 kilobytes in Windows Media Player. It doesn’t mean much for me, I have 2 GB of RAM anyway. But for those who are tight on specifications, this kind of saving is really good.

I also didn’t think a player this samll would have any media library, but I was proven wrong. This player even integrates a basic media library which is enough for most people’s needs. 

And lastly, the plug ins. XMPlay comes as a bare package. It can play standard formats with no problem, but if you need FLAC or AAC (like me), you need to download the plug ins. It’s not a hard job, as the file size is only around 200 kilobytes, and all you need to do is placing the files in the same directory as XMPlay. Not only file support, it also have a lot of skins and visualizations to choose from.

 Now, the bad things. This player doesn’t have any portable media player support, especially auto-sync. his only apply for those who need it, though, so if you don’ need it, it’s no problem.

Next, this player needs a beter buffer system. I experienced quite a lot of stuttering if I listen to it while doing hard-drive intensive things, like installing a software. It rarely happens, though.

In my opinion, this is a very good music player for its size, even compared to full player ike Media Monkey, It remains competitive. Therefore, I happily recommend to try this one, especially if you are low on computing power. You might actually like it.

I just downloaded the Nurien demo from nvidia, you can find it here, more information here. The demo is basically shows some girls walking on a runway, while showing what Physx can do with their hair and clothes. Well, basically, it makes them (the hair and clothes) act more believable.

There is a catch, though. Back in the beginning of its popularity, we need a separate card to calculate physics. The only card capable of doing that was the Ageia Physx card. Now, though, Nvidia took over the fun by making Physx accesible using only nvidia cards, specifically the CUDA-capable one. My 8600GT is on the list, so I downloaded the demo and gave it a try.

This is the first girl on the demo. Like I said, this demo showcases what Physx can do with clothing and hair.

See?

Now, my 8600GT is already crawling helplessly with one girl on screen. And now there are three of them.

This is what my humble 8600GT managed. Remember, this card is still reasonably stronger than what most people are using, yet it was humiliated with this game. Granted, I was using the 175.16 driver, instead of CUDA-enabled one, so I’ll try with one of those later.

 Here’s a quote about Nurien:

Nurien is a new category of social networking service where we can give our users more powerful ways to express their identities by enabling them to create their own unique avatars, fashions, 3D objects, legacy media (such as photo, video, and text) and share them with the world via their own 3D rooms that are accessible from a web-browser as well as our software clients. Users will use their own unique avatars to play various fun games and also partake on social applications like fashion shows, and music video contests.

Now, let me ask you a question: How many social networking fans are actually using anything better than 8600GT?

And: How many of them are girls?

Yeah, I know, it’s sad.

UPDATE: I installed nvidia’s 177.89 beta drivers. With this, I managed to get around 10% improvement in nurien demo in software physx mode. Using Geforce Physx, I got 50% improvements, but with a lot of weird texture glitches. I’m pretty sure the problem lies in CUDA implementation. I still think this is a nice development over the old 175.16 drivers.

I’m currently trying Maxthon browser. I have a reason, really. Firefox seems to have crashed here and there sometimes, so I need to try another browser for comparison.

I’ve used Flock for quite a while, I actually wrote a post about it, but I switched to Firefox after I realize that I don’t use any of its features except photo uploader. And now, Firefox crashed itself on me, so I guess I need to migrate.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is pretty much out of question even before anyone mentions it. I’ve tried Opera for quite a while and actually like it, but I had a problem with wordpress, which in turn prevents me from writing in this blog. The only options left are Safari, Maxthon, and Avant. I’m not really into mac look, so I avoided Safari. I saw a review that puts Maxthon ahead of Avant, so Maxthon it is.

My first impression is that this browser is really clean, not in Safari way, more like in Windows Media Player way, and I quite like it. It is based on Internet Explorer, so I can see some resemblances. It is not a bad thing, though, It makes easier adaptation for IE users.

Since, like I said before, this browser is based on IE, the configuration settings and options are pretty much the same. There’s one notable addition, though, this browser features a built-in download manager. It’s somewhat resembles Opera’s download manager, with every basic functionality covered. I don’t think I will use it, though, I usually use BitComet to download everything anyway.

The performance of this browser is quite good, I haven’t had any problems with it. And this browser doesn’t seems to be a bad resource hog, I can say it uses less memory than Firefox.

Page loaded nicely, and quickly. Though I notice some things missing from a page. Those things are the ads, this browser features integrated ad-blocking program, called Ad Hunter, and I’m happy to say that it does its job nicely.

To sum it up, I like this browser, and I’ll stick to it for a while. If you have any problem with your current internet browser, I’ll recomend this one.

You need to dress like that if you want to survive.

As I stated in my previous post, I re-started Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (again, R6V2) on harder difficulty.

For your information, there are three difficulty settings available in this game: casual, normal, and realistic. Since casual and normal doesn’t sound too different, I went with realistic.

Let me tell you now, it is hard.

When I was playing at casual, I could sometimes rush into a room full of bad guys and survived to tell the tale. But in realistic, you need to make your goodbye letter before rushing in.

I don’t think there’s any difference in enemy AI between casual and realistic, it’s just that the damage we received in realistic is much higher than in casual. And I mean much, much higher.

In casual difficulty, a gunshot to the body will be shrugged of easily, around three gunshots will start disorienting you, and five gunshot could be lethal. A gunshot to the head might or might not kill you, I’m not really sure. Sometimes, I die even before seeing the person shooting me. While some other time, I got badly disoriented all of a sudden. Well actually, the latter is pretty much always followed by death, so there’s no big difference. 

In realistic difficulty, a gunshot to the body will disorient you badly to the point that you can’t see anything in the screen. And a headshot is pretty much a ticket to the loading screen. I stated before in my Bioshock review that I like games that is not too difficult. But I also like games that are challenging. And this game, I should say, is a challenging one.

Challenging (or, I should say kinda hard) difficulty in a game can either be good or bad. It won’t make a good combination with stupid/fun shooters. If you play serious sam and die every time a stray bullet hits your leg, you’ll end up getting frustrated at the beginning ogf the game. But this game is a tactical shooter. and this kind of difficulty is exactly what I expected from a tactical shooter.

And it even actually seems tactical.

 See?