Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

What was I writing about in April 2013?  https://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.com/2013/04/ I started the month complaining about the ever growing issue of DLC. Unlike most gamers of the time it wasn't the rip off factor that annoyed me it was the nuisance factor of there being too much of it.  My second post that month was a long and thoughtful analysis of the demise of the PC. The PC proved more resilient than I expected at that time but it interesting that the PC market is again in sharp decline after a pandemic lock down inspired boost. One of my biggest concerns about a possible decline of the PC was whether or not I would still be able to play older games. It is interesting the the big consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have since become much more aware of the value of their back catalogue and have introduced various ways to play older games.  I was playing Fallout 3, Darksiders 2 and the Walking Dead according to my next post. I remember finishing the first t...

EVE online used to inspire the best writing about games. The sandbox universe of New Eden gave rise to a million stories and the uncompromising ruthlessness of the game ensured that many of those stories were worth reading. Epic stories like the Guiding Hand Social Club's meticulous evsiceration of Ubiqua Seraph  caught the attention of main stream media but I have always enjoyed more mundane stories of the day to day experiences of capsuleers: tales of piracy and revenge, tales of exploration and discovery, tales of incompetence and mastery. I myself was never more than a very casual EVE player and yet it inspired some of my own favourite writing Where have all these great EVE blogs gone? Some stalwarths like Wilhelm over at the Ancient Gaming Noob   still write regularly about the game but these are stories of participating in mega alliances and huge wars. This seems to have become a feature of EVE writing lately. The politics of mega alliances dominates everything and g...

If you use a feed reader like Netvibes or Feedly you are probably familiar with the problem of noisy feeds that clog up your reader with dozens of posts every day most of which are dross (like Buzzfeed). You can leave these out of your feed entirely but then you miss the occasional funny or interesting item that they do post. I have found that a good way of dealing with them is to create a new category (feedly) or tab (Netvibes) called "Noisy Feeds" and stick all your noisy feeds in there. That way your less prolific sources do not get buried and you can still occasionally dip into the noisy category occasionally to keep up with the zeitgeist.

If you are one of the new migrants to Netvibes you may not realise that it has several mobile clients. You may want to try them all out before choosing the one which suits you best. I mix and match depending on the deice I am using and the quality of my internet connection. To get each version just type the url into the address bar of your browser. wap.netvibes.com This text only version of Netvibes looks really ugly but I find it very useful useful on my phone. It gives you the information you need with no extraneous distractions and you can always click the header of a post to get to the original webpage if you need more. Great if your internet signal is weak because it uses almost no bandwidth. It only seems to show RSS feeds though so any fancy Netvibes widgets don't show. It doesn't seem to be able to judge screen size so be prepared to do a bit of manual zooming to use this. mobile.netvibes.com This is the official Netvibes entry point for all  mobile devices. It...

Banner message across the Netvibes front page today (emphasis is mine): If you're experiencing slowdowns or feed latency, please bear with us as we work hard to handle a huge amount of new users . Thank you for your patience If you aren't familiar with Netvibes it offers a customised web portal (like the soon to be shuttered iGoogle) but it also includes a very flexible feed reading capability (like the soon to be closed Google Reader). I suspect that the big influx of new users are all migrants from Google. I have been using Netvibes for several years now. I originally switched from iGoogle and Google reader because Netvibes has much better support for mobile devices, even on Googles own Android platform but I am very happy with Netvibes overall and heartily reccommend it.   EDIT: Looks like I was right. Netvibes official blog have credited the increase with the closure of Google's reader and has already put up a helpful "how to migrate" page .

Bill Harris is a busy parent , who plays video games and writes a popular blog about gaming and other interesting stuff. His regular "Friday Links" post is an essential guide to the best stuff on the internet. Somehow Bill managed in his spare time (???) to teach himself programming and write a video game from scratch: Gridiron Solitaire . The time for namby pamby congratulations and feigned admiration is way past. Bill Harris you are making the rest of us look bad and we all hate you!

I use Google's blogger platform for this blog and I have a Samsung Galaxy phone running the Google Android operating system. One might be inclined to assume therefore that posting to my blog from my phone would be well supported. One would be wrong. Some months bag Google updated the blogger posting interface and I haven't been able to get it to work properly on my phone since. Fist attempt: Using my preferred Opera mobile browser on the phone. It really is a terrific mobile browser and seems to work well with every website. Except for Blogger. I can read posts well enough but I cannot create new posts. I get a message saying "This browser is no longer supported by Blogger". Second attempt: Using the default Browser built into Android (Gingerbread edition). Surely Google's own Android browser will do the trick? Sadly no. I can get the page for creating a new post but it refuses to activate the text entry box and give me a keyboard. Third Attempt: There'...

One of the disappointments of this here new fangled internet is that the whole of the blogosphere seems to go asleep at 6pm on Friday and not wake up again until 8am Monday morning. I realise that for many of us reading and writing blog posts is an activity best carried out during business hours when we are supposed to be gainfully employed doing something else but I feel it is time to move on from that. Our brains have become so accustomed to a ceaseless flow of digitally transmitted information that this 48 hour break at the end of every seven days has become intolerable. I call for an end to this quietude. Today is Saturday. Blog I say. Blog like you have never blogged before!

Over the years I have revised and improved my daily reading list list both in terms of the content and the technology I use to read it. I am currently using Netvibes as my reader of choice because I find it presents the maximum content in the minimum of space. This allows me to skim over a hundred or more headlines very quickly to select which ones warrant further analysis. In fact this process is so efficient that I am ready to expand the list of feeds I subscribe to. Looking over my current reading list however I cannot help noticing that it is heavily biased in favour of gaming blogs and mmorpg gaming blogs at that. I feel the need to expand my horizons a bit so I am on the hunt for some interesting non gaming blogs that will hold my attention. It is hard to tie down exactly what I am looking for because I deliberately want to broaden my horizons. I will consider anything well written and informative that updates fairly regularly. I love the intimacy of bogging so blogs are prefer...

Bloggers comment system has recently started eating some of the comments left on my blog. I did see your comment before it disappeared . If your request is genuine then I may be interested but I would like to see your website first please. You can email me at mindbendingpuzzles(at)gmail.com  to prevent your reply getting eaten by Blogger. 

Hi Solbright I get an email notification of your comments even though they aren't appearing on the blog. I wonder if it is something to do with anonymous posting. I did check my settings and I have anonymous posting turned on however. 

I have actually had a Twitter account for several years but up until recently it had all of one tweet on it. I have decided to give it another go however so I started a new account under the tag: liambp (L ife I s A M ind B ending P uzzle, geddit?). My thinking goes like this: I love blogging but blogging can be slow. Even short posts can sometimes take an hour or more to write and re-write. Often I have thoughts I want to record but the effort involved in crafting a full blog post dissuades me. Twitter is going to be my instant blog. A place for unedited ideas dumped straight onto the interwebs. I don't know if this is how other people see or use Twitter but I am keen to experiment with it and see how it goes. There should be a link to my Twitter feed in the side panel. Feel free to join, add, invite or whatever it is twititererers do and I will be delighted to reciprocate. 

One of the consequences of generally waiting till games fall in price is that I am usually a few months behind the curve when it comes to blogging about them. That gave me the idea of trying to put a more scientific measure on just how up to date (or out of touch) is my blog. The process turned out to be relatively easy and you can apply it to you own blog if you like: 1. Look at all the posts you have made in the last month (if you are a very prolific poster you can limit it to your ten most recent entries). 2. For each post try to pick a date in time when this particular post would have been a "hot topic" worthy of front page placement on a major blog or news site. Wikipedia is handy for finding release dates while Google's "timeline" view (probably hidden under "more search tools") is also very useful. Remember that we are only considering timeliness here, not writing quality. 3. Once you have the "timeliness" dates of you most recent ...

Just back from a very enjoyable two week family vacation in France. We managed to pack in Paris sightseeing, several Loire chateaux, much pool time, quite a bit of fine dining and even a few days in Disneyland. That didn't leave much room for gaming or blogging but a few thoughts did come to mind about the practicalities of being a gamer on the move and I will try to cover them over the next few posts. By the way I struck it very lucky with my choice of holiday reading. Joe Abercrombie's "The Blade Itself" is a great fantasy read and Harold Sinclair's "The Horse Soldiers" turned out to be a terrific piece of historical fiction based on the US civil war. More details here .

Three cheers to Melf_Himself of Word of Shadow fame. Cheer number one is for pointing me towards Specter Spelunker Shrinks which is a brilliant little Flash game. Ken Grafals the creator of the game hit on an the extremely simple but extremely brilliant concept of allowing you to shrink or grow your character arbitrarily to overcome obstacles. I predict it could be the next Portal if he plays his cards right. Cheer number two is for giving away a buddy code that allowed me to get 75% off Demigod. Downloading it now. Cheer number 3 finally is just for being an all round sound chap. Thank you Melf.

I am constantly amazed by people who have real artistic talent. The pinnacle of my own artistic ability was the achievement of a "D" grade in intermediate certificate art at age 15. It was a compulsory course in my school and I am pretty sure that you would need to be legally blind to get less than a D. Anyway the source of these musings is that one of my fellow bloggers is an artist and a game designer. Please check out the beta of Anton's latest creation here . Syphon Spirit is very original and very pretty. It is also addictive. There are only a few levels in the beta but the later ones are quite tricky so enjoy.

I would like to listen to more podcasts but I don't have the time. The trouble with pod-casts is that they take too long to listen to and you cannot skim through them quickly to find the bits of interest.I have been playing around with an open source audio tool called "Best Practise" to see if I could speed up a pod-cast while still retaining comprehension. The problem with increasing the playback speed of audio is that pitch increases in proportion to the speed increase. Everybody ends up sounding like " Alvin and the Chipmunks ". Best practise has some very clever algorithms which allow independent control of pitch and speed. If you leave the pitch control in the middle and increase the playing speed it will endeavour to keep the pitch correct. From what I can tell it does this by chopping out bits because by the time you get to 200% speed the audio is unintelligible. This is where the pitch slider comes in handy. By letting the pitch slider increase...

Nope this isn't a post about gaming but about blogging or rather about using a reader to subscribe to other folks blogs. Up to about a year ago I didn't bother with a reader, I just had a folder of favourites stored in Firefox and a single right click opened the whole lot in tabs. This became unwieldy when the number of blogs I keep an eye on went much into double figures so I started to use a reader service to simplify things. Without doing any research I plumped for Google reader because it seemed to be easy to use and because it appeared to integrate seamlessly into Blogger and into my iGoogle home page. It works pretty much as advertised. Each day I log in see a list of recent blog posts, so far so good. Problems arise however when I try to do a bit of maintenance. I go into Google reader and am presented with a list of my subscriptions. I hit the "manage subscriptions button" and proceed to add new blogs and remove those which I no longer wish to follow. The lis...

If this is true then I am in absolute awe of Tobold. Outstanding. Simply outstanding.

For me the ability to comment on other peoples blogs is a privilege which greatly enhances the whole blog reading experience. If you write something which pulls a string with me I like being able to tell you with a quick comment. I am aware however that there are limitations. In particular it seems to me that commenting works better for less popular blogs with a small numbers of readers. If you leave a comment on my blog for example I will be delighted and in reply I will certainly read it and probably reply unless you are advertising WOW gold (mind you in quiet weeks I have even been known to reply to spam bots). I have pretty much given up commenting on the big commercial blogs though like Rock Paper Shotgun. Who on earth reads all 119 comments to a post like this . I certainly don't and I doubt the authors do either. Even popular non commercial blogs have way too many comments to read. Tobold's posts often attract 100+ comments sometimes involving heated discussions. Or so...