Derrick's Haven

Testing

Hey wake up you wimp!

Yep thats right. The picture you just saw is the cyclops that i have just floored in the game Titan Quest. I am that little warrior standing at the cyclops foot, admiring his kill (It aint that hard to find, cos there is only one character left standing). Doesn't the picture just look cool? Haha Anyway Titan Quest is an action RPG game, where you choose one of the several roles available (i chose the role of the Conqueror), and then fight and kill monsters to gain experience points to up ur level, ala Diablo style. However, somehow i feel that this game is easier to play than the Diablo I that i played years ago. The controls are greate. Pressing 'W' switches between your two sets of weapons (I chose one set for short range and one set for long range combat. So when i meet a slow poke monster, i will run to one side and slowly use bow and arrow to shoot at the nimcompoop). And holding down the left mouse button when attacking will make the chracter kill the targetted monster automactically while holding the shift button at the same time makes the character kill all creatures surrounding him automatically. This somehow makes the tedious task of killing all those puny low level monsters less of a chore. The other thing is that the graphics for this game is simply wonderful. The grass moves as the creatures and my warrior moves thru it. Shadows stick well to the character. Landscaping and texture is superb. Its really and eye candy and it makes full use of my X800GTO running at 1440x900 resolution. Woohoo!
___________________________________________________________________________________

Recently i just bought a Creative ZEN Vision: M to replace the naturally CMI (Cannot Make It) ZEN Neeon. Not that i misused the ZEN Neeon, but the quality of the player is simply CMI. The fault lies mainly with the firmware and software. The firmware is super laggy, it takes like one to two seconds just to switch to the next song. And when i navigate the menu and suddenly decided to change the volume, it actually takes another second or so before it switches to the interface that display the volume. This is unacceptable for a product whose price is around SGD300++. Even my very first player, some Wewa brand from Taiwan (or China?) also performed better. Then the player also did not provide a function to let the user create playlist on the go, a function which i took for granted by today's standard. The worst thing that happen was that sometimes out of the blue, when a song is ending, it appears that the system cannot handle the amount of computing, trying to load the next song while the current song is playing, and the end of a beautiful becomes as if u are hearing it underwater. Once again, this is a SGD300+ player from a company that is trying to defeat the number one mp3 player maker, Apple Computer. On to the software - Creative Mediasource, simply a piece of crap. Totally non-user friendly. That about sums up whtat i have to say for that software, cos i din bother to use it after trying for like 30mins but to no avail. As a consumer, i expect things to work out of the box, without me having to worry about how to use this and that software.

The packaging of the ZVM

Anyway, despite having such a bad experience with my first Creative mp3 player, i decided to give it another try simply because there is so much good reviews with the ZVM (ZEN Vision: M). As you can see from the picture, the player even won the Best of CES award, which is very commendable. I was considering between the iPod 5th Gen and the ZVM and i went with the ZVM because of 2 big reasons - better screen and video format compatibility. The popular iPod 5th Gen or iPod Video as it is commonly known, loses flat out to the ZVM in terms of video format compatibility. It can only play its own quicktime format and the not so popular H.264. In contrast, ZVM was able to handle a whole load of formats, which includes the widely used DivX encoding. This is a very important factor as most animes and videos found on the internet are encoded in that format. This means that when u try to put in some video to watch on the go, chances are u will have to re-encode the video file to a format that the iPod likes. This is a very computing intensive operation and not exactly one that is very fast either. I do not want my computer to sit that doing just that everytime i want to put in a video into the player. Time is precious and is something i do not have a lot of. Hence the winner is ZVM even before i bought it.

After using it for the past week, i must say that the ZVM is a entire opposite of the Neeon. The user interface on the player is great, operation is smooth and hardly laggy. On the go playlist making is availalbe. Software ( Creative Media Explorer) is also very well done. Easy to use and rather stable. The screen is superb. Altough at 2.5" it is rather small, but i still enjoyed watching anime on it on the way home. With the ZVM, i feel that Creative finally has a product that is worthy to challenge the might iPod. The only thing that the ZVM loses out on is the appearance (and hence the appeal). But Creative packed more juice into it (2 times the battery life of iPod) and i cant really complain much here. But for the many out there who dun even noe what the hell DivX is, the iPod is certainly more enticing. Should there be a Creative product that is as sleek as the iPod, but with the power of the ZVM, i will be the first one to plonked down my pay packet on it. Meanwhile, here are the pics.

The winner!

Cool blue backlights

From left to right: The loser, the winner and ting's cute cute ZEN V Plus

Have decided to move my blog back here and forsake my derrick81.50webs.com domain because i am just too lazy to take the effort to try designing my own blog space, upload the html and create rss feeds. Especially when there are so many free tools out there that can do everything at a click of a few buttons. Right now i am using one such software and its called Windows Live Writer. Its one of the software that software giant Microsoft has made as part of its "Live" branding, which includes Live Mail, Live Messenger, Live Spaces, Live blah blah.

The good thing about this software is that the interface is similar to one that many almost anyone has at least touched once before - Office Word. So my this first post back here is essentially used to test how good this software actually is.

Uncanny resemblance to Office Word 2003

One nice feature is the save draft online. It actually saves the blog to my online msn spaces account on top of saving it locally on my harddrive. So i cant blog at home half way, go to Ting's place and continue blogging. Neat feature IMO. The list of task that i can carry out is always listed on the right. For example, i can insert a picture by simply clicking "Insert Picture". All the task are done locally, so there is no lag unlike online blogging tool, where one have to upload before getting to manipulate and my experience with Google Blogger in this aspect was not exactly pleasing.

Instant water marking facility

Talking about Image manipulation, i somehow feel that this is gonna be the best feature of this free blogging tool. The resizing option are toally user friendly, with the default options to let you resize your images to small, medium and large size, without you having to worry what is the exact dimesion. However, customization options are provided for advanced users and control freaks. The other coll thing in the Imaging function is the ability to let you add a watermark to the image by simply click a button and adding the text (see pic above). Now u dun need to learn photoshop to do that. Like Word 2003, Live Writer also gives you the option to view your workspace in different layout. In the pictures you see above, i am using the default Web Layout.

 
Doesn't it look really like Word 2003 now?

 In the picture above, i actually used the Normal Layout so that it looks like the usual word processor for people who prefers it that way. Two other views are provided for in this beta version - web preview and html code. The former lets you edit as it you are really editing online while the latter, as the name implies, lets you see the auto generated html code. The latter is really meant for pro-sters and control freaks.

There are a couple more features such as font formatting, font alignment formating, link insertion which are all too common. What i really like best is that it gives the total integration with the online component while letting one edit with the ease of using wordprocessors ( i was really fed up with Blogger). Another sweetener is that this software is compatible with other online blog providers such as Wordpress and Blogspot. I would really recommend it, and for a beta version, i would give this simple but wonderful app 4 out of 5 stars.

(Edit: The damn publishing tool does not seem to be working too well. It freaking times out evertime i try to pusblish. Hope i can put this up soon.)