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Articles

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Site Updates - New Logo, and New Theme

As you probably have noticed, the site looks a bit different. I have decided to go with a new layout and design of the site. I want to show more content while keeping it clean. Which is a bit silly since there is hardly any new content here, ha but hopefully that'll change soon enough. The old theme is one that I love, and it was very clean, but the problem is that it was too narrow and boxy. Also it was designed years ago so the coding was a bit off. Comparison of old layout and new: click thumbnails to see full view. There are alot of things that need to be improved and fixed up on this new theme. One of them is all the broken images. One of the main issues I have with Wordpress is how each theme needs its own images. I don't mean like graphics such as background textures, I mean every image I have ever uploaded to the Grunch needs to be resized to fit each of the custom sizes of this theme. I end up with about 20 copies of the same image, which is damn annoying. I stupidly used some of these custom images in alot of posts. I have learned now that this isn't a good idea. Due to this I have noticed ALOT of broken images in old posts. Going forward, I have added custom images to the site which I will use in the posts, and I can copy these sizes from theme to theme just by adding some code into the functions.php of the theme and this way, i won't ever have to worry about images becoming broken upon theme changes. The code is: add_image_size( 'good', '730', '492', array( "1", "") ); $image_sizes = herald_get_image_sizes(); The above code generate the specific size of 730x492px cropped of each image I upload. This will be a pretty decent size image that isn't as small as the default worpdress thumbnail/medium size, and not as large as the original image. Keep in mind that this will only create the sizes of new uploaded images. If you wish to create the size of all the images in your media library, you'll have to force regenerate all the thumbnails, etc. I use a plugin called Force Regenerate Thumbnails which I recommend and use often. If you wish to have the above size show in the sizes of the instert media page, just add the following code to the functions file as well: add_filter( 'image_size_names_choose', 'my_custom_sizes' ); function my_custom_sizes( $sizes ) {     return array_merge( $sizes, array(         'good' => __( 'good' ),     ) ); You can add more sizes and such, just change the name. You can learn more about custom sizes here. Just keep in mind that the more sizes you have, the larger the space you'll use up on your server. File Space isn't really an issue anymore, but for me, the problem with large file size is how large the backups are which lengthens the download, extraction, and upload times. I think that most of the broken images in old posts have been corrected and updated, So all images should work. I used a plugin called "Broken Link Checker" to automatically detect broken images, which then I was easily able to go in and update.   I am still doing alot of customizing of the theme. I will be tweakinga lot, especially the main page in the next few days... well actually the tweaking never stops. But it should start looking better. I really like how much space this theme allows for articles. So there is alot of content in front of you now, as opposed to the old theme, which i mentioned was very narrow. There is also some tweaking that needs to be done with the mobile version. I really hate mobile versions of websites, but i suppose they are necessary. If you see any bugs and broken things on the site, please let me know. Thanks New Logo
This isn't really new news, because I applied the "newish" logo a month or so ago, but i didn't post any info about it, so I should do that now. I am in the constant look to find the perfect font and such for the logo. I don't want the logo to be boring, while at the same time I don't want it to appear to busy. I played with so many shape and font combinations. I think I finally came up with something I like. I was instantly inlove with the font, but for some reason It just didn't look right with just the thought/speech bubble on the right side. I created a cartoon stressed out guy, and placed him on the left side, and I think it balanced it out well. Still needs to be tweaked though. Here is the old logo and the new logo:   I want to play around with more quiet and vibrant colors too. 2016
I really hope that 2016 is the year where the Grunch really takes off. I know new content has been sparse, but alot is going on with me personally health-wise and such that is prohibited me being as productive and creative as i'd like, which I plan to write about soon. I am attempting to resolve those issues, and hopefully I am able to so that i can become a content producing monkeyfish. I would also continue to extend my hand in welcoming any new writers or bloggers to come join me here. We can create something nice together. That alone could help new content creation. Stick around! The Grunch is not going anywhere
Josh

A Small Orange - VPS Downtime

As you may have noticed, Grunch has been down for a nearly a week. The reason is, well i don't know the damn reason. A Small Orange which was previously my favorite host, has been broken for nearly a week, since the 25th, with no real explanation. I've been leaving the site hosted with them, hoping it'd come back on, but day after day, i'm finally getting annoyed. I finally decided to put Grunch temporarily on my old shared hosting account which is hosted with GeekStorage. I assumed it'd be much slower since its basic shared hosting, but surprisingly its getting high ratings on Google PageSpeed and GTMetrix. [caption id="attachment_3512" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Geek Storage GT Metrix Rating[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3513" align="aligncenter" width="230"] Geek Storage Google PageSpeed Rating[/caption] I really don't know whats going on with ASO, or our future with them. I have prepaid for a full year of hosting, but nearly a week of downtime without a real explanation is not acceptable, and I'm not too sure if i wan't to continue with them. Their support has pretty much annoyed me earlier in the month. The cloud backup system suddenly stopped working, and their support pretty much told me that itys an unsupported feature, even though their site clearly states that there are automated weekly backups. If they don't mean this automatic system, then perhaps they have another one in the background that they handle themselves, i don't know. I think the backup failing issue was an indicator that something major was going on behind the scenes with the server connections and settings, which led to the downtime we are having now. luckily, since i had the backup issue with them, i manually create backups that day via SSH and downloaded them via FTP, so I had pretty much an accurate up todate backup beofre the completely failure, that i was able to upload to GeekStorage. [caption id="attachment_3516" align="alignleft" width="150"] Read my interaction with their useless support.[/caption] Support at ASO has always been horrible now, it could be due to them being an EIG company. I wonder if this is the end of them being a great host too. People have been waiting for the end to come ever since EIG acquired them in 2012, but ASO continued to be super great and speedy. Maybe this is it. The support hasn't said much, or gave any real reason as to why the downtime. I give them benefit of the doubt that something major is going on. but then again, they should of had it resolved by now, i mean a week if downtime? get serious. [caption id="attachment_3514" align="alignright" width="180"] ASO Facebook comments[/caption] Their facebook is also being flooded with angry customers, without a single reply from ASO. Maybe all their tech people are on XMAS vacation, or something. I don't know. [caption id="attachment_3510" align="alignleft" width="179"] Downtime Status. doesn't really say much[/caption] They do randomly update a status page, which they cut in half because it was getting longer and longer, but they pretty much just write the same update status, without any real info at all. The plan now is to just sit on GeekStorage until ASO gets their shit back up. I know the site has gotten high ratings on GeekStorage using the page speed tools, but I ran the tests at like 5am when most of the server visitors were probably asleep, and its simply basic shared hosting so the speed isn't going to be consistent, and wont stay fast. I do still like ASO, and am willing to give them another chance. This is the first major trouble that i've had with them. We'll see, we'll see. The worse situation is that they stay crappy, I attempt to get a refund for the year of hosting i paid for, and we go back to TrafficPlanetHosting or some other host. I don't plan on using KnownHost due to the price. Edit: 11:58 AM - I just noticed the my VPS at A Small Orange is back online and working, so i moved the site back. All seems to be working good, but the cloud command service isn't running yet, so hopefully I don't need to restart anything. Seems all the data is still here, and working good. Hopefully the VPS's will stay on, if not then its back to the shared hosting.
Josh

So, the iPhone 6 Plus Does Bend

I'm sure many of you have heard of the rumors of the iPhone 6 Plus being brittle and easily bendable. Alot of us blew this off as just haters and anti apple people being crazy and doing what they do. Well surprise! Turns out its true. Now this could be old news since the iPhone 6 line has already been replaced by the iPhone 6s, but alot of people who got the 6 aren't going to upgrade to the 6s. We're going to keep our phones til at least the 7, if we even upgrade then, these suckers are expensive, so it's an on going issue for most of us. I've had my phone for little over a year now, I bought it last year a little after release and waiting a month to get it. After seeing all the videos and articles about people having their phones becoming bent easily, I was very scared that I paid over a grand for a phone that wasn't going to be very durable. I was relieved once I finally got me phone to see that my phone was straight, and appeared to be a super strong and durable. I immediately put my phone in one of its several cases, i think the first was a durable hard box type thing, which then I replaced with another durable mountable hard case from Quadlock which would allow me to easily mount it to my bicycle. I pretty much babied the thing. I had a glass screen protector on it for most of its life until recently when I got tired of trying to apply the damn things without dust getting trapped under neath. [caption id="attachment_3484" align="aligncenter" width="738"] Something weird happening to the screen, same with top right corner.[/caption] Last week I noticed what appeared to be air getting under my screen. It was almost like when you have a screen protector that is coming loose. Same effect. I didn't take my case off to look at it or anything, and I immediately started looking at my options with apple to have this fixed before it got worse. The phone functioned just fine. It was only the screen that seemed to be separating from itself on the inside. My only options are to either send Apple the phone, and be without a phone for a week or two. Make a 200+ Mile round trip to visit an Apple store, take advantage of their Advance Replacement service which allows them to send me a phone, and then they give me 10 days to send them my broken one, or just deal with it. The Advance Replacement service sounds like the best for me. The only scary down side to that service is they'll put a temp charge on my card for the entire price of the phone, and if they don't get the phone returned to them within 10 days they'll chage my a late fee of several hundred, and if they never get the phone they'll charge me the total price of the phone which is $942.39 including tax. If I wanted to buy a whole other iPhone i'd just get the 6s Plus. My Apple Care + Expires in November 2016, so I still pretty much have a year left, so I put having it fixed right now on the backburner, after all, it still worked and functioned just fine. [caption id="attachment_3486" align="alignleft" width="300"] With case on, its barely noticeable.[/caption] Last night I started to notice something odd about my phone. The case I have is the QuadLock case which has the round back which is where the mounts attach too, so it always looks a bit deformed and never sits flat. I usually lay the phone on its back, and last night I decided to lay it on its front, and I noticed how distorted the phone looked. Now I've had this phone for little over a year so I didn't really bother with checking out if it was flat or anything like that, so I hadn't noticed it til this point. I took the case off, and surely enough, the dang thing was bent, just like the previous people described theirs bending around the volume button areas. I was actually shocked. The people before weren't just haters. This really happens. [caption id="attachment_3492" align="alignleft" width="215"] With case off.[/caption] For some reason Apple fan boys and myself included always blame the user for their phone being bent, like obvious the user did something to do this. But I can say that I took care of my phone. I paid over $1000 for mine, i'm not going to toss it around and abuse it.  I'm certainly not going to do anything to it that should bend it. Yes, maybe every once in a while I started to sit down and noticed it was in my back pocket, and immediately took it out. Yes maybe it dropped a few times, but nothing that normal phones don't go through, and certainly like i said, nothing that should bend the damn thing. It's very disappointed. The quality seemed nice and Apple is usually known for their quality. But there is obviously something wrong with the iPhone 6 Plus. I'm not too sure how long my phone has been bent. Even though the screen started to look weird this past week, the bending could've started a while ago, and only gotten bad recently. I suppose once its starts bending it can keep bending and getting worse. [caption id="attachment_3490" align="aligncenter" width="768"] The Phone Laying face down[/caption] I contacted Apple Support today via phone to talk about my options. I explained to them that I lived hundreds of miles from any Apple store, so visiting one isn't an option. The lady on the phone was very nice and asked me for some info and gave me some options, all of which I already knew of from the Support Website, which I already mentioned in this article. I decided to go with the Advance Replacement. The lady explained to me that I can get the phone replaced for a price of $89, which will use up one of my accidental damage points or whatever in my Apple Care+ Plan. At first I didn't like that idea since I honestly feel its a defect in the phone, but whatever. I know of many cases where people reported going to the Apple store and having their bent phones replaced for free, but meh, the $89 is less than the gas would cost for me to even get to an Apple Store, so whatever i'm okay with it. She also explained to me that there would be a temp charge and all that, and explained to me that its only for security, so i don't jut keep the phone, and I agreed. She gave me the case number, explained to me that i'll receive an email to follow up the payment, and wished me a happy holiday. [caption id="attachment_3495" align="aligncenter" width="608"] Advance Replacement Service Fee[/caption] I immediately got the email, and completed the payment process, and we'll see where we go from here. From reports, Apple made the iPhone 6s more thicker and durable to avoid this issue, so hopefully its just an issue with the iPhone 6. If my replacement bends as easily, I'll seriously have to question if its worth getting another iPhone in the future, even though I've always loved my iPhones and prefer iOS over Android, but these suckers are so pricey. Edit: Dang, Apple's shipping is so fast. The replacement phone is due to be delivered tomorrow 12/15. I was worried about going through this entire process right now due to it being holiday season and the carriers will be swamped, but seems to be going just fine.
Josh

Rainbow Six Siege

Rainbow Six Siege is the latest in the Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series, and I must say, it's a whole hootin heck of a fun time. The first thing I noticed about this game is that it was very similar to an other game I played and wrote about earlier this year, called BurstFire, which I actually liked. You can read that article here. At the time, I didn't know that Burstfire was pretty much trying to clone Rainbow Six Siege. I have to say, they did a pretty good job at it. It has alot of the same features and such. But way more bugs, and the graphics and engine don't seem as polished. The matchmaking was complete rubbish as well. Luckily, Rainbow Six Siege doesn't suffer from any of that, and is a well made, rounded game. There are some bugs though, but no game killing bugs. Before I bought the game I read reviews which moaned about server lag, rubber banding, and players being kicked from servers, but I played for an entire day without any of these issues, but I was finally kicked from a game today, which isn't a huge issue since matchmaking is so fast and I was back into another game within a few minutes. *Edit - December 7th, 2015 - I'm not sure what happened, but now matchmaking is a laggy buggy slow mess. Takes ages to join a game, if you ever do get to join one. Was fine the first few days for me, maybe many more people are ATTEMPTING to play now and the servers cant keep up? i dunno, but I give up most of the time now, and go play lone wolf mode or something. Devs have stated that they are working on a patch with no ETA. We'll See We'll see. * *Edit - December 10th, 2015 - Connection issues must've been a temp thing. Been connecting fast and just fine yesterday and today.   [caption id="attachment_3426" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Matchmaking[/caption] I did however have a bug where I kept getting stuck on my own legs, or something weird, and it was preventing me from moving or doing anything. The fix for this was to go into prone which freed me. There also seems to be a bug with the voice system. Supposedly people are supposed to only hear you when you push the mic button which is U, some how it gets stuck sometimes and doesn't indicate that others can hear you. I was singing Britney Spears for a while, and I didn't realize it til finally after a while someone said something. The Performance of the game is great. I usually average 60-70 FPS on a GTX 770 4G @2560x1080res, and it never stutters or hangs. The graphics might not be the super best ever, but they're nice and the game looks great. [caption id="attachment_3431" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Bullets Flyin', Shit happening![/caption] Rainbow Six Siege is a 6vs6 slow but realistic paced tactical multiplayer game, where both teams have to use their sources, and be strategic on how to complete their mission. The game itself is pretty simple in the idea, The terrorist lock them selves in a building thats containing a hostage or bomb, and they have to reinforce the walls and door ways to protect it from the attackers. Although the game is slowly paced, it can be over very quickly if either side makes a mistake, such as shooting the hostage, or killing each other. Each round starts with a few minutes for either side to prepare and plan. The attackers have remote controlled drones which they drive through the building using access vents, and tiny gaps that are conveniently placed on the bottom of every single door and barricade, and scout the building for for the terrorist or hostage/bomb and spot them, while the terrorist on the other hand use the time to reinforce the walls, barricade door ways, and place traps. There is no single player campaign, which alot of people are moaning about, but I don't care much for single player, its nice but not rquired. Single player campaigns don't have much replay value and usually once you beat them thats it. Online is where it stays fresh, and this game does that well but there are a series of single player training missions, that can be pretty fun. The AI is kinda stupid though, but they can be tough. There is also Terrorist Hunt, which is a group of humans, or you can lone wolf it, go against a of AI controlled terrorist. It can be fun, but like i said, the AI is so stupid. Each team has many tools and resources at their dispense, such as heart rate monitors to detect players through walls, disruptive to block drones, and so on. [caption id="attachment_3448" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Heat Beat Scanner detects two enemy.[/caption] The wall reinforcements come in very handy because nearly every wall or item in the game is destructible, not entirely though meaning entire buildings and rooms wont collapses, but almost all the walls can be blown away with bullets or bombs. [caption id="attachment_3450" align="aligncenter" width="768"] wanna see through a wall? make a hole![/caption] The thing that has really impressed me about this game is the fluid moment. You can crawl prone forward, backwards, side ways, etc. And it's cool seeing your legs realistically lay out in front of you. You can also lean and look around corners, which is a rarity in alot of FPS games today. Repelling up and down structures has to be one of my favorite things in the game, well that and reinforcing walls. You can take the enemy by surprise buy repelling up a building, and then down the side of another and bust through a window. The reinforcing wall thing is cool because the way it expands and the sounds, i don't know, it's just fun. [caption id="attachment_3420" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Just Repelling with a bud![/caption]   The game provides a very immersive raw feeling and atmosphere. The sounds on this game are simply amazing. I think the sound is one of the things that makes this game very intense. You can hear the other team breaking things and moving around in another room, and the louder it gets, the closer you know they are, and the more your heart starts to beat. The fact that you only get one life per round adds to the suspense. While the game can be more realistic than most FPS, it does kind of mock that idea by having huge blood spray. When someone is shot, especially in the head, it like explodes into a big red mist, and the surrounding walls are covered in blood splatter. It's not gruesome, just cool. [caption id="attachment_3422" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Headshot! Blood Mist[/caption] The operative and customization system is very confusing, and I still haven't figured it out. Things are laid out weird and I dunno. [caption id="attachment_3418" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Weapon Upgrades[/caption] The game requires you to earn points by playing the game, and from the points you get what the game calls "Renown", which is ingame currency you use to unlock operatives/soldiers, and upgrade the weapons, etc. The program with this is it takes FOREVER to earn enough renown to unlock operatives and weapons. You can buy ingame renown or whatever using real money to speed up the process though, and alot of people cry about these "micro transactions" but its very expensive and not required, so I doubt very many people take advantage of this. Then there is another screen that lets you chose from the available unlocked operatives, and you can select from some weapons that you have previously upgraded. Each operative comes with their own special gadgets, such as sniper rifles, heart rate monitor, ballistic shields, and so on. [caption id="attachment_3429" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Operative Loadout[/caption] Ubisoft also provides online stats and leaderboards, however i'm not too sure how accurate these are, or when they are updated. I played hours upon hours, and it says I've only played 3 hours, which can't be true. Or maybe it is, maybe it only counts actual time in a round/mission, and not the wait time, etc. So far, this game is HUGE fun. No regrets on buying it at all. I see myself playing this alot for the next month at least. Ubisoft does plan on DLC, but they said that all the new MAPS will be free. The game doesn't get boring as it is, because the bomb or hostage is always in a different area, and the way you approach it is different each game. There are just so many variables that change. This game is a fresh breath from faced paced shooters such as COD, or even Battlefield, which i play the most.  It would be so amazing to have this type of game play, on a huge open map like what we have in Battlefield 4. The game is currently $59, is it worth it? meh i don't know. I don't really want to pay $59 for any game, but its really fun, and funner than most $60 games out there. You can buy it on cd key sites as I did for much less. The price seems to be rising on those sites as well. It does use the UPLAY client, which isn't too bad to be honest. So even if you buy from steam, it'll still need to be launched through Uplay. Game is worth it. Get it, enjoy it. Buy: Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/359550/ uPlay: http://shop.ubi.com/store/ubina/en_US/pd/ThemeID.8605600/productID.316011800
Josh

And we're back at A Small Orange

A few months ago I moved the Grunch to a small host called "A Small Orange". Which I loved. However after a month or so of hosting, I let weirdos weird me out about the fact that EIG owns ASO, which is bad because EIG usually buys hosts and then ruins them.  So, I let my weirdo friend spook me out, so I joined another host, KnownHost, which cost double the money, and used them for a couple months.  To be honest, I was kinda disappointed in KnownHost. Not because they're bad, but because they're not much, if not any, better than ASO, and doubled the cost to get the same sort of performance. Don't get me wrong though, If it weren't for ASO, I'd stay with KnownHost, and I'll probably use KnownHost again in the future. I've been debating on moving back to ASO for a couple weeks now. Mostly due to cost. Is this site worth spending nearly a thousand dollars a year to host? I mean, maybe, but I haven't been in the mood to write anything for a long while as you can tell, which is kind of due to a health/mental issue which will write about sometime in another article. And why spend so much money, when ASO gives the same if not better performance at half the costs? The only thing that made me put off moving back to ASO is the difficulty. KnownHost is 100%managed. You'll get a reply from support staff there in within minutes of submitting the ticket, and they'll fix the issue themselves. You pretty much have to do everything your self if you get a VPS at ASO. ASO does offer managed service which is pricier than KnownHost, Which I haven't used to read much on. What finally made me switch was the performance was going down hill at KnownHost. Wasn't super slow, but wasn't as fast for the money. I would have to reboot the VPS to increase the speed again. This could be due to cPanel, and such, while the VPS I use at ASO doesn't have such things. I was looking yesterday to switch back to ASO, and I noticed that they were doing a cyber Monday deal. 75% off all new packages, and free double ram! HECK OF A DEAL! So I immediately started to consider it. If anything, I could get the LEVEL II VPS again for only $7.50 for the first month, which would allow me to test it. However, the site wasn't working for me. For some reason it wouldn't let me order the hosting, or apply the coupon half the time. [caption id="attachment_3352" align="alignleft" width="300"] ASO - Mark M explaining to me that EIG lets ASO do their own thing[/caption] I spent a few minutes on live chat with Sales support (ASO might not have good customer hands on tech support, but their sales support is !BAM! right there, ha) The sales agent Mark Murphy helped me alot, and manually submitted the order for me. He actually consider buying a whole years worth of hosting. Actually, he was hinting 3 years, but as I explained to him, i don't really want to buy that far into the future, and I make a remark about EIG might kill ASO by then, which he replied that EIG has been very goo to them, reiterating what i've head from other ASO staff, which is EIG lets them to their own thing, which is surprising. I did the math, and at 75% off, which is 7.50 a month, I could get an entire year for $90, in which Mark corrected me, it'd be $75 since i'll receive a 16% price break for paying annually. Would be super silly to not take that offer. I did actually consider the 3 year thing, but meh, I didn't want to pay all that much right now, and as I said, who knows what EIG will do. By the way, ASO has been owned by EIG since 2012, and since then ASO has been allowed to run independently. So there are no signs that EIG is going to change this anytime soon. Mark said that the system was kinda slow due to all the people signing up for hosting due to the sweet deals, and suggested that I can either wait for him to enter the info, or check back in a few hour. I said i'd check back later, and surely enough few hour slater the invoice was in my account, and i immediately paid. Man, this is a sweet deal. I think I'm going to regret not getting more than one year this time next year when the bill is do again. Once I paid the invoice, my account was immediately set up. Now I had the fun of learning how to install my site again. I say install, because there are alot of steps you gotta do via the VPS control page, and via SHH which is command based. Eventually i was able to get the site up and running, and wow! It was much snappier than it was on KnownHost. I had greater specs at KnownHost, but i think the cPanel must've dragged it down, i'm, not sure. I should mention that you can order a raw VPS from KnownHost, and get nginx and all that stuff on it as well, but what makes ASO great, and they have template/LEMPS that are optimized for wordpress, and other situations, that you can easily install. I am getting better performance at ASO then I was when i moved the site from KnownHost. The score is also higher than the previous score I had on ASO, but since that time, I had disabled some plugins and did some other optimizations while I was at KnownHost. Here are the scores: GTMetrix: Using the same files, only different tweaks based on server config, which are automatic on each service. [caption id="attachment_3349" align="aligncenter" width="600"] KnownHost VS ASmallOrange GTMetrix scores[/caption] The google Page score pretty much remained the same on each service which is 91/100. It's weird how the score on KnownHost has changed from when I first got it. You could tell something was up as the site was slowing down over time. In the end, We'll be at A Small Orange for at least the next year.As I've always stated, even when i moved from ASO to KnownHost, I love ASO, their speeds and reliability are so amazing for the price. I had no reason to leave them other than that weird EIG issue, which I have since gotten over since it was kinda stupid to begin with. If you're looking for a host, please give ASmallOrange a try! As you can see, their speeds are amazing. Unlike many providers, ASO's speeds and reliablity is consistent. www.ASmallOrange.com
Josh

Get One Year of Unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive Storage for Just $5

I recently wrote an article about Amazon's Cloud Storage, which I am still using and love. It's definitely worth the $60 a year. However, I just came across a killer deal that allows you to register the service for only $5 for the first year, which is awesome. It was a black Friday deal, but its still working. I'm assuming it'll continue working til CyberMonday, but I could be wrong. They don't provide any info on this. However, today is Sunday, and the deal just worked for me. My 3 month trial was up in January, and i was planning on paying the $60, but this has saved me from that. I already have 184GB backed up to Amazon's Cloud Drive, and its working perfect. [caption id="attachment_3334" align="aligncenter" width="300"] My Amazon Cloud Drive Usage so far[/caption] Use this Link to get the service for $5: https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/landing/everything/buy Remember that the desktop client is pretty simple. If you can use third party sync tools,  I use and recommend Expandrive. Read my Amazon Cloud Drive article for more info.
Josh

Amazon Cloud Drive

I've been seriously looking in to Cloud Storage lately, mostly due to me wanting to get out of the habit backing up my pictures to a static Disc, which is what I've been doing for nearly 20 years now. A static disc is basically a DVD R, and its static because once you burn and finalize it, it's done, you can't edit or change it. But the problem with the disc method, is its very unreliable. In the past week I've tried to back up my photos to a disc and went through about 3 blank dvdrs before one successfully burned, finalized, verified, and was readable. The first two discs went through the verification process just fine, but my computer couldn't read them. Which is a problem I've had constantly throughout the past. So, I want to get away from this, it's just scary to break this habit, and the idea of not having them backed up this way gives me some anxiety, but I can get over it. I don't just want a cloud backup, I want a local backup too, but I'll be doing this on hard disk drives, or SSDs. I do currently use CrashPlan, which is an automatic backup system, but it only mirrors files you have on your PC, and its not very intuitive to use. I'd prefer to have Storage where I can archive, explore, and deal with just as I could a local computer drive. I had been using OneDrive, but not seriously. I think i have like 200gb on there for free, 100 of which was from a Bing promotion, which will expire within the next year. Due to the fact that it'll expire, I never actually considered using that space. I pretty much use Onedrive to auto backup my camera roll from my iPhone, which i think gave me 15-30gb of free storage in itself, and some other minor files that I don't want to lose such as Photoshop settings. I have used DropBox and Google Drive in the past for the same exact reasons. All of these services offer free storage, which isn't very much, and it can get very expensive if you wish you buy more storage space. OneDrive has the best offer in my opinion, you can get Office 365 Personal for like $60 a year which includes all the office Apps, plus 1TB of OneDrive Space, which sounds nice. But Microsoft recently started screwing over its users. They had originally offered 15gb free storage, and promised to offer unlimited storage for paid subscribers. They recently lowered the free to 5gb, done away with the camera roll free space, and limited paying customers to 1tb. Which is still enough, but it kinda makes Microsoft seem really shady since they lied about the unlimited and screwed all the paying subscribers out of what they promised. I don't blame Microsoft for not wanting to do the unlimited storage, but they shouldn't have promised too offer it in the first place. I really wanted to use DropBox. But it's so dang expensive. The iOS app is so sexy. Man I want to use it! It's about $120 a year for 1tb of storage, which is just too much for me right now. I prefer to stay away from Google. I've became so annoyed at having to disable Google Plus accounts that they tricked me into creating in the past few years, that meh. Screw them. But at a close look, it's still about the same price as DropBox if you want the 1TB of space. I then started to google at Amazon Cloud Drive. I've used them in the past, well not really. Back in 2011 they had a promotion, buy the Lady Gaga Digital Album for like $2, and get 20gb of free storage, which expired within a year, but i wanted to try out their Cloud Player, so I got it, and wasn't very trilled with it, so I never touched it again. Music Streaming isn't something I'm really interested in anyways. In the past year they started two new Cloud Drive services: Unlimited Photos for $12 a year, which gives you unlimited storage for photos, and 5gb of storage for videos, and whatever else. Unlimited Everything for  $59.99 a year, which is really sweet. They offer a 3 month trial on each plan, so you can test it and see if you like it. I signed up for the unlimited everything. A credit card is needed to set up the trial. Unlimited Storage is attractive to me because  I don't have to worry about what I can upload. I don't want to buy 1tb and then run out and have to buy another 1tb. That would get so expensive on other services such as Google Drive, or Drop Box (drop box doesn't offer more than 1tb at the moment). Even if it wasn't unlimited, 1tb isnt bad for $60. Amazon seems trustworthy. They aren't going anywhere soon, and Cloud Storage is one of their major business, so they know what they're doing. If you look online, you'll find some sketchy posts about Amazon and their Terms of Use and Private Policy, etc. People seem to think highly of themselves, and assume  Amazon really wants to single them out and look at their files. I have a low self esteem, so I don't think this is an issue, and if Amazon wants to look at my boring files, have fun, ha. [caption id="attachment_3264" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Amazon Cloud Drive Desktop Client[/caption] At first, I was severely disappointed with Cloud Drive. Mainly because the Desktop client is so limited. It pretty much is just a window that you drop files into, and they upload to the cloud. You have to use a web browser to sort, view, and organize your files, and attempting to use the desktop client reminds  you of this because every time you click something in it, it opens your internet browser to load the site. [caption id="attachment_3289" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Cancelled Subscription - Active Trial[/caption] I quickly cancelled my subscription. But even if you cancel the subscription, your 3 month trial remains, which is nice because over the following several days I started to mess with it more and more, and found that I really like it. The official desktop client is crappy, but you can get third party sync clients that work very well. I discovered Expandrive, and I have paid for the life time update license. It basically lets you mount Cloud Drive, or any other Cloud service, or even FTP account as a hard drive on your computer. I'm not 100% sure how it works. I think it caches a place holder locally, and downloads the file when you go to open it. I hope it doesn't keep a full sized copy of the file locally. This could be something some want, but many of the files I'm uploading are for archival reasons, and are already backed up, so i don't need another copy of a copy on my machine. [caption id="attachment_3268" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Amazon Cloud Front Page[/caption] Amazon Cloud Drive was built so far with photos and video in mind, which comes very clear and obvious once you start using it. They display all your photos in videos in a nice view, and also let you create special albums, which I haven't really messed with yet. The web browser version isn't that bad. It sorts your videos, photos, and other files into their nice little sections. The thing that I really like about the service is it lets you view almost any photo or video type directly from the browser, and iOS client. I read that the video playback is limited to 20 minutes, but I haven't ran into this. [caption id="attachment_3266" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Amazon video Player playing old video.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3308" align="alignleft" width="169"] Amazon Cloud Drive iOS App is nice, and easy to use.[/caption] I think the service creates a view able/watchable copy that you can view from any device. For example, It'll create a JPG of a PSD or CRC raw file. I'm not sure how it handles videos. It plays nearly every video format I've uploaded, but I haven't tested this intensely. Amazon uses a custom cloud player for videos, and it seems to be HTML5 or some other technology. It's not flash. There is no right click menu. [caption id="attachment_3321" align="alignright" width="151"] This day - all the memories.[/caption] Amazon Cloud Drive also has a "This Day" feature, which goes back through all the years of photos and videos you uploaded, and displays ones that happened on the current day in the previous years and displays them. I wish the Picasa program for windows had this feature. I'll be uploading all my photos to Cloud Drive, so this will be good enough for now. It also creates a readable PDF copy of any office document such as Docx files. It doesn't seem to load any of the special fonts you may have used in the document, but its readable and the formatting still seems to be there. Even though it creates a copy that you can view at any time, it leaves the original file unaltered. I would assume this extra copy doesn't count against your file space, which isn't even a problem if you're on the unlimited plan. The only real disappointment I've had is you can upload audio and store it, but you can't play it via the browser. I assumed the music and other audio  would auto load in the cloud player and allow you to stream and listen to it, much like the video and pictures, NOPE. They want you to pay for a separate music subscription for that. So it'll play/display almost any file type you throw at it, but not music. You can upload 250 songs to Amazon Music for free, which will display in your cloud, but that's it, and you have to do that via the Amazon Music client. This is a disappointment especially if you have alot of old voice recordings, sound clips, and such. Sharing - I really love this sharing feature. If you're going through you're library of 10 year old videos and photos and want to share, EASY! just click the share button, it'll create a link and you can send that link to anyone. They won't be able to see anything else in your cloud storage but the file you shared, and you can turn off the sharing of that file at any time. You can also share directly to facebook which is nice. The iOS app lets you send the photos and videos to people via messenger as well. It doesn't create a link, it actually sends the photo as if you were doing it from your computer or camera roll. I'm really enjoying the service. Once you get passed the disappointment with the official desktop client, and start using third party clients, the service really opens up, and becomes easy to use, and very reliable. The official mobile apps are perfect. [caption id="attachment_3272" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Expandrive on windows 10 showing my amazon Cloud storage.[/caption] For a third party client, I suggest Expandrive, which isn't free, but has a week long trial. I used the coupon "5EDUCATIONL" which gave me 20% off, so the lifetime upgrade licenses was only $54, well worth it. odrive is a nice free client, which I loved, but it seems to be buggy with some Windows 10 installations, including mine, which will constantly crash explorer, which is too bad because its a nice app. The devs can't seem to figure out why this is happening only on some installations, but they have mentioned they are rewriting the program from scratch. [caption id="attachment_3279" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Amazon Cloud Drive Apps[/caption] Amazon actually has a page dedicated to list the popular third party apps that are compatible with its service. [caption id="attachment_3291" align="aligncenter" width="300"] My Amazon Cloud Drive Usage[/caption] I haven't had any real issues yet, and I have uploaded nearly 80gb of data, mostly documents, videos, and pictures. The speed seems to be only limited by my ISP, so no downtime, slowness, or any such matters. At this point, I recommend Amazon's Cloud Drive to anyone looking for online storage, and the ability to watch their videos, or view photos from the web. As a matter of fact, they way it converts each picture or video format into a streamable format is worth the price alone if you plan on sharing alot of such content because it does it VERY well, and requires little effort on the users part.
Josh

Facebook Videos - Mostly all Stolen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q Facebook is such an Evil mess. Video sums up why they are such a evil mess lately. Several times a day I see stolen videos being shared and reshared on facebook. Thank god no one in their right mind would want to steal any of my videos. Due to facebook being such an evil mess, i hardly touch the thing anymore.
Josh

Prison Architect - My New Favorite Game!

Update: October 22nd, 2015 - Can no longer recommend this game -  Read at bottom Dang, is it already 7Pm? I've been playing this game since I woke up at 6am, and dang, I'm still going! The game of course, is Prison Architect, which has recently been upgraded from BETA to version 1, and I must say, This damn game is fun as heck. If you haven't heard of this game, it's pretty much an open sandbox game where you build and manage a prison. The game looks simple, but it's very in depth and there is alot to do. Most of my day today has been trying to solve problems, which seem to be bugs at first, but they are all correctable it seems. Prison Architect has been out for a few years now, and a buddy of mine told me about it ages ago, but like Minecraft, I didn't bother with it at first due to it just looking ugly, and even more like minecraft, once I actually gave it ago, I was hugely addicted. What led me to finally give the game a serious ago, is the review by Mack, who gives awesome reviews, and him and I usually share the same opinion on games. I bought the Mad Max last month due to one of his reviews as well, which I didn't regret. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t5GG0oQvxE I started playing the story mode at first just to get the hang of the game, but I kinda got bored, so I immediately went into open sandbox mode, and have been playing it most of yesterday, and all day today (damn gotta get my work out in!!!).  I should go back and finish the story mode, because the things I'm having trouble with could just be features of the game, like I said before, each of these issues i'm having seems to be solved some how, which could just be a temporize work around though, but its a puzzle. The fact that you can workaround the issues are nice. I think some of the issues could just be that the game is so deep and in depth, So there are alot of small things you sometimes have to do to get apparent simple things to work. It's not a simple is just making rooms and accepting prisoners. You have to have water, electric, and other systems in place, that are slightly complex on their own. Not only, that, you have to also worry about laundry as well. Making a large enough laundry room, and employing enough prisoners to manage it is an issue in itself. I believe the janitors you hire also handle the laundry. One of the main issues I've had is with the CCTV Monitor, and Door Control stations that allow you to open doors remotely, which only work when there are guards stationed and managing them. The guards seem to wonder off for no good reason at all. The Door stations, especially, only work when there is a guard at the other end. So, i kept running into issues with the doors not opening for the staff, nor for the inmates, which would lead to many more issues, such as the inmates getting hungry, frustrated, and then they'd riot, and such. Things would break, and keep getting worse, and worse if the impatience staff can't get in to fix things, and injured people and staff would die due to not being able to get treatment. It'd be a serious game breaking issue if there weren't a workaround. Luckily, there is. It turns out, the reason the staff leave their positions at the stations is because they get tired. The game allows you to create staff rooms, which allows the staff to  rest, and get all of their energy back. You'd think that another guard would take their place, rather than just leaving the stations unmanned, but they don't. Sometimes, another guard will eventually show up and managed the stations for a bit, but they'll leave as well. The workaround on this issue is to create a small room that allows you to fit both a security section (required for the monitoring/door control stations), and a staff room. THEN LOCK THE DOORS! It's a bit tricky because the guards will wonder off leaving their stations, so you gotta make sure there are enough staff left over to manage each station. I like to leave a few extra guards. So if I have 5 stations in the room, i'll trap about 7 guards in there, this way if one gets tired, he can go rest, if they do even rest using this method, and the stations will be always manned. Works nicely. [caption id="attachment_3189" align="aligncenter" width="502"] Security / Staff room set up.[/caption] Another bug I'm having is related to the remote doors too. You'd think it'd be easier to just not use the since its not required, but i have some Maximum security units, which I don't want the guards to have constant contact with the inmates due to security risks. The bug is the remote doors require a Servo thing, which is a remote machine that opens the remote door (oh, i know, super complex). And this device can break. For some reason the maintenance worker guys wont come fix them, and I end up running into the same problem with people not being able to get out and in. I have no idea how to fix this one though. I end up manually opening those broken doors so people can get in and out. I noticed earlier when I was having the issue, I saved and left my game, I came back, and the servo's were fixed. I also noticed them sometimes randomly get fixed. I think the trick is to just fix the doors themselves, but I'm not sure. There are some other tiny bugs, but nothing game killing and I am having so much fun. I am having an issue with inmates tunneling their way out of the prison, which  is preventable if you micromanage the prison. I've been doing so much building that this happens before I realize its happening. I've read that the developers put this in the game so that it keeps you on your toes. So you can't just leave the game on and let the prison manage itself. Maybe that's why things randomly break too, I'm not sure, but it does keep the game fun. I think you can have dog patrols and such, which smell out tunnels. I've noticed many times the guards walking the dogs will put flags down where the dogs sense the tunnels, and a shovel icon will popup and alert me. When this happens you can search the entire block, or do a shakedown which searches the cells and inmates for tools, weapons, and other things they aren't supposed to have. [caption id="attachment_3192" align="aligncenter" width="538"] Just destroy and rebuild the cell![/caption] I just had a small bug while getting some screenshots for this article. For some reason, one of my prison cells was throwing up an alert. The alert was the room wasn't enclosed, which it obviously was. I removed all the objects from a room, and saw a tile/block that wouldn't allow me to build on it. No idea why. After messing with it for a good 5-10 minutes, I finally just bulldozed that area, laid another foundation in the spot, recreated the room, and wallah, was 100% again. This bugs are annoying, but at least you can usually fix them! There is so much more to the game that I haven't gotten to yet. I'm learning alot as I go, and I keep tweaking, adding, and fixing things on my prison, making it better and better. I don't see myself getting bored of this one anytime soon. [caption id="attachment_3193" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Prison Architect Kitchen with its own dedicated power source![/caption] I've been spending alot of time on the kitchen and canteens.  I thought my kitchens were large enough, guess not. Many prisoners still weren't eating. Hiring more cooks didn't help, so I made three large kitchens and canteens and placed them on different sides of my Prison. I think the key is just to have a large kitchen and canteen. I don't think having as many cooks as prisoners is the answer. My next prison I'll just place a large food place in the center of the prison. That's what's fun about this game, trial and error! I have put in a death row unit, and executed a rapist/killer. Not a guy who rapes killers, but a guy who is both a rapist and a killer..... It's was very dramatic, but was very lackluster when the switch was flipped, ha. But I think my prison earned a few thousand dollars for the kill. I do want to try the Escape mode soon. Mack said in his video that its pretty fun. There is still alot more in this game that I haven't gotten to! and I've already put probably 20+ hours into it. This game is much worth the price tag of $30 on steam, and you can get it for half that price using sites such as G2a, and Kinguin. Use those sites at your own risk, but I've bought many games from them and never had an issue. Again, this game proves that graphics aren't everything. Many of the games I've enjoyed the most these past years have had lower graphic styles, as as Minecraft, The Long Dark, and Banished, of which all are fantastic games. Update: October 22nd, 2015 - I can no longer recommend this game, at least for now. Reason is, it gets sluggish as hell once you reach over 500-1000 prisoners depending on how many staff members you have. I have decent hardware and there is no reason why the game should perform like this. It doesn't matter which graphic settings, or resolution I use. It must be a bug in the way the game calculates and moves around the people. I have no idea what it is, but it ruins the game for me. Like Cities Skylines, these games claim to be sandbox and open and such, but are limited, limited to an extent that makes them unfun. Sure, its fun if you want a tiny prison, but everything has to grow. Once they fix this issue, if they ever fix this issue, the game will be great. I'll keep looking into some tweaks that I may be able to perform that may help these issues.  
Josh

Testing yet another host - KnownHost

I feel a bit silly announcing that we have a new host within the time span of only a month, but well, we have a new host. I was very happy with ASmallOrange. The speed was okay, and the price was good. However, the hosting there was unamanged, and didn't have any control panel, which I knew going in, but it made making any changes very time consuming and complicated. The VPS and servers at ASmallOrange were so compiled and complicated using CentOS and Nginx, that rarely would any online tutorials for the systems help due to things being in different locations and such, and if I asked their support for help they'd reply with telling me to Google it, or use a third party host's tutorial files, which again, didn't help due to having their own set up. I recently learned that way back in 2012, ASmallOrange was bought buy EIG (Endurance International Group), which is a large group that goes around buying up all the webhosts that they can, such as HostGator. The problem with is this, they move all these hosts to their own datacenter, lower the quality of the hosting, and customer service and  support is nonexistent. They seemed to allow ASmallOrange to stay their own company/team and do their own thing so far, but I believe its only a matter of time before the quality goes down. Even if it stays as it is, I don't see it improving much or having much room for growth. I debating over the EIG situation for a few days asking myself if it really made sense to leave due to that. Like i said, the hosting is still great, and still gets high ratings, but at the end of the day, I really just don't want to support such a company (EIG, not the ASmallOrange team). I'd much rather support a company that is growing, and has a future in front of it. My good buddy Matt, who is a webhost himself, has told me about KnownHost, and suggested to me that I use them.  I begun researching them, and all I can find are high remarks and ratings. Especially over their support. I really don't care much about support to be honest, I presume a known host would have their crap together, and I shouldn't have any major problems, so I rarely ever end up actually using support. The fact though that they are proactive shows though that they are a caring company who is inspired to grow and get better. KnownHost specializes in VPS and Dedicated Servers. Which they all offer managed, so if I'd ever need help with anything at all, they'd be there to help me, and I don't have to worry about security and all that, because they'll be there monitoring it all for me. Managed is nice. They do have a page labeled MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING, but really, this just seems to be the standard VPS hosting, just optimized for Wordpress. I couldn't get a clear answer from Sales, or Support staff as to what they do to "optimize" it though. The sales staff told me that any VPS package could be optimized, but they suggest the SSD due to the speed, which I agreed, I don't see the point of going with old HDD when SSD is available. The total cost of hosting the Grunch at KnownHost would more than double, from $30 a month, to  $60+a month, which is crazy considering only a few months ago we were being hosted on a shared host that cost only $53 a year (using 50.00% Recurring Discount). So, I had to sleep on it, and decide of the weirdo issue with EIG was really worth doubling the monthly cost. I woke up and decided that it was. I know that Grunch will not get better, unless its made better (does that even make sense?), gotta put the power behind it... Like i said with ASmallOrange, everything was overly complicated and time consuming to achieve, such as restoring a backup, managed databases, etc. I decided to go with the SSD-2 VPS package, which comes with 2.5GB of ram which should be enough for now to power the Grunch, along with cPanel. I decided to get the LiteSpeed Addon for server performance and speed, which added a $12 LiteSpeed license price to the monthly bill. The total came out to $60.30 using the 10% lifetime coupon KNOWNSSD10. The VPS account was set up well within 5 minutes after paying, an d before I could contact support staff about Wordpress optimizations, they emailed me letting me know that they were installing LiteSpeed for me, I replied asking about the Wordpress optimizations, they immediately replied saying that he was only installing this, and that another support staff member would assist me in the optimizations.  The LiteSpeed addon only took a few minutes, then I got an email from another support guy saying that due to having Litespeed, The optimizations to Apache to work with Wordpress weren't needed. So that answers that question. There really aren't any complex backbone tweaks to make wordpress run better, jsut some minor Apache tweaks. When switching to ASmallOrange, I decided to take advantage of CloudFlare's DNS hosting. This is mostly because ASmallOrange didn't have DNS on their Wordpress hosting, so I had to find a third party DNS service, and CloudFlare was it. I wish I had used them sooner. Benefits of using CloudFlare to managed your domains DNS is that you do not have to wait for the DNS to propagate around the world when  you make a change. Previously I was switching hsots like crazy, and the DNS would bounce back and forth between the new and old host constantly for days, which can cause issues. Using CloudFlare I can easily change the IP (server) that the domain points to, and the changes would take affect immediately. Not only is there this benefit, but there are also other benefits such as caching, and DDOS protection, and best of all, CloudFlare offers this for free! I updated the IP  of the domain to point to the new server, and wallah. Uploaded the files, and all was done. First thing that I noticed is that I was not at all blown away by the speeds. The site loaded just as well as it did on ASmallOrange, and WE Engine, which isn't super super fast, but not too bad. Obviously I need to do some more optimizations on the wordpress end. The Sites score on many site testing tools has greatly improved though. Google PageSpeed Insight: [caption id="attachment_3166" align="aligncenter" width="652"] PageSpeed Insights[/caption] GTMetrix: [caption id="attachment_3167" align="aligncenter" width="595"] ASmallOrange VS KnownHost GTMEtrix Score[/caption] The ratings on the quality of customer service at KnownHost are true. Super fast response times to all of my emails. Each time the staff were super friendly, and helpful. So far, I am happy. We moved away from an EIG company, didn't lose speed, and have a huge future.https://www.knownhost.com/ Hopefully, we have a decent host now, and the Grunch can stay and grow! Edit: 10/8/15  - I got rid of some plugins, and now the pages here load super fast for me, and the pagescores have improved as well. Google is giving us a 90, and GTmetrix is now giving us a YSlow score of 92%, with a load time of less than 1second on average. Happy! [caption id="attachment_3178" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Updated score: As you can see, the cache system is taking effect to and lowing the size of the page.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3179" align="aligncenter" width="591"] Insight Updated Score[/caption]
Josh

Tip: Performing Facebook Advanced Searches

[caption id="attachment_3077" align="alignleft" width="310"] Facebook Advanced Search[/caption] A while back Facebook removed the ability to refine searches using the main search box on Facebook. No idea why they did it, but they did it. What we have now is a retarded search box that just finds whatever,  but nothing that you're really looking for. Previous, the Search on Facebook would allow you to refine your searches by typing specific names, and towns, jobs and other info such as: "People named ***** who live in Wichita, Ks, and works at McDonalds", etc. but this no longer works. I had given up on finding certain people that I was looking for until tonight, when I discovered that there is still a way to perform Facebook Advanced Searches. To do so, you need to be logged in, and goto the Requests page, and on the left of that page will be an Advanced Search box, where you can customize the info to find people based on name, city, etc, just as before, if not easier.    
Josh

Yelawolf - American You

I've always been a huge fan of Yelawolf's. Even long before he was famous. He deserves much more recondition than he currently has, but I know he'll get there some day. Anyone who's been through some struggles and continue trying to survive can relate to his raps/music. Check out this amazing song  off his latest album. [g1_quote author_name="Yelawolf" author_image="http://www.grunch.com/legacy/uploads/2015/09/yelawolfamericanyou-730x492.jpg" author_url="http://www.yelawolf.com/" author_description_format="%link%" align="center" size="s" style="solid" template="01"] You work hard, you don't beg, you don't borrow Night at the factory, daytime job at McDonald's You make somethin' out of nothin', you make money for a livin' Pushin' buttons, diggin' ditches, flippin' burgers in the kitchen With the vision, you've been dreamin', you've been savin' You've been given nothin' but shit But you take it cause you're patient in this prison [/g1_quote] Yelawolf - American You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8MratH51eY
Josh

Make Some Easy Cash Selling Domains

Many of my friends think that I'm addicted to buying website domains because I seem to constantly be doing that, which is true, but there is a good reason behind it: Cash. I'm not a big domain seller, meaning, I don't buy domains for thousands of dollars and then sell them for 5 times the amount, but I do buy domains for as low as $20, and usually sell them for double or triple what I paid, which means quick fast sells, where I usually double my money. That's $20 or more from nothing, with very minor work. I've been lucky in the past where I've bought a domain for less than $20, and sold it for several hundred. I actually bought the Grunch domain with money that I obtained for selling a few domains that I thought were crappy, but someone wanted them bad. So i got $500+ for them. Basically, I just look at expired domain lists, mostly at Godaddy. Name.com used to have a good expired list, but they recently changed the way their site looks, and it just sucks now. But really, Godaddy is all you need to do this. What Godaddy does is try to auction off all expiring domains that are about to drop and be deleted. Many Registrars do this, but Godaddy has the best price, along with a buy it now option. This is their attempt to make money from nothing. Daily I'll head on over to the auction page at https://auctions.godaddy.com/, and sort the search filters with options to only show me expiring domains, with the BUY IT NOW option, I also filter out domains with numbers and dashes. Also I only look for .coms. I usually filter out newer domains and put the age at 10+ years, but the domain I've sold for the most so far ($300+) was a new domain that was only a couple years old, that I only saw because i left the age out. My idea behind the aged domains is that if they've been registered for so long, they must be of some value, right? [caption id="attachment_3011" align="aligncenter" width="768"] GoDaddy Auctions Search Options[/caption]   And then on the search results I click the "Price" table column twice so it sorts the more expensive domains first, which are the newer ones, and since they're newer, there is more of a selection since they haven't been picked off yet.  The cheaper domains are $5, and most expensive are $11, but stay in mine that you still have to add the renewal fee to this price, so the total price will be around $25, but you can use coupons to make this price around $20 or less. Each day that goes by, the domain price drops, so I'll go from $11, to $10, to $8, to $5 and then eventually drop. Then I pretty much scroll through the pages, checking the name and age of the domains. If I see a really good one I'll immediately buy it. If I see one that is okay, I'll usually write it down, and keep checking it each day as the price gets lower, and eventually grap it when its listed at $8 or $5. But this is a bad practice, because I've lost chances at many very good domains by being cheap. If you see one you like that you think will sell, grab it! Don't wait. Keep in mind that even though there is a BUY IT NOW button, you wont actually get the domain now. Instead, Godaddy will take the payment, and remove the domain from the listing and list you as the winner, but you have to wait for the domains expiration date to drop off, which it then will be automatically added into your godaddy account, but don't worry! You wont lose the domain age, the age will remain intact. Age is valuable in the domain industry, the older the domain WITHOUT DROPPING, the more value it has. [caption id="attachment_3016" align="alignleft" width="337"] Godady Bidding Menu[/caption] It's usually 43 or so days from the expired date listed in the whois of the domain is when you'll get the domain. But godaddy also lists when you'll obtain the domain in the auction winner information. Click on the bidding tab, and a list will drop down, then head over to WON, and it'll give you a list of the domains, and on the very far right there will be status, which is where the date will be listed when you obtain the domain. Usually is a few days to a week after the auction end date, So you wont have to wait too long, certainly not 43 days. This domains were already long into the expiration timing before Godaddy Listed them to be sold. You'll get an email the date Godaddy adds them into your account. I used to wait 60 days before I tried to sell a domain, but I don't think you have to do this if you're selling a domain to another godaddy user. I think the 60 day wait in the ICANN rules is from the Registrar date, i could be wrong though. But what domainers usually do is do a FREE PUSH to the buyers account on the same Registrar, This should bypass the 60days, and also its free, so no transfer fees are required. Keep in mind that You have to actually buy good domains. Alot of newbies make the mistake of buying random crap domains, don't do this. The domain needs to be short, clean, and have some meaning and way to actually use it.  Look for keywords that will define the site, these are great for SEO, and I've seen people even sell crap domains before just based on the keywords in the domain. Now how do you sell the domain you just bought? My Practice is very simple, I just head on another to a popular Domain Selling forum, where I list the domains for free. The forum I prefer going to now is NamePros.com, I used to visit other forums such as DigitalPoint and sell domains back in the day, but their rules are so crazy anymore, its hard to do any business. NamePros is all you need. There are listing sites such as Sedo that you can use, but I prefer a quick fast sale, where I at least double my money. I'm not looking into getting rich, unless the domain is really good. I usually list the domain in the "Make an Offer" forum to see which offers come, sometimes this is enough to make a quick sell. I've notice lately that even on domains that I have trouble selling, I can set up an auction on the forum where people seem to go crazy for domains. I think the longer they think about the domain the more they want it. So a domain I could've easily sold for $20-30 is now selling for $50 or even more via the auctions. Either way, this is very small easy work where the costs are low, and the rewards at least doubles your money. Sometimes even quad-triples it. Keep in mind that you're dealing directly with the buyers when you list in the forum. The website has no control over the transaction. So you'll need to research the buyer before you accept their offer. Sites such as NamePros have iTrader feedback, which will display how many transaction they have participated in, along with a negative and positive review. I'm usually very hesitant with newer member accounts with zero feedback. If I am selling a domain for super low I'll usually go ahead with the sell, but if it looks sketchy i'll back out. But since its between you and the buyer, if you get scammed, then its your lost. The site has no control over it. Free open market place that you are using for free. [caption id="attachment_3024" align="aligncenter" width="768"] My NamePros iTrader feedback[/caption] Now I'm not a huge domain seller, and I don't spend that much time doing this, But i can imagine that if you went crazy with this, you could be making lots of money, and maybe this could be a way for you to get your foot into the door. You don't have to only sell domains on NamePros, you can also be the buyer. Imagine this scenario, which has happened many times: Buy a $20 domain on Godaddy Auctions, Sell that domain on NamePros or another domain selling website for double or triple the money. Repeat this process several times without much work until you racked up a few hundred dollars, then you buy a much better premium domain on NamePros. Now you can hold on to that domain for a few months, and then list it for resale, and double that money if not make thousands. This happens all the time. I get a bit scared of dealing with this much money, but it does happen. NamePros isn't only a site for selling and buying domains. There is also alot of knowledge being posted there to help you learn the domaining business, help make the right decision, and just learn more and more. There are pros there that deal with thousands and even millions of dollars with domains. I suggest heading over there, sign up for free, and read some of the discussions. Domaining is pretty much finding the right buyer which can take some time, but I sell quickly. Sure, many of these domains I've probably could've sold for much, MUCH more money, but since I wanted quick sales. Doubling my money meant I'm getting easy money from thin air almost. That's enough for me. If you wish to check out other expiring domain auctions other than GoDaddy, you can check out Namejet.com, which auctions off expiring domains from eNom, and SnapNames. I'll list more as i find them, but I pretty much stick with Godaddy due to how easy and simple it is. There is no limit to the amount of money you can generate by doing this. Depends on the time you put in, and the quality of the domains you look for. I'm no where close to being one of the big players, but you could easily become one. It's all up to you!  
Josh

Short Takes - September 19, 2015

Chase and DigitalRiver Fraud?
Something weird happen this morning. I woke up to an email from Chase asking if this recent purcahse made with my Chase card was fraud or not. The charge was for $14.99, from DRI*AVAST SOFTWARE. I suppose the DRI stands for DigitalRiver which is a payment processing company thing, and this time supposedly they are charging for an Avast Subscription. The problem with this is, I DON'T USE THE CARD, and besides, I don't use Avast. I got the card last year, and used it for one month. In November of 2014, I made a total of 8 purchases, mostly at real life stores, and one large one via paypal for an iPhone 6 Plus. This card has remained untouched in my wallet collecting butt dust since then. So my question is, how the hell did anyone get the info to perform and charge? It doesn't make any sense. Even if I had a virus on my machine that  stole card data, I haven't used the card, and these thieves would be much better to use one of my other more active cards with higher limits. There is something fishy going on here, and I'm not sure what it is. Some people who also have Chase cards have been randomly charged by DigitalRiver for other things. Anyways, Chase is sending me a new card with a new number. Either way, It's nice how they contacted me so fast about this fraud. Something I likely wouldn't have noticed otherwise for a long while. Facebook Dislike Button
Facebook is coming out with a dislike button, which I guess is cool? I'd rather just have a button that lets me fully and completely delete my account.  Since Facebook Accounts are for ever, I'd prefer a way to just disable ratings period. edit: It's been brought to my attention that you can delete facebook. I've never found this option before, even after searching and searching. Here is a delete button. Donald Trump Still Leads in Polls
I don't know who the hell takes part in these polls and questionnaires, but apparently Trump is still leading in poles. I love how the media and other candidates are constantly trying to belittle Trump. What does it say about them if the guy who they constantly mock and make a joke out of is doing far better than they are? The "Liberal media" is just as bad, really? Hillary?... It would be cool to have Bill back in the whitehouse though, if even just for novelty and nostalgia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q96wexKWwo I always respected Trump for how he stood up and defended Michael Jackson all these years, especially during the child molestation trial, while all the fakes were shying away from Michael.  It shows loyalty and character. The media likes to call Trump a bully, but he seems loyal and 100% friendly until you try to bully or betray him. Like the people in the polls, I'd trust him as President over all these other goons, including Hillary, but that doesn't say he's great, it says the rest just stink. Oh well, i don't really pay attention to Politics anymore, all seems like bullshit to me anymore, I think many agree, which is why Trump is ahead, because he isn't like the rest, or the usual. Mad Max - Game - PC Steam.
I picked up the Mad Max game for steam. Actually got it off G2A.com for only $18. Pretty fun game, especially if you like open world. Visuals are stunning. Controls are clunky, but so far its a great game. Check it out if you haven't. Good deal for $18, not sure though for $59. Steam Link ($59.99 ), G2A.com link (currently $15.77). Foxy Shazam
I wrote about the lead singer of Foxy Shazam, Eric Nally a few days ago. The more I hear songs from this band, the more I like them. I don't think I've ever liked so many songs off of a album before. I can't stop listening to them. Check out their albums "The Church Of Rock and Roll", and the self Titled album "Foxy Shazam".  Was an amazing band. Hopefully they can repair their band, or Eric can go solo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V5f_T4TXTQ
New Host: A Small Orange
I wrote about looking for a new host and having tested WPEngine a long some others. I'm very happy with the host I decided to go with: A Small Orange. This server is speedy and consistent. Only took me a day or so to set the site up, which was mostly due to me having to learn commands and crap, but it seems to be all going good now.  You can be the judge of how fast the site loads. We have a heavy resource intensive theme it seems, and this host handles our install just fine. Check them out: ASmallOrange.com
Josh

New Host: TrafficPlanetHosting, WPEngine, A Small Orange

The two users who visit The Grunch may have noticed that it was online for the past day or so. This was due to me moving the site to yet another new host, and having to learn how to use linux console commands to get it up and running. Our other host TrafficPlanetHosting is great, but they have some odd server technology, where the site would like goto sleep, and it was like a hamster running on a wheel meaning it has to pick up its speed each time someone would visit the site, which i found to be very on. The site could sometimes take too long to initially load, but then some times pages would randomly take a while to load as well. I find this to be very annoying. I want the pages to be super snappy. TrafficPlanetHosting seems to have good weeks and then bad weeks. Google was reporting server response times of over 1sec to me with TrafficPlanetHosting, which is a problem I initially had with them and contacted support about, but that issue went away for a month, only to return this past week. ** I'm going to refer to TrafficPlanetHosting as TPH for now on, silly name is too dang long to type out each time, ha I actually verified this "sleep" like state using the First Byte test. The first connection was 12seconds, and then 2nd and third were much less. I want the dang pages to load when you click on them! Grunch is never going to be successful if it has random connection issues. My search for another new host started. I knew I wanted Managed Wordpress since that is what the site uses, and not some shared hosting. I've been eyeballing WP Engine for a while, everyone says how speedy they are, but their starting prices are high, and its scary how they charge based on visitors, including bots and spam, which has always made avoid them. I found a $4 coupon to test out their Personal plan, so I figured what the heck. I signed up, and loaded a backup of the Grunch, and connected to it via a subdomain that they provided for me to use to test the speeds.... Man were they a disappointment. For being way over priced, and being as known as they are, I just assumed the pages would load super snappy and much better, but nope. They did seem to load slightly better than TPH even by a whole entire ms! but not by much, certainly not much more to have to potentially paying alot more, since Wp Engine limits your visitors, and chargers for more. Comparison: TrafficPlanetHosting VS WP Engine:
I tested both using their smallest plans. TPH: Business Plan - $24.99 /MO. WPEngine: Personal Plan - $29 /MO. It's hard to get an accurate score of TPH, mostly due to as i said, their speed changes often. WP Engine was mostly consistent with giving me the same scores, which weren't much faster than TPH. WP Engines slowest and fastest score: [caption id="attachment_2974" align="aligncenter" width="723"] WP Engine Fastest and Slowest scores - GTMetrix[/caption] TrafficPlanetHosting: [caption id="attachment_2975" align="aligncenter" width="723"] TrafficPlanetHosting Fastest and Slowest scores - GTMetrix[/caption] Things to consider: TPH allows me to use whatever cache method I prefer, and I am using a highly customized w3 cache setup (was a pain in the ass to get working right), while WP Engine uses their on server side caching system, which as you see, provides a much lower score than w3 cache does, even though the pages are nearly a whole millisecond faster. Do these things really even matter to the user? I'm starting to wonder myself. Google PageSpeed Insight Results:
WPEngine: [caption id="attachment_2973" align="aligncenter" width="664"] WP Engine - Insight Speed[/caption] TrafficPlanethosting: [caption id="attachment_2972" align="aligncenter" width="664"] TrafficPlanetHosting - Insight score[/caption]     But as you can see, WP Engine wasn't MUCH faster. At least not fast enough to validate paying as much extra as I would be, while be limited on cache systems other plugins that they disallow, which over all hurt my page score on all scoring sites including Google's PageSpeed Insights, and I still got a deduction for server response, which is almost as bad of not the same as TPH (TPH bounced between .50 - 1ms). So, WP Engine is out of the bucket of potential hosts. Oh well, their price structure scares me. My Search for host continued.... There is a Managed Wordpress Host called "FlyWheel", which I may still try out, they have some highly positive reviews, but I came across this benchmark site during my reaserch, which already tests most of these hosts, which you can view here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2015/07/28/wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-2015/ They brought many new hosts to my attention, especially one they talk about called A Small Orange, which got the highest over all scores in his tests. I checked out their prices on their website, and it's not too bad. Review Signal's reviews say its managed Wordpress Hosting, but I came to discover that its not. Not at all. It's more unmanaged VPS, with VPS Templates that are designed for certain things, such as wordpress. Which ReviewSignal finally points out in the comment section below the article, and they even state that while it's great, their Wordpress VPS doesn't come with control panel, or any such thing, so you'll have to be comfortable with using the linux terminal, and console commands. Scary! But while talking to their Sales Staff, They said they do have a cpanel/whm wordpress template that isn't as fast but works, so that's always an option. [g1_quote author_name="A Small Orange" author_image="http://www.grunch.com/legacy/uploads/2015/09/logo.png" author_url="https://asmallorange.com" author_description_format="%link%" source_url="https://kb.asmallorange.com/customer/portal/articles/1603150-all-about-our-wordpress-optimized-lemp" align="center" size="s" style="solid" template="02"] The A Small Orange WordPress Optimized LEMP stack is built upon Nginx version 1.4.x, PHP versions 5.4 or 5.5 (template dependent) with PHP-FPM and MySQL 5.5. The installation has been tuned with appropriate configuration files to achieve a high degree of performance within A Small Orange's Cloud VPS and Dedicated server platforms. [/g1_quote] I decided to give them ago, I got the Cloud VPS - Level II Plan, which comes 2 Dedicated scores, 2048 MB, 50 GB Storage, and 1 TB bandwidth for only $30 a month. Much more than I was getting at TPH, but for only $5 more. Trying to copy the site over to ASO probably made me lose some hair over the next day or so. The main problem is, this Cloud VPS is unmanaged, so you pretty much have to set it up yourself, and they don't offer many tutorials on it. Not knowing what you're doing and how they have it set up is what screws you up in the beginning. They call the templates "lemps", and this wordpress one pretty much installs wordpress, and all the scripts and server architecture to offer the best wordpress performance, but at first It looks like a huge mess. While it doesn't come with a control panel, it does come with a VPS manager, which allows you to shut down, restart, and completely reformat and reset it at any time, which is nice, and also FTP access. But all real work will be done using command line via SSH. AHH! While it was a headache at first, I'm actually finding this command stuff to be fun, ha. This Wordpress Lemp doesn't offer DNS. They give you IPs to use, but you have to manage your DNS elsewhere, I decided to go with CloudFlare, which I've should've done way sooner. I'm using the free Plan, which offers security, but also offers DNS so that I don't have to keep taking my sites down while the DNS propagates around the world for a few days. Using Cloudflare, I simply just change the IP it points to, and it updates the domain to point to that server immediately. Nice. Use it Cloudflare if you aren't already, if only for this feature, but they also provide security, which is great. So far I'm enjoying ASO's service. It's fast, and what I like more about it as compared to TPH is its consistent. It might not match TPH's top speed, but it's never slow as TPH often is. Due to not being able to use the same cache methods as I was using on TPH, I get a lower over all score using many of these testing sites, but they don't matter much to me, because actual usage and speed is better, which is what I prefer. Besides, I've ran many of the tests on some of the sites that I visit, which load super fast, and they get scores in the 50's and such, so maybe I shouldn't worry too much about some score. [caption id="attachment_2981" align="aligncenter" width="730"] A Small Orange GTMetrix[/caption]   As you can see, i get a lower score due to the compression and other cache methods, but over all a better speed, which stays consistent. [caption id="attachment_2982" align="aligncenter" width="1147"] ASmallOrange PageSpeed Insight Score[/caption] I'm certain that the above score is lower due to not having the same minified settings. The render-blocking javascript and CSS really hurts the score, but as you can see, there is no response time warning, and if it ever does show, its never higher than .40sec. Anyways, for now and the foreseeable future The Grunch is going to be hosted on a VPS from A Small Orange. The performance over all is much better than both WP Engine, and Traffic Planet Hosting, also they provide more space and bandwidth for around the same price. Even though this VPS LEMP thing SEEMS  way super complicated, it's really not, with the way they have it set up. I was just an idiot wanting to mess around, but the SSH Console and learning commands has been really fun for me. If you don't need to do any of that, it pretty much works out of the box using the info they provided. I suggest checking out their hosting packages, especially the VPS, and seeif they work for you. You can use coupon "gWFrA" to save 15% off your first invoice. https://asmallorange.com
Josh

Eric Nally, Who the heck?

[caption id="attachment_2956" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Eric Nally Stealing the show on the Tonight Show last weekend.[/caption] The chances are high that you've recently seen or heard the popular song "Downtown" music video or song by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, and most likely heard the catchy chorus sung well by some dynamic singer, which I think is the best part of the song. The song itself goes from strange, to interesting, to annoying after a few plays, while the chorus remains great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGhoLcsr8GA The guy behind the voice in the chorus is Eric Nally,  who is the former lead singer of a rock band called Foxy Shazam, that disbanded some time last year, temporarily or for good. And man, can this guy really sing! Many people compare him to Queen's Freddie Mercury, but I don't hear it. He does have unique strong dynamical vocals and an electrical and strong stage presence, but I see him as his own style and character. I checked out several of the albums the band put out, and so far their 2010 self titled album Foxy Shazam is my favorite, and is probably going to be one of my all time favorites of over all albums. Many of the tracks on this album have grown on me, from "Oh lord", to "Connect", to my new favorite "Evil Thoughts". It's really refreshing to hear music that isn't like all the other crap being released anymore. I'm a creeper, and when I get interested in an Artist I like to look in and learn about them.  Eric Nally seems like a really cool down to earth soft spoken guy, who can be super weird at times, but always seems nice and cool. He has a wife/longtime girl, and several kids with her. I predict after the popularity of the Downtown track, Eric's career is going to take off. He has certainly createda fan in me, and has a nice talent that I think the world will enjoy. I hope though that he makes his own music, and stays away from this rap stuff. Links: Check out Foxy Shazam's Amazon page to sample and buy tunes! Eric Nally's Website Eric's facebook Eric's Twitter InstaGram Foxy Shazam' Youtube channel Some great videos:
  Great Acapella/Acounstic Live Performance of "Evil Thoughts" [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF-rvo3kEfQ[/embed] "Oh Lord" music video: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg4CPaKzSUU[/embed] "Connect" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD52kn2VrbE   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKo5WK0liUs
Josh

Short Takes: Apple Event

Man oh man, when did Apple become so boring? Nothing new or innovative anymore. I used the iPhone as my phone, I love it, and prefer it over all others, so don't assume that I'm an Apple hater. The Latest Mac OS X LOOKd way better than windows 10, but just looks, not functions, and it's just not worth the price. I was most excited about Apple TV today than anything else. I knew they'd offer an over sized iPad, and a new iPhone, but the Apple TV was the only supposedly "new", and "fresh" thing, well was supposed to be at least. What a damn let down. As I've written in the past, I do all my TV watching online, no cable, no satellite. As I have for years. I either Stream from my pc, or use Netflix, or Sling TV for live TV. Apple TV was supposed to offer live streaming TV, or at least its what I was hoping, and offer more live streaming channels than both Sling, and the PlayStation Vita. Apple Upgrade Program
One good thing  was announced was the Apple iPhone Upgrade program, which lets you pay a monthly fee every month, price is dependent on the phone and size you get, and you simply exchange the old one for a new gen after 12 months (if a newer gen is out by then). You basically get an unlocked iPhone, which Apple Care+ which is pretty cool! The bad thing about this upgrade program as of now, is its only available in the US, and it must take place at an APPLE STORE, which are very rare. Read more about the upgrade program here: http://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
Josh

Short Takes - August 4, 2015

I'm going to start a new category here on Grunch called 'Short Takes'. Alot of times I just want to comment on something which doesn't need an entire article.  This will fulfill that need, and also allow me to write more without worrying about how to stretch something out to be a page or so long. Grunch Logo - I've been working all night and day trying to find a suitable logo, I can't find one. But, I found one that looks okay, and well work for now. Old logo: Current 'New' logo: [caption id="attachment_2909" align="aligncenter" width="300"] This screen of the media library shows a sample of how many different fonts and designs i've uploaded and tried.[/caption] 11 year old boy in St. Louis shooting and killing an intruder - I first heard about this on CNN today. The Anchor lady was being overly dramatic about the situation, not applauding the boy for defending himself and his little sister, but rather whining about how the boy was home alone and had access to guns. What the hell? They seriously want all the kids now to continue to grow up as pussies. I was left home often when I was a kid, and I'm only semi-retarded now. This kid is responsible enough to defend himself and his little sister. If he hadn't had access to the gun, who knew what would've happen? Two kids could be dead, instead criminal was stopped in his tracks,  and no one else was injured, so whats the issue here? This kid is a hero. The real story is why crime is out of control, and why did this kid even HAD to defend his family and himself. Why is the media constantly victimizing the criminals, while trying to make the good guys and police look bad? I expect the current evens to make this situation much worse. Media is majorly to blame. Kids shouldn't have access to guns, but this time it potentially saved their lives. Link to article at CNN. Gnat / Fruit Fly issue - Seems to be a gnat/little flat issue going on nationally this year. They are constantly in my room and jihading my coffee, and flying into my mouth. I noticed them else where at the store, and also seen an segnment on the news today about it bering a national issue.I usually hate killing anything, but these things are out of control, and I finally had enough of them. I bought this Fruit Fly at work, and so far there are at least 15 suckers in the trap, and its only been a couple hours. WOOT. You can buy the trap at Walmart for $5.88. Link to the item at Walmart.com   IGN free iOS game of the month: Radiation Island - This game looks good, and sounds good. Says it's an Open world Survival game, which is my type of game, and hey, it's FREE for the month! GET IT! [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vZU02uLUSw[/embed] link to IGN FREE GAME page.
Josh

Grand Theft Auto V - PC Worth Buying Yet?

[caption id="attachment_2838" align="aligncenter" width="768"] AI People of Los Santos just living out their lives.[/caption] Grand Theft Auto V - On the PC is probably the most fun game I have played in a very long time. Especially the online mode. I LOVE games that have a bit of realism to them, and a huge open free-roam sandbox world. GTA Has always had that, and the latest version takes it to a new level. Its an ALL IN ONE game, meaning it has alot of different games rolled into run, such as FPS Shooters - Death Match- Team Death Match, Strategy with Heists, Racing, and more! It's super amount of fun. The atmosphere of the game is so amazing, especially in single player. They remove some of the atmospheric affects from the online version, such as animals. But, It's still a fun busy world. I had been eagerly waiting for GTA V to be released on the PC for years, and was so happy back in April when it was released finally. I pre purchased it so I could have it loaded before the release date, which was a good deal since its around 50gb, and takes a few hours to download. [caption id="attachment_2824" align="alignleft" width="300"] Walking in the mountains hiding from the police. So beautiful![/caption] After loading the game I was simply amazed by the graphics. I Don't have the latest high end graphics card, i'm still toting a EVGA GTX 770SC, and the game runs beautifully at high graphics. The first thing I noticed was how amazing it felt to simply walk in the GTA V world. It felt very real, from the sounds of distance cars, animals, people talking around. Walking at night really felt awesome. I really never experienced that in a game before to that deph. GTA has always had it huge with the atmosphere of a game, but they took it up a few notches with GTA V. I pretty much bought GTA V for the single player, so it took a few weeks before I tried the Online, which honestly I didn't even know about when I bought it. I assumed it was going to be as buggy as the mods were for the previous versions of GTA. I wasn't aware that it was an sandbox open world. [caption id="attachment_2842" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Los Santos at dusk. So beautiful.[/caption] The thing that put me off about the online world is that you have to go through some missions at first when you first load it up, which made me think it was going to be a mission based online game, pretty much co-play with someone else, and not an open world, but once i passed those first few missions i was pretty much in the open world. The online world is so amazing, but it has its drawbacks. There is so much to do, such as go on heists and do missions for the AI to earn money that you can spend on new cars, or upgrades for them, and on weapons, or you can just drive around and shoot the other players in freemode. [caption id="attachment_2831" align="aligncenter" width="768"] The Racing in GTA V is so fun. Cars handle well and are very sexy.[/caption] Racing in GTA Online is amazing as well. I personally don't care for racing games, but GTA made it fun for me. The cars handle so well, and they really give you a rush when you drive them with all the effects, and sounds. [caption id="attachment_2828" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Relaxing to climb atop a building at night and just look at the world below. Even more amazing when you realize each light and object an actually there.[/caption] This game is simply amazing. One thing I love to do is just fly on top of a mountain or a skyscraper at night, and just sit and watch the city below. It's actually very relaxing. There is so much going on. You can see the whole city below you, and the amazing thing is each light in the distance is an actual car, building, or person that you can actually travel to. Something can appear to be miles away, and in most games that'd just be a flat wallpaper graphic, but in GTA is an actual object that exists in the game. WOW! What's even more amazing is that's not even the end. There is much more passed the mountains and beyond what the eye can see that exists, and its realistic distance. It's not like most games that just draw/load objects when they are beyond a certain distance. [caption id="attachment_2839" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Busy City of Los Santos[/caption] Here are the draw backs. The game is laggy. So laggy. The matchmaking is supposed to be good, but it usually pairs me when people on the other side of the world, that have crazy lag, they teleport/desync around like crazy, which makes it hard to shoot them to defend yourself, or escape, or even chase them. What sucks even more about the lag is it seems the players around you load in some of the AI, so if there is a laggy player, you'll also have some laggy Cars around you that are driven by the AI. CHEATERS EVERYWHERE! I hate to call these kids "hackers", since they're pretty much just loading a free already made trainer, but these kids are everywhere in the game, essentially ruining it. You can spend days doing jobs, killing, winning races in the game to collect money to buy an awesome car, only for a cheater to come and drop millions of dollars on the ground for people to just pick up. Sure it's nice to have all that easy free money, but it ruins the game, and shortens the fun time of the game. Also lately the cheaters have been putting god mode on themselves, and floating around killing everyone. Ruins the game when you're in battle with someone for a few minutes, and cheater flies above you on a motorcycle and instant headshots you. It's annoying. Online is still fun, even with the cheaters. I hope Rockstar fixes this cheater problem. Hopefully they learned some sort of lesson and the next version of GTA online will have some REAL anti cheat system in place. Preferably not PunkBuster, but something that works! They seem to have something that semi-works now, and people are getting banned. It's just very slow and takes a long while. Obviously it's not doing the job because cheaters are so very rampant. [caption id="attachment_2834" align="aligncenter" width="792"] GTA Online Session Options[/caption] For now, if you wish to play a more secure game with only people you trust, or even by yourself, you can choose to launch a solo, or invite, or friend only session which will only let your friends and people you trust in. Surely there are communities of trusting players out ther ethat game this way. I haven't found any, perhaps could start one myself. Worth buying?
With that said, is the game worth buying? Heck yes! for single player alone its worth buying. I prefer to just cruise around in single player most of the time. No lag, just you and the open busy world. Just the amount of work and detail they put into this game justifies the $59 price tag. Rockstar is quickly adding new content into the game, that is FREE! No need to buy DLC. It's all free. New guns, vehicles, clothing, and more are constantly being added. As I said in the opening of this post, I love open world sandbox games. Especially realistic survival ones. GTA isn't very realistic, and there isn't a sense of survival other than not being shot by a laggy player or hacker in the face. But it'd be so awesome if someone was to make a mod of GTA V kinda like DAYZ. Not by adding zombies, but by adding a more realistic Survival feel. To Date, Dayz MOD (not the standalone), is the only game that has given me that realistic raw survival feeling. It's graphics are ugly, and its laggy and so resource intenstive. Imagine such a game running on/in the GTA world/engine. Wow that'd be simply amazing. [caption id="attachment_2840" align="aligncenter" width="768"] The Police chases and shootouts alone are worth the money![/caption] You can buy GTA V from Rockstar Directly here: http://www.rockstargames.com/V/order Or if you prefer to have it on steam (both require SocialClub from rockstar). http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/271590/
Josh

Tech Tip: Larger Thumbnails in Picasa

Picasa is my favorite photo organizer. It's lightweight, fast and simple to use. My only main bug with Picasa is how small the thumbnails are, especially on modern resolutions. This is probably due to Picasa being a pretty old program. Google has added features to it such as annoying Google+ integration, but no meaningful core updates. My current monitor resolution is 2560x1080 pixels, which isn't even close to being up with the most modern 4k resolutions, due to this thumbnails in picasa go from super tiny small to super small. I have an ultra wide monitor, so I want the ability to view larger versions of my photos in the preview thumbnails. [caption id="attachment_2733" align="aligncenter" width="300"] The Largest The Thumbnails can get in Picasa.[/caption]   I discovered a trick to making the thumbnails larger, which is a simple registry tweak, and with this trick, I can pretty much make the thumbnails as large as I want. ** Edit the registry at your own risk. You can really mess up your computer if you alter the wrong settings. Make sure Picasa is properly closed and not running. [caption id="attachment_2730" align="alignright" width="300"] RegEdit Picasa[/caption] Simply push Win Key+ R to open Run and type 'RegEdit', or if you're on windows 7 and up simply type regedit in the start menu. Once you open regedit navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Picasa\Picasa2\Preferences and look for 'Thumbscale", next ot that you're see a bunch of weird numbers such as "00x0000400", the 400 represents the current max size of the thumbnails in Picasa. You can right click on Thumbscale and select 'Modify', here you can change the resolution. I believe 400 is 400 pixels, so what I did was change the option, load up Picasa and repeat the process til I found the best resolution. I ended up going with 800, which provides me with decent large sized thumbnails in Picasa. I suggest creating a .reg file in order to easily apply this thumbnail size in the future, because if you touch the thumbnail slider size within Picasa, it'll reset the thumbnails and you'll have to redo this entire process over again. To do this, just open Notepad from the start menu, and copy the following and paste it into notepad. Save it as 'picasa800.reg', or whatever name you want, just make sure the extension is .reg. Now all you have to do is double click that reg file and apply it to restore the large thumbnails in Picasa. Remember Picasa must be closed for this change to take effect. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Picasa\Picasa2\Preferences] "Thumbscale"=dword:00000800 [caption id="attachment_2812" align="aligncenter" width="627"] Picasa Apply Reg[/caption] If you don't want to go though this messy option, you can download my reg file I use, which is set for 800pixel resolutions. You can also open the reg file in notepad and change the number to whichever resolution you want. (to do this simply right click on the reg file and goto OPEN WITH, and select notepad, do not select always open with). Download Reg File (right click, SAVE as). Now enjoy large thumbnails! [caption id="attachment_2731" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Picasa 800x Thumbnails[/caption] If you don't already have Picasa, I suggest you get it for free from Google! https://picasa.google.com/  
Josh

Canceling Sling TV Subscription *updated*

* Update - August 24, 2015 - Subscription renewed- Sling gave me a free month, click here to read. I wrote an article a few months ago about how I loved Sling Tv. Back then, I only watched it on a spare monitor hooked up to my computer set up, which worked fine. However, Since that time I have purchased and 60inch Smart TV, and have gotten more serious into my TV entertainment and such. Sling did seem to work better on the TV than it did on the PC, such as I didn't really get the audio sync issues that always popped up after a while. Since then, the Service as degraded so horribly, and the novelty of Streaming TV service is quickly wearing off. For the past month A&E, History, and History 2 channels, and possible even more (these are the only channels i really watch), have been pretty much unwatchable. They are having a weird bug where the audio channels are pretty much ruined. The background noise is louder than the dialog/vocals. You can barely here anything any of the fellas of Pawn Stars are saying. I figured this would be a bug that only lasted a few hours to days, but after a week or so had pasted I decided to contact their support via facebook. I read many other people on facebook having the same issue, and Sling only replies with the same vague generic response. [caption id="attachment_2677" align="alignleft" width="300"] Cancel Threat[/caption] I never contacted their support via Facebook other than a public wall post. I contacted them ages ago about the iPhone bug, which they never replied to. So, Whats the point of that? Besides, its not isolated to my account. A week later, and the issue still exists, many people still reporting it, and still getting the same bullshit reply. Is this really something that is overly complicated to fix? It sure doesn't seem like it, but im not an Audio tech expert, but it seems like Sling doesn't have any of those working for them anyways. A thing that kinda makes me even more bitter today is another guy posted the same issue last night, and a few of us replied to him disusing how fed up we are with Sling, and their vague copy and paste responses, but some how that post is magically gone, or its hidden from me now. I haven't noticed this because I haven't bothered watching, but in between reading people complaining about this audio issue, alot of people are also complaining about some weird no content error, which i think is due to too many people watching. I think Sling is dropping the ball here. There are so many streaming services popping up everyday, and there are slowly more and more options to chose from. Sling had the chance since it was the true first Live TV Streamer on the internet, but these bugs and all the glitches really make its it undependable. *Update* While writing this post, I contacted Sling Support, And they pretty much told me that the Facebook replies are just from Hired PR people, and the actually Sling support team doesn't have any way of speaking to their developers/engineers, tech people, so they have no idea whats going on and when it'll be fixed, and as a matter a fact, they even agreed with me that Sling is "unwatchable", and this is "unacceptable". Suggested that after the issue is resolved, I SHOULD be able to contact them and get some sort of credit. While I appreciate their more honest, candid reply to my support email, It only shows me that they seem to have no idea what they are doing. Do people not talk  to each other there? Perhaps that's why they have so many issues. Since I started writing this article, the audio issue has been mostly resolved (after nearly a month), but there are still many other issues that exist, such as their servers going down when too many people are attempting to watch Sling. It's very annoying. I'd suggest to stay away Sling for now, til they organize their departments better at least. How can any of these issues be resolved if their teams don't speak to each other? [caption id="attachment_2714" align="alignright" width="300"] An Error Has Occurred - Get used to this error.[/caption] And to be honest, Sling, as with cable tv, really never has anything on to watch, mostly repeats, and when there is something that everyone wants to watch, the Service crashes. i've found myself watching and using my $12 Netflix subscription more lately, which seems to have more to watch on it. [caption id="attachment_2721" align="alignright" width="1233"] Sling TV Cancelled[/caption]
Update - August 24, 2015 - Sling has resumed my subscription and given me a free month. To be honest I am glad that they did this. I kinda missed having live TV. The audio issues seem to be completely resolved. I won't have to actually pay for another month from now. I'll update this then.
Josh

H1Z1 Fun yet?

I'm still looking for a game to replace Dayz MOD (not standalone), as the best Survival Game. H1Z1 seemed promising, and like it could be the one, but for the months after it was released, h1z1 was such a let down. Let's make it clear: I don't even care about zombies, I really just want an open world realistic Survival sandbox game, and Its only that most developers are basing their games on a zombie apocalypse, and if they're going to add zombies, they need to do it right. To date, Dayz MOD is the only online game that has provided me the raw survival feeling. Even with all its bugs and lag, and stupid ass dumb running zombies, it's still provides the best survival experience in my opinion. When i mention "DayZ", i am meaning the mod, not the broken boring mess that is DayZ Standalone. I started to write a  review back when H1Z1 was released, but as many, I was confused about the game, so I didn't know what to write. I kinda liked the game, but it was just so buggy and felt so limited, while at the same time seeming very promising. I just couldn't solve this puzzle that was within my head. The bottom line is, H1Z1 just wasn't fun to play for long periods of time. There were constant bugs. The previous loot spawn issue ruined the game, and didn't make me want to explore it any further to be honest. The game was pretty much running around checking hundreds of loot spots such as boxes, fridges, containers, trash bins, old cars, only for it all to be empty. It really sucked! Everyone will yell at you for bringing up bugs and glitches since it is Early Access, and I understand that agree that bugs are a given any any early access title, but i can also say that it wasn't very much fun to play in its current state. Main problems that made it unplayable: Loot spawn glitches - loot would rarely spawn random zombie spawns and weird ai no fun if you're alone hackers and lots of them [caption id="attachment_2616" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Haze + Rain = Nice shiny Visuals[/caption] [caption id="attachment_2614" align="alignleft" width="300"] So many Zeds - Chasing my bud Seth![/caption] Anyways, months latter my friend and I decided to load up the game, and give it a go. My first impressions were the graphics looked much better. They added some hazyfogginess-whatever to the game, which actually looks pretty nice, and sets the atmosphere. The second thing I noticed is that there are TONS OF ZOMBIES. Everywhere. Maybe even TOO MANY! and I'm not sure how to escape from them. They seem to be drawn to you no matter what, unlike DayZ which as Zombie Agro which is alerted by noise and sight so you can sneak around and hide from the Zombies by crouching and crawling. The zombies in H1Z1 are just always aware it seems, but overall their AI  seems much better and more intelligent than those in DayZ, but there really needs to be a way to avoid them. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SbLCiMmyY[/embed] In the above video, my friend and i were stuck in an apartment building which was surrounded by at least 30 zombies. It Was kinda freaky hearing them try to get it and the closer you got to ground level the louder they became. Eventually we were able to escape from them by jumping off a balcony and just running. I guess we out ran the zombies because soon they were all gone and behind us. I'd hate to think that they magically vanished because that'll lower the quality of the game. *note - I logged in later and played by myself, and only saw a few zombies here and there. Which is weird considering the amount the time before. Maybe when two players are on more spawn, i'm not sure, I only saw about two zombies this time as I was playing alone, so i'm not too sure how the zombies work and what triggers them to spawn in. [caption id="attachment_2615" align="alignright" width="300"] Shoot, they is even Zeds on Mountains - Forrest Gump[/caption] Another thing I noticed almost immediately is the interaction between the Zombies and the animals. I'm always being constantly attacked by the wolves in H1Z1, which usually never kill me unless i'm already injured, and running into a bear means an inevitable death. Previously the animals and zombies would just ignore each other. Upon loading up the game I saw a zombie chasing a deer, which was hilarious. Some how the zombie caught it which i don't see how since its nearly impossible for a human player to do such a thing. Now You can easily lose wolves and bears by leading them into zombies which usually end up attacking each other. There is now tons of loot in the game that seems to spawn in just fine. It's not OP as it was when it worked in the past, such as you wont find guns everywhere. I find tons of ammo, but hardly any guns. Zombies will often drop a bag with a hat or some other item in it which you can use to craft into bandages by shredding. I'm pretty happy with the loot system now. [caption id="attachment_2619" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Hazy Nights[/caption] [caption id="attachment_2623" align="alignleft" width="300"] Crafting - Craft Max[/caption] There are some minor UI improvements, such as the craft amount and MAX option, which lets you select a certain amount of items to craft, depending on the resources you have. For example, you can click the CRAFT MAX option on arrows, and craft all the arrows possible depending on the sticks you have in your inventory. This option helps ALOT. This saves alot of repetitive mouse clicking. There still isn't an option for EAT ALL, which would be great if you wanted to eat alot of blackberries.  So, get your best clicking finger ready when you need to eat or hydrate, which the latter is nearly constant in the game. Is the game worth playing now? Meh, I'd say yes, especially if you have other people to play with. If you're playing alone you'll probably be killed alot by other people who are in groups. I prefer the lower populated servers anyways. Is the game better than Dayz Mod for me? Well, I don't know. It doesn't provide as raw of a feeling for me as DayZ does, and maybe even feels more arcadish, not as arcadish as WarZ, but I think it has more long term play due to base building and such. DayZ's maps are much larger, so you spend alot of your time just traveling, which adds time to the gameplay. H1Z1 Potentially has more to offer especially with crafting items and building bases. Since the game is only $15 on Steam during early access (free after release), i'd suggest going ahead and picking it up. H1Z1 is slowly progressing into a decent game with lots to do. Be sure to watch out for the roof wolves! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNmiqG0lzM0
Josh

MailBird

Last month I started looking for new programs and apps to use. I've been using the same programs for years, computing started to get boring, and change I wanted to change some things up and see what new programs were out there. One of the main programs I wanted to change is my Mail client. I've been using Windows Live Mail desktop client for the longest time, which works great with my @live.com email address, but the program is aging, and hasn't been updated in several years. I started my pursuit of a new mail client, and I came across MailBird. MailBird has a simple beautiful flat metro UI, and seems to be simple and too the point, which I like. Too many mail clients have way too many settings, features, and just clutter in the way of the the mail. [caption id="attachment_2578" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Mailbird Vertical View[/caption] [caption id="attachment_2577" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Mailbird Horizontal View[/caption] The UI has two display views: Vertical, which displays a more compact UI for displays with limited width, and email previews on the side. Or Horizontal, which displays all the labels for folders and the accounts, and also loads the email preview below the inbox. You can easily make either view compact or full by dragging the side panel to the left or ride, and it'll automatically hide or display the labels. I prefer the more compact Vertical view. [caption id="attachment_2587" align="aligncenter" width="768"] MailBird looks great On Windows 10[/caption] I wasn't a fan of new flat "modern" UI design  that started with Windows 8 and has gained huge popularity now, but it's starting to grow on me, and I'm beginning to prefer it over the shiny beveled UI graphics of the past. MailBird really looks nice and fits in perfectly with Windows 10, which I upgraded to last night. [caption id="attachment_2584" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Mailbird also allows you to change UI theme color very easily.[/caption]   Mailbird has a nice featured called "Unified Inbox", which is essentially one inbox that holds all the mail from each of the accounts that you add into Mailbird. I've added every single email account I use into it, which consists of 2 gmail, 1 outlook.com, and 1 imap @gunch.com email address to it. Mailbird claims to work best with Gmail and even supports Gmail keyboard shortcuts, but I found that it works nearly identically with all accounts. Don't worry if you still want to see each individual inbox, simply click on the account that you wish to view the inbox of, and it auto loads that inbox. If you wish to never use the Unified inbox, you can easily disable the feature from withing the settings, or you can remove certain accounts from taking advantage of the feature. Mailbird allows you to set an icon to each of the mail accounts so you can tell the difference between them on the side panel. [caption id="attachment_2596" align="alignleft" width="188"] MailBird Folders[/caption] Mailbird doesn't clutter the interface at all with your folders. You simply hover over the folder icon for that account (click the account icon, and then click the folder icon), and it'll pop up with all the folders for that account, you simply click on the folder you wish to enter. [caption id="attachment_2591" align="aligncenter" width="768"] MailBird Email Composition[/caption] Email Composition is pretty simple and to the point, however, if you type anything with "attach" in it, it'll pop up with this alert box as you send, ha One thing you might want to change if you don't use Gmail is the "Send and Archive" feature. What this feature does is automatically moves the email from the Inbox and puts it in a "Archive" folder. If the account isn't with Gmail, it'll simply create an Archive folder to use, as it did with my Outlook.com account. This is a great feature if you don't mind your emails not being organized, but I personally prefer to sort my emails into folders such as: Work, Family, Friends, Payments, etc. [caption id="attachment_2567" align="aligncenter" width="768"] MailBird Apps[/caption] Mailbird supports "apps", which I find to be useless. Who needs Facebook, or the most recently LifeHacker articles in their mail client? They do have an attachment and Contacts app, but that should be already included within the app itself, which is weird. However, there are some bugs. Shortly after buying I realized that It wasn't synching my email. I'd get alerts on my iPhone that I have new email, but MailBird would never download them.  I noticed that one of my gmail accounts hasn't been synced in a really long time, and also my Grunch imap mail stopped syncing. The first thing I noticed is that MailBird doesn't have a "check for new mail" or "refresh" button. I assume it tries to do this when you click on an Inbox for an email account because there is somewhat of a loading bar that goes across the top of the inbox and sometimes it moves alot as if its trying to check for new mails. I begun my investigation on this issue, and came across this support ticket. This seems to be a common issue that many people have complained about over the past year, and have yet to get a response or fix to. I was worried that I had just wasted $30 on a program that barely works. [caption id="attachment_2574" align="alignleft" width="257"] MailBird Grunch Email Settings[/caption] I went looking to the settings for each account, and tried to resale the details. The Gmail account that wasn't syncing was giving me an error saying that the program does not support Two Step Authentication. I didn't enable this setting in gmail anytime recently, so I'm not too sure why the client would suddenly have the issue, but i navigated to gmail, and disabled this setting, and wallah! MailBird was getting all the email from the past week. I went into the setting for the Grunch email, and everything looked good, Saved the settings again, which I guess relog you in, and wallah, was starting to get emails with that account again. So if you are having an issue with Mailbird no longer receiving new emails, go into the settings for that account, and save them again. This seems to have resolved the issue for me, for now at least.   MailBird claims to be free, but if you want to actually to use it and the features, you'll need to subscribe to the Pro version, which you can pay annually, or pay a one time fee of $40 (use the 33% off coupon to pay only $30: MB-LIFE-33) and have access to all pro features for the life time of the product. This means you'll get free upgrades and updates to any future versions as well, which i made sure to be true by asking the dev team directly before I bought. They let you test the Pro version for 30 days, so you can makes sure you love the client before you buy, which I took advantage of, and ended up loving the program, So I went ahead and bought the Pro Lifetime license for the one time fee, which seemed to be the best deal. I am very happy with MailBird, and I think the $30 investment was worth it. I find myself using email alot more lately. Links: GetMailbird.com, more complete feature list. More info: This article is not advertising Pizza Hut, ha it was the only non personal/spam mail in the inbox when I was taking screenshots, so I simply went with it. ha.
Josh

OpenRCT2 - RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 Recreaton

[caption id="attachment_2546" align="aligncenter" width="800"] OpenRCT2[/caption] Great news for those of us who love good games! RollerCoaster Tycoon used to be one of the most fun and creative games out there, which is why it's surprising that Atari didn't keep up the production of the game. The last solid stable PC release of the game was way back in 2004! Amazingly, late last year Atari announced that they were working on RollerCoaster Tycoon World, which is the next release in the series due out sometime in 2015 - Can't wait! The good new is, in the mean time you can relive the the RCT2 experience with OpenRCT2! OpenRCT2 "is an attempt to recreate RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 into opensource code." Kind of like what they did with the old Transport Tycoon game, which was also created by the RCT creator, Chris Sawyer, Called OpenTTD. Which is a great deal. [caption id="attachment_2533" align="aligncenter" width="768"] Launching OpenRCT2[/caption] This is great because RCT2 was released back in 2002 and it doesn't work the best with modern computers and resolutions. It doesn't support wide screen ,or nearly any resolutions of the monitors out today, so you have to play in a weird unscaled black box border mode, which isn't very enjoyable. It also doesn't natively support windowed mode. There is a hack you can get to enabled windowed mode, but it's very buggy, and for me it always snaps the window to the edge of the screen. OpenRCT2 adds native resolution support, and also it also adds Windowed mode, so you can do other things while your park runs itself. [caption id="attachment_2538" align="alignleft" width="248"] OpenRCT2 Rides Cheat Menu. Open it by pressing CTRL+ALT+C[/caption] OpenRCT2 also ads other features, such as a built in cheat system, which means you no longer need a trainer. I always used 8cars Trainer to renew my rides so they wouldn't break down every second as they aged. [caption id="attachment_2530" align="alignright" width="120"] OpenRCT2 Game Speed[/caption] Now with OpenRct2, you can also control the time speed of the game, so you don't have to wait forever for a new park to fill up, just put the speed on super fast! [caption id="attachment_2535" align="alignright" width="300"] Saved RCT2 Games[/caption] Another great thing is you can load your old RCT 2 games, along with custom coasters, Scenery, and even user created rides! No conversion needed, it all just simply works. The code isn't very buggy, It rarely crashes on me, but even if it does, its not much of an issue due to the AutoSave feature they added to OpenRCT2. It doesn't auto save over your saved game, instead it creates a save called AUTOSAVE. If the game ever does randomly crash, you should have the auto saved game to recover from. [caption id="attachment_2537" align="alignleft" width="234"] Boom! Guest blows up![/caption] I've only experienced crashes when blowing all my guests up (a feature you can find in the Cheat Menu, Push CTRL + ALT + C to bring it up). With all the features that OpenRCT2 adds, they still haven't increased the amount of rides you can have in the game, you're still limited to 128 objects (rides, scenery, stalls) which to me was always the most disappointing thing about RCT2. Hopefully they can increase this in the future. Also I don't think that you can have larger maps/parks at the current time. Hopefully in time they'll add these features, and also improve the AI of the guests and staff, which has always been slightly buggy in the RCT games, especially 1 and 2. The code will be OpenSource, so its only limited by the lack of the coders imagination, and the engine I suppose. I expect alot of fun features to be added to the game once the code is fully recreated. There are many more features that I haven't discovered yet, and I'm sure they'll add more as the get deeper into the code recreation. Due to the code not being fully recreated yet, you still need to have an installed copy of RCT2, which you can get the game including the expansion packs from Steam and GOG.com for only $10, or from G2A which is currently only $6. I'm using the GOG.com version. You can get the most updated version of the OpenRCT2 code from the GITHUB and compile it yourself, but if you don't want to go through that headache, you can easily download the compiled version directly from their website, which seems to be updated daily, if not hourly. Once you download the compiled version, you simply install it, select your RCT2 installation folder, and wallah. I'm using the portable version of the compiled game because I don't see the point in the installer version due to how often the code is updated. I just download the update, unzip, and load the game. OpenRC2 automatically copies all your saved games from the RCT2 installation to a folder it created in your My Documents called OpenRCT2, so you never have to worry about updating the code, or moving files around or anything like that. If you're a fan of RCT, and RCT2, and wan't to play with modern resolution support, and more features, I suggest getting OpenRCT2. It's very playable in its current state, I'd say even more playable than RCT2 is on modern machines. OpenRCT2 should keep you busy until RCT World is released, or even longer, especially if you're like me and prefer the older games over the newer RCT3. https://openrct2.com/
Josh

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