Curse starts charging something for nothing.
Posted by Jeremy in Gaming, Rant, World of Warcraft on May 4th, 2009
As a heavy World of Warcraft gamer, I use a lot of UI-addons. They add an endless number of features to WoW such as DPS (damage per second) meters to quest help. And the best (or at least in my experience) is Curse. it’s database was huge, it’s client was clean and easy to use, and the features the client offered were great. But either because of need or greed, Curse decided to split their userbase into two groups. Regular and Premium.
There’s nothing premium about it. Here is the feature list.
Let’s review.
Premium Curse Client
It’s the same as the regular one, except premium lets you update all of your addons at once. Wowza! Yeah it’s nice being able to update all at once instead of clicking them individually, but I’m not about to pay for that. But I guess that’s why the other features are there…
Support Curse
Oh so I get the “feature” of giving them money? Awesome!
Support the Addon Author Rewards Program
I’m not one to donate usually, but if I was going to I’d rather just pick an addon I like a lot (in this case it would probably be Quest Helper) and give the author the donation directly so they got more from it. Not pay for “features” and all the random authors get a few cents of my monthly fee.
Beta Key Giveaway
This is such a joke. There’s not going to be Curse-exclusive beta keys, so why would I pay for something I could easily get elsewhere for FREE?
Add-Free Curse Experience
This is also a joke. Ad-blocking addons for browsers exist and accomplish this same “feature” for FREE.
Faster Add-on Downloads
Seriously?! You’re going to increase the download speed of the downloads that take like 2 minutes MAX?! Yay! And it costs me money? Oh boy!
To sum it up, this is some serious bullshit by Curse. The only feature I’m missing out on now because of this is being able to update all addons at once. But that’s not something I’d ever pay money for. and the fact that they think people will pay $3/month for the above is a joke. They’re going to lose users over this and the number of premium users will be hilariously low.
Things (Part One of Five)
Posted by Jeremy in Internet, Random, Technology on March 27th, 2009
Everyone needs things. I do, you do, that crazy cat lady down the street..she does, too. So to help you in your never-ending quest to acquire things, I have crafted, using the mighty forges of Ironforge itself, a list of 25 helpful things that you may, or may not, find useful. Yes, I totally just fit five commas in one sentence. But to maximize site traffic and make it more motivating for me to write, I’m splitting it into 5 parts.
Can You Run It?
For those that don’t understand computer hardware as well as others, figuring out whether or not a video game will run on your computer can be tremendously confusing and difficult. But not if you use Can You Run It. Figuring out if your computer can run a game is as simple as selecting the game from the game list and clicking the “Can You Run It?” button. It will then tell you if you can and how well you will be able to run the video game. If that’s not enough, it also informs you which aspect of your computer is the culprit if you either can’t run the game, or can’t run it well. That’s a great way to figure out which components need upgrading.
An alternative use can be to run the Crysis test and gloat the results to your friends and family, thus boosting your ego at least 34%.
Cyanide & Happiness
I can’t even explain it. Just go there (it’s a web comic).
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Everyday NASA showcases a new astronomy-related picture. And a lot of them are just amazing. There’s not much more to say about it. THAT’S HOW AMAZING IT IS! Also a great source of new desktop backgrounds (although they may require a little resizing).
Newegg
I really enjoy spending money on computer parts. And there isn’t a better place on the internet to do that than Newegg. This is hands-down the best resource for system builders and average users alike. Their prices are amazing and that almost-always-3-day-shipping thing is great. So before you go waste your time at walmart or bestbuy buying upgrades for your almost-awesome Dell, stop by newegg first and save a couple tens.
Digg
If websites that look like netscape don’t appeal to you, but you still want the latest tech stories plus the latest lolcat, then Digg is for you. It’s got a good community (if you ignore a few ass holes, aka powerusers) and is a great source for news. For those that just want a weekly recap there’s Diggnation and the Digg Reel.
Testing Windows Live Writer
I just installed Windows Live Writer and I’m testing it out. It seems pretty cool…All I had to do was give it the URL of the blog, my username and password and now I can add posts without opening up the site and logging into the WP admin area.
Everything post-related I can do in Wordpress I can do with Writer (Add/set catetories, tags, and publish dates). It’s pretty neat.
Click here to try out some of the Live Essentials from Microsoft.
Happy Birthday, Website
This website turns two years old today. After I sold off ZillaDesigns.net, I needed a new place to post my junk and thus JeremyDuenas.com was born.
As a birthday gift, the website will be recieving an overhaul on the mess that is the Categories and Tags system. I’ve got tags as categories, categories as tags, misplaced tags blah blah. So I’m going to be working on that so if the site acts funky that’s why.
I Conditionally Applaud Bristol Palin
I’m spending the evening at my parent’s place and I took the time to watch some TV. When I walked into my parent’s room (which in my family has always served as more of a living room than a bedroom), Fox News was on. Curiosity got the best of me and I watched Bill O’Reily. One of his top stories was that of Bristol Palin, who no longer intends to marry the father of her child, Levi Johnston. Bill reported that the “liberal media” (btw, the opposition isn’t liberal just because you choose to be uber Republican, Fox News) was doing everything they could to spin the story and use it to attack Sarah Palin. He apparently has a beef with MSNBC (who in my experience is neutral compared to CNN and Fox News) and made at least 5 attempts to discredit them. According to him, the liberals are scoffing at the Palins and are finding joy in the pain surrounding Bristol. Now I won’t deny that it’s being over-reported by news sources that are less Republican (I say Republican because I refuse to call the current batch fo republicans Conservatives, becuase they are NOT) than Fox News. Maybe he’s right, and maybe he’s full of shit as usual. Either way I conditionally applaud Bristol for her most recent action.
I do not agree with getting married just because you got pregnant. If two people can say that they’re ready to get married and believe it’s the best opportunity for both them and their unborn child to create a good family environment, then I say go for it. Get married. But under no circumstances should two people get married because of external pressure. Meaning their parents, friends, and in this case political faction, should have NO say or impact on the situation. And I applaud Bristol Palin for defying her parents, friends, and political faction because she realized the marriage was a bad idea.
That’s assuming that’s the reason. If the real reason is that she never intended to marry him and only said that to decrease the political pressure on her mom long enough for the election to end, then I give her a giant middle-fingered-salute.
You Be The Anchor Cover
This is a cover of some song called “You Be The Anchor” that my brother (guitar) and his friend Peter (bongos) did at their church. I figured I’d give him a little free publicity 
Wordpress Permalink Updates For All
In an attempt to bring better SEO to the site, I’ve changed the permalink structure of this website from “archives/id_number” (which looked like this http://jeremyduenas.com/archives/32/) to “articles/article_category/article_name/” (which looks like this http://jeremyduenas.com/articles/news/wordpress-permaklink-updates-for-all/). I was reluctant to do this at first, because a lot of the site’s traffic comes from people linking directly to an article. So by me changing it, the links everyone had before would no longer work, which would shoot me in the foot because I’d end up losing a majority of the site’s traffic. And I need that traffic to continually stroke my obese ego.
A quick trip to google helped me find Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration Plugin. It is a God send. Using it, I have successfully updated the permalinks on this site without causing a big storm of 404 errors.
Finding Downloaded EA Download Manager Files
Posted by Jeremy in Gaming, How To, Technology on February 22nd, 2009
I go into a lengthy explanation of my situation, so if you want to skip that go straight to meat of the article (explanation of how to find the downloaded content), click here.
I know EA and it’s download manager are pure evil, but I was feeling very lazy late last year and wanted to play Spore REALLY bad. Usually I would pirate a copy that has it’s DRM cleanly ripped away, but I wanted to use Spore’s online features. As I said, I was lazy, so I didn’t feel like going to the store a whopping 30 minutes away. So I bought it online and downloaded it via the EA website.
Fast forward to today (Feb 22, 2009). I’ve just downloaded the Creepy & Cute Parts Pack via download manager, but thanks to a ton of really messed up issues with Spore, Download Manager, and their inability to work on 64bit Vista (that’s right, I’m blaming the programs, not the operating system), I can’t install it because I’m unable to apply the latest Spore patches. I contacted EA about this and along with some bullshit canned response I was told to re-install Spore and try the updates again. Cool. Whatever. So I do that TWICE and I still get the same error when I go to install the patch (via manual download, in-game download, and the files provided with the C&C parts pack). Let me restate this- I just paid $25 for a product that I am unable to install because I can’t install the required patches because EA’s programmers don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And every conceivable work around there is is met with another issue. I started out with one problem and now I’m stuck trying to fix 2 more.
Anyway, during my re-install attempts, I got this error:
As you can see, I can choose to Ignore the problem and continue the install. That works fine and I can play the game. However, I still want to try to fix this error. So I google it and I see that running as admin in vista might fix it (yet another fine display of EA’s inability to GET WITH THE FUCKING PROGRAM). The only problem is that EA Download Manager doesn’t show any easy means of accessing your downloaded files. You’re supposed to install it from EADM, not on it’s own.
So I set out to find my files, but the internet was no help.
Here are the steps I took to find my downloaded files:
1. Run the install from EA Download Manager
2. Ctrl+Alt+Delete and get into the Task Manager (if you don’t know how to do that, get off of my website. Now.)
3. Find SPOREsetup.exe and right click on it. If you’re not installing spore, it’ll be “GAMENAMEsetup.exe” or something similar.
4. Click Properties and wait for the window to pop up.
5. Next to Location should be a path to the directory the install files are in.
6. Copy and paste the path into a browser window and hit enter.
7. Boom. There are your files.
Watermark
I don’t use a whole lot of images with my articles, because I’m lazy. But I used to back when I first started this site. I was looking at my traffic stats and it looked like my Put TV shows on iPod on TV article was pretty freakin popular. One small problem…a good bit of the popularity was due to people stealing my articles (images and all) and reposting them and adding a little bit of content without providing a link to the original source.
So to either put an end to this, or to “cash in” on the traffic I’m missing due to people not knowing where the content they’re reading really came from, I’ve created and applied a watermark to a majority of the site’s images.
Laptopical
These days it is quite difficult pick out a laptop that suites your needs. True, most laptops can do just about everything, but you might be over-paying for things you don’t need, or you might be sacrificing things you do need to save a few dollars without even realizing it. Most computer manufacturing companies provide online-guides to picking which of their computers is best for you, but there are few places to find bias-free, third-party guides. But easily one of the best, and one I definitely wish I had used back when I was buying my first laptop, is Laptopical.
Sporting a fresh, new design, the Laptopical homepage showcases the latest articles written by their team of writers. If you’re finding it difficult to find one you’re interested in, you can easily narrow it down using the search, a list of the most popular articles, a list of editor choices, or even the reader-elected list of the best and worst of Laptopical. Additionally, all of those lists can be further narrowed down by OS company (Microsoft, Apple, etc.). For further convenience, these lists appear on every page of the website. Some people, myself included, prefer reading lists than long articles. Laptopical caters to this crowd with their Laptop Top Lists. The topics of the lists range from “Top 10 Notebooks for Over $2,500” to “Top 10 Useless Gadges of CES 2009“.
If articles aren’t your thing, then you can easily view a large selection (or as the page’s intro text suggests, a “plethora”) of laptop reviews. On top of giving an in-depth look at the laptop, the reviews also offer large, close-up photos of the laptops. Furthermore, the article is summed up at the end, stating a general opinion of the laptop and then a list of the laptop’s specifications. So, if you’re not up to reading a whole review you can just read the recap.
There’s a lot of uncertainty in picking the right laptop. You may ask yourself, “Is this the cheapest?” or, “Is this the best?”. Well Laptopical has just made it a bit easier with their list of the 5 best laptops and 5 cheapest laptops. Both lists provide you with the links to the full review of the laptop and a means of quickly displaying the cheapest place to purchase the laptop. All of this is done without leaving the page or refreshing it.
If none of that is helpful to you, or you just want even more help in making a purchase decision, you can access their Laptop Buying Guide, which breaks down what type of laptop is best for you in an easy to read and understand format.
Whether you need something simple like an Acer Laptop, or something advanced and powerful like an Alienware m15x Gaming Laptop, Laptopical is the place to find reviews, prices, guides, and more all in a stunning and easy to use interface.
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