Good n’ Cheap Game Review: The Elder Scrolls IV; Oblivion

When 2K Games’ The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion first came out, it really shook up the RPG industry.  And for good reason – it is a beautifully and painstakingly detailed world full of open-ended exploring and almost limitless possibilities for gameplay.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty much been eclipsed by World of Warcraft in terms of popularity.  

Sprint’s 4G Phone Arrives in Las Vegas

CNet recently reviewed a number of new phones on display at Las Vegas’ CTIA 2010.  The one that really captured attention was the HTC Evo 4G by Sprint.  It offers a boatload of features, including Bluetooth, WiFi, a huge 4.3 inch display (bigger than the iPhone), an HDMI output for connection to a monitor or TV, 1Gb of internal memory which is expandable to 32Gb using a microSD card, and GPS.

4G (which stands for 4-th generation wireless technology) access right now is still relatively limited, but is expanding.  Sprint’s 4G WiMax network through Clearwire is ahead of the pack.  It is currently in 27 major metro areas and is soon expand even further (yes, even to the ‘Burgh!).  It will be available for not only cellular smartphones but also for portable PC’s as well.

All in all, this looks like it could be a viable iPhone killer for those looking to upgrade their current devices.  There may not be the lines like there were for the iPhone, but the future of 4G definitely looks good.

RocketDock 1.3 a Worthy Desktop Addition

Windows has always seemed to lag behind other operating systems in terms of desktop coolness: no fancy icon dock a-là Apple’s OSX, and no switchable desktops or windows effects found in Linux.  While Windows lacks the innate ability to have these fancy – and useful, by the way – effects, there are a multitude of third-party applications which can do the trick for you.

One of my favorites has been RocketDock, a freeware application which allows you to create a desktop toolbar to quickly launch applications.  It is highly customizable and also very stable.  Hundreds of skins and custom icons are available, and best of all, customization is relatively easy.  Want to add an icon?  Just drag it to the bar and it pops into place.  The video below shows it in action.

While it’s not officially tested for Windows 7, it installed and runs fine on my Windows 7 HP system.  It has occasionally locked up when my computer comes out of hibernation though, which may have something to do with the alpha-blending settings.  Not a deal-breaker though.

I’ve used both RocketDock and ObjectDock, which is a similar free dock program by Stardock, and have found RocketDock easier to work with and just plain better.  It’s a great way to clean up your desktop, provide quick access to programs without hunting through the start menu, and look cool doing it.

Is Google’s Chrome Unhackable?

I’ve been running Chrome as my primary browser now for a few months.  This began as a necessity as I found Firefox to be really dragging in terms of page loading.  I don’t know if this was due to an extension, but the frustration factor had reached the tipping point.

While Chrome is not as customizeable – you can’t even change the toolbar – it is one of the fastest browsers out there.  Recent news has also highlighted Chrome’s security, noting that hackers at the pwn2own event have generally avoided trying to crack it, leaving $10k in bounty unclaimed.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s unhackable, but the fact that IE8, Firefox 3, Safari 4, and Mobile Safari have all been successfully hacked on day one means that they are definitely easier to hack than Chrome.  Hacking Chrome may require more pull than $10,000 apparently.

This should give pause to those wishing to switch from IE8 to Firefox, and may even pull some Firefox users as well!

Has the FCC Spelled the End of Cable TV?

The FCC recently unveiled a plan to increase Internet broadband speeds dramatically.  And by dramatically I mean going from around 4 Mbps to around 100 Mbps.  That’s insane type fast.  Google and Cisco are already jumping on the bandwagon, researching new networking and hardware prototypes.

The reasoning is pretty simple: we are becoming an ever more mobile economy, with ever more mobile consumers.

One thing that occurred to me is that this move might finally spell the end for traditional cable TV.  Rather than primarily pushing content to sets or set-top boxes, cable companies will be able to provide content directly over the web.  While lots of companies do that, it isn’t live and there still isn’t a lot of real HD programming out there.  However this will allow users to stream HD movies and view taped and live HD content practically in real-time.  The transplanted New Yorker could watch their local live news over the web while in Arizona, for example.  Subscribers could watch tonight’s episode of “American Idol” on their iPhone on the plane, without needing to set the TiVo at home.  Plus, the holy grail of digital television might finally come to fruition: subscribing to only the shows or channels you actually will watch while avoiding the other 80% of your current package that you never do.

Traditional cable television is already facing stiff competition from the web via Hulu, Netflix, Joost, and even YouTube.  Some have cut the cable completely and are getting their entertainment content directly from the web.  With this increase in capacity on the horizon, there may be a game change in the works.

Trojan.Swizzor: NFected by NVidia’s 197.75 update??

Personal story here…

A couple nights ago I tried to watch a movie on my Windows 7 PC, which for some reason wasn’t liking it.  At one point it spit up a window that said that it could be a driver problem and that I might want to update my drivers.

For graphics I have an NVidia 8600GT running driver version 8.16.11.9107, which so far has worked flawlessly.  But I thought I’d check out NVidia’s site anyway.  It turns out that they do have an updated driver package so I download it and rather than save it first I choose to run it directly.  As soon as the install package started Bitdefender popped up, stating that a trojan was prevented from running.

“Huh?”,  I thought, as I had just scanned it fully about two days prior and it had been found clean.  So I try again…same thing.  The actual virus was trojan.swizzor.gen.8 and it had about 30 infections which freaked me out.  I did a little searching which at the time didn’t show much.  So I ran Bitdefender’s antivirus and about 3 passes later it shows as clean.

A few days later the Bitdefender boards have lit up by others having similar problems, some having shown the infection after trying to install the NVidia package.  However, it could be a false positive.  I’m not willing to try to reinstall the driver update right now, but we’ll see what happens.

UPDATE 3/5/10:  Now I’m getting BSOD’s from some sort of a driver issue.  So I don’t know if the old driver became corrupt or if something else is now broken.  Hooray.

UPDATE 3/6/10: I saw today that there’s been overheating problems with NVidia’s 197.75 update package and they’re recommending a rollback to the prior driver, 197.21.  So I downloaded and ran 197.21 without issue.  No BSOD’s or virus popups as of yet.  So it seems that 197.75 should be avoided irregardless.

FINAL UPDATE 5/4/10: I’ve upgraded the drivers again to the latest version.  I still have occasional blue screens but no more virus problems.  I’m guessing it was a false positive.