You may have noticed a lack of posts the last couple days and there is a good reason...

Yep... Moving time, ugh.

So there will be a combination of me being super busy, me not having Internet access and quite possibly, me being super busy AND without Internet access!

Thank goodness for my mobile data plan, I don't want to relive the horror of the great Internet outage of '07. Those were truly dark days!

Hopefully it will all be over quickly and regular scheduling will resume!

Totally Off Topic GameFromScratch

You are going to hear nothing but the sound of crickets on GameFromScratch tomorrow.  April 1st is the one day of the year I turn off the internet. Each year, April fools jokes get worse and worse and worse.  People have said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit… no doubt, those people were born before Aprils fools day.  Actually, in the pre-internet days, I actually found April’s Fools day rather amusing, I love a good prank.  But once the internet got involved,it just became painfully stupid.

Already the first of the bad Aprils Foolsday jokes have infected reddit. 

If you haven’t detected yet…

See y’all on April 2nd!  The best day of the year, as it’s 364 days away from the next April’s Fools day…

I seriously will be completely offline browsing wise tomorrow, it’s become an annual tradition for me.  I will of course still be available by email should anything not April 1 related come up!

Totally Off Topic Rant

They say a picture says a thousand words…

I am bringing no laptop nor frankly sobriety, so things will be pretty quite here for a couple days.  It’s only a short vacation though, I’ll be back early next week. I will have my phone and a spotty wifi internet connection, so I may reply to some emails… I just can’t promise any of those replies will make any sense!

See you all next week!

Totally Off Topic

You may have noticed an unsightly error message if you tried to access GameFromScratch.com this afternoon.  Well, long story short, GameFromScratch.com runs on one of Flexamail’s servers.  On the server where I happen to store database backups.  They occur weekly and are a few GB each in size, so if I forget about them, they rapidly use up hard drive space…  which is exactly what happens.  Apparently Windows Server isn’t happy trying to run with only 5MB of disk space…

Oops…

Anyways, I used the “opportunity” to perform some long overdue patching, security updates and maintenance.  So, sorry for the downtime and please let me know if you notice any oddities.

Totally Off Topic

As per this story on The Register, nVidia has announced they are creating a new handheld console named "Shield".

Let's start off with the most obvious.  It's ugly, exceedingly ugly.  The form factor isn't exactly practical either, this isn't a handheld you are going to be slipping in your pocket anytime soon.  Which begs the question then… why make a handheld at all?

The Shield, nVidia's clamshell portable console.

Told you it was ugly!  Basically it's a tablet pasted to an Xbox 360 controller.  I am surprised with the recent spat of clones and copycat controllers, like this one or worse... the WiiU, that Microsoft isn't launching lawsuits.

Alright, those are all the negatives, now to some positives.  First off the thing is beefy.  It's powered by nVidia's Tegra4 chipset and a quad core ARM processor.  It runs Android, Jelly Bean currently and should be compatible with all the games in the current App Store.  Although I can't really imagine touch only games being comfortable if the controller isn't detachable.  It also ships with HDMI out, for those looking for the full console experience.  The screen itself is 720p.

Now the one feature that might actually redeem the thing… it can connect to your PC and play your Steam games by streaming them over wifi.  Now that feature… is neat.  I've actually done this already with existing iOS and Android software, and the latency is actually fine, it's always the controls that let you down.  So I expect the experience to actually be quite nice.  However, if you are home and able to stream your Steam games, why not just play them on your PC?  Now if it lets you buy games from Steam without a PC, that could be a game changer.

As you may be able to tell from my text, I think nVidia are crazy.  It's too niche a product entering a segment that is struggling already.  Especially when the OUYA Android console already exist and Steam are rumoured to be bringing out a console shortly.  Plus, it really is ugly and unwieldy.  

It's apparently in beta now and could be coming to market within months.

News, Totally Off Topic