In my last post, I gave what I referred to as a ‘technical overview’ sort of review of BioWare and EA’s latest epic: Mass Effect 3. However, as most anyone familiar with the game is well aware, there has been much controversy over the game’s ending. Therefore I found it necessary not merely to review the game as a whole, but to specifically spend some time talking about the game’s ending in particular. Unlike so many others out there, I don’t intend to rant about BioWare’s alleged laziness ...

Mass Effect 3 Review Part 2 – The Ending

From the very first announcement of Mass Effect 3, I was curious to see how the graphics would stack up against its predecessors. All three games in the series use Unreal Engine 3 (which, as a sidenote, happens to be my personal favorite engine on the market right now), but thankfully that’s not to say nothing has changed in how things look over the past 5 years. Mass Effect 1 being game developer Bioware’s first time using the Unreal Engine, it naturally lacked a lot of the detail and polish that even ...

Mass Effect 3 Review Part 1 – Technical Overview

Well, this place is ‘my dropbox for tech thoughts’, and today I’m going to take advantage of that and launch into a train of thought that has been particularly bothering me lately. Let me start from the beginning. I often find myself slightly annoyed at work when I have to do tasks on Windows XP that Windows 7 could do much better. Frequently I recommend that home users also make the upgrade. I vouch strongly for Windows 8 and can’t wait to see how it performs on tablet hardware, especially of the ...

Looking back…nostalgia, or a warning of things to come?

For decades now, Linux users the world over have happily enjoyed themselves using symbolic links to increase productivity, make their computers easier to navigate, or squash certain location-related bugs in what they are trying to do. However, users of the more mainstream Windows persuasion have long been left out of the game, not realizing their computers are capable of such wizardry, or not knowing how to make use of it. What are these mysterious symbolic links, why are they so wonderful, and how can you ...

Symbolic Links on Windows…the Easy Way!

Whenever I’ve had a side-job of computer repairs, the most common complaint I heard from people about their computers was: “it just runs slow!” Identifying the exact reason why varied in difficulty from case to case, but in the end it was always something like multiple anti-virus programs were installed and running in the background (sometimes actually attacking each other), too many start up items were enabled for the amount of installed RAM to handle, or some kind of malware had been introduced to ...

Myths vs Truths: The Slow PC

For decades we’ve seen scifi concepts of a heads-up display (or HUD) that presents all sorts of different pieces of information right on a person’s field of vision, completely personal to the wearer. In the last couple of years, concepts began to arise for contact lenses that could project such a display, though any serious plans to make the product were stymied by the question of how to give power to the things, not to mention how to mass produce such fine and fragile pieces of technology. More ...

Project Glass – Google's Personal Heads-up Display is Real