The UK's #1 Mobile Phone Recycling Comparison Site. Sell mobile phone handsets with leading phone recyclers - Envirofone, Mazuma & Fonebank

• Search for:


• 
  The Sell Cell Phone Price Comparison Site.

• Cash For Mobile Phones you no longer need

• Categories

  • Auto & Motorcycle Tech
  • Consoles
  • Desktops & Laptops
  • Gadgets
  • Gaming
  • Graphics / Design
  • Hardware
  • Internet
  • Mobile
  • Multimedia
  • News
  • Operating Systems
  • Performance
  • Reviews
  • Security
  • Software
  • Technology
  • Tips & Tricks
  • Tutorials
  • Web publishing



• Affiliates

  • bork designs – affordable web design
  • Software Development
  • Wifi Antenna

• Recent Posts

  • Fire vs. Nook: Different Strokes For Different Folks

    ---

  • Windows 7 lag when using dual monitors with different refresh rates

    ---

  • Sticker Mule Review

    ---

  • Supermoto on Highway 1 – DRZ400 and Ducati Multistrada

    ---

  • Rider brushes flying crashed motorcycle during race

    ---

• Random Posts

  • Is your iPod or cell phone scratched?

    ---

  • Intel won't let Nvidia make Nehalem chipsets

    ---

  • 9800 GX2 Unveiling - from Maxishine

    ---

  • Is Crysis Forgotten?

    ---

  • Team Fortress 2 Gold Rush Review

    ---

A lot of people are praising Firefox 3 and have been using it since the first beta. I recommended not to use it before. But now, the final version of Firefox 3 is only four days away, so the final version will be mostly the same as Release Candidate 3. However, RC 3 is still not ready, and made me go back to Firefox 2.

I installed Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3 yesterday, and have been using it most of yesterday and most of today. During these two days, I have found obvious and very annoying bugs that make it impossible for me to use it. Actually come to think of it, I don’t know if they are obvious, because I haven’t seen anyone else report these problems. But I don’t think they’re exclusive to my computer.

My first problem was with Google. Firefox 3 RC 3 didn’t seem to be accepting cookies from Google. How strange, because I haven’t changed absolutely anything on my computer except installing FF3. I checked on my other computer running FF2, and all was fine. The problem was that I had to log in each time I opened Firefox. It wouldn’t keep me logged in, it kept logging me out. And it was forgetting that my home page was set to iGoogle, as it wouldn’t load iGoogle unless I clicked the link from the Google classic home page. Every time I navigated away from Google and then back to it, it logged me out and took me to Google classic.

Another thing was plugins not working. I installed a beta version of FireFTP, but there was no replacement for Fasterfox. Firefox became notably slower without Fasterfox, even after tweaking the about:config settings.

Speaking of speed, it didn’t seem any faster in loading online apps like Gmail. It took the same amount of time to load Gmail, Digg, and other script-heavy sites. Add to this the lack of Fasterfox, and Firefox 3 RC3 became slower than Firefox 2, the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

Continuing on with the problems, when writing the previous post here on Wordplop, I noticed there was no spell check. They certainly didn’t take out the feature, which so many people praise and depend on, so it must be a bug. Once again I don’t know if it’s only happening on my computer or others’ too, but I haven’t seen any other complaints like this. I also found spell check not working on forums and basically anywhere where there is a text box. It was working in all of these places with FF2, so it’s definitely Firefox 3′s problem.

The last bug I took note of before I decided to uninstall RC3 was that pressing the “Enter” (or “Return”) key while in a text field makes the entire page scroll to the top. So when I was making that last post here, every time I hit “Enter” to make a new paragraph, the page jumped up. This was the last straw – I downloaded Firefox 2 and reinstalled it, deleting Firefox 3 RC 3.

These weren’t the only bugs or annoyances I found. There were also problems with history not being saved, toolbar clicks not registering, and toolbar submenus not opening on mouse hover.

I hope it’s not just me having these bugs, because then they will get fixed faster. These problems make it impossible to use Firefox daily. I really hope all of this gets fixed before release date, or I won’t be downloading Firefox 3.

Although not many people may know about this game, it has been around for a few years now. The first versions of Redlynx’s Trials games, back then known as Trial Bike, were available as a Java version online. They helped start the 2D flash bike games you see on every flash game site now.

The latest version of the Trials series is called Trials 2 Second Edition, and it was just released on Steam. Trials 2 SE only costs $9.99, which can make it the perfect game for those lazy evenings, or when you don’t have the time to play a whole round of CoD4 or CS:S.

Another thing regarding Trials is that it doesn’t belong into any familiar category of games. It’s a 3D game with 2D gameplay. Meaning the controls are still only the arrow keys for controlling the bike, yet the graphics are 3D. This makes the game kind of hard to judge, so it can’t be compared to any other game. The price also makes it seem like a mini-game, but it’s not.

Trials 2 Second Edition has great graphics. It incorporates 3D dynamic lighting effects, volumetric particle effects, bloom, motion blur, and shadows. It looks really good, and all of the effects give it a realistic feeling. You can take a look at the official screenshots, but the game looks better when you’re playing it. Sounds are much better than in previous versions of the game, but they’re still not the best.

The gameplay is the same as in previous versions of the game. However, this version of Trials is 3D. The gameplay just doesn’t seem to fit a 3D game. The bike doesn’t act realistically, and that is something that is expected of most good-looking 3D games. The game looks realistic, but doesn’t feel realistic. To go uphill you lean backwards. If you’re going uphill and lean forwards, you will slam your face on the ground, even though you’re going uphill. This type of gameplay is great for a game you play in your browser through flash or java, not a game you play fullscreen in 3D. It just doesn’t feel right.

The online part of Trials 2 Second Edition is stats and achievements. You can show your stats to your friends, and the top scores are listed on the game’s website.

Overall I have to say this game is great. This is one of the best arcade games I’ve played in a while. And with a $9.99 price tag, it is definitely worth the money. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download the demo.

Yesterday the Race Driver GRID PC demo was released. You can download it at GamersHell. So I played it today and here is my review. Remember it is just a demo and doesn’t represent the quality of the final game, and so neither does this review.

GRID has almost the same gameplay as DIRT. You can probably say that GRID is the same thing as DIRT except it’s not off road and has different cars. However, compared to the other ToCA Race Driver games, GRID has the same type of handling. GRID is an arcade type of game, and I don’t think it is supposed to be a simulator. There are physics, but they’re not realistic.

Racing is fun but can also be annoying. Using a keyboard, it is hard to turn at high speed because if you let go of the gas and then press it again your car will beg to spin out. This can be solved with tiny taps on the gas key. I haven’t tried to play GRID with my Logitech MOMO wheel yet, but if it’s going to be anything like playing with a wheel in DIRT, I won’t even try.

The sounds are good. The crowd cheers you on when you’re driving, goes “ooohhhhhhh” when you crash, and boos you when you’re messing around and doing things like going the wrong way, spinning donuts, or burning out. The tire screeching is good, and the engine noise is decent. Gear shifting though sounds completely unrealistic, almost like crumpling a water bottle. And backfires are too quiet and also soft sounding.

The graphics are great but have some flaws. The edges of everything look blurred. The antialiasing seems flawed. It runs great at 4X MSAA, but anything above that and the menu goes at 1fps, making you ALT-F4 and restart the game in safe mode, and change back the settings. But at 4x AA, the edges look jagged yet blurry. Almost as if you’re using no AA at a very low resolution. But I was running it at my monitor’s native 1440×900. The cars look great though, and so does the track. And now that I think about it, DIRT had the same problem with looking blurry.

I ran this demo on Ultra settings at 1440×900 resolution with 4x antialiasing. I ran it on Vista Ultimate x64, E6600 CPU @ 3GHz, 4GB (2×2) RAM @ 830MHz, and an 8800GTS 320MB GPU @ stock speeds. It ran at about 50FPS, dropping into the 20′s when surrounded by lots of smoke (from burning out, drifting, etc).

In conclusion: the gameplay is very arcade, so if you like arcade type racers, this is great. Controls are decent on the keyboard. Sounds are mostly good. Graphics are great except for being blurry. And no it’s not the blur that’s making them like this, because it’s blurry even if you’re not moving. Blur isn’t supposed to be active when standing still. Since it’s a demo, you should just go download it here and see for yourself if you like it.

Check out a few screenshots I took below. Check out exclusive Nintendo Wii Game Console Review, Sony PlayStation 2, PS3 reviews at game-consoles.org.

Now, you can buy a Chinese made BMW for $5,000! Simple as that? No. As China continues to expand its market, selling things like appliances, shoes, and shirts, Chinese cars are also beginning to appear in the world market. Chinese cars aren’t much better than fake iPods and cell phones that are also made in China. Chinese brands like Chery Automobile, BYD, and Great Wall Motor Company (GWM) are copying major car manufacturers like Toyota, BMW, and General Motors (GM). Chinese engineers can now reverse-engineer established car manufacturers’ cars so well that an average consumer couldn’t really even tell the difference between a knock-off Chinese car, and its original counterpart.

Knock-off Chinese cars are built below the world standard. They fail crash tests miserably; many Chinese cars get a score of one star. Mechanically, they don’t last very long because they are “reverse-engineered;” they are not designed the same way that the engineers of the original non-knock-off cars designed their cars. It is also hard to find specific parts for Chinese automobiles since they are not widely used in the USA yet. For the price of a summer job’s pay, who wouldn’t want drive around in a brand new Chinese car with leather seats made to look like a BMW? I know I wouldn’t.

The “Smart Car” brand is appearing in the USA as the ultimate city car. Smart Car is owned by Daimler-Benz, and production takes place in France. There is mainly one model available in the USA at this moment – the “Fortwo,” which is available in its most basic form as “Pure,” and, in more user-friendly forms, as a “Passion Coupe” or “Passion Cabriolet”. It features a three cylinder, 1.0 liter engine, which produces 71 horsepower. Top speed on the Smart Car is 90mph, and its 0-60mph time is 12.8 seconds. The horsepower rating may not seem like much, but the car weighs just 1808lbs., and it gets 33mpg in the city, and 44mpg on the highway – and let’s not forget that it is not a hybrid. Safety features include front and side airbags, and a collapsible steering column. If there is an impact, the car is engineered to “crush” itself until the impact reaches the passenger compartment. The doors are reinforced for side impacts. Pricing for the Fortwo starts at $11,590 for the most basic “Pure” version, and it goes all the way up to $16,590 for the “Passion Cabriolet.” For that money, it’s hard to not want to buy a car that’s also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and is the only car in the museum still in production and on sale today.

image from Elijah on Flickr – source

I have been using siteuptime.com to monitor my websites for downtime. I find this service to be very useful because lately my site has been experiencing some downtime, so I might be switching hosts. With Site Uptime I can see exactly when my site goes down and comes back online. I can also configure it to send me an email when my site goes down or comes back up.

You can get a free account from Site Uptime that will test your site every 30 or 60 minutes and send you an email when it goes down and back up. For only a couple dollars a month, you can also receive detailed graphs and statistics on your site, as well as have your site checked up to every 5 minutes. With a free account you can track only one site, but with one of the paid accounts you can track more. You also get a lot of other features. I highly recommend getting a paid account because it’s cheap and has so many features.

This tool can save you a lot of money because if your website is down, you can’t make any money from it. Site Uptime will show you if this happens, and if it happens frequently you should maybe get a different host. So sign up with Site Uptime now!

Recently the Gold Rush update was rolled out for Team Fortress 2. I spent most of my free time today playing it, so here is my quick review on it. But before that, if you don’t have Team Fortress 2, you can play the full game for free this weekend.

Gold Rush is a new map and gameplay type in which you have to stand around a cart and move it along the tracks. The more teammates standing near the cart, the faster it moves to each checkpoint on the tracks. The other team is defending. Players on the attacking team need to be constantly pushing the cart forward to keep it from automatically moving backwards – after 30 seconds it starts moving backwards.

Since the object of Gold Rush is to stand around the cart while the defending team is attacking you, it sure sounds like the attacking team would always be made up almost entirely of heavys. I thought this too at first, but actually it’s not like that at all. I played as a sniper most of the time, and I had a score of 183, being the highest on my team and the second highest of both teams. Even if your team is attacking, you can stand a good ways behind the cart and snipe the defenders.

A heavy teamed up with a medic is how the cart is moved forward most of the time. The thing about Gold Rush is that the whole opposing team is attacking a single area. If you camp, you won’t move the cart forward. And if you’re defending, you know where the attackers are going to come from by looking at the tracks. This is about the only thing wrong with Gold Rush though – everything else is gold (no pun intended).

I played a couple of rounds as each class, and I can say that each class can be useful in Gold Rush. A couple of good spies can be extremely useful. You can go invisible and sneak through the line of fire and go behind the other team. The other team is facing one way the whole time, so if you get behind them you can get a few stabs before being shot.

The engineer becomes very useful to set up turrets along the track, if you’re defending. Once again, since there is only one track, you know where the main group of attackers are going to come from. Placing a turret after a turn can get you a nice number of kills.

Medics are absolutely necessary when moving the cart in TF2 Gold Rush. The cart gets attacked very heavily when moved, and without a few medics the whole team can be destroyed with a couple of stickies from an opposing demoman along the tracks. This is good though, as now maybe someone will have a chance of actually unlocking the almost impossible medic achievements that just came out.

The one class that I would say is almost completely useless in Gold Rush though is the scout. When attacking, scouts get destroyed by explosions. When defending, well.. you can’t really defend with a scout. Gold Rush is for the heavy classes such as demoman, heavy, soldier, etc. Scouts are for close up combat, but they just can’t survive the bombardment of rockets, stickies, and heavy fire flying at them.

In conclusion Team Fortress 2 Gold Rush is an extremely fun new map and gametype. Although I have only played it for one day, I think I can say it is the best map and gameplay in Team Fortress 2. The fun level is just off the charts. So go play it now if you have Team Fortress 2, and if you don’t, either buy it or play this weekend for free.

ASE Adnet is a Cost-Per-Click based content network that is specifically targeted towards web publishers. I have been trying out ASE Adnet here on WordPlop while it was still in its beta stage. Today ASE Adnet is finally ready for applications.

The great thing about ASE Adnet is that you can completely customize the advertisement layout. You can make an ad of any size, using any colors, and placing different parts of the ad – like the product price, image, and store – in different places within the ad box. All you need to have full control of your ads is some CSS knowledge, and if you don’t know CSS, there is always the option for a simple ad customization.

Another great feature of Adnet is the ability to pick which product you specifically want showing your ad. You can search the hundreds of thousands of products on the Products page, and put only the ones you want on your ad.

Payouts are through Paypal, with a minimum payout of only $25. It takes about 30 days to get paid, and a lot of the time it takes less than that. Adnet also has a great click and revenue tracking system which allows you to track each ad individually.

ASE Adnet offers the most customization and features I have seen of any ad network. So far I am extremely pleased with their service. Click here to sign up and try them out – it will cost you absolutely nothing.

Is on-the-fly sensitivity switching needed for gaming mice? I find it to be a very useful feature. I have a Logitech MX518, which has on-the-fly DPI changing. A lot of people say this is a useless feature. I game almost daily, mostly playing FPS games like Counter Strike Source and Team Fortress 2. I find that it is very useful to be able to switch from high to low sensitivity when sniping or trying to shoot someone from far away.

I like to play at a very high sensitivity setting in Counter Strike Source. I play at 1600DPI, which is full on my MX518, and 4.8 sensitivity in-game. This lets me make about three 360 degree turns while moving my mouse six inches. This is considered very high, and most people like to play on very low sensitivities. But I like it like this because with this setup I do very well in both close combat and sniping, mainly because if I want to get a headshot from across the map, I will quickly switch my mouse to the lowest DPI setting, and proceed to get my headshot.

The MX518 doesn’t need software to enable DPI switching. However you can use Logitech software to change the default DPI settings, but I choose not to as the defaults suit me well. There are three settings, and I use the highest for gaming, lowest for sniping, and middle for Windows.

I find on-the-fly sensitivity switching to be a great and very useful feature, and I definitely will not buy a mouse without it.

Crysis was one of the most over hyped games ever. People were flooding forums with Crysis related talk before the game came out. Everyone was eager for leaked info, footage, screenshots, and anything else that would make their wait easier.

And then Crysis was released. People found out they couldn’t play it on high settings, even if they had the latest hardware. They thought Crytek was kidding when they said computers wouldn’t be able to completely max it out for two or three years.

Now there is no more talk about Crysis. People found they couldn’t make it look as great on their own machines as in the release videos. And Crysis became a tech demo and benchmark. EA claimed sales exceeded their expectations, and while they probably did, I bet it’s not selling many copies anymore.

Crysis singleplayer is boring, and in multiplayer you won’t find a server without any hackers. For me, it’s just a tech demo now; the only fun I get out of it is downloading custom maps people make any playing them, mainly for the physics and graphics. The game makes an incredibly fun tech demo, but I wouldn’t play singleplayer anymore, and multiplayer is doomed. I wouldn’t purchase this game again.

People aren’t talking about it anymore in gaming forums. No one is posting Crysis screenshots anymore, while they’re still posting F.E.A.R., Call of Duty 4, and Battlefield 2 screenshots. Crysis has almost been forgotten by the gaming community.