Every Single Article Written by N - All 1343
Sorry Dropbox, Google Drive Won
I’ve been a Dropbox user for the past four years and it’s been an incredible service. Kelly and I have used it regularly to swap art and documents on our various projects over the years and Cody and I use it on a regular basis to work on the comics (which will return sooner than later!). You drag your files to it and it syncs across all of your devices easily, it’s wonderful. Unfortunately for Dropbox, I’ve been a Google user for twice as long, biting down when I was invited to the early Gmail beta in 2004. I had some doubts that Google’s new Dropbox-ish cloud storage service wouldn’t be able to match, but now that it’s finally out for the masses (except Kelly) it wasn’t a difficult switch.
Building Oceana: The Verge’s Minecraft Pyramid – Week Two
This is part of an ongoing series chronicling the construction of Oceana, an epic Survival-built megastructure on the Vergecraft server. Be sure to check them all out!
Week One – Week Two – Week Three – Week Four – Week Five – Final Week
The problem with building a megastructure so far from civilization — especially one whose first stages involve creating a framework of hundreds of similarly-designed tunnels, diagonals, and nodes — is that the project can be repetitive and alien. Many of Oceana’s levels aren’t really all that different from each other and until now, there was no real way to make your mark aside from an addition to the expanding (and still quite temporary) resource hut that serves as the external production facility. For the second week of Oceana’s development, it was time to turn an eye to making the massive pyramid something bigger than a work site: home.
Spotify’s New Android App Finally Doesn’t Suck! But…
Two months ago, I wrote about the terrible headache I was having with Spotify. While the desktop app has been relatively stable (and it’s been bettered since that writing, too) the mobile app has always been a rubbish, barely-tolerable experience. Between a non-optimal layout, frequent crashes, and connection issues, it was dreadful to use if you weren’t on wi-fi. Yesterday, Spotify introduced a beta for their upcoming Android app and it rights almost all the wrongs of its previous iterations, but it introduces a few niggling things as well. So how is it? Let’s break it down.
Building Oceana: The Verge’s Minecraft Pyramid – Week One
This is part of an ongoing series chronicling the construction of Oceana, an epic Survival-built megastructure on the Vergecraft server. Be sure to check them all out!
Week One – Week Two – Week Three – Week Four – Week Five – Final Week
I love that technology works. I don’t necessarily need to know how it does so at the silicon or mechanical level, I just find find these elaborate contraptions remarkable. I love schematics, drawings, maps of all shapes and sizes. Some of my favorite technologies are those that go behind megastructures: the true demonstration of man’s power over nature. Whether dams, cruise liners, or the Burj Khalifa, the sight of these coming together in deliberately planned phases is awe-inspiring. (Yeah, I watched TLC a lot before it became the Trading Spaces channel.) So when the opportunity arose to take my favorite game of the past five years and work with dozens of people to construct such a massive project, namely the Oceana Mega-City Pyramid, I took it up quick. As project lead on Oceana, it’s fair to say I’ve lost more than a few winks of sleep putting it together, but when it’s finished… well, the project already speaks for itself. So what did we accomplish in one week? Let me show you.
‘The Cabin In The Woods’ Review – If You Must See One Horror Film…
I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I’m really not a fan of horror films. Not that I don’t enjoy the thrill of having my emotions manipulated or the thrill of juicy, juicy gore, but they really don’t make much sense. Many feature a malicious, sociopathic entity that murders people for the heck of it with no rhyme or reason to speak of. People just get murdered. That’s fine once, but to have an entire genre based on such basic tropes is uninteresting. Why is this evil so evil? What is their ultimate plan? Kelly got me to see Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil last year, kinda against my gut, and while it featured a clever twist on the formula, it just wasn’t inventive enough as a film. So what happens when you task the incredibly resourceful Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly, Dr. Horrible) with tackling the genre? You get genius.
Joshua Topolsky Doesn’t Understand Windows Phone
Microsoft wants the Lumia 900 to do business. Fifteen months after their initial partnership with Nokia was announced, all the pieces seem to be falling into place. Microsoft, who had an operating system without a hero, and Nokia, who had hero hardware without an operating system, seem to be some perfect match, the latter becoming a sort of ‘premier partner’ for Windows Phone after titans like Samsung, HTC, and LG have completely failed to make an exceptional device for it. Well, it’s time for Microsoft and Nokia to get paid after setting up the dominos for so long with the launch of the new Lumia 900, Nokia’s first major phone in the States in years, Microsoft’s first real ‘flagship’ phone, and AT&T’s largest marketing campaign, as they say, since the early iPhones (back when they were exclusive).
Then Joshua Topolsky stepped in.
Instagram For Android Review: Are We Doomed?
I hate post-processed photos. Hate, hate, hate. With the rise of smartphones have come tools powerful enough to not only take high-resolution pictures, but also reprocess them with crazy filters, color correction and so forth enabling otherwise shoddy photographers some light sense of professionalism and visual taste. No app encapsulates this utility – or pretentiousness – better than Instagram, which until today had been exclusive to iOS devices. Now that it’s on a platform that we actually use around the FEZ office (take that, Kelly!), and available to now millions more users out there with Android phones, we can finally render a real review by actual professionals. So how is it, aside from being hipster bait? Well…
Should You Buy A New Phone Right Now?
Buying new technology is always a risk. Anything you buy’s going to be obsolete in a week or two, anyway. But as we near summer and do that ‘go outside’ thing more often, millions of us are looking to upgrade their phones. Sure, there are new releases, like HTC’s One X, but is this really the best time to do it? Can’t you wait a little bit? I’ll cover the pros and cons.
Is Facebook’s Timeline Erasing Your History?
Now that everyone has Facebook’s latest Timeline layout, an expansive format that allows you to dip back all the way to your birthday, it’s easier to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. I had some complaints about it when it originally launched for developers back in September and while few have been addressed and many others can be looked over, there’s one critical flaw to Facebook’s Timeline that I honestly didn’t realize until now: Facebook is more than happy to leave out a lot of your special moments to condense the look.
I Can’t Stop Playing Minecraft
All it takes is a mention, my mind fills with possibilities. Crazy structures, incredible palaces, wonderful towns to explore and lots of mining. Lots and lots of mining with little more to keep me going than the promise of rare or essential minerals to assemble my next project. Once I get the Minecraft bug, it’s like a maddening fever: intense, with an eventual cure. Right now, I got the fever, Minecraft fever, and I know I’m not alone.
