A blog by James: Gamer, Father, Geek.

I think I’m going to leave Facebook. After deleting the vast majority of ‘friends’ from there, the only real use it has been is seeing the odd pictures from friends. Even then, the people I’m interested in seeing about are friends with my wife on Facebook so anything really worth seeing she will no doubt show me anyway.

So yeah I’m going to delete it. May be forever, maybe not, I shall see. I have barely used it and between this blog and Twitter I have the whole ‘posting whatever I want’ covered.

Will leave a status up for a couple of days with my Twitter/e-mail/blog details and then get delete the account.

It’s no secret I am a geek, and always have been. It is something I am proud of, but this was not always the case! Like many people I became more aware of what others may think of me during my teenage years. I’m not sure when exactly I did it, either just before going to college or just before university, but I trashed a lot of my geeky things through shame that the new people I would meet would judge me negatively. Which in retrospect is shameful in itself, and of course I gravitated to people that were fellow geeks anyway. It was probably the fear of scaring off girls actually, which is a silly thing as there was no real danger of them entering my bedroom, let alone my house.

One of the things I binned was a technical manual of the USS Enterprise D. I loved this book: 

It attempted (pretty well) to scientifically explain all the ins and outs of the ship, with a few bits of behind the scenes trivia on the show. I have regretted throwing it away for a while, so the other day, on a whim, I looked it up on Amazon to find it going second hand at the tidy sum of £2.81 including delivery. Well I could hardly refuse! So it’ll be part nostalgia re-reading it but part correcting the mistake I made of being ashamed of what I love.

So when it arrives this week it will take pride on my shelf amongst my comics, games, DVDs and programming books.  The funny thing is this time there will be a woman in my house, and this one will call me a loser. But it’s ok, we’re married, it’s allowed and she loves me anyway.

When listening to music I like to construct my own mental video to match it. Certain songs more than others invoke imagary, one such track is “Heartbeat” by Robyn:

A lot of the videos I envisage are influenced by science fiction. The strings playing constantly throughout the track combined with the lyrics give a sad tone, while the electronica sound definitely makes me think of travelling though space. So my video for this has some kind of space-born entity (I actually picture Moya from Farscape) who is heartbroken, speeding away from it’s former lover at the speed of light, passing beautiful nebulae in an attempt to run away from it’s feelings.

Ahh, lovely, lonely sadness in space.

I finally finished The Naked God, thereby completing the epic Night’s Dawn trilogy. Again no surprise, I found it to be brilliant.

*Major Spoilers*

There are just a few niggles I had with the book. The ending is very Deus Ex Machina, which in a way was always obvious from the moment Joshua and Syrinx set off to find The Sleeping God, but I feel there should have been some greater challenge once they found it. Not simply just *Bing!* Joshua is given God-like abilities to save the day. His solution was good and interesting, but I didn’t like the way his ability was used to tie up so many threads, especially that of Quinn Dexter. Such a brilliant villain was disposed of all too easily. I was expecting Louise, Fletcher, Powell Manani, Dariat and Tolton to all battle Quinn and outsmart him.

My other niggle is that I can believe in God like machinery that can transport whole solar systems with wormholes, I can believe Al Capone came back from the dead to conquer the galaxy and I can believe in all the different dimensions with vampire like alien souls, but the romance between Joshua and Louise? Nope. Throughout the books the love between Josh and Ione is built up so much to be this love that can never be, you assume that in the end, against all odds they will end up together. But no, he goes and marries the woman he shagged a few times and barely spoke to. He never once expressed any feeling for her other than guilt at leading her on. So to then at the end of it say he loves her and wants to marry her is just very unbelievable to me. Josh should have ended up with Ione and Louise with either Fletcher or Andy.

*End of spoilers*

Anyway they are really minor niggles compared to the rest of the book. I found each of the plot threads to be entertaining and I really do feel like I’ve been on the adventure with them. They are very, very lengthy books but if you’ve got the time and you love epic science fiction, you won’t be disappointed!

Some Twitterfolk have been murmuring about getting iPads and I think @OnlyRad has just ordered one so I though I’d make a short(ish) list of essentials!

Reading Apps

I use RSS feeds extensively to keep up to date with all my favourite websites, in fact the only websites I manually visit are BBC News and Facebook. If you’re using Google Reader then the app for you is Reeder (£2.99). It’s slick, simple and offers nice options like sharing articles and a Readability function that can retrieve the whole article for those RSS feeds that only have the first paragraph or so of a story.

Next up is the Kindle app (Free). I prefer it over iBooks because Kindle books are cheaper and you can read them on a PC, Mac, Android and eventually within any web browser so you’re future proofing your eBooks.

Comics wise you can’t go wrong with Comics. Sure most comics are a year old but it’s good for catching up with older stuff. It has lots of publishers on board (including Marvel and DC) and I think all but the Marvel ones can also be viewed online too. Each comic is about £1.19 which is pretty good.

If you come across a lot of ‘must read’ links throughout the day, you should get yourself Instapaper (£2.99). A large number of apps support it and you can use a bookmarklet to send links to your Instapaper account. When you launch Instapaper it downloads all the articles, strips out the ads and presents it in a very simple way for you to enjoy on or offline at your leisure.

The iPad reads a lot of popular file formats off the bat, but if you want a great file reader you need GoodReader (£2.99). I read a lot of PDFs and have found GoodReader essential, not only for it’s easy organisation of your files but the fact that it connects to my Dropbox account and pretty much any other cloud service you will need. They are constantly improving it and it’s PDF annotation features are matching some PDF apps that cost almost 10 times as much.

Productivity Apps

The built in Calendar is ok but very basic. If you want better integration with online calendars (like Google Calendar), and a decent todo list/organiser, go for Informant HD (£8.99). It’s pricey but worth it if you like to organise your life.

For note taking, I only recently got this but it’s fantastic, Springpad (free). It is also available on other platforms including it’s website and all notes sync automatically. You can attach links, files, locations and more to your notes and you can even present them on a pinboard. In addition to this you can share your notes with others so it would also be great for organising parties/events or even collaborating with work as you can set notes to be public.

The iPad isn’t really a creation device, it’s a consumption device but if you really want them, the Numbers, Keynote and Pages (£5.99 each) apps by Apple are pretty good. If you’re after a database app, you can’t go wrong with Bento (£2.99) either.

Misc Apps

I have tried out a large proportion of the Twitter apps, and the winner for me is Twitterific (free, in-app purchase to remove ads). The reason being it’s simple, stable and it colour codes replies, DMs and mentions differently so if you’re skimming it’s very easy to see when people are talking to or about you. The official Twitter app is pretty and simple, and Osfoora is great if you want all the bells and whistles such as managing lists and using GPS to show you the locations of where other people are tweeting, but Twitterific is the one I always go back to.

For the lazy amongst us, getting up and going to the next room to see if a file has downloaded on your other computer is just too much. SplashTop (£2.99, free version also available) to the rescue! It’s a very simple VNC style app that lets you connect to your PC/Mac and control it remotely. The best part is the speed and quality is good enough to watch videos, so if you want to see a Flash video, get it streaming on your PC and watch on your iPad. I did this with 4OD to watch the first series of Misfits and it worked a treat.

IMDB is one of the most frequent websites I use. It’s a database of movies, tv shows, computer games and more that has information on actors, directors, writers, crew etc. The essential website to answer the question “Ooooh, what have we seen her in before?”. The app is just as good as the website with a nice interface. It is also free!

Also for the lazies who can’t be bothered to get the remote (or you know, are not at home!) is the TV Guide app (free). Has listings for all the UK channels and if you have Sky+, you can even remotely tell your Sky+ box to record something.

Games

I have a lot games on my iPad so I will just narrow it down to 3 essentials.

First up is Infinity Blade (£1.79). It’s a simple premise, you duel opponents on your way to defeat some evil guy. You can dodge, parry, attack and use spells. It’s very addictive and the graphics are stunningly amazing. If you want to show off the power of your iPad, this app is essential.

Next up is Plants vs. Zombies (£3.99). Zombies want to eat your brain and your only defence is an army of plants. It’s a tower defence style game and it’s brilliant.

Finally is Cut the Rope (£1.19). A piece of candy needs to travel from the rope to the little monster using the physics of swinging the ropes, bubbles, blowers and teleporters. It’s not too challenging until the newer levels, easy to pick up and play

So there’s the best apps I’ve come across so far, but of course half the fun is looking for new and exciting ones so it is by no means a definitive list.