PixelAddiction

More than a week after the Xbox version, PC gamers will finally be getting a demo for BioShock later today:

PC DEMO COMING TO YOU ON MONDAY

August 19, 2007

The wait is nearly over. At 7 PM EST the BioShock PC demo will go live for you to enjoy. We will have exclusive pre-loading at Fileplanet. Set your watches for 7 o’clock!

IMPORTANT: Please be sure to download the latest drivers from ATI and Nvidia that will be available Monday for best performance with your video cards.

Fileplanet? hopefully someone will torrent this pretty quick.

Just in case you’ve been having problems with Skype and haven’t seen the news, don’t go adjusting your firewall or anything just yet – they’ve been having some pretty serious problems since early yesterday.

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the delay, but we can now update you on the Skype sign-on issue. As we continue to work hard at resolving the problem, we wanted to dispel some of the concerns that you may have. The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.

Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock — from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose — to resume normal service as quickly as possible.

Update:

Hello friends,

Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal.

On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order.

If I had to pick a single feature of WoW that really endeared it to me – that feature would undoubtedly be the almost limitless level of customization it allows. Be it simply adding a few more buttons to you action bars or completely replacing your interface there are many, many addons out there to help you.

Obviously this is a rather large subject to cover in one post, so I’ll be going over some of my favorite’s one by one – starting with…

Bongos2

“Bongos is an action bar replacement designed to be both low memory, and easy to setup. It is not as feature rich as other bar mods, but should include the features most commonly used.”

I used the stock Blizzard action bars for quite awhile, but by the time I hit about 40-50 I had so many blessings, seals and trinkets that I’d filled up almost every available slot on the bars. I tried a few of the other bar addons like TrinityBars and BarTender but found many of them had many features I didn’t need or were still a little buggy after one of the big patches. finally I tried Bongos and found it to be at the sweet spot of being very powerful and customizable but still being lightweight and relatively easy to setup.

To illustrate – here’s a shot of my UI before I moved to Bongos:

And this is how it currently looks – although it’s still a work in progress:

You can setup however many bars you need or even separate all 120 buttons for individual placement. They can all be dragged around and will snap into line with other buttons you place them near. You can even setup modifiers, so hold down shift and all (or any you setup) of the buttons will change – I have it setup to show my lesser used spells, hearthstone and longer duration buffs when I hold control, so Bongos both added to my total available buttons while reducing the screen area it used. It also supports stance bars if you happen to be a warrior.

Another great thing about Bongos is the key binding – it’s simple as switching to binding mode, hovering over the button you want to bind and hitting your desired key.

That’s it for Bongos, I recommend you check it out for yourself as there are a lot of features I’ve not covered here.

Spotted this on Fazed:

“Anyone involved with geeks will know that we share many character traits with those suffering Asperger syndrome: obsessive attention to detail, social awkwardness, and some difficulty relating to other people. A few years ago, I ran across a test used to diagnose Asperger syndrome, and was surprised to note that it seems like a thumbnail description of your average geek.”

“Being a geek, I decided to port the test from dead trees to PHP and Javascript. You can find your AQ by filling in the form below. If you feel like it, note your AQ in a comment.”

Now obviously it’s not a professional diagnostic tool, but interesting nonetheless. And as anyone that knows me can probably guess I scored rather highly…

I finally got Canis to 64 the other day, it’s been slow going as I’ve been alternating between setting up some new addons (more on these at a later date) and helping a guild mate level up his new priest.

I always enjoy helping people level new alts, you get to see the classes from a whole different perspective. Now he’s reached his 50′s things are getting a little more challenging, but as we’ve been leveling him almost from scratch we’ve each developed a pretty good feel for the others play style – I’m looking forward to adding a few more to the group and heading into some higher instances.

I’m way overdue a talent re-spec – trouble is I’m having a hard time deciding where to go from here – I’d like to give Retribution a shot, but as I’m our guilds only plate wearer (unsurprising as currently we seem to be a guild of three) that would leave us a little lacking in the tank department. I’ll probably try out a Holy/Protection hybrid as that’s where I originally planned go as a paladin

Oh, and I would totally sell my horse for a [Hellreaver] to call my own.