Mental Gamers by MGAceman

Category: Geek

Geek

Progress… or Not

Finishing off the video and then adding the voiceover tonight, I’m actually quite pleased with what I’ve accomplished so far with MoviePlus X5, WAY more than if I’d stuck with Windows Movie Maker. I think the ‘ProTip’ there is, spend a little to get better results. I’m just blowing the dust off what X5 is capable of, I don’t want anything too fancy and don’t have the funds (or knowledge or need) for high-end stuff like Sony Pro Vegas or Adobe Premier. As for the reading, I may have to replace Life of Pi (which I wasn’t particularly bothered about reading anyway) with The Hobbit of which I have literally just located under my Half-Life² Collector’s Edition tin!

Geek

Keeping Busy…

I’ve really dug in to putting a video together as my YouTube intro vid, it’s taken quite a while to get things together and work out what I was going to put into the 6m 45s blurb, but it’s coming along. I haven’t had time to game today yet or read, which is a bit more important, but that said, I should finish The Colour of Magic in no time since I’m near the end anyway. The PS3 is running while I type this and carry on editing for a little while longer, but I’ll soon get back to playing just as soon as I save progress for now!

Geek

Video Editing Headaches

So yeah, I bought Serif MoviePlus X5 at the end of last year for the bargain price of £8.99, I’d tried the starter edition and really like the features, so figured it was worth at least that much.Talk about a pain in the butt! When you see some of those gaming videos on YouTube which have been edited down to about 5 or 6 minutes, when you try doing that with a program you haven’t figured out properly and got zero help from video tutorials, you really appreciate the time and effort they put into them. I kept trying the trim method and got absolutely confused by how I was supposed to trim parts of the video out, so I did it in a more reliable way, just played the video and split it in parts I wanted while deleting the chunks in between.

Geek

Kinzie Kensington Cosplay Done Right

Saints Row’s Kinzie Kensington who is the FBI geek of Saints Row the Third and Saints Row IV has got many cosplayers, finding one who you think portrays her in the way you most know her as isn’t too difficult.

Geek

Come and Flip a Switch!

Videogame music has come a long way from just blips and beeps, gone are the 2 and 3 channel midi tunes, now full orchestras are used in more epic titles, but there’s on tune that is just so addictive, everyone should know about it!

Geek

Control Your Coffee

Gamers love their caffeine fix, it’s what keeps us alert and focused, but what about when you’re out and about? Do you prefer a latte? Certain coffee shops will have a resident artist who, on demand, will put a pretty picture on your latte.

Geek

[Cosplay] Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

If you’re going to do cosplay right and especially Legend of Zelda, then it’s no good sticking on a green sack with a yellow bathrobe belt, you need to take time getting the details down, right to the last little button and make-up plays an important part, see how it’s done here.

Geek / General

JetPack Reaches 2.1 [Updated]

JetPack is good for having some of the features on a self-hosted installation that you would normally only find on a WordPress.org hosted blog and now it has reached version 2.1 which brings a whole load of tweaks and fixes, so I’ve listed them in this bonus blog post (already done todays ‘Post-A-Day’ post). Changelog 2.1 Enhancement: Tiled Galleries: Show off your photos with cool mosaic galleries. Enhancement: Slideshow gallery type: Display any gallery as a slideshow. Enhancement: Custom CSS: Allow zoom property. Enhancement: Stats: Show WordPress.com subscribers in stats. Bug Fix: Fix errors shown after connecting Jetpack to WordPress.com. Bug Fix: Photon: Fix bug causing errors to be shown in some posts. Bug Fix: Photon: Convert all images in posts when Photon is active. Bug Fix: Infinite Scroll: Improved compatibility with the other modules. Bug Fix: Custom CSS: Updated editor to fix missing file errors. Bug Fix: Publicize: Don’t show the Facebook profile option if this is a Page-only account. Bug Fix: Photon: A fix for photos appearing shrunken if they didn’t load quickly enough. Bug Fix: Sharing: A...

Geek / General

Speeding Up The Web

I’m always looking to streamline and optimize Mental Gamers in any way I can to conserve bandwidth while also keeping loading times low, that’s why when I saw someone mention CloudFlare (thanks @weefz), I checked out the site and saw that there’s a free option, so I signed up and started using it. The site still seems to load at around the same speed as before, even though it’s now running through CloudFlare’s DNS servers and I’m using WP Super Cache, although, I sometimes wonder if using the cache really works OK scratch that, updated the settings to serve me a supercached page and it pretty much halved the speed to load the main page. When I check the box for “Make known users anonymous so they’re served supercached static files.” I can shave around three seconds off the loading time as well as seven less links, I’m not sure why or what the links are, but it improves Page Rank Flow by 1% to give a total of 76%. I use All-in-One SEO which suits me fine since I...

Geek / General / PC / Xbox 360

GA: It's PC To Be Skyrim

Had a go at Skyrim on the laptop, it kind of runs OK with everything low, the main problem is there seems to be a slight delay with a controller, mostly with the right stick which is used to look around, it’s not quite right. Despite being on low settings, the game still looks pretty great, the specifications suggest you need a 512 MB graphics card, but it runs fine on a 256 MB card, although, mine is a Radeon 4200 HD with 256 MB dedicated RAM, rather than being a separate GPU altogether. I couldn’t remember seeing Anise’s Cabin in the Xbox 360 version (as pictured above), so I even booted that up to revisit the place, but instead of encountering some guy and a bunch of dead Imperials, it was a dead treasure hunter of whom had a note on him about a weapon (I think it’s the Elven Mace of Harrowing) in a cave or dungeon, so I’ll go look for it when playing that version again. Anyway, while still playing some Skyrim, I’m trying to get...