Curaris's Weblog

(smart)Phones

curaris — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:08:48 +0000

Since recently I’ve moved to a new country to attend university here. Alongside with moving and a lot of changes one has to come to think of the more obvious changes and things you need. For example a new phone. While I still travel frequently from Belgium to Holland (my new place of residence) I decided not to cancel my Belgian subscription.

I also decided to keep my HTC Touch Diamond II

A phone I’ve grown used to. However it’s isn’t the most modern phone around and It has a few huge downsides. First of all Windows Mobile 6.5 , Windows mobile in my opinion seems to be a dying platform and as well as that if Windows Mobile 7 comes out you cannot upgrade it you would have to buy a new phone. Also seeing that windows mobile doesn’t seem to be the most popular platform around , the app store doesn’t seem to offer a wide variety of applications.

Therefor I decided to purchase a new phone however the options are wide open – I could go for a BlackBerry , the HTC Desire Z or HD or an Iphone 4. These would all be bundled with a dutch subscription and depending on the phone the price of the subscription changes. Main problem with the Iphone for me is that the price seems to be a bit blown out of proportion. The cheapest subscription around for the Iphone is 44.5 euro per month – presuming you take the 16 gig version – and is a 2 year subscription. For a Blackberry it would be around 25-30 euro and the same would be the case of the HTC Desire HD or Z. Seeing that the price of buying it without the subscription would be about the same for all of the phones (depending on which Iphone you want) I don’t see why the Iphone should be so much more expensive.

(from top to bottom HTC Desire HD , HTC Desire Z and Blackberry Bold 9700)

Both HTC’s are running 2.2 – also known as Froyo. They won’t be available from local carriers here till 22 th of october so I have time to watch some reviews etc.

Anyone here have experience from using a blackberry as well as android in general who could tell me which they prefered and why?

Hectic Hectic

curaris — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:59:34 +0000

Soo , my initial plan was to simply keep my blog up to date. At first , it seemed possible .

Then obviously it went downhill , School started again after my holiday so my good intentions went out of the window.

HOWEVER – I’m glad to announce my retirement from wow. As i found wow less and less interesting and challenging i decided to not renew my subscription.Thing about it is once you get what you always wanted it just doesn’t feel as good as you thought it would. (A problem very wealthy people seem to have as well) So instead of trying to get even more gold and such i decided to stop. (In case someone was wondering i stopped collecting gold around the 13.5k gold mark) But apart from that , my life has been good. I quite like my lessons in school and feel like leaving WoW behind has only improved my moods and given me more time to do things , or some of the times more time to do nothing at all .

Anyway. The reason behind me not updating my blog is quite simple. Holidays followed by school which i barely got round to , as i spend quite a time being sick and going to school to then come home SHATTERED. So the question i ask myself is the following – If i stop with WoW , what do i have left to write about? Current reply? Absolutely nothing. However i do realise hardly anyone reads my blog but it’s more of a valve to let of steam anyway.

As far as what has come in the place of wow , I’ve started spending more time on one of my Passion , being music. Not really writing songs or what not , but just spending time to listen to my music and do some thinking on my own. Which in Hectic times is truly of great value to me.

That is all i had to say for today

PS – In case anyone has any suggestions of bands/Cd’s i should check out , please do not hesitate to let me know.

My User Interface

curaris — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:59:13 +0000

I’ve been trying to work on making a UI again but i’m finding it hard to be happy. I don’t like big UI’s but making them very minimalistic doesnt help seeing that i’m a healer.

Anyway this is my UI so far , kept light weight as can be.

And these are the mods i’ve been using

The reason there are no in combat screens or raid screens is because i’m still trying to sort those out

I’m open to any suggestions so feel free to comment

The Dark Knight

curaris — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:45:19 +0000

So yesterday i decide to go watch “The Dark Knight” . I initialy didn’t feel like going to watch it because all of the hype . The thing is , usualy i would use IMDB as a reference to see how good a movie is. But IMDB has failed me. The Dark Knight has been boosted up to the top of the top 100 movies of all times by the fanboys yelling it’s the best and the previous number 1 being the godfather was horribly boring. How ever if you shed some light on it , the Godfather might not be super new and full of high tech things , it has to be put in it’s era.

Nether the less , i decided to go watch The Dark Knight. Filled with negative emotions about all the hype i entered the movie theatre. Only to have it blown away in a few minutes. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it THE best movie , but it certainly gives other classic high rated movies a run for its money. As far as the acting of Heath Ledger goes it truely is sublime. He plays an excellent joker and is most likely one of the key selling points of the movie. (Ignoring the attention people their work get upon someone passing away) HOWEVER he is not the only selling point. The acting of Christian Bale is truely a exellent piece of work too. Obviously the others were very good aswell , but i must admit i didn’t pay particular attention to them so i refuse to judge them on what i remember vaguely.

My advice is to just go see it , and ignore the whole judments that you gained before you even saw it. Go in there and just be objective , and see that it is truely a good movie .

Itemselling.

curaris — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:58:27 +0000

At the end of vanilla wow a new phenonomon emerged , namely itemselling. High end guilds decided to sell off t2 / t3 items or other items for large ammounts of gold. I recall the price for a T2 item on my realm was about 1000 gold. Which used to be a huge ammount for vanilla wow. Along the forum posts announcing the start of these “sales” a series of complaints emerged. Per guild selling items about 3 forum topics would emerge about the sales being a bad thing. It eventualy ended up with the casual VS hardcore battle or the claims that i would encourage gold buying for ingame items.

So now the “end” of BC is near , the item selling has returned . However i was suprised to have not stumbled upon any complain threads yet. Instead the services seem to have risen in popularity and some servers are known to have dozens of people waiting to loot their tokens or weapons or what not.

My point of view on this is fairly simplistic. I aprove of it. I’m of the opinion that if the demand is there , why should the supply not emerge or simply respond. Problem with this remains to be the question of morality . Although i’m not sure how or why WoW has become such a serious matter with a moral , it has. People are yelling about wellfare epics and the argument (this time not in forum posts but more as random trolls , making it less reasonably explained) of encourgement of buying gold seems to have returned.

Now my question is , should this be encouraged? Alot of previous games sold so called of boosts for items before so why should world of warcraft not be one of these? It is the case that it has now become a different style of boosting , seeing that items are BOP and people get saved to instances.

Also should Blizzard prevent these kind of behaviour or should they shut an eye to it? Or even possibly make it easier for people to do this. I personaly think this will not happen as the whole reason for the creation of BOP items was to prevent the selling of items which occured in other online games or MMO’s.

Well designed UI

curaris — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:51:32 +0000

Today while browsing the UI forums i stumbled upon a UI that drew my attention.

It’s a very clean and simple UI but still manages to not have to sacrifice any funtionality.

The UI is made/maintained by a person known as Metz. A name i havn’t seen before in terms of UI’s. However this version of his UI is labeled as Metz UI as 3.0 so therefore isn’t his first. and even after doing some research i couldn’t find any versions of his UI before 2.8 .

Another reason that i like this UI is it’s resolution , being 1280×1024. Not that this is my native resolution but i feel a smaller resolution opens up alot of options in terms of reaching more people and making your UI more accesable. That being said though 22″ monitors seem to have the standard these days.

I’ve attached a screen or 2 showing the UI in action aswell as the Download link. Also i’ve added the original forum post so that you can read up on feedback or possibly reach him if you need to.

Raid Solo Download Original forum post

Bored?!

curaris — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:36:57 +0000

Well , after a long period of playing wow ive landed in one of those moods again.

Not up for alot in the game and everytime i log in i feel like logging out again.I’d like to think a alt would help but it doesn’t really help at all.My main (being my priest) has over 10,000 gold and alot of reagents .

Everytime i try to make an alt it doesn’t quite make me feel good or entertain me. I was considering a new spec on my priest to shadow but that would only end up in more boredom or possibly annoyance as people tend to ask me to instance heroics which i actualy need for rep or anything other while i’m shadow. Either way i’m considering giving wow another rest just to see if that helps me regain interest in the game.

Cura hits 10k.

curaris — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:09:34 +0000

I managed to save up 10k gold on my priest , i used to have more in fact but had to spend a bit when changing realms.

Pictures will follow later.

10k

Ps : If you guys are wondering where the large UI post went i unpublished it as most of the UI’s are no longer funtional in current patches.