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From the same people who brought you Zombieland USA comes OMG Pirates a great iPhone game that will keep you entertained for a while. There's that age old question of who would win in a fight a pirate or a ninja. In OMG Pirates you play a little ninja fighting off the invading pirate horde. As you gain experience, by fighting off the pirates, you unlocks new moves and power-ups. OMG Pirates is a side scroller game that has easy controls featuring a joystick on the left and two buttons on the right. There are 10 levels to play through each of them featuring 3 scenes for ninja vs. pirate action.
The game play is really smooth and the moves are fun and easy to accomplish. You can move around with the joystick, perry and jump with one button, and attach with the other. As you play you unlock new attacks that help you dispatch the pirates faster. As you kill pirates you charge your special power notated by the blue circle in the top left. When it's charges up you hit it and your ninja lets out a super blast that hits any pirate in it's wake.
OMG Pirates is a great iPhone game and has just the right balance of fun and easy with determination and difficulty. It sells for $1.99 on the app store and is one of the best affordable iPhone games I have seen in a long time. OMG Pirates! @ the App Store
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Lifelock has rolled out a whole new level of protection that goes way beyond anything the other identity theft protection service have to offer. For all you computer geeks out there that spend a lot of time on peer-to-peer networks listen up.
People use peer-to-peer networks to download music, videos, and documents from around the world and from several computers at once. What a lot of people don't know is that those connections can be used by hackers to steal information from you and are sold on the black market. There is no fool proof way to protect yourself from this threat without using the software in the first place but with LifeLock's Command Center you can be alerted to the presence of your information on the p2p black market. If your information is detected LifeLock will help you protect yourself.
If you spend a lot of time downloading music, movies and other files on these networks you are at risk and LifeLock can help you detect your information and help protect it something other services don't offer.
Other than the Personal Breach Detection that alerts you of p2p breaches, LifeLock Command Center also offers the following additional protection above and beyond their standard services.
- Payday Loan Alerts and Reports: Alerts you when your information is used for Payday Loans, who don't use the standard credit bureaus something that makes it's detection difficult.
- Sex Offender Registry Alerts and Reports: Alerts you if a register sex offender is using your address as their home address.
- Public Records Alerts and Reports: Will show you a list of addresses that are associated with your ID which are found in the public record.
- Alias Records Alerts and Reports: lists alternative names associated different pieces of your identity found in public records.
Court Records and Reports: Shows a list of court records that are associated with your information. Will alert you is someone is committing crimes using your identity.
LifeLock's Command Center still offers all the protection of the standard service like eRecon, WalletLock, Identity Alerts and TrueAddress. Command Center also offers all these additional services for just $15 a month. I found the promotion code “DEFENSE” that gets your $10 off. I'm not trying to sell you anything I just signed up for LifeLock and thought I would write about the benefits. I just had my check card canceled for the second time in 6 months because of some find of breach. It thought it was time to get LifeLock.
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Mini Squadron is a little game for your iphone that is sure to capture your attention. It's simple and fun as you fly around shooting down planes, helicopters, and UFOs. The controls are simple using a left side joystick and a right side fire button. The game offers multiple levels, unlock able planes and keeps track of your high scores. As you fly around shoot down planes power-ups and extra lives fall from the sky offer a change in your planes abilities or arsenal.
One thing I really like about this game is when you use all of your lives you can always restart the level from the same wave you were on when you died, preventing the frustrating replaying of the same waves as before. You can also play multiplayer with friends and complete strangers online. The game play also offers a survival mode which will throw endless waves of planes at you until all your lives have been spent.
You unlock new planes by getting high scores and completing levels and waves, which allows you to select different of planes the possessing different capabilities and weapons. It's a great game for only $2.99 and is worth every penny. Check it out in the App Store.
Mini Squadron $2.99 App Store
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A petition has been put forth to Infinity Ward to release a patch that allows players to change the colors used to notate who the good guys and bad guys are in the multiplayer. Currently when you play MW 2 Multiplayer the people who are on your team are green and your enemies are Red. Likewise on the map the enemies are red and friendlies are green. For people who are colorblind and have a hard time distinguishing red and green they don't know the good guys from the bad. They want Infinity Ward to release a patch that allows players to change the colors to ones more easily distinguished.
The petition mentions that Call of Duty World at War had a feature that allowed people to change the colors from red/green to orange/blue. The petition also mentions that Ghost Recon had a similar feature. The writer at Kotaku, who is colorblind, was pretty hard on the people putting out the petition. He said that people with colorblindness find workarounds and that it's just not cost effective to release an update for 10% of the male population. I can't imagine that they couldn't release the color change feature along with some other patch. They released an update because people turned themselves into suicide bombers using the javelin glitch, so why wouldn't they patch the game so 10% of the male population can play the game properly? Makes sense to me but maybe I sympathize with the people who are colorblind because I'm left handed and also deal with only being 10% of the general population. We live in a right handed non-colorblind world i guess.
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People are always asking me how do I make my Mac faster like it was when I bought it? The answer to that question is often times a little bit more complicated than most people want to hear. So I offer a couple easy things you can do to make you and your Mac happier and faster.
Let's do a Little Spring Cleaning!
So if you want to make your Mac happy and fast again make sure you have plenty of space to play with. You computer uses what's called virtual memory that needs hard drive space to store temporary files for processing. If you are maxing out on hard drive space you might be headed for a crash. So go through all your files and delete things you don't need like applications you don't use or old video project files that take up space. A good rule of thumb is to make sure you have at least 10% - 20% of your hard drive free.
Apply Some Elbow Grease
Okay so your hard drive has some wiggle room so now it's time to make your drive sparkle. There are some processes you can do to make sure that the structure and file permissions are what they should be. For that you can use the disk utility to verify and repair your hard drive and your file permissions. You can also use an application called Onyx that can do those functions as well as others like running a hard drive diagnostic to ensure your hard drive is healthy. Onyx can also delete caches and logs that most people don't use anyway to free up space and to force applications make new ones. This can sometimes speed up your boot time for the OS as well as applications if the caches and or logs were corrupted to begin with.
About Your Usage
Okay so you we have room on the drive and it's clean now let's talk about how we use our computer. It makes sense that your computer get's slower the longer you have it because you install more and more junk onto it. At some point you will realize that you can't run all your applications at once because your computer just isn't fast enough. What about all those processes running in the background? I have several apps that run in the background that can take up a lot of memory if I let them. Applications that provide shortcuts or stream media to my Xbox are some examples. All these and more run all the time slowly eating away at your RAM and will slow you down. So pick which ones you want to run and ditch the others. You can control what applications run on startup by going to the System Preferences >> Accounts >> Login Items. Select the application you don't want to start at login and hit the minus button. Some applications will automatically add themselves to this list when you launch them. You can find the setting in their preferences so when you take them off the list the app will not add themselves back again.
Watch the Stats
It's great to leave your applications open so you don't have to relaunch them to open a file in them, but this takes up memory. You can gauge how hard you are running your computer by looking at the Activity Monitor. At the bottom of the window you will see a color coded pie chart that shows you your memory consumption. If the chart is almost all yellow with little green or blue you are out of memory and your computer might be running slowly. You can sort the list of processes by memory consumption to find which application is using all your memory. When you study the activity monitor you can find out how much memory an application uses, which may allow you to adjust which applications are open at what time. For example if I was going to run more than one adobe application at the same time on my computer I would close others to save memory. I also might discover that an application that runs all the time takes up a lot of memory and I might choose to only open it when really need it.
Wrapping it up
Okay so these tips are more like good habits that you should try and do on a regular bases. I know that I have been trying to keep to this and it seems to keep my computer happy. So keep your computer happy and until next time happy computing and thanks for reading.