R4 Kernel 1.18 released

It’s a couple of days old, but I checked the R4DS site on the off-chance that there was an update and lo and behold, 1.18 was available.

Update R4 v1.18 kernel 2008-4-24
1） Solved 2203, 2219, 2240, 2250 problem

I’m guessing these are more savegame solutions for commercial games :/

Anyway, as usual, I’ve uploaded it to a nice fast host for you to download. Remember, just copy the files over to the root of the R4 (Micro SD card) and overwrite all, there are no themes in there, so those won’t be overwritten. If it doesn’t work, I really can’t help you as it’s simpler than Paris Hilton.

Amazon fail

This isn’t an attempt at getting in on the ‘Fail’ thing, although, I do regularly visit The FAIL Blog (it’s in my blogroll over there –> ) to see what updates are there, this is more of a one-off personal type fail… which could be considered general.. I guess..

Anyway, I bought the wife Supernatural season 1 some time ago, so I thought I would order season 2 and pre-order season 3 as they seemed to be at a good price on amazon.co.uk at the moment and they’re known for raising and dropping prices on a daily basis.

I can understand them recommending season 1 since that’s not part of my order, but why recommend items that are literally in my order? There’s no need to recommend them as I’ve clearly just ordered them. I realised the delivery date is going to be when season 3 is released, but it doesn’t matter since they were going to be for her birthday which is in October.

Amazon seem to have plenty of fail going on on their site, such as when you view certain products like the Nokia N81 (8GB) Sim Free Mobile Phone – Black/Silver which recommends a Nokia N95 8GB Unlocked Mobile Phone – Black as a ‘perfect partner’. Why would you want to buy a mobile phone … with a mobile phone? Especially when one is obviously different/better than the other, you’re just going to get the one you want or need unless you have money to burn…

My Second Life Experience…

…is not really a pleasant one. What is with the way the avatars walk around? It’s like some kind of fast shuffle than a proper casual stride.

Although I haven’t traveled around too much yet, there doesn’t seem a whole lot to do… I’m sure I saw someone say something about some kind of skilling, well if that’s possible, I’d like to know where you do that as there doesn’t appear to be any info about where you can do stuff unless you find it yourself.

From my little experience, I can’t see what the big deal is about Second Life. I’ll give it a chance for a while longer and see if it improves somewhat, if it doesn’t and just turns out as crap as I expected, I’ll just stick to There.com of which I’m having a great time on.

I’ve gone… There

After testing Kaneva and There, There seems to offer me a better choice of things to do, so I’ve gone and paid the one time fee of $9.99 to become a premium member.

Although it has simple looking graphics, it has a lot more than just dancing to do. There’s always something going on somewhere whether it be some kind of skilling, teaching, racing or just hanging out. If you just want to stand around and chat, that’s fine as there are loads of people around, unlike Kaneva where you have to go and look for people.

I wanted to post a pic of some cool transport like this hovercar for 2 reasons…

1. It’s a great way to get around and you can even fly over water with it.
2. Philipino girls, in usually just their white newbie underwear will ask you if they can drive, then take you to a house to ‘make out’ with you, ask your age, possibly leave you stranded and move on to the next one.

It’s only happened to me twice, but already I can see what goes on. They log on around 2am BST (GMT +1), take off their newbie clothes to reveal their underwear and go around asking people if they want to visit a house, once there, you’re led to a bedroom where you both ’sit’ (there isn’t a lie down option) and, well, kiss.

It’s kinda sad really, they don’t want to play the game properly and would rather choose to have what is probably the There equivalent of cyber sex, maybe they should stick to games that really allow you to have virtual sex and leave games like this alone.

Of course, you have the typical morons who think they’re clever by trying to shoot you or run you down with cars and if you and they are a premium member, you can hear them talk or play music through their mic’s, if it happens too often, just ignore them and they can’t touch you. Every game has retards and obviously, There is no exception and has some annoying people, ignoring them is a good way to solve that and if they have any sense, will give up and just go away.

With that slight negativity aside, I enjoy playing it and hope to see more people from TSO/EA Land move over onto there, it has more of a community spirit than Kaneva and has at least 5x more things to do. Some people have mentioned Twinity, sorry, but I’m not that impressed with what I’ve seen of it, so I won’t be applying for that beta.

Kaneva, my thoughts

In a bid to find a new online social ‘game’ for when EA Land eventually gets the plug pulled, I thought I would try Kaneva which is one of the titles some people are also playing.

You get a room of which you can design yourself by uploading textures and moving things around, seems pretty pointless since your avatar doesn’t really need food or sleep, but one of the cool things is, you can stream media through the TV.

If you want to socialize with other people, don’t bother looking outside since it’s almost a ghost town. People are rarely ‘outside’ and prefer to get together ‘inside’, not a lot seems to happen outside and you can run around for ages trying to find someone, only to find they’re going somewhere like the mall or something.

This seems to be what Kaneva is all about, clubs and dancing. It’s just a progression of pressing the arrow keys in the correct order for you to accumulate points and get a title under your name… that’s it. There doesn’t appear to be any interaction between avatars, if you click on someone, you get nothing like ’shake hands’ or what would be appropriate, ‘dance’.

It just seems so pointless, I don’t really understand the point behind it all except that it’s a 3D social network, a kind of MySpace 3D where you can chat and dance. It can take quite a lot of resources too, around 1GB of RAM and even sapped the 1GB of virtual memory I have (yeah I know, I need to set it at 1.5x my amount of RAM, but I didn’t), so once I’ve changed that, I’ll give it more of a chance, but I can’t see me getting into it that much…

You can see my Kaneva profile here.