Pixelique

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There have been many new reviews coming out very recently. To start it off, GameSpot just recently reviewed Civilization IV. The game earned a 9.4 out of 10, superb by GameSpot's rating system. GameSpot gave the game a perfect 10 in game-play, an 8 in Graphics, an 8 in Sound, a 9 in Value and a Tilt of 10.

Here is an excerpt from the 3-page review:

Even single-player and multiplayer options have been improved in Civ IV. The single-player game offers much-improved artificial intelligence that seems to cheat much less than in previous games, or not at all. In the single-player game, rival nations won't mysteriously explore the entire world in two turns, nor will they use those two turns to magically build a network of five cities where there were none before. Computer-controlled nations will also make much more reasonable bids at the table, but they can't be easily bribed with small handfuls of cash, either. The single-player difficulty seems to scale extremely well by offering a very gentle introduction for beginners at the lowest levels and a suitably tough challenge for experts at the highest levels.

Reviews also come from 1Up, Yahoo! Games, and Eurogamer. They have all given Civ4 high marks at 9.0/10.

Yahoo! Games' Mike Smith mentions this about the interface:

The interface is much more of a consideration, and barring one or two fairly minor issues, Civ 4 gets it right. Even though it feels like almost all the game's frontend is given to a picture of the game board, there's a surprising amount of information crowbarred into the surrounding windows and buttons. Liberal amounts of help and reference material are provided in-game, and getting detailed information on anything is just a matter of letting your mouse float over it.

There is also a Multiplayer review up at Apolyton written by Jesse Fletcher (others may recognize him as Friedrich Psitalon, I simply know him as the best Civ4 MP player I've played against ). Jesse, also the co-authur of the Official Civ4 Strategy Guide talks about what the major differences in Civ4's multiplayer are compared to previous versions of Civ.

Here is a quote from his MP Review:

The Final Tally

Soren Johnson put it best: "CIV - sometimes it's better to be good, than lucky." I've said it before and I'll say it again many times - CIV's biggest difference over C3C is that canned, often-repeated-and-mimicked strategies just won't work anymore. There are so many approaches and styles, so many available responses, and so many minor factors to balance between health, happiness, commerce, military, this-tech-or-that-one... "build this and then do that" is simply not relevant anymore.

>> GameSpot Review 9.4/10
>> 1Up Review 9/10
>> Yahoo! Games Review 4.5/5
>> Eurogamer Review 9/10
>> Apolyton MP Review by Friedrich Psitalon

Posted by Maverick at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Nikon D200's images leaks in the Nikon UK site. This time it seems very real, sources said in couples of weeks Nikon will announce its details specifications.

Posted by Maverick at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Your computer chooses a name for your baby.

You mixed up what name to choose for your babies!? well let your computer do that for you!!! yes, now by using Random Names within a second you'd be able to choose hundreds of sweaty and beauty names for your daughter/sons. It will choose random names after some special mathematical calculations. It contains over 2900 names for sons and over 4900 for your daughters.

Click here to download it

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Paris Mon Amour is a blog... a photo blog about Paris and Taiwan I guess. Because I can't decrypt chinese words (^o^). Just enjoy all the photos there, very classic.

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Picks' Tribute to the Simpsons is my homage to the world's favourite and longest running animated sitcom.

One cannot help but love the Simpsons; Homer's insatiable food cravings, Marge's tall blue hair, Bart's prank calls to Moe's Tavern, Lisa's moodiness and the rest of the characters provide us with hours of entertainment.

This site has been on the web for over 6 years and I'm proud to say it has been visited by thousands of fans, had a few makeovers and has even survived the great shutdown of '97 by Twentieth Century Fox. Web Link

Posted by Maverick at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Designed from the ground up for professional photographers, Aperture provides everything you need for after the shoot, delivering the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers.

Featuring a RAW-focused workflow, Aperture makes RAW as easy as JPEG, letting you import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your images more effectively and efficiently than ever before. From capture to output, you work directly with your RAW files, never having to first convert them into another format before viewing, adjusting, organizing, or printing them.
And with the most powerful image processing in the world, Aperture is fast — whether you’re working with RAW, JPEG, or TIFF images. It supports the RAW formats from all leading digital camera manufacturers (including Canon and Nikon) and provides optimized support for such market leading cameras as the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II, Canon EOS 20D, and Nikon D2x as well as the highly popular Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D50. It also supports the Adobe DNG format.

Whether you’re a fashion, wedding, sports, portrait, fine art, commercial, or editorial photographer, Aperture’s color-managed workflow and flexible design tools will help you easily create stunning prints, customized contact sheets, elegant books, and web pages as beautiful as the images you capture.

Posted by Maverick at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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You probably already know that your printer may be secretly outputting hidden data to allow investigators to track you by magnifying and decrypting the info. Now, you can find out what info is being shared. The Electronic Frontier Foundation commissioned a study to decode a series of dots that appear on pages printed by the Xerox DocuColor laser printer.

With the help of a microscope and a trusty blue LED (see, those things are useful for something other than mods), the EFF researchers were able to reveal a grid of yellow dots that provide information about the date the printout was made, as well as the printer’s serial number. Is your printer tracking you? If you’ve got a DocuColor and a microscope (or a powerful magnifying glass), you can decrypt your dots via the EFF’s web site. If you’ve got another printer, you can send in paper samples for them to add to their research database. In the meantime, don’t assume that anonymous letter blowing the whistle on your employer’s nefarious deeds or a politician’s leak of a CIA agent’s name can’t be traced back to you. (source: Engadget)

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What is KPL?

KPL stands for Kid’s Programming Language. KPL makes it easy for kids to learn computer programming. KPL makes it fun, too, by making it especially easy to program computer games, with cool graphics and sound.

Can I learn to program?

If you are using a computer to read this on the Web, you can certainly learn to program! Programming is really good exercise for your brain, too. The skills you already have that you will let you learn to program are reading and typing and math. As you learn to program with KPL, you will also learn something called ‘computer logic.’

A computer program is simply a series of instructions to the computer. Computers are very good at following instructions, but they must be told what to do very precisely, and using logic that the computer understands. When you learn KPL, you are learning how to do that. When you learn KPL, you are learning how to make a computer do anything you want it to do – including play games!

KPL is for games?

We invented KPL because we think learning is best when learning is fun. And the whole point of games is fun, of course! It’s also true that playing games is the thing that computers are used for more than anything else in the world. Computer graphics and computer sound make for some very fun games!

Because we were thinking about these things, we designed KPL to make it easy to program computer games. So it’s easy for you to make computer games yourself! KPL is not only for programming games – it’s for learning other things, too. But learning is best when learning is fun, right?

Click here to go to the website

Posted by Maverick at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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As speculated, there is a new iPod out. Called The iPod, it has a 2.5" color screen, with QVGA resolution (320 x 240). Jobs claims the device will be 30% thinner than the current 20GB iPod, which would make it about .44" thick - slim. The iPod will be available in black, and will be offered at 30Gb and 60Gb sizes ($299 and $399 respectively). Apple say the device will do real-time decoding of MPEG4 and H.264. The devices will begin shipping next week, and, will come with a case. Apple is still getting flak over the scratch happy iPod nano; presumably made out of a similar design, the company doesn't appear interested in a repeat. In other iPod news, Apple updated the list of car companies with iPod features in-built.

Apple have also announced updates to the iMac line. The new iMac is thinner, and has an in-built iSight video camera built in. Included is a new application called PhotoBooth. It lets you take pictures with the iSight and email them to friends, adding special effects, if you'd like. It even uses the iMac screen as a "flash" of sorts. The new models are $1299 for the 17 inch and $1699 for the 20 inch. Both include Bluetooth, Superdrives (DVD-RW/CD-RW) and a Mighty Mouse (Apple's new two-button mouse) and are available starting today. Click 'read more' for the full specifications.

Apple have also announced a new version of iTunes, coming out today. Version six, hot on the heels of a version five release literally weeks ago, will feature the ability to purchase music videos for $1.99. The store launches with 2,000 music videos. Said videos come with a similar DRM setup, allowing the playback of the videos on up to 5 computers. iTunes lets you preview the entire video for free before purchase. A slightly upgrade version of Quicktime is shipped with version six of iTunes. (Neowin)

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Microsoft and Yahoo will connect together their IM's network by Q2 next year.
Customers of both services will be able to see their friends' online presence, share emoticons, and add new contacts from either Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger to their buddy list.

This join force planned to push AOL, currently still holds the market and also to protect them from Google Talk.

Posted by Maverick at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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People are waiting for new stuffs from Apple today. Rumors said it will launch several new Mac computers and a new iPod probably a video iPod.

Let’s wait and see as Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2005 fourth quarter ended September 24, 2005, reporting the highest revenue and earnings in the Company’s history.

Apple posted revenue of $3.68 billion and a net quarterly profit of $430 million, or $.50 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $2.35 billion and a net profit of $106 million, or $.13 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 28.1 percent, up from 27.0 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

“We’re thrilled to have concluded the best year in Apple’s history, with 68 percent year-over-year revenue growth and 384 percent net profit growth,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “This is the direct result of our focus on innovation and the immense talent and creativity at Apple. We could not be more excited about the new products we’re working on for 2006.”

Posted by Maverick at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Looking for baby? errr... I mean looking for baby names?
Go here and find what is the most popular baby names in U.S.

In this site you can find popular baby names by birth of year, top 5 by state, top 1000 by a decade even popular names of twins.

Below are example of popular names in 2004.

Posted by Maverick at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
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Some say Jack Carver settled down in Micronesia because he was on the run from past mistakes… And while it’s true that the dishonorable discharge and the price on his head made it hard to earn an honest living, that never stopped Jack before.

A few years and lot of boat trips later and Jack can almost imagine that life was always this simple. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t smell trouble when Val Cortez shows up at his dock with her cameras and her swimsuit and a day-pack full of cash. Or when she asks him to take her to the Jacutan islands, a remote archipelago that the locals know enough to avoid…

Now his boat and livelihood are so much burning debris, Val’s disappeared, and everywhere he runs Jack finds more wackjobs in fatigues trying to shoot him or blow him up or run him over. On top of that, he’s cornered in a merciless tropical jungle, where a violent death lurks just an inch below the natural beauty.

Jack has a choice. He can either embrace the wilderness and make its brutality his own, or face extinction at the point of a mercenary gun.

http://www.farcrygame.com/us/farcryinstincts/

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There're several applications you can use to scan if there's any spyware in your work and play 'box'.
The very best of all but NOT free is Spyware Doctor from PcTools. 2nd place is Ad-Aware Personal Edition, a free version from Lavasoft.
The next good in scanning and removing spyware and adware comes from PepiMK Software, Spybot S&D a freeware also.

One more also quite good in scanning and deleting spywares as well as adwares is from Microsoft. Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware while it's still in beta version but good enough to give you peace of mind out of the malicious items.

You also can put in companion to them a prevention spyware program SpywareBlaster, this application could blocked harmful list of addresses on your browser (IE and Firefox supported).

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1. Civilization IV
2. Black & White 2
3. Age of Empire III

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