Pleco OCR Review: A Chinese Real Time Dictionary

Pleco is a well crafted Chinese to English and English to Chinese dictionary for iOS devices. The basic free app performs the function of a Chinese dictionary very well. However, the software is unique on the App Store because it is very customisable and allows the purchase of 'Add-ons' to add more features to the dictionary and the sheer number of these in-app purchases that are available is extremely impressive. The most interesting and unique of these features is the Pleco OCR, which allows the use of the iPhone camera to recognise Chinese characters and find related dictionary terms instantly and in real-time.




The OCR module can be found in the 'Add-ons' section of the Pleco app. The module itself costs £8.99 (or £7.99 with the opt-in educational discount) or for $14.99/£12.99.

How To Rip DVDs To USB From Any Computer In Under 10 Minutes

This guide allows you to copy a full two hour DVD to a USB flash drive in under 10 minutes without installing any software or making any permanent changes to any computer. It means that instead of borrowing a DVD from a friend, you can choose to do a very quick copy of it straight to USB flash drive. This guide works with any CD and DVD, and the method can bypass all copy protections and region restrictions. Virtually any computer can be used, even if it is a school, library, office or university computer without any risk. This is because the programs do not attempt to make system changes. The only real requirement is that the computer allows executing programs from a USB flash drive.

Use A Fruit Peeler As Cheap Cheese Slicer

Using a standard fruit peeler is an easy way to cut thin slices of cheese quickly and conveniently from a larger block. Simple as that!

But why?

1) No need for an expensive, specialized tool.
2) Easy to wash up and clean.
3) No need to take the cheese out of the packaging fully.
4) Keeping cheese in blocks minimizes surface area exposed to air and prevents the cheese drying out.

Essential Windows Tools For Seamlessly Migrating To A Solid State Drive

Switch from a standard platter drive to a solid state drive can have a drastic reduction on loading speed. It is definitely the preferable options for loading large complex applications or loading data intensive games. However, with the prices of SSDs being so high compared to HDDs, it's not possible to find solid state drives with storage sizes like1tb without spending a fortune. The best option is to consider a hybrid approach and to place your most and critical applications on the SSD, and to keep a high capacity HDD for use for storing and backing up media and data.

In the past, the only real way to do this without reinstalling your operating system was to clone the older HDD and then restore the image onto the new SDD. This would require reducing the size of the original drive to fit onto the smaller SDD, and to engage in a fairly lengthy and complicated process of cloning and restoring. However, there are some free tools that you can use in Windows which will allow seamless moves of data from one drive to another, without ever having to reformat, clone or image your drives. The tools listed in this guide can also be used to migrate or upgrade to any other drive, be they larger or smaller than the origin drive.

5 Reasons Why Casuals Should Return To World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

World of Warcraft is a mess. Blizzard themselves admitted that 70% of players never even get past level 10. How many people quit the game upon reaching level 40 quit because they didn't have 100g for the mount riding skill? And how about raiding? How can sane people get anything done at maximum level without spending 6 straight hours in some raid dungeon hoping that a piece of loot drops from a boss that you don't have to fight 4 other people in the same class for? It's easy to get burned out from World of Warcraft because it can seem to require a huge commitment of time an energy to make any progress within the game.

It's not so bad anymore. Blizzard have listened to the player feedback and have improved everything for the better, and the game is now much more casual player friendly. With the coming release of Cataclysm in December 7th 2010, there has never been a better time for the casual player to be drawn back into the game, and here are the 5 reasons why:

Turn Any Old PC, Laptop Or Netbook Into A Flexible Media Centre

More and more people are experiencing streaming video as the primary source of video entertainment. For example, most students at college or university rely on their laptop for their source of (usually illegal) video content such as movies and television shows. However, with legitimate services like Lovefilm, Hulu, YouTube, BBC iPlayer and 4OD, a truly immense catalogue is available at one's fingertips (not to mention PPStream, a very impressive video streaming client). The problem is that most people are still consuming online video via their PCs at their desks. Video content like movies and television shows should be enjoyed as they were designed to be viewed; to be watched in the living room and shared with friends and family on the big TV screen.

Inverted Y-Axis Option And A List Of Games Without Y-Axis Support

'Normal' mapping is the case where moving the joystick/mouse/analogue stick 'up', results in the game point of view shifts 'up'. The y-axis inversion control scheme is basically the inverse of this. 'Up' points the camera 'down', and 'down' points the camera 'up'. Y-axis inversion is the way that I've learned to play any game that requires change one's point of view.

Inversion of the y-axis was never really a choice me. Like many, I learned to play like this because the first games I played were flight simulators or space combat games like Wing Commander. In real-life, airplane joystick controls by default are 'inverted'. When I transitioned to first-person shooters, the mentality of the flight simulator stuck with me through the first-person view point (as well as third-person view point games).

The way that I see it, y-axis is a valid way of thinking about pointing a camera. If you imagine your virtual character as a puppet facing away from you with a pole sticking out of its head horizontally, you can make the puppet look up by tugging the pole down, and vice versa. And a similar logic applies to the flaps of an airplane, where one pulls the joystick downwards in order to 'pull up' the plane.

Inverting the y-axis doesn't really offer an advantage or disadvantage. Rather, it's just a way that some people expect controls to work in a game. And developers know this: almost every single game that has come out in the last 10 years supports y-axis inversion. However, there are a select few titles which do not, and this is why I've created the list. I hope this is a useful resource for you. Inverted gamers unite!

Ultimate List Of Steam Serial Keys From Retail

Steam always sells games at higher prices than in the retail stores. However, many retail copies of games contain serial keys that can be registered on Steam. By comparing Steam Store prices with retail prices, it is possible to find a Steam serial key that costs much less than buying directly from the Steam Store. For example, Order of War is available from the Steam Store for £29.99, but can be bought on Amazon for £2.60 including delivery. This retail copy can be registered and played on Steam without ever using the disc.

The following page is a list of every possible retail Steam key with a Metacritic rating over 60 that can be bought from retail. Each game title contains a link to its Steam Store page. My list includes a price from Amazon which is generated dynamically, as well as a link to Camelcamelcamel, a site which generates graphs of Amazon prices to track the decrease in price of a game over time. An explanation of how the graphs work is available in a previous article: Buy New Games For Less Using Graphs. The source of games that this article is based on is from Steam Support which lists the serial key formats of the games.

Last Updated: 18th January 2011.
Please comment if there are any new additions that I have missed.

(All versions linked are for Steam PC versions of games, even if the correct box art is not displayed).

Watch PPStream In English On Windows

PPStream is a streaming video player popular with users in mainland China. The technology PPStream uses is a combination of YouTube and BitTorrent. Users can stream video instantly, storing the data on their computers, and then upstream this data to other users.

What is unique about PPStream is how centralised and organised this content is made available to users. The range is phenomenal - it includes DVDs, camcorders of current films in cinemas, Asian dramas (from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan), and most importantly, a gigantic range of American and British movies and TV shows. Almost all of the content is moderated with care, and most sources include subtitles in Chinese (Simplified). For example, the entirety of Lost seasons 1-6 can be streamed, as can Battlestar Galactica (dual subtitled in English and Chinese), Mad Men, True Blood, The Simpsons, Firefly, as well as more obscure things like British snooker games, pro StarCraft II matches, Little Britain, Australian Top Gear, The IT Crowd, the British rebooted Sherlock Holmes series, etc.

For this reason, I believe that PPStream is the most ridiculously, blatant and well organised wholesale infringement of copyright that has ever occurred on the internet. The content streams are very fast, the software and website is centralised and user friendly, and the breadth and range of content is staggering.

Make World of Warcraft Load Faster Using Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives are in their infancy in terms of mainstream adoption in the PC market. Barring the cheap SSDs found in notebooks, finding an SSD that offers good performance can be very expensive. The price to storage ratio is of an SSD very poor when compared with traditional hard drives. For example, a 128gb SSD will cost around £213.99 whilst a 7200rpm 250gb HDD will cost around £28.71.

With huge cost and tiny storage spaces, SSDs are not really meant to be used for replacing your 500gb of storage of movies or even for your games collection. However, in a game like World of Warcraft, SSDs make a huge difference in terms of speed increase in loading times. Any loading speed boost has a multiplicative effect on the entire game experience. This is because logging into a character, taking a ship between continents, dying in a dungeon and entering an instance or a battleground will take a long time if you are running from a slow hard drive, whilst a SSD will make your loading speed up to 60% faster.

Fixing Lord Of The Rings Online Borderless Windowed Fullscreen

Update 20 March 20120: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game.

I've been trying to figure out a way to fix the windowed border issue present in games such as Lord Of The Rings Online (LOTRO) in Windows. Usually when trying to run a game in borderless windowed fullscreen, I would set the resolution to the monitor native resolution and  use the program ShiftWindow to coordinate the screen so that the borders would not be visible (guide). However, games like LOTRO forcefully resize the window so that the border is always visible, no matter how you try to manipulate it. So I thought about some other solutions, and hopefully some more intelligent person will help me to figure it out, and in turn, help to fix the same issue in lots of other games too.

Civilization V And Borderless Windowed Fullscreen

Update 20 March 20120: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game. 

I've been trying to make Civilization V work using my normal method of windowing the game, and then using the program ShiftWindow to push the game to fullscreen (guide). However, it hasn't been working as well as I had hoped. Firstly, the windowed border refuses to stretch to the correct aspect ratio of the screen, so that it always leaves a border either at the top or the bottom. Secondly, the mouse is not bound within the window, so mouse edge scrolling is disabled (mouse scrolling is an important part of any game involving large amounts of units and terrain).

Buy New Games For Less Using Graphs

Buying games is an expensive hobby. The key to saving money is to resist the urge to impulse buy on the day of release. However, game companies are making it harder and harder to wait for prices to go down as they pile on tempting preorder bonuses and collector's editions for games that you may have been waiting for years to be released. However, the key is knowing how long to wait, and how to get the best deal.

Camelcamelcamel
There is a new service is available called camelcamelcamel uk which is an Amazon price tracker which is what I have been using to produce these graphs. It started tracking prices in March 2010, so it's a perfect tool to see how much prices of new games can drop within 6 months.

For demonstration I've take a look at the price fluctuation of Just Cause 2. Just Cause 2 was released on PC on March 26th 2010. This was retailing at an RRP of £34.99. This game began retailing in most establishments at £29.99, including Steam. Incindentally, Just Cause 2 is one of the few games whose serial key within the box will allow a Steam activation. A handy list of other such games is available on Steam Support. As of 23rd September it is available at the price of £29.99 on Steam. However on the retail side of things, Just Cause 2's price has dropped much further than that.




Data involving 'used sales' has been removed leaving only Amazon stock price (green) as well as the 3rd party new price (blue). The lowest price is available from a reputable 3rd party store called 'gzoop' which offers Just Cause 2 for £9.87 + £1.99 shipping which totals £11.86. This is a 61.5% drop in price from the original retail price of £29.99 after just 6 months, between March 26th and September 23rd 2010.

You can also check the current price of Just Cause 2 here: http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B002ZRQ3U.

The lesson here is to be patient, because games often fall in price much faster than you think!

Review: DAVE From Ikea, An In-Depth Look At The Best Couch Desk / Laptop Table

As a response to my previous article (How To: Do PC Gaming On Your Couch Or Sofa) I've been asked to give a more in-depth look at the Ikea DAVE.

The Ikea DAVE is marketed as a "laptop table", but really for the rest of us it is the ultimate adjustable couch desk for the keyboard and mouse. It allows the keyboard to be stable at exactly the right height and to give plenty of level space to use the mouse. This single purchase has is the single most important part of the PC couch gaming setup and has completely changed the way I use my PC. It is more comfortable than using craning over on a coffee table to use a keyboard, or having the keyboard on your lap. And the mouse is much more accurate on a hard and firm surface instead of on a couch arm.

The cost of most "laptop tables" are priced ridiculously. This one is £75.12, and this one is £51.08. DAVE is available from any Ikea internationally for the price of £14.99 and $17.99.

Also makes a great laptop table (this is a tiny 8.9" laptop).

Do PC Gaming On Your Couch Or Sofa

Sometime in the last console generation, it became unfashionable to sit at a desk to play games. This happened sometime around the release of Halo, when - shock horror - people sat on their couches to play a first-person shooter of all things. Although there were plenty of FPS games released on consoles before this, none had quite succeeded as well as Halo did in bringing the hardcore game to the mainstream audience. In turn, this meant that millions of people previously playing Quake and Counter-Strike at their desks turned to their couches to get their hardcore gaming fix from games like Halo and Gears of War.

It is easy to see why people have turned to the couch to game. Firstly, it's just much more comfortable to sit on a couch than at a desk. People spend 8 hours a day working at an office, going to classes, sitting all day and people don't want to do that when they get home. Secondly, whatever TV and sound system that you have invested in also do double duty for whatever multimedia experiences you have, for example, high definition movies, music and TV can be piped through the same equipment. Why invest in a 5.1 surround sound system for your PC when it could be used in the living room for your whole family to enjoy? Thirdly, gaming in front of the TV on a couch is a more welcoming and social than your PC. The TV has replaced the fireplace as the warm thing that families huddle around. The couch is a 3-player co-op chair.

The PC wasn't designed to be used from the couch. It was designed to be used with a keyboard and a mouse whilst sitting at a desk. PC gaming, however, can exist in the living room too. Nay, the PC is best in the living room. Why play the watered down Xbox 360 version of Mass Effect when you can play it in glorious 1980x1080 at 60 FPS from your couch on your TV?

The reason people don't do this is because is firstly, it costs a lot. But more importantly, people have no idea that it can be done comfortably and without ruining the look of your living room. If you have the means, a few simple purchases can transform your living room couch and TV into the ultimate PC gaming setup.

Auto Sync And Backup World of Warcraft Interface Settings To Cloud Storage For Free

This particular article will focus on making World of Warcraft interface settings sync across multiple computers. This guide is also related to another one of my articles called How To: Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free. You can look there to see how to auto sync savegame and folder for other games.


World of Warcraft Interface Folders Introduction
All of your World of Warcraft interface settings are stored in a number of places:

X:\[World of Warcraft]\Interface\
This folder contains all of your downloaded AddOns.

X:\[World of Warcraft]\WTF\[ACCOUNTNAME]\
This folder contains all of your other AddOn settings such as the position of chat windows, the settings on Recount, etc.

X:\[World of Warcraft]\WTF\
Within your WTF folder is a file called 'Config.wtf'. This file contains details specific to your computer such as resolution and detail. We will avoid syncing this folder and the 'Config.wtf' folder because it may cause problems with the display of your AddOns unless your target computer has the same aspect ratio.

You may not want to sync the 'Config.wtf' file to another computer unless it has identical performance and resolution.

The rest of the settings such as spells on action bar placement (unless using an AddOn bar like Bartender) and friends lists etc. are stored on Blizzard's own cloud and do not need to be backed up.

Review: Kensington Ultra Portable Battery Pack (aka The Most Useful Accessory You Will Ever Own)

The Kensington Ultra Portable Battery Pack is a battery pack that can be used to charge anything that can be charged via USB. The small pack itself is a 1800mAh battery that can be charged from a computer or mains socket with the included via a mini USB jack, and can accept any USB cable to output charge to any other device. Coming in cheapest at £14.99 from Amazon.co.uk, it's the best value and most versatile of battery packs when compared to batteries like the £63.55 Mophie JuicePack Air, and it deserves a permanent space in your bag for emergencies.

Losing power in your phone is extremely frustrating. With modern gadgets like the iPhone barely lasting 8 hours of charge with frequent use, it's very likely that most of us will be caught out with low battery whilst we are out after work and without a power plug or USB socket in sight. With so many processor intensive distractions like media and games, smartphones will probably run out of power right when you need it most - when want to make a phone call at the end of the day. In this respect, the Kensington Ultra Portable Battery Pack does a great job of charging devices like the iPhone 3GS for 90-110% of its battery.

The fastest rising cause of heart problems in smartphone users.

The Kensington Ultra Portable Battery Pack is also extremely versatile, since it can be used to charge a whole host of devices. It's saved my life once when my TomTom would not charge from the car's power socket, since it accepts the mini USB jack from the battery. It can charge any proprietary power socket as long as it can be charged via USB, including devices such as my Archos 605 or my Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable (of which universal integrated charge cables for these devices are invaluable).

I have way too much stuff.

Review: Toastabags

You may have seen Toastabags as one of the businesses pitched to Dragons Den UK back in 2008. After watching the episode, I was impressed and intrigued by the product so I decided to add one onto my next Tesco online delivery for a pair of these for a mere £1.69.

The Toastabag is a bag made of a heat resistant material that covers your sandwich so that the whole thing can be heated in your toaster. Covering the sandwich in a bag allow it to be placed in the toaster without everything falling out. The Toastabag makes the process of making a toastie much cleaner and easier than using the oven. And at £1.69 for two of these bags, it is also a lot cheaper and more space efficient than a toastie machine or a panini press. However, the proof is in the pudding. Are Toastabags any good at toasting sandwiches? The results are in after the cut.

Slightly hilarious JML advertising.

I love how the sandwich is moving so fast.

Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free

Or How To Integrate Steam Cloud Features Into Any Game

Updated 19th January 2011: changed name of Windows Live Sync Beta to Windows Live Mesh 2011 to reflect name change of the service. At present, the program, service and UI are identical to Live Sync Beta.

A World of Warcraft Interface folder being synced.

The Steam Cloud is a service that allows the synchronizing of savegames and settings from one computer to another. This means that one could play a Steam game on one computer, and then when logging into Steam on another computer their savegames and preferences would automagically be transferred. This is a feature on many Steam games such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Torchlight, Trine, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Plants vs Zombies etc. However, although Steam Cloud is not available for all games it is still possible to sync savegames over the cloud using a program called Windows Live Mesh 2011. This free utility offers 2gb of storage (soon to be upgraded to 5gb) as well as automatically cloud syncing and peer to peer syncing.

Windows Live Mesh 2011 is far superior for the purposes of PC gamers to other popular syncing cloud services such as Dropbox. This is because Dropbox only allows a single designated Dropbox folder to be automatically synchronized. If you wanted to have automatic backup and syncing of say, your Mass Effect save game, you would have to either 1) manually copy the files or 2) create a fiddly symbolic link. Windows Live Mesh 2011 allows you to specify individual folders. This makes it possible to be extremely flexible in exactly what you want to synchronize. Windows Live Mesh 2011 also gives the option of direct peer to peer transfer bypassing the cloud, which gives a very good performance boost to certain syncs between computers and networks. Anyone who has used Dropbox or older versions of Mesh will know that it takes a long time to sync large files only through the cloud, so the peer to peer option is welcome.


Guide To Syncing Any Savegames Using Windows Live Mesh 2011

Step 1) Download the latest version of Windows Live Mesh 2011 using this link: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Windows Live Sync Beta is only available as part of the Windows Live Essentials Beta package. Make sure you only install what you need to (make sure to install Live Sync).

Install Flash Without Administrator Priviliges

Offices and schools around the world do not and will not allow Flash to be installed on their machines, therefore depriving millions of users their YouTube and Flash games. This is a quick hack to make sure that you can access Flash on any Windows based computer.

Step 1) Download and install Firefox Portable. This is a version of Firefox that is designed to be run from a USB stick, and can be installed on any computer including those without administrator privileges. Make a note of where you have installed this program.

Step 2) Right-click and save the file in this this link: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/xpi/current/flashplayer-win.xpi and follow these instructions:

a) Save Link As...

Reorder Activities On A Logitech Harmony Remote

Part of the Harmony Remote FAQ:
9. Is there a way to reorder devices and/or activities?

For remotes that have physical buttons for activities, you are not able to reorder the activities listed under the "More Activities" option.

Logitech support states that the Harmony 600, 650 and 700 (and possibly other Harmony remote controls) do not have the native ability to 'Reorder Activities'. This means that if the remote chose to place your favourite 'Activity' on the 4th page, you would have to scroll there every time you wanted to access that 'Activity'. This ordering feature is missing on the recent versions of the desktop software (7.7.0), despite the fact that previous versions of the software supported this. This workaround functions by accessing an older web version of the software (7.3.0) which is still works on newer remotes, although not in the most user intuitive way.


Reordering Activities Hack For Harmony 650

Step 1) Login to the following website: http://members.harmonyremote.com/. If you have been using your Harmony desktop software, this will have all of your settings stored here.

Play Any Game In Borderless Windowed Fullscreen (aka Maximized Window)

World of Warcraft and StarCraft II fullscreen side by side, as God intended.

Update 20 March 2012: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game.

Games like StarCraft II and World of Warcraft provide the option to run their game in "Windowed Fullscreen" (aka Maximized Window). Also modern Valve Source games such as Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm and Half-Life 2 natively support this mode, calling it "Windowed (No Border)". This is basically a normal windowed game where the window has been stretched to fit the screen in such a way that it looks maximized (by hiding borders of the window and the title bar).

This has several advantages to running a game in traditional fullscreen mode:

1) Ability to alt-tab quickly at any moment, even during loading screens.
2) Does not disturb multi-monitor set ups during loading.
3) Generally more stable experience.

Guide To GPS Stalking Using iPhone, BlackBerry and Android

For whatever reason, you might want to keep tabs on exactly where your wife/husand/girlfriend/boyfriend/teenage daughter, etc. have been all night (for their own "safety"). In the past, you had to rely on them to telling you the "truth" about where really were.

Thankfully we can bypass all of this guesswork if they happen to own either an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device, which all contain GPS chips. These devices are capable of pinpointing and broadcasting exact locations at all times over the air. It's actually very simple process to view a smartphone's location just by configuring a few free apps.

Remember, always consult the owner before you make any changes to their device. And as always, with great power comes great responsibility.

WWSD
What would Spider-man do?