Final Fantasy XIII-2 contains an interesting mini-game where you have to find a sequence of numbers around the circle.
Nathaniel Johnston does a nice write up of the game:
"The way the game works is as follows:
- The user may start by picking any of the N positions on the circle. Call the number in this position M.
- You now have the option of picking either the number M positions clockwise from your last choice, or M positions counter-clockwise from your last choice. Update the value of M to be the number in the new position that you chose.
- Repeat step 2 until you have performed it N-1 times.
You win the game if you choose each of the N positions exactly once, and you lose the game otherwise (if you are forced to choose the same position twice, or equivalently if there is a position that you have not chosen after performing step 2 a total of N-1 times). During the game, N ranges from 5 to 13, though N could theoretically be as large as we like."
I created a brute-force solver in JavaScript to solve the clock puzzle problem for those who need a helping hand on the problem.
On the timed puzzles, the best thing to do is take a picture of the game, pause the game (which will distort the screen), and find the solution.
I own an Eye-Fi Geo, which does geotagging of photos I take, and automatically syncs photos to my computer through Wi-Fi.
I tried out the SD card on my camera on small batches of photos (5-10 at a time) before syncing, but recently tried out my card on a large set of photos (Around 200) before syncing. It started out working great, the photos were appearing on my computer... until, the card froze, and ultimately stopped being recognized by my computer and camera.
This is a known problem with these cards, but upon contacting Eye-Fi support, I was directed to the following support page which tells me I am out of luck in getting my photos back, and that they will not even try to help. I understand that they cannot make guarantees to get my pictures back, but I would have at least appreciated the attempt to get them back, being as it was their defective product that caused the issue.
In the end, they are going to replace the card for me, but I will never use the replacement card. This experience has lost all my confidence in Eye-Fi forever. The memories that I record on my camera are priceless to me, and I cannot in good-faith use a product I know has a strong potential of corrupting my memories.
I think the idea behind the Eye-Fi is awesome, but I cannot stand by a product that loses pictures. For now, it is back to my old reliable regular-SD card.
I recently came across a problem where my Outlook 2010 window became a toolbar and I could not resize the window to see my mail:
I could press the Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons, but I could not resize the window because it would only let me move the bar.
To solve this problem, I pressed Alt + Space, clicked "Size" in the toolbar that appeared and pressed the down key a few times and then Enter and the rest of Outlook appeared below the toolbar. I was then able to resize Outlook with a mouse like normal.
I got a Kindle 2 recently, and was looking for some free books to download, and stumbled across Amazon Digital Services which is offering two free games for Kindle!
Shuffled Row
Every Word
Hopefully this means the Kindle Development Kit will be coming out of beta shortly, and we will see a lot of cool Kindle apps in the next few months; maybe even a Kindle App Store?
(Update, 8/4/2010)
I received an email from the Amazon KDK team today:
"Dear Robert Woodward,
The first Kindle active content titles are now available to Kindle customers. They are Shuffled Row and Every Word from Amazon Digital Services. We encourage you to download and try them at
http://www.amazon.com/shuffledrow or
http://www.amazon.com/everyword.
We continue to work with limited-beta developers who have been given early access to the KDK and appreciate your patience while we work towards opening up the program to more developers. Stay tuned.
Regards,
The KDK Team"
Looks like progress is being made on Kindle Apps, and we should hopefully see more soon shortly!
I decided to set up a Fedora 13 installation on Windows Virtual PC (I'm running Windows 7 Professional).
I read the Wikipedia article on Windows Virtual PC which said running Linux as a guest OS is a bit iffy. Though, I decided to try anyway.
I first created a new Virtual Machine:
I created a dynamically expanding virtual hard drive
I downloaded the Fedora 13 Desktop Edition Installable Live CD - 32bit, and went into the newly created Virtual Machine's settings and pointed the DVD Drive to the ISO I just downloaded.
I started up the Virtual Machine and the GNOME Desktop appeared! I clicked the icon "Install to Hard Drive" on the Desktop:
And then I selected the "ATA Virtual HD" as my hard drive.
Picked to "Re-initialize" the hard drive
Told it to "Use All Space". Because I am using a dynamically expanding hard drive, it will not actually allocate all 127GB, only how much ever it needs (After installing, the Virtual hard disk was about 2.3GB)
Then told it to "Write changes to disk".
Then waited and rebooted and it worked!
It does not have any of the Integration Features / Components that a Windows OS running in the Windows Virtual PC would have, but that is ok. So it makes it kind of hard to access my Windows 7 files on Fedora...
Though to get around this, I set up SSH (Which was off by default) by configuring SSHD to start up by default. To do this I installed the "Utility to start and stop system services" (system-config-services) through the Add/Remove Software tool.
Then I opened up the Service Configuration and pressed Enable and Start on "sshd" (This way it would start up sshd on reboot).
Next I had to open up the Firewall Configuration and add a check mark next to "SSH."
Now I can use FTP over SSH from my Windows session (I use FileZilla) to the Virtual PC to access files! I just connect to the IP address that my window
One downside to the Windows Virtual PC version of Fedora, is the awkward screen size. I have not figured out a way to increase the resolution :(
As a side note, I have a Number Pad on my HP HDX18, and despite setting the Number Lock to turn on in the Virtual PC BIOS, it keeps on turning off my number lock when I power on the virtual machine. I found a Fedora Wiki that explained how to fix this.