Continue reading »]]> It seems like for a limited period only, the fantastic Braid on XBLA, a game that I’ve been avoiding paying fullprice of 1200 MSPoints for, will be discounted by 33% to 800 MSPoints!

Rocking! It seems this is an Exclusive Gold-Only deal, and forms part of a new “Deal of the Week” feature on XBox Live. The Deal of the Week feature seems to be available in all territories, to see what is the most recent deal for US accounts, here is the link for that.

If you’ve been like me and put off buying Braid due to it’s higher price-point, now’s your chance to own it for only 800 points. Hurry, the deal starts today (23 February 2009), and will end this Sunday.

If you’ve been like me and were put off by the higher price-point for Braid previously, now’s your chance to own it at a nice discount. Don’t delay, go now.

Continue reading »]]> Ever since I no longer have a Mac at work, I’ve been seriously missing several functions that certain apps gave me on OSX. Skitch is one of those apps that gave me superior screenshot ability, to be able to take a partial screenshot, annotate right then and there with text and arrows, and then just drag the image into an email or onto the desktop or wherever.

Last night, a friend mentioned he’s been using Jing on OSX, and that there’s a Windows version available. pity there’s no Linux support.
Speaking only of the Windows version here, Jing is not quite as feature-rich as Skitch is on OSX, but it there are certain things it does better, such as selecting a window to capture, instead of, like in Skitch, having to precision-select a box around the window.

Other really useful functions, however, Jing has, where the last version of Skitch I used, didn’t. It has auto-uploads to Flickr, or to Jing’s own screencast.com. Jing can also record video in the specified selected area on-screen, so you can do screencasts and upload them wherever, including capturing of the microphone.

Jing is a magic little app, and even though it’s not something I do every day, it’s a nice addition to an arsenal of little apps that just improve every day (and not so everyday) life on your Mac or Windows PC.

And yes, Jing is free.

Continue reading »]]> Since starting the new job and getting an HP 6710b laptop with Vista pre-installed, the first thing after having Vista properly configured, was shrinking that partition right down and installing Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. But every so now and again I boot into Vista to do something. And not liking the idea of being forced to pay for a piece of software by a bunch of software delinquents and/or terrorists (Dumbass virus and worm writers/script kiddies), I run the free version of AVG anti-virus, written by Grisoft. I’ve not had a single problem with them ever (even on my home PC), and not a single virus has passed my way (That AVG or I know of, anyway…).

So surprise for me this morning, when, straight after an auto-update of the virus definitions on the laptop, I get this popup, advertising their “new” Internet Security Suite.

This just caught me by surprise, as I’ve never seen this with AVG before, and it’s probably buried somewhere in their terms and conditions that they can do this.

On the one hand I feel it’s a bit cheeky to do such blatant popup spam, which is something one would expect your typical adware/malware app to do. On the other hand though, I feel Grisoft is quite within their right to advertise their paid-for products to those of us that make use of their free products. I mean, their software is saving probably millions of people lots of time and money by protecting their Windows PCs from viruses. I’m still a bit undecided if I should just shrug it off as “OK”, or to be upset about. I’m leaning towards the former.