I keep a list of competitions, and I enter my fair share, and I even win. I would get more prizes though if I actually followed up on the competitions. I discovered yesterday that in August of last year I won a copy of AIDA64 from Real World Labs. To make matters even worse, I sent a message to Nik Kastrantas, the site's editor, yesterday, then today I deleted my gmail spam, only to notice just before the mails were gone that one of them had the name Nik on it.

Still, that's not nearly as bad as the time I won a Radeon 6950 at Bjorn3D and didn't notice it until a few days later, and because I didn't respond within a day the prize was given to someone else.

In short, I suck at this. I'm decently lucky so I still manage to win stuff (and actually get it), but I still disappoint myself on incidents like these.

Edit: Nik Kastrantas was very nice about it, and sent me the e-mail again, and this time I took it out of the spam box. Turns out he didn't redraw, and he gave me a key. So things turn out well in the end.

In "2011 - my year in gaming" I said that finding out about Steam Gifts could make me buy more games for gifting, and it looks like I know myself well. :)

Giving away low cost stuff on my Facebook page hasn't been much of a success, but on the other hand the low cost giveaways I tried on Steam Gifts got many hundreds of entries, and I've seen hundreds of entries even for $1 games or DLC's. It crossed my mind to mix these crowds by creating a new promotion for my Facebook page. When the numbers of likes on my page reach certain milestones I will give games on Steam Gifts. These will be private giveaways (in the Steam Gifts sense) where I will post the URL on the page, so only readers of my page will be able to participate. Hopefully some of the Steam Gifts crowd will join my page. After all, a page about giveaways is a good place for people looking for stuff to win.

I will determine the milestones as I go along. For now I will set two: 60, a close target, and 100, where I promise to give a more expensive game than I usually do.

It's rare that I come upon a program I immediate take a shine to, but Pismo File Mount Audit Package (catchy name) is such a program. This program allows mounting ZIP files and ISO files as read only directories or drives. It adds two entries to the Explorer right click menu: "Quick mount" and "Mount...". Quick mount makes the ZIP or ISO file into a directory, as far as the PC is concerned. You can browse it in Windows explorer and open files on it from any program. "Mount..." allow to mount the program as a drive, which is needed if you want to install from it.

The program is quite limited in what it can do . It doesn't support more compression formats, and the mounting is read only. WinMount can do the same things and a lot more, but its free version is very limited. I'll probably still continue to use IZArc for general zip use and 7zip when I need to compress a large amount of data, but PFMAP could become my default way to open archives, to save unzipping them. We'll see. One thing it did achieve is that I've uninstalled Virtual CloneDrive.

I was surprised to find out that Microsoft has a Remote Desktop client update available for XP and Vista. I still use Vista x64, even though I have more than one copy of Windows 7 to install (I just hate the hassle of reinstalling everything, and Vista is good enough), and I tried using Remote Desktop only to find out that I can't specify widescreen settings. I then discovered that there's a newer version, the one which comes with Windows 7, which not only adds such resolutions but even more features. It's available not only for Vista but for XP, so any holdouts who have escaped the clutches of 7 can take advantage of the updated client.

While my gaming time dropped a lot because of my kids, I estimate that I still play over 100 hours a year, maybe even 200, and that's just on the PC. I spend quite a few hours on Android while watching over the kids. Still not nearly enough gaming time to chip away at my ever growing library of games, but enough to make it my major hobby (web surfing not included), so a summary of the year makes sense.

It's also your chance to get for free some of my games of the year selection. Don't get your hopes up, they're really cheap, but hey, free is still better than cheap. See later down this post.

I'll start with the money I spent on games. Some time in 2010 I realised that my estimate of spending $10-$20 a month on gaming was off by about $20, and vowed to reduce how much I spend on games. I started writing down how much I spend to be more accountable. Here are the results for 2011 (defined as 3-Jan-11 to 2-Jan-12 to match the Steam end of year sale).

I've been running Folding@Home for a while. If you don't know it, it's an application that does calculation using idle CPU cycles to help find cures for diseases like cancer. I've been folding on the Bjorn3D team, since the owner of the site has a daughter with cancer (currently in remission) and also has monthly competitions, giving stuff to those who fold for the team. (I don't always participate in these competitions, and there are other sites which sometimes have better folding prizes, but they're still an incentive.)

Anyway, folding can run on the CPU or GPU and it makes them run at full speed all the time, which makes them run hot. As a result the CPU or graphics card fans can fan make a lot more noise (and it can also shorten the lives of these components). Real enthusiasts might buy a quiet CPU cooler, a case that insulates noise better, and overclock the CPU and GPU to fold faster, but even though I did upgrade my CPU cooler after buying a Phenom II X6 1090T recently (because the stock cooler was very loud even without folding), having the fans at full speed all the time bothers me.

That's where underclocking and undervolting come in. It's possible to run the CPU and GPU at lower clock speeds and also lower their voltage. These chips can often work with a lower voltage than the default without losing stability, and that's even more true when you lower the clock.

When I still had my Phenom II X3 I folder mainly on the GPU. I used MSI Afterburner to underclock and undervolt my Radeon 5850. It's a Sapphire card, but Afterburner works with all cards even though it's from MSI. The AMD drivers provide the ability to underclock, but in a more limited range, and without undervolting, so this utility is very helpful. The only problem is that when the computer wakes up from sleep the voltage goes back to the default.

I had the same problem when I got the Phenom II X6 and started folding on it. I used AMD OverDrive to undervolt it, and that worked well for making the CPU cooler and reducing fan noise, but whenever I woke up from sleep it was noisy again. I tried to control the voltage from the BIOS, but that didn't seem to do anything but destabilise my system.

After asking on online forums someone at Anandtech referred me to PhenomMsrTweaker, and that not only helped solved my problem by also explained why the BIOS tweak didn't work. The explanation goes like this: the CPU has several performance levels, each with its own multiplier and voltage. The highest performance level is P0 and in the case of the X6 it goes down to P4. The BIOS on my Gigabyte board controls P0, which works for most AMD CPU's, but the Phenom II X6 has turbo core functionality, and P0 is reserved for that, while P1 is what's used as the maximum normal speed (for example when folding). Luckily PhenomMsrTweaker can control each of the performance levels, and it also makes sure (as an option) to set them when the PC wakes up.

So now my Phenom II X6 runs at 1.225V instead of 1.35V and is about 6 degrees cooler, which I think is pretty cool.

(Note: This post will only be understandable to players of City of Heroes. If anyone is interested in a more detailed explanation of the game terms, post a comment.)

In my last post about City of Heroes Freedom I mentioned how it disables all Invention Origin enhancements if you don't have enough reward tokens (subscription time or buying point packages).  My level 50 character suffers greatly from this, and I'm not going to play her any time soon. I was surprised however that another character is ready for the transition.

How I found out is this: I have a personal supergroup for these characters, and wanted to reduce base rent to 0, because Premium players (non-subscribers) are unable to pay base rent. I was able to pay rent with another character on an account which was subscribed for a month, and wanted to make the change before rent runs out. The only thing which cost rent at my base was an inspiration storage device, containing 20 inspirations. So I decided to clear them and delete it. A little thinking and web searching brought up the solution of storing them in the market. Unfortunately I have only 11 slots there per character, so I decided to unlock another character, e-mail the inpirations and have her store them at the market. The obvious choice for a character was the one I was playing most apart from the level 50, a level 27 scrapper.

When I unlocked that character I was surprised to see that most of her enhancement slots were empty. All her attacks had one or two Single Origin damage enhancements, and there was only one Invention Origin enhancement (Deflated Ego: Chance of Recovery Debuff) in a power, but all other slots were empty. I was certain that the character had quite a few IO's, so at first I couldn't understand it at all, but now I have a theory. I suspect that I respecced just before leaving that character, selling most enhancements to buy new versions suitable for the level (level 27 is when level 30 ehnahcements can be used). She indeed has quite a bit of influence.

So it looks like this character is ripe for playing with just SO's. I have enough inf to buy a full set of SO's, and checking the market I saw that the one IO I have slotted has been selling for low prices, so I can just slot something else over it and buy it again. I will probably continue to play my new low level brute for now, but it's good to know that one of my old characters is there for me if I want her.

It's less than a day since I moved from GoDaddy to Internet.bs and I already got close to a hundred spams (mostly penis enlargement). So obviously my feeling that GoDaddy mail was slow and occasionally lost my messages was due to this spam filtering. While I'll have to deal now with the huge number of spams, I think it's preferable this way, because there's less of a chance I'll lose something. Still, can't say I'm looking forward to it.

I haven't transfered a domain for ten years. All my domains were at GoDaddy.com until a couple of years ago, but I started getting fed up with the UI, which has become quite slow and confusing (and changed often), and the prices which crept slowly up. Good prices were still available with coupons, but I much prefer a straightforward pricing structure. Besides, buying anything forces you to go through several screens of other things they're trying to sell. I registered one domain at name.com, but that also became more costly and complex. Then last year I found out about internet.bs. It's a simple site that sells only domain, has a simple and fast management interface, and good prices. Prices have gone slightly up over the past year, but they're still good and the other advantages make it attractive.

There was another reason I wanted to move my "signature domain", et3d.com. This is the domain I use mainly for e-mail forwards. I get practically all my mail through it and my wife gets some of hers. I had suspected for years (though never could prove) that some of my mail never arrived due to the GoDaddy.com forwarding service, and at times mails arrived slowly. I wanted to try another service. The problem was that I was also afraid of interruption. I was worried that any change I make would take a while to happen and will cause me to lose mails.

I got a message today that the multi-year registration of the domain will end soon, so I decided it's a good time to switch. I must say I needn't have worried. While the process has quite a few steps, I think it all took under an hour (including multiple interruptions because of the kids) and at the end of it I had e-mail working perfectly, forwarded by internet.bs.

Last time I posted that City of Heroes is going free to play, and it has since then. Unfortunately it turned out that unless you have quite a lot of veteran time (5+ years) you lose the ability to use Invention Origin Enhancements. They are simply disabled, which means that any characters using them are at half power or less. It's possible to enable them for $2 a month, which that kind of goes against the grain of the "free to play" model (i.e., buying stuff permanently unlocks it), or to pay a large sum of money to get to the reward tier that unlocks them. I decided that the solution would be to play new characters, and started a couple.

Then I went back to Everquest II Extended. Someone wrote about it and complained about slow movement, and I wanted to comment that you can easily get a horse and there are other ways to move faster, and just went to check about that and discovered that the horse was now moving at 130% extra speed, rather than 50% the last time I checked. That was exciting enough that I decided to stick around and continue playing. With some help from the forum regarding finding quests which aren't totally boring I did manage to spend quite a few hours on the game. There have been a few improvements in the time I wasn't playing, but the movement one is probably the biggest. Not only is it easy to get from place to place, but riding through mobs is done quickly enough that even if they attack my character they are left behind quickly. That makes me feel a lot safer, which encourages me to explore more.