DuncsWeb

Guild-wars is an MMORPG, developed by Arena Net, and published by Ncsoft. It’s been given many awards, and for good reason.

So, first let me start off, Guild wars is not free, but it’s not a membership service either. Theres four campaigns, each of which you pay for once, and are able to play forever. Each campaign costs around 20 USD. The three campaigns are : Prophecies, Nightfall, and Factions. (The fourth is eye of the north, and is considered a expansion, which I am not reviewing)

In this installment, I’m going to review Prophecies.

You start off in an area known as Ascalon, pre-searing. This acts as a tutorial world, as nothing can really hurt you that badly, and it lets you get a feel of the game. Once you finish this tutorial, a race known as the Charr summon the magic of the searing, which turns the beautiful fairy tale world of Ascalon into a post apocalyptic wasteland. I’m not going to go any more into the story than that, so no spoilers here.

So, lets get down to game-play.

Guild-wars is different than most MMORPGS, when you leave a town, you enter an instanced variant of the world. You are with your party, which can be filled with Henchmen, players, or hero’s. Theres no kill stealing, or loot stealing. You are separated from the mass of the player base, and you’re on your own to kill, advance the story line, whatever you want.

You can argue that this alienates the player, but I’d have to disagree with you. Yes, lots of the easy story line can be done with NPCs, but this game shines where you’ll actually need seven to fifteen players to complete a mission, and that is incredible for a game this cheap.

When you leave a town into the instanced area, you’ll be put out with the eight skills you picked, and you’ll be free to go kill, explore, or whatever you need.

Over all, this is a great expansion, as guild-wars was meant to tell a story. It’s a one time payment, and you’ll have endless hours of fun, even after the story line is finished, you can play PVP. As a final note, all of the guildwars campaigns, (save eye of the north) can be played standalone, you don’t need any others to have them work.

Features: 10/10
Interface: 9/10
Performance: 9/10
Price: 9/10 ($20.00 USD, 12.5 Pounds.)

Overall: 9/10

http://www.guildwars.com/products/guildwars/default.php

Ever wanted to record a really quick video and tweet to a friend in need? If so, Screenr is your answer.

Here in the video i will give a demonstration on this web based application.

This thing really does work and at a speed that is unmatched by anything else I’ve used or seen.

You could call the ‘Social Screen Recorder’.

Features: 9/10
Interface: 10/10
Performance: 10/10
Price: 10/10 (Free)

Overall: 10/10

Dan Valverde

This Christmas, I got an LG Viewty KU990, and I got amazed from his features, and also downsides of it. I got the Lite version, and this meant:

- No CD for the PC Suite;

- No Headset;

- No Image Stabilization;

- No Schnieder Lense;

- No Stylus Pen.

Features Of It:

- Nice Design;

- Available In Several Colors;

- Touchscreen;

- 5 Megapixel Camera;

- It’s capable of 120 FPS while recording a video.

Downsides:

- No Wifi;

- Slow;

- Touchscreen is sometimes not responsive;

- Hard to connect to the phone.

The front of the phone has the 3 bottom buttons (Answer Call, Stop Call, and the Delete one), it has a camera, and it has the microphone.

Photo of the front (Sorry for the quality of the photos):

The back of the phone has the 5 Megapixel camera, Flash Light, and the sound. Also, on the Camera, it has a little scrolling thing, if you want to scroll between contacts, music, etc, you can use that, instead of the touchscreen.

Photo of the back:

On the right of the phone, you have the camera button, when you want to record/take a photo/video of something, the Lock button, and a little switch, when you want to switch between Video Recording, Photo taking, or Photo Viewer.

Photo of the right:

And on the left of the phone, you only have the USB Port:

Price:

69.99£;

109€;

112.31$.

You can check out the phone here.

Overall, I give this Phone a 7/10, due to the fact of being slow, kinda expensive in some places, and no Wi-Fi.

Thanks for seeing this post, and I will see you next time

I recently tweeted about this, but as it is such a serious issue, I thought I’d write the full story in a blog post.

As you may know, Google has a service called Adwords, whereby customers can pay them to have ads on publishers websites (where publishers get paid for this through the Adsense program, more on that here). They have a choice of the following:

Prepay - Paying a set amount in advance, and when all of this is used up on ads, they stop showing

Postpay – Set ads up and the balance will build as ads are clicked which is then charged to the advertiser

I set up an Adwords account, and paid for the activation & £10 (£15 total) which was set up right away, but a voucher was sent through to me to an old email address not long before for £75 of free ads which I read shortly after, but it would need to have been used on signup, typical!

So I signed up on my sisters account with the voucher and am now happily running ads on the google network, but no longer have any use for adwords on my own account. All I need to do is cancel it and get a refund, right?

To do it all I needed to do was click the following:

and then type a reason and cancel here:

Oh no, I got the following error!

Refreshing the page, emptying cache, logging out and in, using a different browser & using a different computer didn’t fix the error.

Alright, so I now need to go through help, and their steps shown below what needs to be done :

But wait, I already did that! I really could do with talking to an Adwords Rep right now, who could sort the system out and cancel it for me, but nothing shows about it here? I keep going round in circles to the same place!

Then I discovered the Adwords Support Forum, and boy was I in for a shock. Google ignores its paying customers! The Billing section is littered full of people with complaints that they could not contact anybody regarding their problems, some had been overcharged, some (like myself) could not cancel their account, and some were even still paying for ads even though they had NO CAMPAIGNS in their account!

Heres just some of the things that have been said in the Billing Section:

“The only thing more annoying than the fact that I can’t find a way to cancel my account is that there’s no way to contact customer service!  Only a virtual monopoly like Google can treat customers like crap and get a way with it…I’ll be happy to be gone!”

Shown Here (notice the rep sends him through the same loops as me)

“Miss Sarah,
I see a lot of pissed off customers on your forum and I’m one of them. I can tell you where the contact flow is breaking down and you know it too. There is no phone number posted ANYWHERE and the one your customers share on the forum also takes people in circles. WE NEED A PHONE NUMBER THAT’S EASY TO FIND WITH A REAL PERSON ANSERING THE CALL.
It’s NOT HELPFUL AT ALL when the “AdWordsPros” send us to the exact same place we were already running around in circles at. It’s infuriating. What’s up with that? Are we not paying customers?
Come on! Googles knows the problem.  I suggest you model MICROSOFT’s customer support. It’s exceptional.
I cancelled my account I’m that mad. Yahoo and Microsoft are much better and less expensive.
Why is that?”

Shown Here

Google is a massive company, and earns an extremely large amount of money, and its both worrying for potential and existing customers that there is no support if there is a problem with an account, especially when large amounts of money are being paid to the service. Its understandable that there would be a large number of issues and complaints, but other large corporations seem to cope, don’t they?

If you are looking to advertise your website, Adwords is a good option for reach, but a very bad option if anything goes wrong while you are with them!

A while ago Duncan made a video on “Ninite“, a cool website that allows you to combine all of your favorite apps into one single installer. While Ninite is great the only disadvantage is that it only works with Windows and me being an Ubuntu user I had to look for a worthy alternative, so i came across this website called Allmyapps.

Allmyapps does the same thing as Ninite but the only difference is that is supports both Windows and Ubuntu. Listed below are operating systems it supports:

Ubuntu 9.10

Ubuntu 9.04

Ubuntu 8.10

Ubuntu 8.04

Windows XP

Windows Vista

Windows 7

Once in the website click on the “create your list” button and from there you can add applications to your list (they have applications from a variety of categories). Once you have added all the application you want you would want to install them, so to do that notice that there is a box in the upper left called “My list” which lists all the applications that you’ve added. You can choose to save them by clicking on the save button or just press the install button to install all your applications.

There you have it, now you can easily install all of you favorite Ubuntu apps in one go and don’t forget it works on Windows as well. You can also suggest them an application that they don’t have yet by putting the name of the application in the “suggest an app” box.

Skype is used by millions of people worldwide communicating through instant messaging, voice calls and
video conferencing. Skype enables users to make calls to landlines and mobile phones using Skype Credit.
Skype is a cross-platform application which can be installed on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Skype has landed into the Apple App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Skype iPhone and iPod Touch Features

• Free iPhone App.
• Free Skype-to-Skype calls from any WiFi zone.
• Call and text (SMS) phones and mobiles at great Skype rates¹.
• See who’s online and send and receive instant messages on the move.

Credit: Skype

User’s should not have problems using the application with the navigation split into Contacts, Chats, Call, History and My Info.

Contacts shows a search panel and your contacts in alphabetical order.
Chats shows All and New chats which features recent open chats.
Call shows a keypad layout with options to Call and delete previous numbers
History shows recent items in your history
My Info allows you to edit your Status, Edit Profile, Call Forwarding, add Skype Credit, Buy an Online Number and Voicemail.

I recommend Skype for iPhone and iPod Touch if you want to communicate with your friends and family on the go.

I rate the application the following:

Features: 9/10

Interface: 9/10

Price/Value: 10/10

Overall: 9/10

Download Skype

CORRECTION: Windows users are currently out of luck for the Single Windowed Mode, although we hear that it is in the works for future releases. We apologise for any misconception brought about by this.

GIMP is an awesome open source image editor but one of the things that people found really annoying about GIMP in the past was that it doesn’t come in a single window. It has 2 or 3 separate windows which makes it hard for people to move it around and in my opinion it doesn’t look very professional and streamlined but thankfully that is going to change because the 2.7 SVN trunk build has a “single window mode” which allows you to put GIMP into one single window.The “single window mode” option will be available under the “windows” menu

This is a great improvement and it certainly will be appreciated by GIMP users. However if you are like me you probably don’t want to wait until the final release comes out right?

If you are using Ubuntu like me, you have add the PPA to your Ubuntu software sources. The PPA is located here.

Unfortunately the build is not available for Mac, so Mac users have to wait until the final release comes out.

Today i will discuss Gwibber which is a good social networking client for Linux. It works on Ubuntu and a few other distributions and is available in your local repositories so go ahead and grab it.

It supports quite a few social networks including the widely used Twitter and Facebook. Overall it is a very good client, although you may not find it as robust as Tweet-deck which is used in Windows but it still provides you with all the basic features.

Ubuntu is the most widely used Desktop distribution of Linux and you’ve probably heard people say  “Linux sucks because you can’t even play games on it”. Well the people who say this are totally wrong, it’s not even close to the truth. The truth is that there are a tonne of fun games available for Ubuntu, completely free of charge.

Now they might not be as good as the ones you play on Windows, you might not find a game like COD but you will find some very good fun and amusing games.

So where the heck are all the Ubuntu games?

Well PlayDeb.net is the answer. Play Deb is a project operated by volunteers and their objective is to provide you with the latest open source and freeware games for Ubuntu. They’ve got loads of games available in different genres.

To be able to download games you need to add the Play Deb repository to your Ubuntu software source. Instruction for the are available here.

There you have it, you now know the secret of where all the Ubuntu games are. It’s just a matter of searching before you find a game you want. Have fun playing

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