Christina Sng dot com

Yes, I have finally got it installed. While typing is a chore, it autocorrects quite efficiently. This post is from my iTouch.

Since I am one month to go before popping out another human, I have been doing most of my shopping online. I can’t quite carry my son in a carrier anymore (he prefers to run and explore, and my pregnant beer belly is in the way). Plus I like getting stuff in the mail. So does Jack who keeps asking me if we can go to the post office to buy some nice toys.

Among the many neat sites I visit (of which there are many), there is the very cool SHOP.COM that carries awesome electronics (a deal-maker with the pound so low now).

There are a bunch of sales there right now (sale is my favourite word, really): the Electronics Clearance Sale and the Digital Camera Sale.

Plus a whole lot of MP3s, televisions, and other cool electronic toys that you’ll spend much of the day drooling over, finger hovered over the “Go to Store” button.

I’m off to shop now!

After months with my iTouch now, I feel I know it as well as the back of my hand. So does Jack, my almost-3 year-old, hence more apps have been downloaded for him than myself and I daresay he spends more time on it than me. Educational games of course, and here are the best, presenting the Best iPhone Apps for Toddlers. And what about us adults? Ahh, I have not neglected me. Here are the ones I think most awesome:

1. Orions

A cross between Heroes of Might and Magic and Magic: The Gathering (both of which I played extensively), Orions kept me up for nights, my hero overthrowing other hapless digital characters and taking over their orions. I built and bought cards to which I used to battle them. Oh pleasure. Go buy this one already if you were a Heroes or MTG junkie like me.

2. Monopoly

When you’re tired and frustrated after a bad day, there’s nothing like beating the pants of some annoying metal avatar like a sumo wrestler or that windmill (that kept beating me repeatedly for some arcane reason but now I rule… yeah). Monopoly rules!

3. The Quest

Do I betray my age when I tell you my fave games (before WoW of course) were Eye of the Beholder (I, II, III) and World of Xeen? Anyway, whatever. They are. Were. The Quest is just like that, but on your iPhone. Go get it already.

Yep, 3 faves compared to Jack’s 12. Tells ya something right?

This happened to me twice. Once on my Lenovo and today again on hubby’s desktop. After booting and running the Windows start up screen, the monitor blanks out. Something about analog or digital. I just wanted to shake the monitor into waking up again.

Anyway, with the laptop it was easy since it works with an inbuilt screen already. Just fiddle with the display settings and install an updated driver and that usually works. But what if you can’t see a damn thing on the screen with the desktop?

On XP, while booting up, press F8 and you’ll be faced with a whole bunch of choices on how you want to boot up. Choose VGA mode and lo and behold, that errant screen will display your desktop, albeit in 640×480.

Windows will most likely let you know this isn’t the ideal display setting but even if it doesn’t, just right-click your desktop and head to Properties -> Settings. Check out your resolution and see if you can change it to your desired one. If it doesn’t work, go disable and re-enable your monitor driver. That did the trick for me.

I’m gonna claim a nice reward tomorrow now that hubby can play Warcraft III again.

(Credit: Vista Forums)

Things I wish I knew before I bought the iTouch. (Sorry, it is just so much easier to say than iPod Touch so I’m going to regress.

1. No wall charger!

After years of buying non-Apple stuff, I never knew the iTouch would come WITHOUT a wall charger. It comes with a USB charger to hook up to your computer. So if you’re not on the comp 24/7, make sure you haggle with the salesman to throw in one or wait for a sale. Dang thing costs around US$35!

2. You NEED iTunes

Especially if you don’t have the wall charger and your computer, you’re screwed if you travel. So either acquire the wall charger or you’ll have to lug your comp to whatever exotic destination you go cos you’ll need it to charge and sync your stuff.

3. You NEED a screen protector and protective case

Although the iTouch is beautifully metal, it can be very vulnerable to scratches. So far most packages come with a screen protector and a case (usually silicone, which is safe and not that PVC crap) - both of which would probably cost US$20-35 if you buy them separately.

4. There is no printed manual with your box

You’ll have to troubleshoot online like I did if you need help with anything. So if you have no Internet access, you’re screwed too. You can download it from their website but troubleshooting it took needless hours which could have been better spent.

5. Restarting it requires you to press both buttons (there are only 2 pressable ones)

Press till the Apple pic appears. Then you’d have saved a trip to the Apple service centre.

Final Tip: Before you buy, look out for deals that give you a:

a) Wall charger (in addition to the USB charger that comes in the box)

b) Protective casing (look for PVC-free ones)

c) Screen protector

Happy Podding!

Yep, I betrayed my PC geek self and bought myself an Apple product. Why? Lack of substitutes, really. There’s nothing prettier or sleeker than the iPod Touch and though I still like to annoy my friends loyal to Apple by calling it the iTouch, I shall be PC (excuse the pun) and call it the iPod Touch here.

Here are the reasons why I bought it:

1. Unparallelled video and sound

Now, I cannot claim to have tested every model of every brand, but trusty blogs and review sites have rated the Touch the best in video and sound output. My brother even let me test run his Touch (not to be removed from his home) and the video was remarkable.

2. No toxic crap in or on it

Here I mean there are no phthalates, PVC, or any toxic chemical crap in it. Apple has championed the environmental cause and tells you exactly what is NOT in the Touch.

3. It’s so darned pretty

There’s just no arguing with it. Every other design just looks… well… unpretty next to it.

4. Free apps (and games)!

From their app store you can download (legally) free games and other useful apps. And the paid ones are pretty reasonable compared to mobile games.

Those 4 were rather compelling reasons to get it. Next post will cover what to note when you want to buy it.

If you think I may have crossed over, I did promise my Lenovo that I would never ever replace it with a Mac.

I just had to know. My hand was burning after 30 minutes of surfing and this is pretty common.

So I surfed over to Nokia to check. According to a 2002 Nokia Environmental Report (PDF), a phone is made out of 20% ABS-PC and 4% PC. PC = BPA and BPA messes you up bad, even minute amounts.

Bisphenol A has been known to leach from the plastic lining of canned foods and, to a lesser degree, polycarbonate plastics that are cleaned with harsh detergents or used to contain acidic or high-temperature liquids. While most exposure is through diet, exposure can also occur through air and through skin absorption.

Good news is there’s no lead or PVC in them Nokias, but they really need to work on getting rid of polycarbonate (PC) in their phones. If they have, I couldn’t find it on their site. Anyway, I emailed them for clarification. Let’s see what they say.

After persisting another day, I eliminated the final possibility. I read this forum post about the Hostage of Comodo Firewall Pro and knew this must be it! Firewall conflict - that’s what the nice Blizzard lady Leah wrote and told me. So here’s what I did.

In Vista (yes, still using that confounded thing), under Services, (just type “services” in the blank box after you click Start), I disabled the Comodo Pro service, which didn’t uninstall when I uninstalled Comodo initially. Then went to Comodo’s website to download the Comodo Pro Firewall 3.0, which is nice and free.

After I installed it, restarted, and absently clicked Launcher.exe (news didn’t load) and then Play, typed my login and pass, clicked a bunch of Accepts under Comodo, and suddenly it authenticated. I almost cried. Whether of joy or frustration, I did not care. All that mattered was I was suddenly downloading the latest 3.0 patch (which I would have had to anyway today).

Still am. And maybe sometime tomorrow, I’ll be back in Dragonblight, cruising the land of Feralas where I last left off. Thought I’d uninstall Comodo after cos of the conflicts but then decided to keep it, cos it is pretty and the problem was really my own faulty config.

Now, if only I can drag myself off to bed. But that Blizzard downloader is mighty hypnotizing to watch.

It is now day 2 and I have solved the “Tracker not responding” problem. Turns out WoW doesn’t like Comodo Firewall such that even turning it off doesn’t work. When I finally threw in the towel and uninstalled it, the Launcher worked and downloaded the latest patch.

Now when I restarted it, the News page refused to load and I could not login to WoW. Says, “Unable to connect”. Hence unable to Play!

Now you know I’m no slouch. I spent the past 4 hours trying to fix this. Suggestions from the forum and Blizzard pages include:

1. Adding ports 3724 and 6881 to 6999 to your router’s port forwarding page.

Did not work.

2. Turning off router and modem, shutting down computer, and starting up everything again.

Loaded News page for 3 seconds then failed again.

3. Running as Administrator.

Did not work.

4. Changing setting to be compatible with XP2 and back again.

Did not work.

5. Repairing WoW.

Funnily enough, repairing ran yesterday. But today, cannot connect to server.

6. Uninstalling antivirus, spybot killer.

Did not work. Now feel naked. Reinstall again.

7. Add WoW.exe to Windows Firewall.

Did not work.

8. Turned off Windows Firewall.

Did not work. Hastily turn on again.

9. Released/Renewed IP.

Did not work.

10. Right-clicked folder and ensure everything in folder is not read-only.

Did not work.

11. Resetting IE’s Advanced settings.

Did not work.

12. Downloading program to reinstall.

Downloader doesn’t run anymore. Tracker problem again.

I’m posting this to the forum page for some additional advice. I do have another 28 days of game time. Here’s hoping for a solution and for some game play.

Make sure you patch the game first.

I did that before signing up for the Burning Crusade free trial but somehow after getting an itch to run through the Barrens again, this time I stupidly went to subscribe via Paypal BEFORE patching.

I’m not worried about a whole day lost patching the game but possibly not being able to play at all!

This time, it is the Blizzard Launcher that decided it won’t work. Spews out an error saying the “The tracker is not responding” plus this error log:

10/13/08 02:11:36.0890 Failed to connect to tracker.
10/13/08 02:11:20.4060 Connecting to: http://us.tracker.worldofwarcraft.com:3724/announce with 1
10/13/08 02:11:20.4050 No UPnP Device Found.
10/13/08 02:11:20.4050 Getting UPnPDevice Information
10/13/08 02:11:20.4040 Creating UPnPEngine interface
10/13/08 02:11:20.4030 Success!
10/13/08 02:11:20.4020 Creating Microsoft Firewall Rule: Blizzard Downloader: 3724
10/13/08 02:11:20.4020 Success!
10/13/08 02:11:20.4010 Creating Firewall interface
10/13/08 02:11:20.4010 Success!
10/13/08 02:11:20.4000 Enabling Blizzard Downloader on Windows Firewall
10/13/08 02:11:20.4000 Success!
10/13/08 02:11:20.3990 Enabling Microsoft Firewall UPnP Framework
10/13/08 02:11:20.3990 Success!
10/13/08 02:11:20.3980 Creating Firewall interface
10/13/08 02:11:20.3980 Downloader initializing…

And on and on it goes.

So I went to check Google which gave me a lot of WoW gold for sale (useless), the Blizzard help page (none of which helped), and the forum page (which had some useful suggestions like running the program as admin) but none worked. I even shut down all the firewalls, spykillers, and antiviruses as a desperate measure. But no cigar. I wrote to tech support but realise they won’t be able to respond till 24 hours later cos it is still Sunday there.

Now the question is whether I have given up a whole day (two really, if there is a fix) or a whole month. Regardless, several hours have been wasted already trying to fix this and now I think I should waste no more and go to sleep.