Portal 2 – Perpetual Testing Initiative – My First Look

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks then you should already know and have played with the new feature that Valve added to Portal 2, the Perpetual Testing Initiative! Ever since they announced this awesome news, I have been wanting to get my hands on it. So, on May 8th they finally released it to the public. It is awesome!

I recorded my first time on it and uploaded it to YouTube for all to see!

The map isn’t brilliant, but its not bad for 25 minutes of work. If I was to do that in Hammer, then it would have taken perhaps a couple of hours to do! So there it is. It’s now out in the wild and people have been mapping like crazy fools over the past 2 days. As I write this, there have been 28,641 maps made.

If you haven’t jumped on the Portal band wagon, then I suggest you do it right now. For the next 12 hours Portal 2 will be £5.09, then will go back up to its usual price of £14.99. If you’[re real smart, then you will also spend an extra £3.40 and get both Portal 1 and 2 together!

If you’re one of those people who need to buy the game on a physical disk, then head on over to Amazon and buy it for £16.00 and free delivery if you live in the UK.

Maths worksheets

As it was still early last night after I printed off those maths worksheets, I decided that I would get Ryan to complete a few for me. I explained what he had to do and he done the rest himself. I am really impressed with his work! He had no trouble at all!

Of course, I had to record a video of him doing one! He’s completing the Greater Than, Less Than, or Equal To 1 – 5 worksheet in the video.

While he was doing the worksheets, I also snapped a few photos!

This is the set up that I used to film him doing the worksheet!

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A silly little Facebook… Bug?

Check out the update below.

A friend of mine posted a status update with something rather interesting. According to the status, you were able to find out the name of your phones sim card by typing in a simple “code” to the comments box of any type of post. All you had to do is type in the following;

@[123:0]

Replace the numbers “123″ with the last three numbers of your telephone number. I tested it out and indeed it work. It changed @[854:0] into Ashley Nathanson. Kind of odd, but what ever. I then started to wonder if it would work with other numbers. It did. It worked with almost any number abover 110. It even worked with 4 digit numbers and so on.

Im not sure if this is a bug, or if Facebook knows about this, but I thought I would share it with you. Check out the video below to see me doing it on one of my photo comment boxes.

Update
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Guy Fawkes Night 2011

I have never taken photos of fireworks before, so I thought I would start with Guy Fawkes. Turns out it’s much harder than I first thought. My main problem is getting the focus right when zooming in and out all the time. Perhaps either the new year fireworks or next years Guy Fawkes I will actually use my tripod also and just leave it at a single focal length.

Any way, here are my photos. Enjoy!

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HTC Desire Camera Bug

If you have a HTC Desire and have used the video feature of it and noticed that your video becomes all messed up? For example, when recording video on my phone, the image tends to be purple one half of the image is “magically” moved to the other side of the screen.

It turns out that this may well be a software conflict issue, and there is an easy way around this problem.If you, like me, live in a city where it is hardly covered by 3G or faster, you are limited to using the GSM network to establish your internet connection. Using this GSM connection while your camera is active causes a software conflict some how.

The best solution to the problem is to either switch off your GSM connection or switch to 3G or WiFi. I have done numerous tests with my camera and have noticed that it does not have any issues when my GSM connection is not active.

Unfortunately this issue is not localised to one particular version of Android on the HTC Desire. I was having the same issues when I first got my phone. It was using Android 2.1. Tthe issues continued through 2.2 and 2.3 also. Unfortunately, HTC are no longer going to update the Desire, so a permanent solution will not be found.

If you have this same issue, have you found any other solutions? Has solution I have provided worked for you?