Gosh, I bet everyone is tired of hearing about these commentaries on the Apple Watch. I almost didn’t want to bother you with another article commenting on my first impressions on a device. After all, first impressions change a lot, like that time with the Sega Dreamcast, or that whole thing with Windows 7. Anyway, I felt that I had to write about the Apple Watch because I love watches, and I own a now competing smartwatch (A Pebble), and I have some things I just need to say.

As a millennial I am just absolutely confused as to several things about what Apple did or failed to do on Tuesday (like the fact that streaming only worked on OSX, and only on Safari, and didn’t really work at all), I am absolutely baffled at the design of the Apple Watch. There is nothing about it that says or much less screams “Buy me!” other than the exchangeable wristbands. In fact, it seems that most of the features of the Apple Watch are gimmicks to attract the washed Apple masses to spend money on a smartwatch that barely challenges the competition.

It almost feels like the design team got lost in the woods on the way to Granny’s house.

In regards to size, I am glad that Apple is offering two different “Case Sizes” (the size of the face of the watch), however Apple seems to have just given up on creating a smartwatch with a design that was in any sense classic. Bizarrely the Apple Watch invokes the result of throwing an iPod nano, an iPhone 1st generation, and the back case of a Swatch and pouring the whole thing into a baffling item of design mediocrity. Apple has wowed us before with designs that are clean, solidly constructed, and thin. The Apple Watch is none of these, its large and confusing; it almost feels like the design team got lost in the woods on the way to Granny’s house. The fact that apple is selling a gold plated smartwatch that doesn’t meet the standard requirement of a dress watch of fitting under a dress shirts cuff. I don’t know a lot of people who wear gold watches that don’t wear at least business casual to work every day. Mens fashion is a huge market at the moment, and a watch is a must have accessory as a man. The watch working with your shirt to only be seen when you want to see it, that is a absolute must. My dress watch isn’t even a smart watch, currently its a metal watch from Freestyle USA which offers somewhat cheaper sports oriented watches, all quartz movement. If you collect watches, if you like watches, you know that you want mechanical movement as the end all to end all of high-end, classic watches.

In regards to the back of the case of Apple Watch, which seeks to replicate the iconic style of mechanical watch backs, I can only call it a gimmick. Among the other things on the gimmick list is the setting dial, the inclusion of what Apple calls “messaging”, which is simply the equivalent of talking to Siri on your wrist. Perhaps the only thing that one can gauge as a non-gimmick is the inclusion of Apple Pay, although that functionality truly belongs to the new iPhones. My pebble offers no gimmicks, its pretty basic as far as smartwatches go. That’s actually why I chose it over the competition. As someone who is getting ready to graduate college and enter the business world, I wanted something that would be seen as professional enough to blend into a workplace but not flashy enough to get told to take the watch off during a test, or lord forbid any situation with sensitive material. Looking forward smartwatches with microphones and cameras offer just another possibility for infringing on our personal privacy in the world.

Despite not being the new standard for smartwatches, the Apple Watch offers increased exposure for wearables. More importantly the Apple Watch could move wearable devices to a place where they become more mainstream and acceptable as opposed to a geeky niche. With a brand like Apple pushing wearable devices, even if the Apple Watch is a weak first foray into the wearable market in my mind; there could be an explosion in the market, similar to the explosion of smaller brand MP3 players that came along with the iPod. The Apple Watch will get better over time too, after all most things do, and we can’t expect Apple to kill the device after just one iteration. Apple may not have a market winner on their hands, but they will have at least a segment that will buy it.

This morning, the inevitable happened, Amazon announced the Amazon Fire TV. We all saw this coming, we all knew it would happen. However Amazon seems to have hit all the marks on their way to making a challenger for the streaming box market. The box also mixes in an effort to take on systems like OUYA in the android gaming market. Which with a retail of $99USD it seems like it has a pretty solid future in the market.

Amazon has crammed more into this box than any other one on the market. First and most impressively is that it packs a Quad-Core processor, Adreno 320 graphics engine, and 2GB of memory. On the remote side Amazon has included voice search, something that might come in handy when searching for titles with long names. The box itself is pretty small, square, and glossy. It packs ten different streaming services, although its oddly missing HBOgo. The box also features a service called ASAP which starts streaming of a title right when you hit play instead of showing that buffering or loading screen we are all accustomed to.

On the Android side, the box has a strong push to become the big Android console. Amazon has also released a game controller peripheral (A great hands on can be found on Engadget, who detail it as a similarity to an Xbox 360 controller. Speaking of Xbox controllers, a USB one can apparently be used with this Fire TV, so thats a plus.

Bezos and crew have packed a lot of other features into this box as well. For the full set you can visit the product page on Amazon.

I’m not especially socially inclined. I can’t small-talk to save my life. Eye contact is just about the Worst Thing Ever™. And then there are those times where I’ll just about lose my shit if I have to interact with another human being. Thank goodness I live in a world where Cloak exists.

Cloak is an iOS app that warns you when people you’d rather avoid—an ex, that obnoxiously chatty coworker, whomever—is in your vicinity. It works its magic by scraping location data for your, um, “friends” from Instagram and Foursquare. What? Your friends don’t use either of those services? All bets are off, then; good luck, have fun, etc…

Cloak is a free download from the App Store and requires iOS 7 or later. Check it out if you dare. Or don’t. Just don’t expect me to acknowledge your existence if I see you out around town.

Follow Deep Thought on Twitter @dtgeeks.

I recently mentioned a game called The War Z in an article. At the time, there was not a lot of chatter on the internet about it. Just your average game, on the average internet. The last two days have seen some of the largest amount of internet activism against the game that I have ever witnessed, and I think its of note because of several things.

First of all, the internet is unforgiving. Just Bob Seger used to tell us that Rock n’ Roll never forgets, the internet never forgives, and most certainly this is not an exception. Since the games release on steam meta critic has gone from twenty-one user reviews, to an astounding 1,211 user reviews at the time of this writing. The breakdown of those feature 100 positive, nineteen mixed, and a staggering 1,093 negative. After scrolling through about six pages of reviews I found most of the negative reviews are of the zero and one variety, and most are well thought out and articulated reviews. Feel free to peruse them for yourself at the above link, I personally rather enjoy the writings of angered gamers.

Along with the MetaCritic gloom hanging over the game, it has also faced Steam troubles in the last few days. Released on the 17th of this month on Steam, The War Z rocketed to the number one selling game on the service. With a price tag under fifteen USD it was bound to sell well, and it did. However, the Steam forums for the game instantly became a place where the same things that were being said on MC were being screamed in an even angrier fashion. With over 2,000 threads after only two days on Steam. The troubles on Steam didn’t end there for The War Z, today it was removed from the service. The full details are at the source link, in summary, Steam called releasing the game a “mistake.” But wait! There’s more! Thirteen hours prior to this posting Steam began an investigation into abuse by The War Z community modorator Kewk in the Steam forum. People were apparently being banned and negative posts against the game being deleted (along with some insane forum rules). Steam is now offering refunds for the game to anyone who wants one via their support site. Also, the head developer of The War Z told everyone he was sorry that people didn’t read the Steam page correctly.

The woes for the game didn’t end there though. As we’ve seen time and time again on the internet, some very keen geeks find some very interesting things that no one ever wants to be brought to light. Today it was found that The War Z’s website was using images of zombies stolen from photos of The Walking Dead. These images were used as a background for the website entirely, including the forums, and in parts of the game. If there wasn’t already a chance that Hammerpoint Interactive, the developers behind The War Z, were getting sued, there sure is one now. This situation reminds me a lot of the craziness about the President Obama poster and photo about four years ago. Also someone decided to actually measure the map, which Hammerpoint claims is 100Sq Kilometers, they found it to be about nine square Kilometers.

The story carries on from here to the social justice portion of the internet, and of course Change.org. Two petitions have popped up on Change that target The War Z. The first petition, with 2,200 signatures at the time of writing, demands a full refund of retail price to everyone who bought the game. The petition claims that Hammerpoint Interactive has broken multiple digital distribution laws and demands a refund for everyone who bought the game. You can see my signature on there, I signed it just because I’m addicted to Change.org, and I always side with the gamers. The second petition, which was closed with 2,031 signatures, demands that valve take The War Z off Steam. Oh and if you look real close at that one, you’ll see that almost all those signatures are from today.

The internet, or at least part of it, grabbed its stomach and threw The War Z up today. In a time when we see companies trying to rip everyone off all the time. From charging us to make phone calls on Skype, to gumball machines being fifty cents USD now, everyone’s a scoundrel. At least the internet can still defend itself. For more information, see this article from Kotaku which helped me find so much of this information. Also if you have played The War Z and want to offer up your opinion, hit up the comments section. Finally if anyone wants to buy me a copy of The War Z, I will review it for everyone, then give it back to whoever bought it for me (I definitely won’t be touching a game with this much drama myself). Finally, to call me ignorant, a terrible writer, or just to hate on the topics I have chosen to write about, you can abuse me in the comments. I promise I won’t moderate them.

http://kotaku.com/5969784/the-war-z-mess-every-crazy-detail-we-know-so-far

Its been two years since we saw anything on here. Despite my picture on the staff page being drastically outdated, I feel I owe at least one last article. Also, no one reads my personal blog, and this is a better shot than that. So, welcome back geeks, here’s more of my nonsensical ramblings.

I’ve been a gamer for a very, very long time. My Steam account is a five digit, which to those who know what that means, it means that at least once during every game of Counter Strike: Source/Global Offensive I play I get asked by a thirteen-year-old if he can buy my steam account. Of course thirteen-year-old’s don’t have enough money to buy my Steam account. The point is that I’ve been around the PC gaming block once or twice.

During my adventures through all sorts of virtual terrain, our digital earth, alien planets, radioactive swamps, etc; I’ve found that games have gone from a time where we saw one or two patches for a game, to total redesigns of games after final release (I’m positive that Team Fortress 2 is on its 4,000,000th patch, most of which are content updates). Of course, looking on one of my favorite games to play on old thrift store computers, Fallout has only one patch released. Its also totally unplayable on Windows 7 or any modern hardware. On the other side of the spectrum, we see a lot of developers doing open beta’s these days, and releasing tons and tons of versions of their game until at some point they decide to arbitrarily name a version 1.0 and call it the full game. Of course that full game is only replaced by version 1.01 a week later because these days we rarely see the end of cycle for a game not put out by a major developer. The following applies mainly to smaller developers, not the THQ’s, EA’s, and Activisions of the world.

I want to point a finger at the game that really truly brought this pattern of development to the forefront, and more so why its an especially great thing for PC games. Then, if people read this, i’ll turn it into a series of articles where I play the beta versions of games and discuss them (but that’s far away, at least a week). If you follow video games at all, you don’t need me to say the name Minecraft as the answer for the game that started this fundamental shift in the way PC games are developed. Sure, Minecraft didn’t master the direct gamer feedback model, instead we all had to hop on some guys twitter or tumblr and publicly decry the issues we were having with the current built, or offer up ideas. Through all 35 some odd beta updates that Minecraft went through, we saw a lot of additions to the game.

In other words, we got a box at first, and later the developers put stuff in the box. Then we asked for more, so they colored the box. That is where game development is today. In the past we got handed a box, colored and full of stuff already, and some of that stuff was kind of broken or not working fully, so a few years down the line the developers came back with a fixed version of the stuff in the box, and swapped it out for us. I remember when they would come with those new things for the box. I would surf to Gamespot.com on my windowsME machine and start a download for a 58Mb patch that would take not only twenty minutes to finish, but also occupy my phone line so my girlfriend at fifteen couldn’t call me and ask me to go to a Good Charlotte concert. It was worth it to have an updated Roller Coaster Tycoon 2.

Today, a 58Mb patch would take about a minute to download, and I cant even run RCT2 on my computer its so old. Modern technology allows us to have the greatest opportunity ever as gamers. Because of high speed Internet we can now have a development model where gamers buy in early, and get to see the game unfold before them. More so they get to provide important feedback that will sculpt the game into something that the gamers want. If we look at the success of this very new model of game creation, we see a lot of success. From small scale situations, like that of Prison Architect by Introversion, where they are applying the model even in alpha. To a larger scale, with The War Z by Hammerpoint Interactive, where after opening the beta up only last week, the game has seen a flood of great feedback and four new patches (one of them drastically changing the game play). Heck, we just saw SOE say that they were letting the players determine the future of Planetside 2, and thats far from small news.

Its an interesting time to be a PC gamer. In a time when two of the three main consoles on the market remain as stale as month old crackers, the PC is seeing a resurgence of creativity and dedication. A lot of “PC only” games are coming out these days, and are being developed in a way that makes the gamers playing them more loyal to a game and developer than ever.

EDIT 19/12/2012: In light of recent news I feel I would be remiss if I did not set the record straight about The War Z. Yesterday The War Z was released on Steam. It soon became clear to everyone that the features listed on the steam page were not in the game, and the game was removed. I personally have never played the game, but have monitored it for the last few months. The events of yesterday were interesting, today even more so. I will be writing up a full story on it soon. Mainly I wish for it to be known that I am not endorsing The War Z in anyway.

Posted courtesy of http://www.piratedthoughts.us the private blog of Jay Grider, DTgeeks.com features editor. Original article can be found At this location. This is a modified version of the article edited to better suit the content of this site.

My Curve was a gift from a friend and former boss Chip. Chip bought the phone through T-mobile probably when it first came out as the Curve 8320 was released in 2007 and it was gifted to me in 2009. Chip moved from that crackberry to another quickly, and shortly after moved to AT&T for an iPhone. When my Nokia flip phone, whose model number I am too lazy to find but we can suffice that it was a piece of crap, died after a long string a abuse (being pushed into the pool during JAWS camp, being thrown into my wall and getting stuck, being dropped out the car window on the interstate on accident [you get the idea]) I tried to seek a cheap alternative to pay for a new phone.

As someone who has task management issues I found myself craving the scheduling features that a smartphone packed. Posting around and tweeting asking if people had any old blackberry’s laying around *since i knew no one would give out a free iPhone or Droid* @ichip offered his to me. I fell in love as soon as I unlocked the T-Mobile device to work on my wireless carrier, a process that only took me 18 hours of active hacking. The phone was fast, easy to use, and feature rich. This was a whole new league of phones I had never experienced before.

Yet like all my phones during those teen years of angst and pubescent rage, the crackberry took abuse. Anger over breakups and douches with beards stealing the girls I pined for at night, the crackberry began to see some wear and tear. About a year ago the trackball went out, a combination of angst fits, clumbsyness, and using my phone while my hands were greasy. This was an easy fix, a four dollar order from overstock.com meant a new trackball for my crackberry, and another year of functionality.

Now as 2010 is drawing to a close, my crackberry cries in pain everyday, as I weep over missed calls and sms messages. Recently the sim card pins soddering has come loose, either that or my sim card is busted, which it appears to be alright, and replacing it is not an option as my wireless carrier doesn’t know I am using a smartphone (SHHHHHHHHH). Leaving me with a phone that drops service every ten minutes or so and requires a reset to get it to come back. These are dark days in my digital world.

As my crackberry began to die I felt it was time to let it rest in peace. I began examining the newer models of crackberrys available from my wireless carrier. I went to several wireless stores to play with the models of the new phones, and even called a friend who has one of them and asked if I could play around with it for an hour or so. The outcome was glum at best. Despite being a crackberry the features and apps offered were just to downbeat. The new interface was confusing and extremely complex. I quickly grew to fear that I may have to venture into a realm of a new phone manufacturer.

In my senior year of highschool I spent about $1200 on a macbook. This was the worst decision of my life. If I had saved that money I would have $1200 less in student loan debt.... ok maybe it was an ok decision, no it wasn’t. The truth is that I love PC’s, I love playing video games, I love being able to take the side off my desktop and move things around and change speeds of fans and physically manage every aspect of my computer. Beyond that In the two years I owned that macbook I had numerous failures of the hardware, and numerous issues with the customer relations team at Apple. In the few instances that they refused to repair an issue caused by poor manufacturing I found that getting angry and peeling keys off the macbook’s keyboard and tossing them at them would usually get them to fix it for free, and buy my something from Captain Ahab’s Coffee ARRRRR. However, it was only a matter of time until I got bored of wasting my time doing this and sold the piece of crap for a cold $600. That was a good decision. Anyway, thats why I hate Apple now.

So with iPhones off the table, I decided to look at windows 7 phones, since they just came out and all. These phones, although cool, and full of features, were not very customizable. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the interface, its what makes me love my Zune HD so much, but there is not much you can customize about it, and I like to customize. This only left one option, Android. My carrier, like all non Verizon carriers does not offer a stellar offering of Droid phones. However they have a few, and one that is about the size of my Curve and just as cool.

Why Droid though? Thats the real question. The market demand seems to be calling all of us to buy an iPhone, not a Google mobile OS based smartphone that is made by some Taiwanese person. The simple answer is in the quality of the hardware and the market experience. The phone that I chose to purchase is made by HTC, a mobile industry leader since the mobile industry began. This company is the big leagues of mobile devices. They created the IPAQ, the first touchscreen phone, one of the first 3G phones, and the first 4G phone. Thats quite a list of accomplishments, on top of the fact that they have a custom distro of android that features a much smoother GUI. HTC, a company that many of us never heard of till the last few years grew in silence. They didn’t start branding devices as HTC until just several years ago and the first big one that anyone can remember was the myTouch.

Lets look at Apple, more specifically their accomplishments in the mobile communications industry: Multi-touch technology (Invented far before the iPhone was released, 1982 by the University of Toronto to be exact), a mobile phone that sync’s with itunes (first done my the motorokr), Application market (done first by RIM with blackberrys), Retina Display this is really just a combination of an LED screen with TFT and capacitive technology, in other words “they took a bunch of things and put them together"). To summarize, it is impossible to find innovation by Apple in the mobile market, it was all done before the iPhone came along, it was all done after the iPhone came along.

All in all, I find the reasoning to go with an opensource OS and a trusted hardware manufacturer more reassuring than a company that simply duplicated features and claimed they were new. Just saying.

Link

Apple initially rejected Jelle Prins’ iPhone app Lyrics, which displays lyrics for the songs in your music library, including the profanity contained in some song lyrics. Apple cited that fact as the reason for turning Prins down.

Oh Apple, look what I found:

Perhaps maybe you should make them censor it?

Ooh, and there’s this other app that allows unfiltered access to the internet, including objectionable content which you seem not to like allowing. I think it’s called… um.... Safari, that’s it! Wait a minute....

Yeah, make the developers of that conduit of smut pay for their sins against our children.

Speaking of children, won’t somebody think of them?

In wake of the DDOS attack on /b/ that I reported on a few minuets ago. It has taken only twenty seven minuets for the moderators at 4chan to take down /b/. At 7:27PM EST /b/ was reported as 404’d.

Mac Heist three began today. They are offering Process, normally $39USD, for free just for logging in. Beware, the web server is buckling under the load of people. So it may take a long time to get anywhere.

Head over to www.macheist.com to join the fun!

UPDATE: It appears that the next piece of loot is MacDust