The World Tour features an adaptive opponent AI difficulty, meaning if you drive a slow, not upgraded car so will the computer. You don’t even have to win to progress but if you do the AI will get a little harder to beat next time. This system actually works quite well often giving you the impression that your skill allowed you to only barely win a race.

Picture: Ran out of skill.

Manufacturer Affinity replaces the car levels of earlier installments. Each level up gives you some credits and from level 4 onwards you get all tuning parts for their cars for free. Reaching level 4 can be done in just a couple of races. Getting affinity to the maximum level of 50 on the other hand requires a huge time investment.

This leads to basically being “stuck” with one manufacturer for a very long time if you are serious about it. I don’t know if that was such a wise decision for a game with more than 80 manufactures and hundreds of different cars already in the game. I for one will try to get my 50 Ferrari affinity ASAP so I no longer “have to” drive one if I don’t feel like it.

Sounds strange I know but so is the nature of Achievements, Titles & Badges.
And Forza Motorsport 4 has all of the above.

The next step was to purge my gaming rig of all the WoW stuff like update clients, dual-boxing tools, backup scripts and some such. I wanted to make absolutely sure to get rid of every piece of WoW-ware that was now possibly on my system. A clean reinstall of the operating system was in order.
For the first step, reformatting the drives, I used GParted from a Linux live-CD. Erasing the system drive and formatting the data drive in NTFS was quick and painless. A restart and short visit to the bios later – to change the boot order – and Windows 7 was happily installing only prompting me for input once ore twice.
I was, of course, completely offline at that time having literally pulled the ethernet plug. You really don’t want to go online with an un-patched system. But you only get your updates online you say? Although that may in essence be the case you can download them on a second machine and feed them to your freshly installed system via USB flash drive or CD/DVD-R. Since downloading and installing every update manually is not fun at all let’s use a tool called WSUS Offline Update. It features a GUI for downloading and installing security updates and other downloadable tools from Microsoft.
The next thing I did was installing new drivers for the mainboard/chipset, audio (on-board) and graphics. I was careful not to install any unnecessary tools or driver components (like 3D-display support). Finally I flashed the DVD drive’s firmware. It had blue-something (Bluefish, Bluebird?) on it that always tried to auto-start when there was no disk in the drive.

I also talk about this topic in a less detailed but more energetic way – and in German – on my podcast. Head over to the Podcast section and grab a copy of episode #111 if you want to give it a listen.

Here you can see what I ate in the last two weeks but not necessarily how much though.
More stats after the jump.

Softness Scale: 1 = liquid, 5 = “normal” (unachievable for me)

For more information on my condition head over to the UC Page.

Are you a lousy photographer? There are apps for that!

Combine today’s smartphones and tablets with sub-par cameras and app marketplace/stores and you get a lot of photo effect/filter apps trying to salvage your snapshots and turn them into pieces of art or just something you are not afraid to share on your social network of choice.

I tried Pixlr-o-matic, and liked it, because it’s a multistep process thus giving you more control over the resulting image. The app works in portrait mode only but can handle landscape images just fine as shown in my quick video-review below the jump.

Here you can see what I ate last week but not necessarily how much though.
More stats after the jump.

Softness Scale: 1 = liquid, 5 = “normal” (unachievable for me)

For more information on my condition head over to the UC Page.

From left to right: iPod era, iPhone era, iPad era.

I was always impressed with the attention to detail and the whole Apple experience prior to even turning on your new gadget. Starting with the packaging itself to the unique look and feel of – in reality standard – power cables. In recent years you could almost watch as packaging became less expansive and the build quality of things like the pictured sync cables was slightly reduced.

Here you can see what I ate last week but not necessarily how much though.
More stats after the jump.

Softness Scale: 1 = liquid, 5 = “normal” (unachievable for me)

For more information on my condition head over to the UC Page.

This is a graphical representation of what the Kinect sensor picks up with its infrared point-cloud 3D tracking system. I try to show you the challenge of finger tracking and how well Kinect does with facial expressions and different textures/surfaces. I also do some pseudo martial arts and MJ-esque dance moves.

Here you can see what I ate last week but not necessarily how much though.
More stats after the jump.

Softness Scale: 1 = liquid, 5 = “normal” (unachievable for me)

For more information on my condition head over to the UC Page.

Here you can see what I ate last week but not necessarily how much though.
More stats after the jump.

Softness Scale: 1 = liquid, 5 = “normal” (unachievable for me)

For more information on my condition head over to the UC Page.