The basic idea behind this game is that you simply have to draw one item from a list of 3 options (different at every round) and the other player (can be a random player from all over the world or from your social network list) has to guess what you are drawing.

Of course, most players are pretty bad (including myself) with drawing on a touch screen so the end result might be pretty… lets say interesting… there are others however that can draw great stuff. Check out the gallery below from one of my twitter friends Matthew (www.twitter.com/matthewzammit) . Great collection!

[Show as slideshow]

Uncharted 3 will see protagonist Nathan Drake and mentor Victor Sullivan travelling around the world to such places as the Rub’ al Khali desert, in search of the legendary lost city, the Iram of the Pillars. He ends up being pulled in to an even bigger mystery filled with deceit, pitting him against a shadowy clandestine organization and the occult treachery of its cunning and ruthless leader. Marlowe is always trying to undermine Drake and getting him to do things he doesn’t want to do.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective, with the player in control of Nathan Drake. Drake will have a large number of different animation sets, enabling him to react according to his surroundings. Drake is physically adept and is able to jump, sprint, climb, swim, scale narrow ledges, wall-faces to get between points, and perform other acrobatic actions. Drake can now take on opponents in more ways than before: hand-to-hand combat with multiple opponents, contextual melee attacks, and new stealth options. Drake can be equipped with up to two and a limited supply of grenades. Drake can pick up weapons, automatically replacing the existing weapon he was using, and additional ammunition from killed enemies.

The player can direct Drake to take cover behind corners or low walls using either aimed or blind-fire to kill his enemies. The player can also have Drake fire while moving. If Drake is undetected by his enemies, the player can attempt to use stealth to take them out, such as by sneaking up behind them to knock them out with one hit, or by pulling an unsuspecting foe over a ledge from which Drake is hanging. The stealth mechanic has been simplified and improved. Some areas of the game will require the player to solve puzzles with the use of Drake’s journal, which provides clues towards the puzzles’ solutions. When enabled, a hint system provides gameplay clues, such as the direction of the next objective.

Like its predecessors, throughout the game there will be special treasures that may be hidden or in difficult-to-reach places that the player can collect. Collecting these treasures, along with completing certain feats within the game, is tracked by the awarding of medals, which gives the player in-game money to use to unlock special options; these include in-game bonuses such as alternate costumes, unlimited ammunition, buy new weapons, as well as upgrades for online gameplay. Also non-game extras, including concept art and making-of movie. All the money that players earn in the game’s story mode will be available for transfer to multiplayer, and vice versa. The statistics tracked for a large portion of the in-game medals are used to award trophies.

Numerous gaming websites have called Uncharted 3 one of the most anticipated games of 2011 with 1UP and IGN ranking it number one in their “Top 10 PS3 Games of 2011″. We can only just wait and see when this game is released and if it manages to impress the audience and keep its high rankings.

The game takes place during the year 2027, 25 years before Deus Ex. Nanotechnological augmentations have yet to be developed and biomechanical augmentations are the current state of the art. The main protagonist, Adam Jensen, is a private security officer with Sarif Industries, a leading company that specializes in human augmentations. After he witnesses a chilling attack on his company which leaves him horrifically injured and forced to undergo augmentation to survive, “the conspiracy begins.”

The player will visit five cities over the course of the game, including Detroit, Shanghai and Montreal. In addition, the protagonist will have his own apartment where he may store his secrets and collected information. The events in the game will lead to the formation of UNATCO from the original game.

Deus Ex 3 was announced on May 17, 2007, and an initial teaser trailer was released on November 26, 2007. Around one year later a first preview was launched which detailed some of the game’s mechanics and setting. Several of the design decisions mentioned, most notably the introduction of regenerating health, precipitated an initial backlash amongst many fans of the original Deus Ex.

The different “pillars of gameplay” are “Combat”, “Stealth”, “Hacking”, and “Social”. Players can switch between these gameplay types whenever they please, and certain pillars may flow into others. For example, a failed hack may sound an alarm and start a fight, and exploration might lead to the discovery of a stealthy way past the area’s enemies.

In the series, Augmentations are technological modifications to the body that allow the user to use superhuman abilities. While augmentations in the first two games were nanotech, Human Revolution is set prior to both and instead features mechanical augmentations. These Augmentations cater to each of the five gameplay types. While the player character is highly capable of bringing death on his enemies, the player is never forced into acts of lethal violence. Augmentations, while enhancing the player’s performance in each of the gameplay types, also allow players to craft their own methods of play should they see fit.

Every enemy squad will have an identifiable squad leader who will direct the team’s actions. If the leader is killed, the squad falls into disarray. Enemies will also react to subtle player decisions, such as a change in behaviour or weapons, etc. Unlike in Invisible War, weapons will fire distinct ammunition types instead of depleting a unified pool. They can also be upgraded to better suit the player.

Another major change seen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the highlighting of objects a player can interact with, explained via the in-game plot as tactical vision Augmentation. This highlighting of objects can be turned off in the game options. Human Revolution is primarily a first-person game, but will switch to a contextual third-person viewpoint when using the cover system, certain Augmentations, or for melee combat.

Deus Ex Human Revolution has received widespread critical acclaim in reviews. Reviewers who had access to the game in February 2011 praised the importance of conversations in the missions, and also the depth of the storyline. Various other websites also described that this is a game that “puts almost everything else in the genre to shame.”

For those who think computers are dull, functional and slightly boring, the name ‘workstation’ isn’t going to change their minds, and adding in a few technical “gigs, cores and rams” in the way, will probably just make all this worse. After all, it does what its name suggests – it’s something that you sit at to get a job done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The Z800 sits at the top of the tree from all the HP workstations, and is aimed at serious computing tasks where multiple processors and huge amounts of memory bandwidth is required. We’re talking here on intense data crunching like animation, games developers, graphic design, broadcasting video etc…

When this workstation was delivered to me, I was actually quite shocked at the weight of this system (thank god for elevators). The case of this computer is absolutely fantastic and can be also perhaps described as “cool” compared to other systems. Its design gives it a very smart, efficient look, but also enables air to flow into the case from front to back, cooling all the lovely internal stuff, the stuff that counts most. It also has handles on top (front and back sides) to facilitate moving this workstation around if need be.

An interesting part was definitely the opening for the slot loading optical drive where you can say it’s totally invisible. I’d be interested to see if it would be problematic to add on further drives in the future. Strangely enough this slot loading drive bay is also able to take the mini-dvds, but you might have to give it a good push so it reaches the loading mechanism.

There are also three front mounted USB ports, headphone and microphone sockets and a full 6-pin FireWire port, which makes a lot of sense for its target audience, which could well be editing digital video. Round the rear of the machine you’ll find six more USB ports and another FireWire socket along with two Ethernet ports.

Embossed on the large brushed metal side of the workstation is the HP logo, plus a handle at the top that allows you to easily remove the cover to reveal the impressive insides of this workstation. The design of this workstation from the inside is absolutely impressive and its tool-less approach is definitely a massive advantage.  To help out with this marginally different setup, HP took great care to include a full schematic on the side panel, which seems to be printed on the side panel, so you wont even have to worry about the sticker peeling off years down the line.

A tool-less approach is evident in this system where for example, the hard disk removal is absolutely fantastic and you can plug in or remove a hard disk in seconds. Tool-less entry extends to a cover hiding the PCI cards, and retaining flaps at the back of the PCI slots, so if you need to fit a large dual slot professional graphics card, you can do without needing a screwdriver.

Internally on the motherboard you’ll find four x16 PCI Express ports, two x8 and one 32-bit PCI port. Things are motored along by dual Intel Xeon 5560s and these run at 2.8GHz, feature 8MB.

These two monster processors are covered by two large fans and unlike your average desktop the memory is too. Then again, the Intel 5520 chipset based motherboard is a heavyweight in every sense, featuring 12 DIMMs slots, which enables it to support an eye popping 192GB of RAM, using 16GB DIMMs.

With all these fans, it would be a bit much to expect the machine to be absolutely silent, but that said I did manage to easily ignore the sound of the machine after a while.

Performance is very much what this machine is about. Even though this test workstation was delivered to me running Windows Vista (which is well known to be a resource hog, and not the best performing OS) this HP workstation easily handled (actually blasted through) every intensive graphic demo I threw at it, and even while running multiple instances in the background! Since I don’t personally own any video editing software or extreme 3D rendering, my tests were only limited to the graphic and general day to day operations.

I installed the latest version of Assassin’s Creed, which is to my knowledge, one of the most graphically intensive games and the performance was absolutely jaw dropping with MAX settings. No hiccups at all and the performance was as smooth as it could be. Normal day to day operation like software installations, zipping and unzipping files was the best I ever saw.

As far as negative points for this system, I was very surprised with the keyboard and mouse supplied. Very basic cheap versions that simply don’t match at all with such system, I’m positively hopeful that these are not the standard keyboard and mouse shipped with such a system. Second negative point with the system is simply the reason that its front fins design in Malta might actually be a bit of a nightmare to keep clean since of all the dust in the air. Very minimal –ve points compared to the vast list of +ve’s!

The raw power of the HP Z800 Workstation mean that for those in industries where performance is everything – be it analysing data, or rendering 3D visuals – investing in this system could potentially pay for itself in a matter of months, which would make the upgrading to one of these a totally no brainer. You’ll be saying to yourself…. Why didn’t I get one sooner! As a self admitted geek, this is a dream come true machine. All good things come to an end, and I’m absolutely dreading the moment the machine has to go back to the supplier. I might beg them on my knees to leave it here in my office!!

When upgrading the account is out of the question (even though it’s really cheap). Sorting through the emails would be a never ending task, and unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t offer any built in feature to find the largest emails in your mailbox. So in this scenario, one has to turn to a third party offering to handle this tedious task.

One solution would be to use Gmail’s IMAP service to download the emails to Outlook, and sort through the emails using Outlook’s email sorting capabilities. Outlook will connect to your Gmail account via IMAP and therefore when you delete an emails with big attachments locally, the same happens in your online inbox as well.

If you however find the above workarounds a little complicated, and that it would take ages to download all email, there’s an even simpler method that won’t even require you download or install anything – it’s called findbigmail.com.

This incredibly useful and simple to use web service will quickly find all the big email messages in your Gmail account that are taking up the maximum space. These messages are categorized with special labels to help you decide which of them should be removed to recover more space.

To get started, you simply connect your Gmail account with Find Big Mail using Google’s OAuth. It then scans all your messages for their sizes and send you an email notification once the scan is over.

You can then log into your Gmail account and act on messages marked with the labels to instantly reclaim space. I have freed up about 1GB of space from files I didn’t even know I had in my account.

For business users, this could also be an incredibly precious tool, since it can be used to delete any unnecessary files from your account, therefore you might be able to reduce storage costs from your Gmail service.

This service is run on donation basis, so if you like the tool, a donation to the team would be appreciated to help them cover the costs and keep the service running.

Windows Live Messenger 2011 contains a brand new ribbon interface that aims to bring Messenger in-line with the other ribbon-based applications such as Windows 7 Paint and Microsoft Office 2010. This new interface has advantages and disadvantages.

The obvious major change to the interface is that the main window area is no longer just your friends list. The friends list has been moved to the right hand side and the majority of the window is taken up by your social networking. Currently, you can integrate Facebook, MySpace and (new to the the full version) LinkedIn accounts into this main window. Surprisingly there is no Twitter integration. You can go back to the old style list view in windowed mode, but the maximised view might take some time to get used to.

Facebook Chat is integrated well with Windows Live Messenger. Previously this feature was only available to those in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and Brazil, but we can confirm now that more countries have been added to the support list.

WLM 2011 introduces tabbed conversation windows with a familiar ribbon-style interface. Instead of each open conversation being allocated to a separate window as with previous Messenger versions, all conversations are put together into a single, tabbed window. This window is complete with middle-click to close tabs and tab rearrangement. While the tabs appear in one window, like Internet Explorer each tab appears separate in the Windows 7 taskbar.

While the basic mechanics of WLM conversations haven’t changed, Windows Live Messenger automatically embeds YouTube videos in the conversation window when you post a YouTube link, as long as both people are running 2011. I actually found this feature to be quite annoying, and as yet we haven’t discovered the setting where to actually disable this.

Unfortunately, Windows Live Messenger 2011 is also completely loaded with advertising. Under the contacts list there is advertising, under conversations there is advertising and there are buttons that take you to affiliated websites. To have so much advertising it really takes up a huge amount of space that could be used for other, more useful purposes. We do understand that advertising is what keeps WLM free, but Microsoft could have tried to keep it to some small banners or text-only ads. (If you are extremely frustrated with the advertising around Windows Live Messenger you can remove it via third party software such as A-Patch).

Other new interface features include a new Office 2010 style notification pop-up, a brand new set of emoticons, a simplified options menu that unfortunately (or thankfully!) removes the ability to have custom names.

VIPRE Antivirus Lifetime is a fully featured PC security solution with antivirus, antispyware and firewall, with the added advantage of lifetime protection and antivirus definition updates. Consumers pay only the one-off retail price for the product and will receive virus definition updates for the life of the PC on which it is first installed.

It includes notable features such as extensive support for removable drives; support for 64-bit environments, including a 64-bit boot cleaner and 64-bit rootkit scanner; support for Mozilla Firefox Scan Extensions; and other capabilities to bolster the efficiency and performance of VIPRE.

GFI VIPRE Antivirus Lifetime is available for pre-order now from Amazon.co.uk. Virus definition updates and protection continues for the life of the machine with no annual renewal fees or additional charges.

VIPRE is compatible with both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Amazon.co.uk link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0042ESPK2

The game story starts 2,000 years ago in ancient Central America, where a battle began between Totec, the Guardian of the Light, and Xolotl, a dark spirit. After Totec defeated Xolotl he banished him and entombed himself in the Temple of Light along with the magical Mirror of Smoke to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. In present day, Lara Croft finds the temple and Mirror but mercenaries follow behind and steal it from her. Xolotl and Totec are awaken from their tombs by the chaos and Xoloti kills the mercenaries and runs away with the artefact. Totec blames Lara for the whole disaster, but realises that they will need to work together in order to retrieve the Mirror and defeat Xolotl

In the multiplayer, players will take the role as either Lara Croft or Totec. They will have to work together in order to stop the evil spirit Xolotl and retrieve the Mirror of Smoke. A single-player campaign mode will be available that will have a different storyline and will not include the non-playable character AI following or helping Lara. Guardian of Light will use the same game engine as Tomb Raider: Underworld, and will include modern visuals and physics.

The game will be a departure from the main series as being a third person adventure game. Instead it will be a non-linear “arcade-inspired” action game played from an isometric viewpoint using a fixed camera. Each playable character will possess unique weapons and skills. Lara will retain her dual pistols with infinite ammo and a grappling hook. She will be able to use her grappling hook to make it across difficult gaps and Totec can ride along. Totec will carry spears which can be used as a weapon and on the environment. Both characters will carry unlimited “bombs” that can be dropped and detonated with a press of a button.Tombs can be explored and some will have trap puzzles to solve.

Guardian of Light was shown at E3 2010 on 14 June. It will be released as a download only title and is scheduled to be released for the Xbox Live Arcade on 18 August 2010. It will be released later for the PC and PlayStation Network. In the United States, the PC download will be distributed exclusively by the DRM digital distribution platform Steam. The download will be approximately 2 GB.

I use this software extensively and it’s my primary solution to take care of my backups. I highly recommend this software for anyone that is looking for hassle and maintenance free backup.

Full Review:

Since the alpha and beta builds, this software has been incredibly stable and bug free. I was one of the many testers that were trying out the software and checking for bugs and improvements. From day one the software was very close to a final solid product. Needless to say I was very glad to be testing such a good product and that it didn’t mess up my system.

The stability of the software is reflected in the full final version of the software. So far I haven’t experienced any crashes or unresponsiveness and the memory footprint is relatively low, so it doesn’t interfere with your computer’s operation.

This innovative backup solution offers several innovative features that include:

BackInTime – This is one of the major software selling points. BackInTime allows you to go back and browse the data in your backups in different periods of time.

Silent File Versioning – This feature works in conjunction with the 1st feature. Oops!Backup runs in the background and monitors all file changes. Once a change/modification is detected it will back up the file for you in your pre-set location.

ReverseDelta – is an incredible time saver as you only have to create a full back up the first time you run the software. All the following backups after that will just be the new changes applied to your files. This will dramatically reduce the time taken to do your backups.

Plug & Protect – This feature will automatically back up any changed or new files to an external drive when it is plugged into the computer.

Software installation is simple, just like any other windows program, and the download is only around 13MB so download on a broadband connection will take just a few seconds. Once the program has finished installing, you will be presented with the Setup Wizard that guides you to configure your backup (as in what to back up, when and where).

Once the setup wizard is complete, the software will run its first (and last) full backup. Make sure you have plenty of free time when running your first backup, especially if you are backing up a lot of data. This is due to the fact that while backing up the computer performance is affected due to the hard disk reading and writing in the background. It’s probably recommended that you leave your computer alone for a while until the backup is complete.

The good thing about this software is that you only need to set it up once, and you don’t have to think about your backups any more. The software will scan your monitored files for changes and save any changes to your preferred backup location (External HDD, Internal HDD, network location, USB flash storage etc…). You can also set the frequency of when the backups are saved (say every 30 mins, or 1 hr, once a day, once a week etc…)

I found the Go BackInTime and Restore browser to be extremely handy. You can view the actual state and contents of your files and folders over time so that you can see what has changed and when it was changed so you can decide exactly what you want to restore. This is very handy particularly in a file corruption scenario or when a user saves changes to a file (example accidentally deleteting some data from a spreadsheet or document) and a previous version has to be restored.

Improvements:

I found out that the software does not seem to have the ability to back up to multiple locations. This means that if one wants to be ultra safe and backup your files onto 2 different locations, this doesnt seem to be yet possible. A second point for improvement would also be that once a backup has started, there was no way for me to easily postpone the backup process to a later time. This could be quite annoying if the backup process started right when you are working on some CPU intensive application.

Conclusion

Being designed as a totally automated backup software, Oops!Backup manages to perform what it promises really well. There is no user input required for performing backups, so you can easily set this up on your relatives’ computers so they won’t have to think about their backups (and you won’t get panic calls asking to retrieve files from a dead hard disk!)

It’s easy to use even by a beginner, light weight and very cheap to purchase – let’s face it; at €29 per computer (volume discounts possible) it’s a very small price to pay for keeping all your files safe. Imagine losing a lifetime of photos, documents, assignments and work that you wont be able to get back!

A FREE 30 day trial download is also available if you want to test out the software before committing to a purchase. If you want to get the free trial, click here to access the download page.

Later this week IT News will be launching a mini competition, and 5 lucky users will get a free Oops!Backup copy for use at home or at the office. Stay tuned for mer info soon!

After a full week using my new Nokia N97, I can officially say that it’s quite a great phone. Mind you, it’s still far from perfect, but the experience in itself was more rewarding than when I got the iPhone. It has all the features that you can think of and none of the awful limitations of the iPhone. This is a list of pros and cons that I found when using the device.

• Battery life, compared to the iPhone is great. I can run the phone for about 2 days of heavy use without charging, so that is definately a big plus. Although in comparison, that battery diddnt last as much as it used to do on my Nokia N95.
• The phone suffers a bit due to the underpowered CPU and/or poor graphics rendering. The user interface animations are sluggish and the graphics in the games are poorly antialiased. This is a feature that should be addressed in a future version of this phone. This however doesn’t make the phone slow or unresponsive, it’s just the animations that are not so good to look at. It probably needs a RAM increase as well.
• The device operating system feels a bit unfinished. It appears like no (or just little) customisation has been done to port the Symbian Operating System to a touch interface. It also still has a scroll bar where-as, most phones have kinetic scrolling, which is missing in this phone. (Kinetic scrolling has been recently added thanks to a software upgrade.
  
• There is a MAJOR lack of widgets. One of the main features that is being advertised on the phone is the ability to customise your home screen with widgets like weather, email, Facebook etc… however these are basically the only ones available. Nokia really should have done much better and release more widgets to increase the customisability of the home screen. – I was quite disappointed with this one.
• The keyboard is awesome, I managed to get used to it in a few days. It’s very quick and responsive, and perfect for people with larger fingers since the keys are well spaced apart. However it does have a very weird space bar position (you can get used to this easily though) and I seriously miss a right side shift button. Also, inserting symbols is not as easy since you have to either keep the character switch button pressed all the time, or else double tap it for a “caps lock” effect. There is also a SYM button that brings up an on screen character map, however this one allows you to only select one character at a time, meaning if you want to write several symbols at once (say… :-) ) you would have to use a combination like this (SYM button + Tap : on screen, SYM button + Tap – on screen, SYM button + Tap ) on screen) – which is way too long. If a feature to allow you to tap multiple symbols at once exists. I haven’t found it yet.
• Another issue I have with the keyboard is with the Fullstop button. The button displays a fullstop symbol and a comma on top of it. This usually means that a press of this button will print a fullstop, and a Shift + button press will display the charachter on top (which is a comma) – on this phone, this is not the case, and the buttons are reversed, and the symbol at the bottom is actually printed on screen with a shift + button press. I don’t know if its a “feature” or a bug – (i hate it like this!) – This issue has been fixed with the release of the Firmware Update 12.2.024
• Menu Double click – some items in the menu require a double click… why? isn’t this quite useless?
• Email reading is not stellar. The software works well, its quick and very responsive, however I  believe that it’s not capable to read HTML email. most probably there might be an HTML capable email client for Symbian available, however I didn’t find one yet.
• App store is seriously lacking in applications. This is bound to improve on a daily or weekly basis. However for now, the applications available on the OVI store are very little, and years away from a great app store such as Apple’s. However on the plus side, you can find loads of applications on other sites simply by looking on Google.
  
• PC Synch is incredibly awesome using the OVI manager. It automatically synchronises the phone contacts, messages, music and photos automaticallly when you connect the device. very handy indeed and very nice interface.
• Maps 3.0 is a great application, expecially if you live in large countries. It has a great interface, and it also has information for travellers and also map overlays to pontpoint several touristic places, accomodation, services, transportation etc… but the maps for some smaller countries like Malta, it’s extremely bad. It’s not even close to the iPhone version. The zoom level for Malta is very low, and just gives you a slight idea where you might be located. This application however (unlike the iPhone) allows you to download the maps into the device, and therefore be able to use the map application offline, saving you loads of money while roaming.
• Camera, its absolutely awesome, its one of the best I’ve seen on a mobile phone. The level of detail is great and colours are nice and vivid. Not as vivid on night shots though where the colours looked a bit dull. (Examples below) I did notice however that with the Flash OFF feature, the LED lights still turn on for a few seconds. Some very helpful users at the N97 Geeks forum told me that most probably, the flash goes on for autofocus. However this defies the purpose of a flash off feature since this makes it unusable in situations where a flash photo is not permitted! There doesn’t seem to be an auto-focus off feature.

Click the image for the FULL photo

• On the phone I have 2 applications that I never plan to use JoikuSpot and Boingo that I never plan to use, however they seem to be “protected” and I can’t uninstall them from the phone. Why?
• Web browser on the phone is good, and it supports flash, however I found a browser called Digia @ Web which actually works a lot better than the default application (And it’s FREE). Same goes with the Photo viewer. There is a beta application which is downloadable from the Nokia beta labs which works a lot better than the default viewer.
• Most Nokia phones running the s60 Symbian OS can make use of the N-Gage gaming application, that usually works great. However yesterday I tried to install Age Of Empires on the N97. The installation went smooth and it successfully installed. However the game failed to load, and after a couple of tries and reboots, I gave up and uninstalled the game.
• Customisability is a feature that is completely absent from the iPhone. By downloading themes from loads of sites on the web, you can customise the appearance of the phone. The themes are able to change the appearance of the wallpapers, operating system icons, animations and more. there are tons of themes available. You can even customise the Nokia n97 to look like an iPhone.
• Screen is absolutely gorgeous, the quality is great and the colours are also very bright and vivid. This doesnt disappoint.
• Firmware updating is handled much better than the iPhone’s updating since it keeps all your settings, applications and files so you dont actually have to re-install all the software you have made on the device everytime you update it. This is absolutely great! – you are still advised to back up your data in case something goes wrong.
  

This is the end of the review for now. I plan to add and modify additional points to this post as we go along since new firmware updates might bring improvements to the phone’s usabiliy and more functions could be added or improved. Keep reading!