Another 15 minutes

I’m so looking forward to this! This fall both Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 are released, both with guitar, microphone and drumset. But what are the differences between the games and what will I get? I have read that Guitar Hero is generally a more difficult (and fun) game to play, if you master GH on “hard” level, one would have no problem with RB at all. GH WT also adds new elements to the guitar playing experience with chords that does not all start and end at the same time, but you have to “strum” between them. The compatibility between the games and instruments may differ abit depending on platform, you can play both games with either instruments, but some features might be disabled, like the fifth drumtrack on GH WT if you don’t have their drumset, atleast so I’ve heard. However GH WT have better instruments than RB.

Guitar Hero World Tour

• Create your own tracks.
• Drumkit with 3 drums and 2 symbals.
• Pressure sensitive drumpads.
• Compatible with Guitar Hero.
• Custom characters and instrument creation.
• Touch sensitive pads on guitar for tapping etc.
• Online career mode.
• Drums are quiter than Rock Band’s.
• About 85 songs (download and upload of custom tracks).

Rock Band 2

• Lots of downloadable songs and albums.
• About 80 songs (up to 200 downloadable).
• Backwards compatibility with instruments and songs.

I already have Guitar Hero 3 (Legends of Rock) so I have now pre-ordered Guitar Hero World Tour, even though Rock Band have better songs, but WT seems like a better game. I’m looking forward to World Tour very much :) – about 3 weeks left and counting. I’ll be back with a review of it.

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Today I decided to try out Internet Explorer 8 (beta 2) on a virtual machine running Windows XP. At first glance it looks just like IE7, but with a few more buttons and menues. The main new feature is probably that IE8 can suggest sites with relevant content to the ones you have recently visited by a click of a button.

You can also re-open tabs you have closed, sort of a new version of website history, which I think is very nice, as seen in the picture.

There is also a feature to use “InPrivate Browsing” which is browsing websites but not let IE save any data from the sites and share them with other sites, such as cookies, and the history will be deleted when you close the tab.

You can also select compatibility view to pages designed for older browser still will look OK, and there’s also a “smartscreen filter” that scans the websites for malicious content, and ofcourse all the old features of IE7 is all there what I could see. There are also these little helpful new things that sometimes really comes in handy, for example the “duplicate tab” option to open a new tab with the same URL as the current one.

I think that IE8 will be a very good browser, but the biggest leap forward was from version 6 to 7 with the introduction of tabs for IE, even though version 8 will improve it yet again. I like it.

Did you remember to set your clock back 1 hour today? Today it was time for adjusting the clocks according to the end of daylight savings time. Someone asked me who came up with this strange idea, I had a pretty good idea about its purpose, but I decided to research the area abit.

DST: Blue use. Orange did use. Red never used.

Daylight savings time is used in most countries in the northern part of the world where the amount of daylight shifts alot from summer to winter seasons. It was “invented” in 1905 (and published 2 years later) by William Willet in England who didn’t like to cut his golf round short at dusk.

The idea was adopted by Germany, its allies and occupied countries during World War I in 1916. The Brittish and other neutral European countries soon followed.

The start and end of DST varies with location and year, since 1996 DST in Europe is from the last Sunday of March to the last Sunday of October. The purpose of daylight savings time is to benefit trade, save electricity, decrease the number of traffic accidents and increase public health. (source: Wikipedia)

I installed a new theme on the blog today and modified it to fit my needs, credits to the original creator “deniart”. I will probably continue to do small changes with fonts and some colors over the next couple of days to fine tune the design. I hope you like it? Abit more vivid than the last I think. 

I also take the opportunity to share a nice song with you, “Cry for you” by September. I like the intro and melody of it alot.

Got the new battery pack for my UPS now and the internal temperature seems to be low and stable so far, it’s been charging now for an hour. I’m glad this solved the problem because getting a new UPS would’ve cost alot more money since it was out of warranty.

Collected my pre-order of the PS3 game Far Cry 2 today and spent a couple of hours with it. The first impression was that the graphics was maybe not as awesome as I’ve thought, but it is still pretty cool. Also the environment is very nice and the play area huge, you can run or drive around as you please over a 50 km² African savannah & rainforest, collect missions and earn money to buy better weapons, sort of like Grand Theft Auto 4. The ultimate goal is to find an infamous arms dealer and kill him.

Aiming is abit difficult, but perhaps the opposition is harder also since I started out on a more difficult level than normal. I think this game will take a long time to play through, and I bet I will get bored with driving around pretty soon, because that part is not so fun at all in this game. I like the freedom in the game where you can choose yourself howto proceed with missions, stealthy or mayhem. I still haven’t tried the multiplayer option, so I will probably be back with a report on that one later.

The price and date for the new HTC Touch HD mobile phone has been set, currently the date in Sweden is 2008-11-21. This phone I think has it all; touch screen, microSD memory expansion, 3.5mm headphone plug, 5 megapixel camera, nice user interface (Windows Mobile 6.1 with TouchFlo 3D), big high resolution screen, better battery than the HTC Touch Diamond and more. I hope we can get it to my work to try it out, and then if I like I’ll probably get it. The only downside is the size and weight.

Its dimensions are 115 x 62.8 x 12 mm and weighs 146.4 grams.

Compared to:
IPhone 3G: 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm and weighs 133 grams.
Nokia N95: 99 x 53 x 21 mm and weighs 120 grams.