Rihards Unplugged

To get a better idea of what people like and don’t like, I have added a post rating system which lets everyone, anonymously rate a post. The ratings are your typical five star business, where five is the best, and one the worst. I’d like to add a sort of guide though, or more like a reference, so that I could maximize the rating results and draw better conclusions from them.

It’s actually just one thing. Please rate. That’s it, it doesn’t take any time, and doesn’t require you to do refresh the page or anything, just one click and you have rated the post. Rating posts will help me decide in what direction to take my blog, and to see what type of posts (lots of text, or lots of images, or a mix, or whatever) people enjoy reading most.

So go ahead and rate my posts, and don’t just go giving everything five stars, if a post deserves only one star (and I’d give quite a few that low of a score here) then please do put it down as one star. Thank you for your time.

While I think that most tuning is a waste of money and time, if it’s done excessively and only to show off, I really do love what some people have done with their ZAZs. For those of you who don’t know, a ZAZ is basically what a VW Beetle and East Germany’s Trabant were, a people’s car. Very compact and most importantly affordable.

Really amazing what some creativity and money can do. For even more crazy ZAZ tuning pictures, have a look at English Russia’s entry on ZAZ tuning.

Spent quite a sizable chunk of my weekend playing Fable and CoD2, mostly Fable though. Don’t know why I really started playing it again, as there are quite a few things that annoy me to no end, but somehow I just keep going back to it. Always just saying, one more quest, to myself and then playing about five or six through.

Mind you, most of the quests aren’t that exciting and offer very little in variations, or ground breaking things. Quite the contrary, a lot of them are either go from point A to point B, and/or rescue someone from somewhere. But there have been some really cool quests, like gathering books for the local school (it’s actually a lot better than it sounds like), or the chicken kicking competition quest.

One of the really cool things about Fable though as I have already mentioned in previous posts is the character customization. Lots of choices for various things, each armor piece looks differently on your character, and you can combine various armors. Then there’s of course hair styles, beard and mustache styles, and of course tattoos. So you can basically play with a completely differently looking character each time. Especially considering that the scars that your character gets from fighting are unique each time as well.

Overall a top notch game that could have done with some better storyline, storytelling and some more varied quests.

Some of you, especially those that browse a lot will have by now probably noticed that more and more webpages have started switching from flv based videos over to divx based videos. It’s quite easy to notice it as well, for one, you need to install a special plugin to view these videos, and also you get to see a big divx logo first.

At first I didn’t like this at all (I don’t like most things that require a plugin to be usable), but after getting the plugin and watching some videos, especially those on Stage6 site, I must say that I’m very pleased with this new web video format. Now divx itself is quite old of course, but it is new to the web, and beats flash video and sound quality any time of the day.

Here’s an example, and don’t be alarmed if it asks you to install the divx plugin, it should be perfectly safe to do so. It’s the Theatrical Starcraft 2 trailer.