What’s Wrong with Destiny’s Skolas
I played everything in Destiny with the exception of Trials of Osiris and Prison of Elders Skolas. For now I have no intention of doing ToO but Skolas is aggravating me and makes me want to stop playing Destiny altogether. By any means I am not Datto, Professor Broman or King Gathalion but an average player trying to have fun while playing.
Before I go on I want to emphasis that Bungie said multiple times that they are listening to complaints and so reduced the severity of Cerberus Vae III strike. They did something similar to Skolas but it did not accomplish the goal of make it manageable or fun to play. Keep in mind that I did Cerberus on a Nightfall before the nerf without any burns and could finish it.
Now what is wrong with Skolas or even with PoE?
- No Checkpoints
- Essence to aggressive
- Bad Modifiers Read more
Destiny Iron Banner Guide
Last week was the first Iron Banner (IB) with the new DLC House of Wolves. Because of my continued struggle with Prison of Elders level 34 and 35 I took the opportunity of IB to earn some Etheric Lights to upgrade boots and weapons. I also helped others to reach level 3 and 5 and so here are my tips.
Dear Hillcrest Board of Trustees
It came to my attention that you sent out an email yesterday stating this:
We understand that there is a parent meeting being called tomorrow night by some families to discuss the organizational changes happening at Hillcrest, under the guise that the changes are going to be harmful to the school. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Personally I find that statement troubling in many ways and I want to use this opportunity to respond to it here in public:
Xbox One and Digital Content Issues
Upate:
After a long discussion with the Xbox Support I finally could resolve the issue by getting a refund for the digital Destiny Guardian Edition. Now I can buy that with my wife’s account and then it will run on her XB1 with her Xbox Home. This way any of our family members can play Destiny on any of the two consoles.
That said this does not solve the underlying problem of a house hold with multiple Xbox Ones especially if they are kids. With a Game Disc they can just take it and play it where the disc is put in but not with a digital download. If my kids want to have their own XB1 and one wants to play with me and my wife then we cannot be logged in in that console. Does this now means that I need to create a 2nd Xbox account just to buy and manage Games on that XB1?
Cheese in Destiny
Datto and others started to call certain hiding spots in Destiny cheese spots meaning that it safer but less exiting way to handle a fight. When Bungie released the first DLC called The Dark Below the word cheese started to morph into the description for exploiting a glitch in the system to change the mechanics of the game so that it is easier to handle. In the raid Crota’s End warlocks could use self-resurrection to pass the bridge without having a sword or to deal with sword bearer or using the host’s quitting of the Game to make Crota kneel “forever”.
Update: Later I say that DLC gear is not giving Radiant Shards / Energy when dismantled. That is not true for Raid Gear though but for any DLC gear (Lvl 36 for Armor) that is obtained otherwise.
In my book a cheese is the exploit of a glitch to change the game mechanics to make it easier and faster to beat. Read more
Finally I can leave Verizon Behind
In a little bit more than one week from now I will receive my iPhone 6 with the no-contract option and will initially use T-Mobile as carrier. Hopefully that works out but if not I still have the option to switch but for sure I will not go with Verizon. After more than 3 years being a Verizon customer I can’t wait to ditch them. This is not only a story about bad customer service but also a story why I would never buy an Android phone because Apple is to a certain degree limiting the power of the carriers. Read more
Adobe AEM (CQ) 5.6.1: Cutting Down on Dispatcher Flush Agents
Having multiple domains / virtual hosts on an Adobe AEM Dispatcher with an AEM Publish instance would require a multitude of Dispatcher Flush agents but you can cut them down to one per Dispatcher / Apache Server. This can be done but there is a pitfall to be handled. Read more
Adobe AEM 5.6.1: Changes to the Impersonation
In the past few days I had to investigate on how to manage impersonation and it turns out that behind the scenes a lot has changed since 5.5 and I am not 100% sure what and why. Here is a rundown on the changes I experienced and on how to manage the impersonation programmatically using CURL. Read more
IntelliJ, License and Frustration
As a Java power developer I have two Macs, a MacBook Air and a Mac Pro, side by side and develop on the concurrently. Dealing with Adobe AEM (formerly known as Day CQ) I need more horse power than a MacBook Air can provide but I always place the client’s VCS onto the Laptop (Air) in order to be able to retrieve or upload changes on the go.
Now Subversion is not easy to use and IntelliJ makes it much easier to deal with changes that the command line or any other free app. I can look at locally deleted files, unversioned files and incoming changes and so I need to have IntelliJ running on the Air. For the regular development I switch over to my Mac Pro so that I handle deployments or test changes on a scrap AEM instance. For that the 8-core CPU, 16GB Mem and 500GB SSD is very andy and development on it is a breeze.
IntelliJ and License
Since IntelliJ 6 I am a client of JetBrains and bought every single version even after the also provided a Community Version because I like the additional features. Since quite some time when I open IntelliJ on the other Mac IntelliJ come up with a dialog box complaining that I only have a single seat license and should either re-activate or shutdown IntelliJ. So, for now I just ignored that dialog box, did my thing on the other Mac and then shut IntelliJ on the other Mac down, re-activated it and kept on developing. But then when I ran into an issue with Subversion and had to update the code I had to go back and test it and so this whole procedure became annoying and frustrating.
I am one person, have two hands and cannot develop on two computers at the same time. So I think I use IntelliJ within its limits and I don’t see any reason why I should have to buy another license because of this screwed up behavior of IntelliJ.
Little Snitch to the Rescue
As of lately I upgraded Little Snitch to version 3.3 and so I wanted to see what IntelliJ does in order to figure out if there is a license violation. I am not giving away on how that IntelliJ does it or how to use Little Snitch to fix it because people should pay for their software but IntelliJ is annoying the honest customers and crooks can get around it fairly easily. It took me about 20 minutes to figure it out and to fix it. In the past I was always annoyed when I saw users in a big, profitable companies using the evaluation version as if they could not afford it. Since I started my own company I always bought my software if it wasn’t for free and I refuse to use Eclipse because I don’t have the time and thus the money to waste.
Proposal for a Fix
Most likely I am not the majority of IntelliJ users and so I don’t have much faith that JetBrains would consider my proposal but I don’t want to end this post without at least show an idea on how to fix it.
The basic problem is that IntelliJ should look for concurrent usage and not concurrent launch or processes. Developers should be allowed to have multiple IntelliJ instances up and running if they only use one at the time. IntelliJ takes quite some time to fire up and so keep the instances up and running would be a great feature.
Therefore instead of sending out a message to other IntelliJ instances and then complain if such a message is received IntelliJ should connect the two instances and then check from time to time if they are used at the same time. But if you do so please give some slack because not every concurrent use is a criminal act.
Cheers – Andy Schaefer
Rocksmith 2014: Bass and Shortcomings
Two weeks ago I finally could pick up my shinny red Ibanez Bass and started to play on Rocksmith with it. Having played the Guitar for over half a year rally paid off and many of the songs I could play quit well from the get go. I went through many of the lessons and played all the song at least once. With one or two exception I mastered all of the songs over 50% and that all within 7 days. So far so good. Now if that sounds too good to be true then you are right. Unfortunately for the Bass RS has a big shortcoming. It does not mark a note played too many as mistake and so if you pick the strings fast enough then you will hit all the right notes if they are on the same string. This is not very helpful to learn rhythm patterns.
Afterwards I went back to the Guitar which suddenly felt small and short. Here I finally have to conquer chords which I for most part tried to avoid because my hand tenses up and my hand and arm start to hurt. Now applying less pressure is easier said then done and after a while I am back to my old habits. With that in mind I started to play the parts with chords slower so that I can focus on the pressure and try to apply as little as possible. Especially on chord changes to barre chords I tend to apply way too much pressure to avoid half-pressed or mute strings. Guess practice makes perfect and for me it means even more practice.
RS has another shortcoming because it does not give good hints on why chords, bends or slides are not good. For example in Billy Idol’s White Wedding there are two chords played back and forth and I failed to play them right. Eventually I figured out that one chords has to be kept short (lifting my fingers are playing it) and to play the other chord slightly faster. Later there are two chords that are easy to be done because there is enough time to prepare aka breaks in between but most of the time it does not take it. Even though this is frustrating at the end I have to feel good which also applies when RS thinks I was perfect but I know I was