Richard Kadrey / Sandman Slim

I’ll keep this short and sweet. If you’re not reading Richard Kadrey’s books, specifically, the Sandman Slim series, you are seriously missing out. Go get them now, whether it’s on e-book, or the killed-a-tree kind. Just. Do. It.

I’ve gotta go looking for his stuff outside of the Sandman Slim books, now that I’ve finished all three of ‘em.

New Toys: Transformer Prime

It’s been two weeks now, give or take. And I love this device. Looooooooove it. Oh, there’s a few flaws (every once in a while, it’ll burp when an app shuts down, and reboot the tablet), but it’s pretty much exactly what I need for 90% of the stuff I do with a computer these days.

For those who don’t know, the Transformer Prime is the first Tegra 3 tablet. If you want more specs than that, well, check out either of those links, and you’ll get ‘em. Performance-wise, it’s fast. Blindingly so. I’ve not managed to make it chug at all, and I Have a bad tendency to leave everything running indefinitely, and never actually shut the thing down, just put it into standby.

My Prime, with the keyboard attachement, sitting on top of my 17″ Compaq.

The weight is just about perfect. @dogandgarden has a Transformer, the previous generation, Tegra2 model. The Prime is dramatically lighter in hand, and thinner as well. Given the screen size is the same, the edges are a fair approximation of the original, minus a few thirds of an inch in any direction. What this means is that I can use it as a reader almost indefinitely: it weighs about the same as a trade-paperback.

What this also means is that it’s perfect for the stuff I want to read. Articles, especially long ones (I have a lot of love for the LongReads RSS feed) fit perfectly, via GReader Pro. The only issue I’ve found so far is that video doesn’t play in GReader Pro since the update to Ice Cream Sandwich. Flip it out to the right browser, though, and it works just fine, and hopefully, GReader will get fixed fairly soon.

The form factor and weight also make it perfect for reading comics: this is something I’d avoided on my Samsung Captivate because a 4” screen is still not quite enough to read comics on. By the same token, it’s perfect for online magazines, which render beautifully.

The same is true for ebooks. I’ve been spending more and more time reading on my phone in the last year, and this just brings it up to real-world level. I can read this thing for hours without any more fatigue than I’ve had from reading a turn-the-pages book for the same length of time.

Gaming performance is what you’d expect for an Nvidia chipset, especially a class-leading one. Stellar. I tend to bounce in and out of games and my other stuff, and it never misses a beat. To be honest, though, gaming is a bonus. It’s not why I bought the device.

There has been some minor weirdness since Asus rolled out the Over-The-Air update from Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich.

The primary one of these is the mentioned weirdness in video playback.

I noticed it first in GReader Pro: the video would simply not play: just do a load and pause routine. So, I tried popping it open with the display in web browers button, and same problem there. I’ve used the Dolphin browser on my phone for ages, and I have a lot of love for it, but I wasn’t able to use the button (either in GReader Pro, or Dolphin) to bump into the Youtube app (which wouldn’t have helped with things like Vimeo, anyway). I even tried ‘sharing’ as an email, then copying the link, but when I tried to share as email I got consistent “this link is either deleted or unavailable”: for some reason GReader Pro had stopped linking properly to the video that was embedded. And, surprisingly, so had Dolphin HD. I found the same problem with the OEM Browser.

So, after a little research, I found I wasn’t the only one with this problem. While there wasn’t a fix, different browsers were, apparently, showing different reactions to the situation. Opera for Mobile, sadly, had the same problem. SkyFire was a little better, but had huge issues with Vimeo; it only displayed a big, black box where the video was supposed to be.

However, after switching, on recommendation, to BOAT Browser, most of the problems cleared up. GReader Pro is still an issue, but with BOAT as my default browser, I can open the page in the browser from GReader Pro, and it renders properly.

This is, now that I have a work around, a minor irritant at worst. Hopefully, this’ll help out other people, as I don’t think this is an issue with the Prime, but rather with apps interactions with Ice Cream Sandwich.

It should also be noted that the first thing I did in BOAT is set it to represent itself as a desktop client, not a mobile client. The 10” screen on the Prime is more than enough to render well-designed webpages as they’re meant to be seen, and not on their stripped-down mobile sites.

I’m also still getting used to the keyboard. But I can see this add-on being invaluable in the long term for me, as it makes my tablet nearly a complete replacement for my laptop.

The keyboard is somewhere between ¾ and 7/8 the size of a regular keyboard. What this means is that I get my ‘pinkie stretches’ wrong occasionally when I’m touch-typing. Otherwise, it’s brilliant. The trackpad on it doesn’t get in the way of my typing, and is pretty responsive. As soon as you dock the tablet to the keyboard, it pops a little pointer on the screen, and you’re off to the races.

The battery system in the keyboard is superbly smart too: it really does just charge up your tablet from the keyboard, under the correct assumption that that’s the one you’d want fully charged when you de-dock. Which means it makes sense to store your table on the keyboard when you’re not using it: it’s basically a big, extended battery pack.

Battery life itself is excellent. I was off sick the other day, and spent the day drifting in and out of sleep on the couch, watching Netflix on TV. In the meantime, the Prime kept me company. Read my multiple GReader Pro feeds (I think you’ve figured out by now that this is one of my primary apps), caught up on my Long Reads feed, which I’d neglected since about Christmas, browsing, social media, and games (specifically, FieldRunners HD, Pixel Rain, Wordsmith, and a Zuma clone). In ‘normal’ mode (you can switch from power-saver, normal, and performance in the taskbar/status area with a touch) I got about eighteen hours of use (including standby) with about thirty-percent left in the keyboard, and sixty-five percent left in the tablet itself. I can see an EASY seventy-two hour charging cycle, especially if you do thinks like turning off wifi and Bluetooth when you’re sleeping, even if you don’t shut down completely. Also, if you don’t geek out on the sheer power of the device, and install the matrix-style live wallpaper to chew up power (but it’s SO PRETTY).

I only had honeycomb on the tablet for a couple of days before ICS was pushed out for it, so it’s hard to compare the differences. But it definitely feels like the battery is lasting longer.

I also spent that time using my phone as a wireless access point, rather than my home network, because I wanted to see what mobile data usage was like on a day like that.

If you have less than 2gb a month, you don’t want to use your phone/tablet in this combination often. However, with a complete (and large) game download (42meg) I topped out at about 200meg for the day’s usage. The speed was probably twenty-five percent slower than my home network, visibly, but definitely useful, especially if you set your phone/WAP up where it gets strong HSPA signal. And better still if you have LTE, I guess. Some of us ain’t that lucky!

What I found out though is that with my old 6gb a month plan, I could do days like this every day, and still have plenty left over. Admittedly, this is less a test of the tablet, but the use of the two in conjunction is important to me.

As a footnote, it should be noted that my 3000Mah extended battery didn’t fare anywhere near as well as the tablet. I had to plug the phone in after about twelve hours acting as an access point: I was at 15% battery remaining.

I’m waiting for my very cheap, very basic neoprene sleeve to be delivered. Hopefully, it’ll be soon, because while the brushed aluminum (in grey, which definitely has a sheen of purple) is beautiful, I’ve already got two or three scratches on the back of the tablet from putting it down on the coffee table. If you don’t protect it, you’re going to scratch it, and the same goes for the base of the keyboard (although less of an issue: it has rubber feet keeping the aluminum off the surface you’re putting it on). Just having something to slide the whole assembly into, and/or place it on top of instead of the hard/dirty/gritty surface of a table, will make all the difference. Expect to see some battle damage though.

Unless I wanted the familiarity of my laptop for looking up issues relating to the tablet, or photoshop crunching, I’ve not turned it (the laptop) on since I got the tablet. There’s just no point. The tablet, so far, appears to be good enough that I can ditch my laptop for everything, and probably even go back to a full-on desktop, if I want to. And I’ll be honest, that’s not something I expected to happen. As I said at the start, for 90% of my daily usage, the tablet is not only capable, but better than my laptop. I’m interested to see how I feel about things after a few months, but for the moment, the honeymoon is in full swing. The only downsides are what appears to be first-out-the-gate issues with ICS, and I expect those’ll get fixed as time, and apps, develop for it.

Are Leaderboards Healthy?

I come to the subject because of a tweet by the (always brilliant) AvantGame:

(oh, and this is the article referenced)

And it got me thinking.

Personally, I love leaderboards. I also hate them. I love competing: and, honestly, I believe that competition is not only healthy, but necessary. There is no benefit in “everyone gets a medal day”: it simply fosters the belief that there’s no point in trying if everyone will be rewarded equally. There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to better yourself. There is nothing wrong with attempting to prove yourself good at something. In fact, there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to be the best at something.

And, I do get that there’s a difference between guys and girls on this particular item. And I am workin’ from the gut, as well: the truthiness of things, to coin a phrase, so you’re not only welcome to disagree with me, I expect it.

For those who’ve not noticed (which will be everyone new to this blog, and no one who read my old blog on livejournal) I’m a car guy. What that means is, I’m a racing guy. This goes for cycling, gaming, cars, the works. Winning does count.

As far as gaming goes, there is nothing quite so quantifiable as a racing game. Be it an arcade-style racer like SSX Tricky, or a racing simulator like (my personal favourite) Forza Motorsports. These are where leaderboards are absolutes. If you drive, ride, or fly better, under the same circumstances, then you win. And winning isn’t a dirty word. Forza4 has become a phenomenal example of this.

In older versions, I spent the entirety of my time playing the single player campaign and race seasons: getting through levels, getting my achievements, and setting my times. But they were somewhat in limbo. Yes, I could see where I stood in relation to the rest of the world, but it wasn’t always real to me: just numbers on the screen.

Forza4, however, has a brilliantly executed community section, which I’ve expounded on before.

This, this back-and-forth war with people I know online and in real life, has me thoroughly hooked: not to beat them, but to better myself. When I get that message on my profile saying that someone has beaten my time on a track, in a car, my first reaction isn’t “That asshole beat me!” but rather “So. You CAN go faster. How do I do it?”

The other reason I’ve come to love this community aspect is that it’s real, and so far, not gameable.

See, one of my big beefs is people (and it’s not just kids) for whom the leader board is god. There are those who truly believe that it doesn’t matter how you got to the top of a leaderboard, as long as you’re there. And that doesn’t help anyone. I know, you need a description.
In every racing game, someone, eventually, finds and publicises how to cheat. Now, the guys who create the games and the online content are really good at weeding out these scores, and deleting them, and resetting things back to fair, but people always try. In HydroThunder, it was a glitch in a map that let you go off-map, and straightline to the finishline. Generally, you could cut about thirty seconds off your time doing this.

And a game like forza, with very specific constraints, is a good example. If, for example, the race in question is a Class E / manufacturer’s car race, around a specific track, there is an absolute level to which you can progress: whether you take the best qualified class E car the manufacturer in question makes, or a lower version and modify it up to be competitive, there are definite, vehicle-related restrictions on how fast you can get around that track. And this is reflected in the times for the top racers. We’re talking the difference between say, fifteenth and sixteenth place being a thousandth of a second. Just like real racing. So, if it turns out the go-to car for the race is, say, a Ford Fiesta, and then Joe Dumbass comes along, runs his little cheat, and can run the track under the same conditions, in a Ferrari, he is going to be number one on the leaderboard, by a significant margin: just like the guy in HydroThunder who can straight line the track.

But that’s the problem. Joe Dumbass hasn’t ‘won’ anything. Is he at the top of the leaderboard? Sure. Does that count as winning? Not at all. But, the mentality I’ve seen isn’t about winning. It’s about being number one. And bringing a gun to a knife fight is seen as the way to do it. Because it’s not about being good at the game, being a good driver, shooter, flier, racer, whatever. It’s about occupying that number one spot.

That’s where it becomes unhealthy. Winning at all costs, and damn the rules, with no respect for those you’re competing against isn’t winning.

The further problem is, you can’t convince these guys (and girls) that they’ve not won, either. Because, as far as they’re concerned, they have won. It’s right there. Number One spot on the leaderboard. They are the fastest, or best.

This crap is why I stopped playing CounterStrike back in the day, too. The auto-aim, multiple-damage cheats were absolutely epidemic, and it simply wasn’t fun being fodder for some douchnozzle who was padding their kill count, rather than playing a game.

I, and I think most of the people around me, believe in competing fairly, even if you lose. Maybe even because you lose. I know I don’t have any fun with a game that’s too easy: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit2 had that problem for me. I walked through every race, and the game was over, I felt like I’d wasted my time.

Just like anyone, I get frustrated when I hit that bit of any game where it becomes difficult. But I’ve never found the need to cheat my way through it. Especially when I’m playing against other people: I take my lumps and losses, and either get better, or acknowledge I’m simply not that good at THAT game. There are games I’m nearly the best at. And it’s really satisfying being in the top three percent on some of those leaderboards. But it’s also just as satisfying for me to rise from top eighty percent, to top fifty percent. Or to not play for a while, then claw my way back into my spot.

At the end of the day, this is the difference: there’s players and leaderboard squatters: one’s healthy, one’s not. The article that AvantGame cites is valid: the base psychology is probably the same (and I’m no expert on the subject). I started out thinking “well, that’s RIDICULOUS. This sounds like more sponsorship of “everyone gets a trophy day” and that’s just dumb”. But there’s definitely more too it than that.

In terms of gamers, I think there’s a divide. There’s a small group who actually aren’t gamers. They’re playing for validation of themselves, for whatever reason, and are willing to cheat (lets not sugar coat what they’re doing: it’s cheating) to get that number one slot. The vast majority of us compete legitimately, take our lumps legitimately, and aren’t so completely obsessed that not being number one in the world breaks our brains, to the point that we have to find a way to change the rules for us, while leaving them the same for everyone else.

There’s a lesson in there too, and feel free to cue the after-school-special, G.I.Joe The-More-You-Know flashbacks now.

The lesson is not simply that winning is ok. Losing is ok too. They’re both healthy, like everything else in our lives, in moderation, and free of obsession. We win the moment, we lose the moment, we move on to the next moment. And generally, we know that we did about as good as we can.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, someone beat my autocross time by a tenth of a second, and I’m certain I can make that up in the fourth corner, with some suspension tweaks, and holding second gear a little longer.