Spontaneous Monotony

I don’t know why, but the search results page was only giving post titles and categories – fuck all use really, so I’ve edited the template so that it will display the full post in search results. Enjoy.

As much as I trust Akismet, I had closed comments on all my posts – not with Wordpress, since providing the singularly useless ‘preview’ was more important to the devs than this rather more useful functions, but with phpMyAdmin – while I was away on holiday. A fortnight later, and I have remembered to turn them back on again. Of course any posts I made in between times had comments open anyway, but you can now comment to your heart’s content on all of the older posts.

A while ago I mentioned that NCSoft were planning to start selling extra character slots for Guild Wars accounts this summer. Well, they are now available. Apparently to coincide with the Nightfall PvP preview event, the character selection screen now contains a (decidedly overprominent) link to the NCSoft Store, from which you can buy game keys (don’t bother, they’re at the Recommended Ripoff Price, Play have both games for £17.99 [Prophecies is currently £15.99 in their sale]), and the all-important character slots.

The one problem is that you’ll need a PlayNC account to access the store. Before you ask, yes that is different from your Guild Wars account, and yes it is also different from your PlayNC Support account. Surely in the age of streaming game updates directly to players while the game is going on, it is no great expectation that NCSoft could type the few lines of code necessary to link Database A with Database B?

I’m not sure when this happened (I only got back from holiday slightly over a week ago), but the Xunlai Storage boxes in Guild Wars have got a significant upgrade. In addition to the storage slots for items, there is now a crafting materials store, which has one slot for each crafting material (rare and common) to be stored. As well as freeing up inventory space, this could make it much easier for sharing materials between characters – your warrior monk doesn’t need that Monstrous Eye, but your Necro might!

Google Labs has produced lots of ideas that have gone on to become full-fledged Google tools (Video, Maps, and Desktop to name a few). Since Notebook is still a Labs project, it hasn’t had a formal launch or any of the associated publicity.

It really is a great idea though. You highlight text on a page (say, a snippet from a product review) and then (with the help of a browser extension [or plugin for those of you stuck in the dark ie-ges]) you can add it as a ‘note’ via the context menu. It sounds simple, but it’s great for when you need something more comprehensive than the page title offered by a normal bookmark (did I mention that it saves the URL that the note was taken from?) – like when you’re doing price comparisons, for example – and you can create multiple ‘books’ to separate, say, the reviews of that game you’re thinking of buying from the information you need for an essay. Notebooks can be made public if you want, but are private by default.

Usual qualifiers – self-styled ‘beta’ product, gmail account required, etc.

Links

• Google Notebook extension for Firefox 1.5 (Windows or Linux, apparently it doesn’t work on Mac). Works brilliantly although I haven’t tried using it in the new v2.0 beta
• Google Notebook plugin for IE6 (Windows only, and it specifically says IE6 [not IE6+] so it probably doesn’t work with IE7).