Ever since I read about “Alice and Kev“, it reignited my interests in The Sims. Many moons ago, I’d had intended to purchase a copy but it sat on the “To Get” list for so long that I lost interest and forgot about it.

So, this weekend I obtained a copy and found it rather entertaining. Not quite GTA but it has its fair share of nonsense. I simmed my animals, Cici and Cuzco who lived in the quiet town of Sunset Valley. Cici was part of the military while Cuzco worked in organized crime. Unfortunately, Cici caused a fire when he was trying to make waffles, it was all very dramatic.

Culinary disaster

I also created Randolf and Ilsa Schmidt, an evil pair who did, well, evil things. But for some reason, they always had a wish to donate to charity. Go figure. They got on to start with but the relationship very quickly went downhill and Ilsa beat up Randolf after she’d cut ties with him. At the moment, they’re still living in the same house, but on different floors with their own amenities (there’s a set of stairs that leads directly to the upstairs area, much like a maisonette) so they could avoid eachother. However, Randolf often goes upstairs to use the dishwasher. During their time together, they were also robbed of their bath tub! Even the sleepy town of Sunset Valley isn’t safe from looters.

One thing I’ve noticed about the land of The Sims is that they’re more or less equal opportunities employers. Repair(wo)men were more often than not female, and blokes were maids too (in various different phenotypes).

Fiendish plotting

It doesn't end well for the Schmidt's

Given my rather short attention span these days, I managed to play it on and off for three days. Unfortunately, it’s also sucked up a lot of time I could’ve been doing other, more productive things like clean out the fishtank and that open book assessment paper.

In a nutshell, it adjusts the colour temperature of your screen in response to the time of day. I wonder if the warm glow of the monitor will make me sleepier earlier on in the evening.

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.

One more thing before I go – I’m actually posting from my iPhone using the WordPress app. It’s fairly capable for blogging on the go. I think other blogging platforms have their own apps too. I love my iPhone.

See here for more info.

It was surprisingly easy to set up, all I did was install the software on my computer and then opened up the app on my iPhone, selected my computer which it automatically detected and voila, all done. So now I can use my computer with ease while I’m on the exercise bike! How’s that for multitasking?

There are some way cool apps you can download for it. My favourite so far is probably Urbanspoon with its scope feature giving that augmented reality feel to it. There’s also What Knot to Do by Columbia, the outdoors clothing people with a guide on knots! Language Translator is pretty good too and the auto detect language tool works fairly well when I tested it with what few languages I know.

I do miss real buttons though. The on screen keyboard is fine, but takes a little getting used to it. Not sure how well it’d work for those with fat fingers.

It’s neat, simple and does the business. 

There’s not much else to say really.

Installed all my programs including this new thing called WeFi. It’s quite neat, it tells you where the closest WiFi hotspot(s) is(are) while you’re WiFi-ing about. Also, if your chums are set up for it, you could see where they are and how close or far they are. If you’re often using public hotspots, I highly recommend this little app.

On a separate note, it’s snowing outside. It’s October and its snowing in London. Brrr… I can’t say that this was anticipated.

WordPress appears to have yet another new release.