Pokémon GO 0.111.3.: The hunt continues!

With a better phone and the ongoing summer I got myself going again on the hunt for Pokémon!

Next entry on my Pokémon GO diary - or better 'once in a while blog'.

With the current summer and a better phone I found the motivation to go on the hunt again and I heard from other players that they are still active.

Plus, I still have so many Pokémon eggs from several places around the world such as Las Vegas, New Zealand or Canary Islands. So I decided to incubate all of them now by going for a walk or several runs by bicycle (I know, not really recommended, but it's in the countryside, so...^^).

So by running around and catching various Pokémon from the Kanto, Johto and Hoenn region I could increase my level from 11 to 16. Still not much, but alright for a casual player.

I won battles at the gym now a few times and also got some PokéDollars (I think that's how the currency is called), so let's see what I do with that.

Looking at my PokéDex there's still a lot to find. Out of the currently available 375 Pokémon I only caught 92 and saw 136 of them! So the hunt will continue! 

Dragon Ball Legends: First impressions on the new fighting game

Released this summer - 

a new Dragon Ball game is out. This time for smartphones - and for free! So it's very to check it out.

Throughout the past couple of months I was aware that this game was in the making and about to be released in summer, but I somewhere missed the point that it was actually free to play.

A colleague at work got me into it since he was already playing for a while.

So, to the game itself:
Story wise you follow Shallot, a new game-only Saiyan, who is gets in touch with for Z fighters for the Tournament of Time.

The battle system itself is quite easy to play: You get cards for sprint attacks, blasts or little power-ups (as seen on the screenshot). You can charge yourself by holding your finger on the touch screen and also do single punches or blasts without using the cards.

Your are in a team with up to three fighters with which you can switch during the battle. Each character needs to be leveled up, be it by single training, joining the story battle or playing against others. You can exchange a friends code and fight against friends.

Apart from that you are able for daily summons - means that you can get new characters - for example recently they added some movie characters like Freeza's brother Coola. 

As it seems they are adding more and more content to the game like extra story arcs, characters... So I hope we should see more Dragon Ball Super characters soon.

Therefore, I can recommend the game, it's fun to play!

TheSuperAdmins #005: Plenty of time!

TheSuperAdmins return with an issue which goes through the minds of many admins... A fair question...

See all comics:
TheSuperAdmins page

Fixing HDD and CPU always up to 100%

Today I could fix a case where a computer got incredible slow over the years, but it took to check lots of points...

First of all the issue was initially hard to figure out where it's coming from. 

Either the HDD in the Task Manager went up to 100% or the CPU - or both together. Even when no application was started. Narrowing down which service or application was at fault was difficult as well as it was always another one.

So I tried first with the 'obvious' solution which you find quite often online: Switching off services like 'Windows Search' or 'Superfetch'. Initially it seemed like no change at all. I even checked the hard disk since I even found sites where users where claiming having issues with the Toshiba DT01ACA100. But the HDD was fine so far, nothing visible with checking tools.

So what else... Such issues can come through viruses or malware so I gave Malwarebytes AntiMalware another go. And it found more than 4000 suspicious entries! After clearing them all and going for another reboot, let the software went through after to check if the malware is really gone and suddenly the issues got less!

Surely, right after booting the computer still took a while 'calm down' in terms after processor and hard disk usage. But then you could finally reproduce it by opening the Firefox browser and open certain websites. Or starting MS Office software.

Generally websites using flash took pushed the scale high again, but after certain tests to fix that issue within FF failed and I tried the same with Google Chrome which was faster and and slightly better.

And now after several restarts the computer finally seems fine again - hopefully it remains!

Back into PS2 homebrew: FMCB & OpenPS2Loader

After a long time I got yesterday back into configuring a PS2 for homebrew software - and this time the slim version!
In the past I've played a lot around with PS2 homebrew software from emulators, media players to HD loaders. My own old console is from 2004 and I added a hard disk and was able to launch games from there - using tools like HDLoader, HDAdvance or OpenPS2Loader.

The latter played a part again yesterday: A friend of mine got an PS2 slim and I remembered about the possibility to play games from USB. So as the first thing I tested with my Memory Card, if the homebrew menu works with the silver PS2 slim. As I read somewhere there were issues with certain firmware version delivered with newer slim models.

However, it was no problem: FMCB started with the extended boot menu. In the following I installed it also on the Memory Card of my friend. As there were issues with the file manager (ULaunchELF) of my Memory Card which was unable to open elf files properly, I copied the FMCB installer on the USB drive and added the elf in the boot menu via the FMCB configurator as a workaround.

FMCB was successfully installed on the Memory Card and I added the OpenPS2Loader to the Memory Card and linked it to the main menu.

Now, via the USBUtil GUI tool I selected a few games to test which were converted from ISO file to a certain format to be able to be booted via OpenPS2Loader 0.9. A 32GB USB flash drive was used and as the games were launched you could notice that it takes a bit longer than using a DVD. Of course the internal HDD drive is the quicker way, but only with the older bigger PS2.

Both tested games, the infamous fighting DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 was still working quickly (you could only see that the in-game transformations were slower than usual) and the fast racing game Burnout Revenge was also running well.

Plus, I also tested the old bicycle racing game Downhill Domination which was quite nostalgic played it again after a long time!

Therefore, still nice having these tools for the good old PS2!

Facebook Check-Ins Cities not loading anymore

Actually one of my favourite features on Facebook and it's currently not working. Can it be fixed?

It noticed it already a while ago, since I like checking the world map especially after checking in to lots of places around the world after a long travel. 

However, I cannot use this feature now for a couple of months. I cleared the cache, using IE or Google Chrome making no difference. As soon as you go to 'Places' the loading bars are running.

I googled for the issue if other users are experiencing the same and it seems that it can happen from time to time. In this thread in the Facebook community Help Center there was simple the suggestion to report the issue to Facebook.


So, I did the same, now waiting for response. As soon as I know something I will get back to that!

And if you have any experience on that feel free to comment!

Why can't WhatsApp be more flexibel?

Anno 2018 - WhatsApp has 1.5 billion users and is therefore still THE messenger. However, there still many things I'd like to be addressed in the future...

Two years ago I wrote an article about things WhatsApp can improve in the future. Things like video calls have been introduced, documents like PDF can be sent, but there are many things I'd like to see different.

Starting with the way the account is used: The ID for the login is basically phone number from your SIM card. Therefore in situations when you lose your SIM card, switch to a phone with another SIM card format (especially on travels) and/or a phone broke down, it's getting complicated to use your previous account.

And even if when you need to use a new phone number, but with the same Google account there's no way to use a backup from your GoogleDrive since its connected to another phone number.

Especially that case could have been solved way easier. They could introduce an option giving your Google account or your email address as an secondary login option. Or is that too risky for being misused since the SIM card is a safer option of course (but it looks different if the phone gets stolen...).

It's definitely something which could be worked on since it's it would make the app more flexibel.

Speaking of 'more flexibel', the database export could be better. There are third-party applications making a proper export and not just a text file.

I remember the MyPhoneExplorer which could make short message exports nicely as an HTML file. I don't see why WhatsApp could offer something like that themselves.

Anyway, let's see what happens in the future and if they are going to add some features making certain things easier...