Steam | Crazy sales

Valve always knows a way into people's wallet during the holidays. I've bought serveral games under wich the following list:

• The Stanley Parable
• How to Survive
• Brothers - A tale of two sons
• UnEpic
• Ducktales: Remastered

Not only games were on my list this year. I also bought a few software packages that had discount on them. My reason for this post is just a thank-you to Valve and all the developers that make this possible. We, as consumers are able to buy games and software for a steal-price and get to gift some away aswell. It's pretty epic when Steam enters sales; when web services like the community, inventory and badges get so spammed by people that you just know a few million people are taking advantage of their Steam deals.

Now, I've noticed something. It was the following. We also double checked this to see if it wasn't some kind of delay or refresh type of deal. We both had different deals. My boyfriend had a lower discount percentage as me. I was able to buy Skyrim, along with most of the other daily deals against 75% while he could buy them against 50%.

We just checked again, 5 minutes after writing this and seems like things are the same on both deals. False alarm. It made me thing for a moment though, as all of this could be true. It could be that Steam will play deals on the kind of behaviour you and me have as customer in their CDN.

You don't hear me complaining. Not at all. To me it seems like Steam knows more about their customers than the average Joe and their customers themselves. Is this some kind of scheme to make me buy more deals? Is this a reward for a well-returning customer? Is this related to your Steam level? Who knows.

If somebody knows where this came from, then please leave a comment on this post down here.

Now, enough about the deals. My download is done and I wanna play some games! I've had some good steals and maby some more to come in the following few days. Leave a comment on what you bought! At what discount, and how long you've wanted the game for!

~ Rob

PS3 | YLOD infected my own PS3!

Yes. It happened. My 60GB launch model Playstation died yesterday giving a yellow light. This was a sad moment indeed as I've recieved an early christmas present, Ratched and Clank: Nexus, wich after installing and playing for a few minutes made my PS3 go ballistic on me.

I happen to be in the situation where I can get a second PS3 without HDD, and maby revive my christmas joy by swapping the HDD and hoping for the best. If that doesn't work than I'll probably buy a new PS3, to also say that I will also get a PS4. You might say, why not pay that small fee for the conversion of the game and keep all games on the PS4? Well, my game library is so big that converting all games would cost more than an actual PS3, and there are still plenty of games I want to play on a PS3.

My PS3 was a very versatile device, playing my games, movies, netflix and music at a rare occasion. I will try to repair this one and keep this post up-to-date with the developements and photo's of the internals. That for sure is going to give me an interesting experience.

Yes, I've been able to get a second playstation on my hands. My lovely boyfriend happened to have one that had a broken HDD. I knew this and so he brought this along as he came over to me. The left(60GB) playstation is mine and right(40GB) is his. 

Swapping out the HDD's is an easy task, taking all of this and switching took less than ten minutes. When we did, we took them to a power outlet to try it out. We discovered that our adventure wasn't over yet. The machine came up with a message that basicly mean't that It woudn't take the system that was installed on the HDD. It required a update from a USB device.

I did as prompted, found an old unused; formatted to FAT32 usb drive. The PS3 took a few minutes to gather the guts to install the update and TADA! Now the system was running, but yet another problem rose. I needed the disc that was in my other system. Ratchet and Clank: Nexus. The gift that was given to me :)

Getting the disc out of the system was actually fairy easy. After googling I found out that the fan blowout cycle is able to remove disc from a dead system. I've used the blowout function before on a dusted machine of friends and relatives.

Did as instructed on the website and the disc came out without any problems. Now I was a few minutes off to playing the actual game without having any damages other than a system that died on me. That old bugger really grew on me. I bought this on release with Motorstorm and Resistance, it played a ton of games, movies and showed many *cough* usb transfered files.

All and all a very solid system to me. Now as for my own PS3. I will take this to a friend who has the tools, time and knowledge to pry it open and have a look to see if we can fix this thing. If that happens than I might have some early christmas magic coming at me.

As for now...

Google | Alternative ways of making money

OMGChad, wich i follow on Youtube posted this video. He made some very valid points. I'm about to share a story on my Youtube accounts that I've had and the montisation that I've used to do some cool things.

 


Chad talked about how this changes the way for "Let's Plays". Not only did he touch on that subject but brought up valid implementations Google could make. A win-win situation as said. He talked about how the pre-roll could potentially go away and that there could be alternative ways of making money such as the sale of merchandise. He is so right about this. Google easily has the power and resources to do this. They have a widely spread network, they have a regionaly store ( play, webstore ) and could expand on this by allowing networks and Youtubers to sell their merchandise through a Google store.

Google could set some standards for selling merchandise in this case, or better put, requirements before you gain the rights to do so, but really. Think of the possiblities. Merchandise is just one way.

Content creators like Shaytards, Rhett and Link, TC, Freddie, Feast of Fiction and others have a hard time selling their merchandise to an international audience. I've experienced this first hand as I've tried many times to order merchandise from their shops and was not able to.

Why a win-win? Google could choose to offer multiple ways of making money and giving the content creators the freedom to choose whatever way they feel works best for them and fits best into their scene. This in the overall picture would give Google the best result in any case. Happy content creators means more content, means that they put more effort into creating quality content.

I know what it is to have a channel of somewhat great size. I've had a channel called SilverMagics with 800~ videos on it. They generated good money for the period I had that channel. The content wasn't really the best quality, yet this allowed me to do some things with that money. At some point I even bought a website with that money and was able to sustain that website. I bought a game server and build-up a community around it with the website I purchased. I've had this server for a solid 4-5 months. Amazing time, memories and the friends that still play games with me via Steam.

Google could come up with ways to make the situation of content creators better. They have the means, resources and power to give us a better community.

Now, as for the whole new policy thing. I think networks will have to pack their bags. This policy will make that clear to say the least. As for the content creators themselves, some will continue creating content and some will stop. This is a sad thing, but thats the reality of the matter.

Anyway, I have way to many things to say about this, but I won't bore you with my long badly written engrish blog post. I would like to know whatever you think about what Chad posted and what I've written down. Feel free to leave a comment.

~Rob

PHP | Different ways of comparing variables

A comment on PHP got me thinking on the ways variables represent themselves. PHP has a funky way of variable handling. I say this because enforcing a variable type is something unheard of in PHP. Variables can be juggled by type. This is an inconsistency, and yes, certainly you can make checks for this. Yet this is not the point of my post.

I will start off by stating that the post on php.net inspired me to make this. I wanted to know the extend of the case he was trying to make and see if my results came up with anything else. This comment, at point of writing, is already 5 years old. 5 years is a long time, a lot of things have changed. Zend has taken php under their wings of development.

I will also say that these test results are my findings. Meaning that what I parse off as false, may indeed be true. I might lack the knowledge or logics to see weither the mechanics are broken or not. I'm a home-schooled programmer who just tries to find a better understanding.

In this post I will parse off different variable types and case some common comparisons. These tests gave back some suprising results. I did not expect some of these results. Now, bear in mind these tests have been done with == and do not check the variable type. Yet still. Lets get started with my main motivation to write this post. The variable type NULL.

Function used	NULL	null	"null"	'null'	0	"0"	'0'
is_null($var)	✓	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗	✗
!is_null($var)	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
$var == NULL	✓	✓	✗	✗	✓	✗	✗
$var != NULL	✗	✗	✓	✓	✗	✓	✓
$var == null	✓	✓	✗	✗	✓	✗	✗
$var == 0	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
$var == '0'	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓
$var == "0"	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓
$var == ""	✓	✓	✗	✗	✓	✗	✗
!$var	✓	✓	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓
$var == true	✗	✗	✓	✓	✗	✗	✗
$var == false	✓	✓	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓
isset($var)	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
!isset($var)	✓	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗	✗
empty($var)	✓	✓	✗	✗	✓	✓	✓
!empty($var)	✗	✗	✓	✓	✗	✗	✗

Above the "suprising" results are marked. I can see the pink ones making some sence, but the coral coloured onces not making sense at all. I expected the opposite to happen. You might not run into these situations often, but when you do, things get tough to debug. Especially when it is nested into some pretty complex codes. I happen to run into these situations when updating ancient ~ not my own ~ coding.

Booleans are the second type I will take under a test. I did this because I thought to have had an similar situation with them, but as the test results show, they react as expected. So, I have nothing really to show with these results, yet I will put them out there as testing these took me some time.

Function used	true	"true"	1	false	"false"	0	NULL
$var == 1	✓	✗	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗
$var == true	✓	✓	✓	✗	✓	✗	✗
$var != true	✗	✗	✗	✓	✗	✓	✓
is_bool($var)	✓	✗	✗	✓	✗	✗	✗
!is_bool($var)	✗	✓	✓	✗	✓	✓	✓
isset($var)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✗
!isset($var)	✗	✗	✗	✗	✗	✗	✓
empty($var)	✗	✗	✗	✓	✗	✓	✓
!empty($var)	✓	✓	✓	✗	✓	✗	✗
is_numeric($var)	✗	✗	✓	✗	✗	✓	✗

So that really concludes my last hour of testing variables in PHP. Now, this might seem a little bit pointless, yet now can reference to this when I'm in doubt. It might help somebody else aswell.

I did some more testing on strings and integers aswell, yet those results were similar to those of booleans and did not find them noteworthy enough to include in the post.

Feel free to comment, I will update this article when additional information gets to me. Either do it through G+ or in the comment section below.

If this was a great read and you happen to be on G+, then hit the +1 button!

~ Rob