General

Free WiFi: WiGO

By Jay Lagare on Thursday, August 13, 2009

WiFi is good. Free WiFi is even better. But it’s quite scarce. One of the more prevalent free WiFi hotspots are the ones from WiGO. It’s advertisement driven so once you connect, you’re taken to a captive portal where you are shown some ads. So far so good. I mean, they have to make money after all.

But, unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. It also requires you to be running the WiGOBar, a pesky ad-carrying floating window that blocks quite a large part of the screen like a fungus infection that just won’t go away.

There’s a solution for the Mac but what about for us Windoze users? Don’t lose hope. There is the Hide Windows Utility. Download, extract, and run (the .bat file), and presto! No more WiGOBar.

I now heart WiGO, too :D

General

Bumper Scraper

By Jay Lagare on Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The less-than-a-year old paint job on my bumper got ruined again. Michelle and I were driving along Ortigas when some stupid family driver (why do stupid people get to drive?) swerved from my LEFT towards Xavier St. on the right. He almost made it but his rear end clipped my front bumper scraping some paint off and exposing the black plastic. And when he got down he even had the balls to say it was my fault!

There’s not sense talking to a useless moron so I talked to the owner who was inside. She readily admitted it’s her driver’s fault and she offered that the insurance take care of it (fat chance!). She was with her kids. Apparently, she was bringing them to school. Here’s their stupid driver endangering not just other motorists but also the owner and her kids. Too bad I wasn’t able to advise her to fire the driver. But I sure hope she does.

General

The EDSA Bus Hazard

By Jay Lagare on Tuesday, August 11, 2009

A bus ran over a two-year old girl and her mother at EDSA yesterday. The girl died while her mother sustained injuries. It was not too long ago when a prominent doctor’s car got hit by a bus killing the doctor and causing the car to go up in flames. That and many more.

Every driver knows how hazardous EDSA is with all those buses. They weave in and out of their dedicated bus lanes and cause accidents with private vehicles, other buses, and pedestrians.

And when they’re not speeding around like the maniacs that they are, they’re causing monstrous traffic jams at intersections where they wait and wait and wait for passengers. One thing you would notice is that most of the buses have few passengers if any. You have to wonder, do we need so many buses and bus companies?

It’s too bad that the government, is not acting on this menace. For as long as they don’t do anything, there will be no justice for all victims of accidents involving buses. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for that. There’s just too much money involved.

General

Farewell to Cory

By Jay Lagare on Saturday, August 1, 2009

Corazon Aquino, popularly knows as Cory to all Filipinos, former president of the Philippines, symbol of hope during the dark days of a dictatorship, has passed away after a long battle with cancer. Farewell. You will be missed by this country, by this people.

General

Diablo II and Mac OS X

By Jay Lagare on Wednesday, July 29, 2009

We we’re looking for an alternative to DoTA and I decided to get another cult classic from Blizzard: Diablo II. I didn’t get it from the online store since Diablo II and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction would have cost me $40 while the Diablo II Battle Chest is only P1795 at DataBlitz and includes Diablo and a strategy guide to boot. Still, I didn’t use the installer CDs. Instead, I used the keys to register online, and downloaded the installers for both PC and Mac.

Setting up Diablo II on the PC was easy but the same could not be said for my sister’s MacBook. For some reason, the game would stop with an error. We researched the problem and it turned out that Apple, in its characteristic infallible wisdom, had disabled 256-color support on the graphics driver. This broke Diablo II and other games that relies on it.

The good news is Blizzard has released a beta patch that allows the game to run. The bad news is it doesn’t work on Battle.Net. Still, it was good enough since it at least allows us to play on the LAN.

We did and it was still pretty fun for a quite old game :)