Put your jet pack on with ‘Jetpack Joyride’ which has laser jet packs, steam jet packs and even afterburner jet packs to choose from. Perhaps the best jet pack game since ‘Jetpack Willy’ in the Spectrum days.
When you start the game you immediately burst through a solid concrete wall on the start of your jet pack flight into the unknown. There are coins to collect in the game which can buy upgrades or you can even customise your character with such upgrades as ‘zombie heads’ or ‘nerd glasses’.
At first, the default character is dressed in business like attire and looks like he’s on his way to a business meeting. When you end a game you are taken to a fruit machine where you can get various upgrades, more money or advantages, depending on the luck of the spin.
There are different vehicles, if you are skilled enough, with your steam jet pack to hit one of the vehicle upgrade graphic icons floating around, as you fly through the maze of hazards. There are lasers, electric pulse beams and missiles to contend with, as well as a host of other physics game objects. There are also scientists milling around at ground level which are always fun to zap or run over. The ‘machine gun jetpack’ is especially effective at wiping out scientists, as there is a constant rain of bullets and sparks to pound the scientists into the ground as you fly. In the game play preview I am using the ‘steam powered jetpack’ which gives you just that extra bit of control sensitivity.
The game is Game Center enabled and there are missions and achievements to complete and unlock. This game never seems static as there is always something new happening each time you pick up and play Jetpack Joyride.
The ‘crazy freakin’ teleporter’ is especially fun, as you can never grasp just how to use this freaky vehicle. My favourite vehicle has got to be the profit bird that opens its beak to collect coins.
The name of the character is ‘Barry’ in the game and you have to battle with evil scientists with a background theme based on a futuristic science lab.
The developers, Halfbrick Studios, were the creators of Fruit Ninja which is still a massive hit. To bring out several games that have had this much success must be a proud achievement by this excellent development team. A fun and fast paced game that is addictive as well as being very original and packed full of non-stop features to keep you on your toes. Get your steam jet pack on and join the adventure.
Just below the clouds, near the village of Mynachlogddu in the Preseli Hills, stand the crags of Carn Meini. Stark, raven-black and shrouded in mist, these crags and the surrounding hills have long been the home of the Gwppau.
No-one has ever seen them, but on the wind-racked slopes their plaintive cries can sometimes be heard by those whose imagination has not been blunted by modern living. The low haunting melodies of the Gwppau linger in the ear for days, maybe even years.
Gwppau are formless and peaceful, wanting nothing more than to be left alone to continue their search for the one object that has eluded them since time began – a cuckoo’s nest. For some reason, perhaps beyond our understanding, the Gwppau search day and night, sunlit summer and frost-shattered winter.
Older residents of the Preseli area believe that they are searching for the cuckoo’s eggs, which, if eaten by the formless Gwppau, will make them visible. Others say that the Gwppau are blind and would dearly love to see the splendid scenery around them. This is possible only if they can eat a cuckoo’s egg.
Yet another story tells that the Gwppau would be able to communicate with human beings through the medium of a young cuckoo. This last story says that the Gwppau liken the antics of humans to those of the cuckoo, and only through these mad-cap birds is it possible to explain the many secrets of the area.
Whichever story you choose to accept, please respect the Gwppau homelands – the magical, mysterious Preselis, which guard legends known and unknown long before our Grandfathers’ fathers were born.
Expense Account by Digital Mind is a really useful expense accounts app that lets you keep track of your expenses. This app has a lot of options and functionality to help you save and keep track of all your expenses effortlessly and in a format of your choosing.
We’ve all come to the end of the month, just before the next pay day and thought to ourselves ‘What happened? How did I spend all that money?’. Well, expenses are like a dripping tap unless you keep tabs on your spending. By spending some time to notice and study your spending habits you can cut down in numerous areas to whittle down your purchases into a solid budget that you can plan for.
With ‘Expense Account’ expense accounts functionality you can quickly save expense information quickly and adjust and add details at a later time if necessary. You can sort your expenses into categories, different formats and currencies, create favourites and even switch the settings into 3 different mode options.
Even surprisingly small expenses can add up. Take for instance the Star Bucks coffees that I love to have every now and again. When I added up this expense, I was shocked at the end expense figure and switched to McDonalds coffees instead – saving me a whopping 80% on this expense alone. How many expenses can you whittle down to inject your funds into more worthwhile pursuits? It is only priced at under $1. A small expense, considering the amount of dollars it will save you after this wise purchase. Keep track of your expense accounts with ease.
While it’s true that smart phones can record a wealth of different material and formats, which is often very convenient, your privacy tends to take a bit of a bashing also.
When you store images on your device, children can wipe the images off unintentionally or you could have a nosey individual checking up on you by scrolling through your images. In fact, what if you lost your iPhone/device? Would you want a complete stranger, or even worse, a thief, invading your privacy and viewing your life through your images?
You need worry no more because ‘PrivatePics V2’ locks your images into a virtual vault which is password protected. This app saves the images to a partitioned memory allocation, not shared by the rest of your device’s apps and functions. You can import images conveniently from your photo library on your device, then just delete the photo in the library and you have just one copy securely locked away, for your eyes only.
This app can help in a wide variety of situations and offers the app’s user privacy and piece of mind. It has a simple interface which is quick to grasp and you can even organise your photos or sort them into albums within the vault. PrivatePics V2 is normally priced at just under $1, a very handy app by the developer Kalana Jayatilake.
The story I’m about to share with you may be dangerous to know if you happen to bring the subject up in Dyfed, Wales.
The fact as to whether the ‘Which Way Winds’ legend is true or not sparked off such controversy amongst historians in Dyfed that it almost tore Dyfed’s community apart. With the bantering and debating from Dyfed historians came much interest from ‘outsiders’, from far away places such as England ( . . . across the bridge) and unheard of places such as Europe that 40 years or so ago were practically unheard of. In fact, when the German historian Siegfreid Hintenberg visited Dyfed he was beaten with leeks and driven out of Dyfed for good. You may hear the odd conversation down the local pub about the legend, whispered in low, guarded tones in Welsh, if you are lucky. However, if you are an outsider, the barman will usually give them a disaproving look and then glance your way to make the locals aware of your presence. If you bring up the subject, people in Dyfed will dismiss it as nonsense. And if you persist in bringing up the subject, well . . . just make sure your life insurance is up to date beforehand . . .
Here is the legend, the tale . . . the closely guarded secret that brought ‘outsiders’ into Dyfed.
A visitor to Dyfed may sometimes be perplexed and puzzled to see trees and shrubs bending in opposite directions, seeming to defy their usual patterns, leaning away from the prevailing wind. The reason for this is bound up in legend, almost forgotten by the people of West Wales.
When the Norsemen invaded the southern coast of the country a great many years ago, they drove the native inhabitants back into the hinterland, until it soon looked as if the whole of Wales would be swallowed up by these fierce and terrible invaders.
Druids, soothsayers and bards deliberated and argued amongst themselves for many hours about ways to stop the total destruction of their homeland. So, they decided to consult the recluse, poet and thinker, Dewin ap Medrus.
On hearing the news, Dewin ap Medrus entombed himself in a cave near what is known as the Aber Gwaun Valley. For six days and nights he thought long and deeply, with only his shadow, cast by a single candle, for company.
When at last he emerged from the cave, he gathered the young men of the disintegrating tribes of Dyfed around him and explained the plan, which was simple and almost child-like.
Dewin ap Medrus had noticed that the Norsemen took their raiding directions using the local trees and shrubs. By following the wind-bent branches they knew that if they became lost in battle, they had only to march in the opposite direction to the wind-flattened foliage and twisted boughs to find themselves back at the coast and to the safety of their longships.
The young defenders were instructed to pull and bend the branches of the trees so that the prevailing winds appeared to come from the opposite direction.
So successful was this in confusing and halting the enemy that the practice continued long after Dyfed’s tormentors had vanished. Indeed, to this day many old trees and shrubs may still be found in sheltered spots leaning in all directions.
The confused Norsemen eventually left the people of inland Wales in peace, because of the strange winds of Dyfed, which they named the ‘Which Way Winds’.
What is a blog? How to blog? And what is a simple explanation of blogging? Well, if you are a newbie to blogging or just want to find out about this new modern craze and to understand it without any jargon, you’ve come to the right place . . .
When I first built this website, I didn’t have a clear idea about what a ‘blog’ was. To make it even worse, when I typed into Google for information on this subject, all I found were technical articles with no layman-orientated clear and simple explanation of what it was.
Well, be confused no more, as I will attempt to explain, jargon free, exactly what a blog is . . .
A blog is simply a place to put up ‘posts’ which are basically articles. The posts can be viewed in order, usually in chronological order, so you can scroll down a list on a blog site to select a post that looks interesting. Blogs are different from ‘pages’ which are pages on a website. Pages are stand alone articles with pictures. In reality pages aren’t that much different from blogs really, the only difference is that a blog  is usually a short article presented in an order, usually centred around a particular subject or even a general blog. There are no hard and fast rules, so if you want to write a really long blog, you can.
In fact, as you are probably aware, the article you are viewing now is a ‘blog post’. You will find a link above this post called ‘general blog’ and if you click on it, up comes all the blog posts I’ve posted to this general blog in chronological order.
A whole website can be centred around blog posts. My main website has app review blogs and this blog area has posts about basically . . . anything interesting.
There are free blogging website accounts you can open to blog – Blogger.com is a popular one. These are great if you enjoy writing articles/blogs. However, if you want to build a website around blogs, WordPress is an excellent choice and it’s open source and free. WordPress was originally built for bloggers but it has evolved. Now you can have a mixture of pages (normal website pages) and blogs. You can even use WordPress to build a website purely with pages and no blogs if you want. WordPress is now a powerful all round website builder as well as being excellent blogging software.
This website uses WordPress and an add-on I purchased called ‘Genesis Framework’. The Genesis Framework adds even more functionality and SEO (search engine optimisation – so that people can search and find your pages/posts easier) functions.
Can’t be bothered to build a website? Well, it doesn’t cost the Earth to pay a WordPress professional to build you one. Just ask around for a recommended website designer that does a good job. You can learn online from WordPress’s site or by searching on YouTube for tutorials. There is a wealth of tutorial material on the Internet which just takes commitment and patience to learn.
How do you drive more traffic to your blog/website? By providing fresh original content regularly. Or you can blog (write an article) on someone else’s blog with a link back to your blog to increase your Google rankings, as incoming links from other sites, especially high ranking sites also increases your rank with Google.
Forget about link farms and other black hat (cheating ways) to increase traffic. It takes less time to write a short interesting article a lot of the usual shortcuts you come across from so called SEO pros. Google’s programmers are smart, they will recognise sites that cheat and will lower their trust in the site and the website’s rank.
Keywords in your post can boost your blog/page post views. You can use the Google Keyword tool for this. Some people cram as many keywords as possible into their posts and it ends up being a kind of mechanical experience to read and doesn’t flow. I normally only put 2 or 3 keywords that fit in nicely and then just write the post naturally.
So what kind of posts are good posts to put up that people will view? Well, there is no certain answer, but I usually focus on posts that have interesting information or posts which can help people complete a task or project.
If you decide to ‘blog’, my advice is to pick a topic that interests you as you will need to put fresh content up – preferably at least once a week, or even better, daily if you want your site to grow. Forget about rehashing old articles or buying bulk article packs, Google can recognise if the content is original or not. In fact, sites that copy and paste material from other websites are actually damaging their website without knowing it. What many people don’t know is that it takes 1 to 2 years to build a website up so that it has a decent amount of ‘traffic’ (visitors to your website). And about that time to get fully recognised by Google as a serious site. Many people give up and take down the website before this as they give up – they don’t give it time to grow. After all, an established website with 2000+ posts is going to bring in a lot more traffic than a smaller less established site with 50+ posts.
You can monetize your site in time with ads such as Adsense ads. Many people plaster these ads all over their site making it look ugly. If you look up to the right hand corner of this page you’ll see that I only have one Adsense ad which I’ve tried to blend in with the site by specifying colours that match my site.
Well, I hope this helps someone who was like me not long ago, scratching around for a simple explanation of ‘blogging’. I’m not saying my site or my advice is the best in the world, but I’ve used this site and the limited experience I’ve had with blogging just to give you some examples to expand upon in your own style, and to clear up any confusion. If you pick a topic that’s interesting for you and can help others, or offer them some interesting information that they are searching for, you can’t go wrong.
Best of all, if you approach it with the right mind-set – blogging is fun!
This is an article my father wrote for the Kennet & Avon Canal Trust about my father’s memories of when he was young and used to play and live around the Kennet & Avon canal area, in and around Bath . . .
Although the canal during the 40s and early 50s was run down, it was a great area for natural habitat. Swans, coots, red wings in winter and the occasional kingfisher were to be seen on the pound above the Wash House Lock. Water lilies were widespread and in winter pike were clearly visible. There were large numbers of bats in the summer evenings and rats were common place.
One of my first memories of any traffic on the canal was a barge full of clay which was being used to ‘puddle’ leaks in the canal bed.
Fishing in the lock using lock weed as bait often produced a catch of dace, roach and perch. We had a cat which waited patiently on the arms of the lock for fish to be caught. This was before cats became fussy about food and the cat would eagerly devour the fish raw immediately after they were dispatched.
There was a cottage on the far side of the lock in which an elderly couple lived. One day the man of the house, who had drunk a bit too much, fell into the lock. His wife was more concerned about the 10 shilling note in his pocket than of his rescue, or so the story went. Also, behind the cottage and leading towards the church was an overgrown garden leading to an isolated house in which lived a lady named Mrs Gusher. We were always told as children that she had left her lights on during the war in order to guide German bombers into Bath during the blitz and that she was a German spy. I am sure this was not true, but it was enough to deter us as children from crossing the iron lock bridge and trespassing into her garden!
In the winter of 1947/1948 is was extremely cold and the canal froze to the point where my cousin and I (aged 5) were towed on a sledge by my uncle from Widcombe to Bathhampton including going under tunnels in Sydney Gardens. The ice must have been really thick and I remember enormous icicles hanging from the Sydney Gardens tunnels. I am sure Health & Safety would be somewhat alarmed had they existed then.
A right of passage for the local boys when we were about 12 years old was to swing across the base of the Wash House Lock iron bridge using the side bars as hand holds. Crazy, but I never recall anyone losing their grip and falling into the canal.
A further rumour was that there were unexploded bombs in the canal pound behind Horseshoe Walk and also in the canal leading to Wash House Lock. If there is any truth in this I often wonder how the present day canal trippers might react.
Why ‘Wash House Lock’? There was a commercial wash house in the opening between Caroline buildings and St. Matthews Buildings up until the 1940s. It was almost adjacent to the foot bridge and it had probably been there since the canal was dug?
Today my rough and tumble childhood playground seems very neat and tidy, but it’s good to see that so many people enjoy the footpath and canal as a leisure pursuit and it’s obviously a great escape from the rush and tear of modern society.
A great iOS download choice is ‘Wooden Labyrinth 3D’ Â with labyrinths of wooden maze levels awaiting your precision metal ball or marble rolling skills . . .
Wooden Labyrinth 3D is a realistic game, based on the old-fashioned style metal ball in a wooden maze type games that I used to buy when I was younger. There is a free version and also a paid version under $1.
The trouble with buying those old-fashioned style, guide the metal ball around the box type games is that you are limited to just one layout. This game has endless levels, with a different layout every time.
The graphics are spot on, with the game viewed from above as if really playing the real physical game. Even the sound effects and the physics seem like the real thing.
If you are not happy with the sensitivity of the graphics, you can alter the settings and tailor the roll behaviour to your liking.
One new feature on this game that appeared on this game since I downloaded Labyrinth 3D is the ability to make the ball jump. This is done by jolting the device, so that you can jump over difficult spots. However, I prefer never to use this feature personally, as I like the challenge of not doing this.
The free option is very popular in the app store. An addictive and simple little game. You can even try and beat your own record for the average level clearance time.
If you upgrade to the full game, you can customise your marbles and create your own levels.
This won the best the best game design award in the students category in 2009. The game has also backed up with a barrage of positive reviews from iOS game players.
I can’t fault this game. But as a suggestion to the developer, a spin off variation of this game could be made with obstacles and different physics objects incorporated. For example, you could have springs, bombs and switches perhaps.
With ‘Pool Bar’ you can play with draw, follow and all the billiards tricks you can do in real life. Become an online pool shark with this popular 3D billiards game . . .
Pool Games by FGOL – Future Games Of London, is a 3D pool game where you have the option to play online or in single or double player modes.
You can view the table from above, go into free view mode and even put spin on the ball. This is one of the most realistic games I’ve played. You can choose between four character avatars to play as, as well as having the option to play English 8-ball, American 8-Ball or 9-Ball pool.
The only thing missing is a career mode option which I am hoping the developers will bring out as an update in the future.
You can play in 3 different skill modes: easy, medium or difficult level. There is also two different types of aiming modes to play with: standard and expert. There is a choice of 1, 3 and 5 racks to play in a match.
The details of the surrounding bar is impressive. You can enter free view mode to look around the bar, where you’ll notice a juke box, a games machine and a poster advertising ‘Hungry Shark’ and you can even just about see outside the front doors. The graphic details of the table and the pool balls are spot on too.
I initially, I found it hard to hit balls softly, but you get the knack of it after a while. The physics of the game are really good and pretty true to reality.
When I first purchased this game you couldn’t play online, but now, with this added function it makes the whole game more of a challenge as you can pit your wits against other Pool Games players.
There are two versions available. One version for the iPhone at under $1.99 and another version for the iPad at $2.99 at the time of this review.
App Name: Wooden Labyrinth 3D
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