Archive for October, 2010

Why Steampowered Drives Me Nuts!

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

So I bought a new game tonight for $20.  It’s an RTS called Supreme Commander 2.  Never heard of it before but I decided I’d give it a try just for the heck of it.  I got home and found out that the game requires Steam to play it.  Of course, I had already opened the DVD up by then so I was past the point of no return.  I haven’t played a Steam game in forever.  So I couldn’t remember my password and I tried to do the “forgot your password” system.  Well they send you an email with a challenge response and also  your secret question.  So apparently I didn’t put the real answer to my secret question and I couldn’t figure out what I put.  I tried over and over again, each time getting one of those stupid emails with the EXACT same challenge response.  My inbox was literally full of them.  I emailed support asking them to reset my account and, since its a Saturday night, I didn’t hear back from them.  I didn’t figure I would.  So I sat down to watch some football when I realized what password I had probably used.  I go back to my computer and type it in and install the game.  I’m anxious to play and I go to hit the play button and….  Steam tells me I have a 40 minute wait while it downloads updates!!  It’s downloading at almost 2Mbit too.   What the hell kind of BS is this? You buy a game, take it home and you can’t even play it for over an hour because Steam forces to you download updates that I really don’t care about.  I would have been happy to just give the game a go in campaign mode and then update it later.  But, I’m not even given the choice!

So why I hate Steam:

  • I have to install their stupid software to play my games
  • They create a list of every single piece of software I have installed.  Can you say stalker?
  • Copy protection only hurts the innocent! If I had pirated the game I’d be playing it right now, not waiting on Steam!
  • Copy protection only hurts the innocent! If I had pirated the game I wouldn’t have spent an hour waiting to install it because I forgot my password.
  • Oh yeah and I couldn’t even install the damn game without a steam account!
  • They sent me about 15 copies of the exact same email. If you’re going to send me a stupid email every time I try to guess my password at least change the challenge / response every time!

How to Sync Multiple Exchange Accounts with Sense (HTC Evo, etc) For Free!

Saturday, October 30th, 2010

So I was trying to figure this out last night and everyone online was indicating that the only way to do this under sense was to get Touchdown or RoadSync or something like that.  This just isn’t true.  The AOSP (Android Open Source Project) email client not only supports multiple exchange accounts, but it will automatically sync your contacts AND calendars, too.  So how do you get the AOSP mail client installed?  Well the good folks over at Cyanogenmod have a copy of it in their ROM.  Download the entire ROM and you can extract just the apk that we’re interested in and install it via root explorer, file manager, or something like that.   It’s in  the \system\app folder.  Once you’ve gotten it installed, just open up the email application (different than the sense Mail.apk) and get to work.  Create the new exchange account and tell it to sync calendars and contacts (if you want).  These accounts will even show in the Sync settings.

Please note that I verified this works with 2.2 Froyo version of the HTC Sense ROM for Evo.  If you have any difficulties, feel free to let me know.