GeekwithEnvy

Mac

Featured App: Treasure Defense

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Looking for something different and challenging to play? Treasure Defense may be just the game to help fix your boredom.

The objective in Treasure Defense is actually quite simple, defend your magic crystals!

You start each round with a set of magic crystals that you must defend from intruders who wish to steal them all. You task is to build up defenses using towers that shoot arrows, shurikens, and lightning. You must employ a strategy when building towers to ensure that you get everyone who tries to sneak in. You have an opportunity to rid of intruders both when they are heading towards your crystals and while they are trying to run away with them.

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Your towers can be upgraded as you continue to play and gather resources like gold and magic. You also get a few power ups throughout the game to help get you out of tough situations but you must use them wisely as they have cool downs and require magic to use. Power ups include meteors, lightning, ice, an axe to make room for more towers and more. In some levels there are also special locations that you can place your towers that will make them even stronger.

This game is just plain fun and it offers up good challenges along with upgrades and an unique power ups to keep things fresh as you advance through the game.

Treasure defense is created by Vitamin Games and is free on the Mac App Store, 99¢ on the iPhone and iPad for the standard version and $1.99 for the HD version

Diablo III Anniversary Brings Gifts

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It’s hard to believe that it has already been a year since the release of Diablo III (May 15 2012) but it’s not time to sit and reflect, it’s time to celebrate. Blizzard is offering players who login to Diablo III between May 15 and May 21 a 25% boost to their Magic Find and +EXP stats plus your magic find bonus will stack above the 300% cap. That’s a pretty sweet deal.

To make your desktop look a little less lame and a little more evil, Blizzard has also put up some new Diablo III wallpapers. Blizzard also has a few other fun things going on in celebration of the anniversary including live streams and having you spread the word by showing off your love of the game by taking a picture of you and your friends holding a “Happy Birthday Diablo III” sign and then tweeting it, and if they like what you send them they will re-tweet it.

*Interesting Fact: Diablo III sold  3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours after it’s release, making it the fastest selling PC game.

Awesome New Way To Experience Google Street View

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An amazing little project by Teehan+Lax changes the way we use Street View by creating incredible “Hyper-Lapse” video from the images in google’s Street View database by stringing them all together. The end result is just plain awesome to look at.

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Even better, you can make your own version, although it will be a slightly lower quality version. All you need is a browser that supports WebGL, like Goole Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Firefox and then you can simply head here to set a start and finish point and make your “Hyper-Lapse” video.

Hyper-lapse photography – a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest – has been a growing trend on video sites. It’s not hard to find stunning examples on Vimeo. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine and release Google Street View Hyperlapse.”

To Enable WebGL in Safari on the Mac (Safari 5.1 and Up):

  • In Safari, open the Safari menu and select Preferences.
  • Click the Advanced tab in the Preferences window.
  • At the bottom of the window, check the Show Develop menu in menu bar checkbox.
  • Open the Develop menu in the menu bar and select Enable WebGL.

Firefox (4 and Up) WebGL is on by Default

For Internet Explorer you can use this plugin.

How to Upgrade Your Mac

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Apple’s latest line up of computers are extremely thin and compact, it’s amazing how much can fit in such a small form factor. All of this makes for an amazing design but it also has a downside.

To those of us who are more inclined to tinker with our machines, it can appear as if there’s almost no way to upgrade Apple’s latest and greatest. There is good news however. If you want to add some RAM or your own SSD to your Mac, then there’s probably a way to do it. You can even get step-by-step instructional videos on how to do it along with all the tools you will need.

All of this can be found at OWC (Other World Computing). OWC offers all kinds of options for upgrading your Mac, they sell the hardware and tools you will need to get the job done and all of it is reasonably priced so you can save some cash by doing it all yourself.

The upgrade projects can vary in skill level quite a bit, some of them are quite simple while others will require you to be pretty confident about tearing down your Mac. It’s safe to say that most of these upgrades are for the bold but if you’re not up to doing it yourself then in some cases OWC can do it for you.

All of their installation videos are available on their site but you can also view them on their YouTube channel. OWC also offers repair services for your iPad along with a ton of accessories and additional software.

 

 

Blizzard Celebrates 15 Years of StarCraft

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been 15 years since March 31, 1998, when StarCraft first captured our imaginations and for some of us, became a solid part of our childhood. StarCraft has also greatly contributed to the online competitive gaming world, even though at the time we couldn’t have known how much it would grow.

So, what’s the best part about all of this? Well, we’ve got many years of StarCraft ahead of us!

Blizzard is offering up a feat of strength for StarCraft players that will allow you to unlock 3 new portraits that pay homage to classic StarCraft along with getting a special achievement “15 Years of StarCraft” .

So how do you get the achievement?

Just play one game of StarCraft II in any online mode before 11:59 p.m. PDT on April 17.

Beginning March 31, play one Arcade, Custom, Ranked, Training, Unranked, or Versus A.I. game to earn the StarCraft 15-Year Anniversary Feat of Strength achievement. As soon as you’ve received the achievement, all three portraits will be permanently unlocked in your StarCraft II character profile.

You get see Blizzard’s official post about the anniversary on battle.net.

 

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